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)?
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
We’ve already decided as a polity that simply being alive in the country isn’t sufficient to get a vote: you have to be of a certain age, you have to have citizenship, you can’t be a felon (a rather arbitrary category of itself).
That's a pretty strong consensus, but does it make sense?
I mean, maybe it makes sense to have various restrictions, but is skin the the game a good reason that applies to property or fixed residence but not to just being alive?
To be honest I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as the best proxy for skin in the game. I’m sure it’s not just being alive, because most people alive are 99%+ unaffected by the actions of alien polities, and given a voice do end up more or less looting those polities to benefit themselves. I think fixed residence makes sense for local politics within the USA because it’s very very easy to move (the USA closely resembles a real-world version of Scott’s political archipelago), and you need to create some friction and investment to prevent the uninvested from doing away with any local polity they disagree with.
Oh I like it, (one year residency). I want more crazy ideas for voter restriction.
1.) You have to pass some simple test every year. Maybe like the student driver test. Here is a short book with all the answers you will need, you just have to show that you've read it.
2.) Some sort of community service to vote. (Volunteer fireman, cleanup day at a park, veteran, school teacher, nurse, doctor, policeman...)
#1 seems kind of redundant to me. If you can figure out how to fill out the ballot, you’ve essentially passed a test already, maybe a simpler one but not that much simpler. What is it that you want to test? Reading comprehension? I have known functional illiterates that I would trust with the public wallet better than academics and professionals.
#2 is the starship troopers approach writ small, which sounds pretty good to me—the main problem with starship troopers is that if you put people into long-term federal service to earn the franchise you end up with a massive bureaucracy of sinecures; nobody actually wants to find government jobs for all those people.
#3 How about a virtue test? A huge tax credit (flat percentage) offered not to vote. Wouldn’t really affect the indigent, but could give the high and mighty pause. Make it totally anonymous, so nobody knows who took the cash and who voted.
What do I want to test? IDK. If there were some ballot measures, it would be nice if the booklet explained both sides of the measure... You have to show you know a little about what you are voting about.
#2, Yeah starship trooper, But maybe just pick up trash along your road or park once a year? Some minimal commitment to the community.
#3 is fun. Rather than a poll tax, it's a poll anti-tax. I'm a man of modest means, and I think if you paid me $100, I would think about not voting. Hmm mostly the rich vote then... I'm not sure that works.
I'm not sure whether it includes that sortition for reasonable terms of office would effectively hand the government over to agencies/bureaucracy, the people who stay for a while.
Boring. How about single combat in the arena? Incumbent gets choice of weapons, and can abdicate on the spot in favor of the challenger if it looks like he's going to lose, in which case challenger is obliged to spare his life. Broadcast on pay-per-view, profits to go half to the charity of the incumbent's choice, and half to the start-up slush fund of the challenger (if he wins), or to his estate (if he loses).
"I really don’t want anyone who doesn’t care enough to show up voluntarily to make decisions about how the country is run."
> Isn't this one of the problems that compulsory voting is trying to eliminate?. I mean, it seems pretty intuitive to me that if you have one population with compulsory voting and another one without it, then in the long run the population with compulsory voting will tend to educate themselves more because they are obligated to vote.
I don’t think that’s what will happen. I think if they didn’t want to vote, that’s because they don’t care, not because they’re not informed. If they cared, but weren’t informed, they would become informed and then vote. Instead, you will have votes made by compelled voters as ‘flies to wanton boys’ (as the great line goes).
Hey, I'm all for it, if the world citizens help shoulder the cost, too. Last year I forked out nearly $90,000 in taxes, about 20% of which helped persuade Vladimir Putin that trying what he's doing in Ukraine in, say, Poland or Romania would end badly for Mother Russia.
So my share of the salary for the World Policeman is let's say ~$11,000 or so, if we consider only the excess over equivalent European international law 'n' order spending. If any citizen of the world wants to kick in 11Gs/year, he can absolutely vote on anything to do with the nature and function of the World Cops. Make it a kinder, gentler approach, let us say, which persuades nuclear-tipped dickheads like Putin to reconsider revanchist ambitions by means less crude than a Big Stick such as...um...I dunno...closely argued moral philosophy pamphlets, maybe. Candlelight vigils, too.
Heck, I would glady auction off the right to vote in US elections to the entire world. You pay $N/year to feed Behemoth, and we give you a vote and disenfranchise 1 native-born who forks out $(N-1) or less. If you put real skin in the game, throw your hard-earned shekels into the maw, then by all means take a seat at the table, and let us kick out some cheapskate or leech, native born or not.
No? You'd rather live as an Indian prince under the Pax Britannica, in the region of the General Government in 1942, in Germany under Napoleon, as a Gaul after Caesar won, or as a Mayan under either Aztec or conquistador hegemony? Well bless your heart.
If you have a specific actual historical hegemon that you think made for a much better life for those under its influence, but not part of the hegemony itself, then what is it? If you're arguing US influence in the world isn't nearly as benign on balance as, say, the Council of Elrond's would be, then I suggest you have an existence proof to offer first.
This looks like an emotive argument: a mood in Europe (“the USA bullies us and we never bother them at all!”) thinly cloaked in vague, objective-seeming language. The margin of error for what? Measured in what? Significant impact in what way? Your assertions are very broad but no evidence is proposed, let alone evaluated.
Beyond dismissing without evidence what is asserted without evidence, I’ll just note that the idea here is that not everybody who is affected by a country deserves a vote in it, just those who are mostly deeply concerned and involved in the country. You’ve blundered the opposite direction, which is a misunderstanding of the point entire.
One tiny caveat from an ideological perspective. I think the "blank vote" is too vague in what it means by the person who places it. There are two reasons not to vote for a specific option:
1. The voter in un-informed or simply doesn't know who to vote for and prefers not to effect the results with a random guess.
2. The voter sees the system as illegitimate and wants to show disapproval of democracy of the validity of the current regime.
I think these are two very different reasons for not voting and it would be helpful and useful to collect information and numbers of both kinds of people.
We want to know how many people don't know or care who to vote for. And we also want to know how many people very the entire system as illegitimate.
So I think instead of simply offering a blank vote, we should offer 2 or a few different options for why they're not voting.
However, I have no problem whatsoever forcing all citizens to turn up to the ballot and supply some kind of input. I think democracies that do this are probably superior and certainly more legitimate as representatives "of the people".
The repeals make me think there's some kind of issue with it, but my immediate reaction is it would be nice. It's basically a jury summons but it's guaranteed to last less than a day. In return you get a completely accurate picture of who the population supports.
One issue is the forced support for democracy; everyone is legally required to show support for the election process. A system that declares itself irreversible is one step closer to disaster.
I'd still pay no attention and probably leave everything blank, or vote Mickey Mouse. (Although the big M's been involved in some shady stuff recently, I might have to vote Bugs Bunny in protest.)
Countries usually track the number of votes blank or otherwise invalid, and there's a tradition of doing so as a protest here if you hate all the candidates. (often, by drawing a phallus on the ballot, sometimes with a shocking level of detail and artistic skill)
Have you considered voting for Pogo the Possum? I know he's a perennial 3rd party candidate, but you're not throwing your write-in vote away if you don't choose from the 2 main animation studios!
As someone who very likely wouldn't bother to vote without mail-in ballots, and whose workplace doesn't consider such civic duty an acceptable excuse for time off - no, I wouldn't really appreciate mandatory voting. Turning out for the truly-local stuff, sure, fine - those are actually competitive, and the outcomes are extremely tangible. I can see mandatory voting for local elections being a doable and useful thing, and that allows flexibility in implementation based on how each locality thinks its voters will be most convenienced/least pissed off.
But like...I don't need a prediction market to tell me the odds of my SF district/county/state voting party-line D on ~everything state or federal level. So I send in those ballots for aspirationally Pascalian reasons which aren't actually self-recommending. Something something setting a good example. (It was encouraging to actually see a youth vote worth half a damn in the recent midterms, at least.) And enforcement at that level runs into...well. I think it'd be one of those rare times when there'd be a bipartisan outcry of "disparate impact!" So who'd sell it, and who'd stick their neck out to make the policy stick?
ETA: also I'd really not waste another ~decade's worth of political energy chasing the phantom of (Progressive) Mobilization Delusion. At this point, the revealed preferences seem pretty clear: a shitload of people just do not care enough to vote, nevermind every election every time. No matter how easy it's made, how long the deadline is, how lax the requirements are...(I do think there's some possible delta in online voting, but that's a whole other level into fraud-and-worries-about-potential-fraud. Current election tech is, uh, really uninspiring already.)
>and whose workplace doesn't consider such civic duty an acceptable excuse for time off
If you do that in Australia, you get fined $1,000 per person you didn't give time off to if you're a person, or $5,000 per person if you're a corporation.
>As someone who very likely wouldn't bother to vote without mail-in ballots,
The detail's in the devil, indeed. Mailing a thing is acceptable, as much as I get annoyed by ballots so lengthy it takes several hours of research to become barely-informed.* It's the no-you-actually-must-go-to-physical-polling-place option which would really rind my melon. Sure hope it's accessible without a car!
"Fine" always translates to me as "cost of doing business", but that certainly seems like a better equilibrium. Half the annoyance with voting is opportunity cost...not how I'd prefer to spend one of two precious days off per week.
*Wonder if ROI would be higher to better-educate those who do bother to vote already, rather than raising turnout. The epistemic environment in politics is, uh, hostile at best...
We have a government broadcaster in Australia, and it does cover elections pretty well, so technically we do spend government money on educating voters. With that said, the big danger with government trying to educate voters about politics is that an incumbent can abuse this for partisan advantage leading to consolidation of power and de-facto one-party state (this is what happened in post-Soviet Russia AIUI, and it's part of what happened in Nazi Germany); the Australian ABC does a reasonable job of maintaining editorial independence and some sort of neutrality, but one does need to keep an eye on that side of things.
Regarding access: There is a polling place in essentially all towns, and multiple in cities, so if you live in a settlement you can generally walk there. If you live outside a town and don't have any means of transportation beyond walking, you probably have bigger issues than accessing a polling place (and there's still the postal option).
Regarding the fine: It'd be pretty rare for it to be profitable to incur the fine for refusing to give employees time off, especially the corporate version; what company gains $2,500 per hour per employee over and above what it pays that employee (it's unpaid time off), in a way that can't be made up for by bringing on more employees for the day and staggering the time off? The fine for personally not voting is pretty low, so it's possible for an individual to get more money by working that time instead and paying the fine, but that's that individual's choice so it's not such a big deal (and you'd need to be making above minimum wage, I think, for the maths to work out).
That honestly just sounds like a pretty good implementation, all things considered. I'd likely support the generic idea of mandatory voting if I also lived in AUS.
Definitely jealous that your version of NPR still tries to live up to its ideals. Though as the realpolitik saying goes, "*all* media is state media". I do appreciate how every election here, there's a relatively non-partisan, coolheaded, CBO-style analysis provided by an independentish government office...plus including the actual text of any proposed legal changes. Maybe I can make a decent decision with that information, maybe I can't, but actually being able to go to the mattresses on empirical data matters a lot for my civic peace of mind. Give Chow a fighting chance, and all that. "More of this, please."
The ABC does have a bit of a lean to the left*, but it's relatively slight AFAIK. I know a few years back I heard an SJer waxing lyrical about how the ABC was too far right, and certainly the election coverage tries to be as neutral as possible. And it's very definitely editorially independent of whoever happens to be in government. So, y'know, definitely better than Russian state media, probably pretty decent compared to the US media, not perfect.
*I use the term "left" here, despite usually being hesitant, because my understanding is that the original cause of this is the ABC's state-run nature attracting socialists back in the Cold War days. Certainly, for the past 25 years or so and possibly more - I was too young to tell before that! - the ABC's leaned left and the "corporate" for-profit establishment Australian media (*all* of it) has leaned right relative to the median Australian. So while there are issues in the abstract with a state-run broadcaster having a bias, it should be remembered in the Australian case that the sort of "woke capital" establishment media that's most of the US mainstream just flat doesn't exist here and as such the ABC's lean could be said to provide a sort of balance in the broader ecosystem rather than create/reinforce a systemic bias.
Terrible idea. The last thing I want is people who can't be bothered to get themselves to the voting place voluntarily to exert the same power as someone who cares greatly about what happens, and does his best to be informed and vote responsibly. Those votes are completely inequivalent, and the former vote is trash that just dilutes the value of the latter.
I'd be in favor of making it much, much harder to vote, so only people who really care about it and are willing to go to a great deal of trouble to register their vote will be counted. The date should be kept secret until the last 24 hours. Your polling place is open for 45 minutes, at any random time of night or day, and is located up to 150 miles from your residence. The building is unlabeled, unavailable on any mapping app, and you have to solve one of several different logic puzzles made available 1 week before voting in order to receive detailed directions 24 hours before voting for you begins. The door is booby-trapped with a bucket of ice-cold water, and there is dogshit freely scattered over the interior corridors, which are unlit. Nobody is available to help you with your ballot, which is printed in Esperanto and must be filled out with your non-dominant hand with a #2 pencil which measures 1" in length, and if you make even one tiny mistake your ballot is thrown away.
This is satire, right? Pointing out that the problem with saying "if you can't go through the trouble to vote then you shouldn't have a say" by pointing out that such an argument would be valid no matter how arbitrary or pointless the obstacles to voting are?
Nope. And you're correct that the argument can be made at any level of restriction, but you're incorrect if you also assume that the argument would be equally persuasive at any level.
If you made the argument that only one person should vote, i.e. that there should be a God Emperor, because if we allow anyone any less enlightened to vote the results will not be as good, then your argument will not be persuasive to anyone. Nobody is going to believe that it is possible to select *the* single best and most enlightened person to make decisions for all of us, and also that this person could possibly be sufficiently well informed.
But on the other hand, if you get to the point where you are trying to force to the polls people who *don't want to go* then the argument becomes for me persuasive. I do in fact believe that the outcomes of a democracy that compels even people who don't want to vote to do so will be worse. And I think we already have a franchise which is more widely and carelessly distributed than is optimum.
FWIW, my country is in the process of being ruined by a minority of people who can be bothered to vote, take care of their short-sighted particular interests while throwing the rest of the country under the bus, and the rest is complaining in general apathy but barely showing up to vote.
If there was a referendum to change our constitution and mandate compulsory voting, I'd say yes in a heartbeat.
I'm baffled by why you think a passive majority who doesn't give a crap to the extent that they won't even defend their interests by doing something as easily as voting, would, if you *forced* them to vote, do any better.
That is, so far as I can see, you have a beef with your majority, which is allowing the evil minority to ruin your country, when they could almost trivially prevent it. That you believe if you prod them harder to do something -- anything, no limitation -- they would suddenly become a lot more constructive seems logically inconsistent. I think a much more likely outcome tis that your country will be ruined a lot faster, because now that idiotic majority is *actively* and not just *passively* contributing to the ruin.
Darn right. Successful voters, as they limped home in torn, drenched, and possibly blood-stained clothing, would nod knowingly at each other, members of a proud and select, if exhausted and perhaps lightly-scarred, fraternity. Thank Christ that's over for another year, at least...
Don't be surprised when the next election is won by some obscure religious group where the leader told his followers that those who won't vote for him will burn in hell.
Unfortunately, "people who don't care" are not necessarily the worst possible voters.
Hey, if all the rest of you are so laissez-faire that you allow yourselves to be outvoted by a weird sect, then you're just getting what you deserve[1].
No, people who don't care are not *necessarily* the worst possible voters, just like people who drive with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.12 won't *necessarily* cause a terrible accident that kills 5 people. But that's the way to bet.
Whoa dude, way to show an aristocratic contempt for traditional Democratic constituencies. I know plenty of hard-core Democrats -- many in my family, forsooth, people who worked 40-year careers in steel mills and factories and such -- who would be first in line at the secret blockhouse ringed with barbed wire in which votes are recorded. They're not weak, or afraid, or lacking in resourcefulness. Seems a bit patronizing and snobbish of you to assume otherwise.
Can we get a better argument here? Carl isn't saying he wants more Republican elections by barring legitimate Democrat voters; he's saying he wants people to get an ID to make elections that much more secure. If everyone gets an ID and then votes Democrat, he's presumably satisfied that election was legitimately won by the Democrats.
Simply saying "you're just using bafflegab to hide the fact you want to drive away legitimate non-Republican voters" wastes everyone's time. Not to mention being bad faith.
No, he's saying what I said he's saying; you're saying he said something he didn't say or mean, and then proceeding to criticize what -you- want to claim he meant.
This is also known as putting words in someone's mouth. And it's still bad faith.
And more likely to be retired, since those of us actually contributing to the economy instead of living on welfare (sorry, "social security") don't have time for that.
Thank you for making the cow-based joke that I originally wanted to post, but retracted for feeling too silly. Do obligate herbivores get depressed more frequently than other nutrient acquisition strategies?
Don’t forget the giraffes, deer, antelope, sheep, and camels. Ruminating isn’t just for cows.
A side note about silly word play. A local book store sold its copyright on the name “Hungry Mind” to a website for enough dough to open another book store named “Ruminator Books”. Guess what was featured on their storefront sign. Yeah, a cow. Unfortunately Amazon out convenienced them and they are both out of business now.
Heh...reminds me of a hometown anecdote. Where I grew up, there was a local favourite cafe called McCoffee, run by an Irish family, the McCaugheys. McDonald's sued them for IP infringement in 1994, so the shop got renamed to M. Coffee instead. At least they're still in business.
I don't suppose that's related to the phenomenon of autistic people often being extra-sensitive wrt constipation and other gastric distress, due to <weird processing issues>?
The linked comment about (partly) Adequan is illuminating. I worry that my own industry, ophthalmology, is going to see a steady decrease in Restasis scripts written because offices are going to have a harder and harder time getting hold of samples, an important part of getting a patient's symptoms under control as they start a dry eye regimen for the first time.
I am really trying to talk myself into quitting smoking. I am 67 years old and have been smoking since I was 15. In addition I worked a lot with plaster and wood so lots of airborne stuff-(and I usually smoked while I worked as well just to get the full benefit….)
Here’s my big hurdle; a very deep sense that I’ve been doing it so long it won’t do me any good to quit at this stage so light up!
What’s the science? Anyone know? Can I shift this issue one way or the other?
I've been smoking since I was twelve, and I am now 65 years old, so much the same as you. It doesn't seem to have done me any physical harm, but then I don't inhale deeply and I try always to smoke in a well ventilated area to minimize my exposure to smoke from the lit end, which I suspect is more dangerous than the filtered smoke one actually takes in.
Re talking yourself into quitting, if the potential health aspects aren't sufficiently persuasive, follow the money. Basically you (well, we) are paying the government a large amount of tax for the privilege of burning dead leaves! Maybe not so much tax in the US, but in the UK smokers practically prop up the economy single handed.
To complement that, another trick would be to have a large jar, and for every day you don't smoke, stuff a twenty dollar bill into it (assuming you're on roughly 30 cigarettes a day and a pack costs say $15). Before long you'll have a large bundle of notes, and it will be visibly apparent how much has been going on cigarettes.
I plan to grow my own Virginia tobacco next year, after a preliminaryy attempt this year which produced about half a pound of passable baccy. But growing the stuff is the easy part. The tricky aspect is curing and fermenting it properly without the leaves going moldy. Mold is many times more toxic than any of the chemicals in tobacco smoke, and I suspect is the underlying cause behind most cases of lung cancer that supposedly result from smoking.
I smoked from 1984 to 2003, about 2 packs every 3 days. Camel Filters until the late 90s, then Pall Malls. Tried to quit several times, kept failing. Switched to chewing nicotine gum: haven’t smoked since. I’m addicted to the gum now, but it’s cheaper and a lot less unhealthy, and you can have some almost anywhere
OK feel free to throw this away. If you have a good reason to quit go for it. (I started smoking 'cause a women I was in love with did, I stopped because I wanted to be with another women who hated smoking.) Have you tried quitting? Are the men in your family particularly long lived? (Dads or uncles that made it into their 90's?) That is to say we all have to die of something. There was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut when asked why he still smoked, "I'm committing slow suicide." Smoking brings you some joy, or scratches some itch. (I remember going to bed and thinking how great that first cig with my morning coffee would be.) All that said I found smoking to be a dirty nasty habit and I was happy to be done with it. (Though I still do miss the part about something to do while I watch a beautiful sunset.)
>There was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut when asked why he still smoked, "I'm committing slow suicide.
I completely understand that framing.
>Are the men in your family particularly long lived? (Dads or uncles that made it into their 90's?)
Nah… 84 was tops for anyone I know about.
I think I need to focus on the quality of life issue instead of the how much longer will I live issue. the links below demonstrating tangible benefits even for old geezers like me is good information. Thank you for your suggestions.
Heinrich gave a great answer with reasons to quit; I'd like to recommend reading *Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking* to help you do it. It really did make it easy for me, 25+ years ago.
try vape pens. don't try the tobacco flavor (or do, I dunno, but my impression is that they're not good). The secondary addictions (oral fixation, blowing smoke effect, etc.) are the same, and they taste better. There's about a three-day lag in which the vape pen doesn't give you the same hit that a cigarette does, it's more of a constant low level nicotine situation, but once you get through this (which I did by vaping every three minutes all day, including falling asleep holding the thing) it's pretty great.
Go to the fanciest, most upscale-looking vape shop you can find locally and tell them you're trying to quit smoking; they'll advise you on which ones will help the most. You're probably looking for easy (I was), so buy disposable vape pens so you don't have to fiddle with them.
Good luck! fwiw I find that escobars, a pretty ubiquitous brand, are easy to use and generally quite good - not my favorite but reliably fine.
I did switch to vaping for about two years, but I switched back about eight months ago. There was something about the vaping smoke that started really irritating my throat.. I can’t quite figure that out, why cigarette smoke would bother me less in that way. Anyway, the whole thing sucks and I am pretty sick of it. It’s like trying to pry a stone out of the ground for me.
I used Wellbutrin to quit. It's an antidepressant, but at lower doses really weakens the craving for nicotine. You only need to take it for a coupla months. For me, it had no side effects.
Earlier benefits include "As the lungs heal and lung capacity improves, former smokers may notice less coughing and shortness of breath. Athletic endurance increases and former smokers may notice a renewed ability for cardiovascular activities, such as running and jumping" at the *one month* mark.
There are other benefits listed there that take place after even less than a month.
But the benefits keep accumulating over the years, as the body heals itself. E.g. "After *10 years*, a person’s chances of developing lung cancer and dying from it are roughly cut in half compared with someone who continues to smoke."
And "After *20 years*, the risk of death from smoking-related causes, including both lung disease and cancer, drops to the level of a person who has never smoked in their life.
In short quitting brings noticeable improvement in health and quality of life in the very short term, and as you continue to abstain from smoking, your body will heal itself from much or all of the damage from the smoking.
For someone about your age, I see this article in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1211128 that found that "those who stopped at 55 to 64 years of age...gained... 4 years of life."
Hey man, I just want to let you know that I've been thinking about you and wishing you well. It would be amazing if you were able to cut back on smoking, but even if not, I'm still rooting for you.
Wow. It’s good to hear from you. I’m still smoking. In fact, I’m smoking a lot. But it’s becoming more and more clear to me that the thing that most attaches me to smoking is the distraction of it. It’s a little barrier between me and the rest of the world. Without that distraction, I start to really twitch. It’s good that I’ve noticed it because it makes it a little easier to get under it. It’s a work in progress. Thank you very much for checking in with me.
Book recommendation: Poor Economics, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. I'm only half way through it, but so far it's fascinating, and I think many people here might be interested in it.
The book talks about the economics of poor people in poor countries, how they make decisions about how to allocate their scarce resources, and what holds them back from improving their situations. A lot of the book is spent talking about whether "poverty traps" are real -- whether there are places in which a simple injection of money is enough to bring a desperately poor person out of poverty, or whether poverty is caused by more complex issues than a simple lack of money.
A simple example of a poverty trap would be something like this: you're a manual labourer and you're malnourished; because you're malnourished you're too weak to work well so you earn very little money so you can't buy food. If someone comes along and gives you money to buy decent food for two weeks then you get stronger and can work harder so you earn more money and can eat better in the future. Sometimes, that kind of thing happens. On the other hand, sometimes you take the extra money and use it to buy booze, spend a week drunk and wind up even weaker than you started.
What I like about the book is that it doesn't simply _assume_ that poor people are not responsible for their own situation, nor does it assume the opposite. It presents empirical data about the sorts of economic decisions that people in extreme poverty make, and I feel like I've got a lot more understanding of the actual lives of poor people than I had before.
I don't suppose it discusses...oh, what's the bloodless term paper-writers use...the informal tax of "social transfers"? That's always been the most interesting aspect of poverty to me...the clash between community and self-interest. A real and readily-observable phenomenon, but somewhat tricky to get an empirical handle on. Every time I see not-well-off friends and family make, ah, -EV investments in supplicants, it always feels like a situation where one ought to Say Something, even if it's heartless. But perhaps it's just one minor hole in a bucket full of them, I'm not sure.
Are you talking about the phenomenon where many poor people, on receiving a windfall, share or are highly expected to share it with family and friends? I’ve heard a couple of explanations of this. One is that poor people take a fatalistic view of success -- if it happens, you got lucky, so you don’t deserve that windfall, so you’d better share or you’ll be labeled greedy and excluded from future sharing. (That’s much less elegant than the explanation I read, but I can’t think of where I read it.) The second is that it forms a type of social insurance. Assuming that there are enough windfalls, a community of sharing poor people will direct resources to the right people, approximately.
Yes, this. The whole don't-lose-your-roots, remember-where-you-came-from thing. Like what JD Vance used to talk about, back before drinking the political koolaid. Which is well-intentioned and reasonable in many ways...but if there's never any "brain drain" where successful outliers are allowed to be outliers, then that's just someone being martyred to temporarily put a bandaid on structurally weak economics. I think also of lottery winners, who often end up no better/worse off because suddenly all these debtors come out of the woodwork with new and convincing claims to alms. (Nevermind the actually malicious scammers and thieves. Everybody Knows when someone makes it big, if one's circle is poor.) Seems to also happen in cash-transfer experiments, albeit at lesser scale. I think Scott or Zvi linked once to a study where such transfers had greater impact if made through anonymized bank accounts, so poor peoples' friends and family weren't able to easily notice the recipient got a windfall. Which was kinda depressing to think about...something something collective action problems.
The social-insurance aspect is the optimistic take, for sure. That's what I'd like to believe ultimately happens...charity starts at home, the community knows its needs best, etc. If I saw more evidence for this actually happening in practice (at scale), I'd be a lot more receptive to leftist-style schemes for mutual aid, collectivism, etc.
This is complicated. On one hand, local people can see things that an outsider might not notice. On the other hand, the community can have its collective blind spots. Maybe their understanding of situation is merely on the level "problem: we are poor; solution: give us money", which does not address the underlying causes. The underlying causes may even be a cultural taboo; perhaps the community is intolerant towards its more successful members and drives them away.
For example, imagine a community that is racist, sexist, and negative towards education; they also have very high unemployment and poverty. From outside, most of their suffering seems self-inflicted. Of course it is difficult to get a job if you have no education and few contacts with outsiders. And it is difficult to improve the educational results of the next generation, if the current mothers were discouraged from paying attention to school, so now they can't even help their own kids with homework, and have zero study habits themselves.
The few guys who got good education and good jobs are too macho to teach the local kids. And the rare women who despite everything got good education, will marry outside their community, because the alternative is to spend their lives surrounded by stupid and poor people who don't even respect them.
How would such community diagnose their own situation? Yes, they are poor. Yes, the kids are hungry, and don't have money for textbooks. Yes, we should help feed the kids. But no matter how much money we throw at the community, the problems will remain. Because the community is not going to decide "starting tomorrow, we will invert our traditional values, we will respect education and despise ignorance, and we will work hard to send our girls to universities because with each educated woman you get a few educated kids in the next generation for free, and also we will respect them when they return home". For the few people who understand that this is the better way, leaving the community might be difficult, but changing it from inside is almost impossible.
(Saying it explicitly to avoid misunderstanding, this is not supposed to be a description of any specific group in USA. I am not an American.)
Not sure if we mean the same thing, but some people are utility destroyers. You could give them million dollars today, and they would be poor a month later. (Sometimes it goes together with a more general mental illness. Sometimes it seems to be one isolated thing.)
I know people who have someone like that in a family, and it's a constant drain on their finances (and time, and nerves) to keep rescuing those people out of trouble. Luckily for them, at least it is not the closest family, i.e. the problematic person lives in a different home. So they can choose how much money to give them, or whether to pay their bills directly and send them food, without giving them cash. They give, constantly, but at least they have some control over how much they give.
The worst case would be this kind of person living under the same roof, so they can simply steal your money whenever they need it (and they need it all the time). Or living in a culture that has less respect towards private property, and is more like "if you don't keep it on your body, it is community property". There, one such person can sink the entire family or the entire community.
Even worse example of poverty trap is being so poor that you cannot afford to enforce your property rights. Imagine a situation where once in a while you starve and need other people's help to survive. Everyone around you does it, so the community survives as a whole. But this creates mutual obligations, and the other people take much more from you than you take from them.
Technically I think utility can only be transferred/exchanged at bad rates, not destroyed outright. Since the destroyer certainly gets something valuable out of the trade. The quibble mostly comes down to, how much "destruction" is one justifiably allowed to claim before entering witch-tier, and who gets to decide that? That's part of the reasoning behind means-testing or otherwise gating government money, certainly..."this money collectively comes from everyone, so we ought to have some say in how it's spent". (For its various pitfalls, UBI at least dodges this particular trap...wealth is a positional resource as much as an absolute one, so Money For All doesn't disrupt the Joneses Equilibrium. Theoretically.)
I think a lot of seeming miserliness is really rooted in the "if you teach a man to fish" thing...of being strongly anti-witch, from a fundamental viewpoint of fairness and desert. Which does include a lot of innocent-needy as collatoral damage, for sure. But humans react really poorly to perceptions of unfair treatment, so all it takes is a tiny fraction of perceived living-on-the-dole to ruin things for everyone. It still bugs me how often perfectly able-bodied young people sporting the latest fashions and tech pay with foodstamps at my job, even though I know cost of living is high here, and covid messed up a lot of people's finances. Doesn't pattern-match to my model of "needy recipient", like the elderly couples who come in every 1st of the month and bulk-buy bargain bean cans...
> It still bugs me how often perfectly able-bodied young people sporting the latest fashions and tech pay with foodstamps at my job, even though I know cost of living is high here, and covid messed up a lot of people's finances.
Do you know how *exactly* this works? Are the foodstamps generous enough to pay for both food and iPhones? Do they buy iPhones while starving? Are their parents or partners feeding them, leaving them the foodstamps as pocket money? Are there charities providing free food, so they eat at the charity, and use the foodstamps for other things?
My guess would be it's probably the parents. There is this intuition that giving your adult kids money is spoiling them, but providing them food and shelter in case of need is just family helping each other. So the kids can leverage this to get food and shelter for free, and use the foodstamps for everything else.
By the way, the thing that triggers my feelings of fairness is walking through the town during a working day. It's a working day, you know, people are supposed to be at *work* (the younger ones at school), and yet the town is full of people, sitting in a café, shopping, otherwise relaxing. Some of them might be tourists, some of them university students who do not have a lesson at the moment, but there are just so many people, and not only in summer. It's like there is a huge community of independently wealthy people that you would never notice otherwise. A parallel society that I am not a part of.
I'm relatively confident it's mostly students, who fall in that weird space of "not having income" despite lots of financial aid and loan dollars floating around (remember back when money was fungible?). So they get approved for foodstamps and other such benefits on essentially a technicality. Which puzzles me - back when I was in college, everyone was at least guaranteed a meal plan for the on-campus dining facilities, precisely so no one starved while studying. Unlimited portions for unlimited time-per-visit made it pretty easy to stay (over)fed, with halfway decent allocation of meal credits anyway...maybe things are different now, shrug. Or it's rising norms of parental support, as you conjecture. My parents gave us kids one [1] annual trip to the outlet mall, and stuff didn't get replaced until it was broken or unusable. It's always been strange to meet peers for whom that seems incredibly stingy. I certainly didn't "feel poor" growing up!
Every day is somebody's weekend, is the way I feel about it. Some people just get more weekends than others. I knowingly chose the shitty non-optimal economic path of wage servitude, so it wouldn't be justified to complain about not getting to relax in cafes more often myself (since I'm the one staffing them...or, rather, working at the grocery store for people to shop at). An ethic of service, which pays more in intangible gratitude than actual money. That's the ideal, anyway - it truly does depress me how shittily imperialistic customers can be. One time a wealthy couple refused to bag their own groceries, asserting that that was a task for "the help" (my coworkers). Well excuse me, Your Worshipfulness...that parallel society I wouldn't *want* to be part of, not if it cost my humanity.
But this is how it works from today's perspective. I guess historically, it was the other way round. Community surviving as a group first; and later, at certain level of wealth, private property, perhaps first as a luxury of the most powerful people, and afterwards a general social norm.
Question is, *how* could we get from "communal property" to "society rich enough that people can reasonably expect to survive on their own" if the few utility destroyers are what makes communal property a poverty trap? There were probably strong rules about using the community property, and punishments for those who broke the rules. Maybe the chieftain made the rules and punished those who took more? Or maybe it was more decentralized, and the utility destroyers were at some moment accused of witchcraft and killed?
> it always feels like a situation where one ought to Say Something, even if it's heartless.
Perhaps this is an ancient instinct prompting you to say "it hurts me to say this, but it seems that your friend is actually a witch"? And if too many people say the same thing, then indeed the friend *is* a witch and finally someone will kill them.
I would not recommend this book. It is substantially incorrect about how to think about poverty, and ignores the necessary and sufficient role played by economic growth. See here for instance -
Even if we accept that economic growth is necessary and sufficient, doesn't that leave us with the lower-level question of what economic growth is and how to cause it?
Going back to the example, if the labourer gets two weeks of good food so he can get stronger so he can work harder to earn more money to continue to buy better food, then that's a micro-scale example of economic growth in action. The book is about these sorts of micro-scale interactions which, when averaged across an entire economy, look like economic growth.
You're absolutely right that we are left with that question of where growth comes from. However, I'm afraid that poor economics does not even come close to any discussion of that question. A much better book for that purpose is 'How the world became rich', by Koyama and another co-author. Try that out.
Hypothesis: one of the reasons EA was moving towards longtermism is that there really weren't many opportunities for charity that had provable good impacts, were neglected, and whatever the third property is.
Are malaria nets over-funded? My impression is just that Killer Robots (TM) are a more compelling enemy than mosquito-borne illness. I'm willing to be wrong here.
Not sure if it means you're wrong but the approximate ranking of money moved by EAs is Global Poverty > Animal Welfare > AI risk. Not sure where existential risk would land but that bundles together pandemics, nuclear war and general survivalism with AI risk, which likely isn't based on compellingness.
I didn't exactly mean malaria nets were overfunded, though that was a reasonable implication that I didn't think about.
It's more a matter that I think EAs want to find something new and exciting, and there just weren't a lot of opportunities like that.
Possibly it's that EA was a effort to prevent being driven by one sort of sentimentality-- as Eliezer so tactfully put it "rare diseases in cute puppies" or more reasonably, the Make a Wish foundation, and didn't realize the emotional drive for novelty and power was also a temptation.
Rather, they estimate that those charities will be at least $150 million short in 2022.
"Super-effective" is defined as being at least 6x as effective as cash transfers.
Given that the programs they support save lives for an average of just a few thousand dollars (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities), there is still a tremendous amount of good that can be done in the short-term, relatively inexpensively.
I think it's self-evident from his views as "ethics as a game with winners and losers"[1] that SBF had ulterior motives there (the same obvious ones all big political donors have, namely more favorable legislation) and doing it under the name of EA was just a convenient justification with ostensibly coterminous goals.
In other words, I don't think EAs *in particular* deserve much blame here, even though your comments upthread about political money being famously ineffective are valid.
I don't think you *have* to wait for a classifieds thread to do it, so long as if your ad is in sufficiently good taste. However, I think that waiting until another classifieds thread might give you more exposure.
A few months ago, I wrote a piece [1] that mentioned Scott's "My Immortal as Alchemical Allegory" [2]. People on the subreddit were quick to point out that Scott was bullshitting to make a point, and I pushed back! At least until I spent 2 minutes on the My Immortal fandom site.
Today I read another (amazing) piece by Sam Kriss [3] which, in retrospect, was obviously satire. But I didn't get the joke until I saw his footnote at the end, and even then I had to try looking up the fake Sun Ra albums he mentions to verify.
Is it tone deafness? Do others read those articles and immediately understand that they're written in jest? Or am I just too credulous?
You can try a little experiment. Spend some time reading The Onion, and the go to The Wall Street Journal. Even their headlines will read like satire for a while. It works every time for me.
The Wakanda one was not obviously satire to me until about halfway through - I'd heard of the Prester John legend, and found it plausible that there might have been some similar legends that I just hadn't heard of. It wasn't until the author claimed that Sun Ra had released three albums about Wakanda that I was like "waaaaait a minute!" And then I googled Olumo Bashenga, who turned out to be an obscure Marvel character, not an early-20th century African American prophet at all. And the story about the Ggon at the end is pretty clearly just over-the-top silliness. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to tell.
I notice a lot of satire follows a template of "polemical about X, written in the style of Y, to lure the reader into associating X and Y, which they wouldn't normally do". The X part is obvious. The Y part is obvious *if* you're familiar with that style. But if you aren't, there's a good chance that piece will go right over your head. A critique of math education written in the style of a postmodern dissertation isn't going to sound very cutting if you haven't run across a lot of postmodern dissertations, and even less so if you've never read any doctoral theses at all.
This goes extra hard if the only clues the writer leaves are one-shot salient details. A writer referring to their proposal as "modest" is winking at exactly no one who hasn't run across Jonathan Swift.
Which is to say, the most well known satire is stuff everyone recognizes. If it's well-known to a particular crowd, it's great... for that crowd. If you want to recognize as much satire as possible, cast your net wide; read a lot, especially of literature that a lot of writers read. The stereotypical nerd who put all his points into INT and read nothing but science textbooks will probably achieve a great deal, but recognizing satire is unlikely to be included in that.
The Sam Kriss one does depend on (1) of course Wakanda was invented by Lee and Kirby in the 70s but let's do the Watsonian versus Doylist thing here and (2) that you know about Prester John which is the set-up for the 'European dreams of Vicindia which is really Wakanda' theme. That is literally the subject of the illustration he has at the top of the piece.
I found the piece very funny, and he did throw in enough real names to make it 'credible' even if he misused them (Caelestius of Aquitaine did exist, was a heretic, but was not burned by anybody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caelestius). I don't know how to advise you on recognising satire - read more history and fiction, I guess? Some things can be really convincing unless you have a level of background knowledge to go "that is not how it happened".
I dunno about the Sam Kriss piece or other satire more generally, but with Scott, it seems hard not to pattern-match. Especially with the fiction writing, Scott loves being satirical! (Thinking of the Bay Area House Party series, for recent examples.) Even without knowing the exact what the refrances, as soon as I pick up "oh this is some kind of joke" levity-vibes, I'm expecting some sort of satire, or at least sarcasm/snark. It's like the the thing Scott used to do all the time, and definitely doesn't sometimes still do as a throwback.
The My Immortal one is very clearly satire; any time you have to convince someone a universally reviled work is actually good, it's almost certainly overthinking it. Any time you have to call upon ancient history to do so, you're almost certainly overthinking it on purpose. (Of course, I've been hearing people make fun of My Immortal for literally a decade and a half, so maybe that's required knowledge.)
The Sam Kriss one isn't nearly so obvious. I guess it's an early wink with Pliny's skyscrapers and lightbulbs, but if it's satire, I don't understand the point.
The Washington Post has its own article on the source of the comic.
I try to read stuff with a certain amount of detachment, and hold in abeyance how accurate I consider it? This is the "Net of a Million Lies", after all (naming credit to Vernor Vinge). There's trolls and motivated reasoning and unscrupulous partisans everywhere. I'm not always good at this, but I think it's an important life skill that my spectrumy nature left me deficient in, and so I have to try extra hard to catch up. (From what I gather, something like this is vital for people in serious academia, with the exception of very hard sciences - not just keeping track of information about their subject, but also where that information is from, and how reliable that source is, and so forth.)
That Wakanda article is awesome, thanks for the link! A book in similar vein that I'm vaguely planning on reading is "Tarzan Alive" by Philip Jose Farmer, which purports to be an actual biography of Lord Greystoke, showing where Burroughs got his information, what he was right and wrong about, what he just made up, and where and how he made mistakes. I love that kind of pseudo-history, seamlessly weaving its way into another narrative. Like what Niven did in "The Mote in God's Eye", finding a way to insert aliens into Pournelle's universe in a way that made it entirely reasonable why they remained cut off from the rest of the galaxy.
Oh, and if you still have an interest in Wakanda, here's a retrospective from Christopher J. Priest, the guy who created the modern incarnation of Black Panther. I think it's a fascinating look into the sausage-making at Marvel Comics, back in the day:
> not just keeping track of information about their subject, but also where that information is from, and how reliable that source is, and so forth
I struggle with this so hard. There are a million "facts" bouncing around in my head which could be from Reddit or Buzzfeed or the Economist. I can usually trace my way back to the source at least.
The signal to noise ratio on Reddit is very poor. I follow only one SubReddit that discusses electric snow blowers. Even that one is sketchy. I wouldn’t trust it for anything more controversial than tracking product experiences.
My vote is for you being unusually credulous—or for this being your long con on us. I actually have a hard time believing you thought Scott’s article was serious. Absolutely nothing surrounding My Immortal is serious.
I guess someone not very familiar with antiquity might be taken in by Kriss’s article, thinking that the comic book country has some basis in legend; it’s not uncommon for comic books to abuse myths for their source material.
Yeah I think in both cases, it was a mixture of (a) not being at all familiar with the source material, and (b) implicitly trusting the authors based on their previous work.
Possibly you should mix a little skepticism into your views on everybody.
I really really like Scott, and find him (inasmuch as I can judge this without ever having met him) to have good intellectual character, be trustworthy not to mislead, and very smart. I also occasionally think he’s hoodwinked by stuff or dead wrong: he has blind spots around people and concepts he knows personally (who doesn’t?), and is inclined to extend a little too much trust and forbearance to institutions because they are institutions, etc. Likewise, everybody has feelings and those feelings distort their thinking. And many people are venal. Almost everybody lies sometimes, but it’s not always going to be clear why. Think about the last few times you deliberately lied—or omitted the whole story, whatever you want to call it. People do this for crazy reasons: personal, idiosyncratic, vain stuff.
I advise always thinking that there’s a sizable chance you’re being consciously or unconsciously misled. There are too many reasons it might happen and the level of trust you have is dangerous.
In the comments of the scandal market for Eliezer Yudkowsky that got started last weekend on Manifold (https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-eliezer-yudkowsky-be-found-to#), there was a comment linking a blogpost (https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/#comment-216) accusing Yudkowsky of being involved in statutory rape and blackmail. Some commenters seemed to take it pretty seriously, but I've never heard anything about this before and the blogpost doesn't seem to cite any evidence beyond the author's word. Does anyone here know more about this?
A few years ago I tried to figure out what actually happened, and it was a long and crazy chain of the "telephone" game.
It started as "this happened in the rationalist community". Someone along the chain added that this is also Eliezer's responsibility, because he is the leader of the rationalists. A few steps further it became "Eliezer was involved", and a few more steps further it became "Eliezer did it".
The nature of the crime itself had a similar evolution. It started with "I saw two people dating, and the age difference was too big; technically it wasn't a statutory rape, but in my opinion it was similar" (I think it was 17 and 27, or something like that). This got shortened to "statutory rape", and then further shortened to "rape".
Clearly, the epistemic norms of the rationalist community are not universal.
I think the waters were also muddied by a real case of sexual abuse some years back (or even more than one) where it was a guy in his thirties having sex and coercive relationships with younger women, one of whom I think was seventeen.
It's an unedifying state of affairs and I don't want to go linking to it but it's easy enough to find.
Yes. There was a 17 (?) year old girl in the Bay Area rationalist social scene ~10 years ago. A few community members in their 20s (?) dated her at various times, but I never heard about Eliezer being one of them. A few years later, a disgruntled ex-employee tried to blackmail MIRI into re-hiring them and various other demands, and set up a blackmail site using that story as a seed to make much crazier Pizzagate style accusations. Eventually MIRI settled their wrongful-dismissal suit which some people interpreted as "giving into blackmail" and got additionally angry about. Every part of this story gets fractally weird, especially the "additionally angry about" part, but I think this is a fair description of Eliezer's role AFAIK.
I'm being kind of vague here because the former-17-year-old is still around and has expressed a preference against this story getting plastered over the Internet too widely.
Doesn’t have to be illegal to be scandalous. In most of the USA such a relationship would be a sign of impermissible immaturity at best, and distinctly unsavory.
When I was new to the U.S years ago, one of the most puzzling things was that people were constantly walking together or doing other activities, to raise money for causes. As a poor student, I was invited for walks I couldn't afford, by classmates. It seemed very hard to comprehend this aspect of culture. Why did this never happen in India?
My only reference point was a P.G. Wodehouse story where Ukridge (famous for his get-rich-quick schemes) realizes it is easy to get people in London to give you money, as long as you have a nice cause to get them to support. He invents "Buttercup Day". He makes a lot of money although no one quite knows what it is!
It looks like Larry David and Seinfeld might have been inspired by this. The character George Castanza invents something called The Human Fund. I loved that episode.
Why is this such a thing in Western culture? Is it bizarre to anyone else?
I have become more comfortable with it over the years but I remember thinking it was an entirely new kind of a thing I'd never encountered before. I'd encountered altruism before, but not quite this organized version of it that was so hugely tied to people's identities.
Including a group activity with your fundraiser generates excitement and exposure for your charity - "Come watch us walk/run for 24 hours straight" is more interesting than "Come listen to us talk about why breast cancer is important and needs money." It gets people to show up, and once they show up they'll probably donate some money.
It also makes people feel like they're getting something for their money - "I paid $50 to help my friend enter a race, and it went to charity!" sounds more appealing than "I paid $50 to charity," even though the second one is perhaps more efficient.
(Games Done Quick is a great example of the second one - they have all sorts of donation goals to get the runners to do various tricks or do bonus speedruns or glitch showcases. It costs them nothing to offer - the speedrunner is already there on the couch, they just get a little more time in the spotlight - but "I'm donating money to save the animals in Super Metroid" is more appealing and lets donors feel a direct connection with what they're paying for.)
Everyone agrees that giving money to charity is a good thing, but with thousands of different apparently-good causes and each of them having an insatiable demand for money, it's hard to make reasonable decisions. In the absence of some kind of Schelling point that tells us when, how much, and to whom to donate, most people probably don't bother. But that bugs us, because we know we probably should.
Enter the Big Charity Event. Instead of a bottomless well of need that my dollars can't possibly fill, there's a nice simple annual event that I can give a two-digit number of dollars to and feel good about. I give some affordable amount of money to charity, and in return my friend or colleague or family member will do something ever-so-slightly difficult or time consuming like walking a fairly long distance. I can give money happy in the knowledge that the same person won't guilt me into making a larger donation next week (because they're not about to walk another fifty miles). Meanwhile the participants get the considerable satisfaction of working in a group towards a good cause, ignoring the large disconnect between their actual physical actions and the good cause.
tl;dr it's a nice Schelling point for everybody that lets some people give modest amounts of money to charity without feeling like they ought to give more, and lets other people have a nice time doing some kind of moderately difficult activity in groups, and lets everybody feel that they're doing good for the world.
Caring about and helping the weak and suffering is important. But there's such a thing as overdoing this concern. That is my point. For example if someone is obsessed with helping the poor, I'd say something is off there. A well-lived life ought to have other things going on.
Im not convinced paying an entry fee and running a 5k would constitute being obsessed with helping the poor. It one of the easiest things one could do to help out a cause.
Partly it seems an US/UK thing that's spreading: My 7 year old had a money-raiser-run in school this summer; here in Germany that was a first for me. (I let them have 1 Euro, pretending "not to understand" that system). But enough parents liked it; I am afraid it will stay. - I guess, we are simply too far from "deserving real poor" people, but we still feel the need to "do good". So: kinda "vacuum activities" (I like Konrad Lorenz). - When I visited India (or Russia) in the nineties, there were enough beggars on the street to satisfy anyone's altruistic needs. Doing those walks to raise money? Outlandish idea there, true. I wondered how Indians dealt with it - obviously begging was more popular where tourists go, but locals gave to beggars, too (unlike Tony Blair, an early EA).
If you give money to a beggar in India, you'll see another beggar around the next corners and feel like you should give money to them too. Pretty soon you're out of money and the problem of poverty in India has not been solved.
So I come along and suggest a deal: you give ten rupees to this beggar for lap of this track I can walk in a day. All of a sudden your moral burden, instead of being enormous, seems quite manageable. I walk a hundred laps, you give the beggar a thousand rupees, and we can all agree this is a good effort all round. Your obligation as a rich westerner to help the third world's poor is, all of a sudden, rate-limited by the ability of other rich westerners to do arbitrary athletic activities.
The EA answer is probably: Drop the nonsense-walk. Work meanwhile. Give the salary to the poor. - My take on your "deal" is: ??? (I see zero connection between those walks by X and me donating to Z. Plus: I find it repulsive to pretend there is one.)
Why does it horrify you? Giving food to beggars is a lot better than giving nothing and arguably better than giving money (doesn't create incentives to have a ring of 'beggars' for profit, while still helping prevent someone down on their luck from starving)
I mean, if they have the food in the car, why not? (As they might if they do a lot of exercise where they have to spend time in the car immediately afterwards.) Those things are durable and last for years. It's certainly better than not giving anything.
I remember being involved in something like this as a kid. It was something like "get people to pledge that for each mile you walk, they'll donate $1 to cure breast cancer, then walk some number of miles". I think it was supposed to be some kind of social bonding activity, where you signal how much you care by walking some number of miles and then everyone pretends to be very impressed by you. Probably works better for kids than for adults.
I keep wondering whether we need more background work (better computers, better instruments, better theories, better programs, more math) rather than more work on specific diseases.
I think walks have a tendency to be health-related, and I figured it caught on because it's an opportunity to challenge yourself to exercise (kinda like a marathon) but branded such that no one expects you to be particularly athletic about it.
I've always thought it was weird as someone who grew up here, so I'm glad to have some outside validation.
But I think ultimately it's popular for a couple reasons:
1) There's a certain type of person that likes to feel like they're directly taking action in a way that just giving money doesn't provide. For a lot of causes (cancer research, etc.) there's no way for most normal people to directly get involved in a meaningful way, so they use walking as a surrogate.
2) For others they probably want some way to signal and show off their altruism. No one really pays that much attention if you just donate some money, but if you can tell everyone you walked x miles for a charity it's a more socially acceptable way of engaging in a minor bit of narcissism/egoism. And if you did directly talk about how you donated money it would likely be seen as garish and unseemly, like bragging about how rich you are.
Are these Open Threads in fact Clopen [0] Threads?
Reasoning: Open Threads Hidden Open Threads are both, definitionally, open. OTs and HOTs are complements within the universe of <X>OTs. Thus, both are clopen.
This also means the space of threads is disconnected. And yet conversations from one thread are sometimes carried over to others, suggesting a degree of path connectedness. Most curious.
The threads start off open, and eventually become closed. Initially, every point anyone makes is surrounded by neighbouring points on the thread, but the discussions are never done and they’re always swimming in a sea of new additions people might make. After a few days, when most people have moved on, the thread has pretty much reached everywhere it’s going to reach.
Musk and company are trying to cut costs and squeeze out as much productivity from the current work force as possible. Highly doubt they’re recruiting new people, at the moment. Even if they do, expect to receive a laughable salary offer.
Probably the other way around. My impression is that Musk thought there was a lot of deadwood around Twitter, Inc. -- and I'm not even sure the previous leadership would be in that strong a disagreement. So he's set fire to the deadwood, and hopes the conflagration doesn't take out any of the useful green growth as well. We'll see.
But anyway the usual denouement in that circus is that it becomes much clearer, after the blood has been washed off the walls and the smoke has cleared, what kind of people you really need, and since you've just freed up a shit-ton of salary and benefit money by discharging 3/4 of your prior employees, you now offer very nice wages indeed to induce people to jump onto your recently foundering but hopefully all now patched up ship.
Google is hiring in Zürich, though it is (and always have been) tough to get in, and even if you are good there is a lot of luck involved in the hiring process.
I don't know so much about the other major tech companies in Zürich, but none of the ETH alumni that I know had issues getting a job, and I see no recent change. I recommend going to tech job fairs, it seems easy to get offers there.
To ETH students I usually recommend the ETH job fairs and career events. Some of them are open to other students or generally open to everyone seeking a job in related areas. The biggest one is Polymesse. For computer science students there are the VIS Kontaktparty and VIS con, other departments have their own events.
I know less about events that are not associated with ETH, but I have heard about the Zurich Tech Job Fair by TechMeetups. I don't know your specific profile, but googling should bring up more events.
Is there any way to see only the new posts since my last update? It's very time consuming to follow threads of discussion when you have to go back through old posts
If you reply to every top-level comment you want to follow the Activity page will then tell you who else replied to that top-level comment (but not replies to replies etc.), at the price of making yourself obnoxious to all other posters.
Scott Aaronson posted his take on AI Alignment, and it seems a lot more like Paul Christiano's than like Eliezer Yudkowsky's. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821 Maybe even less urgent. I am not sure what to make of it.
I not read the "less urgency". Example: "(3) Orthodox AI-riskers worry almost entirely about an agentic, misaligned AI that deceives humans while it works to destroy them, along the way to maximizing its strange utility function.
We Reform AI-riskers entertain that possibility, but we worry at least as much about powerful AIs that are weaponized by bad humans, which we expect to pose existential risks much earlier in any case." Much earlier, see? - My take: true. Think: 2030AI+2030drones+(whoever you fear) . We are lucky Russia is not high on (A)I.
Agree with both of you. Human generals military thinking ends usu. up in "preparing to win the most recent war" - then the new war proves a lot of that thinking obsolete. An "independent, self-improving military AI" vs. a conventional led military would be like chess with deep blue vs. dumb me. (I just assume this AI would go heavily "drones"/unmanned - incl. land and sea. No manned F-35, frigates or Abrams no more.) The US may be first- the DoD must be on it, but some underdog might be more daring to actually try (even KSA's MBS might).
It's possible that preparing to win the previous war might work out better than preparing to win the next war, due to human limitations. There's even less information about the future than the past.
I've been pushing the bad humans scenario for a while, though I frame it as big powerful organizations-- probably governments or corporations, possibly religions.
I haven't been able to figure out the shape of the threat or what might be done about it, though discouraging smart people from working on AI might help a little.
The bad organization model takes away some of the barriers from AIs getting enough power to do a lot of damage. It doesn't have to break out of the box, there are people who want it out in the world. It's not going to have to figure out how to deceive people, it will have plenty of skillful people helping it with deception. It will get support on buying and maintaining hardware.
Classic sf: _The Jagged Orbit_ by John Brunner. An AI in the future has been tasked with maximizing profits for a personal weapons company. Unfortunately, maximum profits means making people so dangerously violent and frightened that civilization collapses, followed by no profits. The AI invents time travel to deal with the problem. I can't remember whether it helps.
Minor note: Scott Aaronson is, for humorous purposes, labeling the AI-factions he describes with names of Jewish denominations; specifically Orthodox and Reform Judaism. There isn't much deep in this, but Carlos' comment made me suspect non-Jews aren't getting it, because the name of the denomination is definitely "Reform" not "Reformist".
I don't think Scott Aaronson is getting it either. The Reform denomination came first and Orthodox was a reaction to it, not the other way round. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism#History):
"It was only the foundation of the Hamburg Temple in 1818 which mobilized the conservative elements. The organizers of the new Hamburg synagogue, who wished to appeal to acculturated Jews with a modernized ritual, openly defied not just the local rabbinic court that ordered them to desist but published learned tracts which castigated the entire rabbinical elite as hypocritical and obscurant. The moral threat they posed to rabbinic authority, as well as halakhic issues such as having a gentile play an organ on the Sabbath, were combined with severe theological issues. The Temple's revised prayer book omitted or rephrased petitions for the coming of the Messiah and renewal of sacrifices (post factum, it was considered as the first Reform liturgy). More than anything else, this doctrinal breach alarmed the traditionalists. Dozens of rabbis from across Europe united in support of the Hamburg rabbinic court, banning the major practices enacted there and offering halakhic grounds for forbidding any change in received custom. Most historians concur that the 1818–1821 Hamburg Temple dispute, with its concerted backlash against Reform and the emergence of a self-aware conservative ideology, marks the beginning of Orthodox Judaism."
I think that this is kind of wrong. Orthodox Judaism as a movement did not need to exist before Reform Judaism did, because it was the default environment. It only got a name and became a movement when Reform made controversial and innovative changes to traditional theology, liturgy and practice. But I don't think it's controversial to say that if a random Jew from 1799 was teleported to the present day, they would be much more at home in an Orthodox shul than a Reform Temple.
Pac-12 football has been entertainingly chaotic this year, although it looks like USC is going to be the one that comes out on top (assuming they win the championship game). Good show for one of their last years in the conference.
It looks like NASA is drifting back towards the bad plan again for a prospective 2040 Mars mission (which won't happen, but it shows where their thoughts are). Once again, they're supporting a mission that theoretically is supposed to be safer because it's not as long, but you end up with astronauts actually getting more cosmic radiation dosage because they're in space for more days as opposed to the mission architecture that has them on Mars itself for 18 months (Mars effectively blocks out half of the sky and thus half the radiation dosage you'd get in space, and you get it even lower by putting your landing site in a crater or near a cliff).
I wonder if it's a case of the nuclear rocket people throwing their weight around. They really want their nuclear-thermal rockets to be included somehow in a Mars mission.
That would be OK with me. Getting new technology mature is way more important than keeping the health of Mars astronauts pristine. It's an adventure job, not a commercial flight for beautiful people. Risk is expected. Or to quote the (very probably apocraphyl[1]) story of the ad Ernest Shackleton supposedly put in the Times to recruit for one of his polar expeditions:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success."
I never understand why anyone plans on the astronauts returning from such missions? Seems like a huge waste. We got lots of people. Just keep sending them.
Could be is NASA thinking in terms of managing a known singular risk ie. cosmic radiation against managing the more varied risks of an 18 month long base on Mars.
I was thinking back to my 60s childhood. One weekend my sister & I stayed with my Grandmother, who was born around 1900. Grammy, had bought us some coloring books and crayons. As we were coloring, we noticed Grammy didn't know how to color, but scribbled like a toddler. Being uncouth youths, we told Grammy, you're supposed to color inside the lines. Grammy said, "Oh, I didn't know, we didn't have coloring books when I was a child." In our 60s now, my sister & I still comment upon this ; but only from the perspective of what Grammy didn't have growing up.
Today I had a thought. What else are we missing?
One of the things I see, is the 'video-game generation' which thinks that shooting an animal always results in insta-kill, as if a bullet has magical life-stopping properties. Yes, a bullet has great damage-doing properties, but not necessarily life-ending properties. Many animals live a surprisingly long time after taking big bullets to the head and/or other vital organs.
I also see in threads which divert towards the prepper-survivalist needs, ala post apolitical world, the phrase "I read a book, I'll just grow a garden." As a life-long gardener, I know that one doesn't 'just grow a garden.' There's a lot to it ; books whilst being a good resource, gardening books, typically aren't written by actual gardeners, but instead are primarily written by someone hailing from the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) who is merely regurgitating other bookish learnings. On gardening shows, the people with dirt under their nails are wearing black 'LANDSCAPE CREW' T-shirts, and standing just off-camera.
Today, I read once again, the worn-out Anthropological fallacy that hunter-gatherers worked less than farmers. I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherers lived quite differently than our image of the noble hunter stalking the equally noble big game, quickly dispatching the beast with a well placed arrow from his handsome bow, hand carved with a stone tool he harvested from yonder volcano. Having hunted, fished, collected rock, lived remotely, lived in Alaskan Exploration camps surrounded by wolves, and observed wolves hunting, and taking down moose calves. I'm more certain the early hunter-gathers lived by shadowing the wolves, coyotes, vultures, etc. and robbing them of their feast. Whilst in the middens, we find the bones of moose, deer, bear, rabbits, fish, etc. I'd venture if we examined feces, we'd find a whole lot more beetle carapaces, mouse, lizard, and snake skeletons, indicating such critters featured higher on the menu than the 'television noble fur-bearers.'
There's a local story—actually a book too—of a 1950s homeopath named Frank, they called "The Goat Doctor" — because he lived amidst a flock of goats. Frank had the ability to fix bad backs by massage, and people came from far distances to be treated by Frank. Many doctors sent their unhealable patients to Frank, where they were promptly treated and healed. Frank credits his learning from a lifetime of slaughtering goats for food. What is it our doctors could learn about backs by slaughtering a lot of goats?
In an earlier life, I had a herd of cattle, and took a weeklong livestock reproduction class, learning how to do artificial insemination on livestock ; I guess I'm a licensed cow-fucker. As part of the class, the instructors brought in—from the slaughter house—a dozen fresh bovine reproductive tracts, vulva - cervix - uterus - ovaries all connected. We examined these, handled them, learned a lot. But when I read r/BadWomensAnatomy, the purported females online have absolutely no sense of female anatomy—perhaps that's why its called Bad Women's Anatomy. I sometimes read women who were considering sex, stating they didn't shave their vaginas ... um ... that's an internal organ, not the external portion. I'm pretty sure you're not shaving that part - its equivalent to a man saying he's shaved his urethra.
I've seen a complaint (possibly from Perun) that war gaming doesn't *begin* to do justice to how little information people have in fighting wars.
I think there's a difference between missing things because skills haven't been invented yet vs. missing things because of living in an environment that's optimized for entertainment or simplicity.
> Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.
Rebel Inc is a game about fighting an insurgency in an Afghanistan-ish country, with the goal being to stabilize the country
It's got a bunch of interesting features, but my favorite is that your airstrikes will occasionally kill an innocent civilian by accident. When it happens, you get the choice of "apologize" or "cover it up." If you apologize, you lose support and have to spend money. If you cover it up, then 95% of the time you lose nothing, 5% of the time you lose a lot more support. So covering up your mistakes is basically always the correct decision, tactically speaking. Just, you know, not the morally correct one.
This ties into my long-standing rant about Civilization-type games - the satellite's view of everything, the fact that you can order a city to build an X and it will immediately do so, and so on. If Civ were truly immersive, you'd start with your founding city, order your townsfolk to build that monument and look into making pottery, and mayyybe they'd do it; you'd put together enough people and stores to send a band of settlers over where your scout said there was some nice citrus trees and cotton fields and mayyybe you'd see a supply wagon return later with luxury goods, and so on.
So, yeah, fog of war, and fog of bullshit. Also, Fog of Ignorance, because you have no reason to know you live in a natural universe where your local nook happens to be spherical and praying to gods is unlikely to do anything other than trick your body into a feeling of control that reduces your stress and oh you should probably hold on to that piece of land with the funny shiny rocks because your ultimate goal is going to be building a spaceship.
Also, why is your wealth measured in coin before you've researched currency, and how do you know the current year is "nnnn BC"? But I digress.
Gameplay license is the obvious counter. I'm arguing for hyperrealism here, and even I know the result is unlikely to be fun. "How the hell was I supposed to know I was wasting my time building Uffizi instead of riflemen?" Et cetera.
OTOH, it might be fun to fight a single war with all that fog, with a post mortem where the game gives you god's eye view and control and clever software and visualizations point out "here's where each player screwed up". I think some game dev will eventually try this, if they can figure out how to get the AIs to handle it.
That's a cool piece of writing, but I think I'd have remembered the fog of bullshit.
Maybe I read about the comparison between the amount of information a commander gets in the real world vs. in games at acoup, but I'm inclined to think it was perun, a very sensible youtuber-- specializes in war with an emphasis on logistics.
I was only suggesting the piece because it seemed similar, not that I though you'd gotten it from there. (I sort of assume no one else on the Internet remembers that piece.)
I hadn't heard of perun, but I'll check him out. Thanks!
I have heard anecdotes from a friend, a middle-aged cis het woman who sometimes has flings with younger men, that a growing number of them have started viewing sex as though it were a spectator sport, she suspects due to watching porn. Not necessarily watching *too much* porn, but watching it with the wrong attitude maybe? Similar to how a lot of people, if given the choice, would rather watch a pro football game than play in an amateur football game. Or listen to music composed and performed by one of humanity's best musicians, rather than try to compose and perform music themselves? When they try it themselves, they're self-analytical, worried about "making mistakes", and feeling pressure to "perform", not in the sense of making it enjoyable for all parties involved, but in the sense that if it were recorded they'd be optimizing for making it rank high on people's list of all-time great sex acts.
This confuses me, but we move in very different circles.
I've seen a complaint, possibly from Clarisse Thorn, that exposure to pornography leads to people imitating positions which were designed to make sex visible-- nothing to do with personal pleasure.
Yeah I am this way with sports. I play a lot of adult team sports (3-4 times a week, sometimes more), I have no idea why someone would watch when playing is an option.
As someone who admittedly would rather do any other non-painful activity than exercise: I think you and I disagree on how very different "watching sports" is from "playing sports", to the extent that I don't understand how a person would think to say "I'd rather do this one than that one", unprompted. But obviously people do.
I'm with you on this. I have a really-really crappy banjo which I can almost pluck out some poorly synchronized riffs. But I enjoy this much more than listening to someone else's superb artistry.
But I'm a bit more toward the "spectator" side of things in terms of music. The more I learn, the more I can appreciate virtuosos. Though that still doesn't change the pleasure of playing in a group, even if it's been years.
I guess I'd say for most things, there's a balance? Some stuff I enjoy doing more than other stuff, and for the things I enjoy, I try not to let world-class performances spoil my taste for "doing", while at the same time I do try to let them inform me to the extent possible. Other stuff I don't enjoy doing as much, but I can still appreciate when other people do them (like reading other people's writing). I just find it hard to wrap my head around sex slipping into that second category. :-/
I've been reading the Economist for a few months, and I find its articles to be much higher quality than most other "mainstream media". Do you agree or disagree? Any better recommendations?
I recommend the book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist.
It covers how TE was founded to agitate in favour of repealing the corn laws (one of the central political struggles between the old feudal land owners and the, then, newly minted financial classes, in the mid 19th century).
It has always presented a view that's amenable to those financial classes (quite blatantly imo), but it was at least rigorous in its data collection and reporting, even Marx considered it a valuable resource back then for example.
It ran into financial difficulties in the 80s however, and rebranded itself as a status signal for the aspiring middle classes that were rising globally, not just in the West also in India, Indonesia etc. That did hugely increased its readership, but many commentators consider it to have declined in quality since then.
Generally yea though there are still huge gaps and biases at times. For example I remember a piece where they were looking at a situation where a law reduced corporate flexibility, but reduced costs, and the people discussing it just refused to even consider that the corporations might prefer the scenario where they had more control over slightly higher costs.
Like that wasn’t even a position they were considering as a possibility. And they were puzzled by the corporate reticence…when the reason was so obvious.
Before the blogosphere (econlib and SSC), there was TE. Found it in 1999 and read each issue, and all of each. The Christmas double-issue I still buy. So, I am kind of a fan. - I ended subscription, because: a) TE still costly -"€144.50/first year - auto-renews at €289" annually - to cancel they want you to call in! (and they will offer you to prolong at 50%!) -, while awful NYT at 2$ a month - while excellent blogs often enough free.
b) Once Matt Ridley wrote for them, but no more - TE 'sold out' to climate-catastrophism plus anti-Brexitism. I remember just 1 article that started to even consider why smart people might want Brexit. (I am no brexiteer, btw). And there are too few clear headed pieces about environmentalism (Though I can remember 2 good titles. In 2 decades.) - That said: TE is still by far the best out there. Which is a shockingly low bar in 2022.
> Dr Schrag at Harvard points out that the climate system as a whole mostly operates on a sliding scale, where higher global temperatures bring greater impacts and risks. “1.5°C is not safe and 2.2°C is not the end of the world,” he says.
Doesn't really sound like catastrophism, perhaps their stance changed recently?
They only quote only one guy. And: "1.5°C is not safe" is sth. Greta would readily agree too. Even "2.2°C is not the end of the world" is, as the doom-sayers are claiming much higher temps are waiting for us.
What would be a change? Well, quote a panel saying the obvious: A: Even +0°C is NOT safe as in "safe from hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, extinctions, pandemics, crime, wars, ...."
B: +1.5°C is not safe, but might be a net positive (earth has become greener, due to greenhouse effect).
C: +4.5°C is based on assumptions that are nonsense (lots of coal in a much richer world in 2100).
D: Politics by panic brought us billions of wasted subsidies and may well lead to billions of premature deaths till 2100 by keeping much more people much longer in poverty.
E: Cold is still the much bigger killer. See ACX.
As I wrote, I am unsubscribed. When I read my free article, it may be COVID, US, Ukraine. Not climate!
If you read mainstream German media it seems that Climate Change is the most important issue and everything else should be put aside to fight it though...
I've heard people say that The Economist has gone downhill after Zanny Minton Beddoes took over, but I can't really say much for or against that position. Have you noticed anything?
The Economist is pretty much the best general news magazine in the world. Not that the bar is particularly high. And they do cover countries that most people scarcely know exist. And they do it from a non "America is the center of everything" approach.
Brett is absolutely right about The Economist occasionally using a handful of locals in the pub as a proxy for the entire country, and you get the feeling that most of the writers have never worked a day of manual labor in their life. But still. Its well-written and the captions are often masterpieces of wit and brevity.
The Economist is mostly a rehash of OECD reports, with nice graphs as an extra[1].
On some topics such as ethics, it's pretty well balanced and displays the different points of view without caricaturing them (looking at you New York Times).
I subscribed for a number of years, and still use their Espresso app to keep vague tabs on what's going on in the world without triggering my PTSD too badly.
As an American, I value that they come to news from a non-USA-centric perspective, and that they're partially insulated from our culture war and preconceptions. They've got their own biases, of course, and there's a different tone in their coverage of Britain, but I find it much more relaxing than anything made over here. And I appreciate how they cover the entire world in every issue, even if no one in the Current American Narrative is paying attention to a particular continent this week. (Shades of Norman Davies' "Europe", a wonderful history book that makes a point of covering the entire darn peninsula, from the Urals to Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland, from the last ice age through the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
One non-obvious downside is that internally, the Economist makes use of a lot of young, sheltered, elite-educated journalists, who can lack the perspective, experience, and insight that I'd prefer. And although their lack of author attributions has some benefits, it also serves to disguise this. So more often than I'd like, their coverage is superficial and repeats the standard classical liberal talking points on whatever subject is there. (Keep an eye out for Gell-Mann amnesia.) Still, they do tend to name enough names, and touch on enough details, that when I want to investigate something in more depth, it's easy. And again, they make a point of covering a lot of area, every week, so they don't overlook stories as much as other sources. (And I do get nostalgic about those "standard classical liberal talking points".)
Finally someone acknowledging that Europe is a peninsula and not (really) a continent...BTW I am European myself and I am not triggered :D (maybe because my area of expertise is Geography?)
This is an embarrasingly accurate description of myself. Could you please tell me an example of those classical liberal talking points? Do you mean things like favoring free markets, freedom of speech, democracy and such?
Me too. Well, not so young or sheltered anymore. :-) But it's a thing to watch out for, if the people providing my news have the same unconscious biases that I do.
And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. It's what I was raised on, and why I'm bitterly disappointed in the modern Democratic party. It's like, the Economist has a perspective, they make it very clear, and that's fine. They've got a hammer, and they acknowledge that not every problem is a nail, but I think they do err on the side of assuming that problems are nails, and don't often enough get into the nitty-gritty of why a particular problem has proven resistant to hammers so far. If that makes sense?
They're usually pretty solid. On a few regional issues they occasionally have "We talked to some folks who could speak english, and then treated them as a proxy for the country" stuff to it, but mostly it's pretty good.
I haven't read in some time but in the days when I subscribed in print, they were always rather short in terms of raw word count but incredibly dense. Very high signal to noise ratio.
Yes, I can't believe the absolutely trash quality of modern writing. My father—who was a newspaper printer in the 50s and 60s—and I talk a lot about this. He's losing his vision now, but he'd remark about how The Sacramento Bee seems to have lost their hyphenation dictionary, which is a very complex dictionary which helps to break sentences down to eye-pleasing narrow columns. In dad's days of hot-metal printing, for a Line-O-Type operator, this was quite an art.
Even as a young teen in the 70s, I read quite a bit of the Sacramento Union, after I finished my morning route. The writing was of very high quality, fantastic wit, pleasing prose, engaging stories, even to a snot-nosed teen. Mark Twain actually wrote for the Sacramento Union ... though about 100 years before my time. But these were the quality of writing we enjoyed in those days.
About a year ago, Scott quoted a claim that "Nazis hated IQ research":
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october/comment/3264463)
Now to add two datapoints to that:
(1) Fritz Lenz, a human geneticist and "influential specialist in eugenics in Nazi Germany" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lenz), whose work was referred to by Hitler in "Mein Kampf", propagated a concept of racial hierarchy; according to wikipedia, claims about intelligence were part of that (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lenz).
You can always discuss about what is actually "IQ research" and what is merely applying some concept of "intelligence". I will not take part in such discussions in this thread.
Lenz is actually a good example of what I was talking about. He is a eugenicist with many evil views, but he also consistently praises the Jews, and attacks anti-Semitism as "unscientific", based on the result of his IQ research.
There were many people like Lenz, and the Nazis were happy to give them positions in the eugenics program based on their other beliefs and their scientific credibility (thus eg the Gottingen test you linked). But the Nazis were pretty against the IQ research itself because of the constant finding that Jews were as good as Germans, so they made it doctrine that IQ tests were bad compared to mystical unquantifiable racial purity vibes, and eventually got Lenz et al to fall in line in exchange for keeping their influence.
I'd like to see some links to quotes where he "praises" the Jews, given that according to Wikipedia, his textbook referred to Jews as parasites. Also, you write as though "the Nazis" and Lenz et al were two different sets. In 1931, he said that National Socialism was "applied biology", and said about Hitler's reference to his work in Mein Kampf: "In any case, he [Hitler] has embraced the essential ideas of racial hygiene and their importance with great intellectual receptivity and energy, while most academic authorities are still rather uncomprehending on these questions."
In May 1933 he supported Hitler in an open letter of Munich professors.
Reading the Wikipedia entry, it seems that the idea that he was a pure scientist among unscientific Nazis seems weird. Many of his beliefs seem just ideologically motivated.
"Jews and Teutons alike are distinguished by great powers of understanding and by remarkable strength of will. Jews and Teutons resemble each other in having a large measure of self-confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire to get their own way - the difference being that the Teuton is inclined to seek his ends by force, the Jew by cunning."
On anti-Semitism, same source:
"Judophobia [is] for the most part the outcome of a feeling of insubordination, [ie] the spirit which animates many of the anti-Semites is the envy felt by a non-possessing class."
The Jews were distinguished by their so-called "mental racial pecularities" and "characterized, not only by shrewdness and alertness, by diligence and perseverance, but also by an amazing capacity for putting themselves in others' places (empathy) and for inducing others to accept their guidance." Lenz viewed them as a highly intelligent race whose representation in the "world of knowledge", particularly in the sciences, was far higher than "might be expected from their numbers". Although they appeared "more prominent as intermediaries and interpreters in the primary work of production", it would be ridiculous, Lenz asserted, "to deny that the Jewish race has produced persons of outstanding genius".
From the same source:
"[The De-Nazification Committee concluded that] 'In accordance with his upright scientific principles, the accused [Lenz] stood in complete opposition to one of the most important National Socialist pseudoscientific dogmas [the inferiority of the Jews].'
It is also true that differences between Lenz and the Party regarding the "Jewish question" were never settled: the Nazis never succeeded in converting Lenz to their brand of maniacal anti-Semitism. Although Lenz's treatment of the "Jewish question" is, in places, more openly anti-Semitic n the 1936 edition of Principles of Human Heredity than in previous editions, it is only marginally so. Moreover, unlike many volkisch intellectuals, Lenz did not openly criticize Jewish writers, artists, and scientists for their alleged subversive influence on German culture.51 Given the Party's sensitivity to the correct treatment of the ^Jewish question", Lenz's willingness both to discuss ^positive" Jewish traits and to argue that, on the whole, Jews and Germans were extremely similar, renders his testimony that he was reprimanded by the Fuhrer's Chancellery quite believable. Probably owing to his reluctance to deviate from his long-standing views on eugenic issues, Lenz was unable to publish a new edition of Human Selection and Race Hygiene during the Third Reich."
Again, just to clarify, I am not saying he was a good person, a perfectly unbiased upright scientist, or even immune to various more common and less obvious forms of anti-Semitism of the time. I'm just saying that his interest in intelligence science helped him escape the particular kind of anti-Semitism more common among the Nazis as this time.
Since I've been around long enough to know that people are *still* going to respond with "SO YOU'RE SAYING NAZIS ARE GOOD?!?!" I'm tapping out of the conversation now before I give them too many things to quote out of context. You can find similar quotes in those sources or by Googling "Lenz Jews" or whatever else without forcing me to get myself in trouble by providing them.
Sorry, I was not clear enough. I posted because I think it is useful information for people who updated in a certain way, but I am not interested in taking part in "Motte and Bailey". I might take part in other kinds of discussion, but I currently am a bit time-constrained.
Recently ended a relationship. Went right into the no contact thing, it's been 1.5 weeks. Today experiencing mild emotions/thoughts that are weirdly more difficult than the previously intense ones (guilt, missing her, wondering how/what she's doing, etc). I don't have ambivalence about whether it's the right thing, but do intensely miss her. I don't think I need the typical advice (push yourself into hobbies, stay occupied, talk with friends/family, gym, etc). Wondering if anyone had anything to say that could relate or that could numb the ruminations or... I don't know... anything at all.
Drink whisky until you sob like a baby, endure the awful hangover, have a decent breakfast, fill a flask with tea and go for a solitary walk in the country.
(When I saw this, my first reaction was that it would make a perfect followup to: "Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like no one is watching. ...")
Yes, I think that would help. Seems to me the crying is the active ingredient in the formula. When you're crying about some awful loss, you're very in touch with the impossibility of correcting the loss or changing how unbearable it is. But something about plumbing the depths of your own helplessness while liquified by emotion (and maybe whisky too) is actually a pretty good change agent. After crying I often feel a sort of peace. The loss hasn't changed, but somehow I'm more accepting of it.
Love is the most renewable resource in a relationship, and the least valuable.
Which is to say that our hearts are designed for love. They're love generation machines. And we frequently generate love for people who are wrong for us; I think almost everyone has a relative or two who we love, but can't stand to be around for too long. And so in romantic relationships, we ooze love. It seeps from any little kindness shown us by our partners, any affection, even though that love. It replenishes daily.
You know what doesn't replenish daily? Trust. When your partner breaks a promise, that reservoir does not refill.
You know what doesn't replish daily? Like. When your partner takes that ugly snipe at you, or belches despite you telling him you can't stand her burping contests, that feeling of "I enjoy hanging with them" drops and re-accretes very slowly.
The truth is, by the time most relationships end, love is all that's left. The like meter has plummeted to zero, the trust is bottomed out on a pile of broken promises, but the love? It's still there. It's what's tugging at you like a fishhook in your heart as your bags are packed, you're out the door, you're crying because you love them but that's not enough, that's never enough.
You keep hearing how "love is all you need." That's not true. Love is like the air; it's everywhere, but you can't build castles on it. What you need is a solid foundation of trust and like, and probably a hundred other things I'm forgetting.
What you need is to remember to steward those fragile ecosystems of promises and amiability as though your love depended on it. Because it does.
My Jungian analyst would say that the psyche is a whole, balanced system, and that whatever the ego (that's your waking self, who makes decisions rationally etc.) decides to do, the unconscious (often felt as feelings, ruminations, dreams, fantasies) compensates for, to provide a balance.
He says this doesn't mean anything was wrong with your decision, or that you need to distract yourself from the emotions or reject them, but just that you accept that there is a balance being enacted will respect the function of your unconscious and thus reduce the intrusive feelings.
He's a bit woo, and I'm not 100% sold or anything, but I found it helpful as a way to understand and frame (and thus accept, though not bow to) the feelings that contradict the decision I made.
In the past, I've tried to step back in my head, and look at the relationship as a whole, the good parts and bad parts together. Sort of hold it mentally like I'd do with a fragile wooden model, turning it around and seeing it from all angles. And let myself feel sad about losing the good parts while simultaneously keeping in mind that overall, the relationship needed to end. (Assuming of course I don't think I made a mistake.)
(From a Buddhist perspective, I also try to feel my attachments to the good and bad parts, how the strings tug on me and vibrate me when they're plucked. If that makes any sense.)
I dunno if this will help you, but it has helped me sometime, and perhaps has given me a more mature attitude toward the whole thing. When I can pull it off, anyway.
Dan Savage's advice: Have a casual fling or, if that's hard to find, just some hookups. I think this somewhat tacky-sounding approach can actually help, and that when it does the way it helps is by providing new data to the part of you that believes there will never be anyone else. You already know that's not true -- but that's a part of your brain that is untouched by that knowledge, and needs concrete proof.
Something that helped me a little in your situation: since the decision was the best course for both of you, remind yourself that you're weathering the resulting pain for her sake as much as for your own. It's the only remaining way of doing right by someone for whom you still care.
This is helpful thank you. It was entirely my decision, but I can justify that it's best for both of us, in that she deserves to be with someone who reciprocates. And bearing this pain means I'm not giving her false hope, or stringing her along, or flip-flopping. There's a lot of things I still want to say to her, but I'm not emotionally in a place to know if those are things that should be said. That knowledge will come with time. I hope she's doing okay now and not hurting, but my decision to end things means I'm not the person anymore who gets to help her with that.
If you don’t need the typical advice, is that because you’re already following it? If so, great, ignore the rest of this paragraph. If not: follow the typical advice. Your problem is not unique and you should respect that advice because it’s well-proven.
You are going through a period of grieving. Time will make this better and easier to accept. A relationship is a habit and lingering feelings about that habit are normal; sadness is normal, some amount of regret and wishing things were different is normal, even if you wouldn’t go back and it makes no sense to start again. Let yourself grieve, just don’t change what you do because of how you feel.
You're right- I know the advice but haven't done a great job of following it. It's hard to when feeling things so acutely, but tomorrows another day to try my best. Thanks for the wise words.
Do you think no contact is the right strategy? Was it your idea? How long do you expect for you to "get over it"? (So when the emotional distress will be negligible.)
Typical advice? Hm, I think hard times call for atypical advice! Meet new people, start something new (but casual) that very suddenly lets you experience a lot of different people. (Which will hopefully allow you to see what your previous relationship lacked, why it ended, etc.) Go to a festival, or a ski trip with random people. (Sure, it's usually hard to do anything alone in that state, so usually best to do it through some friend/acquaintance.) Though maybe this is that typical advice in the end!?
There's an old saying: "It takes one to forget one." Meaning, of course, that having a new person in your life lessens your thoughts about the old one.
One and half weeks is still way early to be thinking of finding someone new, of course, but I've kept this in my thoughts over the years as a reminder to me when I was between relationships.
If you liked many aspects of being in a relationship, like dining out together, exploring new places together, discussing ideas, staying in together, etc., then you're going to want to have that again with someone else. Until you do find at least a casual date or two to spend time with, your thoughts are inevitably going to keep returning to the last time you had that with your recent ex.
Good luck to you, I hope it works out sooner rather than later for you, and that both your and your former partner find contentment and fulfillment again.
Does anyone have any experience with hiring a style or image consultant as a man and any advice on getting the most from the experience?
I'm asking because I get the feeling, as a nerd's nerd, that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in fashion and dress for a relatively minimal investment. For example, I've done some experimenting this year and I've been shocked at how relatively small changes have lead to noticeable changes in how people treat me. Just wearing a little Seiko watch, some decent boots, and some mid-priced cologne has notably improved how people treat me. It's very hard justifying spending a lot of time studying fashion, however, because I'm not terribly interested in it and the opportunity cost is getting some technical certifications which would lead to pay increases well beyond what an annual style consultation would cost. So, has anyone done this successfully and does anyone have any advice on finding a good consultant or, more importantly, advice on communicating what exactly I want to the consultant?
I have a lot of trust in this site: https://putthison.com/start-here/ its not a consultancy but will provide you with basic, straight forward advice. It should at least help you learn the language of this space to make talking with a consultant more productive.
An alternative, go to a Bonobos store. Their in person stores are only show rooms where they show you what they have, let you find your size, then you order online or through them. The staff there are meant to be consultant like and can help you find clothes for any occasion and give advice.
I'm going to say style is what you carry with confidence. I have picked up women at parties where everyone is dressed to the nines and I'm wearing bathroom slippers and old clothes that are falling apart. Which is not to say that's what you should be doing, but I don't think a consultant is who you should turn to. Feel comfortable in who you are and what you're wearing. Also, this is relatively inelastic in the short term, but incredibly valuable in the medium to long term - incorporate weight training into your life
It's definitely an Esoteric Art which doesn't mesh well with typical nerd-approaches to mastery, but I can at least validate that feeling from the other side of gender: yes, there absolutely is a ton of $20 fruit on the ground, and men routinely fail to notice it. You've already seen some evidence for yourself, that really-quite-minor changes have an outsize effect from baseline. No need to dive headlong into, like, The Art of Manliness (which I swear is written for men who spend too much time worrying about how other men view them, not women)...all the little stuff adds up fast, because so many guys don't even put in the bare minimum really.
No idea on Reputable Consultant services. I can give two Real Simple tips though: ill-fitting clothing ruins any man's image (regardless of quality or style); and posture/attitude should rise to the occasion. It's fine to slouch-shuffle in sweatpants and a hoodie, but that fundamental kinetic unseriousness clashes terribly with, say, a suit or button-down. There's more to "clothing is a social weapon" than just the actual clothes themselves, which is part of why it's not purely a p2w game.
Do you have a reasonably well dressed, socially-normal female friend who'd be willing to go on a shopping spree with you?
Failing that, look at what other men (of suitable age/class/status) are wearing and copy that. Clothes should be appropriate in terms of fit, style, and occasion.
Fit is super important; well-fitting clothes will make you look good. A shop assistant can happily help you out here. The weirder the shape of your body is, the harder it will be.
Style: you mention you've got new boots, which is fine, but you shouldn't be wearing boots everywhere. Learn to pay attention to what's appropriate for different sorts of places, and dress appropriately.
Things not to buy, at least until you know what you're doing: any bright or unusual colours, any pattern other than a subtle stripe or check. T-shirts with messages on them, unless you're under the age of 20. Anything with a large visible logo. Athletic shoes unless you're actually exercising. Tommy Bahama.
Most of my peers in tech dress extremely casually. I'll probably mirror that in my work environment but in general I think this holds a lot of technical people back.
As for going clothes shopping with women, maybe it's just the women I know, but I have not found this super effective. Basically, they don't have a plan and don't really understand what I'm looking for. If I show them a pair of shirts they're really helpful at telling me which one is better but at forming an overall plan....
Honestly, I'm kind of more looking for someone who can maneuver around my limitations. Like the shoe thing you brought up. I am not at "here's 4 different nice shoes, how to maintain them, and some rough instructions on when to wear each." I am at "I probably shouldn't wear sneakers literally everywhere, what should I be wearing instead?" and then I need to wear that non-sneaker shoe for a year until I stop feeling like faking goober. Or my ongoing suspicion that I should tell my barber something other than "what I've got now, but shorter" but not like a long thing, just like a word I can tell the barber, like "Hey, give me the squiggerdoodle" and that will work.
I've done this. There are consultants who specialize in "dressing up nerds" so to speak which is a good criteria you can use while searching.
Generally they will help you clean up your closet (i.e. throw away clothes that don't fit you, are dated, or are worn out, etc) and either go shopping with you a few times, or do it virtually with online shopping. They may also come up with a clothing plan if you have some specific objective to your personal style, but probably you don't need that.
The easiest way to communicate your ideas is to find photographs of men wearing the kind of clothes you want, along with what kinds of activities you'll be doing.
One of the supposed use cases for crypto that gets bandied around a lot, is a stable currency for residents of developing countries. Sometimes you'll see these emotionally-framed arguments (almost always from someone in the developed world)- 'you don't know what it's like to have an unstable/inflationary currency if you live in Argentina/Africa/Pakistan/random 3rd world country, etc. Inflation takes all your gains, the government can steal your savings out of your bank account at any time, and US dollars are only available on the black market. Bitcoin/PonziCoin/whatever is the only humane solution for the 3rd world'. While I live quite comfortably in the 1st world, reading about say Argentina's travails (Google their currency inflation woes) does show this to be very true for their citizens. Remember that Facebook's now-shuttered currency scheme involved utopian language around 'banking the global unbanked' or whatever.
So, uh, why don't we just make it easier for residents of developing countries to use stable currencies from functioning governments, as opposed to crypto? The US dollar, euro, yen, British pound, Swiss franc and others are vastly more protected from inflation than any 3rd world country's currency- and they're a million times more practical to use for actual payments than anything in crypto. A few countries have officially adopted the US dollar as their currency (Ecuador, El Salvador and Panama, to varying degrees). Dollars are apparently in extremely high demand on the black market of unstable countries, precisely for their stability.
My understanding is that the real bottleneck here is the banking system. Local governments can outlaw the dollar or euro usage, and it'd be tough to have a regulated bank that could offer seizure-proof accounts in those currencies to say every person in Argentina. Anyways, I don't really have a point here other than rambling a bit, but I feel like 'let's find a way for the 3rd world to use stable currencies backed by actual governments' is vastly more practical than most crypto schemes. (Or perhaps there's a synthesis, like a US dollar stablecoin)
I agree with you. Swiss bank accounts for non-residents have been a thing for a long time now, and, similarly, it should be perfectly possible for a company such as Revolut or Transferwise to provide banking services to residents of unfriendly countries.
People would prefer US dollars over their crappy local currency. As you note, local banking systems make this hard and are used by governments as points of control. History is full of government seizures of people's assets kept in banks.
US stablecoins (e.g. Tether) *are* used around the world as it lets people hold dollars on their cell phone, out of the reach of government. There's still a challenge with censorship as these stablecoins are all centrally controlled and so you can be blacklisted. Work is ongoing to create decentralized stablecoins that would ameliorate this issue (e.g. Taro on Bitcoin's lightning network).
As you note, El Salvador adopted US dollars as their currency. So why did they make Bitcoin legal tender? Because US dollars, as relatively stable as they are, still leak 2 to 3% of their value in a good year and about 8% now. Trillions in pandemic spending in the US made El Salvadorans poorer as they got none of that spending but got the hit on their devalued currency. Bitcoin is a way to opt out of discretionary monetary policies by central bankers who might have interests not aligned with the global populace.
Bitcoin has a nondiscretionary monetary policy. Currently, 900 are produced per day and the supply has increased 1.77% from a year ago. At the next halving in March 2024 450 bitcoin will be produced per day. Bitcoin has lower leakage than the world's reserve currency :)
The monetary inflation is 1.77%. A brand new asset with essentially a fixed supply (21 million) will have its price almost purely determined by demand, so volatility is expected as billions try to figure out and understand its properties. Volatility will decrease over time as understanding spreads.
The decentralized protocol is steady as she goes though, which is more than can be said for deliberate and severe global devaluation of national currencies. Upwards volatility over time with bitcoin or steady decline in value with govt currency; everyone will determine the right balance for themselves between the two.
Isn't this just colonialism? The reason you can't do this is because those third world countries have a national identity. Your bank trucks full of dollar bills will be blow up by "fredom fighters" and the blue checks will call everyone trying to help them use dollars a racist.
To my understanding those countries moved to dollars on the plan of their own governments not because the US state department/CIA/ us banks/ other non native powers orchestrated it as a gift from white people to poor brown people who are clearly too stupid to just use dollars.
I doubt the people are too stupid to use dollars, hence the black market. The government, on the other hand, is always capable of doing colossally stupid things.
I was throwing shade on the idea that we need to strong arm people into using dollars. I'm not interested in helping the natives fight their government.
Let’s say a million people from your unstable currency country decided they wanted to use dollars instead of their local currency (ULC).
Where would they get those dollars from? They’d have to sell the ULCs they receive from work/pensions/savings etc and buy dollars. But what happens then to the exchange rate for the ULC? With all those new sellers of the ULC selling into the market, The a mount of dollars they’d get for their ULCs would decline, and eventually head to zero . In that event, the prices everyone else in the country has to pay to import necessities priced globally in dollars, like oil and gas, for example, soar.
Everyone in the USC is then much worse off: those who continue to use the USC because they’re paying much higher prices for everything, and those who sell their USC for dollars because they get far fewer of them.
And yet Ecuador and El Salvador use the US dollar as their currency- they don't have their own. Panama uses the dollar as the majority currency, and their own as a minority one. Previously, all of these countries had their own exclusive currency, for decades if not over a hundred years. How did they make the switch then if this 'doesn't work'?
They almost certainly implemented it from the top down. The government of El Salvador can tax people in Salvadoran Nothingburgers, use that tax money to purchase dollars as part of more-or-less normal government-level fiscal policy, and then switch by starting to pay public-sector wages in dollars while still accepting Nothingburgers as legal tender for some time. The Salvadoran government can also threaten to shoot people who complain too hard about the negative effects of the changeover, but those are likely to be significantly lower since the Salvadoran Nothingburger, as a fiat currency, is an invention of the state supported by its use in taxation anyway.
In the case of other small countries it's entirely feasible for them to have gone directly from gold-backed currency to using the dollar.
A lot of less developed countries have fixed exchange rate with dollar or euro. That essentially makes them dollar (euro) and the local currency is just technicality. Even Cuba used to have their currency fixed to the US dollar. I found this very weird considering their sour relationships with the US including US embargo. Prices of petrol and other imported goods are kept low by government subsidies in different convoluted ways.
During post-Soviet period the US dollar was also a lot in Russia and the government had to ban its use to strengthen the rouble. Even then the prices were still indicated in reference units with the small footnote that the reference unit is equal to amount of roubles that equal to the dollar exchange rate set by the Russian central bank.
I think it is inevitable that countries with unstable economies will try to use the currencies that are more stable (dollars, euros, yuan etc.) and the government will need to implement strict controls to prevent that. I don't know about Salvador but in a way it was probably very easy for them to switch to dollar because the population was already using it and setting prices of anything substantial in dollars anyway.
My understanding is that the embrace of crypto by developing countries isn't entirely due to inflation. That can certainly be a factor, but the bigger issue is streamlining international transactions. Any effort to ease the use of dollars etc. could be easily regulated by the local national government. As you sort of pointed out in your original comment, the countries where crypto is biggest are places where a non-negligible portion of their GDP is comprised of people in Europe and North America sending remittances home, and where either:
1. The local banks are deeply flawed or nonexistent. If you had a relative in Afghanistan right now, how would you get them money? What banks remain are controlled by the Taliban, and money transfer services (which also aren't free) won't operate.
2. Foreign transfers are heavily taxed, restricted, or prohibited.
3. The local government is sufficiently authoritarian that it will force banks to freeze or seize your bank account for what they describe as subversive activities.
With the arguable exception of 3, the people of the "developed" world have never had to deal with any of that at scale.
Who is the "we" that should be making it easier for residents of developing countries to use existing stable currencies, and how should be we be doing that?
It isn't the governments of the US, EU, UK, Japan, and/or Switzerland who are making it difficult for developing-country citizens to use their currencies. They mostly either don't care, or quietly encourage the use of their currencies anywhere anyone is inclined to do so, for a number of obvious reasons.
It is the governments of those developing countries who are making it difficult. In some cases "just" by insisting that all non-elite government employees be paid in [local crap currency] and that all taxes be paid in [local crap currency], trusting that transaction costs will take care of the rest. But also sometimes by sending their uniformed enforcers to shut down anyone visibly doing business with [stable first-world currency]. That's why dollars, etc, are strictly a black-market thing in some parts of the world.
So, what should "we" be doing about it? I believe Scott once raised the possibility that the most cost-effective humanitarian intervention was a Predator drone, fully armed for the purpose of exploding the people causing the most grief to residents of developing countries. And I'm sympathetic to that belief, but there are reasons to be very, very careful about going down that path. What else would you recommend?
>Who is the "we" that should be making it easier for residents of developing countries to use existing stable currencies
Well, as a fairly nationalistic American, I was thinking the US could quietly encourage such a thing- to help maintain the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. My understanding as a non-SME is that there are huge network effects to being the reserve currency, and we're in pole position now, so if some kind of scrappy startup figured out a way to provide eurodollar(1) transactions to the citizens of say Argentina or Pakistan or Nigeria.... Seems like a good thing. Or alternately, we could at least be blocking China from doing the same.
>how should be we be doing that?
Some kind of electronic peer-to-peer payment & deposit tech that uses eurodollars. Sure Argentina will be mad about it, but when their whole country is paying each other directly in stable dollars and ignoring the regulations- it's tough to lock everyone up.... Anyways, the US specializes in scrappy startups that just ignore the rules in order to achieve market supremacy(2)
Heh, as native inhabitant of the Eurozone, and having learned almost all economica & finance I know after the introduction of the Euro, I initially thought you were sing "eurodollar" as a kind of variable, ie $Stable_Western_Currency (which _did_ make me a bit confused in relation to your identifying as a "fairly nationalistic American") -
until I got to the Wiki-article :D
TDIL finance lingo uses the prefix "euro-" to effectively mean roughly some variation of "(at least in part) not subject to the immediate control of our fiscal policy & regulations because nations and being somehow not entirety within ours" -
whether they be time deposits in USD held in other countries, or securities not denominated in the local currency.
Thanks :)
It makes sense given the history, but I find it interesting and/or weird-feeling that this finance lingo use of the term seems to effectively have shed any meaning of any conncetion to Europe (except the historical one, I suppose), and now essentially seems to just mean smth like "abroad" or "foreign"!
To me, it humourously mirrors the idea of the stereotype of that particular kind of American who seldom, or never, stepped foot outside the country, and - while he may even be quite smart, skilled, and/or educated in other areas - seems to think of the World as effectively being two countries, "America" and "Not-America" :)
(Tbf, even in the purest forms of this, the latter is often sub-divided into the two countries of "Not-America, but kinda alright, if weird and unreliable" and "Not-America, Not Our Friends.")
It seems to me like the purer forms of this kind of thinking have become a lot rarer/more diluted, probably due to the Internet?
Though there's still lots of entertainment emerging from what remains of this kind of "other-country-blindless" :)
Imo such perspectives can even be endearing and adorable - in the absence of obnoxious arrogance or unearned/misplaced pride
> To me, it humourously mirrors the idea of the stereotype of that particular kind of American who seldom, or never, stepped foot outside the country, and - while he may even be quite smart, skilled, and/or educated in other areas - seems to think of the World as effectively being two countries, "America" and "Not-America" :)
The only context in which the name of the World Series makes sense.
after the "Thanks (which was kinda the originally intended endpoint), I basically just started dumping the subsequent chain of mental associations triggered by that little bit of finance-lingo knowledge, until it branched too much and I managed to stop myself
How would that startup make money? How would that startup onboard users? If they have to use Visa/MasterCard to get money into their system then a lot of people are already out. (Plus, since Visa/MC is just a big and super complex settlement framework between banks, built by banks for banks, it means that the source banks, ie. the local banks, won't be happy about it, and as soon as the startup becomes widespread enough to get banned, they'll be the first to comply happily.)
Similarly, Uber was banned in many countries without much fanfare.
One interesting negative consequence of the US dollar used as the world's settlement currency, is that US wages are suppressed. (Basically it's like the "resource curse", but instead of oil, the US is cursed with global reserve currency deposits. This makes exports from the US to other parts of the world more expensive. This drives out sectors that don't work on exporting more dollars. Ie. anything that's not investment/finance. In turn, to keep some manufacturing in the US there are many protective tariffs enacted, which further hurts US competitiveness, leads to perverse incentives, regulatory capture, and serious problems like the baby formula shortage, due to the combination of the aforementioned tariffs & government subsidies-driven-monopolization.)
So, what most people miss is that it's the tax system. (Not really the banking system. That's just the executive branch. Banks will always fill the legal niche of money handling, but they are absolutely powerless in those countries.) You can have any kind of "seizure-proof" whatever, but the moment there's some real value in these accounts the tax system will adapt, and banks have to report it. And even if it's not recoverable, the tax is due.
"Crypto" might be able to compete with Venmo/TransferWise/WesternUnion, eventually with Visa/MasterCard (if efficient arbitration mechanisms are built). But all of these are simply convenience things. At crypto can make it easier to leave a country like Argentina.
But obviously most people suffering from the bad policies don't want to leave.
Crypto is useless if only buyers have it.
And if merchants in Argentina were to start accepting crypto openly they would be easy targets for the tax man.
So crypto has limited usability. Maybe in a decade, when it might become a lot more commonplace.
Yes! The TERA/LUNA shitshow, it was an algorithmic ...coin. It was definitely not stable enough :D
The remaining ones are also problematic, because who knows where the reserves are. (Are there even reserves?) USDC seems the most trustworthy, which is crypto is ... meh. (They publish some kind of attestations.)
> I feel like 'let's find a way for the 3rd world to use stable currencies backed by actual governments' is vastly more practical than most crypto schemes.
It feels true, doesn't it? Just like how it feels true that it should be easier to get banks to coordinate standard improvements rather than inventing a whole new pseudo-banking system.
Nevertheless, it's not. That is a sad statement about large parts of the banking industry perhaps. But it's still the reality.
But why can't a scrappy startup offer a product with direct payment & deposit options in dollars to residents of other countries? Sure, it's technically against the rules, but (gesticulates at the history of every American startup in the last 20 years, including Uber). It starts with say every street vendor in Mexico, Honduras, Peru, whatever paying each other that way- then money transfers from the US- then businesses start to quietly accept it off the books. Yes regulators in those countries will be Big Mad about it, but it's tough to stop a decentralized mass of your own citizens who all use said app. Are they gonna lock everyone up?
Voiceover from a documentary in the year 2122: 'In the early 21st century, some believed the American dollar's reign as reserve currency was up. But network effects from its existing dominance plus a proliferation of new payment tech, plus high desirability, actually entrenched its use globally, and now 82% of countries use the dollar exclusively. Believe it or not, countries like Argentina actually used to issue their own currency!' Etc.
If it's decentralized then that is cryptocurrency! If it's not decentralized, if it's a ledger/clearing house system like most banks use, then authorities are well used to dealing with them and will still be able to regulate it. They don't need to lock everyone up, they can simply pressure the centralized company that controls the clearing house/ledgers. The rise of digital banking in the last twenty years has given huge additional powers to such governments.
Now, it might be better for there to be a Dollar Coin like the Digital Yuan rather than individual cryptocurrencies. That's a separate question.
The modern monetary theory response is likely, "the ultimate demand generator for a currency is taxes." Your local café in East Fakeistan can accept US dollars all it wants, but if your average Fakestani has to cough up several thousands of the local currency every year or get hauled off to prison, the exchange rate is always going to matter.
This. Plus any regulator will require books in local currency. That’s less important in places like Afghanistan (which still uses its own previously issued paper currency, which is now physically wearing out) than places like Argentina (with sophisticated and sometimes highly politicized regulatory bodies).
The deeper point here is that why should any unit of value be tied to a government's monetary scheme. Sure, it would be a band-aid for the citizens of developing countries to have easy access to stablecoins (and many of them do, and many of them choose to transact on the rails of BSC and TRX which blows my mind). But governments around the world right now are levered to the tits in their own debt, and servicing it under the premise that GDP will forever grow.
You worked hard for that dollar bill in your hand, so why should the whims of a central bank decide whether it is able to buy a lollipop or not from one day to the next?
Well, the whole central banking thing is quite new as far as human history goes, and there was tons & tons of inflation long before they were invented. And also lots of other historical attempts at non-government backed money, from the 'free banking' era and probably lots of older attempts before that. It's not like a non-government backed system wouldn't have inflation.
Not to rehash endless arguments about crypto which probably have billions of pixels already written about them. But, as it stands today, I don't see that crypto is technically or logistically there to be used a currency. Maybe someday it will be! But the El Salvador Bitcoin experiment is crashing and burning etc. It's not there yet. Meanwhile, the currency used by the world's superpower.... is? Why not just use that?
12th grade English teacher here in the state of Florida. I believe that our education system has no idea what it wants to signify by a student having earned a high school diploma. This fact is responsible for a whole lot of the dumb things about our experiences teaching.
If you were to look up the official version of what the high school diploma means, it would be something about having adequately mastered the educational standards up until that point. But educational policy is not aligned with this. I regularly have a students A who enter 12th grade having already surpassed the level of proficiency in the standards that student B will ever achieve. If both are going to graduate and Student A has this proficiency at the very beginning of the year, why should he not have the option to opt/test out of the rest of the year? Because the system want them to sit in classes.
So this means that another part of what the high school diploma signifies is that you sat in classes. What exactly is the value of this? I mean, it’s not that this student will learn nothing sitting in class (if he has achieved this level of knowledge already, likely has the curiosity to at least take some advantage of the fact that he has to be there), but shouldn’t that be his choice if he has already reached the standard that is required for earning a diploma?
And there are plenty of students who are going to graduate who have only the most rudimentary grasp of the standards. The bar is so so low…. In truth, the “sitting in class” portion of.what the diploma means seems to outweigh the actual mastery of standards signification of what the diploma means. Which is just so demoralizing because then it makes me feel like a glorified babysitter….
What would I propose? Bring back multiple diploma levels. Allow students who have passed the 10th grade state test but aren’t planning to go to college to opt out of upper level English and math classes in favor of vocational educational or apprenticeship programs. Maybe track the students who don’t pass that test into different courses or sections for remediation so that then your 11th and 12th grade English and math classes will have students who both want to be in them, and are at a comparable level of proficiency.
Think of yourself as being in the business of passing out lottery tickets. You never know when something you say or do -- even as small a thing as an offhand comment, a tone of voice, a slightly different way of putting the same old thing -- will be the match that causes the tinder in some surly uncouth 17-year-old mind to suddenly catch fire.
Did nothing like that ever happen to you? Some striking inspirational bolt from the blue, a brief strange interaction between teacher and student (in the earlier case you) which left a permanent mark? Caused you to get suddenly serious about learning in one way or another, discover an area of permanent intellectual enjoyment, change the course of your future. It certainly happened to me, more than once, and neither I (of course) nor I think my teachers could have predict edwhen and where lightning would strike -- what turns on the lights in some developing adolescent mind.
So that's pretty much a large part of what you're doing. You send out the regular stream of learning, 90% of which your average student will forget in a month, and 98% of which they'll forget in a year, and in the meantime you are also....just passing out the lottery tickets. If you teach long enough, you'll get a steady trickle of winners, a student somewhere randomly will catch fire from what you say, and you'll have been personally responsible for an epiphany that will drive that person forward 30 years after you've returned to the dust. That's actually pretty cool. Not many people have the chance to make that kind of difference. But you're spinning a roulette wheel, there's no guarantee of when and where it will happen.
This is a fantastic perspective. I’m really fortunate to teach at a school where students aren’t out to make my life miserable, as is the case in plenty of schools I’ve taught in, so I can actually teach.
Even though I wote my post with a pretty ego-centric perspective (“I feel like a babysitter”) my bigger concern is really for wasting the time of the students whose abilities are “good enough” but don’t have any interest in further study. Is forcing students to sit and receive lottery tickets really the best use of *their* time in school?
On that point I generally agree with you, and I surely do wish we had more flexibility and imagination in the system. Heck, if you want to argue that the distance between what we actually do and what we *could* do in terms of educating young people is just jaw-droppingly large, deeply discouraging considering there's very little we do of greater import than training our replacements and that we've had freaking millenia to work out the principles -- I'd be with you 100%.
But how we get from the world we live in to a better world, I don't know. I know how to teach pretty well (if the results and student response is any guide), but I have no idea how to organize a whole school to be full of good teachers and good students with good parents at home, and slot it effectively into the actual society into which those students will be thrust willy nilly.
I think a school system designed to optimise for that looks incredibly different to the status quo one (and would be a substantial improvement over it in most regards).
A school-teacher whose primary role is seen by society as babysitting is not exactly primed to be inspirational, even if a few are passionate enough to manage it anyway
In a lot of ways you are a babysitter and the fact that a lot of school is one-size-fits-all type programs makes it terribly inefficient. However, many states have different versions of the diploma that they give out. It's been a while, but AFAIK New York State still has at least 3 different diplomas you could receive:
1. NYS Diploma
-the regular baseline one
2. NYS Diploma with Advanced Distinction
-I believe you had to take and pass many additional regents exams to get this one.
3. NYS Diploma with Advanced Distinction and Honors.
-I believe this one you had to average over 90% on those regents exams.
The state of Washington had (has?) the Running Start program, where sophomore kids who test well enough can go to college on the high school's tab for their last years. So, yeah, Florida could fix it if they wanted.
In my high school (ages ago) there were different tracks for stronger students vs the rest, namely AP, and it was extremely useful (we had some great AP classes). Tracking has become increasingly politically aligned so this might be a harder battle to institutde.
All the diplomas are the "same" but it's clear to colleges that some students have multiple APs and other students don't.
There is some value in a high school diploma which signals that the students was able to go to class and do the bare minimum required to graduate. Bryan Caplan's book goes into this, but basically there are still a lot of students who are unable to manage even that (and you almost certainly don't want to hire them for even low-skill jobs).
Yeah, those still exist. I’m more thinking of what a waste of time it is for students who have no interest in English, but have definitely acquired the level of proficiency that would satisfy the state’s requirements, to need to sit in class all year long when they could spend that time much more profitably in some vocational or apprenticeship program.
So, just a few factors that are contributing to the system:
1) Most funding (state, but also federal) is tied to the number of students in school. What this means is that having students graduate early is damaging to most school's fundings, since the marginal cost of an extra student is probably usually lower than the amount they get in funding.
2) A common thing that gets bandied around is that "weaker students do better when there are stronger students in the class." This is a pretty standard argument against tracking (Honors etc), and is pretty unsurprising, since stronger students will often help out weaker students. Of course, at that point you're admitting that you're leveraging your top students to supplement your teachers, but it's definitely a common reason.
3) See point 1, but replaced with graduation rates. If you let students drop out, even ones who really should, you lose funding.
Is there good empirical evidence for the claim in #2?
I read an article once about "pair programming" (two students at one computer) that said people often assume you'd get the best results from pairing a strong student with a weak student, but actually this mostly results in the weak student being unable to follow what the strong student is doing. The article claimed you get better results from pairing 2 weak students together so that they can mutually help each other, and that strong students might as well work alone because they don't gain any benefit from being paired.
Hmm only one data point, but a big of my success all through academia, was getting the smarter kids to help me with problems. I did more of this in college and grad school than in high school. Perhaps my favorite was Badut Bhattacharya, he was in the physics lab next door, he'd help with my problem, but then also give me a different problem to solve before I got to ask the next question. I learned twice as much.
No, I always rabidly opposed it as a student and honestly never cared enough to look into the other side’s arguments.
As an instructor now, all I have is anecdata, which also says that the study you’re referencing was poorly structured. If a top student is bound to someone they know will be a burden, they’ll do all the work themselves. Makes total sense. I think you get the gains by getting the top students to be friends with the weaker students, so that they can sort of side-tutor them. Generally my opinion would be that a school shouldn’t be fully tracked, aka students should have some Honors/remedial classes, and some that everyone does.
All correct. I do agree with the argument against tracking to some extent, but really what students need by the time they are in 12th grade are so divergent that it can easily be completely different classes.
On of my colleagues dropped out of high school on the day he was allowed to take the GED - age 16 in California - and as soon as he passed it, he enrolled in junior college. Two years later, when his high school classmates were graduating, he transferred into UCLA as a junior. He was done with undergrad before he turned 21 and is now in a top medical school. It doesn't seem that his unconventional path hurt his progress, and when we talked about it, we were both puzzled about why more people don't do that. My guess was: complacency and conformism.
What I would worry about is adequate preparation in incremental fields such as math. Could I really go from taking grade 10 math to first-year non-remedial college-level math without having taken whatever math is typically taught in grades 11 and 12 first? Seems like a stretch. And if I can't, I'd basically be studying highschool-level material in community college.
Maybe. In my case I could have, hypothetically. I learned algebra in grades 8 and 9, and what is now called pre-calculus -- basically a grab-bag of analytical geometry, trig, sequences, linear algebra -- in 10th, so I began differential calculus, which is the normal freshman college math course, in 11th grade.
Mumble. I seem to remember the typical slow track for math in an American high school is
Freshman: Algebra 1
Sophmore: Geometry
Junior: Algebra 2
Senior: Pre-Calc
But it's often possible to skip the very review-intensive Algebra 1, and start one year up, so the sequence is
Freshman: Geometry
Sophomore: Algebra 2
Junior: Pre-Calc
Senior: Calculus
Presumably anyone contempating skipping half of high school and going on to community college is in the advanced track, so all they would be missing is Pre-Calc. I'm not quite sure what's covered in Pre-Calc, but I think it's mostly trig. Combinations and permutations? Complex numbers?
Students who desire to go to college should definitely be advised to continue to take math and English classes throughout their high school career. I’m mainly thinking about those students who aren’t interested in going to college.
This was a theoretical path for me growing up...but all my peers who tried that route had a really rough time of it. Not due to academics - obviously no one leaves early for college unless they're already upper-tier grades - but the "redshirting" issues were daunting. Maybe it's worse for teenage girls vs guys, I dunno? It's tough to get an accurate measure of someone's...temperament? Maturity? Social eptitude? Going to college is already a challenging enough environmental change for those who wait and do it "the normal way". Payoffs can be immense though...wasting fewer prime life-years in inefficient education seems like an underexplored cause area, to use EA terminology.
I think people can be ready for an undergraduate education without being ready to move out of home, so living near enough to a decent university to commute there might be a significant factor
I for sure should have done this. My school sort of briefly mentioned it as an option before discouraging me. But looking back it 100% is what I should have done. The social part is hard though if you have friends and girlfriends.
I'm not sure the GED is really necessary When I was a college sophomore (quite a while ago, so the rules may have changed) I discovered that the places I was applying to did not actually require a high school diploma. I was looking mostly at ivies. So I applied as a high school junior and was accepted at several schools. I have a PhD, a BA, but no high school diploma.
Wait... is your system of high school qualifications a boolean? Universities and recruiters only get one bit of information on how somebody did at school?
Not broken down by grade (so a B student can work on becoming an A student whereas an E student can work on becoming a D student) or subject?
I think it's absolutely clear that the education system in most countries is completely divorced from the actual needs of society, kids, youth, students, families, parents, etc.
And when teachers started to actually teach kids politics got in the way. (Woo history is spooky, let's ban books, CRT and so on.)
It's a very unenviable position for everyone involved.
Germany is big on the vocational model. It seems to be working for them. But with such social support net probably everything would "work".
As long as the underlying causes are not addressed these conflicts between the interests of stronger/weaker students can't be resolved fairly, and every kind of tracking will be just different kind of bad workarounds with different trade-offs.
Yeah, I have no problem helping them to pass. I’m just saying that a student who has gained the level of proficiency that would satisfy the state’s standards and who has no other interest in English class or college could be using his time much more profitably in vocational or apprenticeship classes than in 12th grade English.
Y'know, I've had similar thought a few years back, but applied to higher education:
Everyone wants to go to university to not look like a rube, despite many university having over 30% failures per year. 18-years old would rather waste 2 years studying litterature than not having went at all -my country's universities cost between 4 and 400€per year, so the individual cost is mostly of opportunity-. Thus there ought to be some vocational university, built around a system of "major/minor" akin to the US (or akin to what I imagine the US to be, whatever): Major in plumbering, Minor in philosophy. Major as an electrician, Minor in history. Enjoy the higher part of higher-ed, but still get a useful job at the end (instead of starting again 2 or 3 times until you manage a diploma).
On the other hand, I recently discovered that my science university had a wood-working department, so maybe "vocational higher-ed" exist already and I wasn't aware (perhaps because there isn't much demand for it, actually)
I think the issue is that status has become so unlinked from usefulness of the education - if you want to be financially well-off, training in a trade is better than almost any university degree
As Pas notes, Germany has a system that largely resembles your final paragraph (France - sort of - does, too). But as much as I would support it (state university English prof here) a comprehensive vocational/college-prep split in the U.S. would make race and class disparities so in-your-face that I doubt it would survive. Instead we encourage everyone to “go to college” (meaning about four or five different things, depending on institution) where most schools end up being credentialing factories for lower middle-class clerical work and caring professions.
Not speaking for Scott, of course, but it would seem to be more promising for American society if there were more reasonable, intelligent Republicans than crazed, uneducated wingnuts. More Mitt Romneys and fewer Majorie Taylor Greens.
Putting aside Republican or Democrat labels,, I personally find it hard to see the appeal of being socially conservative. Things that most Americans now accept as normal, and even essential, like women voting, civil rights, recognition of Native American rights, mixed race marriages, Social Security and other safety net programs, homosexual relationships between consenting adults, marriage equality, and on and on, were opposed by the conservatives of the era, sometimes even in later eras.
So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling.
I noticed somewhere down below that you posted a comment condemning something as "dystopian as fuck". It occurs to me that if you apply that feeling to many of the measures that progressives propose and conservatives oppose, you'll likely have accurately modeled the mindset of such conservatives on those measures.
If one of those measures seems hard for you to see as dystopian, you might also need to consider the consequences of carrying out those measures. Possibly while assuming conservative premises; possibly while merely assuming basic economics. (The latter consequences are frequently and helpfully labelled as "unintended" in the literature.)
I think the other comments about how historically conservatives opposed progressive efforts that we now see as lamentable (eugenics, etc.) are very valuable and key to the question of "why would anyone choose to be socially conservative". But I do think that you've identified something key here, which is that current American "conservatism" has a strong reactionary streak - a lot of main stream conservatives seem to still be fighting to undo changes to society that are broadly recognized as positive.
Some of those changes, like gay marriage, are still relatively recent but incredibly popular. Others like access to birth control are sufficiently longstanding that changing the law of the land can't be seen as conservative in a Chesterton's fence sense. Ultimately, I think this generates - at least in the US - a sense that "conservatism" isn't a very robust position, when in fact the opposite is true - that to be a conservative is a perfectly historically aware political position, but one that doesn't see eye to eye with some mainstream US politicians who identify as "conservative".
I'm 100% in favor of people having access to birth control. But in terms of Chesterson's Fence, the impacts of something like birth control aren't going to be quickly apparent. There are people who believe that the American birth rate should be higher than it is. (I'm not one of them.) There are also those who point out that birth control can potentially alter women's mate selection.
One idea that seems obvious to me that some people are resistant to is that some social changes can take generations for their implications to fully manifest.
I do agree that that’s where a lot of the conservative bordering on reactionary thought comes in, but it’s not at all clear to me that “this has had clear positive effects for three generations” but maybe it’s actually bad counts as an example of Chesterton’s fence - it might actually be bad, but at some point enough time has passed the reversion to older policies isn’t really “conservative”.
" “this has had clear positive effects for three generations” but maybe it’s actually bad counts as an example of Chesterton’s fence"
While I'm very much in favor of people being in control of their own bodies, there are other people who contest the assertion that birth control has had 'clear positive effects for three generations.' They worry that there are not enough young workers to support those on Social Security. They seem to favor continual population growth to some extent. Or at least that people have more children in each generation who do not, then, produce grandchildren but who still work.
*I* think the world is wildly over-populated. But there *are* people who lament falling birth rates and who believe that they will lead to a crisis eventually in a few decades.
"but at some point enough time has passed the reversion to older policies isn’t really “conservative”.
That's part of the sticking point. *How* do we determine what is 'enough time?' There are some people who argue for very short time frames being sufficient and some who sincerely argue for very long time frames being required.
Lets say that private gun ownership helps prevent a dictatorial takeover. Lets say the average dictatorial takeover attempt happens every 120 years. And lets assume, arguendo, that, absent a dictatorial takeover, disarmament of a population offers benefits in terms of fewer people being killed.
For how long would disarmament need to be "successful" before we can say that we've successfully torn down Chesterson's Fence? I'd argue for a timeframe of greater than 150 years in this case. However there are quite a lot of people who would scoff at such a long time frame.
I think this is very true. There's a very real sense in which a lot of modern reaction is LARPing, or more a desire to return to a previous social arrangement they no longer have any organic connection to.
So, on sexual norms for example, the Baby Boomers changed a lot of sexual norms during the 60's. Now a lot of Millennials are entering their late 30's and early 40's without stable relationships and they're noting a lot of problems with the new sexual norms. The desire to go back to the pre-Boomer sexual norms, however, isn't really conservative because they have no organic, living connection to the pre-Boomer generations; the Silent and Greatest generations are long gone. In fact, if you look around reactionary thinkers, you'll notice a lot of highly educated former leftists living...not leftist but very blue/coastal lives. A yearning for things they've read about but rarely genuinely experience.
Access to birth control is a case of taking down the fence, getting gored reliably and repeatedly, and then just declaring mission accomplished and moving on.
"The drownings at Nantes (French: noyades de Nantes) were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, that occurred between November 1793 and February 1794. During this period, anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, was cast into the river Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes. Before the drownings ceased, as many as four thousand or more people, including innocent families with women and children, died in what Carrier himself called "the national bathtub"."
Today's anodyne "right side of history" is yesteryear's "extremely radical bleeding-edge social change which has everyone up in arms, sometimes literally". Some of us just don't want to live life in that kind of volatile fast lane. Give me a solid base of fundamentals first - widespread material abundance, housing and jobs, security and stability - and *then* maybe I'll have some bandwidth to spare worrying about what new forms of sexuality and altered mental states to allow inside the Overton window. It's putting the kitchen table before the horse, to use a mixed metaphor.
Although I've always wondered if living in SF is a big part of me being relatively socially conservative. It's one thing to cheer on #LoveMeansLove or whatever from the safety of a bumper sign, yard sticker, or social media bio. Another to actually live with the crazies, look around at the carnival of fantastical absurdities *in practice*, and say...not for me, thanks. Perhaps there's a bit of a thermostatic/reactionary relationship between social permissiveness and living situation: back when I used to live in a small conservative town, I was definitely way more all-in on progessive-everything. (And New Atheism. Embarrassing times.) Temperamentally contrarian, I suppose...
ETA: I very much wish for a sane GOP again, though. The current incarnation is basically a rent-seeking apparatus for conservatism; people who are too epistemically-stubborn to bend the knee to liberal orthodoxy get branded as heretics, so where else are they supposed to spend protest votes? Vibes matter so much more than actual concrete policies, sadly. (Or perhaps Feature Not Bug.)
Well, famous ideas on the left also include eugenics and forced sterilizations, the gulag and Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, Cabrini Green and "the projects," CHAZ and Defund The Police, BLM riots and torching downtown Portland business to...um...something to do with justice I'm sure.
Conservatives are generally reluctant to embrace *all* new ideas -- that's what "conservattive" means. Just like mom is reluctant to embrace most of the new ideas of teenage boys to jump off the roof safely. We know enthusiasts are wrong about whether their ideas will lead to peace 'n' love 'n' plenty or unforeseen freaking disaaster about 90% of the time[1]. The fact that every now and then one of their new ideas works out just fine means that, yes, both mom and conservatives do end up on the wrong side of history from time to time.
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[1] FTX seemed like a brilliant idea about a year ago, right? And all these sticks-in-the-mud financial conservatives would've growled dyspeptically and advised you to wait and see before investing everything you'd ever saved. Same idea.
Anti-drug laws initially received strong support from the African American community. Prohibition was strongly framed as a 'Women's issue."
I don't know that 'left' vs 'right' wing are really good organizing schemas here, but even if those laws are coded, today, as 'right wing' they were, at the time they were initiated, often strongly supported by groups who are not associated with the Right Wing. It might be better to label them as authoritarian-centrist in origin.
Prohibition was the first major project of the Women's Suffrage movement once they had the vote and had to decide what to vote for. And to the extent that it had male adherents, they were mostly on the progressive left of the day, trying to Make People Better by enlightened coercion. You'll find a few extreme religious conservatives on the side of prohibition as well, but they weren't driving the movement.
The conservative take on alcohol is moderation, not prohibition, at least in most of the Western world. We've been drinking since the dawn of civilization; no need for hasty or drastic change.
While you're absolutely right about the left side of the Prohibition movement, I think you're underselling the right. A good chunk of Prohibitionism was driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, in a way that in the modern world would definitely code as right.
There was also a serious strain of the really vicious racism of that era, where drunk black people were likened to beasts and we needed to ban alcohol to protect society. I don't think that readily maps onto modern political divisions, it's simply too alien.
All of which is to say that I think Prohibition was bipartisan and broadly popular.
I'd seen Prohibition attributed to progressives, but the real story is more complicated. There were people on the left and the right supporting it. It was a Protestant vs. Catholic thing. There was a feminist aspect because women were legally apt to be dependent on their husbands, so an alcoholic husband was a disaster.
Perhaps the impulse to take charge of people for their own good isn't actually partisan. It can crop up anywhere.
But as for the rest, like Ryan W. said above, "survivorship bias". And not just that: you're almost advocating for the intellectual equivalent of "might makes right" - whatever idea survives is by definition good, and therefore what you want to have been believing all along. Which I find to be a profoundly dangerous concept, straight out of 1984.
100 years ago, it was considered progressive to take children away from backwards, primitive, uneducated tribal nationalists, and raise them according to modern progressive beliefs, because it was believed that that was what was best for the child and best for society. Today, it feels to me like we're heading toward the same place, just this time aimed at social conservatives instead of at American Indians. "Kill the Indian, save the man.", except applied to the Red Tribe. That feels very dangerous to me, even though it's easy to look up individual cases where it seems justified. It feels especially dangerous because currently the only brakes come in the form of "identity", which is vague and malleable and can be a net imperialistically cast over a population to claim that they have no right to their way of life. (Compare to "Ukrainians don't exist".)
In this particular case, I am definitely a social "conservative", in the sense that I think change might be needed, but we need to go slowly and carefully and be certain of what we're doing. (As opposed to a "reactionary" who is against change, or a "progressive" who thinks the benefits of change outweigh the possible costs (move fast and break things (being sure to fix them later)), or a "radical" who believes in scrapping the whole mess and starting over from scratch.)
With regard to "gay marriage" as a progressive idea/victory, that is in fact the victory of an old socially conservative institution. Marriage, despite all the criticisms and sexual politics theories, and despite what we ourselves have tried to hack away at it, has survived.
So it's ironic in one sense that "yes please, we want to be bound by the shackles of social conservatism in this case" is touted as progressive winning.
Marriage as an institution for a reason; it's existed for thousands of years in a recognizable format, and it exists across multiple cultures. Before you try to change it, you need to figure out what purpose it serves. This is especially true if marriage is a legal institution with benefits.
As a conservative, there are things we want to encourage:
1. Monogamous relationships
2. Having children
3. Children being supported by their biological parents (and, in turn, supporting them when they age)
Gay marriage helps 1 while it harms 2 and 3. You might think that the trade-off is worth it, but understand that there are reasons that other people might not accept that trade-off. Is this unfair to gays? Yes, but nothing is ever going to make the base biological truth 'you are attracted to someone with whom you can't produce offspring' fair.
There are adoptive families, also. Your model seems to exclude those? But given how horrid our foster system is, foster parents seem to be doing an important service.
Also, I think there's the view that encouraging stable relationships is a social positive from an STD standpoint.
Also, people exist in stable relationships even without official recognition. Recognition helps enormously with things like filing taxes, inheritance, social support, etc.
This implies either that gay people would have children if they couldn't marry, or that gay marriage somehow discourages other people from having children. Maybe you have an alternative explanation that isn't completely absurd.
Not the OP, but lots of closeted gay people got married and had kids in the bad old days. It was what you did, so they did it. That this is gone is a good thing, IMO, but there's a clear mechanism where it results in less kids.
Presumably, there's a spectrum from straight to bi to gay, and people pick partners based on a number of criteria which can be influenced by social factors. If society encourages picking a partner based on short term factors like 'attractiveness' and 'how good they are in bed', then presumably the partner selection will skew differently than if society encourages picking partners based on long term factors, such as (importantly for this discussion) whether you can produce children. And we understand this, it's one of the reasons we have restrictions on intermarriage with close relatives; no matter how much you love your sibling, the risk that it will produce bad offspring is too great so it's successfully been made taboo.
The problem is that we've removed the taboos associated with sex to the point where 'I want to have sex with [x]' is an identity, and have pushed that short term gratification of sex outweighs their long-term thinking. And this produces its own tragedies; most people don't get to marry someone that's a perfect match, and that's a part of being human. And so, increasingly, when the sex fades or the relationship hits a small rocky patch, the lifetime partnership of marriage is thrown away, and both individuals involved are almost certainly never going to fully make up what was lost in terms of time and effort.
Gay marriage is a small part of the larger values problem of short term versus long term thinking, and the whole problem is that it plays out over generations. The genie isn't going to go back into the bottle, at least not by force and not without a lot of time. I think at this point the best we can hope for is a live and let live situation (though there will be idiots on both sides that try to use the law as a bludgeon to force things). The best way to get through this is to keep our civic institutions neutral and let people live by their own consciences whenever possible.
There's an issue with 3--there are many children where this isn't possible, due to death and abuse. I guarantee you those children are better off with a same-sex couple than with abusive parents or in continuous foster care. 2 has a lesser issue that same-sex couples can still have children through surrogates or donors, but I don't know how common that is.
There's definitely an issue with abuse, and there are definitely some horrible parents and some wonderful foster parents. It still doesn't change the underlying incentives.
A hypothetical question: supposed we randomized babies. Each day, we take all babies born on that day and gave each of them to a randomized mother that gave birth that day. Would you expect this system to be better or worse than the current one? I don't think there's any reason to doubt that people treat their own children better (or, more properly, no worse than) children of others; someone that abuses their own kids is never going to do better with the kids of others. Yes, there are abusive or otherwise poor parents, but the proper solution is not to open parenting up to more people, but to make parenting and marriage more of a serious decision entered into willingly and cooperatively.
I consider a good friend of mine, a progressive that I regularly (but civilly) don't see eye-to-eye with, as one of the strongest and most moral people I know. As a young adult, he slept around. One of his partners decided to trap him with a child. He wanted nothing more to do with her, but he fought to keep himself in the child's life (and got really lucky with lawyers). On the one hand, the child is lucky to have a father that cares for him enough to fight to stay in the child's life, but the child is still unfairly burdened with being conceived as pawn and being passed back and forth between parents.
We've created a system that encourages this by trivializing marriage and reducing romance to sexual attractiveness. Raising a child, even your own child, is properly a full-effort lifetime partnership between two people. Just as my friend's partner tried to force things on my friend, surrogacy messes with this; can you ever be completely sure that your partner has the same investment in the outcome?
And yes, there will always be worst case scenarios such as the death of one or both parents, but by minimizing the number of cases where society has to step in we can conserve effort and resources for those worst-case scenarios.
Sure it'd be great to stop parental abuse and children being born out of wedlock. And in the six millennia of recorded history, no one has found a way to do that. Maybe we should consider some alternative options so that children in those situations have more opportunities to have loving parents. And man, try saying to someone who was adopted that their parents didn't love them as much as they would a biological child. I'll be the reaction is great.
Your argument against surrogacy is bizarre. Woman decides to have a child with no input from the man and then forces him to support the child. Therefore two men or two women who together decide to use a surrogate to have one of their biological child will run into the same issues. Heck, stepparents are a thing in straight marriages. I guess they're all under suspicion, too?
And while there is more to romance than sexual attraction, sexual attraction is absolutely part of it. A gay man can have a more romantic relationship with another man than he can a woman he has zero attraction to (And vice versa for lesbians). In fact, I must ask: is allowing same sex couples to marry what caused the trivialization of marriage, or had that already happened? If the latter, perhaps you should focus your objection on whatever caused that, as it seems like a much more fundamental problem.
I gotta admit that the official Catholic explanations of marriage have influenced my thinking. They're good enough that even removing the divine teleology, they still work! :-)
"The wrong side/right side of history" is the Victorian View of Evolution. There used to be the proposition that evolution unfolded over vast swathes of time, getting better and better, until it culminated in us, the Pinnacle of Creation.
That view is gone now. Evolution doesn't have a telos ending in the Pinnacle of Creation, it is a process about survival. A 'better' organism is not one that is more advanced than its ancestors and now wears spats and a monocle, it is one that thrives in the particular environment it inhabits and replaces less efficient organisms.
So the view that history has a telos and a tidy "right side" and "wrong side" needs to be abandoned, as happened to the naive view of ever-onward, ever-upward, progress of the Tree of Creation under the shade of the banner with a strange device, Excelsior!
It was more common for the view of history to be one of *decline* than of progress to the right side, that once upon a time there had been a Golden Age or in the time of our grandfathers virtue reigned and the Republic was firmly founded, but every generation since has been declining and becoming decadent.
Which of those is the 'correct' view? Can you judge?
One implication of your last sentence seems to be that one should choose to believe in whatever will be popular some amount of time in the future. That seems to be an odd way of generating beliefs about politics, especially those that depend on beliefs about facts (eg the nature of people). Maybe one could justify believing whatever is currently popular in all kinds of way, but being on the wrong side of history doesn’t have a start date. So you’re on the wrong side of history even if you would be the first person to take the right side. So all the arguments in favor of believing whatever is currently popular don’t support that way of thinking. And history doesn’t really seem to have an end. So how do you know that everyone on the human side of things isn’t on the wrong side of the history that the AI World Machine will write to itself? (Or pick your favorite dystopian result -- Nazi resurgence, techno-feudalism, whatever.)
So maybe you just meant that as rhetoric -- “don’t be a social conservative because progressives will win the current fights”? Or is it in the nature of a threat -- “don’t be a social conservative because, if you are, I’ll label you as being on the wrong side of history”?
Not a social conservative, by the way, but friends with many.
I see in another part of this thread that you have withdrawn the comment about being on the wrong side of history, so kindly disregard my thoughts about it.
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling."
This is survivorship bias. I think you're selecting for those leftist causes that survived and then tracing them backwards. This is going to bias your thinking towards the conclusion 'change is always good.'
I mean, I'm not socially conservative (and 'social conservativism isn't the monolith that some people try to paint it as) but it's worth remembering that the eugenics movement was a Progressive cause in its era. The 'pro-human-evolution book' in the Scopes Monkey trial was viscously racist and probably should have been removed for that reason alone.
Regarding 'homosexual relationships,' there's a wide range of behavior here. Everything from "two or more people lovingly committed to one another" to "random hookups in bathhouses by a minority of individuals that allowed the proliferation of HIV and massive death."
The STD rate even today is higher among gay men than the average population. (And the STD rate among strict lesbians is lower than the population average.)
For that matter, prior to things like condoms, antibiotics, modern germ theory, STD testing, etc. sex with multiple partners would be much more costly socially and individually. Prior to WWII or so, the majority of people died from transmissible disease. Even current levels of cleanliness are modern. Indoor plumbing, much less hot water, mostly didn't exist when our norms and values were forged. It's problematic to take modern values and read them back onto people who didn't have our technology.
Also, what about David Riemer? He had a botched circumcision so he was given a sex change operation and raised as a girl. It was assumed that gender was entirely socially constructed so this would be fine. It turns out that gender identity seems to be inborn to an extent. David went back to living as a guy and eventually killed himself from stress. And we learned from that, but it's an example of an idea that was on the wrong side of history.
Conservative cultures have more gender parity in certain professions like programming than more liberal ones. There seems to be some level of biological preference in the average male towards working with things and in the average woman towards working with subjects. But the notion of 'structural sexism' basically requires an axiomatic belief that men and women are identical and that any difference in outcome is 'structural sexism.' Is there any reason, expressed in the definition of 'structural sexism' that men being several inches taller than women on average would not be considered 'structural sexism?'
Belief in "structural sexism" only requires a belief that differences between men and women are not morally weighted in the sense that "men are better/more deserving people." (Some believers in structural sexism even believe there are differences and they're weighted in the *opposite* way, which is kind of a problem!)
> personally find it hard to see the appeal of being socially conservative.
As an atheist from a very socially conservative country, I, like you, used to be like that. Then life happened, and I learnt that people are (generally) not stupid, or, to be rather more accurate, people are on average no more stupid than you are. Similar to the people who say "I have no need for philosophy", they always go on and invent their own (bad) version of a philosophy-ish, people who have no need for tradition go on and invent their own extremly bad and untested tradition. If you think other people have done a bad job at figuring out a just society, then boy oh boy, are you in for a surprise when you try to figure it out yourself.
This is one of the best things I have read on the matter : https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/. Basically, to summarize it in a slightly computer-science-y way : Tradition is the cumulative cache where every single human before you have, unconsciously, put their experience and mistakes. Yes, there is going to be dumb things and outdated info in there, just like the internet, any public library, any panel of experts, and etc etc etc, that's why you need to have a Cache-Invalidation algorithm, but this algorithm can't be just be "Throw all elements of the cache into the trash bin", because this way you're missing out on useful info. Like a wise man once said :
'''"The only perfectly rational algorithm for truth in arbitary environments is a brute force search over all possible hypothesis."""
That is, bias is not bad, it's good. It's amazing. Occam's razor is bias, intuition and common sense is bias. Bias culls the search tree. It's **unexamined bias** that is bad, because it culls the search tree without (concious) you ever knowing, so it cuts away your options behind your back. But that doesn't mean to throw it away entirely, just be aware of it and its typical blindspots whatever they may be.
Tradition is a sort of "momentum"y bias, always goes in the direction that have worked so far, it has its place and its weight. It can't be always right, because humans are always wrong and dumb, and therefore any aggregation of them is still more or less wrong and dumb. But it can't be always wrong either, because humans are not *that* wrong and dumb. The problem is that you don't know in advance when is which, progressives like to always imagine themselves as "Tradition : The Good Parts", but they frequently invent monstrosities and take bad parts out of other traditions as well. Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence.
>Things that most Americans now accept as normal, and even essential
Come on, I can give you a list of things that most people in my country would find normal and essential, you won't be pleased :).
You don't get to rail against tradition then turn around and argue from tradition. People in the US accept those things because they have become tradition, and people in general are too uncritical and fearful of challenging traditions or even arguing with them. This very point, seemingly in agreement with you, is actually contradicting you. Because those things you listed are actually traditions now, so their acceptance by the majority is not a good argument for them by your own standards.
>women voting
Opposed by the majority of women when it was first advocated in the US, and extremly unfair because voting rights for **men** were tied to their military service. For the 50 years between its acceptance in 1920-ish and the abolishing of the draft in 1970-ish it was a massive inequality between women and men, one of them has to fight and "prove" themselves (like men are always asked to), the other simply has to exist to get the same right. Hardly "progressive", if by progressive you mean fair and not punishing people for how they were born.
> marriage equality
You mean homosexuals getting married ? Oh that's dumb as well, I oppose it now, despite having been on the advocating side previously. Not out of any spite or hard feelings towards gay guys and lesbian gals, but simply because it doesn't make any sense. Marriage is a heterosexual institution through and through, it exists because when women get pregnant their men can't know for sure if the kid is his and\or the women can't know for sure if the man isn't going to run away (possibly invoking his own uncertainty). Marriage exists to solve this particular prisoner's dilemma, one of many thorny ones that arise in male-female interactions. How successful is it ? that's another matter entirely, and it depends on the particular algorithms and protocols the particular culture-dependant marriage institution chose, but that's the general problem all marriages are trying to solve.
Gay and lesbian couples can't beget children of their own. I can sort of squint and see a comparable problem in lesbian marriage where the agreed-upon mother chooses a different sperm than those the 2 chose together, but honestly it feels fake and contrived and I can't imagine why would the other woman feel anger or hurt if her wife can't get pregnant by her anyway.
Other benefits for marriage can be obtained outside of it, there is no reason not to.
>So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over?
Because history doesn't have a direction. To think otherwise is deeply naive and childish. It's an irresistible temptation, I know, the data points are just scattered there, just begging for a straight line to be drawn through them from initial state to final state. No such thing. History is an extremly complex dynamical system, there is no moral arc or soul in there.
A steel man of your statement would be something to the likes of :
>Why would you want to be against the path of history that, when measured by the Rawls' veil of ignorance standard of making the most identity-agnostic good, is optimal ?
And the answers to that would be : because it's not always optimal, not by some objective functions anyway. Take the 2 most conservative opinions I hold for example : (1) That feminism is an unredeemable trash of an ideology, and (2) that gay marriages are somewhat dumb and unnecessary. The first is clearly the Rawl winner, if I held a veil on your genitals and made you forget what your sex was, would you honestly - Honestly - support the vast majority of feminism given __Anything__ I throw at you ? Anything ? r/4thwavewomen ? I know that I will not, I know that when I see ways of speech and thought that mimics feminism but reverses the men-women arrow, I'm intensely disgusted and angered, even though I'm not a woman, but I recognize the other half of my species as a precious and valuable part. So the intense disgust and anger I feel when I see feminist ways of speech and thought is, plausibly, not just my own identity-borne reaction because I belong to the group targeted by it, but (at least in part) a Rawls' reaction.
The second one is more grey, I can easily imagine myself in Rawls' pre-birth heaven, not knowing whether I will turn out straight or gay, saying "yeah whatever let them have marriage it's not like straights have exclusive copyright", but I can also easily imagine myself seeing that marriage doesn't serve any useful function as far as I can see and just ask why, why ask for marriage when you don't need it, it was invented for a problem that you don't ever face.
Honestly, my conservatism doesn't ever feel like conservatism, it feels like better progressivism. Progressivism central tenet for me was always about Rawls' veil of ignorance, which is just the Golden Rule from ethics but slighltly rephrased. Traditional progressivism (hehe) has a slight problem, it has some identities (straight, men) that it seemingly gives 0 fucks about, it has a child-like desire to imitate what it gains nothing in imitating (Gay Marriage, Men Can Get Pregnant Too). It has intense and irrational disgust towards perfectly good values that deserve better. My conservatism is just a patch to those issues.
Sterile heterosexual couples have been allowed to get married. People don't seem to have a problem with that, so why is higher odds of not having children a problem with homosexual marriage?
One of the major functions of marriage is mutual aid for the adults. It isn't just about children.
You're right. There are a lot of cases where we accept deviations from traditional-traditional marriage for heterosexual couples. I see 2 reasons to still be opposed to homosexual marriages :
1- It doesn't involve breaches of privacy. Heterosexual marriages that don't beget children do so for private reasons (medical, personal, financial, etc...) that would be very rude to ask about. Not so for homosexual marriages, it's very easy to determine which homosexual couple won't have any children of their own : all of them. No other info needed. I think this makes a difference.
2- Selective Relaxation, this is a term I made up but it describes something that happens a lot of times elsewhere. Like for example, in countries where they still have a monarch, you will find that they have relaxed a lot of things that used to be a must such as the absolute powers at the disposal of a monarch and things like that, yet they don't often relax other things like the fact that monarchs must get married to other monarchs or that they have a fancy palace or that they participate in fancy ceremonies and so on.
That is, people are sometimes ok with relaxing or abandoning entirely some parts of tradition, but not other parts, based on the percieved "distance" or amount of deviation. Allowing sterile men and women to marry, allowing non-sterile men and women who nonetheless don't want children to marry, those sound like very minor deviations. Allowing 2 women or 2 men to marry, this sounds like it's a radical departure from how even the most gay-friendly societies in history has treated gay relationships.
And of course, it's not about "allowing", people are allowed to do whatever they please with each other. It's about recognition, I don't recognize such a marriage, not as much as I do a heterosexual one anyway. Where does my opinion matter ? This thread and nowhere else.
>One of the major functions of marriage is mutual aid for the adults
This is one of the "other benefits of marriage" that I talked about, and I think it would be valuable to find a name for institutions and relationships that serve them without being named "marriage". Calling every life-long partnership "marriage" is just dumbing yourself down. If the nation state only grants certain desirable rights to married people, then the solution is to tell the state in no uncertain terms to get through its thick coercive head that unmarried people should get those rights too, not to convince it that things that don't look like marriage are also marriage.
Call whatever legal rights the gays want by a boring legal name ("Cohabitation Rights" or "Privileged Kin Rights" or whatever) and make them grantable to every pair of people who <go through certain boring legal procedures>. Those pairs would happen to include married straight couples, but also perhaps unmarried straight couples, gay couples, 2 brothers, 2 sisters, a man and his mother, a man and his dog, etc....
1. It's rude to ask anyone where they got their children.
2. I grant that there's a limit to how much change people want, and gay marriage crosses a line. I just can't see that it's a line worth defending.
Lack of gay marriage has a high cost for a fair number of gay people, and also some heterosexuals, since insisting on heterosexual leads to some gay people marrying heterosexuals in the hopes that the homosexuality will wear off, which it pretty much doesn't. I'm not going to say that never happens because I can't know, but it isn't reasonable to expect it.
I agree that marriage isn't only about the couple involved, it's also about the couple being acknowledged as married.
There seem to be people who have "fluid" sexuality that varies over their life, but they also seem to be no more in control of it than people with fixed sexuality are. It sounds strictly worse imho.
"Other benefits for marriage can be obtained outside of it, there is no reason not to."
There are lots of objections to this. One is that taxes for same sex couples can be awful. My wife is a CPA and has complained loudly about trying to explain a couple sharing finances to the IRS, especially when they filed as a couple in their state and as individuals on the federal level. Things like revocable trusts are also more expensive than marriage licenses.
I would add that there were some in the wake of the AIDS crisis who wanted to encourage sexual fidelity among same-sex couples and hoped the incentive of marriage might facilitate that.
Also, there are things like adoption. And some gay and lesbian individuals have children from a previous marriage.
Also, we allow marriages of people who are past child-bearing age. If creating biological children were the only purpose to marriage, perhaps we shouldn't do that? But nobody does fertility checks prior to issuing marriage licenses.
Perhaps there was some more optimal arrangement, but 'same sex marriage' was at least a 'good enough' resolution to the outstanding issues.
OK, I'll take a stab at arguing for same-sex marriage. :-)
I'd say that as an atheist you shouldn't reason teleologically. Marriage doesn't exist *to* solve a particular problem, it exists *and* solves a particular problem, and other problems too. The big other one being that many humans have a desire to find a life partner and settle down with them, and that even more who don't desire this, are still better off doing it even though they don't realize it. (In my personal experience, anyway.) Whatever bit that gets flipped in the brain to turn off heterosexuality, doesn't seem to affect this desire at all. And society, being another clunky bit of evolution, tends to equate "life partnership" to marriage, such that the easiest way to fit same-sex couples in, is to let them be married.
There is an argument that the existence of same-sex marriage inherently de-emphasizes the raising of children, and I'm sympathetic to that. But I would suggest that it's not causation, but correlation. That is, I agree that modern American society is becoming less and less supportive of having and raising children well, and that this has happened alongside the push for same-sex marriage. But I have seen nothing to persuade me that the former is caused by the latter. Rather, it seems to me that they're both products of progressive ideology, and one is bad and the other is good. (California law might be crazy in a lot of ways, but it gave us "right on red", a distinct civilizational advance.)
If you think gays and lesbians shouldn't be allowed to marry because "it doesn't make sense" to you, then don't ever kid yourself that you exhibit "better progessivism," because that is total bullshit. If two consenting adults want to enter into a legally and socially recognized partnership, which confers benefits like joint property ownership and medical next-of-kin rights, that's none of your sad-face fucking business, whether it "makes sense" to you or not.
Congratulations, your response is the lamest one I've gotten so far.
Jon, you misunderstand me. It's indeed none of my sad-face fucking business whether Alice and Carol want to enter into a marriage, or if Bob and Charlie want to, if by that you mean I can't stop them. I happen to believe that states, not as in "Texas and California" but as in "Germany and Brazil", are an immoral rubbish institutions, and that using their coercive power for anything except the most life-threatening of situations and in the tightest of bounds is also immoral and vile.
But I didn't get from your original post that you're merely against the tendency of some (most?) conservatives' to rush to the state to beg it to defend their tradition, indeed if I did I would have (1) Aggressively agreed, since this issue ***affects*** me more than you can ever imagine (2) Gave you examples where progressives do their own fair share of crying-to-nanny-state, to disillusion you of the strange notion that progressives are somehow more enlightened or freedom-loving in general.
But the way I understood your original post is "I don't know how can conservatism ever make sense to someone remotely smart or educated", so I replied to let you know that not only *some* conservatism can totally make sense to someone who is not a total 20-IQ cave man, it can make sense to this man who used to intensely hate it and associate it with a lot of things he most hates in life, and still has a somewhat complicated relationship with it.
How can feminism be not the total girl-boss bad ass ideology that some progressives seem to think it always is ? by being a straight man on the receiving end of its frequent girl-bossism. How can gay marriages not make sense ? Easy, you have to stop thinking of marriage as a fancy contract that happens to involve weddings and some intimacy, and start thinking of it as an institution created by men and women to solve a very specific men-women problem, a "treaty" if you will, between a man and a woman, one that doesn't make sense except between a man and woman.
Am I wrong ? of course I am, trivially so. Until we perfect Brain2Brain communication we're always wrong about each other and what we believe and whose values are better, that's why living in states is so immoral, it centralizes questions of value and forces the various groups comprising society to fight it out for the 1 "dominant" group that will impose its values upon all others. Fortunately, I'm not going around banning feminism and disallowing gay marriages (ok, I admit that if I have the power I will be very slightly tempted to ban at least the egregious feminism I see online, but I would violently resist myself and they would have to do something especially egregious to force my hand). This is my own opinion that holds sway nowhere other than my own dominion : my mind and extensions thereof.
While I don't think Bi_Gates wrote it as well as he could, and I'm not convinced by it, the thesis that changing the focus of marriage from a joint-family process focused on producing heirs to a strictly voluntary partnership focused on romance drove a lot of the decline in marriage, at least in the West, has a pretty decent pedigree.
Also, this clearly offended you. While I haven't read anything terribly offensive by you, deeply offensive thing get posted here all the time, by all sides and I'd like to think that we can handle them respectfully. To a rough approximation, and I'm open to being corrected here, the overwhelming majority of countries and people in the globe do not accept homosexual marriage and find Bi_Gates' type arguments persuasive. (1) If you can't hear these arguments without taking offense, you're greatly restricting your ability to communicate with most of the world.
I'm not a conservative, but I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.
A foundational conservative insight is that societies are very complex and hard to understand fully. This means the effect from small changes are hard to predict, and large changes mean playing russian roulette with society.
The conclusion is not to be against all changes, but to change in small steps, observe what happened, and then do the next step based on what you learned, if it still seems a good idea.
The gradual introduction of gay marriage over a few decades is a good example of that process. I think preserving gay marriage is the normal conservative position in 2022.
I also think you cherry pick the "wrong side of history" cses. Conservatives were certainly on the right side of history in rejecting communism, naziism, eugenics, and probably many other crazy ideas forgotten by history.
Yeah. Conservatism, at least as it is understood in the US and Canada, seems now to mostly be an egoistic individualism and myopic populism (at least if populism means it's popular with your base)...
I’d say that is its portrayal in the media. I know many social conservatives, but none who fit those descriptions. They are mainly very family-focused, sometimes to the point of being pretty disconnected from politics entirely.
It's 2060. Congress has just legalized pedophilia. Only ignoramuses consider it "harmful" -- when you look up psychological concepts in textbooks, you find that pedophilia is, by definition, healthy, for both people involved. There's a ton of research to support this (although some bigoted weirdos don't think the studies were very good). It was always ridiculous to claim children "can't give consent"; kids give and refuse consent to all sorts of things, all the time, and we respect it. (Should I go on?) A flower shop in Maine is being sued by a 30-year-old woman because they refused to create a floral arrangement for her 1-year anniversary with her 10-year-old boyfriend. If your friends thought you were on the flower shop's side, you probably wouldn't get invited to book club. TV shows that treat pedophiles as dangerous predators "haven't aged well". Famous people punished for pedophilia in the past are considered civil rights icons.
Of course, this will never happen. It's a complete fantasy. Just a thought experiment. The slippery slope fallacy is a classic tool of manipulative rhetoric, and it would be shameful for me to deploy it here. In fact, in the real world, the sexual ethics affirmed by the majority of people in the US in 2022 is exactly the same as it will be in 2060. Although sexual ethics has shifted a good deal in the last hundred years, it has, at last, reached its final, true and correct form. So a thought experiment like what I've proposed is impossible.
Still. Are you capable of putting yourself in the thought experiment? Imagine if the impossible happened, and social liberals in the US generally decided that pedophilia is the same kind of thing as homosexuality. Would you continue to hold to your outdated 2022 code of sexual ethics? Even though that would make you a social conservative, on the wrong side of history? Or would you stay on the right side of history, and believe what everybody else believes?
This doesn't necessarily prevent your thought experiment from being a useful exercise, but I'd like to point out that the whole consent issue is a pretty big disanalogy to the other issues brought up by the previous poster. I've never heard anyone argue against (say) homosexuality on the grounds that homosexuals are somehow not competent to consent to things. And society has a consistent stance that children aren't able to give legal consent *in general*, not only for sex (e.g. contracts with children are not enforceable), so if society reversed that stance then there should be a bunch of other changes, too.
I think it's highly noteworthy that I can't come up with a good way to *fix* your thought experiment. That is, I'm trying to think of some activity that would be nearly-universally considered unacceptable behavior today, *even if* everyone involved gave consent and was considered competent to give consent in general. Typical crimes like stealing have an obvious non-consent objection. I can think of several activities that *some* people would consider unacceptable today (e.g. drugs, polygamy, prostitution) but all the ones I can think of have significant proponents as well.
I mean, I guess you can say that society just lowers the age of consent from 18 to 10 or something, although that should affect a ton of other things besides sex, and so many people will consider it objectionable for reasons that have nothing to do with sexual mores (e.g. 10-year-olds dropping out of school and being saddled with credit card debt).
I've read science fiction in which the line between childhood and adulthood was defined by passing a competence test, rather than by age. This didn't strike me as obviously bad, though obviously it depends on how the test works.
"I think it's highly noteworthy that I can't come up with a good way to *fix* your thought experiment. That is, I'm trying to think of some activity that would be nearly-universally considered unacceptable behavior today, *even if* everyone involved gave consent and was considered competent to give consent in general."
Very late here on my part, but I'm surprised nobody pointed this out so I'll do it: the obvious example is dueling. It used to be considered acceptable to murder a guy, even if he was unwilling to die, as long as you gave him a fair shake at doing *you* in at the same time and he consented to the operation. This is no longer considered okay, and has very few proponents (but ought to be legal).
Euthanasia is a similar thing, but much trickier for various reasons; a duel is simply a matter of two consenting men in good health and with equal arms and thus should not pose any kind of issue in a consent-based framework.
My quick gut response is that I feel differently depending on whether refusing a duel lowers your social status. (Which obviously means that my main objection there is the hypothetical social mores, not the hypothetical laws per se.)
Similarly, I feel differently about a society where 18-year-olds are allowed to have sex and a society where any 18-year-old who refuses an offer of sex becomes a social pariah.
A man refusing a duel is more like a woman *putting out*, that is, it's known to lower the social status in some circumstances but not others. I feel like you probably wouldn't want to restrict women's ability to consent to sex based on this, so I think that whole line of argument is a blind alley.
I think polygamy is the plausible one. You can imagine a big social progressive push to allow marriage equality for the poly - someone like the UUs coming out and starting religious ceremonies for plural marriages, arguing from the Hebrew Scripture or something. Follow it with a strong pushback and a bunch of state referendums stating that marriage is a partnership between two people, and you've pretty much got the scene set as it was in the middle aughts. Get a popular Will and Grace style sitcom where the polycule is having wholesome shenanigans, with the occasional very special episode about the bigotry they face. Right thinking progressive people gradually come to believe that they aren't being fair to the poly and that the poly are oppressed, which makes them into the cause of the moment. A few years later the plural marriage referendums start going the other way, and a few years after that you get another Obergefell and a cakeshop refusing to bake a cake for a poly ceremony.
Five years after that, boy-girl marriages are still the norm, but you have a small percent of poly marriages and no one thinks it's a big deal. And your 2022 person dropped into a boy-boy-girl-girl-nb ceremony is shocked, and has to decide whether to keep their damn mouth shut or out themselves as one of *those* people.
What about cutting off healthy limbs and replacing them with artificial limbs? Effectively nobody advocates even allowing this today, because wanting this with today's artificial limbs is seen as pretty conclusive evidence of legal incompetence, but it's easy to see this potentially changing -- or not changing! -- with advancing technology.
I wish I hadn't mentioned pedophilia... Really, the point of the thought experiment is that everybody is either a social conservative or just amoral, and you can pick any issue where you currently agree with the majority.
That aside, let me suggest that our society is actually pretty mixed up about consent. Different tribes talk about it very differently, and everybody applies it inconsistently.
For instance, libertarians take the idea of consent to financial transactions very seriously, and get all mad about getting taxed because it's like being made to buy something without consent. But for some reason, liberals who, if they were talking about sexual ethics, would take consent very seriously, don't see this libertarian perspective as worthwhile at all. And if you want another example of this same dynamic, look at the coronavirus vaccine.
I have to think that consent really isn't the core principle it sometimes seems to be. Everybody seems to pull it out when convenient and forget about it otherwise.
I just explained that *every* example I can think of has the same problem. Can you think of one that doesn't?
.
I mostly think of consent as being sufficient to make something OK, but not always necessary. I can tow your car if you consent. I can also tow your car if it is parked illegally, whether you consent or not. Some circumstances require consent, some don't.
I think libertarians *do* have a valuable view on taxes, but my impression is that even libertarians think that taxes are fine in a voluntary association; e.g. a book club can charge a fee for membership, as long as people can choose whether to be members or not. In the same way, once we've agreed that someone has the rights to some land, it is legit for them to say you need to pay them if you want to use that land. In a perfect world, if you didn't like their terms, you'd just go somewhere else--Scott has this story about an archipelago where every island has different rules, and you can choose which island to live on or start your own island. The practical problem, of course, is that we don't have unlimited land. So if you don't want the government to tax you, I first want to hear your philosophy of how land rights/sovereignty are supposed to work in a world with limited land.
My take on vaccines is that it's a public safety issue; by refusing to take a vaccine, you're endangering everyone around you, similar to driving drunk. (Again, this could be fixed if you moved to a magically separate island, and THEN I'd say it's your call, but we don't have unlimited land.) You could argue about how strong the public safety interest is vs. how strong your interest in controlling your own body is, but the public has at least *some* legitimate interest at stake here; by interacting with other people without being vaccinated, you are negatively affecting a non-consenting party.
Minor aside in an otherwise interesting discussion which seems to be rediscovering the concept of externalities, your last paragraph is true only for very few vaccines.
My argument assumes that the vaccine in question protects against a contagious disease. It was my impression that that is typical for a vaccine. You're saying it's only a minority of vaccines?
Yes. This inconsistent valuing of consent bothers me, also.
To some extent, I think this harkens back to Scott's "The Ideology is Not the Movement" essay where fighting the outgroup and protecting the ingroup is more important than any consistent ethical stance.
Children are generally allowed to consent to things which are not considered harmful or impactful. So posit technological changes which reduce the physical harms, impacts, and social externalities related to sex, including STDs and pregnancy, as well as any emotional impacts.
"(e.g. contracts with children are not enforceable)"
Sure, but to use that analogy it's not a criminal act to have a child sign a contract, either. The problem with contracts is that, if enforced, they are impactful. So our hypothetical should include a world where sex was not impactful.
Not sure how far I want to go with this analogy, but I could see something like this happening in a very science fiction sense.
To take things full circle, 300 years ago lots of men having sex with other men would have transmitted STDs. Most people died of transmissible diseases, so the fear was understandably much greater. Things like condoms, antibiotics, and STD testing likely helped make same sex relationships more socially acceptable.
If you prefer a less charged and threatening analogy, rules about alcohol in vehicles will likely change with self-driving cars. And who knows, maybe people of 2122 will look at the laws that their ancestors had regarding open containers of alcohol in cars and view those laws as draconian and primitive, because they don't acknowledge the risks that drunk driving posed to the people of our era.
Dealing with the emotional impacts poses a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, because messing with your emotions seems like something that should, itself, require consent. For example, taking a drug that increases sex drive and mixing it into your date's drink without their consent seems pretty rapey.
I already view open-container laws as taking an in-principle perfectly fine behavior and sacrificing it on the altar of making it easier to *enforce* the rule we actually care about, which is no driving while impaired. Which I think is a fine tradeoff to make (though maybe I would feel differently if I liked drinking). But I certainly won't shed any tears if it becomes legal after the practical reason goes away.
"Dealing with the emotional impacts poses a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem,"
Oh, absolutely. But raising kids already involves a lot of manipulation on the part of parents, and parents pursuing harm reduction strategies for their children is often though not always encouraged. Consider the problem hand-waved away by whatever mechanism you would accept, just so that the hypothetical works. Emotional testing finds certain people won't be harmed. Or we develop technology which allows people to rewrite their brains as adults, which obviates any trauma. Or what we call 'trauma' is in some people is caused, in part, by the value that we put on sex such that acceptance of people's sexual history makes some interactions less traumatic.
Whatever. The precise mechanism isn't important to the example. Just that we assume it exists.
I'm also fine with open container laws for the reasons that you mention. Maybe my point there was too subtle. We have rules and we have reasons for rules. When the reasons underlying the rules change, people tend to not acknowledge that change. They simply paint people from previous ages as being stupid or primitive or whatever, rather than reacting rationally to the scarcity and danger of our times. Casual historical analysis is rife with the primary attribution error.
To rephrase the matter, we are privileged to live in modern times and are frequently unaware of our privilege when judging past societies.
"For example, taking a drug that increases sex drive and mixing it into your date's drink without their consent seems pretty rapey.,"
Think of it in terms of harm mitigation. We support people too young to give consent getting the HPV vaccine. Or an IUD. Or, if they are pregnant, an abortion. Many people currently support harm reduction strategies. And that's well and good. But with enough harm reduction strategies (voluntarily pursued) we alter people's views in regards to the originally harmful activity. Jumping off a bridge is stigmatized. Bungee jumping is a fun, recreational activity.
If we can understand this concept as regards physical harm, then insert whatever plot device you want and extend the metaphor to emotional harm.
OK, you have convinced me this works as a hypothetical if you inject enough magic.
My 30-second reaction is that there's probably a lot of current crimes that I'd be willing to legalize if some miraculous technology somehow guarantees no harm to anyone involved (including intangible harms).
You know, I actually find future normalization of pedophilia quite plausible -- at least, if it happens in the context of various tech advances that seem like they might well happen by 2060. For example;
Functional brain age, like gender, becomes something we can manipulate via surgery and drugs. There are many wonderful things about the child brain. Tremendous neuroplasticity. Ability to easily learn certain things, for instance new languages, probably various programming languages or the 2060 equivalent. Joyfulness and energy. A fresh, novel point of view about absolutely everything. Lantern consciousness rather than spotlight consciousness. So in 2060 there might be people who elect to be part child: their body and part of their brain would be 8 years old, but another part of their brain 30 years old. Puberty can easily be brought about if the person wishes it. It's not hard to see the case for making marriage to one of these multi-age people.
-Or, most of the earth's human population might have merged their brains with AI, or with part of each other's brains, or both. All would be functional geniuses. An 8 year old who was part of this network would not be anything like the 8 year olds of now. Marrying one might look just fine to most everybody. Marrying one of the few remaining 8 year olds whose brain is not part of the shared genius brain might also seem OK. At that point, unenhanced human beings might look to us the way cats do now -- they're pets, without human rights.
Yeah. That's how the future looks to me. I don't worry that much about genius AI doing us in. I think AI & related technologies will transform human life so much that for me, at least, it would be bleak and monstrous -- life as I know it would be gone. But maybe I feel that way because it's just too big a stretch for me. Maybe it's just a step along the way to our species evolving into homo deus. Who am I to say that's not worth doing?
You may feel some pride in having crafted some novel "thought experiment," but what you're hypothesizing was raised constantly 20 years ago when the battle for marriage equality was being fought here in California. Literally the first words out of the mouth of many conservatives was "If we let fags marry, and the next thing you know, they're going to want to make it legal to marry little kids!"
This instinctive association between gay men and pedophilia is due in part to that bastion of conservatism, the Catholic Church, where over the years priests sexually assaulted not hundreds, or evens thousands, but literally tens of thousands of children over the years worldwide. The Popes, of course did everything in their power to combat it -- and by "it," I mean the truth and disclosures about the abuse, not the abuse itself.
So when you not-so-subtly suggest that one very reasonable thing -- two consenting adults engaging in a legally and socially-recognized partnership, which confers benefits like joint property ownership and medical next-of-kin rights -- can lead down the road to adults preying on prepubescent children, which is widely and justifiably reviled and illegal, I'm not going rub my chin and say, "Well, dude's got a point."
You may be interested to know that if you go back a bit further in history, to the 70s, advocating for legal paedophilia was fairly prominent among a number of "progressive" movements.
"This instinctive association between gay men and pedophilia is due in part to that bastion of conservatism, the Catholic Church, where over the years priests sexually assaulted not hundreds, or evens thousands, but literally tens of thousands of children over the years worldwide."
And so the mask comes off. Farmer Jon was "just asking questions". He wants to know how we can possibly tolerate all those horrible bad evil wicked Republican-voters on here, when everybody knows they're fascist racist Nazis because the most wicked person in the entire world and throughout all of history has been the White Christian Cis Het Man.
You're the one leaping to "how dare you say gays' want to fuck kids!" when nobody else was saying that. Isn't that rather like that example I've seen elsewhere, when people start 'defending' Jewish people on the grounds of "This character is represented as being miserly and has particular facial features - JEWS YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT JEWS YOU ANTI-SEMITE!" So... you mean that goblins are Jews, Orcs are Jews, fairytale boogeymen are Jews?
If you immediately identify "hobgoblin in a fairy tale" as Jewish, maybe you are the one with the anti-Semitism problem. If you immediately identify "gay means paedophile", maybe you are the one with the anti-gay problem.
I'm sorry, I seem to have picked an example that's too sensitive. My point isn't to suggest any similarity between homosexuality and pedophilia, which are very different things.
But look. In 1900, I would have made this thought experiment about divorce. And you would have taken the same, "How dare you?" tone, suggesting that it's beyond the pale for me to imply that there's any similarity between letting priests marry (or whatever it was) and letting people get divorced.
And in 1950, I would have made this thought experiment about homosexuality. And you would have taken the same, "How dare you?" tone, suggesting that it's beyond the pale for me to imply that there's any similarity between letting people get divorced and letting gay people have sex with each other.
So now, in 2022, not being ironic, please forget I ever mentioned pedophilia, and instead, pick something else that both you and social conservatives agree is morally wrong. Cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, suicide, whatever. Call it X.
If, during your lifetime, X is legalized and anti-Xers find themselves facing uncomfortable social pressure at dinner parties, losing their jobs and getting sued, what will you do? Will you become a social conservative, and keep your anti-X stance? Or will you change your mind? I'm presuming that you don't think the current US liberal ethical system is the final, perfect one which will never change, but maybe I'm wrong and that's what you think.
I'll jump to the end of the argument; you're smart enough to see it from here already. If you would hold firm in the face of social pressure, then you're already a social conservative; it's just that the ethical system you want to conserve happens to be the one currently held by the majority. If you would change your mind and yield to social pressure, then it seems like you don't really believe in right and wrong at all. Like, something was bad, and then some people wrote some words on the Internet and now that thing is good: not really a concept of "good" and "bad" that means much.
Just trying to get you to consider that maybe you and social conservatives aren't that different. Maybe they're just liberals from the 1950s and you're a conservative from the 2060s.
(And hey! At least, if it ever does happen -- which I genuinely think is very, very unlikely -- that pedophilia gets legalized and becomes widely accepted, I can count on you to stand with us against it. That's a win, in my book.)
One angle is to consider how attitudes were to sex with children in the past. In the UK, I'm not aware there were any laws against it until the 18th century, although no doubt anyone caught might well face rough justice from locals, as virginity of their daughters was valued by most people, besides the poorest or the most debased, who might even sell their offspring's sexual services as soon as they possibly could!
During the 18th century a ridiculous superstition arose that sex with innocent youngsters would transfer VD from the adult participant to them. (I believe a similar outbreak of this absurd belief was seen in recent years in South Africa.) So a law was enacted that made carnal knowledge of an infant aged seven or under a capital offence.
I think from then until the mid-19th century the de facto age of consent was around age 10 to 12 (for heterosexual sex of course - By a statute of Henry VIII, sodomy, with men or women, including oral sex, was a capital offence in England until the 1860s!)
Towards the end of the 19th century, motivated by scandals involving child prostitutes, the age of consent was raised to 14, and later in the 20th century to 16, where it is in the UK today for both sexes.
I guess attitudes over time have depended on how much children were valued. In the past, for poor children, that was often not very much, if at all! Incidently, although the church had frowned on sodomy previously, Henry VIII introduced his law mainly because he feared that sodomy and oral sex were being increasingly used for birth control, and there would soon be a shortage of stalwart young men for his armed services. So his law was also the result of valuing the next generation in his own way!
I'll jump right to my point: of course I'd oppose pedophilia! As well as cannibalism, bestiality, and any other repugnant topics you want to list. I don't choose my values based on "uncomfortable societal pressures at dinner parties." I'm a farmer and live in the reddest county in Southern California, and I'm surrounded Trump voters and Newsom-hating rednecks. I'm not conforming to some Bay Area group think.
I don't have to hypothesize about 2060, I'm living in 2022, and in my 50+ years of living, social conservatives have been all about trying to limit the choices and freedoms of others. whether it be the people they loved, the clothes they wore, the music they listened to, the plants they smoked (tobacco was fine, weed deserved a prison sentence). And on and on. You don't need to construct elaborate "thought experiments". Conservatives have not been on the side of compassion, kindness and genuine desire to help those less fortunate. If they had been, I'd vote for motherfuckers.
You're right that it's kind of offensive to suggest that somebody would change their ethical views because of social pressure. What I want you to see is that your original comment sounds like you're being critical of social conservatives for refusing to do exactly that. According to you, they "opposed" "things that most Americans now accept as normal"; they're "on the wrong side of history". You're criticizing the other side for not bowing to peer pressure, but if the roles were reversed, you yourself wouldn't bow to peer pressure.
Whether or not one side is more compassionate, kind or freedom-loving than the other is a separate matter; you didn't mention that stuff in your original comment, and you don't get to move the goalposts.
In the future, unless you believe that it's good and noble to forsake your ethical principles in order to fit in with society, don't criticize other people for not doing it. It comes across as unreasonable.
Hell yeah. I love people all across the political spectrum, I just happen to live in a conservative area. My response was to a comment asking if I'd cave to "uncomfortable pressure at a dinner party." I organize our annual Oldtimers Picnic, I'm a fluent speaker of the Native language of our area, my family has been here since 1898, and this election season I put up campaign signs on my farm for two local candidates I supported the most -- both Republicans.
Your "angry closeted liberal" implication is a country mile off the mark.
I think the point here is slightly different. “Why be on the wrong side of history?” proves too much. If embraced fully, it would say “Well, that future generation is probably right. As long as the children consent, who are we to get in the way?” Matthew doesn’t think the scenario is likely, but there’s nothing in “Don’t be on the wrong side of history” which would make it apply to euthanasia but not pedophilia.
There's been waaaay to much obsession with the term "be on the wrong side of history." Just discard that if that's the sticking point. I withdraw that comment.
The point is, the arc of human social behavior should, and tends, to keep moving towards a more just, compassionate and fair society for all. That has never been a stated goal of social conservatives. But it is for progressives. Has every proposed progressive idea been sound? No. But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced is like saying that "defund the police" was ever widely embraced. Hint: it wasn't. It was just a slogan to be shouted against authoritarian and abusive law enforcement agencies. Some police departments have had their budgets cut, and some funds have been moved to mental health interventions, but widespread phasing out of police departments has not and will not happen any time soon.
Euthanasia is a compassionate option for fully informed people in the last stages of palliative care or unremitting pain. Pedophilia is adults preying upon prepubescent children and it will never be compassionate or kind, no matter how many times people speculate that, "Well, you never know, progressives in the future. . . "
Liberals move society along that arc. Conservatives prevent society from straying from that arc. Both are important. The 20th century showed what happened when you allow radicals to run roughshod over conservatives. The mountains of skulls speak for themselves.
Also, this
"But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced is like saying that "defund the police" was ever widely embraced."
is factually incorrect. 30 states adopted forced sterilization laws. A poll in 1937 found 2 in 3 people supported sterilizations of criminals and "mental defectives". It absolutely was widespread.
It's pretty damn convenient for your argument that every policy turns out to be "it was just a slogan for a special use-case, not widespread support" when it's in your favour and "every single conservative ever has believed and wanted this" when it's not in your favour.
"Euthanasia is a compassionate option for fully informed people in the last stages of palliative care or unremitting pain."
To the arc of human social behaviour: as I see it, the big three social movements of progressivism in the twentieth century are racial equality, gender equality and communism. Two out of three ain’t bad. Conservatism’s thing is mostly resisting social movements, so I’ll give it a point for protecting capitalism (the only area where it really achieved what it wanted), but it loses a point for fascism. So progressivism does do better, but not overwhelmingly so in this sense.
To stated aims: fairness, compassion and justice for all are the stated aims of lots of people who claim abortion is murder. I don’t think stated aims are what you’re really after here.
I really don’t get the claim that fascism was a conservative thing. Fascism was atheist, so Christian democrats (Europe’s homegrown social conservatives) were not facials. (They had debates and splits about whether to ally with fascists.) What am I missing?
"the big three social movements of progressivism in the twentieth century"
Racial equality is *late* 20th Century Progressivism and debatably mid century, post World War II, certainly not early 20th century. Classic Liberals arguably did more to promote racial equality in the early 20th century. Even if many Classic Liberals were closet racists, they at least fought for equality before the law and generally limited the political impact that their racism might have on others.
Also, statements like 'equality' are problematically simple. There are relatively few people in 2022 who favor laws that *deliberately promote* racial inequality.
Progressives, Classic Liberals, and some social conservatives in the 21st century believed that integration and civil rights were important. Derrick Bell, who was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement and founder of Critical Race Theory, posits that classic liberalism, integration, and equality before the law were/are insufficient or improper to sufficiently end racism and that incursions on freedom of speech and other diminishments of individual rights are needed to achieve that end. That's one example of a stance that distinguishes some Progressives from Classic Liberals and Social Conservatives. Progressives are distinguished by the mechanisms they are willing to employ and the value tradeoffs that they are willing to make in service of a goal like racial equality. And any of those mechanisms could have unintended consequences, moral costs, or fail at their goal.
It's not enough to want racial equality to be a Progressive in 2022. You need to favor it over other desirable virtues.
"Conservatism’s thing is mostly resisting social movements"
Conservativism tends to argue for slow and bottom-up change rather than top-down change. Though "social conservatives" are not heterogenous and it's possible to 'conserve' lots of different things.
Conservatives are not absolutely resistant to change and do change over time.
"but it loses a point for fascism"
Fascism is a hard thing to categorize. And not to defend Italian Fascism but the Nazis were outliers as fascists. Historically, most fascists were not racial supremacists. The Romans certainly were not.
Nazi-ism had some conservative elements regarding gender. It drew on Progressive eugenics. It was opposed by the European aristocracy, even though it made strong attempts to court them. It was opposed by classic liberals and some Religious Conservatives. The problem is that Social Conservatives are not consistently racial conservatives and that fact is typically ignored by Progressives. Social Conservativism is a heterogenous category and 1940s Progressives were very capable of being racist.
Nazi-ism had wider philosophical appeal than most modern leftists want to admit. It was collectivist and leveling and opposed to private business which was outside the party/state. Those tend to be authoritarian-leftist values. But Nazi-ism had a very much restricted in-group and a brutal treatment of its outgroups. Mussolini started out as a Marxist and didn't have to change that much to embrace fascism. The thing about Nazi-ism is that people try to fit it onto a left-right spectrum and claim that it failed because it was 'extreme right.' It wasn't. Nazi-ism's greatest failings were on a tribal vs universal spectrum. They treated their outgroups brutally. If the left-right spectrum is not twisted to defend a particular viewpoint then Nazis might be more accurately called centrist authoritarian.
"That has never been a stated goal of social conservatives."
A more "just" and "fair" society has certainly been the goal of *some* social conservatives. "Social Conservative" is a big wastebasket category and not everyone who gets assigned to that category put themselves there, which makes discussion difficult.
The problem is that there are different standards of justice and fairness. These may include:
Egalitarianism
Comensurability
Equity
Expectation
Precedent or Tradition
Consent
Equality
Filial Piety
So you need to unpack the values expressed by the word 'justice' before it means anything because there are plenty of people who are not Progressive who also use the word and claim to value Justice and Fairness, but do not consider Progressive values to be either Just or Fair.
"But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced"
... did you MISS the 1930s-1940s? Heck, outside of Nazi Germany both Sweden and California had significant eugenics programs. Yes, eugenics was once widely embraced by people who called themselves "Progressives." Similarly, Nazism and Fascism was opposed by many aristocrats and some religious conservatives as well as classic liberals. In its own rhetoric, Nazi-ism painted itself as a 'middle way' between Communism and the Weimar Republic. After the fact, those who favored collective politics figured it would look bad to have all the collectivist governments engaged in horrible and authoritarian practices, so the Nazis got rebranded as 'far right.' Rebranding of Nazis as 'far right' was pure damage control.
Rebranding of Nazis as 'far right' was a deliberate policy of the Nazis once Hitler gained control of the party. And in fact he actively purged leftists from the Nazi Party, including ones who used to be influential, making it actually a far right party.
As I understand it, crime statistics are so badly collected that we can't tell whether there's a connection between defunding the police and a crime wave.
"Our idea?" How the hell did you ever get the idea that I supported defunding the police? Because I support many progressive causes, like not putting polluting industries in neighborhoods of color, or offering free school lunches to all kids, that doesn't mean I EVER supported abolishing or even strongly reducing funding for law enforcement. I have assisted our local Police League on Night Out events and helped the Sheriff's Dept. apprehend an arsonist. Have you?
Stop making wild assumptions about people you don't know.
Joe Biden never supported "defunding the police," and what are the names of these "big city Democrat mayors who changed their minds?"
Law enforcement is not the best choice to take the lead on mental health crises. That's a fact. Far too many people have called the police themselves for help, and then got killed by the police who responded. Do you think that's a positive outcome?
Justice reform should be a continual, ongoing process. We should always try to do better in how we treat people, both victims and suspects, who may actually be innocent, and how we work to prevent crime in the first place. That's not the same as "defund the police" which I've never supported. Direct your rant elsewhere, because you've missed the target.
I'm pretty sure there's selection bias there, "people advocated for a thing and then got it" gets remembered, "people advocated for a thing and failed" doesn't.
Weirdly no one has explicitly mentioned religion in a reply so far, so I'll put it here. As a disclaimer, I'm agnostic, but go to an evangelical Christian church. I'll be trying to give my best understanding of that view from my perspective, but this is a second-hand interpretation, and I'm leaving out a lot of the parts about God.
Suppose, if you will, that you were really sad. Your life was sort of a mess, and you felt empty. You were trying to find happiness, but it just wasn't quite being found. I think this is pretty common.
Then, some weird dude with a book tells you to read the book, and like, maybe it will make you happy. And you're like "nope." And then you're still sad. So finally you sit down and read the book. And then you go meet the weird dude and his weird friends, and they all read the book and seem happy, so you keep reading the book. And things get a little better.
And eventually they tell you "Hey, maybe instead of just reading the book you should try doing the things the book tells you to." And you're like, "hey, reading the book worked, so maybe I'll try it." And you try it. And slowly you get this feeling of meaning in your life, and you're happy. And you look at all the stuff you did before you read the book and think "wow, that was pretty dumb, glad I'm not doing that anymore."
And there's a whole bunch of stuff in the book that you didn't do before, but the book says that stuff is bad too. So you say "well gee, maybe I should try and tell people not to do that stuff either, because it's bad too." So when someone says "let's legalize that stuff" you say "no that's bad," and when someone says "let's outlaw that stuff" you say "yup, let's stop that stuff." Because you're consistent, you're also against the bad stuff that you did before.
Okay, storytime's over. But this is sort of the story that I hear from everyone at my church. They were sad, found Jesus, now they're happy, and they trust that the stuff the Bible tells them is bad is bad, and they want to stop other people from hurting themself/others with that bad stuff. And they really do seem happy with their religion, so I think the story is true (though there's stuff with faith, and maybe supernatural intervention that I'm glossing over, depending on how much you believe in God).
I think that if that story describes your life, then opposing the stuff that the Bible says is bad sort of makes sense. Especially if the Bible tells you "hey, there's this entity out there that wants bad stuff to happen, so that's why these otherwise nice people are pushing for it." And if your interpretation of the bible says that homosexuality, drugs, porn, divorce etc is bad, then you're going to oppose it, even if you lose the fights.
This. The only thing I’d add is to imagine genuinely believing that you have an eternal soul, there is a god, he spoke through a specific book, and that failing to follow its directions takes your soul to eternal damnation. Wouldn’t that cause you to worry enormously that, say, your homosexual child’s soul is damned for eternity? While I don’t believe those things, I have friends in exactly that situation. Their initial desperation has mellowed to tearful sorrow, but you can imagine the discussions that initial desperation caused. Again, start from where they do an much of the rest makes sense.
I don't know of any religion in which you get sent to hell for having homosexual tendencies, only of religions in which you get sent to hell for homosexual acts.
Even Christianity is not a religion where you get sent to hell for homosexual acts, as long as you are saved (and that's even assuming that you do get sent to hell for homosexual acts if you're *not* saved which depends on your hermeneutics). Some brands of Christians, including in particular Evangelicals, tend to forget this though.
Oh well, that's such an important distinction, that's for clarifying. And here I thought religious people were inflicting their ridiculous beliefs everyone, but it turns out they only believe in eternal suffering and damnation if you're a real gay, not gay adjacent.
Is the distinction between having pedophilia impulses and actually commiting pedophilia important? What about the distinction between wanting to kill someone and actually doing so? Its seems strange to mock the distinction between thought and deed as generally unimportant, since that distinction is the foundation of morality -- what distinguishes humans from animals who simply always act on on whatever impulse they have.
Amidst this chaotic swirl of opposing commentary, allow me to mention Carl Pham that I have read and enjoyed many of your posts. You have a clear and succinct style, and I have yet to read one of your comments that I felt was subpar.
I may not agree with all your positions, but they are well-stated and I think that you have a keen intellect.
Religious conservatives say "Oh we don't hate you and think you'll burn in hell forever because you're gay, we'll only feel that way if you actually express your deeply-felt sexuality and love someone of the same gender." I get the distinction. You can spend your life in lonely torment and still get in our heaven club, but if you kiss another man, it's off to hell you go. How beautiful and sacred.
And stop equating consenting adults engaging in sexual behavior with pedophilia and murder, for fuck's sake. There's an enormous difference. I'm not even gay, but as soon as someone begins their argument by analogizing consensual adult same sex relations to fucking a dog or eating babies or killing people or something equally abhorrent, you know they're trying to hide their bigotry behind a tattered sheet of rationalist absurdity.
If you are sincerely baffled by, and want to understand, social (and especially religious) conservatives and don’t claim be baffled merely as a way of signaling your moral superiority, then this distinction is one you should spend time trying to understand and not ridicule.
It is a huge divider between their world view and a more secular world view. From their perspective, the gay who tries sincerely and with all the effort he can muster to avoid acting on his gayness will be forgiven where an inveterate sinner will not; and of course, there’s always the chance that he succeeds in not sinning. There’s no difference between the sin of homosexual acts and any other sin in those respects. But for a more secular world view, this amounts to something like denying who you are, staying in the closet, or being the jackbooted thug to your own oppression. And it seems to me that many (not just on the left) view those as secular sins.
I don’t think the two world views can be brought together in the sense of some middle ground being found. But mutual understanding and tolerance can get us a long way.
I understand how this point of view works and I still think it is ridiculous and catastrophizes homosexuality in particular among all sins. There are plenty of socially conservative Christians who are totally accepted by their peers despite building their lives around sins and sinful tendencies like materialism, anger, pride, self-righteousness, all of which are called out just as strongly as the various forms of sexual immorality in the New Testament. Why just focus on the guy with a gay marriage as the one who is unacceptable? It's purely because of extra-Biblical considerations.
Yes, I abbreviated, so as not to have to be specific about the situation. It was not a case where mere tendencies were at issue, though resisting the tendencies were exactly what my friends wanted, if I have successfully translated what they told me about it.
I get your point, and I appreciate your explaining it in a reasonable and measured way. I have family members who find great comfort and meaning in religion. I know the sense of community they find while attending church.
I'm a man of science, however, and that invisible Sky Daddy nonsense is crazy talk to me. Prayers are as efficacious as writing letters to Santa. Belief in some kind of Devil or Satan is even weirder. It's as real as Voldemort or Sauron.
American social policy should be about getting the possible outcomes for all Americans, not obliging religious beliefs.
I agree, though might not phrase it quite as harshly. That said, OP was asking why someone would hold conservative beliefs, and I was trying to illustrate the internal narrative that I think can lead to it
The status quo bias in defending one's belief system is insanely strong. It's more important than one's own life (after all, what gives meaning to life if not what one arrived at as beliefs about life).
Worldviews are memes, and they fight hard for their mindshare.
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling."
So "reasonable, intelligent Republican" means "accepts social progressivism"? I don't know if Mitt Romney accepts every single element of social progressivism, but we'll see how it all ends up.
As to "The wrong side of history", gay marriage succeeded by adopting the very social conservatism you decry. "We're just ordinary people like you, we fall in love like you, and we want to get married and have the white picket fence life like you, so why can't we get married just like you?" was the messaging, and the "actually I want monogamish not monogamy if I ever do get married which is unlikely" element was told to sit down and shut up so as not to scare the normies. Andrew Sullivan was very strong on "the conservative case for gay marriage".
All the victories have been achieved by appeals to "This is not a slippery slope, this will not lead to greater liberalisation and weaker bonds, this is just extending what already exists to a new group of people who want to settle down and live ordinary lives".
Intelligence is (currently) something that we as humans value a lot. And of course it is.
And AGI will take us to the limits of intelligence and the place it holds of value in our society.
However, there must be intelligence that is beyond language, and therefore unable to be selected for in our quest to optimize AGI. Powerful knowledge like the non-dualistic thinking within the Zen koans, mystic experience, and all other subjective qualia that is like a black box to our dialectic observational powers.
In a distant future, when our minds are shaped by augmented AGI (instead of by social and entertainment media), what will become of this unspeakable knowledge?
Is the end goal of our society to have selected completely for intelligence or human-ness?
Because as I see it, human-ness includes all the unspeakable knowledge that can't be entered solely into a language system. That is, unless we develop AE, artificial emotion, or something ridiculous like that. I believe feeling and the body are more than just stimuli to steer our grey mass of an intelligence center away from things that are too hot or too cold. They are part of the ecosystem we call a human being.
So I wanted to ask the readers here who I know will have some great takes: What will happen to a society that selects only for intelligence that fits into the bounds of language?
I want to first tidy up your phrasing a bit. I think that what you mean by "Intelligence that can't be put into language" is something more like Tacit Knowledge or Implicit Know-How or Praxis or Gestalt or whatever phrase anyone anywhere tried to cook up to get a hold on this slippery concept.
The reason "Can't be put into Language" is not enough is because there is already a lot of things that computers already do (and others that they can be taught to do) that can't be put into language arleady. Language is extremly limited, it's not a high bar to be not expressible in it. The framing "Can't be Made Explicit" is better, or - even better in this case where we're discussing computers - "Can't be operationalized as an Algorithm".
As to what will happen to whatever knowledge, intelligence, ways of thought, etc... that can't be algorithmized, well, *is* there such a thing ? Programs and Machines are extremly general ways of viewing the world, they're literally just Input->Output mappings on symbols. What is those things that your brain or any orgain in your body does that can't be summarized into "takes some chemicals, does some things, produces different chemicals" ? That's a program, the symbols are different sure (chemical elements instead of 0s and 1s), and the machines are different (cells instead of logic gates), but it's computation by any reasonable definition.
Anything your brain can do, a computer can too. Because your brain is a computer, and any physical system that takes things and transforms them to other things according to some "mechanical" rules is a computer.
So in the Ideal, I don't think you have to worry. Of course in practice, you may have to worry. Maybe the AGI we will end up developing this century or the next is actually a very robotic and mechanical-sounding creature, in this case all bets are off. It's always possible to make an AI that don't understand Love or Family or some horror like that, and it's always possible to give it control over all of society, then maybe we will all turn into p-zombies\slaves or maybe some will have the capacity to go underground and fight. But this is a crazy amount of assumptions.
From among the examples you chose here :
>non-dualistic thinking
>Zen koans
>mystic experience
How common are those things among humans even now ? Even humans are not that great at non-explicit knowledge and fuzzy thinking, computers and AI can actually teach us a thing or two or 10^9 about different and alien ways of thought.
There's no reason to think that AGI will be limited to "intelligence that fits into the bounds of language". Even present-day AI things like Stable Diffusion's img2img can take input and deliver output that is non-linguistic.
I think you're reading too much Star Wars robotics into AGI. AGI is a fancy way of saying advanced statistics applied to the body of human writing. What I see AGI lacking, is basic context.
Hm, I think quite the opposite is true. What we have is endless amount of context. What AGI is lacking the feedback loop to put things into that context, to have values (you might argue that this is the missing context, I think these are more like instrumental goals), to deliberate on input according to its values and all the context it has learned.
I'm prepared to believe that there are aspects of human-ness that cannot be expressed in human language. However, I don't believe the limitations of language as you describe them exist. Those are limitations of *our* language, and to some degree, our intelligence. If we were to become more intelligent, I think we will find that everything is able to be communicated by medium-agnostic information.
Hmm yeah that's an interesting idea. So like, if there was an intelligence that was able to observe both the speed and position of particles, and developed its own language to communicate that, then hypothetically there would be nothing outside the bounds of its language... I feel like there's something missing here though that I can't find the words for :)
I don't understand what it would mean for some knowledge or intelligence to be beyond language, or why you'd expect that to happen. Language basically works by taking a mental concept and attaching an arbitrary label to it, right? What's stopping you from attaching an arbitrary label to whatever-example?
I'm confused, there is all sorts of knowledge that is beyond language. (beyond is not a good word here, let's say orthogonal to language.) This includes math and shapes and faces and geometry and... Take a map as a simple example, sure you could describe a map with enough words, but it would be useless.
None of those are "beyond language" in a sense that would prevent an AI from understanding or working with them, and in fact computers are arguably already better at those than humans are.
There's *some* sense in which it would be reasonable to describe those as non-linguistic, but that seems like obviously not the distinction Dasloops is driving towards.
I think if you focus exclusively on reasoning you're already on your way to being a rationalist. And down the road there inevitably be MetaMed and Basililks. You'll find EA alluring and further down that road there inevitably will be FTX, Alameda and lots of things like them. You'll entertain repugnant conclusions (and worse, repugnant premises) and you won't care because reasoning is your God.
I don't think, though, that society as a whole will ever select only for intelligence. And while that is the case, all will be well.
Yeah good points. I'm sure that as we write this some brave researcher is already creating SBF-3, an AGI with the potential to take on even more risk, stimulants, and Bronze-III League.
It's true that intelligence will never become the entire cake. There will always be a slice of those other values we need to make us functioning human beings. I think the reason we as a species have prioritized intelligence comes down to energy/money/ability to live better. It's led to technology that has enriched certain entrepreneurial types and raised our quality of life. Will there ever be a point where the limits of this are reached, and we are left wanting for our more human qualities we left far behind us?
I remember an SSC post that raised a hypothesis that was something like: "the USSR collapsed because its citizens realised that not only were they unhappy, but most other citizens were unhappy too."
In a communist society everyone knows everyone else is unhappy, it's not a secret. Of course, a lot of it is communicated via humor (of the gallows variety in particular), art of varying degrees of legality, and so on.
The thing that matters is whether those who will be called to punish dissenters, would reliably do so. If there are doubts about it, the cascade can start.
I don't know what post you have in mind. The idea sounds similar to Timur Kuran (1991) on how the end of preference falsification fuelled the 1989 revolutions. Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.
a bit tangential, but here's a video about the fall of the USSR due to its low-productivity economy finally in ~1985 running off the cliff as cheap oil runs out
Question for phantasics (people who can see mental imagery in their "mind's eye"): does mental imagery look like the after-images you get when you stare at a red light and then close your eyes and see green? Is it similar in vividness and/or apparent location?
It shows in a non-place, unless I choose to place it somewhere in the world (in an AR-like manner), in which case it's localized in space but still on a separate "layer" - or perhaps, the non-place takes the qualities of a part of my visual field. It's hard to describe but it's quite unlike visual perception.
If I really insist on asking "if I imagine an apple, where is the apple", I'd say it is simultaneously inside my skull and floating in space - but a different space than the physical one, like seeing the apple on a screen in a videogame.
When in a half-awake state, it is possible to confuse the "mind's eye" with actual vision. While fully awake they appear to be two different... senses, so to speak.
I don't know how to describe it non-circularly, but it's not like after-images.
It depends on what type of mental images I'm conjuring :
1- Actual things or people I saw in the past, then it's going to be pretty much a direct recall if it's recent enough, it's not going to contain all the details of course, but then again neither is your eyes picking up on all the details when it sees something. Recall of such images works as if you mind-travelled your eye alone to the time when you saw it.
2- Verbal descriptions from novels or talking people, then it's a lot more hazy and dream-like. You're filling a lot from incomplete wordings. If the novel is describing a character, then inevitably the actor\actress who played that character in the film\series is going to feature in my imagination too, unless the descriptions conflict then I'm synthesizing a new person entirely. The image is even shifting and changing things all the time as I get updated descriptions.
Thanks for all the replies! I was trying to imagine what it would be like to have visual mental imagery, and I thought maybe it was like seeing afterimages except you can consciously control them. But it sounds like it's not.
I can do the auditory equivalent ("picture" or "audialize" a song or a person's voice in my head), but I would say that *is* similar to the auditory equivalent of afterimages. If there's been a ringing noise and then it stops, it can be hard to tell whether it's actually stopped and you're imagining it, and if you consciously try to imagine the sound then I think it makes the distinction even more difficult.
In my experience: mental images do not look like afterimages. There is a great variety of levels of detail and richness but in extreme cases the realism and detail is (or feels like it is) at the level of a photograph. They don't seem to usually appear at any particular location -- or any location at all! -- relative to my "actual" visual field except if I close my eyes they sometimes feel like they're right in front of me. I mostly have trouble maintaining a mental image for a long period of time, usually they are like quick flashes.
Relatedly, my theory of aphantasia is that being able to visualize (and "audialize", etc) ideas is fundamental to the way the brain works, but there are mechanisms to suppress it so we stay focused on reality, and sometimes those mechanisms work maybe a little too well. This theory was prompted by hearing on this site from an aphantastic person who had photorealistic dreams and could sometimes visualize when half-asleep.
I like to think I have a fairly good ability to visualize, and I can confidently say that for me, it's not like afterimages at all. Afterimages feel like physically seeing something. Visualizing doesn't feel like it goes through my eyes. I can visualize something in 3D surrounding me, including behind me, so it doesn't have the apparent location of an afterimage.
The best non-visual comparison I have been able to think of is reading a text silently but imagining it in the voice of someone familiar. It doesn't feel like it goes through your ears, and you don't physically hear it, but you maintain an awareness of the qualities of the voice. You can apply those qualities of the voice to a new set of text that you've never heard the person read. I'm not sure if that's a helpful comparison; I'm now wondering if there exists a sort of auditory aphantasia. There probably does.
I've never stared at a red light long enough to assess the afterimage (seems dangerous!), but mental imagery for me has these qualities:
-lower fidelity than original, nowhere near "photographic"
-unquantifiable broad-strokes details (e.g. I can visualize a chain, but not a chain of exactly X links, for meaningfully large values of X)
-image "appears" in the upper third of field of view, not directly in focus, "above" eyes
-much easier to pattern-match to an existing close-enough cached image than to create something new from scratch; "visualize an apple" -> image of a specific apple, not $PLATONIC apple.
Dreams function basically the same as waking visual perception, so the hardware isn't insufficient; I also notice that "mind's ear" functions significantly better, and it's fairly easy to cache hours-long concerts or whatever. So perhaps weak "mind's eye" is a function of actual-eyesight being not that great. I'm used to seeing the world fuzzily, so of course my conjured visions will be the same way, how could they not? (Now I'm curious whether bothering to wear my glasses regularly improves mental imagery...)
Plausible-sounding speculative psychology, I like it. Indeed, why don't people look down while contemplating? It definitely helps if I also close my eyes, although that might have as much to do with appropriating resources ordinarly reserved for $PERCEPTION_VISUAL subroutine. I'd imagine that it's also easier to visualize if one could easily block out hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting too. Does sensory deprivation improve mental modeling of sensing?
Yeah, I think I am just bad at shape-rotation in general (and correlated scores on IQ-type tests confirm this is my weakest strength). So it's hard to "hold" an image, nevermind actually manipulating it. Without a substrate to anchor that idea on (e.g. sketching out a visual idea on paper, or locking it down in words), the idea doesn't really wanna stay fixed in possibility-space indefinitely.
Lyrics I conjecture take advantage of that hardwired human propensity to run "human voice recognition" at an extremely high priority level, even for languages that one doesn't actually know. Lots more salient Schelling points scattered throughout the music. Orchestral is harder - I "know" Bach's Brandenburg Concertos "by heart", but would have difficulty playing the whole thing out with no prompting. Simpler melody-heavy music like videogame stuff, I think is easier, maybe because it's got lots of pattern-recognition hooks (motifs) that help "chunk" the data more manageably. Which maybe implies long music is stored as serial-linked small discrete data packets, rather than giant filesize packets commensurate with the length. Epistemic status: wild conjecture!
I mostly describe myself as aphantastic because I can’t generate visualisations either intentionally or in response to a prompt, and there’s only one very specific circumstance in which I would see a visualisation at all.
However, because there IS a specific circumstance I can answer your question (for me) - the visualisations that I see when lying down, very relaxed, and about to drop off to sleep are like poorly-drawn versions of real objects - similar to what you might experience when wearing a really terrible pair of glasses. They are lacking in detail and surrounded by fuzz, but the colours are right and they move like real objects
Question for people who know they can see mental imagery and those who know they cannot: how the heck can you tell [the difference]?
I can at will enter a mental state where I believe I can "see" things which are not present, but I can simultaneously hold the belief that I am not in any sense experiencing a visual phenomenon; neither as one does during ordinary experience nor during dream-like hallucinations nor during paranoia-like hallucinations. I can report a great number of different visual phenomena as being part of my "mental imagery" but I am dubious about some combinations (e.g. "orange-green"). Does that make me aphantasic or not? Can anyone convince me that there are actually two different conditions which can be compared, or is it just a competition between confabulations for a single self-same ability?
>I can at will enter a mental state where I believe I can "see" things which are not present.
That’s the difference. I can’t enter that state at will, though in limited circumstances I will just naturally enter it. And some people just can’t enter it at all.
I don’t think you can count as aphantastic if you can generate any sort of visualisations on purpose
I think last thread someone mentioned trying to imagine the word 'blue' written in red. That's nearly impossible for me; the word 'blue' IS the color blue when I think of it.
It is extremely rare for me to be able to imagine any non-visual information alongside visual. I remember songs as pure sound playing in a featureless void. I've had maybe five dreams that included sound, maybe three that included any kind of feeling (such that a dream where I was snapping my fingers becomes extraordinarily memorable for having both).
It IS a little difficult but I was able to do it. As an encore, it was much easier to imagine 'red' written in blue - perhaps because I had practice, but I think more likely because I normally write using blue or sometimes black ink.
It's more like looking at a painting or drawing of the object than actually looking at the object. That's the best way of describing what I see. It's not made of brush-strokes, exactly, but there are a finite number of brush-strokes / details. And the painting changes - as time passes it is drawn in different ways.
No, mental imagery isn't a negative, it's like a photograph with progressively less clear edges. If I imagine an apple, it's a red apple with a brown stem and a white lens-flare spot to the top-left where the light is shining off of it. It's sitting on my counter, which is white or light-blue, and which is shifting between uniform plastic or patterned tile. The oven in the corner is black with no other details. It;'s got the burners but is distinctly lacking the metal covers for them. I can pan up to see the green luminescence of the oven's digital clock but can't read what the numbers are, it's mostly just a green glow.
I can focus on any given object to make it look correct, but doing so will cost me the apple.
The biggest difference for me is that anything I am imagining is flicking from one viewpoint to another, one style to another, very quickly, rather than persisting for a long time and gradually fading. Something like this: https://80.lv/articles/movie-to-cartoon-la-la-land-remade-with-stable-diffusion/ but now the camera is also jumping from location to location, half the image is usually missing, and colors are rare.
I'm only partly phantasic, but when I focus a lot I can generate images in my mind's eye, however, they're on another plane of existence. I can sort of, say, conjure an image of an apple, and answer questions about it's appearance without having to add new detail as asked (does it have a stem?, where is the light coming from? Those questions already have an answer as soon as I generated the image.) But I cannot answer, for example, "does the apple occupy more of your visual space than this other (real) apple? There is no correspondence between the real visual space and the imagined visual space. If you believe tulpa communities however, developing that particular skill to the point that you can subconsciously "confuse" real images with imagined ones is possible.
No, mental imagery is an entirely separate experience from even the most basic visual stimuli. I'd hesitate to compare them in vividness, because that implies they might have a relative brightness to real vision, which is not the case. For example, it's extremely difficult for me to imagine a familiar room, but in almost complete darkness. But in terms of how well I would be able to describe details of a mental image, a retinal afterimage is maybe roughly comparable on vividness, even if that feels like comparing apples and oranges.
Can you imagine the sound of someone's voice, or the melody of a familiar song, or the smell or taste of pine or lemons? Visual imagination bears the same relationship to visual perception as these other imaginations do to the other perceptions (and perhaps the same as imagination generally does to actual belief), though I find visual imagination easier than most other sensory imagination.
15 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 17 % on November 14)
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
45 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged).
40 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 38 % on November 14).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Only important change from the previous update is that now it is clear Democrats will lose their House majority. On November 14 it was merely highly likely.
So, I want to use the space created by such unusually short update to address frequent pushback that I am defining Ukrainian victory too narrowly.
I think it is important to pay attention to what Ukrainians themselves define as their victory, not to choose a baseline of “victory means they were not beaten as badly as was expected by many Western commentators, who ate up Russian propaganda about the strength of the Russian army and also thought that Ukrainian army will disintegrate like Afghans after American pullback”**
Among other things, Zelensky demands, as a condition for peace, withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, which for him obviously includes Crimea. He did not say the word “Crimea” in the speech, but “Russia must reaffirm the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the framework of the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the applicable international legally binding documents. It is not up to negotiations” doesn’t leave any room for another interpretation.
So, if the war would end in a ceasefire which would gave Ukraine de facto control over all of its internationally recognized territory with the exception of Crimea, and Crimea would NOT be recognized as a Russian territory, but would remain as an illegally occupied part of Ukraine, I would count that as an Ukrainian victory, but nevertheless, it would mean that Ukraine agreed to moderate its current demands.
Technically speaking, even if Crimea would be returned to Ukraine, but “Special Tribunal regarding the crime of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” would not be established, that would also be a step down from what Ukraine now demands.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
**Time for a bragging section: I think my prewar prediction of what will happen basically held up well, although not completely and it was less quantitatively rigorous than these updates. I did not post it here, but if someone is interested, I am happy to (badly) translate it from Czech so you might judge for yourself.
Interesting. I think you should stay with "your" definitions of victory and not with Zelensky's recent speeches - those are better seen as bargaining chips/rhetoric. - Logically, the speech seem to demand Crimea back, but if he really meant it, he would simply say it. Saying instead "Russia must reaffirm the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the framework of the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the applicable international legally binding documents” does leave MUCH more room for interpretation. ;) - I want to see Putin loose, ofc. So I do see your 40% of Russian victory (if that is keeping territory occupied in 2022) as too high. But you may be right, Putin seems to be at least as optimistic. This expert agrees kind of: https://slantchev.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/countering-the-russian-narratives/
But he ends: "The Ukrainians will have to win this war on the ground to compel Putin to adjust his goals. It will be a long war." - Still: "The West will stay."
And I do not see any chance of victory for Russia against the West. NATO used less than 2% of its potential, yet.
OTOH your definitions of victory seem to imply that getting Putin back to before 22.2.22 would be consistent with Ukraine winning AND loosing. Maybe better put up separate definitions for "winning" the 2014 aggression and the 2022 war resp.? Putin might loose the one but "win" the other.
Fyi, I am not changing my definitions. I quoted Zelensky only as a counter to frequent pushback I am getting from people defining Ukrainian victory as something like "Ukraine is not wholly occupied by Russia after the war", which is a standard by which Ukrainian victory would be more than 90 % assured, but it bears little relationship to why and how is the war actually being fought (e.g. Russians do not have enough troops to occupy the whole country even if professional Ukrainian army would magically disappear).
My definition of Ukrainian victory (which btw. includes return to prewar status quo) is based on Ukraine achieving most but not necessarily all of its war aims.
I am fine. - Just got the impression that "Ukraine returns to prewar status quo" is also an description of your "Ukraine loses"-scenario. If Russia gets to keep Crimea. - Which may then also be a scenario for your "both sides get to an agreement". - Zvi had some definitions, https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-7-more-data-and-peace-terms. ("Ukraine just survives" - is "minor Russian victory" in his concept). But whatever, betting markets are out there to tax the BS: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-post-11-longer-term-predictions.
When are we going to get some serious (any?) reporting on the relative economic performances of states/countries as a (possible) function of COVID repose (public and private)? For example, one has an informal impression that FL/TX did better than CA/NY. Is there data? What about among European countries with different responses
"When are we going to get some serious (any?) reporting on the relative economic performances of states/countries as a (possible) function of COVID repose (public and private)?"
alesziegler's answer is a good one.
This is one of the many times where I find it helpful to remember that the original name of the subject was "political economy."
Yes, I would expect this to be an extremely active area of research in various areas of political science and economics during this coming generation. One problem with such research is that a lot of countries did very similar things. For example, lockdowns and masking policies were very commonly employed. This makes it difficult to determine what actually worked. OTOH, even first-world countries had very different death rates, so perhaps it's possible to tease some signal out of the mass of data. If nothing else, let's try to find out what South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan did to keep their death rates so low.
I would expect difficulty in comparing death rates across different countries. It's the standard problem, if you've got a 90-year-old in hospital with four different problems and then they catch covid and die, is that a covid death or not?
You are asking a different and more difficult question. Ideally my explanatory variable is actual behavior over time regardless of whether it was mandatory or voluntary. But of course having lost of people die of COVID is a drag on economic performance so there are tricky problems of identification to address.
Hello and welcome to the ACX invisible orbiting space station. Today the bomb bay is full of 25 Truth Bombs. Each Truth Bomb must be armed with a truth. The bomb, which is intelligent and aware, must be persuaded to accept this truth claim as proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or it will not arm. When dropped, a Truth Bomb causes everyone within 100 m of the impact point to believe that truth for 24 hours if they did not do so before. And our invisible orbiting space station can drop Truth Bombs anywhere in the world with pinpoint accuracy.
So, what Truth Bombs do you want to drop on the world, and where do you want to drop them?
ADDED: If the question becomes more interesting with bombs that have permanent effects (or maybe permanent effects that are subject to ordinary counter-persuasion,) feel free to consider that case instead.
Well, since I'm not sure I know the truth, I think the best way would be to demonstrate fallibilism. Invite the most radical political ideologues with absolute certainty and then have them drop truth bombs. Either they will proven correct, in which case I will accept the truth, or they will not, in which case they will hopefully become less certain and more willing to see all sides.
Lots of political possibilities here, if you could land them.
Any system which treats women as second class citizens is deeply immoral, and then target the major Muslim capitals. Or Mecca during the Hajj.
Genocide is bad, mmm'kay? And drop a few on Beijing.
The best possible thing that could happen to Russia is for Vladimir Putin to die, followed by peace and trade with the west, and drop a few in Moscow.
Probably a bunch more. The problem would be that those are true for me, but for the Russian revanchist or Chinese imperialist or devout Wahhabist the truth is literally the opposite, and I don't see how to square that circle.
Skip outside of politics and I think I'm at a loss.
I agree. The bombs would not arm. Those claims are feel good claims aka BSP. (most human and chimp history all war was genocide, ofc, and self-evidently "good", if you won). And shallow at that. (The best for Russia ...). And women? Are special. Not 2nd class. Clausewitz "Vom Kriege" - read the preface by his wife.
Fortunately, we have established the principle of "ex opere operato" so this has no effect on the validity of the sacrament, even if the minister doubts for the duration:
Yeah but the Vatican is full of Catholics, and Catholics are...well, catholic. There's a certain flexibility of application despite a general firmness of principle. If you were to proffer a time machine, and absolutely prove that life began on Earth as single celled protozoans 800 million years ago, and evolved gradually thereafter, the great mass of Catholics are not going to freak out.
Yes, well, Genesis is clearly meant as metaphor, we already knew that centuries ago, and God works in mysterious ways, who's to say He did not put forth His hand to tweak the DNA slightly this way and that as it slowly tumbled and mutated over the millenia? Go over there and bother the fundamentalists, those are the guys with a seriously brittle worldview that might shatter if you whack it with a living trilobite you carried back (forward?) from the deep past in your carry-on luggage.
Catholic: "According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the 'Big Bang' and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5–4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_and_the_Catholic_Church#Pope_Benedict_XVI
TANSTAAFL. Not only does keeping it in mind prevent many personal and collective follies, it also answers about 80% of the questions that begin "Why don't they...?"
However, this truth would never work with the truth bombs. Nobody ever comes to understand it except by direct and usually painful personal experience. It's generally impossible to persuade other people of this truth unless they've had appropriate experience, so there's no way I'd be able to convince a bomb fresh from the factory with no experience at all.
Unless you are thinking of a very specific and narrow version of this idea, basically every economist understands this idea, and most of them without (probably) needing to learn it "painfully".
I certainly think _I_ understand it, and I come from a pretty privileged background and don't think I've had very many "personally painful" life lessons.
It might be true that without such an experience, one won't understand it viscerally but only intellectually, but I think that's probably true of just about everything. Most things are only understood/known intellectually unless you have experienced them in a way that activates other kinds of human knowledge/feeling/etc.
Well, yeah, I'd say a shocking number of economistgs at best understand it abstractly and in circumstances where it doesn't conflict with their pet theories. Otherwise it's hard to explain MMT.
About your understanding, I have no idea, but yes I would a priori consider it on shaky grounds if you have no personal experience buttressing it, just as I would consider the opinion of a virgin (however well read) on issues of sex to be on shaky grounds.
That of course doesn't mean I assume you're wrong, nor that you would fail to exhibit grit if the concept conflicted with your hopes. Some people do very well under fire, even the first time. But veterans are generally more reliable.
Nevertheless, I fully agree I would have been more accurate if I'd said "Almost nobody" or "Rather a depressingly small number of people" isntead of "nobody." It was a rhetorical flourish.
I do however stand by my conclusion that I would be unable to persuade an intelligent bomb of the principle, through pure rhetoric and dazzling logic.
I guess, I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that if that's they way you are meaning "to know" something, then basically no one "knows" hardly anything and its a sort of trivial point. Most people will probably only get that kind of really visceral understanding of a small number of concepts, especially in modern times.
Kind of bouncing from one extreme to the other, aren't we? You start off saying you're confident you understand a broad hard and (what is usually considered an) unhappy truth notwithstanding relatively few (your words) relevant experiences, and then we bounce right over to but what can any of us really know about anything?
Yikes. I'm going to prefer hanging out in the middle here. Yes, I think it's hard to really grasp the principle of TANSTAAFL until you've had some (generally not happy) life experience to drive home that truth -- e.g. been lied to once or twice by hucksters or politicians promising you A Free Lunch and lost time, money, or opportunity believing them.
But also yes once you've been around a while, aren't completely wet behind the years, I think most people build up a pretty solid experimental data set about what the world is like on a wide variety of topics to some moderate degree, and on one or two in quite some depth, and usually in their area of 10,000 Hours they are at least moderately skeptical of A Free Lunch.
I didn't say nobody ever learns the rule, I just said it is learned annoyingly slowly and usually with at least some collateral damage to one's bonhomie, so it'd be great if a truth bomb or Vulcan mind meld could just sort of impart the wisdom without people having to learn it the hard way. I mean, I kind of wish someone had exploded this particular truth bomb on me about 40 years ago, would've saved a certain amount of wear 'n' tear on the soul, left the escutcheon with fewer dings and scrawled obcene graffitti.
I'm arguing that lots of people have a very good understanding of lots of topics (including TANSTAAFL), but very few people have the _visceral_ gut level understanding you describe. You are the one saying you don't "really" understand something without painful personal experience. I think that that is one way of getting a different kind of understanding on a topic, but I don't think it's necessary to have that painful personal experience to "know" or "understand" something.
I'd argue most people "know/understand" lots of things, but if having the kind of knowledge that comes from painful personal experience is what counts, then no, most modern people "know" (in the sense that they have experienced a painful personal lesson on the topic) very few things. But that's your definition of "know" not mine.
To summarize, you claimed that almost no one understands TANSTAAFL because they haven't had painful lessons on the topic, I used the fact that very few modern humans have painful lessons on almost any topic to demonstrate that I think that's a silly definition to use for "to know", and that lots of people know lots of things without it, and so we should therefore believe that lots of people also understand TANSTAAFL
I guess the really cheeky answer would be "Truth Bombs are a waste of public funding". Beyond a reasonable doubt is a very hard standard to hit, and if you can hit it I doubt you need the bomb.
I guess the best thing to do is prime it with the workings of an entire language and drop it on all the countries that don't speak it. Behold, Universal Communication every 24 hours.
The radius means you can only change the minds of a small number of people, which means that to accomplish anything they probably need to be important, powerful people - almost certainly politicians.
And powerful politicians often have al sorts of daft beliefs about questions of value and interpretation and the likely consequences of difference policies, but those seem outside the scope of this sort of bomb.
The only place I can see the kind of narrow, purely factual, objective question that my interpretation of this question allows resolving, where the answer is provable to a standard sufficient to convince a rational bomb, but seems not to be believed by a lot of powerful politicians, is climate change.
So, boring and obvious as it is, I think the best use is going to be to work out, say, five facts about the probability distributions of consequences of not doing more, sooner, to tackle climate change, that lie in the (surprisingly large) gap between "probably beyond reasonable doubt using the state of the art of contemporary scientific research" and "universally accepted by senior world leaders", load them into five bombs each, and drop them on sites at which senior politicians (especially US, Chinese, Indian and Brazilian ones) are gathered.
I think it depends on the level on which the bomb operates. For example, "You will one day die and be forgotten" might be a truth that politicians accept intellectually, but some emotional part of them could be accurately modeled as being ignorant of the future/convinced that if they build themselves a big enough metaphorical pyramid they will achieve something meaningfully similar to immortality. Are there common truths which we _know_, but don't intuitively _accept_, with which the truth bombs could be loaded to (temporarily) produce better people?
Hmm, if the bomb must be persuaded, I can't quite is it as an oracle of truth. But I could use it to validate possibly flawed arguments that I'm not clever enough to refute myself. Maybe an application for AI safety.
One problem is that it's not clear to me if the target of the bomb necessarily becomes aware of the new belief. If I bomb my neighbor with how the minute waltz is usually completed in around two minutes, but the topic doesn't comes so that they don't have a chance to think about it in the next 24h, does the bomb have any effect? Will he notice and remember that he was truth bombed for a day?
I think I'd like to play with the intelligence more than I'd like to drop the bombs though. I have questions!
a. The truth bombs are actually truth oracles (they can't be misled) or are at least much better at reasoning than humans.
b. The truth bombs overwrite humans' beliefs vs convincing them in a way that also is based on the truth and quality of evidence of the claim.
Can I convince a bomb that the morally right thing for humans to do is to give me all their money, and then drop it someplace with a lot of rich people?
Re: (a) Truth bombs are clever and knowledgeable, but they are not infallible. An able persuader with enough skewed evidence can persuade a truth bomb to believe things that aren't true.
Re: (b) Truth bombs overwrite their subjects beliefs temporarily rather than actually persuading them of the truth of the beliefs in question. But the subjects do remember believing what they were made to believe, and some may investigate the matter further and come to be persuaded after the fact, but not many.
Would have been nice to get one of those to drop on COP26... The truth that mixed nuts are usually mostly peanuts and therefore a scam! Ban mixed nuts.
The one truth: there is no truth, only models and opinions of various degrees of accuracy. Where accuracy is determined by explanatory and predictive power.
I don't know, are they truth bombs or are they just "be convinced by a reasonably persuasive argument" bombs? The original problem specification is a bit internally contradictory on this point. If the bombs can be convinced by good arguments to spread falsehoods as easily as truths then please just drop them in the ocean, I have no use for them.
Fair - I can't work out a way to specify this hypothetical that won't let me use the bombs for verification rather than persuasion, but which also won't let me use them to spread persuasive falsehoods.
I think the most interesting version to me is "you are an omniscient entity, which can only interact with the world via these bombs, and can only prime them with facts that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt using facts already publicly available to humans", but looking above that doesn't seem to have been Jonas's intent.
So, this might be a silly question, but what causes insulin to break down, and why isn't such a compound part of the standard diabetic toolkit.
I know that insulin doesn't stay in your bloodstream forever (that's how they measure how well your pancreas is functioning if your T1 diabetic). I'm not entirely clear on what actually causes the breakdown, since one unit of insulin can handle pretty different amounts of carbohydrates in the blood for different people.
Secondly, if it is some sort of chemical reaction, could it be manufactured so that you could use it after you accidentally take too much insulin? If not, why not, and if so, where might one purchase such things?
1) Insulin doesn't survive in the bloodstream itself very long, minutes typically. It gets taken up by cells of various types (most often liver and kidney) by receptors on the surface. It's then sometimes brought inside the cell, where it can affect various cell processes, or be degraded. But also it's sometimes released again. So excess insulin isn't really floating around the bloodstream, it's mostly bound to receptors on or in various cells, from which it can be re-released in response to...something. There's nothing in this article that suggests anyone knows exactly how and why insulin moves from place to place, meaning what biochemical signals cause it, but the authors believe it's an important aspect of how insulin works and is regulated.
2) The main initial degradation of insulin seems to be cleavage of the polypeptide strand[1] at a number of places by the "insulin degrading enzyme" (IDE), which is present in a wide variety of tissues, usually in the cytosol (meaning it's not usually membrane-bound or present in some specific organelle).
The fragments IDE produces may have their own biochemical signalling role, meaning the level of insulin fragments may be a signal to other metabolic processes. Final degradation of the fragments may take place in lysosomes, little destructo-pods all cells have that can generally degrade proteins.
3) IDE appears to have a number of *other* functions besides degrading insulin[2], so you would want to be careful interfering with its behavior, as it appears tied into a web of processes, which is alas all too typical for biochemistry -- everything is connected to everything, you tug on one strand of the spiderweb and things seemingly very distant are affected.
In answer to your final question, yes, it is a chemical reaction, and in fact a very simple one: just the hydrolysis of the peptide bonds holding the amino acids in the insulin chain together. Second-year students in chemistry degrees learn this reaction, and it's easy to do in a lab. But of course the body is careful not to allow destruction of proteins willy nilly, so the reaction is very carefully controlled by only being done via an enzyme (IDE), which only destroys certain proteins that fit into its active site. The activity of IDE, like the activity of all enzymes, can be turned up or down by the binding of other molecules to various sites on the enzyme, and it's in this way that the body maintains control of IDE's activity.
You can't easily introduce IDE into yourself. If you ate or drank it, it would just be promptly digested. If you injected it into the bloodstream, it may or may not work, since it depends on a certain environment to function (including pH, presence at certain concentrations of certain "cofactors," including at least one metal ion). It'd be like expecting a CPU to work after it was removed from the motherboard. And besides all that, the insulin is mostly not in the bloodstream at all, it's on the surface of cells, and sometimes inside them. It's extremely difficult to introduce foreign molecules into cells, because cells are very careful what they allow to cross their membranes. You can do it with very small molecules that can slip through the cracks, essentially, or hijack some transporter mechanisms, but none of these would work to bring a big enzyme into the cell. (Plus you also need to persuade the surface-bound insulin to be transported inside the cell.)
That all said, as mentioned almost all enzymes have small molecules that turn their activity up and down, so that they can be controlled by the body, and these small molecules stand a much better chance of being introduced externally -- e.g. by injection -- and crossing into cells where they can do their work. So people are definitely working on this:
By and by here might be a drug that makes its way into the market, but it will probably be a while, because this enzyme lies at the heart of a lot of complex biochemistry. People will try various ways to tweak its activity, and they'll work just fine in the test tube, then fail in animal studies or on rare occasion clinical trials about 99.99% of the time. Still, someday it might very well happen.
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[1] Insulin is a small protein, a "polypeptide" strand of amino acids held together by peptide bonds.
[2] The Wikipedia article observes that people have become quite interested in the role IDE may have in Alzheimer's, since it also degrades the protein the accumulation of which has been traditionally hypothesized to lead to Alzheimer's.
I'm not an endocrinologist and my understanding here is very shallow, but let me take a guess and then if someone knows more then they can correct me.
Usually substances are either excreted by the kidneys, metabolized by enzymes in the liver, or metabolized by enzymes in the cells that absorb and use them.
Enzymes are very finicky, and you usually can't just stick a bunch of them in the bloodstream and expect them to survive and do the same thing they would do within a cell. Usually you would want to find a drug that gets absorbed by cells and makes the enzyme stronger or weaker, but this usually takes some time to work, and getting the dose of this drug wrong would be at least as danger as getting the dose of insulin wrong.
My understanding (again, not an expert!) is that the acknowledged antidote for insulin poisoning is glucagon, a hormone that does ~ the opposite of insulin.
An insulin overdose leading to low blood sugar and an altered level of consciousness is treated by EMS in two main ways: either injection of sugar (glucose) or glucagon. They each have their advantages and disadvantages.
The major reason why low blood sugar is bad is that cells in your body (most notably your brain) require fuel to operate. Though some cells can use things other than glucose as fuel, high levels of insulin in the body shut down your body's production of them, too. Like with a fire, a lack of fuel is about as harmful as a lack of oxygen for continued operation.
The preferred way to treat this in the field is with administration of glucose (specifically dextrose). This needs to be done into the bloodstream, typically via an IV. For adults we typically administer 25g of sugar in a 10%, (rarely)25%, or 50% concentration, known as D10, D25, or D50 respectively. There are risks and benefits.
The biggest risk in this process is extravasation where the drug you are giving leaks out at the administration site and into issue. This fluid is hypertonic and will effectively pickle your live tissues, possibly cause necrosis and loss of the limb being used.. Using a lower-concentration formula is now preferred because it both causes harm more slowly if extravasation occurs, and the larger volume being administered will make it more obvious.
On the down-side, low-concentration IV dextrose takes longer to administer (though in-practice you end up needing less of it). The larger volume may also be a risk if someone is a dialysis patient as the extra fluid may be a problem.
Glucagon is a hormone which causes (among other things) your liver to release more sugar through glycogenolysis (not to be confused with glycolysis, glycogenesis, or gluconeogenesis.). Glucagon can be given into the blood stream directly, or as a mist into the nose or an injection into a muscle. This makes it great for people where you can't get an IV established, and the low volume (roughly 1mL) avoids the risk of volume overload. It has several down-sides. It takes much longer to take effect, perhaps 10x as long. It cannot work if the patient has exhausted glycogen stores. And it costs a lot. Instead of a few dollars for a dextrose preparation, you are looking at hundreds of dollars.
So glucagon can be used, but it is a second-tier option for EMS providers in the field.
So my understand of glucagon is that it doesn't exactly do the opposite of insulin. Basically it triggers the kidneys to produce a bunch of extra glucose. This is basically equivalent to eating a bunch of sugar, except that it can easily be done to an unconscious person. This isn't quite the opposite, in that it doesn't stop sugar from leaving the bloodstream into non-brain cells, it just pumps out a bunch of extra sugars.
This is pretty effective still for when you went hypoglycemic though, and the general strategy of "eat a ton of high carb, low fat/protein foods" is pretty effective against a short-acting overdose.
My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a great way to counteract a long-acting overdose besides "be super careful and eat snacks every hour or two" until the 24 hour time window passes. Obviously, eating every 24 hours isn't particularly condusive to sleep. Then again, maybe it's just not necessary since now using an insulin pump can easily prevent such things (as they don't use long-acting)
Does anyone know how you'd start a small manufacturing business? Like, with a company that makes power tools - how does someone decide to found it? How does he get funding and a minimal viable product and get it off the ground? I'm somewhat familiar with the tech startup ecosystem, but how does it work for old-fashioned brick and mortar manufacturing businesses?
(Backstory: I'm thinking of writing a short story about Uncle Vernon's backstory, which made me wonder: How do you start a drill company?)
I know a bit about how this is done in the aerospace industry. It generally starts by establishing a Name for yourself as the best in the business at making some specialized widget, say a helium pressure regulator tough enough to survive a rocket launch without leaking. Ideally, you'd do this as an employee of a large manufacturing firm, where they would pay for it and introduce you to all their internal and external customers for that sort of widget. But you can do it as a university project, or in your basement workshop or local makerspace or whatever, though that does make achieving name recognition a bit harder.
Then you take the leap of faith, quit your day job, take out a second mortgage on your home, and start talking to potential customers, investors, and bankers. If things line up, the endorsements from potential customers will convince enough investors and bankers that you'll get a reasonable amount of start-up capital.
You can pretty much buy your factory from McMaster-Carr, either online or through their magnificent print catalog. Okay, it's a *slight* exaggeration to say that McMaster sells entire factories by mail order, but not much. Point is, there are people in the business of exchanging their factory-stuff for your money, and they don't make themselves hard to find or difficult to deal with.
Hire a few good people, maybe people you know from your old day job, maybe graduates from the local trade school. The Mark I Widget was something you could make yourself, so you don't need too much specialized talent here and you can train them as they go. Make a few prototype widgets.
If you're doing this for aerospace customers, they'll want to see those widgets tested very thoroughly. You can do that in-house, if you document everything properly, but it may be easier to just go to someone like National Technical Systems that specializes in guaranteeing that, yep, that widget can survive the shakiest rocket launch we've heard of and still work flawlessly. Or not, in which case back to the drawing board.
Then go back to all those potential customers you talked to earlier, with prototype widget and test reports in hand, and explain that yes, $80,000 is a lot for a widget but yours will just plain work. They've probably been getting lots of grief from their generic widgets, so they might sign on to buy a few from a specialist. First sale is critical, because that lets you go to the next customer with prototype, test reports, and flight heritage.
Maybe it doesn't work, and you lose your home and have to go back to the day job. But if it does work, you can have a stable, profitable business making widgets to the end of your days, or try to branch out into thingamajigs and doohickeys. Or you can sell out and retire to a life of ease.
For an amusing case study. Zeppo Marx quit his day job as an entertainer to start a small manufacturing firm along these lines, and his signature product (the Marman clamp) is still vital to the aerospace industry for ensuring reliable payload separation during space launches. And for that matter, the aforementioned National Technical Systems started out as two engineers in a garage, who'd made a name for themselves not building widgets, but testing them. I think Zeppo also had a partner during the early days of his venture; this is definitely something where you want to share the load if at all possible.
There are probably many ways to start. One way is to make something for a larger business, we make door handles for Ford. A second way is to find a niche market that is not covered by larger manufacturers. A third is to invent something completely new, that we didn't know we needed. A fourth is ...
While I recommend anyone should watch the series of videos on it (it's incredibly interesting), I think it's an importantly different (although certainly related) thing in that LTT doesn't actually _make_ any part of the screwdriver. They were very intensely involved in the design of it, but 100% of the actual manufacturing is being contracted out.
Smallish scale first depending on how much capital. There are some pretty serious industrial machines you can get for $100-200k. Say some plastic moulding machine.
So say you work at a plastics plant and do some side projects on weekends. Those take off and you decide to quit and get a bank loan and buy your own used machine. That either works or it I doesn’t. If it works you might expand to other products/machines.
They don’t make power drills, but here is a company that has basically blogged the whole history of starting a publishing and then tool making company. As well as several discussions of other tool makers they appreciate.
idk, my bet is that (for drills) you'd start with custom bits. It feels like you could probably manufacture a custom bit yourself with moderate machining tools, and then as demand picked up you'd branch out into more and more bits, and eventually drills themselves. But this is pure speculation
Yeah, for what it's worth I grew up in an area that had tons of small, family-owned tool and die shops that contracted out for rush orders when the larger supply chain had gaps. That business all went away in the late 90s as China's manufacturing got better and quicker, but for a time it was very common for, say, a dairy farmer in Northwestern PA to have a small machine shop doing custom manufacturing as a profitable side business.
What is the value of Scott writing a "modest proposal" for Republicans if he doesn't support the party? Feels like a bad idea to write such a thing if he thinks it's helpful advice.
Third paragraph of the post: "I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you. "
Sure, he might have not meant it. He sometimes votes for a Republican or two on Election Day. I hope he didn’t mean it; it’d be disappointing. But I suspect he did. I thought he meant it when he first published the article and i think he means it now
Honestly I don't think Scott _hates_ Republicans at all, that particular rhetorical flourish notwithstanding. He believes they're right about some things, and wishes they were right about more things.
In principle one should want a R Congress and Administration to enact the same policies as a D Congress and Administration. Of course if you only get one wish, you want the R's to change to favor something D's already favor (immigration?) and D's to change to favor something R's already favor (remove obstacles to fossil fuel development?).
Most people only like some of their favoured party’s platform. So in theory a non-preferred party could become many people’s preferred party just by changing one major aspect of their platform
When you say Rs, do you mean the politicians or the voters? I'd love for the voters to change to support more of my policy preferences, but that is a very hard thing to do. As for the politicians ... if they voted in line with my policy preferences they would all lose their primaries.
Utilitarianism is out. Deontology is in. No more biting the bullet on the murderous transplant surgeon, we bite the bullet on the murderer at the door now. That means always saying good ideas.
How about "no biting bullets"? Use virtue ethics when rules feel iffy. So, no murderer at the door, no murdering patients, basically no murder, except possibly in self-defense.
People bite bullets, because they want ethics to be algorithmic, to give determinate answers. "Don't bite bullets" means "don't do things that seem subjectively wrong to you on some intuitive basis"...but then everyone is running off their own intuition, without any coordination. Theres a reason ethics is still unsolved.
St. Augustine says yes, because lying is a worse harm that kills the soul than merely killing the body is harmful. A guy who says "Yes, of course" when you ask him "So would you choose to have someone tell the murderer after you the truth?" is at least biting the bullet there:
"They add also a case with which to urge not only those who are devoted to the Divine Books, but all men and common sense, saying, Suppose a man should take refuge with you, who by your lie might be saved from death, would you not tell it? If a sick man should ask a question which it is not expedient that he should know, and might be more grievously afflicted even by your returning him no answer, will you venture either to tell the truth to the destruction of the man's life, or rather to hold your peace, than by a virtuous and merciful lie to be serviceable to his weak health? By these and such like arguments they think they most plentifully prove, that if occasion of doing good require, we may sometimes tell a lie."
... Since then by lying eternal life is lost, never for any man's temporal life must a lie be told. And as to those who take it ill and are indignant that one should refuse to tell a lie, and thereby slay his own soul in order that another may grow old in the flesh; what if by our committing theft, what if by committing adultery, a person might be delivered from death: are we therefore to steal, to commit whoredom? They cannot prevail with themselves in a case of this kind: namely, if a person should bring a halter and demand that one should yield to his carnal lust, declaring that he will hang himself unless his request be granted: they cannot prevail with themselves to comply for the sake of, as they say, saving a life. If this is absurd and wicked, why should a man corrupt his own soul with a lie in order that another may live in the body, when, if he were to give his body to be corrupted with such an object, he would in the judgment of all men be held guilty of nefarious turpitude? "
"But I am not persuaded that it is right to unearth them [heretics, the Donatists] out of their hiding places by our telling lies. For to what end do we take such pains in tracking them out and running them down, but that having taken them and brought them forth into open day, we may either teach them the truth, or at least having convicted them by the truth, may not allow them to hurt others? To this end, therefore, that their lie may be blotted out, or shunned, and God's truth increased. How then by a lie shall I rightly be able to prosecute lies? Or is it by robbery that robberies and by sacrilege that sacrileges, and by adultery that adulteries, are to be prosecuted? But if the truth of God shall abound by my lie, are we too to say, Let us do evil that good may come? A thing which you see how the Apostle detests. For what else is, Let us lie, that we may bring heretic liars to the truth, but, Let us do evil that good may come? Or, is a lie sometimes good, or sometimes a lie not evil? Why then is it written, You hate, Lord, all that work iniquity; You will destroy all that speak leasing. For he has not excepted some, or said indefinitely, You will destroy them that speak leasing; so as to permit some, not all, to be understood: but it is an universal sentence that he has passed, saying, You will destroy all who speak leasing. Or, because it is not said, You will destroy all who speak all leasing, or, who speak any leasing whatsoever; is it therefore to be thought that there is place allowed for some lie; to wit, that there should be some leasing, and them who speak it, God should not destroy, but destroy them all which speak unjust leasing, not what lie soever, because there is found also a just lie, which as such ought to be matter of praise, not of crime?"
Later developments in theology said "Yes, lying is terrible, but maybe telling the guys who want to kill your neighbour where your neighbour lives is not so great either, so here are some guidelines as to how to get around that without lying lying":
"Reply to Objection 4. A lie is sinful not only because it injures one's neighbor, but also on account of its inordinateness, as stated above in this Article. Now it is not allowed to make use of anything inordinate in order to ward off injury or defects from another: as neither is it lawful to steal in order to give an alms, except perhaps in a case of necessity when all things are common. Therefore it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever. Nevertheless it is lawful to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back, as Augustine says (Contra Mend. x)."
Reply to Objection 5. A man does not lie, so long as he has a mind to do what he promises, because he does not speak contrary to what he has in mind: but if he does not keep his promise, he seems to act without faith in changing his mind. He may, however, be excused for two reasons. First, if he has promised something evidently unlawful, because he sinned in promise, and did well to change his mind. Secondly, if circumstances have changed with regard to persons and the business in hand. For, as Seneca states (De Benef. iv), for a man to be bound to keep a promise, it is necessary for everything to remain unchanged: otherwise neither did he lie in promising—since he promised what he had in his mind, due circumstances being taken for granted—nor was he faithless in not keeping his promise, because circumstances are no longer the same. Hence the Apostle, though he did not go to Corinth, whither he had promised to go (2 Corinthians 1), did not lie, because obstacles had arisen which prevented him.
Reply to Objection 6. An action may be considered in two ways. First, in itself, secondly, with regard to the agent. Accordingly a jocose lie, from the very genus of the action, is of a nature to deceive; although in the intention of the speaker it is not told to deceive, nor does it deceive by the way it is told. Nor is there any similarity in the hyperbolical or any kind of figurative expressions, with which we meet in Holy Writ: because, as Augustine says (Lib. De Mend. v), "it is not a lie to do or say a thing figuratively: because every statement must be referred to the thing stated: and when a thing is done or said figuratively, it states what those to whom it is tendered understand it to signify."
The surgeons are probably a reference to involuntary organ donation, a famous counterargument to utilitarianism, and the murderer at the door is probably a reference to a famous counterargument to absolute deontology.
I noticed the sudden switch to something like rule utilitarianism or deontology. Or was it sudden ? Maybe it's been bubbling under for ages. My efforts to sell (something like) deontology to the rationalsphere didn't go to well in the past , so why the change?
Rule utilitarianism and absolute deontology aren't the same. Absolute deontology says "never lie", but rule utilitarianism allows, maybe insists, that you break rules if the stairs are very high and the evidence is very good.
I disagree with this. Rule Utilitarianism is defined by an insistence you never break the rules, with this prohibition justified with reference to some greater good than the situation you're currently in:
1) eg1 because breaking the rules I'm any circumstance whatsoever means nobody trusts you to uphold the rules ever again (cf defecting on an iterated prisoner's dilemma).
2) eg2 because the sort of situation the rules covers is one where people frequently reach the wrong conclusion because of the stakes or because of cognitive biases
If your Utilitarianism system says you can sometimes break the rules then you have Act Utilitarianism by definition (most Rule Utilitarians have multiple 'orders' of rules so that they have rules which explain when you can break other rules - I'm not talking about that, but rather a situation where you say 'Screw the rules, I'm doing what's right'). Act Utilitarianism plus a bunch of rule-like heuristics is a perfectly respectable moral system, but the OP was asking about the difference between Rule Utilitarianism and Deontology and I think the claim that they are different because you can break the rules in one but not the other might lead to confusion.
Neither 1, nor 2, is an absolute. Regarding 1, people aren't necessarily going to hate you forever if you break one rule one time. Regarding 2, people frequently reach the wrong decision, but not always.
I think elsewhere you note that there is no single thing that is 'Rule Utilitarianism' and I agree with you absolutely - there's a bunch of perfectly sensible systems which satisfy the critera to be called Rule Utilitarianism which allow you to eg break the rule 'Don't lie because people will distrust you' because of a meta-rule '... unless people will forgive you quickly' or whatever.
But then I think you're not actually 'breaking' a rule, you're following the precepts of a higher-order rule.
But if you introduce a meta- rule which says 'Any rule can be ignored if ignoring it produces more total happiness' then this just collapses into Act Utilitarianism - that's why it is important, on a point of taxonomy, that the 'rules' in Rule Utilitarianism are regarded as being just as binding as the 'rules' in Deontology
I've slightly lost sight of whether these contributions are helpful or if I'm just splitting hairs!
Incidentally, I keep noticing that Rationalists are discussing these issues in terms of virtue theory, as if the ultimate payoff is to be well thought of. But utilitarianism is about utility for it's own sake, and deontology is about rules for their own sake, and virtue ethics is about virtue for its own sake.
> Rule utilitarianism and absolute deontology aren't the same. Absolute deontology says "never lie", but rule utilitarianism allows, maybe insists, that you break rules if the stairs are very high and the evidence is very good.
Deontology doesn't say "never lie", it says "[insert rules here]".
It's entirely possible to be a deontologist and have principles a bit more complicated than "never lie". For instance you could have "never lie, unless telling the truth presents an immediate danger to life or limb". By building sensible and reasonable exceptions into your moral rules in advance, you can dissolve most of the dumb paradoxes that undergraduate philosophy wants to throw at you.
I would say that rule utilitarianism is a subspecies of deontology. Deontology tells you to follow moral rules/heuristics, and rule utilitarianism tells you how to pick the rules.
To be slightly pedantic, I don't think Rule Utilitarianism is a subspecies of Deontology - I think it is more like a point of overlap between Utilitarianism and Deontology on an imaginary Venn diagram of possible moral positions.
In Utilitarianism you do things because doing so leads to the greatest happiness. In Deontology you do things because a set of rules dictates what is moral, although *why* those particular rules are moral depends on the particular version of Deontology you follow.
The obvious overlap in the two systems is when you follow a particular set of rules *because it leads to the greatest happiness*, and we call this 'Rule Utilitarianism'
Isn't having two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas better than having one party with reasonable-sounding ideas?
On this note, I feel the same way about telling people to vote. From a "do anything it takes to win" perspective, it only makes sense to tell people to vote if you're confident they'll vote for your preferred party.
Politics is demand-driven by voters, not supply-driven by party elites. To any given fixed reference frame of values, one party getting better will likely mean the other party getting worse. This is because the same demand exists in the electorate for core ideas and policy preferences, you're just moving it around. I don't think there are going to be two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas, period.
Politics is demand driven in the sense that the electorate demands certain things of its politicians. The problem is that it rarely gets them, because politicians in most countries, especially today, form a coherent political caste that actually agrees on a lot of things, seldom including what people want. There's thus a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, such that electorates turn to new suppliers (Brexit, Le Pen, Trump etc. etc.) as a way of sending signals to the traditional parties, who of course have no interest in listening.
Let me modestly draw attention to an article of mine earlier this year that attempted to deal with this question:
> Politics is demand-driven by voters, not supply-driven by party elites.
Well, I don't think that's entirely true. At best, it's a complicated tug-of-war between voter interests and party elite interests. There's a definite principal-agent tension between the desires of the actual voter base and the desires of the sorts of people who wind up holding the power in political parties.
(I can think of all sorts of examples right now but I'm loath to share them because I feel like I'd derail the thread into discussions of particular examples.)
Part of the restoring force in this tension is articles bubbling up that say "Hey guys, you are totally out of whack with the concerns of actual voters". Scott's article is part of this system.
>I don't think there are going to be two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas, period.
Just my guess, but Because this party he likes won't win every election anyways. If the Republicans took that advice, he would like parts of both parties. He wants a world with two good choices for candidates.
I commented above about how politics is demand-driven^^ basically if Republicans talk more about class, Democrats will talk about it less. I think that's probably not good, especially if Republicans are using this class discourse cynically.
Counterexample: Both parties have converged on a ton of formerly very contentious issues. To use an obvious example, slavery was once a contentious enough issue to trigger a civil war, but now, both parties are 100% on board with keeping it illegal. Democrats favoring womens sufferage does not cause Republicans to oppose it. The war on drugs is bipartisan policy--a vote among only Democrats or only Republicans would not end it. And so on.
I don't buy that talking more about an issue will cause the other party to talk about it less. Are there any other issues where this has happened in the past?
Besides, it's not like Democrats are talking about class now. And on the occasion they do, they fundamentally misunderstand it, thinking that economic class is the only thing that matters.
You seem to be implying that there's some sort of zero-sum game going on, such that any given person should either want to help the Republicans as much as possible or else want to harm the Republicans as much as possible?
Not exactly, just that if someone is generally opposed to the Republican Party, it's an interesting thing to try and come up with ways they can help themselves win.
EAs (like me) have definitely pushed back against political involvement but tbh I have met plenty of (mostly younger) EAs who think politics are worthy of EA money. IMO it's borderline impossible to make a persuasive EA argument for electing representatives since they vote on so many different issues / there's no guarantee their vote changes anything. I'm a bit more optimistic about EA funds going to support campaigns for ballot initiatives.
(1) I do think EA community does have an instinctual feeling that the Democratic party is their natural ally because of all the values they share in common, whereas the Republicans are just profit-maximising, environment-destroying, climate denialists, science denialists, anti-reproductive justice, anti-immigration, anti-fun and all that right-thinking people believe and love, etc. So of course if they're going to donate to anyone, it's going to be a Democrat/the Democratic Party.
Bankman-Fried was not an exception here, in fact I was *more* surprised to find that Ryan Salame had donated to the Republicans. Because of the entire scandal, everyone is going to be reading the tea leaves about his donations to various causes; for instance, did he set up/donate to GAP to give his brother a cushy sinecure as head? That may sound mean to say, but it's a question that always arises when family members are involved with "getting lots of money from my family to run this thing".
(2) I thought the Carrick Flynn backing was a bad idea the moment I read about it. It does seem that Bankman-Fried/other donors had a slate of candidates and most of them did okay:
"The bulk of Bankman-Fried’s donations, however, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, which supported 25 candidates focused on pandemic prevention this year. So far, most have won their races. Among those candidates were Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who won a tough reelection campaign in a bellwether district, and Maxwell Frost, who will represent Florida as the first Gen Z member of Congress."
The donations to Republicans seem to be mostly to people who were supportive of crypto and/or supportive of a (lenient?) regulation scheme. So again, the question of self-interest arises. It's more obvious (in hindsight) here, but it also gets to be asked about his donations to Democrats and good causes, in light of what he said to Kelsey Piper about needing to create a good reputation so people will like you so you win, and being able to spout off the shibboleths of Western liberalism/progressivism.
Most of the politicians who got a donation seem to be shedding them in order to disassociate themselves from the bad karma:
Speaking of the Oregon election, the woman who defeated Carrick Flynn for the nomination won, though it was close enough - 50% of the vote to the Republican opponent 48% - and the media take on it seems to be that the EA/Bankman-Fried donations hurt rather than helped because *everyone*, Democrat rivals as well as Republican, made hay out of "outsiders spending millions to influence our election!" So even if selected, I don't think Flynn could have won this seat.
(3) I think EA getting involved with politics is a very bad idea. That makes them just one more lobbying group. There's always going to be an overlap, but I think specifically donating to any one party or even both/several parties should be left up to individual donors rather than the movement as a whole or in part doing it. Even bilateral donations are iffy. Donating mostly to one party is endorsing that party. Charities and churches shouldn't - and are not supposed to - endorse particular parties or candidates.
This is the big question now for EA - is it a charity or charitable organisation, as it started off? Or has it shifted focus, emphasis, and purpose to being something else? Because if it's going to be a lobbying group amongst all the other groups, and this site has a breakdown of who is giving what for lobbying interests:
Number of Lobbyists: 3,065/Percent of Former Government Employees 46.69%)Number of
Top spenders out of *that* - Pharmaceuticals/Health Products
So pandemic prevention is small fry in that pond, and sure "candidates will owe them something and will listen to them about pandemics" - the same way they have the Pfizer lobbyist pencilled in to visit after your pandemic pitch.
Hell, even my country spends money lobbying your politicians!
1. SBF donated to the Democratic party for his own reasons, probably relating to it being the family business (his mother was some kind of Democratic operative) and wanting regulators on his side. Since all his other donations were under the EA heading, this got calculated under the EA heading, but probably wasn't what anyone else would have chosen.
2. Some combination of SBF and institutional EA spent a lot of money trying to get Carrick Flynn elected to Congress. He was a long-time EA with lots of experience in pandemic prevention and AI alignment, and they thought having one of those people in Congress might be high-leverage. This didn't work and is now retrospectively considered a bad idea. Later they pivoted strategies to spending much less noticeable amounts of money on lots of different smaller races with people more tangentially linked to EA. I don't know how this is going, but I think of it more as "get our people into key positions" rather than "support Big Democrat".
3. Mostly SBF, but with some support from institutional EA, has (had?) a PAC in DC, "Guarding Against Pandemics", that does biosecurity work. The people involved are political veterans, and my understanding of how the sausage gets made is that they donate to candidates, and then they're in the door as a friendly special interest and those candidates owe them something and will listen to them about pandemics. People who know more than I do say it's better PR to have one group that only works with Democrats and another that only works with Republicans. GAP is the "only work with Democrats" one, and EA started with that one because SBF's family was veteran Democrat operatives and knew how to make it work, plus Democrats seemed more value-aligned. I don't know if anyone ever got around to starting the "only works with Republicans" one, although there are rumors that SBF's co-founder Ryan Salame donated a lot of money to Republicans and this was probably something along these lines.
I think that with FTX out of the picture, EA will continue doing some things along these lines but probably only at like 10% of the scale.
"Scott Aaronson, who defended FTX's donations in passing as achieving the effective altruism goal of "avoiding fascism."
That poor guy is his own special case. He is a very anxious, nervous person who is in a constant state of hypervigilance about being literally pogrommed any second now. He is all too easily convinced that that guy I drove past standing on the street corner who looked funny at me is itching to pull on the jackboots and pack him and his family off to Treblinka.
Thus he'd pay any amount of money, even to the Devil himself, to be protected from that and he does think the Democrats are his best chance of protection, so hell yeah let FTX give them donations!
I want to defend Scott A. a little bit here, because he is near and dear to my heart regardless of the ideological nonsense he happens to believe (and who among us doesn't believe at least some?), he is a nerd, he loves computers, he is agreeble and was\is (excessively?) socially anxious, he's one of mine. He is also outstandingly heretic-welcoming and compassionate towards his outgroup, perhaps even more than this Scott.
Weird that you brought up the Jewish angle, I never saw him play it that way. "Fascism" from him means the boring old same as when most US uber-liberals use it : The other party gets a little more authoritarian (as opposed to when *they* get a little more authoritarian, which happens all the time).
All in all, Scott Aaron is awesome, this is coming from someone on a hard 180 to most everything S.A. believes in, and this thread is a little too harsh on him.
I'm not laughing at him or trying to belittle him. I feel a little sorry for him, because he posts stuff that shows just how tightly-wound he is (e.g. the airport anecdote where he talks about that feeling he had that 'oh yes of course finally it happens that I'm dragged off in chains' - I'm paraphrasing off memory here, exact quote not that) so it's clear that he has a lot of anxiety about "Them" coming to get "Us".
"Us" may be Jews, or more broadly non-Christians, non-whites, liberals, progressives - basically anyone not White Cis Het Christian Male. So I discount anything he says re: fascism etc. a little because of my perception of his anxiety leading him to exaggerate something that may or may not have happened as a Definite Present Threat.
The bog-standard "vote blue or else" commentary I see (Tumblr, Twitter at second hand, Reddit, etc.) is of course "vote for the Democrats to keep the Fascists (Republicans) out of power or else the torture conversion camps for women and minorities will be set up in your town!" so again par for the course.
Fascist and Fascism have become worn-out terms, like racist and transphobe and all the rest of the list. It's gone to the stage that if I were seeing "Adolf Hitler is a fascist, I'm warning you all!" for the first time ever, I'd automatically think "That Hitler guy must be doing something right" because "fascist" gets thrown around to mean "doesn't agree 100% with my political positions".
> The other party gets a little more authoritarian (as opposed to when *they* get a little more authoritarian, which happens all the time).
Yeah, I remember Gore whipping up the crowd to ‘Fight like hell or we’re not going to have a country anymore.” before sending them to the Capitol to nudge the VP into not certifying the election in 2001.
What a mess that was.
Oh wait a minute; he *was* the VP and when the Supreme Court said no to a recount he said “it’s over” and certified W’s win. (By 500 votes in Florida)
It's always, **always**, possible to pick the worst incident ever committed by $OUTGROUP to throw at anybody who says both sides suck, it's unoriginal and doesn't mean anything.
Resist this fallacy, when somebody says both sides suck, the correct way to interpret this is as an average. You won't ever respond to someone who says that humans are 70 KG on average with the protest that your $RANDOM_ACQUAINTANCE is actually 100 KG, or that another one is an amazing 50 KG, or whatever unusual weights and non-average body plans you happen to know.
Your criticism can be better steelmanned to "In my own weighted average function, refusing to believe in the results of the election counts far more than any other data point", and that's fair, unfortunately a lot of people don't share that view, including ~=~half of your own country and lots of others from the outside as well. So, while the sight of feces in that beautiful white building might have been shocking and a little bit sad, it doesn't meaninfully change that both US parties as well as all nation states everywhere love authoritarianism and gravitates to it as their natural low-energy configuration.
Anytime you find yourself thinking that the other party is uniquely bad, look at them winning 50% of the vote on average, that can only mean 2 things (1) 50% of your country is on average mad or deluded or evil (2) your standards can't be all what matters. (2) might be a bitter pill to swallow, but it's the more merciful option when you think about it.
I’ve been working on understanding Trump voters for a while now. WoollyAI gave me a hint to their motivation. They aren’t my out group tho. They are friends and relatives that I love.
Those capped words preceded by a dollar sign, are they constants defined in an include file? Yes that was a joke. No malice intended.
What is the coordinating with giant corporations to silence dissidents about?
I remember the health emergency lockdown. The CDC did get the lethality of Covid wrong. It was less bad than anticipated but plenty of vulnerable people did die.
I don’t think erring on the side of caution is a Stalin-like move.
Edit
An interesting bit of information I learned about Stalin today; Some people think his fatal stroke was caused by Warfrin put in his wine by members of the Politburo. An assassination.
This, frankly. "rounding up the jews" has a depressingly bipartisan history, it's not an inherently right-wing position and the Republicans are *very* pro Israel... (though maybe the worry is that Trumpism might break that?)
The worry is some combination of "Jews are great but only if they stay the fuck in Israel" and "We support Israel but only because it helps us immanentize the eschaton" red heifer BS.
The opposing worry is that "Jews are great except for those fanatical Zionists who insist in living in an occupied territory / war zone when Manhattan is right here". There's somewhat of a shortage of people, even Jewish people I think, who enthusiastically support both a thriving Jewish community in Jerusalem and one in New York.
Many of SBF's donations benefited EA, but as an individual he can put his money wherever he wishes. I don't think EA is in the business of nagging philanthropist billionaires who already support EA to get them to stop donating any money to their less effective preferred causes; it would certainly risk burning bridges.
IIRC the numbers, it was far from "most" that went to political donations. It might have been most of the actually realised donations, since a lot of promises turned to smoke, but the expectation was than multiple billions would be going to EA causes over the next few years while a few hundred mil went to politics.
Also, again, "effective altruism", to the extent it is an entity at all, wasn't deciding where SBF donated his money
Not sure what SBF's strategy was, but there are two possible paths to impact: 1. cause the better side to win, and 2. get on the side of whoever's going to win.
About approach 1:
> ask Mike Bloomberg how many votes $500 million buys
It helps to be able to choose who you support from a wide pool. It's a lot more expensive to buy votes for Mike Bloomberg than to buy votes for the few best candidates out there (though I do agree that even still this might not be a very good approach).
About approach 2:
> it drowns in a sea of other donations
SBF was one of the biggest democratic donors nationwide, so I imagine he had substantial sway with the politicians he supported.
> there's no guarantee that candidates you support will even try to keep their promises anyway
Yeah, I guess. There's no guarantee anyone will do anything... but if they hope to run again in the future, they will want to be seen as cooperating with funders, right?
To address your point more generally: yes, there are a lot of EAs who think supporting political campaigns is worthwhile, though I suspect many would disagree with SBF's approach. You might be interested in reading about the Carrick Flynn campaign (funded mostly by FTX but with contributions from many EAs) which was a high-profile loss.
My impression is that EA is a small enough field that someone who donates over $100m to EA causes is going to rank high on a list of important EA donors, regardless of where else he donates.
I'll posit that EA is taking the most effective course in praising and celebrating the amounts their donors give, and in not criticizing donors for not giving more, or for not giving to EA only. I know EA philosophy can lead to conclusions like that, and that a number of EAs wrestle with feelings of guilt and scrupulosity, but whenever I've seen this type of choice mentioned explicitly, it's always been to warn against this form of extremism. That said, I'm not technically EA, I don't live in the Bay Area, I don't go to their meetings, I have no idea what they say in person to each other.
And for the rest of this thread, I'll take a principled stand that we shouldn't normalize taking actions against people in response to their political donations (no matter how much some of us may sometimes want to rain fire and brimstone down on the heads of a particular party and all who support it). That is to say, money is speech, and Mozilla forcing out Brendan Eich was bad, and EA distancing itself from SBF simply because SBF donated to Biden would be bad.
(As opposed to EA distancing itself from SBF because SBF was an unethical scammer who made money by pumping worthless cryptocurrencies, which would have been a great reason to hold his money at arms' length. EA would have been much better off if those donations had been anonymized. Something something "when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth".)
Eh, slight disagree here. Money is action far more than it is speech. Part of my reasons to support 99.99999999999% unrestricted freedom of speech is that it's so harmless a freedom, unlike a lot of other freedoms there is usually so little we lose by allowing anyone to say anything. Speech is action too, I know, but it's far more slow-acting and ineffective than most actions, let alone **money**, let alone **Big money**, like the scale SBF was apparently giving away.
I still rally behind your conclusion because I hate witch-rituals, I hate it when a group near-unanimously finds out about something private an individual was doing and retaliates against them. Just the mere form of it worries and repulses me.
So, yes to your principled stand, but no to basing it on "Money Is Speech" because it's somewhat weak and doesn't even convince a free speech maniac like me. But, just No To Witch Hunts, No to sniffing around your group members' private beliefs and outing them publicly when you find something spicy. (But let us not forget to note, with the usual cynicism, that some spicy beliefs are more equal than others, and that - for example - from the set {Spicy LGBT Causes, Spicy Anti-LGBT Causes}, only one is going to get you witch-hunted and fired, with very high probability. As your mention of Brenden Eich allude to.)
I see where you're coming from, and I half-agree? I'm partly just trying on this position to see how it fits. :-) And with that said...
Money isn't technically speech, but it's the potential for speech on any scale other than the smallest. And yes, I'll buy that speech is a sub-type of action, and that we've carved out a line roughly around it, but not completely overlapping, saying that the stuff inside should be protected. More generally, money is potential for action, and sometimes action counts as "speech".
So it seems that what I'm arguing is that donating money to an entity that will spend it on speech should count as speech. (And donating money to an entity that will feed the hungry should count as feeding the hungry, ... genocide ... genocide, etc.) In particular, I'd say that political donations, especially donating to candidates (as opposed to parties), should count as speech and not action. I do not see how our political system would function at all, otherwise. (Not that I'd describe it as "functional" in isolation, but there's worse out there.)
My take on this is that the issue is not that EA takes billionaire cash. If there is a supply of cash that billionaires are willing to give for ego massaging then my platonic ideal of EA (which is very much not what exists) would simply give them the ego massage and then use the money for the best cause.
The issue is they don't REALIZE the issue and its implications. If they're functioning to some degree as elite prestige generators they need to realize that and how it can corrupt the mission. Establish red lines. Work towards changing the prestige economy. Etc.
Empirically, many billionaires sure do seem to donate a lot of money to charity (eg Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Dustin Moskovitz, etc). Am I missing some reason why that doesn't answer this concern?
Is the idea that anyone who donates large sums to charity must be acting altruistically, so we can automatically trust that Bill-Gates-level donors must be using their money in nice ways?
That seems like a pretty naive assumption. Past a certain point of wealth, you've maxed out material consumption and can pretty much only use your money to buy relationships and influence-- for the use of your loser family members and clients who might need a position on somebody's board someday, for future lobbying if you need certain legislation implemented, to have a retinue of powerful people you can call if you need to arrange a favor or to have some charges dropped.
Charitable donations are one obvious way you buy those kinds of relationships, hence I would expect even Ebenezer-Scrooge himself to be donating heavily to nonprofits if he reached Bill Gates' level of wealth. No reason for us to assume that he wouldn't allow his charitable cash to corrupt its recipients; in fact, isn't corrupting them kind of the whole point?
No, I think it does, for those 3 guys. But SBF's profile and situation are quite different. Buffet and Gates are old guys, and became wealthy before they became philanthropists. Moskovitz isn't old, and I'm not clear how wealthy he already was when he became a philanthropist, but it does seem like it was after some substantial success, and after founding a company he expected to lead to even more success (and it did). SBF, on the other, seems to have set out to make money in order to fund EA -- so he had to be both Get Rich as Shit Guy and Major Effective Altruist. To me, sounds very hard to start both those jobs at once. Plus he was making his money with crypto, which seems to me a way of making money that's especially far removed from serving the public. The other guys got rich by providing goods and services people liked -- so providing goods and services to people in another way, via philanthropy, isn't such a huge step. But dealing in crypto has a very different feel. I do not understand crypto well at all, but it seems to have a smoke and mirrors aspect to it -- you have to make sure people *believe* in your form of crypto, or else it can turn into nothing -- plus crypto is less subject to scrutiny and regulation by government, plus it is the preferred form of money for various criminal undertakings. So the whole feel of crypto is kind of glitzy and narcissistic and sociopathic. Seems like a pretty long walk from winning at crypto to helping the world -- whereas the walk from Berkshire Hathaway is quite short.
I don't think claims about different motivations stemming from "providing goods vs making money far away from public use" holds up, since the two founders of Givewell are former traders at Bridgewater, unless you're narrowly making the point about only crypto.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to be a trader and have a deep commitment to helping the world. There are probably researchers who are secretly committing fraud and plagiarism in their own work, but meanwhile helping their students to do great, honest research. People are complicated, and some are capable of functioning in vastly different ways in different settings.
What I am saying is that most
people have a characteristic modality that they is a good fit for them and they tend to function that way in most areas. And trading crypto sounds like a modality of functioning that is very far removed from responsible philanthropy. It’s a big stretch — being capable of it isn’t impossible, but it’s rare.
Note that Karnovsky majored in social studies as an undergrad and Hassenfeld in religion — *then* they went in to become traders. That’s an indication both are capable functioning in the 2 different modes I’m talking about.
I wouldn't necessarily trust the WHO's stance on this, given how they eg. handled Covid. Someone else coming along and solving problems they've failed at with far less money would make them look very bad so they have an incentive to badmouth him.
Having said that, it sounds like you did a bunch of your own research too, so maybe the Gates foundation has been incompetent? I'd really really struggle to believe they haven't been a net positive though.
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.
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?
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)?
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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?
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/
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.
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?
We’ve already decided as a polity that simply being alive in the country isn’t sufficient to get a vote: you have to be of a certain age, you have to have citizenship, you can’t be a felon (a rather arbitrary category of itself).
Anyway,
That's a pretty strong consensus, but does it make sense?
I mean, maybe it makes sense to have various restrictions, but is skin the the game a good reason that applies to property or fixed residence but not to just being alive?
To be honest I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as the best proxy for skin in the game. I’m sure it’s not just being alive, because most people alive are 99%+ unaffected by the actions of alien polities, and given a voice do end up more or less looting those polities to benefit themselves. I think fixed residence makes sense for local politics within the USA because it’s very very easy to move (the USA closely resembles a real-world version of Scott’s political archipelago), and you need to create some friction and investment to prevent the uninvested from doing away with any local polity they disagree with.
Oh I like it, (one year residency). I want more crazy ideas for voter restriction.
1.) You have to pass some simple test every year. Maybe like the student driver test. Here is a short book with all the answers you will need, you just have to show that you've read it.
2.) Some sort of community service to vote. (Volunteer fireman, cleanup day at a park, veteran, school teacher, nurse, doctor, policeman...)
3.) others?
We tried #1, and people used it to prevent black people from voting.
3.) OK how about another layer. Every ~1k people elect someone to do all the research and voting for them.
#1 seems kind of redundant to me. If you can figure out how to fill out the ballot, you’ve essentially passed a test already, maybe a simpler one but not that much simpler. What is it that you want to test? Reading comprehension? I have known functional illiterates that I would trust with the public wallet better than academics and professionals.
#2 is the starship troopers approach writ small, which sounds pretty good to me—the main problem with starship troopers is that if you put people into long-term federal service to earn the franchise you end up with a massive bureaucracy of sinecures; nobody actually wants to find government jobs for all those people.
#3 How about a virtue test? A huge tax credit (flat percentage) offered not to vote. Wouldn’t really affect the indigent, but could give the high and mighty pause. Make it totally anonymous, so nobody knows who took the cash and who voted.
I've fantasized about making all the votes write (includes typing) in. From memory, as a way of showing at least some knowledge of the candidates.
It would be a miserable thing to administer.
What do I want to test? IDK. If there were some ballot measures, it would be nice if the booklet explained both sides of the measure... You have to show you know a little about what you are voting about.
#2, Yeah starship trooper, But maybe just pick up trash along your road or park once a year? Some minimal commitment to the community.
#3 is fun. Rather than a poll tax, it's a poll anti-tax. I'm a man of modest means, and I think if you paid me $100, I would think about not voting. Hmm mostly the rich vote then... I'm not sure that works.
There would be at most one election before politicians figure out how to game it to exclude people they don't like.
My second reform is that representatives are selected by sortition.
https://equalitybylot.com/2020/04/30/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-sortition/
I'm not sure whether it includes that sortition for reasonable terms of office would effectively hand the government over to agencies/bureaucracy, the people who stay for a while.
Boring. How about single combat in the arena? Incumbent gets choice of weapons, and can abdicate on the spot in favor of the challenger if it looks like he's going to lose, in which case challenger is obliged to spare his life. Broadcast on pay-per-view, profits to go half to the charity of the incumbent's choice, and half to the start-up slush fund of the challenger (if he wins), or to his estate (if he loses).
I can't see any way this could possibly go wrong. (◔_◔)
"I really don’t want anyone who doesn’t care enough to show up voluntarily to make decisions about how the country is run."
> Isn't this one of the problems that compulsory voting is trying to eliminate?. I mean, it seems pretty intuitive to me that if you have one population with compulsory voting and another one without it, then in the long run the population with compulsory voting will tend to educate themselves more because they are obligated to vote.
I don’t think that’s what will happen. I think if they didn’t want to vote, that’s because they don’t care, not because they’re not informed. If they cared, but weren’t informed, they would become informed and then vote. Instead, you will have votes made by compelled voters as ‘flies to wanton boys’ (as the great line goes).
Hey, I'm all for it, if the world citizens help shoulder the cost, too. Last year I forked out nearly $90,000 in taxes, about 20% of which helped persuade Vladimir Putin that trying what he's doing in Ukraine in, say, Poland or Romania would end badly for Mother Russia.
So my share of the salary for the World Policeman is let's say ~$11,000 or so, if we consider only the excess over equivalent European international law 'n' order spending. If any citizen of the world wants to kick in 11Gs/year, he can absolutely vote on anything to do with the nature and function of the World Cops. Make it a kinder, gentler approach, let us say, which persuades nuclear-tipped dickheads like Putin to reconsider revanchist ambitions by means less crude than a Big Stick such as...um...I dunno...closely argued moral philosophy pamphlets, maybe. Candlelight vigils, too.
Heck, I would glady auction off the right to vote in US elections to the entire world. You pay $N/year to feed Behemoth, and we give you a vote and disenfranchise 1 native-born who forks out $(N-1) or less. If you put real skin in the game, throw your hard-earned shekels into the maw, then by all means take a seat at the table, and let us kick out some cheapskate or leech, native born or not.
I admit curiosity as to the policies a plutocracy like that would pursue, and the USA's status quo isn't a tremendously high bar....
No? You'd rather live as an Indian prince under the Pax Britannica, in the region of the General Government in 1942, in Germany under Napoleon, as a Gaul after Caesar won, or as a Mayan under either Aztec or conquistador hegemony? Well bless your heart.
If you have a specific actual historical hegemon that you think made for a much better life for those under its influence, but not part of the hegemony itself, then what is it? If you're arguing US influence in the world isn't nearly as benign on balance as, say, the Council of Elrond's would be, then I suggest you have an existence proof to offer first.
And vice versa? Or does U.S. influence only go one way?
Can’t say I take this criticism seriously, sorry.
This looks like an emotive argument: a mood in Europe (“the USA bullies us and we never bother them at all!”) thinly cloaked in vague, objective-seeming language. The margin of error for what? Measured in what? Significant impact in what way? Your assertions are very broad but no evidence is proposed, let alone evaluated.
Beyond dismissing without evidence what is asserted without evidence, I’ll just note that the idea here is that not everybody who is affected by a country deserves a vote in it, just those who are mostly deeply concerned and involved in the country. You’ve blundered the opposite direction, which is a misunderstanding of the point entire.
Well by that theory, everyone should be able to vote in every election.
Maybe restrict the vote to property owners in the relevant jurisdiction.
I'm a big proponent and it seems to work well.
One tiny caveat from an ideological perspective. I think the "blank vote" is too vague in what it means by the person who places it. There are two reasons not to vote for a specific option:
1. The voter in un-informed or simply doesn't know who to vote for and prefers not to effect the results with a random guess.
2. The voter sees the system as illegitimate and wants to show disapproval of democracy of the validity of the current regime.
I think these are two very different reasons for not voting and it would be helpful and useful to collect information and numbers of both kinds of people.
We want to know how many people don't know or care who to vote for. And we also want to know how many people very the entire system as illegitimate.
So I think instead of simply offering a blank vote, we should offer 2 or a few different options for why they're not voting.
However, I have no problem whatsoever forcing all citizens to turn up to the ballot and supply some kind of input. I think democracies that do this are probably superior and certainly more legitimate as representatives "of the people".
The repeals make me think there's some kind of issue with it, but my immediate reaction is it would be nice. It's basically a jury summons but it's guaranteed to last less than a day. In return you get a completely accurate picture of who the population supports.
One issue is the forced support for democracy; everyone is legally required to show support for the election process. A system that declares itself irreversible is one step closer to disaster.
I'd still pay no attention and probably leave everything blank, or vote Mickey Mouse. (Although the big M's been involved in some shady stuff recently, I might have to vote Bugs Bunny in protest.)
Countries usually track the number of votes blank or otherwise invalid, and there's a tradition of doing so as a protest here if you hate all the candidates. (often, by drawing a phallus on the ballot, sometimes with a shocking level of detail and artistic skill)
Have you considered voting for Pogo the Possum? I know he's a perennial 3rd party candidate, but you're not throwing your write-in vote away if you don't choose from the 2 main animation studios!
As someone who very likely wouldn't bother to vote without mail-in ballots, and whose workplace doesn't consider such civic duty an acceptable excuse for time off - no, I wouldn't really appreciate mandatory voting. Turning out for the truly-local stuff, sure, fine - those are actually competitive, and the outcomes are extremely tangible. I can see mandatory voting for local elections being a doable and useful thing, and that allows flexibility in implementation based on how each locality thinks its voters will be most convenienced/least pissed off.
But like...I don't need a prediction market to tell me the odds of my SF district/county/state voting party-line D on ~everything state or federal level. So I send in those ballots for aspirationally Pascalian reasons which aren't actually self-recommending. Something something setting a good example. (It was encouraging to actually see a youth vote worth half a damn in the recent midterms, at least.) And enforcement at that level runs into...well. I think it'd be one of those rare times when there'd be a bipartisan outcry of "disparate impact!" So who'd sell it, and who'd stick their neck out to make the policy stick?
ETA: also I'd really not waste another ~decade's worth of political energy chasing the phantom of (Progressive) Mobilization Delusion. At this point, the revealed preferences seem pretty clear: a shitload of people just do not care enough to vote, nevermind every election every time. No matter how easy it's made, how long the deadline is, how lax the requirements are...(I do think there's some possible delta in online voting, but that's a whole other level into fraud-and-worries-about-potential-fraud. Current election tech is, uh, really uninspiring already.)
>and whose workplace doesn't consider such civic duty an acceptable excuse for time off
If you do that in Australia, you get fined $1,000 per person you didn't give time off to if you're a person, or $5,000 per person if you're a corporation.
>As someone who very likely wouldn't bother to vote without mail-in ballots,
Australia's had those for a while now.
The detail's in the devil, indeed. Mailing a thing is acceptable, as much as I get annoyed by ballots so lengthy it takes several hours of research to become barely-informed.* It's the no-you-actually-must-go-to-physical-polling-place option which would really rind my melon. Sure hope it's accessible without a car!
"Fine" always translates to me as "cost of doing business", but that certainly seems like a better equilibrium. Half the annoyance with voting is opportunity cost...not how I'd prefer to spend one of two precious days off per week.
*Wonder if ROI would be higher to better-educate those who do bother to vote already, rather than raising turnout. The epistemic environment in politics is, uh, hostile at best...
We have a government broadcaster in Australia, and it does cover elections pretty well, so technically we do spend government money on educating voters. With that said, the big danger with government trying to educate voters about politics is that an incumbent can abuse this for partisan advantage leading to consolidation of power and de-facto one-party state (this is what happened in post-Soviet Russia AIUI, and it's part of what happened in Nazi Germany); the Australian ABC does a reasonable job of maintaining editorial independence and some sort of neutrality, but one does need to keep an eye on that side of things.
Regarding access: There is a polling place in essentially all towns, and multiple in cities, so if you live in a settlement you can generally walk there. If you live outside a town and don't have any means of transportation beyond walking, you probably have bigger issues than accessing a polling place (and there's still the postal option).
Regarding the fine: It'd be pretty rare for it to be profitable to incur the fine for refusing to give employees time off, especially the corporate version; what company gains $2,500 per hour per employee over and above what it pays that employee (it's unpaid time off), in a way that can't be made up for by bringing on more employees for the day and staggering the time off? The fine for personally not voting is pretty low, so it's possible for an individual to get more money by working that time instead and paying the fine, but that's that individual's choice so it's not such a big deal (and you'd need to be making above minimum wage, I think, for the maths to work out).
That honestly just sounds like a pretty good implementation, all things considered. I'd likely support the generic idea of mandatory voting if I also lived in AUS.
Definitely jealous that your version of NPR still tries to live up to its ideals. Though as the realpolitik saying goes, "*all* media is state media". I do appreciate how every election here, there's a relatively non-partisan, coolheaded, CBO-style analysis provided by an independentish government office...plus including the actual text of any proposed legal changes. Maybe I can make a decent decision with that information, maybe I can't, but actually being able to go to the mattresses on empirical data matters a lot for my civic peace of mind. Give Chow a fighting chance, and all that. "More of this, please."
The ABC does have a bit of a lean to the left*, but it's relatively slight AFAIK. I know a few years back I heard an SJer waxing lyrical about how the ABC was too far right, and certainly the election coverage tries to be as neutral as possible. And it's very definitely editorially independent of whoever happens to be in government. So, y'know, definitely better than Russian state media, probably pretty decent compared to the US media, not perfect.
*I use the term "left" here, despite usually being hesitant, because my understanding is that the original cause of this is the ABC's state-run nature attracting socialists back in the Cold War days. Certainly, for the past 25 years or so and possibly more - I was too young to tell before that! - the ABC's leaned left and the "corporate" for-profit establishment Australian media (*all* of it) has leaned right relative to the median Australian. So while there are issues in the abstract with a state-run broadcaster having a bias, it should be remembered in the Australian case that the sort of "woke capital" establishment media that's most of the US mainstream just flat doesn't exist here and as such the ABC's lean could be said to provide a sort of balance in the broader ecosystem rather than create/reinforce a systemic bias.
Terrible idea. The last thing I want is people who can't be bothered to get themselves to the voting place voluntarily to exert the same power as someone who cares greatly about what happens, and does his best to be informed and vote responsibly. Those votes are completely inequivalent, and the former vote is trash that just dilutes the value of the latter.
I'd be in favor of making it much, much harder to vote, so only people who really care about it and are willing to go to a great deal of trouble to register their vote will be counted. The date should be kept secret until the last 24 hours. Your polling place is open for 45 minutes, at any random time of night or day, and is located up to 150 miles from your residence. The building is unlabeled, unavailable on any mapping app, and you have to solve one of several different logic puzzles made available 1 week before voting in order to receive detailed directions 24 hours before voting for you begins. The door is booby-trapped with a bucket of ice-cold water, and there is dogshit freely scattered over the interior corridors, which are unlit. Nobody is available to help you with your ballot, which is printed in Esperanto and must be filled out with your non-dominant hand with a #2 pencil which measures 1" in length, and if you make even one tiny mistake your ballot is thrown away.
This is satire, right? Pointing out that the problem with saying "if you can't go through the trouble to vote then you shouldn't have a say" by pointing out that such an argument would be valid no matter how arbitrary or pointless the obstacles to voting are?
Nope. And you're correct that the argument can be made at any level of restriction, but you're incorrect if you also assume that the argument would be equally persuasive at any level.
If you made the argument that only one person should vote, i.e. that there should be a God Emperor, because if we allow anyone any less enlightened to vote the results will not be as good, then your argument will not be persuasive to anyone. Nobody is going to believe that it is possible to select *the* single best and most enlightened person to make decisions for all of us, and also that this person could possibly be sufficiently well informed.
But on the other hand, if you get to the point where you are trying to force to the polls people who *don't want to go* then the argument becomes for me persuasive. I do in fact believe that the outcomes of a democracy that compels even people who don't want to vote to do so will be worse. And I think we already have a franchise which is more widely and carelessly distributed than is optimum.
FWIW, my country is in the process of being ruined by a minority of people who can be bothered to vote, take care of their short-sighted particular interests while throwing the rest of the country under the bus, and the rest is complaining in general apathy but barely showing up to vote.
If there was a referendum to change our constitution and mandate compulsory voting, I'd say yes in a heartbeat.
I'm baffled by why you think a passive majority who doesn't give a crap to the extent that they won't even defend their interests by doing something as easily as voting, would, if you *forced* them to vote, do any better.
That is, so far as I can see, you have a beef with your majority, which is allowing the evil minority to ruin your country, when they could almost trivially prevent it. That you believe if you prod them harder to do something -- anything, no limitation -- they would suddenly become a lot more constructive seems logically inconsistent. I think a much more likely outcome tis that your country will be ruined a lot faster, because now that idiotic majority is *actively* and not just *passively* contributing to the ruin.
Grin, well than at least putting on the 'I voted today' sticker would carry a lot more prestige.
Darn right. Successful voters, as they limped home in torn, drenched, and possibly blood-stained clothing, would nod knowingly at each other, members of a proud and select, if exhausted and perhaps lightly-scarred, fraternity. Thank Christ that's over for another year, at least...
Don't be surprised when the next election is won by some obscure religious group where the leader told his followers that those who won't vote for him will burn in hell.
Unfortunately, "people who don't care" are not necessarily the worst possible voters.
Hey, if all the rest of you are so laissez-faire that you allow yourselves to be outvoted by a weird sect, then you're just getting what you deserve[1].
No, people who don't care are not *necessarily* the worst possible voters, just like people who drive with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.12 won't *necessarily* cause a terrible accident that kills 5 people. But that's the way to bet.
-------------
[1] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_163179
Whoa dude, way to show an aristocratic contempt for traditional Democratic constituencies. I know plenty of hard-core Democrats -- many in my family, forsooth, people who worked 40-year careers in steel mills and factories and such -- who would be first in line at the secret blockhouse ringed with barbed wire in which votes are recorded. They're not weak, or afraid, or lacking in resourcefulness. Seems a bit patronizing and snobbish of you to assume otherwise.
Can we get a better argument here? Carl isn't saying he wants more Republican elections by barring legitimate Democrat voters; he's saying he wants people to get an ID to make elections that much more secure. If everyone gets an ID and then votes Democrat, he's presumably satisfied that election was legitimately won by the Democrats.
Simply saying "you're just using bafflegab to hide the fact you want to drive away legitimate non-Republican voters" wastes everyone's time. Not to mention being bad faith.
No, he's saying what I said he's saying; you're saying he said something he didn't say or mean, and then proceeding to criticize what -you- want to claim he meant.
This is also known as putting words in someone's mouth. And it's still bad faith.
The ratio of democrats to republicans who know esperanto is probably enormous.
And more likely to be retired, since those of us actually contributing to the economy instead of living on welfare (sorry, "social security") don't have time for that.
Headline of the Day:
“Highly ruminative individuals with depression exhibit abnormalities in the neural processing of gastric interoception.
True ruminant’s stomachs have four compartments: the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum and the abomasum.
A system that complicated is bound to generate some weird vedana. (hedonic tone)
Thank you for making the cow-based joke that I originally wanted to post, but retracted for feeling too silly. Do obligate herbivores get depressed more frequently than other nutrient acquisition strategies?
Don’t forget the giraffes, deer, antelope, sheep, and camels. Ruminating isn’t just for cows.
A side note about silly word play. A local book store sold its copyright on the name “Hungry Mind” to a website for enough dough to open another book store named “Ruminator Books”. Guess what was featured on their storefront sign. Yeah, a cow. Unfortunately Amazon out convenienced them and they are both out of business now.
Heh...reminds me of a hometown anecdote. Where I grew up, there was a local favourite cafe called McCoffee, run by an Irish family, the McCaugheys. McDonald's sued them for IP infringement in 1994, so the shop got renamed to M. Coffee instead. At least they're still in business.
Change in appetite is one of the symptoms of MDD mentioned by the ICD-11.
I don't suppose that's related to the phenomenon of autistic people often being extra-sensitive wrt constipation and other gastric distress, due to <weird processing issues>?
I wonder…
Does man make the bacteria, or does bacteria make the man?
The linked comment about (partly) Adequan is illuminating. I worry that my own industry, ophthalmology, is going to see a steady decrease in Restasis scripts written because offices are going to have a harder and harder time getting hold of samples, an important part of getting a patient's symptoms under control as they start a dry eye regimen for the first time.
Medical issue:
I am really trying to talk myself into quitting smoking. I am 67 years old and have been smoking since I was 15. In addition I worked a lot with plaster and wood so lots of airborne stuff-(and I usually smoked while I worked as well just to get the full benefit….)
Here’s my big hurdle; a very deep sense that I’ve been doing it so long it won’t do me any good to quit at this stage so light up!
What’s the science? Anyone know? Can I shift this issue one way or the other?
I've been smoking since I was twelve, and I am now 65 years old, so much the same as you. It doesn't seem to have done me any physical harm, but then I don't inhale deeply and I try always to smoke in a well ventilated area to minimize my exposure to smoke from the lit end, which I suspect is more dangerous than the filtered smoke one actually takes in.
Re talking yourself into quitting, if the potential health aspects aren't sufficiently persuasive, follow the money. Basically you (well, we) are paying the government a large amount of tax for the privilege of burning dead leaves! Maybe not so much tax in the US, but in the UK smokers practically prop up the economy single handed.
To complement that, another trick would be to have a large jar, and for every day you don't smoke, stuff a twenty dollar bill into it (assuming you're on roughly 30 cigarettes a day and a pack costs say $15). Before long you'll have a large bundle of notes, and it will be visibly apparent how much has been going on cigarettes.
I plan to grow my own Virginia tobacco next year, after a preliminaryy attempt this year which produced about half a pound of passable baccy. But growing the stuff is the easy part. The tricky aspect is curing and fermenting it properly without the leaves going moldy. Mold is many times more toxic than any of the chemicals in tobacco smoke, and I suspect is the underlying cause behind most cases of lung cancer that supposedly result from smoking.
All very good ideas. Thank you. Historically I rolled my own; so much cheaper…
I smoked from 1984 to 2003, about 2 packs every 3 days. Camel Filters until the late 90s, then Pall Malls. Tried to quit several times, kept failing. Switched to chewing nicotine gum: haven’t smoked since. I’m addicted to the gum now, but it’s cheaper and a lot less unhealthy, and you can have some almost anywhere
OK feel free to throw this away. If you have a good reason to quit go for it. (I started smoking 'cause a women I was in love with did, I stopped because I wanted to be with another women who hated smoking.) Have you tried quitting? Are the men in your family particularly long lived? (Dads or uncles that made it into their 90's?) That is to say we all have to die of something. There was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut when asked why he still smoked, "I'm committing slow suicide." Smoking brings you some joy, or scratches some itch. (I remember going to bed and thinking how great that first cig with my morning coffee would be.) All that said I found smoking to be a dirty nasty habit and I was happy to be done with it. (Though I still do miss the part about something to do while I watch a beautiful sunset.)
>There was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut when asked why he still smoked, "I'm committing slow suicide.
I completely understand that framing.
>Are the men in your family particularly long lived? (Dads or uncles that made it into their 90's?)
Nah… 84 was tops for anyone I know about.
I think I need to focus on the quality of life issue instead of the how much longer will I live issue. the links below demonstrating tangible benefits even for old geezers like me is good information. Thank you for your suggestions.
Heinrich gave a great answer with reasons to quit; I'd like to recommend reading *Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking* to help you do it. It really did make it easy for me, 25+ years ago.
I did read that book and it’s good.
try vape pens. don't try the tobacco flavor (or do, I dunno, but my impression is that they're not good). The secondary addictions (oral fixation, blowing smoke effect, etc.) are the same, and they taste better. There's about a three-day lag in which the vape pen doesn't give you the same hit that a cigarette does, it's more of a constant low level nicotine situation, but once you get through this (which I did by vaping every three minutes all day, including falling asleep holding the thing) it's pretty great.
Go to the fanciest, most upscale-looking vape shop you can find locally and tell them you're trying to quit smoking; they'll advise you on which ones will help the most. You're probably looking for easy (I was), so buy disposable vape pens so you don't have to fiddle with them.
Good luck! fwiw I find that escobars, a pretty ubiquitous brand, are easy to use and generally quite good - not my favorite but reliably fine.
Any time to quit is a great time to quit.
I did switch to vaping for about two years, but I switched back about eight months ago. There was something about the vaping smoke that started really irritating my throat.. I can’t quite figure that out, why cigarette smoke would bother me less in that way. Anyway, the whole thing sucks and I am pretty sick of it. It’s like trying to pry a stone out of the ground for me.
I used Wellbutrin to quit. It's an antidepressant, but at lower doses really weakens the craving for nicotine. You only need to take it for a coupla months. For me, it had no side effects.
See here: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317956 for a timeline of the effects of smoking cessation based on time since quitting.
Earlier benefits include "As the lungs heal and lung capacity improves, former smokers may notice less coughing and shortness of breath. Athletic endurance increases and former smokers may notice a renewed ability for cardiovascular activities, such as running and jumping" at the *one month* mark.
There are other benefits listed there that take place after even less than a month.
But the benefits keep accumulating over the years, as the body heals itself. E.g. "After *10 years*, a person’s chances of developing lung cancer and dying from it are roughly cut in half compared with someone who continues to smoke."
And "After *20 years*, the risk of death from smoking-related causes, including both lung disease and cancer, drops to the level of a person who has never smoked in their life.
In short quitting brings noticeable improvement in health and quality of life in the very short term, and as you continue to abstain from smoking, your body will heal itself from much or all of the damage from the smoking.
For someone about your age, I see this article in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1211128 that found that "those who stopped at 55 to 64 years of age...gained... 4 years of life."
Similarly, see here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114575-quitting-smoking-in-your-60s-can-still-boost-life-expectancy/ that "former smokers were at substantially reduced risk of mortality after age 70 years relative to current smokers, even those who quit in their 60s."
This is what I was looking for. Thank you
Hey man, I just want to let you know that I've been thinking about you and wishing you well. It would be amazing if you were able to cut back on smoking, but even if not, I'm still rooting for you.
Wow. It’s good to hear from you. I’m still smoking. In fact, I’m smoking a lot. But it’s becoming more and more clear to me that the thing that most attaches me to smoking is the distraction of it. It’s a little barrier between me and the rest of the world. Without that distraction, I start to really twitch. It’s good that I’ve noticed it because it makes it a little easier to get under it. It’s a work in progress. Thank you very much for checking in with me.
My pleasure!
My pleasure! Good luck!
Book recommendation: Poor Economics, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. I'm only half way through it, but so far it's fascinating, and I think many people here might be interested in it.
The book talks about the economics of poor people in poor countries, how they make decisions about how to allocate their scarce resources, and what holds them back from improving their situations. A lot of the book is spent talking about whether "poverty traps" are real -- whether there are places in which a simple injection of money is enough to bring a desperately poor person out of poverty, or whether poverty is caused by more complex issues than a simple lack of money.
A simple example of a poverty trap would be something like this: you're a manual labourer and you're malnourished; because you're malnourished you're too weak to work well so you earn very little money so you can't buy food. If someone comes along and gives you money to buy decent food for two weeks then you get stronger and can work harder so you earn more money and can eat better in the future. Sometimes, that kind of thing happens. On the other hand, sometimes you take the extra money and use it to buy booze, spend a week drunk and wind up even weaker than you started.
What I like about the book is that it doesn't simply _assume_ that poor people are not responsible for their own situation, nor does it assume the opposite. It presents empirical data about the sorts of economic decisions that people in extreme poverty make, and I feel like I've got a lot more understanding of the actual lives of poor people than I had before.
I don't suppose it discusses...oh, what's the bloodless term paper-writers use...the informal tax of "social transfers"? That's always been the most interesting aspect of poverty to me...the clash between community and self-interest. A real and readily-observable phenomenon, but somewhat tricky to get an empirical handle on. Every time I see not-well-off friends and family make, ah, -EV investments in supplicants, it always feels like a situation where one ought to Say Something, even if it's heartless. But perhaps it's just one minor hole in a bucket full of them, I'm not sure.
Are you talking about the phenomenon where many poor people, on receiving a windfall, share or are highly expected to share it with family and friends? I’ve heard a couple of explanations of this. One is that poor people take a fatalistic view of success -- if it happens, you got lucky, so you don’t deserve that windfall, so you’d better share or you’ll be labeled greedy and excluded from future sharing. (That’s much less elegant than the explanation I read, but I can’t think of where I read it.) The second is that it forms a type of social insurance. Assuming that there are enough windfalls, a community of sharing poor people will direct resources to the right people, approximately.
Yes, this. The whole don't-lose-your-roots, remember-where-you-came-from thing. Like what JD Vance used to talk about, back before drinking the political koolaid. Which is well-intentioned and reasonable in many ways...but if there's never any "brain drain" where successful outliers are allowed to be outliers, then that's just someone being martyred to temporarily put a bandaid on structurally weak economics. I think also of lottery winners, who often end up no better/worse off because suddenly all these debtors come out of the woodwork with new and convincing claims to alms. (Nevermind the actually malicious scammers and thieves. Everybody Knows when someone makes it big, if one's circle is poor.) Seems to also happen in cash-transfer experiments, albeit at lesser scale. I think Scott or Zvi linked once to a study where such transfers had greater impact if made through anonymized bank accounts, so poor peoples' friends and family weren't able to easily notice the recipient got a windfall. Which was kinda depressing to think about...something something collective action problems.
The social-insurance aspect is the optimistic take, for sure. That's what I'd like to believe ultimately happens...charity starts at home, the community knows its needs best, etc. If I saw more evidence for this actually happening in practice (at scale), I'd be a lot more receptive to leftist-style schemes for mutual aid, collectivism, etc.
> the community knows its needs best
This is complicated. On one hand, local people can see things that an outsider might not notice. On the other hand, the community can have its collective blind spots. Maybe their understanding of situation is merely on the level "problem: we are poor; solution: give us money", which does not address the underlying causes. The underlying causes may even be a cultural taboo; perhaps the community is intolerant towards its more successful members and drives them away.
For example, imagine a community that is racist, sexist, and negative towards education; they also have very high unemployment and poverty. From outside, most of their suffering seems self-inflicted. Of course it is difficult to get a job if you have no education and few contacts with outsiders. And it is difficult to improve the educational results of the next generation, if the current mothers were discouraged from paying attention to school, so now they can't even help their own kids with homework, and have zero study habits themselves.
The few guys who got good education and good jobs are too macho to teach the local kids. And the rare women who despite everything got good education, will marry outside their community, because the alternative is to spend their lives surrounded by stupid and poor people who don't even respect them.
How would such community diagnose their own situation? Yes, they are poor. Yes, the kids are hungry, and don't have money for textbooks. Yes, we should help feed the kids. But no matter how much money we throw at the community, the problems will remain. Because the community is not going to decide "starting tomorrow, we will invert our traditional values, we will respect education and despise ignorance, and we will work hard to send our girls to universities because with each educated woman you get a few educated kids in the next generation for free, and also we will respect them when they return home". For the few people who understand that this is the better way, leaving the community might be difficult, but changing it from inside is almost impossible.
(Saying it explicitly to avoid misunderstanding, this is not supposed to be a description of any specific group in USA. I am not an American.)
Some American athletes who make the big time but come from humble roots seem to have this problem, though it could be some other problem in disguise.
Not sure if we mean the same thing, but some people are utility destroyers. You could give them million dollars today, and they would be poor a month later. (Sometimes it goes together with a more general mental illness. Sometimes it seems to be one isolated thing.)
I know people who have someone like that in a family, and it's a constant drain on their finances (and time, and nerves) to keep rescuing those people out of trouble. Luckily for them, at least it is not the closest family, i.e. the problematic person lives in a different home. So they can choose how much money to give them, or whether to pay their bills directly and send them food, without giving them cash. They give, constantly, but at least they have some control over how much they give.
The worst case would be this kind of person living under the same roof, so they can simply steal your money whenever they need it (and they need it all the time). Or living in a culture that has less respect towards private property, and is more like "if you don't keep it on your body, it is community property". There, one such person can sink the entire family or the entire community.
Even worse example of poverty trap is being so poor that you cannot afford to enforce your property rights. Imagine a situation where once in a while you starve and need other people's help to survive. Everyone around you does it, so the community survives as a whole. But this creates mutual obligations, and the other people take much more from you than you take from them.
Technically I think utility can only be transferred/exchanged at bad rates, not destroyed outright. Since the destroyer certainly gets something valuable out of the trade. The quibble mostly comes down to, how much "destruction" is one justifiably allowed to claim before entering witch-tier, and who gets to decide that? That's part of the reasoning behind means-testing or otherwise gating government money, certainly..."this money collectively comes from everyone, so we ought to have some say in how it's spent". (For its various pitfalls, UBI at least dodges this particular trap...wealth is a positional resource as much as an absolute one, so Money For All doesn't disrupt the Joneses Equilibrium. Theoretically.)
I think a lot of seeming miserliness is really rooted in the "if you teach a man to fish" thing...of being strongly anti-witch, from a fundamental viewpoint of fairness and desert. Which does include a lot of innocent-needy as collatoral damage, for sure. But humans react really poorly to perceptions of unfair treatment, so all it takes is a tiny fraction of perceived living-on-the-dole to ruin things for everyone. It still bugs me how often perfectly able-bodied young people sporting the latest fashions and tech pay with foodstamps at my job, even though I know cost of living is high here, and covid messed up a lot of people's finances. Doesn't pattern-match to my model of "needy recipient", like the elderly couples who come in every 1st of the month and bulk-buy bargain bean cans...
> It still bugs me how often perfectly able-bodied young people sporting the latest fashions and tech pay with foodstamps at my job, even though I know cost of living is high here, and covid messed up a lot of people's finances.
Do you know how *exactly* this works? Are the foodstamps generous enough to pay for both food and iPhones? Do they buy iPhones while starving? Are their parents or partners feeding them, leaving them the foodstamps as pocket money? Are there charities providing free food, so they eat at the charity, and use the foodstamps for other things?
My guess would be it's probably the parents. There is this intuition that giving your adult kids money is spoiling them, but providing them food and shelter in case of need is just family helping each other. So the kids can leverage this to get food and shelter for free, and use the foodstamps for everything else.
By the way, the thing that triggers my feelings of fairness is walking through the town during a working day. It's a working day, you know, people are supposed to be at *work* (the younger ones at school), and yet the town is full of people, sitting in a café, shopping, otherwise relaxing. Some of them might be tourists, some of them university students who do not have a lesson at the moment, but there are just so many people, and not only in summer. It's like there is a huge community of independently wealthy people that you would never notice otherwise. A parallel society that I am not a part of.
I'm relatively confident it's mostly students, who fall in that weird space of "not having income" despite lots of financial aid and loan dollars floating around (remember back when money was fungible?). So they get approved for foodstamps and other such benefits on essentially a technicality. Which puzzles me - back when I was in college, everyone was at least guaranteed a meal plan for the on-campus dining facilities, precisely so no one starved while studying. Unlimited portions for unlimited time-per-visit made it pretty easy to stay (over)fed, with halfway decent allocation of meal credits anyway...maybe things are different now, shrug. Or it's rising norms of parental support, as you conjecture. My parents gave us kids one [1] annual trip to the outlet mall, and stuff didn't get replaced until it was broken or unusable. It's always been strange to meet peers for whom that seems incredibly stingy. I certainly didn't "feel poor" growing up!
Every day is somebody's weekend, is the way I feel about it. Some people just get more weekends than others. I knowingly chose the shitty non-optimal economic path of wage servitude, so it wouldn't be justified to complain about not getting to relax in cafes more often myself (since I'm the one staffing them...or, rather, working at the grocery store for people to shop at). An ethic of service, which pays more in intangible gratitude than actual money. That's the ideal, anyway - it truly does depress me how shittily imperialistic customers can be. One time a wealthy couple refused to bag their own groceries, asserting that that was a task for "the help" (my coworkers). Well excuse me, Your Worshipfulness...that parallel society I wouldn't *want* to be part of, not if it cost my humanity.
But this is how it works from today's perspective. I guess historically, it was the other way round. Community surviving as a group first; and later, at certain level of wealth, private property, perhaps first as a luxury of the most powerful people, and afterwards a general social norm.
Question is, *how* could we get from "communal property" to "society rich enough that people can reasonably expect to survive on their own" if the few utility destroyers are what makes communal property a poverty trap? There were probably strong rules about using the community property, and punishments for those who broke the rules. Maybe the chieftain made the rules and punished those who took more? Or maybe it was more decentralized, and the utility destroyers were at some moment accused of witchcraft and killed?
> it always feels like a situation where one ought to Say Something, even if it's heartless.
Perhaps this is an ancient instinct prompting you to say "it hurts me to say this, but it seems that your friend is actually a witch"? And if too many people say the same thing, then indeed the friend *is* a witch and finally someone will kill them.
I would not recommend this book. It is substantially incorrect about how to think about poverty, and ignores the necessary and sufficient role played by economic growth. See here for instance -
https://lantpritchett.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Basics-legatum-paper_short.pdf
Even if we accept that economic growth is necessary and sufficient, doesn't that leave us with the lower-level question of what economic growth is and how to cause it?
Going back to the example, if the labourer gets two weeks of good food so he can get stronger so he can work harder to earn more money to continue to buy better food, then that's a micro-scale example of economic growth in action. The book is about these sorts of micro-scale interactions which, when averaged across an entire economy, look like economic growth.
You're absolutely right that we are left with that question of where growth comes from. However, I'm afraid that poor economics does not even come close to any discussion of that question. A much better book for that purpose is 'How the world became rich', by Koyama and another co-author. Try that out.
Hypothesis: one of the reasons EA was moving towards longtermism is that there really weren't many opportunities for charity that had provable good impacts, were neglected, and whatever the third property is.
Are malaria nets over-funded? My impression is just that Killer Robots (TM) are a more compelling enemy than mosquito-borne illness. I'm willing to be wrong here.
Not sure if it means you're wrong but the approximate ranking of money moved by EAs is Global Poverty > Animal Welfare > AI risk. Not sure where existential risk would land but that bundles together pandemics, nuclear war and general survivalism with AI risk, which likely isn't based on compellingness.
I didn't exactly mean malaria nets were overfunded, though that was a reasonable implication that I didn't think about.
It's more a matter that I think EAs want to find something new and exciting, and there just weren't a lot of opportunities like that.
Possibly it's that EA was a effort to prevent being driven by one sort of sentimentality-- as Eliezer so tactfully put it "rare diseases in cute puppies" or more reasonably, the Make a Wish foundation, and didn't realize the emotional drive for novelty and power was also a temptation.
Last I saw from GiveWell here: https://blog.givewell.org/2022/07/05/update-on-givewells-funding-projections/, super-effective charities are *not* currently overfunded.
Rather, they estimate that those charities will be at least $150 million short in 2022.
"Super-effective" is defined as being at least 6x as effective as cash transfers.
Given that the programs they support save lives for an average of just a few thousand dollars (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities), there is still a tremendous amount of good that can be done in the short-term, relatively inexpensively.
EDIT: As of today's update: https://blog.givewell.org/2022/11/23/giving-recommendations-2022/, they project that their top charities will be underfunded by about $300 million in 2022. So that is even more good left for people (like us) to do.
I think it's self-evident from his views as "ethics as a game with winners and losers"[1] that SBF had ulterior motives there (the same obvious ones all big political donors have, namely more favorable legislation) and doing it under the name of EA was just a convenient justification with ostensibly coterminous goals.
In other words, I don't think EAs *in particular* deserve much blame here, even though your comments upthread about political money being famously ineffective are valid.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
You might be thinking of "scale" and "tractability"
I think you're right.
What are the rules regarding promoting a project that I’m a part of on an open thread? Do I need to wait for a classifieds thread to do it?
I don't think you *have* to wait for a classifieds thread to do it, so long as if your ad is in sufficiently good taste. However, I think that waiting until another classifieds thread might give you more exposure.
Why do I suck at recognizing satire?
A few months ago, I wrote a piece [1] that mentioned Scott's "My Immortal as Alchemical Allegory" [2]. People on the subreddit were quick to point out that Scott was bullshitting to make a point, and I pushed back! At least until I spent 2 minutes on the My Immortal fandom site.
Today I read another (amazing) piece by Sam Kriss [3] which, in retrospect, was obviously satire. But I didn't get the joke until I saw his footnote at the end, and even then I had to try looking up the fake Sun Ra albums he mentions to verify.
Is it tone deafness? Do others read those articles and immediately understand that they're written in jest? Or am I just too credulous?
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-mysticism-of-scott-alexander
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/
[3] https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-secret-history-of-wakanda
You can try a little experiment. Spend some time reading The Onion, and the go to The Wall Street Journal. Even their headlines will read like satire for a while. It works every time for me.
The Wakanda one was not obviously satire to me until about halfway through - I'd heard of the Prester John legend, and found it plausible that there might have been some similar legends that I just hadn't heard of. It wasn't until the author claimed that Sun Ra had released three albums about Wakanda that I was like "waaaaait a minute!" And then I googled Olumo Bashenga, who turned out to be an obscure Marvel character, not an early-20th century African American prophet at all. And the story about the Ggon at the end is pretty clearly just over-the-top silliness. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to tell.
I notice a lot of satire follows a template of "polemical about X, written in the style of Y, to lure the reader into associating X and Y, which they wouldn't normally do". The X part is obvious. The Y part is obvious *if* you're familiar with that style. But if you aren't, there's a good chance that piece will go right over your head. A critique of math education written in the style of a postmodern dissertation isn't going to sound very cutting if you haven't run across a lot of postmodern dissertations, and even less so if you've never read any doctoral theses at all.
This goes extra hard if the only clues the writer leaves are one-shot salient details. A writer referring to their proposal as "modest" is winking at exactly no one who hasn't run across Jonathan Swift.
Which is to say, the most well known satire is stuff everyone recognizes. If it's well-known to a particular crowd, it's great... for that crowd. If you want to recognize as much satire as possible, cast your net wide; read a lot, especially of literature that a lot of writers read. The stereotypical nerd who put all his points into INT and read nothing but science textbooks will probably achieve a great deal, but recognizing satire is unlikely to be included in that.
The Sam Kriss one does depend on (1) of course Wakanda was invented by Lee and Kirby in the 70s but let's do the Watsonian versus Doylist thing here and (2) that you know about Prester John which is the set-up for the 'European dreams of Vicindia which is really Wakanda' theme. That is literally the subject of the illustration he has at the top of the piece.
I found the piece very funny, and he did throw in enough real names to make it 'credible' even if he misused them (Caelestius of Aquitaine did exist, was a heretic, but was not burned by anybody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caelestius). I don't know how to advise you on recognising satire - read more history and fiction, I guess? Some things can be really convincing unless you have a level of background knowledge to go "that is not how it happened".
I dunno about the Sam Kriss piece or other satire more generally, but with Scott, it seems hard not to pattern-match. Especially with the fiction writing, Scott loves being satirical! (Thinking of the Bay Area House Party series, for recent examples.) Even without knowing the exact what the refrances, as soon as I pick up "oh this is some kind of joke" levity-vibes, I'm expecting some sort of satire, or at least sarcasm/snark. It's like the the thing Scott used to do all the time, and definitely doesn't sometimes still do as a throwback.
The My Immortal one is very clearly satire; any time you have to convince someone a universally reviled work is actually good, it's almost certainly overthinking it. Any time you have to call upon ancient history to do so, you're almost certainly overthinking it on purpose. (Of course, I've been hearing people make fun of My Immortal for literally a decade and a half, so maybe that's required knowledge.)
The Sam Kriss one isn't nearly so obvious. I guess it's an early wink with Pliny's skyscrapers and lightbulbs, but if it's satire, I don't understand the point.
The Washington Post has its own article on the source of the comic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/07/the-surprising-religious-backstory-of-black-panthers-wakanda/
Maybe THAT's the point; maybe he's trying to make fun of that, or similar stories? I don't know.
I try to read stuff with a certain amount of detachment, and hold in abeyance how accurate I consider it? This is the "Net of a Million Lies", after all (naming credit to Vernor Vinge). There's trolls and motivated reasoning and unscrupulous partisans everywhere. I'm not always good at this, but I think it's an important life skill that my spectrumy nature left me deficient in, and so I have to try extra hard to catch up. (From what I gather, something like this is vital for people in serious academia, with the exception of very hard sciences - not just keeping track of information about their subject, but also where that information is from, and how reliable that source is, and so forth.)
That Wakanda article is awesome, thanks for the link! A book in similar vein that I'm vaguely planning on reading is "Tarzan Alive" by Philip Jose Farmer, which purports to be an actual biography of Lord Greystoke, showing where Burroughs got his information, what he was right and wrong about, what he just made up, and where and how he made mistakes. I love that kind of pseudo-history, seamlessly weaving its way into another narrative. Like what Niven did in "The Mote in God's Eye", finding a way to insert aliens into Pournelle's universe in a way that made it entirely reasonable why they remained cut off from the rest of the galaxy.
Oh, and if you still have an interest in Wakanda, here's a retrospective from Christopher J. Priest, the guy who created the modern incarnation of Black Panther. I think it's a fascinating look into the sausage-making at Marvel Comics, back in the day:
https://digitalpriest.com/legacy/comics/panther/start.html
> not just keeping track of information about their subject, but also where that information is from, and how reliable that source is, and so forth
I struggle with this so hard. There are a million "facts" bouncing around in my head which could be from Reddit or Buzzfeed or the Economist. I can usually trace my way back to the source at least.
The signal to noise ratio on Reddit is very poor. I follow only one SubReddit that discusses electric snow blowers. Even that one is sketchy. I wouldn’t trust it for anything more controversial than tracking product experiences.
My vote is for you being unusually credulous—or for this being your long con on us. I actually have a hard time believing you thought Scott’s article was serious. Absolutely nothing surrounding My Immortal is serious.
I guess someone not very familiar with antiquity might be taken in by Kriss’s article, thinking that the comic book country has some basis in legend; it’s not uncommon for comic books to abuse myths for their source material.
Still, pretty gullible, friend.
Yeah I think in both cases, it was a mixture of (a) not being at all familiar with the source material, and (b) implicitly trusting the authors based on their previous work.
Possibly you should mix a little skepticism into your views on everybody.
I really really like Scott, and find him (inasmuch as I can judge this without ever having met him) to have good intellectual character, be trustworthy not to mislead, and very smart. I also occasionally think he’s hoodwinked by stuff or dead wrong: he has blind spots around people and concepts he knows personally (who doesn’t?), and is inclined to extend a little too much trust and forbearance to institutions because they are institutions, etc. Likewise, everybody has feelings and those feelings distort their thinking. And many people are venal. Almost everybody lies sometimes, but it’s not always going to be clear why. Think about the last few times you deliberately lied—or omitted the whole story, whatever you want to call it. People do this for crazy reasons: personal, idiosyncratic, vain stuff.
I advise always thinking that there’s a sizable chance you’re being consciously or unconsciously misled. There are too many reasons it might happen and the level of trust you have is dangerous.
Probably just Poe’s Law in action
you might be on the spectrum?
Somewhat, sure. Probably no more than your average ACX reader though. Definitely not to the point of it being medically recognized.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
In the comments of the scandal market for Eliezer Yudkowsky that got started last weekend on Manifold (https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-eliezer-yudkowsky-be-found-to#), there was a comment linking a blogpost (https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/#comment-216) accusing Yudkowsky of being involved in statutory rape and blackmail. Some commenters seemed to take it pretty seriously, but I've never heard anything about this before and the blogpost doesn't seem to cite any evidence beyond the author's word. Does anyone here know more about this?
A few years ago I tried to figure out what actually happened, and it was a long and crazy chain of the "telephone" game.
It started as "this happened in the rationalist community". Someone along the chain added that this is also Eliezer's responsibility, because he is the leader of the rationalists. A few steps further it became "Eliezer was involved", and a few more steps further it became "Eliezer did it".
The nature of the crime itself had a similar evolution. It started with "I saw two people dating, and the age difference was too big; technically it wasn't a statutory rape, but in my opinion it was similar" (I think it was 17 and 27, or something like that). This got shortened to "statutory rape", and then further shortened to "rape".
Clearly, the epistemic norms of the rationalist community are not universal.
I think the waters were also muddied by a real case of sexual abuse some years back (or even more than one) where it was a guy in his thirties having sex and coercive relationships with younger women, one of whom I think was seventeen.
It's an unedifying state of affairs and I don't want to go linking to it but it's easy enough to find.
Yes. There was a 17 (?) year old girl in the Bay Area rationalist social scene ~10 years ago. A few community members in their 20s (?) dated her at various times, but I never heard about Eliezer being one of them. A few years later, a disgruntled ex-employee tried to blackmail MIRI into re-hiring them and various other demands, and set up a blackmail site using that story as a seed to make much crazier Pizzagate style accusations. Eventually MIRI settled their wrongful-dismissal suit which some people interpreted as "giving into blackmail" and got additionally angry about. Every part of this story gets fractally weird, especially the "additionally angry about" part, but I think this is a fair description of Eliezer's role AFAIK.
I'm being kind of vague here because the former-17-year-old is still around and has expressed a preference against this story getting plastered over the Internet too widely.
In the vast majority of places that relationship wouldn't even be illegal. A strange thing to get scandalized over.
Doesn’t have to be illegal to be scandalous. In most of the USA such a relationship would be a sign of impermissible immaturity at best, and distinctly unsavory.
Cross-posting this question here should a subject matter expert in proof theory and/or recursion theory wish to comment: https://twitter.com/jpt401/status/1594079004574863361
When I was new to the U.S years ago, one of the most puzzling things was that people were constantly walking together or doing other activities, to raise money for causes. As a poor student, I was invited for walks I couldn't afford, by classmates. It seemed very hard to comprehend this aspect of culture. Why did this never happen in India?
My only reference point was a P.G. Wodehouse story where Ukridge (famous for his get-rich-quick schemes) realizes it is easy to get people in London to give you money, as long as you have a nice cause to get them to support. He invents "Buttercup Day". He makes a lot of money although no one quite knows what it is!
It looks like Larry David and Seinfeld might have been inspired by this. The character George Castanza invents something called The Human Fund. I loved that episode.
Why is this such a thing in Western culture? Is it bizarre to anyone else?
I have become more comfortable with it over the years but I remember thinking it was an entirely new kind of a thing I'd never encountered before. I'd encountered altruism before, but not quite this organized version of it that was so hugely tied to people's identities.
Including a group activity with your fundraiser generates excitement and exposure for your charity - "Come watch us walk/run for 24 hours straight" is more interesting than "Come listen to us talk about why breast cancer is important and needs money." It gets people to show up, and once they show up they'll probably donate some money.
It also makes people feel like they're getting something for their money - "I paid $50 to help my friend enter a race, and it went to charity!" sounds more appealing than "I paid $50 to charity," even though the second one is perhaps more efficient.
(Games Done Quick is a great example of the second one - they have all sorts of donation goals to get the runners to do various tricks or do bonus speedruns or glitch showcases. It costs them nothing to offer - the speedrunner is already there on the couch, they just get a little more time in the spotlight - but "I'm donating money to save the animals in Super Metroid" is more appealing and lets donors feel a direct connection with what they're paying for.)
If you say so. - Glad that works out for you.
Everyone agrees that giving money to charity is a good thing, but with thousands of different apparently-good causes and each of them having an insatiable demand for money, it's hard to make reasonable decisions. In the absence of some kind of Schelling point that tells us when, how much, and to whom to donate, most people probably don't bother. But that bugs us, because we know we probably should.
Enter the Big Charity Event. Instead of a bottomless well of need that my dollars can't possibly fill, there's a nice simple annual event that I can give a two-digit number of dollars to and feel good about. I give some affordable amount of money to charity, and in return my friend or colleague or family member will do something ever-so-slightly difficult or time consuming like walking a fairly long distance. I can give money happy in the knowledge that the same person won't guilt me into making a larger donation next week (because they're not about to walk another fifty miles). Meanwhile the participants get the considerable satisfaction of working in a group towards a good cause, ignoring the large disconnect between their actual physical actions and the good cause.
tl;dr it's a nice Schelling point for everybody that lets some people give modest amounts of money to charity without feeling like they ought to give more, and lets other people have a nice time doing some kind of moderately difficult activity in groups, and lets everybody feel that they're doing good for the world.
Caring about and helping the weak and suffering is important. But there's such a thing as overdoing this concern. That is my point. For example if someone is obsessed with helping the poor, I'd say something is off there. A well-lived life ought to have other things going on.
Im not convinced paying an entry fee and running a 5k would constitute being obsessed with helping the poor. It one of the easiest things one could do to help out a cause.
"Why is this such a thing in Western culture?"
Smarmy piety.
"Is it bizarre to anyone else?"
It is a profound absurdity.
I LOLed, hard.
Thank you for that.
It's absurd to link a fun social activity to giving to your charity?
Partly it seems an US/UK thing that's spreading: My 7 year old had a money-raiser-run in school this summer; here in Germany that was a first for me. (I let them have 1 Euro, pretending "not to understand" that system). But enough parents liked it; I am afraid it will stay. - I guess, we are simply too far from "deserving real poor" people, but we still feel the need to "do good". So: kinda "vacuum activities" (I like Konrad Lorenz). - When I visited India (or Russia) in the nineties, there were enough beggars on the street to satisfy anyone's altruistic needs. Doing those walks to raise money? Outlandish idea there, true. I wondered how Indians dealt with it - obviously begging was more popular where tourists go, but locals gave to beggars, too (unlike Tony Blair, an early EA).
If you give money to a beggar in India, you'll see another beggar around the next corners and feel like you should give money to them too. Pretty soon you're out of money and the problem of poverty in India has not been solved.
So I come along and suggest a deal: you give ten rupees to this beggar for lap of this track I can walk in a day. All of a sudden your moral burden, instead of being enormous, seems quite manageable. I walk a hundred laps, you give the beggar a thousand rupees, and we can all agree this is a good effort all round. Your obligation as a rich westerner to help the third world's poor is, all of a sudden, rate-limited by the ability of other rich westerners to do arbitrary athletic activities.
The EA answer is probably: Drop the nonsense-walk. Work meanwhile. Give the salary to the poor. - My take on your "deal" is: ??? (I see zero connection between those walks by X and me donating to Z. Plus: I find it repulsive to pretend there is one.)
By the way, speaking of beggars on streets, here is what someone I know does in America at traffic lights.
They open their window and hand the beggars protein bars. They've raised their kids to do this too.
This absolutely horrified me.
I wonder what Larry David would have done with this material :).
Why does it horrify you? Giving food to beggars is a lot better than giving nothing and arguably better than giving money (doesn't create incentives to have a ring of 'beggars' for profit, while still helping prevent someone down on their luck from starving)
I mean, if they have the food in the car, why not? (As they might if they do a lot of exercise where they have to spend time in the car immediately afterwards.) Those things are durable and last for years. It's certainly better than not giving anything.
It probably horrifies the beggars too.
I remember being involved in something like this as a kid. It was something like "get people to pledge that for each mile you walk, they'll donate $1 to cure breast cancer, then walk some number of miles". I think it was supposed to be some kind of social bonding activity, where you signal how much you care by walking some number of miles and then everyone pretends to be very impressed by you. Probably works better for kids than for adults.
When it comes to finding a cancer cure, is the bottleneck really money? Or something else? Maybe they've hit a wall? They being researchers.
And I hate to say this, because it is pessimistic, but maybe there's no cure possible and no one who knows will admit it.
Maybe each type of cancer is different with all this.
I keep wondering whether we need more background work (better computers, better instruments, better theories, better programs, more math) rather than more work on specific diseases.
I think walks have a tendency to be health-related, and I figured it caught on because it's an opportunity to challenge yourself to exercise (kinda like a marathon) but branded such that no one expects you to be particularly athletic about it.
I've always thought it was weird as someone who grew up here, so I'm glad to have some outside validation.
But I think ultimately it's popular for a couple reasons:
1) There's a certain type of person that likes to feel like they're directly taking action in a way that just giving money doesn't provide. For a lot of causes (cancer research, etc.) there's no way for most normal people to directly get involved in a meaningful way, so they use walking as a surrogate.
2) For others they probably want some way to signal and show off their altruism. No one really pays that much attention if you just donate some money, but if you can tell everyone you walked x miles for a charity it's a more socially acceptable way of engaging in a minor bit of narcissism/egoism. And if you did directly talk about how you donated money it would likely be seen as garish and unseemly, like bragging about how rich you are.
Are these Open Threads in fact Clopen [0] Threads?
Reasoning: Open Threads Hidden Open Threads are both, definitionally, open. OTs and HOTs are complements within the universe of <X>OTs. Thus, both are clopen.
This also means the space of threads is disconnected. And yet conversations from one thread are sometimes carried over to others, suggesting a degree of path connectedness. Most curious.
The threads start off open, and eventually become closed. Initially, every point anyone makes is surrounded by neighbouring points on the thread, but the discussions are never done and they’re always swimming in a sea of new additions people might make. After a few days, when most people have moved on, the thread has pretty much reached everywhere it’s going to reach.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clopen_set
How bad is hiring at big tech now? Are no big companies hiring anymore?
6 month hiring freeze at mine, but that may get lifted if the word comes down from on high.
Full speed ahead at my employer, Snowflake. There are still jobs out there.
Thank you. I just checked it out and unfortunately they don't have engineering openings for their office in Zürich, Switzerland.
Glad I could help. If you're interested enough to move for the job, consider the Berlin office.
Hiring is still going on but everyone is cautious.
How about Twitter? I'm tempted to apply just to see what will happen.
Apparently hiring engineers and sales, but not massage gurus or pronoun consultants.
Musk and company are trying to cut costs and squeeze out as much productivity from the current work force as possible. Highly doubt they’re recruiting new people, at the moment. Even if they do, expect to receive a laughable salary offer.
Probably the other way around. My impression is that Musk thought there was a lot of deadwood around Twitter, Inc. -- and I'm not even sure the previous leadership would be in that strong a disagreement. So he's set fire to the deadwood, and hopes the conflagration doesn't take out any of the useful green growth as well. We'll see.
But anyway the usual denouement in that circus is that it becomes much clearer, after the blood has been washed off the walls and the smoke has cleared, what kind of people you really need, and since you've just freed up a shit-ton of salary and benefit money by discharging 3/4 of your prior employees, you now offer very nice wages indeed to induce people to jump onto your recently foundering but hopefully all now patched up ship.
Don't know about Twitter.
I see a few people getting hired though. Maybe it is not as bad as people imagine.
No idea.
I have heard that a chunk of the Meta layoffs were technical people but probably not A players.
Following as I'm looking for work in Zürich, Switzerland.
Google is hiring in Zürich, though it is (and always have been) tough to get in, and even if you are good there is a lot of luck involved in the hiring process.
I don't know so much about the other major tech companies in Zürich, but none of the ETH alumni that I know had issues getting a job, and I see no recent change. I recommend going to tech job fairs, it seems easy to get offers there.
Any fair you'd recommend in particular?
To ETH students I usually recommend the ETH job fairs and career events. Some of them are open to other students or generally open to everyone seeking a job in related areas. The biggest one is Polymesse. For computer science students there are the VIS Kontaktparty and VIS con, other departments have their own events.
I know less about events that are not associated with ETH, but I have heard about the Zurich Tech Job Fair by TechMeetups. I don't know your specific profile, but googling should bring up more events.
Everyone,
Is there any way to see only the new posts since my last update? It's very time consuming to follow threads of discussion when you have to go back through old posts
There's an add-on that will (among other things) put "~new~" next to new comments, similar to what SSC used to have:
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
Related question: How do you link to comments? Saving a hyperlink of a comment would help with checking back in on a discussion.
Click on the time next to the username.
Thanks!
If you reply to every top-level comment you want to follow the Activity page will then tell you who else replied to that top-level comment (but not replies to replies etc.), at the price of making yourself obnoxious to all other posters.
I don't think so. If you ask substack they may add an option to get notified of all top-level comments in a post.
Scott Aaronson posted his take on AI Alignment, and it seems a lot more like Paul Christiano's than like Eliezer Yudkowsky's. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821 Maybe even less urgent. I am not sure what to make of it.
I not read the "less urgency". Example: "(3) Orthodox AI-riskers worry almost entirely about an agentic, misaligned AI that deceives humans while it works to destroy them, along the way to maximizing its strange utility function.
We Reform AI-riskers entertain that possibility, but we worry at least as much about powerful AIs that are weaponized by bad humans, which we expect to pose existential risks much earlier in any case." Much earlier, see? - My take: true. Think: 2030AI+2030drones+(whoever you fear) . We are lucky Russia is not high on (A)I.
On the other hand, given that the US are the AI world leader, the yemenis don't have our same luck.
This is not to say in any way that the US are as bad as Russia, it definitely isn't, but I wouldn't trust any gov with military AI.
I think that's the point, though there's a difference between the military AI that's currently plausible, and independent, self-improving military AI.
Agree with both of you. Human generals military thinking ends usu. up in "preparing to win the most recent war" - then the new war proves a lot of that thinking obsolete. An "independent, self-improving military AI" vs. a conventional led military would be like chess with deep blue vs. dumb me. (I just assume this AI would go heavily "drones"/unmanned - incl. land and sea. No manned F-35, frigates or Abrams no more.) The US may be first- the DoD must be on it, but some underdog might be more daring to actually try (even KSA's MBS might).
It's possible that preparing to win the previous war might work out better than preparing to win the next war, due to human limitations. There's even less information about the future than the past.
If it were AI vs. AI, I shudder to think.
I've been pushing the bad humans scenario for a while, though I frame it as big powerful organizations-- probably governments or corporations, possibly religions.
I haven't been able to figure out the shape of the threat or what might be done about it, though discouraging smart people from working on AI might help a little.
The bad organization model takes away some of the barriers from AIs getting enough power to do a lot of damage. It doesn't have to break out of the box, there are people who want it out in the world. It's not going to have to figure out how to deceive people, it will have plenty of skillful people helping it with deception. It will get support on buying and maintaining hardware.
Classic sf: _The Jagged Orbit_ by John Brunner. An AI in the future has been tasked with maximizing profits for a personal weapons company. Unfortunately, maximum profits means making people so dangerously violent and frightened that civilization collapses, followed by no profits. The AI invents time travel to deal with the problem. I can't remember whether it helps.
Seems there's a real "Reformist" movement as Aaronson puts it, there was also Katja Grace disagreeing majorly with Eliezer earlier this year (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LDRQ5Zfqwi8GjzPYG/counterarguments-to-the-basic-ai-x-risk-case)
Minor note: Scott Aaronson is, for humorous purposes, labeling the AI-factions he describes with names of Jewish denominations; specifically Orthodox and Reform Judaism. There isn't much deep in this, but Carlos' comment made me suspect non-Jews aren't getting it, because the name of the denomination is definitely "Reform" not "Reformist".
I don't think Scott Aaronson is getting it either. The Reform denomination came first and Orthodox was a reaction to it, not the other way round. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Judaism#History):
"It was only the foundation of the Hamburg Temple in 1818 which mobilized the conservative elements. The organizers of the new Hamburg synagogue, who wished to appeal to acculturated Jews with a modernized ritual, openly defied not just the local rabbinic court that ordered them to desist but published learned tracts which castigated the entire rabbinical elite as hypocritical and obscurant. The moral threat they posed to rabbinic authority, as well as halakhic issues such as having a gentile play an organ on the Sabbath, were combined with severe theological issues. The Temple's revised prayer book omitted or rephrased petitions for the coming of the Messiah and renewal of sacrifices (post factum, it was considered as the first Reform liturgy). More than anything else, this doctrinal breach alarmed the traditionalists. Dozens of rabbis from across Europe united in support of the Hamburg rabbinic court, banning the major practices enacted there and offering halakhic grounds for forbidding any change in received custom. Most historians concur that the 1818–1821 Hamburg Temple dispute, with its concerted backlash against Reform and the emergence of a self-aware conservative ideology, marks the beginning of Orthodox Judaism."
I think that this is kind of wrong. Orthodox Judaism as a movement did not need to exist before Reform Judaism did, because it was the default environment. It only got a name and became a movement when Reform made controversial and innovative changes to traditional theology, liturgy and practice. But I don't think it's controversial to say that if a random Jew from 1799 was teleported to the present day, they would be much more at home in an Orthodox shul than a Reform Temple.
Pac-12 football has been entertainingly chaotic this year, although it looks like USC is going to be the one that comes out on top (assuming they win the championship game). Good show for one of their last years in the conference.
It looks like NASA is drifting back towards the bad plan again for a prospective 2040 Mars mission (which won't happen, but it shows where their thoughts are). Once again, they're supporting a mission that theoretically is supposed to be safer because it's not as long, but you end up with astronauts actually getting more cosmic radiation dosage because they're in space for more days as opposed to the mission architecture that has them on Mars itself for 18 months (Mars effectively blocks out half of the sky and thus half the radiation dosage you'd get in space, and you get it even lower by putting your landing site in a crater or near a cliff).
I wonder if it's a case of the nuclear rocket people throwing their weight around. They really want their nuclear-thermal rockets to be included somehow in a Mars mission.
That would be OK with me. Getting new technology mature is way more important than keeping the health of Mars astronauts pristine. It's an adventure job, not a commercial flight for beautiful people. Risk is expected. Or to quote the (very probably apocraphyl[1]) story of the ad Ernest Shackleton supposedly put in the Times to recruit for one of his polar expeditions:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success."
------------------
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/shackleton-probably-never-took-out-an-ad-seeking-men-for-a-hazardous-journey-5552379/
I never understand why anyone plans on the astronauts returning from such missions? Seems like a huge waste. We got lots of people. Just keep sending them.
Could be is NASA thinking in terms of managing a known singular risk ie. cosmic radiation against managing the more varied risks of an 18 month long base on Mars.
What else are we missing?
I was thinking back to my 60s childhood. One weekend my sister & I stayed with my Grandmother, who was born around 1900. Grammy, had bought us some coloring books and crayons. As we were coloring, we noticed Grammy didn't know how to color, but scribbled like a toddler. Being uncouth youths, we told Grammy, you're supposed to color inside the lines. Grammy said, "Oh, I didn't know, we didn't have coloring books when I was a child." In our 60s now, my sister & I still comment upon this ; but only from the perspective of what Grammy didn't have growing up.
Today I had a thought. What else are we missing?
One of the things I see, is the 'video-game generation' which thinks that shooting an animal always results in insta-kill, as if a bullet has magical life-stopping properties. Yes, a bullet has great damage-doing properties, but not necessarily life-ending properties. Many animals live a surprisingly long time after taking big bullets to the head and/or other vital organs.
I also see in threads which divert towards the prepper-survivalist needs, ala post apolitical world, the phrase "I read a book, I'll just grow a garden." As a life-long gardener, I know that one doesn't 'just grow a garden.' There's a lot to it ; books whilst being a good resource, gardening books, typically aren't written by actual gardeners, but instead are primarily written by someone hailing from the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) who is merely regurgitating other bookish learnings. On gardening shows, the people with dirt under their nails are wearing black 'LANDSCAPE CREW' T-shirts, and standing just off-camera.
Today, I read once again, the worn-out Anthropological fallacy that hunter-gatherers worked less than farmers. I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherers lived quite differently than our image of the noble hunter stalking the equally noble big game, quickly dispatching the beast with a well placed arrow from his handsome bow, hand carved with a stone tool he harvested from yonder volcano. Having hunted, fished, collected rock, lived remotely, lived in Alaskan Exploration camps surrounded by wolves, and observed wolves hunting, and taking down moose calves. I'm more certain the early hunter-gathers lived by shadowing the wolves, coyotes, vultures, etc. and robbing them of their feast. Whilst in the middens, we find the bones of moose, deer, bear, rabbits, fish, etc. I'd venture if we examined feces, we'd find a whole lot more beetle carapaces, mouse, lizard, and snake skeletons, indicating such critters featured higher on the menu than the 'television noble fur-bearers.'
There's a local story—actually a book too—of a 1950s homeopath named Frank, they called "The Goat Doctor" — because he lived amidst a flock of goats. Frank had the ability to fix bad backs by massage, and people came from far distances to be treated by Frank. Many doctors sent their unhealable patients to Frank, where they were promptly treated and healed. Frank credits his learning from a lifetime of slaughtering goats for food. What is it our doctors could learn about backs by slaughtering a lot of goats?
In an earlier life, I had a herd of cattle, and took a weeklong livestock reproduction class, learning how to do artificial insemination on livestock ; I guess I'm a licensed cow-fucker. As part of the class, the instructors brought in—from the slaughter house—a dozen fresh bovine reproductive tracts, vulva - cervix - uterus - ovaries all connected. We examined these, handled them, learned a lot. But when I read r/BadWomensAnatomy, the purported females online have absolutely no sense of female anatomy—perhaps that's why its called Bad Women's Anatomy. I sometimes read women who were considering sex, stating they didn't shave their vaginas ... um ... that's an internal organ, not the external portion. I'm pretty sure you're not shaving that part - its equivalent to a man saying he's shaved his urethra.
What else are we missing by not doing?
I've seen a complaint (possibly from Perun) that war gaming doesn't *begin* to do justice to how little information people have in fighting wars.
I think there's a difference between missing things because skills haven't been invented yet vs. missing things because of living in an environment that's optimized for entertainment or simplicity.
That reminds me of the classic "The Ultimate War Simulation Game" by David Wong:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071107054536/http://www.cracked.com/article_15660_ultimate-war-simulation-game.html
> Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.
Rebel Inc is a game about fighting an insurgency in an Afghanistan-ish country, with the goal being to stabilize the country
It's got a bunch of interesting features, but my favorite is that your airstrikes will occasionally kill an innocent civilian by accident. When it happens, you get the choice of "apologize" or "cover it up." If you apologize, you lose support and have to spend money. If you cover it up, then 95% of the time you lose nothing, 5% of the time you lose a lot more support. So covering up your mistakes is basically always the correct decision, tactically speaking. Just, you know, not the morally correct one.
Cool! That's going on my list. Thanks!
This ties into my long-standing rant about Civilization-type games - the satellite's view of everything, the fact that you can order a city to build an X and it will immediately do so, and so on. If Civ were truly immersive, you'd start with your founding city, order your townsfolk to build that monument and look into making pottery, and mayyybe they'd do it; you'd put together enough people and stores to send a band of settlers over where your scout said there was some nice citrus trees and cotton fields and mayyybe you'd see a supply wagon return later with luxury goods, and so on.
So, yeah, fog of war, and fog of bullshit. Also, Fog of Ignorance, because you have no reason to know you live in a natural universe where your local nook happens to be spherical and praying to gods is unlikely to do anything other than trick your body into a feeling of control that reduces your stress and oh you should probably hold on to that piece of land with the funny shiny rocks because your ultimate goal is going to be building a spaceship.
Also, why is your wealth measured in coin before you've researched currency, and how do you know the current year is "nnnn BC"? But I digress.
Gameplay license is the obvious counter. I'm arguing for hyperrealism here, and even I know the result is unlikely to be fun. "How the hell was I supposed to know I was wasting my time building Uffizi instead of riflemen?" Et cetera.
OTOH, it might be fun to fight a single war with all that fog, with a post mortem where the game gives you god's eye view and control and clever software and visualizations point out "here's where each player screwed up". I think some game dev will eventually try this, if they can figure out how to get the AIs to handle it.
That's a cool piece of writing, but I think I'd have remembered the fog of bullshit.
Maybe I read about the comparison between the amount of information a commander gets in the real world vs. in games at acoup, but I'm inclined to think it was perun, a very sensible youtuber-- specializes in war with an emphasis on logistics.
I was only suggesting the piece because it seemed similar, not that I though you'd gotten it from there. (I sort of assume no one else on the Internet remembers that piece.)
I hadn't heard of perun, but I'll check him out. Thanks!
Surely I'm not the only perun fan here.
You're not.
I have heard anecdotes from a friend, a middle-aged cis het woman who sometimes has flings with younger men, that a growing number of them have started viewing sex as though it were a spectator sport, she suspects due to watching porn. Not necessarily watching *too much* porn, but watching it with the wrong attitude maybe? Similar to how a lot of people, if given the choice, would rather watch a pro football game than play in an amateur football game. Or listen to music composed and performed by one of humanity's best musicians, rather than try to compose and perform music themselves? When they try it themselves, they're self-analytical, worried about "making mistakes", and feeling pressure to "perform", not in the sense of making it enjoyable for all parties involved, but in the sense that if it were recorded they'd be optimizing for making it rank high on people's list of all-time great sex acts.
This confuses me, but we move in very different circles.
I've seen a complaint, possibly from Clarisse Thorn, that exposure to pornography leads to people imitating positions which were designed to make sex visible-- nothing to do with personal pleasure.
Yeah I am this way with sports. I play a lot of adult team sports (3-4 times a week, sometimes more), I have no idea why someone would watch when playing is an option.
As someone who admittedly would rather do any other non-painful activity than exercise: I think you and I disagree on how very different "watching sports" is from "playing sports", to the extent that I don't understand how a person would think to say "I'd rather do this one than that one", unprompted. But obviously people do.
I'm with you on this. I have a really-really crappy banjo which I can almost pluck out some poorly synchronized riffs. But I enjoy this much more than listening to someone else's superb artistry.
I do the same thing with an old guitar. :-)
But I'm a bit more toward the "spectator" side of things in terms of music. The more I learn, the more I can appreciate virtuosos. Though that still doesn't change the pleasure of playing in a group, even if it's been years.
I guess I'd say for most things, there's a balance? Some stuff I enjoy doing more than other stuff, and for the things I enjoy, I try not to let world-class performances spoil my taste for "doing", while at the same time I do try to let them inform me to the extent possible. Other stuff I don't enjoy doing as much, but I can still appreciate when other people do them (like reading other people's writing). I just find it hard to wrap my head around sex slipping into that second category. :-/
I've been reading the Economist for a few months, and I find its articles to be much higher quality than most other "mainstream media". Do you agree or disagree? Any better recommendations?
I recommend the book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist.
It covers how TE was founded to agitate in favour of repealing the corn laws (one of the central political struggles between the old feudal land owners and the, then, newly minted financial classes, in the mid 19th century).
It has always presented a view that's amenable to those financial classes (quite blatantly imo), but it was at least rigorous in its data collection and reporting, even Marx considered it a valuable resource back then for example.
It ran into financial difficulties in the 80s however, and rebranded itself as a status signal for the aspiring middle classes that were rising globally, not just in the West also in India, Indonesia etc. That did hugely increased its readership, but many commentators consider it to have declined in quality since then.
Generally yea though there are still huge gaps and biases at times. For example I remember a piece where they were looking at a situation where a law reduced corporate flexibility, but reduced costs, and the people discussing it just refused to even consider that the corporations might prefer the scenario where they had more control over slightly higher costs.
Like that wasn’t even a position they were considering as a possibility. And they were puzzled by the corporate reticence…when the reason was so obvious.
Before the blogosphere (econlib and SSC), there was TE. Found it in 1999 and read each issue, and all of each. The Christmas double-issue I still buy. So, I am kind of a fan. - I ended subscription, because: a) TE still costly -"€144.50/first year - auto-renews at €289" annually - to cancel they want you to call in! (and they will offer you to prolong at 50%!) -, while awful NYT at 2$ a month - while excellent blogs often enough free.
b) Once Matt Ridley wrote for them, but no more - TE 'sold out' to climate-catastrophism plus anti-Brexitism. I remember just 1 article that started to even consider why smart people might want Brexit. (I am no brexiteer, btw). And there are too few clear headed pieces about environmentalism (Though I can remember 2 good titles. In 2 decades.) - That said: TE is still by far the best out there. Which is a shockingly low bar in 2022.
I don't know much about Brexit, but climate-catastrophism?
https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2022/11/05/the-world-is-going-to-miss-the-totemic-1-5c-climate-target
> Dr Schrag at Harvard points out that the climate system as a whole mostly operates on a sliding scale, where higher global temperatures bring greater impacts and risks. “1.5°C is not safe and 2.2°C is not the end of the world,” he says.
Doesn't really sound like catastrophism, perhaps their stance changed recently?
They only quote only one guy. And: "1.5°C is not safe" is sth. Greta would readily agree too. Even "2.2°C is not the end of the world" is, as the doom-sayers are claiming much higher temps are waiting for us.
What would be a change? Well, quote a panel saying the obvious: A: Even +0°C is NOT safe as in "safe from hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, extinctions, pandemics, crime, wars, ...."
B: +1.5°C is not safe, but might be a net positive (earth has become greener, due to greenhouse effect).
C: +4.5°C is based on assumptions that are nonsense (lots of coal in a much richer world in 2100).
D: Politics by panic brought us billions of wasted subsidies and may well lead to billions of premature deaths till 2100 by keeping much more people much longer in poverty.
E: Cold is still the much bigger killer. See ACX.
As I wrote, I am unsubscribed. When I read my free article, it may be COVID, US, Ukraine. Not climate!
If you read mainstream German media it seems that Climate Change is the most important issue and everything else should be put aside to fight it though...
I've heard people say that The Economist has gone downhill after Zanny Minton Beddoes took over, but I can't really say much for or against that position. Have you noticed anything?
For Economic issues...I always like to read their Year-End issue and their predictions, though usually they are quite off the mark...
The Economist is pretty much the best general news magazine in the world. Not that the bar is particularly high. And they do cover countries that most people scarcely know exist. And they do it from a non "America is the center of everything" approach.
Brett is absolutely right about The Economist occasionally using a handful of locals in the pub as a proxy for the entire country, and you get the feeling that most of the writers have never worked a day of manual labor in their life. But still. Its well-written and the captions are often masterpieces of wit and brevity.
The Economist is mostly a rehash of OECD reports, with nice graphs as an extra[1].
On some topics such as ethics, it's pretty well balanced and displays the different points of view without caricaturing them (looking at you New York Times).
[1] They publish some of their R notebooks on GiHub, which is pretty cool: https://github.com/TheEconomist/graphic-detail-data
I subscribed for a number of years, and still use their Espresso app to keep vague tabs on what's going on in the world without triggering my PTSD too badly.
As an American, I value that they come to news from a non-USA-centric perspective, and that they're partially insulated from our culture war and preconceptions. They've got their own biases, of course, and there's a different tone in their coverage of Britain, but I find it much more relaxing than anything made over here. And I appreciate how they cover the entire world in every issue, even if no one in the Current American Narrative is paying attention to a particular continent this week. (Shades of Norman Davies' "Europe", a wonderful history book that makes a point of covering the entire darn peninsula, from the Urals to Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland, from the last ice age through the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
One non-obvious downside is that internally, the Economist makes use of a lot of young, sheltered, elite-educated journalists, who can lack the perspective, experience, and insight that I'd prefer. And although their lack of author attributions has some benefits, it also serves to disguise this. So more often than I'd like, their coverage is superficial and repeats the standard classical liberal talking points on whatever subject is there. (Keep an eye out for Gell-Mann amnesia.) Still, they do tend to name enough names, and touch on enough details, that when I want to investigate something in more depth, it's easy. And again, they make a point of covering a lot of area, every week, so they don't overlook stories as much as other sources. (And I do get nostalgic about those "standard classical liberal talking points".)
I love Norman Davies and that book in particular. Have given it as many Xmas gifts.
Finally someone acknowledging that Europe is a peninsula and not (really) a continent...BTW I am European myself and I am not triggered :D (maybe because my area of expertise is Geography?)
> young, sheltered, elite-educated
This is an embarrasingly accurate description of myself. Could you please tell me an example of those classical liberal talking points? Do you mean things like favoring free markets, freedom of speech, democracy and such?
Me too. Well, not so young or sheltered anymore. :-) But it's a thing to watch out for, if the people providing my news have the same unconscious biases that I do.
And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. It's what I was raised on, and why I'm bitterly disappointed in the modern Democratic party. It's like, the Economist has a perspective, they make it very clear, and that's fine. They've got a hammer, and they acknowledge that not every problem is a nail, but I think they do err on the side of assuming that problems are nails, and don't often enough get into the nitty-gritty of why a particular problem has proven resistant to hammers so far. If that makes sense?
Yeah, I kinda see what you mean. But sadly, having a good hammer at all puts it at top 5% of the journalism in my country.
Yep. *sigh*
They're usually pretty solid. On a few regional issues they occasionally have "We talked to some folks who could speak english, and then treated them as a proxy for the country" stuff to it, but mostly it's pretty good.
I haven't read in some time but in the days when I subscribed in print, they were always rather short in terms of raw word count but incredibly dense. Very high signal to noise ratio.
Yes, I can't believe the absolutely trash quality of modern writing. My father—who was a newspaper printer in the 50s and 60s—and I talk a lot about this. He's losing his vision now, but he'd remark about how The Sacramento Bee seems to have lost their hyphenation dictionary, which is a very complex dictionary which helps to break sentences down to eye-pleasing narrow columns. In dad's days of hot-metal printing, for a Line-O-Type operator, this was quite an art.
Even as a young teen in the 70s, I read quite a bit of the Sacramento Union, after I finished my morning route. The writing was of very high quality, fantastic wit, pleasing prose, engaging stories, even to a snot-nosed teen. Mark Twain actually wrote for the Sacramento Union ... though about 100 years before my time. But these were the quality of writing we enjoyed in those days.
About a year ago, Scott quoted a claim that "Nazis hated IQ research":
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october/comment/3264463)
Now to add two datapoints to that:
(1) Fritz Lenz, a human geneticist and "influential specialist in eugenics in Nazi Germany" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lenz), whose work was referred to by Hitler in "Mein Kampf", propagated a concept of racial hierarchy; according to wikipedia, claims about intelligence were part of that (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lenz).
(2) Here's a file of an intelligence test used in 1937 to decide whether a person should be sterilized: https://www.landesarchiv-bw.de/stal/grafeneck/grafeneck03.htm, from the hospital of Göttingen.
You can always discuss about what is actually "IQ research" and what is merely applying some concept of "intelligence". I will not take part in such discussions in this thread.
Lenz is actually a good example of what I was talking about. He is a eugenicist with many evil views, but he also consistently praises the Jews, and attacks anti-Semitism as "unscientific", based on the result of his IQ research.
There were many people like Lenz, and the Nazis were happy to give them positions in the eugenics program based on their other beliefs and their scientific credibility (thus eg the Gottingen test you linked). But the Nazis were pretty against the IQ research itself because of the constant finding that Jews were as good as Germans, so they made it doctrine that IQ tests were bad compared to mystical unquantifiable racial purity vibes, and eventually got Lenz et al to fall in line in exchange for keeping their influence.
I'd like to see some links to quotes where he "praises" the Jews, given that according to Wikipedia, his textbook referred to Jews as parasites. Also, you write as though "the Nazis" and Lenz et al were two different sets. In 1931, he said that National Socialism was "applied biology", and said about Hitler's reference to his work in Mein Kampf: "In any case, he [Hitler] has embraced the essential ideas of racial hygiene and their importance with great intellectual receptivity and energy, while most academic authorities are still rather uncomprehending on these questions."
In May 1933 he supported Hitler in an open letter of Munich professors.
Reading the Wikipedia entry, it seems that the idea that he was a pure scientist among unscientific Nazis seems weird. Many of his beliefs seem just ideologically motivated.
Lenz, quoted https://books.google.com/books?id=6jNniq7Ji7YC:
"Jews and Teutons alike are distinguished by great powers of understanding and by remarkable strength of will. Jews and Teutons resemble each other in having a large measure of self-confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire to get their own way - the difference being that the Teuton is inclined to seek his ends by force, the Jew by cunning."
On anti-Semitism, same source:
"Judophobia [is] for the most part the outcome of a feeling of insubordination, [ie] the spirit which animates many of the anti-Semites is the envy felt by a non-possessing class."
Lenz, quoted/described https://www.jstor.org/stable/25805018 :
The Jews were distinguished by their so-called "mental racial pecularities" and "characterized, not only by shrewdness and alertness, by diligence and perseverance, but also by an amazing capacity for putting themselves in others' places (empathy) and for inducing others to accept their guidance." Lenz viewed them as a highly intelligent race whose representation in the "world of knowledge", particularly in the sciences, was far higher than "might be expected from their numbers". Although they appeared "more prominent as intermediaries and interpreters in the primary work of production", it would be ridiculous, Lenz asserted, "to deny that the Jewish race has produced persons of outstanding genius".
From the same source:
"[The De-Nazification Committee concluded that] 'In accordance with his upright scientific principles, the accused [Lenz] stood in complete opposition to one of the most important National Socialist pseudoscientific dogmas [the inferiority of the Jews].'
It is also true that differences between Lenz and the Party regarding the "Jewish question" were never settled: the Nazis never succeeded in converting Lenz to their brand of maniacal anti-Semitism. Although Lenz's treatment of the "Jewish question" is, in places, more openly anti-Semitic n the 1936 edition of Principles of Human Heredity than in previous editions, it is only marginally so. Moreover, unlike many volkisch intellectuals, Lenz did not openly criticize Jewish writers, artists, and scientists for their alleged subversive influence on German culture.51 Given the Party's sensitivity to the correct treatment of the ^Jewish question", Lenz's willingness both to discuss ^positive" Jewish traits and to argue that, on the whole, Jews and Germans were extremely similar, renders his testimony that he was reprimanded by the Fuhrer's Chancellery quite believable. Probably owing to his reluctance to deviate from his long-standing views on eugenic issues, Lenz was unable to publish a new edition of Human Selection and Race Hygiene during the Third Reich."
Again, just to clarify, I am not saying he was a good person, a perfectly unbiased upright scientist, or even immune to various more common and less obvious forms of anti-Semitism of the time. I'm just saying that his interest in intelligence science helped him escape the particular kind of anti-Semitism more common among the Nazis as this time.
Since I've been around long enough to know that people are *still* going to respond with "SO YOU'RE SAYING NAZIS ARE GOOD?!?!" I'm tapping out of the conversation now before I give them too many things to quote out of context. You can find similar quotes in those sources or by Googling "Lenz Jews" or whatever else without forcing me to get myself in trouble by providing them.
Sorry, I was not clear enough. I posted because I think it is useful information for people who updated in a certain way, but I am not interested in taking part in "Motte and Bailey". I might take part in other kinds of discussion, but I currently am a bit time-constrained.
Recently ended a relationship. Went right into the no contact thing, it's been 1.5 weeks. Today experiencing mild emotions/thoughts that are weirdly more difficult than the previously intense ones (guilt, missing her, wondering how/what she's doing, etc). I don't have ambivalence about whether it's the right thing, but do intensely miss her. I don't think I need the typical advice (push yourself into hobbies, stay occupied, talk with friends/family, gym, etc). Wondering if anyone had anything to say that could relate or that could numb the ruminations or... I don't know... anything at all.
Drink whisky until you sob like a baby, endure the awful hangover, have a decent breakfast, fill a flask with tea and go for a solitary walk in the country.
(When I saw this, my first reaction was that it would make a perfect followup to: "Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like no one is watching. ...")
Yes, I think that would help. Seems to me the crying is the active ingredient in the formula. When you're crying about some awful loss, you're very in touch with the impossibility of correcting the loss or changing how unbearable it is. But something about plumbing the depths of your own helplessness while liquified by emotion (and maybe whisky too) is actually a pretty good change agent. After crying I often feel a sort of peace. The loss hasn't changed, but somehow I'm more accepting of it.
If it was long and meaningful, might be worth getting a therapist for a few weeks/months. This shit is hard, and an impartial guide can really help.
I'll quote a short text on love.
-----
Love is the most renewable resource in a relationship, and the least valuable.
Which is to say that our hearts are designed for love. They're love generation machines. And we frequently generate love for people who are wrong for us; I think almost everyone has a relative or two who we love, but can't stand to be around for too long. And so in romantic relationships, we ooze love. It seeps from any little kindness shown us by our partners, any affection, even though that love. It replenishes daily.
You know what doesn't replenish daily? Trust. When your partner breaks a promise, that reservoir does not refill.
You know what doesn't replish daily? Like. When your partner takes that ugly snipe at you, or belches despite you telling him you can't stand her burping contests, that feeling of "I enjoy hanging with them" drops and re-accretes very slowly.
The truth is, by the time most relationships end, love is all that's left. The like meter has plummeted to zero, the trust is bottomed out on a pile of broken promises, but the love? It's still there. It's what's tugging at you like a fishhook in your heart as your bags are packed, you're out the door, you're crying because you love them but that's not enough, that's never enough.
You keep hearing how "love is all you need." That's not true. Love is like the air; it's everywhere, but you can't build castles on it. What you need is a solid foundation of trust and like, and probably a hundred other things I'm forgetting.
What you need is to remember to steward those fragile ecosystems of promises and amiability as though your love depended on it. Because it does.
-----
https://web.archive.org/web/20141231133251/http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1624339.html
My Jungian analyst would say that the psyche is a whole, balanced system, and that whatever the ego (that's your waking self, who makes decisions rationally etc.) decides to do, the unconscious (often felt as feelings, ruminations, dreams, fantasies) compensates for, to provide a balance.
He says this doesn't mean anything was wrong with your decision, or that you need to distract yourself from the emotions or reject them, but just that you accept that there is a balance being enacted will respect the function of your unconscious and thus reduce the intrusive feelings.
He's a bit woo, and I'm not 100% sold or anything, but I found it helpful as a way to understand and frame (and thus accept, though not bow to) the feelings that contradict the decision I made.
In the past, I've tried to step back in my head, and look at the relationship as a whole, the good parts and bad parts together. Sort of hold it mentally like I'd do with a fragile wooden model, turning it around and seeing it from all angles. And let myself feel sad about losing the good parts while simultaneously keeping in mind that overall, the relationship needed to end. (Assuming of course I don't think I made a mistake.)
(From a Buddhist perspective, I also try to feel my attachments to the good and bad parts, how the strings tug on me and vibrate me when they're plucked. If that makes any sense.)
I dunno if this will help you, but it has helped me sometime, and perhaps has given me a more mature attitude toward the whole thing. When I can pull it off, anyway.
Thank you this helped immensely. Broke the dam of emotion I've felt all weekend and I cried for half an hour. It hurt but was needed.
Wow, I'm glad I could help! :-)
Shame on you… smiling at making a stranger cry. Lol
Dan Savage's advice: Have a casual fling or, if that's hard to find, just some hookups. I think this somewhat tacky-sounding approach can actually help, and that when it does the way it helps is by providing new data to the part of you that believes there will never be anyone else. You already know that's not true -- but that's a part of your brain that is untouched by that knowledge, and needs concrete proof.
I attempted it and felt somewhat worse after because the sex wasn't nearly as satisfying as it was with my ex (and had no potential to be).
It does help a ton IME. If you sadness is lasting more than 10% of the length of the prior relationship, it is time it get laid.
Agree that it’s sound advice at the right time but I’m at less than 1%, it wouldn’t feel right at this phase.
My sympathies.
Something that helped me a little in your situation: since the decision was the best course for both of you, remind yourself that you're weathering the resulting pain for her sake as much as for your own. It's the only remaining way of doing right by someone for whom you still care.
This is helpful thank you. It was entirely my decision, but I can justify that it's best for both of us, in that she deserves to be with someone who reciprocates. And bearing this pain means I'm not giving her false hope, or stringing her along, or flip-flopping. There's a lot of things I still want to say to her, but I'm not emotionally in a place to know if those are things that should be said. That knowledge will come with time. I hope she's doing okay now and not hurting, but my decision to end things means I'm not the person anymore who gets to help her with that.
Yikes! Sounds tough.
If you don’t need the typical advice, is that because you’re already following it? If so, great, ignore the rest of this paragraph. If not: follow the typical advice. Your problem is not unique and you should respect that advice because it’s well-proven.
You are going through a period of grieving. Time will make this better and easier to accept. A relationship is a habit and lingering feelings about that habit are normal; sadness is normal, some amount of regret and wishing things were different is normal, even if you wouldn’t go back and it makes no sense to start again. Let yourself grieve, just don’t change what you do because of how you feel.
You're right- I know the advice but haven't done a great job of following it. It's hard to when feeling things so acutely, but tomorrows another day to try my best. Thanks for the wise words.
One foot in front of the other. It’ll get easier. God bless.
Do you think no contact is the right strategy? Was it your idea? How long do you expect for you to "get over it"? (So when the emotional distress will be negligible.)
Typical advice? Hm, I think hard times call for atypical advice! Meet new people, start something new (but casual) that very suddenly lets you experience a lot of different people. (Which will hopefully allow you to see what your previous relationship lacked, why it ended, etc.) Go to a festival, or a ski trip with random people. (Sure, it's usually hard to do anything alone in that state, so usually best to do it through some friend/acquaintance.) Though maybe this is that typical advice in the end!?
There's an old saying: "It takes one to forget one." Meaning, of course, that having a new person in your life lessens your thoughts about the old one.
One and half weeks is still way early to be thinking of finding someone new, of course, but I've kept this in my thoughts over the years as a reminder to me when I was between relationships.
If you liked many aspects of being in a relationship, like dining out together, exploring new places together, discussing ideas, staying in together, etc., then you're going to want to have that again with someone else. Until you do find at least a casual date or two to spend time with, your thoughts are inevitably going to keep returning to the last time you had that with your recent ex.
Good luck to you, I hope it works out sooner rather than later for you, and that both your and your former partner find contentment and fulfillment again.
Does anyone have any experience with hiring a style or image consultant as a man and any advice on getting the most from the experience?
I'm asking because I get the feeling, as a nerd's nerd, that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in fashion and dress for a relatively minimal investment. For example, I've done some experimenting this year and I've been shocked at how relatively small changes have lead to noticeable changes in how people treat me. Just wearing a little Seiko watch, some decent boots, and some mid-priced cologne has notably improved how people treat me. It's very hard justifying spending a lot of time studying fashion, however, because I'm not terribly interested in it and the opportunity cost is getting some technical certifications which would lead to pay increases well beyond what an annual style consultation would cost. So, has anyone done this successfully and does anyone have any advice on finding a good consultant or, more importantly, advice on communicating what exactly I want to the consultant?
I have a lot of trust in this site: https://putthison.com/start-here/ its not a consultancy but will provide you with basic, straight forward advice. It should at least help you learn the language of this space to make talking with a consultant more productive.
An alternative, go to a Bonobos store. Their in person stores are only show rooms where they show you what they have, let you find your size, then you order online or through them. The staff there are meant to be consultant like and can help you find clothes for any occasion and give advice.
This sounds like a great idea for a webservice. Send in a few photos and an AI/consultant recommends some clothing items/haircut options for you.
PimpMyNerd.com.
I'm going to say style is what you carry with confidence. I have picked up women at parties where everyone is dressed to the nines and I'm wearing bathroom slippers and old clothes that are falling apart. Which is not to say that's what you should be doing, but I don't think a consultant is who you should turn to. Feel comfortable in who you are and what you're wearing. Also, this is relatively inelastic in the short term, but incredibly valuable in the medium to long term - incorporate weight training into your life
It's definitely an Esoteric Art which doesn't mesh well with typical nerd-approaches to mastery, but I can at least validate that feeling from the other side of gender: yes, there absolutely is a ton of $20 fruit on the ground, and men routinely fail to notice it. You've already seen some evidence for yourself, that really-quite-minor changes have an outsize effect from baseline. No need to dive headlong into, like, The Art of Manliness (which I swear is written for men who spend too much time worrying about how other men view them, not women)...all the little stuff adds up fast, because so many guys don't even put in the bare minimum really.
No idea on Reputable Consultant services. I can give two Real Simple tips though: ill-fitting clothing ruins any man's image (regardless of quality or style); and posture/attitude should rise to the occasion. It's fine to slouch-shuffle in sweatpants and a hoodie, but that fundamental kinetic unseriousness clashes terribly with, say, a suit or button-down. There's more to "clothing is a social weapon" than just the actual clothes themselves, which is part of why it's not purely a p2w game.
Do you have a reasonably well dressed, socially-normal female friend who'd be willing to go on a shopping spree with you?
Failing that, look at what other men (of suitable age/class/status) are wearing and copy that. Clothes should be appropriate in terms of fit, style, and occasion.
Fit is super important; well-fitting clothes will make you look good. A shop assistant can happily help you out here. The weirder the shape of your body is, the harder it will be.
Style: you mention you've got new boots, which is fine, but you shouldn't be wearing boots everywhere. Learn to pay attention to what's appropriate for different sorts of places, and dress appropriately.
Things not to buy, at least until you know what you're doing: any bright or unusual colours, any pattern other than a subtle stripe or check. T-shirts with messages on them, unless you're under the age of 20. Anything with a large visible logo. Athletic shoes unless you're actually exercising. Tommy Bahama.
Most of my peers in tech dress extremely casually. I'll probably mirror that in my work environment but in general I think this holds a lot of technical people back.
As for going clothes shopping with women, maybe it's just the women I know, but I have not found this super effective. Basically, they don't have a plan and don't really understand what I'm looking for. If I show them a pair of shirts they're really helpful at telling me which one is better but at forming an overall plan....
Honestly, I'm kind of more looking for someone who can maneuver around my limitations. Like the shoe thing you brought up. I am not at "here's 4 different nice shoes, how to maintain them, and some rough instructions on when to wear each." I am at "I probably shouldn't wear sneakers literally everywhere, what should I be wearing instead?" and then I need to wear that non-sneaker shoe for a year until I stop feeling like faking goober. Or my ongoing suspicion that I should tell my barber something other than "what I've got now, but shorter" but not like a long thing, just like a word I can tell the barber, like "Hey, give me the squiggerdoodle" and that will work.
+1 on copying. Some people have good success with trying to copy celebrities that have similar body structure as them.
I've done this. There are consultants who specialize in "dressing up nerds" so to speak which is a good criteria you can use while searching.
Generally they will help you clean up your closet (i.e. throw away clothes that don't fit you, are dated, or are worn out, etc) and either go shopping with you a few times, or do it virtually with online shopping. They may also come up with a clothing plan if you have some specific objective to your personal style, but probably you don't need that.
The easiest way to communicate your ideas is to find photographs of men wearing the kind of clothes you want, along with what kinds of activities you'll be doing.
Do you have links to those consultants? I probably need one but I don't know how to find a good one (or even to judge between a good and a bad one).
Seconded
You could try something like https://www.outfittery.com/ . I like the idea but have never tried it, so I cannot speak from experience.
One of the supposed use cases for crypto that gets bandied around a lot, is a stable currency for residents of developing countries. Sometimes you'll see these emotionally-framed arguments (almost always from someone in the developed world)- 'you don't know what it's like to have an unstable/inflationary currency if you live in Argentina/Africa/Pakistan/random 3rd world country, etc. Inflation takes all your gains, the government can steal your savings out of your bank account at any time, and US dollars are only available on the black market. Bitcoin/PonziCoin/whatever is the only humane solution for the 3rd world'. While I live quite comfortably in the 1st world, reading about say Argentina's travails (Google their currency inflation woes) does show this to be very true for their citizens. Remember that Facebook's now-shuttered currency scheme involved utopian language around 'banking the global unbanked' or whatever.
So, uh, why don't we just make it easier for residents of developing countries to use stable currencies from functioning governments, as opposed to crypto? The US dollar, euro, yen, British pound, Swiss franc and others are vastly more protected from inflation than any 3rd world country's currency- and they're a million times more practical to use for actual payments than anything in crypto. A few countries have officially adopted the US dollar as their currency (Ecuador, El Salvador and Panama, to varying degrees). Dollars are apparently in extremely high demand on the black market of unstable countries, precisely for their stability.
My understanding is that the real bottleneck here is the banking system. Local governments can outlaw the dollar or euro usage, and it'd be tough to have a regulated bank that could offer seizure-proof accounts in those currencies to say every person in Argentina. Anyways, I don't really have a point here other than rambling a bit, but I feel like 'let's find a way for the 3rd world to use stable currencies backed by actual governments' is vastly more practical than most crypto schemes. (Or perhaps there's a synthesis, like a US dollar stablecoin)
I agree with you. Swiss bank accounts for non-residents have been a thing for a long time now, and, similarly, it should be perfectly possible for a company such as Revolut or Transferwise to provide banking services to residents of unfriendly countries.
People would prefer US dollars over their crappy local currency. As you note, local banking systems make this hard and are used by governments as points of control. History is full of government seizures of people's assets kept in banks.
US stablecoins (e.g. Tether) *are* used around the world as it lets people hold dollars on their cell phone, out of the reach of government. There's still a challenge with censorship as these stablecoins are all centrally controlled and so you can be blacklisted. Work is ongoing to create decentralized stablecoins that would ameliorate this issue (e.g. Taro on Bitcoin's lightning network).
As you note, El Salvador adopted US dollars as their currency. So why did they make Bitcoin legal tender? Because US dollars, as relatively stable as they are, still leak 2 to 3% of their value in a good year and about 8% now. Trillions in pandemic spending in the US made El Salvadorans poorer as they got none of that spending but got the hit on their devalued currency. Bitcoin is a way to opt out of discretionary monetary policies by central bankers who might have interests not aligned with the global populace.
Bitcoin has a nondiscretionary monetary policy. Currently, 900 are produced per day and the supply has increased 1.77% from a year ago. At the next halving in March 2024 450 bitcoin will be produced per day. Bitcoin has lower leakage than the world's reserve currency :)
The monetary inflation is 1.77%. A brand new asset with essentially a fixed supply (21 million) will have its price almost purely determined by demand, so volatility is expected as billions try to figure out and understand its properties. Volatility will decrease over time as understanding spreads.
The decentralized protocol is steady as she goes though, which is more than can be said for deliberate and severe global devaluation of national currencies. Upwards volatility over time with bitcoin or steady decline in value with govt currency; everyone will determine the right balance for themselves between the two.
Isn't this just colonialism? The reason you can't do this is because those third world countries have a national identity. Your bank trucks full of dollar bills will be blow up by "fredom fighters" and the blue checks will call everyone trying to help them use dollars a racist.
To my understanding those countries moved to dollars on the plan of their own governments not because the US state department/CIA/ us banks/ other non native powers orchestrated it as a gift from white people to poor brown people who are clearly too stupid to just use dollars.
I doubt the people are too stupid to use dollars, hence the black market. The government, on the other hand, is always capable of doing colossally stupid things.
I was throwing shade on the idea that we need to strong arm people into using dollars. I'm not interested in helping the natives fight their government.
Let’s say a million people from your unstable currency country decided they wanted to use dollars instead of their local currency (ULC).
Where would they get those dollars from? They’d have to sell the ULCs they receive from work/pensions/savings etc and buy dollars. But what happens then to the exchange rate for the ULC? With all those new sellers of the ULC selling into the market, The a mount of dollars they’d get for their ULCs would decline, and eventually head to zero . In that event, the prices everyone else in the country has to pay to import necessities priced globally in dollars, like oil and gas, for example, soar.
Everyone in the USC is then much worse off: those who continue to use the USC because they’re paying much higher prices for everything, and those who sell their USC for dollars because they get far fewer of them.
That’s why your idea doesn’t work.
And yet Ecuador and El Salvador use the US dollar as their currency- they don't have their own. Panama uses the dollar as the majority currency, and their own as a minority one. Previously, all of these countries had their own exclusive currency, for decades if not over a hundred years. How did they make the switch then if this 'doesn't work'?
They almost certainly implemented it from the top down. The government of El Salvador can tax people in Salvadoran Nothingburgers, use that tax money to purchase dollars as part of more-or-less normal government-level fiscal policy, and then switch by starting to pay public-sector wages in dollars while still accepting Nothingburgers as legal tender for some time. The Salvadoran government can also threaten to shoot people who complain too hard about the negative effects of the changeover, but those are likely to be significantly lower since the Salvadoran Nothingburger, as a fiat currency, is an invention of the state supported by its use in taxation anyway.
In the case of other small countries it's entirely feasible for them to have gone directly from gold-backed currency to using the dollar.
A lot of less developed countries have fixed exchange rate with dollar or euro. That essentially makes them dollar (euro) and the local currency is just technicality. Even Cuba used to have their currency fixed to the US dollar. I found this very weird considering their sour relationships with the US including US embargo. Prices of petrol and other imported goods are kept low by government subsidies in different convoluted ways.
During post-Soviet period the US dollar was also a lot in Russia and the government had to ban its use to strengthen the rouble. Even then the prices were still indicated in reference units with the small footnote that the reference unit is equal to amount of roubles that equal to the dollar exchange rate set by the Russian central bank.
I think it is inevitable that countries with unstable economies will try to use the currencies that are more stable (dollars, euros, yuan etc.) and the government will need to implement strict controls to prevent that. I don't know about Salvador but in a way it was probably very easy for them to switch to dollar because the population was already using it and setting prices of anything substantial in dollars anyway.
My understanding is that the embrace of crypto by developing countries isn't entirely due to inflation. That can certainly be a factor, but the bigger issue is streamlining international transactions. Any effort to ease the use of dollars etc. could be easily regulated by the local national government. As you sort of pointed out in your original comment, the countries where crypto is biggest are places where a non-negligible portion of their GDP is comprised of people in Europe and North America sending remittances home, and where either:
1. The local banks are deeply flawed or nonexistent. If you had a relative in Afghanistan right now, how would you get them money? What banks remain are controlled by the Taliban, and money transfer services (which also aren't free) won't operate.
2. Foreign transfers are heavily taxed, restricted, or prohibited.
3. The local government is sufficiently authoritarian that it will force banks to freeze or seize your bank account for what they describe as subversive activities.
With the arguable exception of 3, the people of the "developed" world have never had to deal with any of that at scale.
Who is the "we" that should be making it easier for residents of developing countries to use existing stable currencies, and how should be we be doing that?
It isn't the governments of the US, EU, UK, Japan, and/or Switzerland who are making it difficult for developing-country citizens to use their currencies. They mostly either don't care, or quietly encourage the use of their currencies anywhere anyone is inclined to do so, for a number of obvious reasons.
It is the governments of those developing countries who are making it difficult. In some cases "just" by insisting that all non-elite government employees be paid in [local crap currency] and that all taxes be paid in [local crap currency], trusting that transaction costs will take care of the rest. But also sometimes by sending their uniformed enforcers to shut down anyone visibly doing business with [stable first-world currency]. That's why dollars, etc, are strictly a black-market thing in some parts of the world.
So, what should "we" be doing about it? I believe Scott once raised the possibility that the most cost-effective humanitarian intervention was a Predator drone, fully armed for the purpose of exploding the people causing the most grief to residents of developing countries. And I'm sympathetic to that belief, but there are reasons to be very, very careful about going down that path. What else would you recommend?
>Who is the "we" that should be making it easier for residents of developing countries to use existing stable currencies
Well, as a fairly nationalistic American, I was thinking the US could quietly encourage such a thing- to help maintain the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. My understanding as a non-SME is that there are huge network effects to being the reserve currency, and we're in pole position now, so if some kind of scrappy startup figured out a way to provide eurodollar(1) transactions to the citizens of say Argentina or Pakistan or Nigeria.... Seems like a good thing. Or alternately, we could at least be blocking China from doing the same.
>how should be we be doing that?
Some kind of electronic peer-to-peer payment & deposit tech that uses eurodollars. Sure Argentina will be mad about it, but when their whole country is paying each other directly in stable dollars and ignoring the regulations- it's tough to lock everyone up.... Anyways, the US specializes in scrappy startups that just ignore the rules in order to achieve market supremacy(2)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar 'In 2016, the Eurodollar market size was estimated at around 13.833 trillion'
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber
Heh, as native inhabitant of the Eurozone, and having learned almost all economica & finance I know after the introduction of the Euro, I initially thought you were sing "eurodollar" as a kind of variable, ie $Stable_Western_Currency (which _did_ make me a bit confused in relation to your identifying as a "fairly nationalistic American") -
until I got to the Wiki-article :D
TDIL finance lingo uses the prefix "euro-" to effectively mean roughly some variation of "(at least in part) not subject to the immediate control of our fiscal policy & regulations because nations and being somehow not entirety within ours" -
whether they be time deposits in USD held in other countries, or securities not denominated in the local currency.
Thanks :)
It makes sense given the history, but I find it interesting and/or weird-feeling that this finance lingo use of the term seems to effectively have shed any meaning of any conncetion to Europe (except the historical one, I suppose), and now essentially seems to just mean smth like "abroad" or "foreign"!
To me, it humourously mirrors the idea of the stereotype of that particular kind of American who seldom, or never, stepped foot outside the country, and - while he may even be quite smart, skilled, and/or educated in other areas - seems to think of the World as effectively being two countries, "America" and "Not-America" :)
(Tbf, even in the purest forms of this, the latter is often sub-divided into the two countries of "Not-America, but kinda alright, if weird and unreliable" and "Not-America, Not Our Friends.")
It seems to me like the purer forms of this kind of thinking have become a lot rarer/more diluted, probably due to the Internet?
Though there's still lots of entertainment emerging from what remains of this kind of "other-country-blindless" :)
Imo such perspectives can even be endearing and adorable - in the absence of obnoxious arrogance or unearned/misplaced pride
> To me, it humourously mirrors the idea of the stereotype of that particular kind of American who seldom, or never, stepped foot outside the country, and - while he may even be quite smart, skilled, and/or educated in other areas - seems to think of the World as effectively being two countries, "America" and "Not-America" :)
The only context in which the name of the World Series makes sense.
Thank you for reading through all that! ;)
That comment got a lot longer than expected, bc
after the "Thanks (which was kinda the originally intended endpoint), I basically just started dumping the subsequent chain of mental associations triggered by that little bit of finance-lingo knowledge, until it branched too much and I managed to stop myself
How would that startup make money? How would that startup onboard users? If they have to use Visa/MasterCard to get money into their system then a lot of people are already out. (Plus, since Visa/MC is just a big and super complex settlement framework between banks, built by banks for banks, it means that the source banks, ie. the local banks, won't be happy about it, and as soon as the startup becomes widespread enough to get banned, they'll be the first to comply happily.)
Similarly, Uber was banned in many countries without much fanfare.
One interesting negative consequence of the US dollar used as the world's settlement currency, is that US wages are suppressed. (Basically it's like the "resource curse", but instead of oil, the US is cursed with global reserve currency deposits. This makes exports from the US to other parts of the world more expensive. This drives out sectors that don't work on exporting more dollars. Ie. anything that's not investment/finance. In turn, to keep some manufacturing in the US there are many protective tariffs enacted, which further hurts US competitiveness, leads to perverse incentives, regulatory capture, and serious problems like the baby formula shortage, due to the combination of the aforementioned tariffs & government subsidies-driven-monopolization.)
https://archive.ph/M3fTB
There are multiple USD stablecoins.
So, what most people miss is that it's the tax system. (Not really the banking system. That's just the executive branch. Banks will always fill the legal niche of money handling, but they are absolutely powerless in those countries.) You can have any kind of "seizure-proof" whatever, but the moment there's some real value in these accounts the tax system will adapt, and banks have to report it. And even if it's not recoverable, the tax is due.
"Crypto" might be able to compete with Venmo/TransferWise/WesternUnion, eventually with Visa/MasterCard (if efficient arbitration mechanisms are built). But all of these are simply convenience things. At crypto can make it easier to leave a country like Argentina.
But obviously most people suffering from the bad policies don't want to leave.
Crypto is useless if only buyers have it.
And if merchants in Argentina were to start accepting crypto openly they would be easy targets for the tax man.
So crypto has limited usability. Maybe in a decade, when it might become a lot more commonplace.
Didn't one of those stablecoins recently implode rather spectacularly?
Yes! The TERA/LUNA shitshow, it was an algorithmic ...coin. It was definitely not stable enough :D
The remaining ones are also problematic, because who knows where the reserves are. (Are there even reserves?) USDC seems the most trustworthy, which is crypto is ... meh. (They publish some kind of attestations.)
> I feel like 'let's find a way for the 3rd world to use stable currencies backed by actual governments' is vastly more practical than most crypto schemes.
It feels true, doesn't it? Just like how it feels true that it should be easier to get banks to coordinate standard improvements rather than inventing a whole new pseudo-banking system.
Nevertheless, it's not. That is a sad statement about large parts of the banking industry perhaps. But it's still the reality.
But why can't a scrappy startup offer a product with direct payment & deposit options in dollars to residents of other countries? Sure, it's technically against the rules, but (gesticulates at the history of every American startup in the last 20 years, including Uber). It starts with say every street vendor in Mexico, Honduras, Peru, whatever paying each other that way- then money transfers from the US- then businesses start to quietly accept it off the books. Yes regulators in those countries will be Big Mad about it, but it's tough to stop a decentralized mass of your own citizens who all use said app. Are they gonna lock everyone up?
Voiceover from a documentary in the year 2122: 'In the early 21st century, some believed the American dollar's reign as reserve currency was up. But network effects from its existing dominance plus a proliferation of new payment tech, plus high desirability, actually entrenched its use globally, and now 82% of countries use the dollar exclusively. Believe it or not, countries like Argentina actually used to issue their own currency!' Etc.
If it's decentralized then that is cryptocurrency! If it's not decentralized, if it's a ledger/clearing house system like most banks use, then authorities are well used to dealing with them and will still be able to regulate it. They don't need to lock everyone up, they can simply pressure the centralized company that controls the clearing house/ledgers. The rise of digital banking in the last twenty years has given huge additional powers to such governments.
Now, it might be better for there to be a Dollar Coin like the Digital Yuan rather than individual cryptocurrencies. That's a separate question.
The modern monetary theory response is likely, "the ultimate demand generator for a currency is taxes." Your local café in East Fakeistan can accept US dollars all it wants, but if your average Fakestani has to cough up several thousands of the local currency every year or get hauled off to prison, the exchange rate is always going to matter.
This. Plus any regulator will require books in local currency. That’s less important in places like Afghanistan (which still uses its own previously issued paper currency, which is now physically wearing out) than places like Argentina (with sophisticated and sometimes highly politicized regulatory bodies).
US dollar is fairly stable, and surely the exchange rates change is much worse in crypto?
The deeper point here is that why should any unit of value be tied to a government's monetary scheme. Sure, it would be a band-aid for the citizens of developing countries to have easy access to stablecoins (and many of them do, and many of them choose to transact on the rails of BSC and TRX which blows my mind). But governments around the world right now are levered to the tits in their own debt, and servicing it under the premise that GDP will forever grow.
You worked hard for that dollar bill in your hand, so why should the whims of a central bank decide whether it is able to buy a lollipop or not from one day to the next?
Well, the whole central banking thing is quite new as far as human history goes, and there was tons & tons of inflation long before they were invented. And also lots of other historical attempts at non-government backed money, from the 'free banking' era and probably lots of older attempts before that. It's not like a non-government backed system wouldn't have inflation.
Not to rehash endless arguments about crypto which probably have billions of pixels already written about them. But, as it stands today, I don't see that crypto is technically or logistically there to be used a currency. Maybe someday it will be! But the El Salvador Bitcoin experiment is crashing and burning etc. It's not there yet. Meanwhile, the currency used by the world's superpower.... is? Why not just use that?
12th grade English teacher here in the state of Florida. I believe that our education system has no idea what it wants to signify by a student having earned a high school diploma. This fact is responsible for a whole lot of the dumb things about our experiences teaching.
If you were to look up the official version of what the high school diploma means, it would be something about having adequately mastered the educational standards up until that point. But educational policy is not aligned with this. I regularly have a students A who enter 12th grade having already surpassed the level of proficiency in the standards that student B will ever achieve. If both are going to graduate and Student A has this proficiency at the very beginning of the year, why should he not have the option to opt/test out of the rest of the year? Because the system want them to sit in classes.
So this means that another part of what the high school diploma signifies is that you sat in classes. What exactly is the value of this? I mean, it’s not that this student will learn nothing sitting in class (if he has achieved this level of knowledge already, likely has the curiosity to at least take some advantage of the fact that he has to be there), but shouldn’t that be his choice if he has already reached the standard that is required for earning a diploma?
And there are plenty of students who are going to graduate who have only the most rudimentary grasp of the standards. The bar is so so low…. In truth, the “sitting in class” portion of.what the diploma means seems to outweigh the actual mastery of standards signification of what the diploma means. Which is just so demoralizing because then it makes me feel like a glorified babysitter….
What would I propose? Bring back multiple diploma levels. Allow students who have passed the 10th grade state test but aren’t planning to go to college to opt out of upper level English and math classes in favor of vocational educational or apprenticeship programs. Maybe track the students who don’t pass that test into different courses or sections for remediation so that then your 11th and 12th grade English and math classes will have students who both want to be in them, and are at a comparable level of proficiency.
Think of yourself as being in the business of passing out lottery tickets. You never know when something you say or do -- even as small a thing as an offhand comment, a tone of voice, a slightly different way of putting the same old thing -- will be the match that causes the tinder in some surly uncouth 17-year-old mind to suddenly catch fire.
Did nothing like that ever happen to you? Some striking inspirational bolt from the blue, a brief strange interaction between teacher and student (in the earlier case you) which left a permanent mark? Caused you to get suddenly serious about learning in one way or another, discover an area of permanent intellectual enjoyment, change the course of your future. It certainly happened to me, more than once, and neither I (of course) nor I think my teachers could have predict edwhen and where lightning would strike -- what turns on the lights in some developing adolescent mind.
So that's pretty much a large part of what you're doing. You send out the regular stream of learning, 90% of which your average student will forget in a month, and 98% of which they'll forget in a year, and in the meantime you are also....just passing out the lottery tickets. If you teach long enough, you'll get a steady trickle of winners, a student somewhere randomly will catch fire from what you say, and you'll have been personally responsible for an epiphany that will drive that person forward 30 years after you've returned to the dust. That's actually pretty cool. Not many people have the chance to make that kind of difference. But you're spinning a roulette wheel, there's no guarantee of when and where it will happen.
This is a fantastic perspective. I’m really fortunate to teach at a school where students aren’t out to make my life miserable, as is the case in plenty of schools I’ve taught in, so I can actually teach.
Even though I wote my post with a pretty ego-centric perspective (“I feel like a babysitter”) my bigger concern is really for wasting the time of the students whose abilities are “good enough” but don’t have any interest in further study. Is forcing students to sit and receive lottery tickets really the best use of *their* time in school?
On that point I generally agree with you, and I surely do wish we had more flexibility and imagination in the system. Heck, if you want to argue that the distance between what we actually do and what we *could* do in terms of educating young people is just jaw-droppingly large, deeply discouraging considering there's very little we do of greater import than training our replacements and that we've had freaking millenia to work out the principles -- I'd be with you 100%.
But how we get from the world we live in to a better world, I don't know. I know how to teach pretty well (if the results and student response is any guide), but I have no idea how to organize a whole school to be full of good teachers and good students with good parents at home, and slot it effectively into the actual society into which those students will be thrust willy nilly.
I think a school system designed to optimise for that looks incredibly different to the status quo one (and would be a substantial improvement over it in most regards).
A school-teacher whose primary role is seen by society as babysitting is not exactly primed to be inspirational, even if a few are passionate enough to manage it anyway
In a lot of ways you are a babysitter and the fact that a lot of school is one-size-fits-all type programs makes it terribly inefficient. However, many states have different versions of the diploma that they give out. It's been a while, but AFAIK New York State still has at least 3 different diplomas you could receive:
1. NYS Diploma
-the regular baseline one
2. NYS Diploma with Advanced Distinction
-I believe you had to take and pass many additional regents exams to get this one.
3. NYS Diploma with Advanced Distinction and Honors.
-I believe this one you had to average over 90% on those regents exams.
You are 90% a babysitter. That is the actual reality.
The state of Washington had (has?) the Running Start program, where sophomore kids who test well enough can go to college on the high school's tab for their last years. So, yeah, Florida could fix it if they wanted.
In my high school (ages ago) there were different tracks for stronger students vs the rest, namely AP, and it was extremely useful (we had some great AP classes). Tracking has become increasingly politically aligned so this might be a harder battle to institutde.
All the diplomas are the "same" but it's clear to colleges that some students have multiple APs and other students don't.
There is some value in a high school diploma which signals that the students was able to go to class and do the bare minimum required to graduate. Bryan Caplan's book goes into this, but basically there are still a lot of students who are unable to manage even that (and you almost certainly don't want to hire them for even low-skill jobs).
Yeah, those still exist. I’m more thinking of what a waste of time it is for students who have no interest in English, but have definitely acquired the level of proficiency that would satisfy the state’s requirements, to need to sit in class all year long when they could spend that time much more profitably in some vocational or apprenticeship program.
So, just a few factors that are contributing to the system:
1) Most funding (state, but also federal) is tied to the number of students in school. What this means is that having students graduate early is damaging to most school's fundings, since the marginal cost of an extra student is probably usually lower than the amount they get in funding.
2) A common thing that gets bandied around is that "weaker students do better when there are stronger students in the class." This is a pretty standard argument against tracking (Honors etc), and is pretty unsurprising, since stronger students will often help out weaker students. Of course, at that point you're admitting that you're leveraging your top students to supplement your teachers, but it's definitely a common reason.
3) See point 1, but replaced with graduation rates. If you let students drop out, even ones who really should, you lose funding.
Is there good empirical evidence for the claim in #2?
I read an article once about "pair programming" (two students at one computer) that said people often assume you'd get the best results from pairing a strong student with a weak student, but actually this mostly results in the weak student being unable to follow what the strong student is doing. The article claimed you get better results from pairing 2 weak students together so that they can mutually help each other, and that strong students might as well work alone because they don't gain any benefit from being paired.
Hmm only one data point, but a big of my success all through academia, was getting the smarter kids to help me with problems. I did more of this in college and grad school than in high school. Perhaps my favorite was Badut Bhattacharya, he was in the physics lab next door, he'd help with my problem, but then also give me a different problem to solve before I got to ask the next question. I learned twice as much.
No, I always rabidly opposed it as a student and honestly never cared enough to look into the other side’s arguments.
As an instructor now, all I have is anecdata, which also says that the study you’re referencing was poorly structured. If a top student is bound to someone they know will be a burden, they’ll do all the work themselves. Makes total sense. I think you get the gains by getting the top students to be friends with the weaker students, so that they can sort of side-tutor them. Generally my opinion would be that a school shouldn’t be fully tracked, aka students should have some Honors/remedial classes, and some that everyone does.
All correct. I do agree with the argument against tracking to some extent, but really what students need by the time they are in 12th grade are so divergent that it can easily be completely different classes.
On of my colleagues dropped out of high school on the day he was allowed to take the GED - age 16 in California - and as soon as he passed it, he enrolled in junior college. Two years later, when his high school classmates were graduating, he transferred into UCLA as a junior. He was done with undergrad before he turned 21 and is now in a top medical school. It doesn't seem that his unconventional path hurt his progress, and when we talked about it, we were both puzzled about why more people don't do that. My guess was: complacency and conformism.
What I would worry about is adequate preparation in incremental fields such as math. Could I really go from taking grade 10 math to first-year non-remedial college-level math without having taken whatever math is typically taught in grades 11 and 12 first? Seems like a stretch. And if I can't, I'd basically be studying highschool-level material in community college.
Maybe. In my case I could have, hypothetically. I learned algebra in grades 8 and 9, and what is now called pre-calculus -- basically a grab-bag of analytical geometry, trig, sequences, linear algebra -- in 10th, so I began differential calculus, which is the normal freshman college math course, in 11th grade.
Absolutely you can. Intro to say call in college is totally fine for a smart 10th grader.
Mumble. I seem to remember the typical slow track for math in an American high school is
Freshman: Algebra 1
Sophmore: Geometry
Junior: Algebra 2
Senior: Pre-Calc
But it's often possible to skip the very review-intensive Algebra 1, and start one year up, so the sequence is
Freshman: Geometry
Sophomore: Algebra 2
Junior: Pre-Calc
Senior: Calculus
Presumably anyone contempating skipping half of high school and going on to community college is in the advanced track, so all they would be missing is Pre-Calc. I'm not quite sure what's covered in Pre-Calc, but I think it's mostly trig. Combinations and permutations? Complex numbers?
Students who desire to go to college should definitely be advised to continue to take math and English classes throughout their high school career. I’m mainly thinking about those students who aren’t interested in going to college.
This was a theoretical path for me growing up...but all my peers who tried that route had a really rough time of it. Not due to academics - obviously no one leaves early for college unless they're already upper-tier grades - but the "redshirting" issues were daunting. Maybe it's worse for teenage girls vs guys, I dunno? It's tough to get an accurate measure of someone's...temperament? Maturity? Social eptitude? Going to college is already a challenging enough environmental change for those who wait and do it "the normal way". Payoffs can be immense though...wasting fewer prime life-years in inefficient education seems like an underexplored cause area, to use EA terminology.
I think people can be ready for an undergraduate education without being ready to move out of home, so living near enough to a decent university to commute there might be a significant factor
I for sure should have done this. My school sort of briefly mentioned it as an option before discouraging me. But looking back it 100% is what I should have done. The social part is hard though if you have friends and girlfriends.
I'm not sure the GED is really necessary When I was a college sophomore (quite a while ago, so the rules may have changed) I discovered that the places I was applying to did not actually require a high school diploma. I was looking mostly at ivies. So I applied as a high school junior and was accepted at several schools. I have a PhD, a BA, but no high school diploma.
The school system actively discouraged it. Kids who go that path are counted as dropouts in their metrics (at least in FL).
Wait... is your system of high school qualifications a boolean? Universities and recruiters only get one bit of information on how somebody did at school?
Not broken down by grade (so a B student can work on becoming an A student whereas an E student can work on becoming a D student) or subject?
No -- students certainly get grades. But a lot of students don’t really care about grades and just want to pass so they can graduate.
So? Help them do that.
I think it's absolutely clear that the education system in most countries is completely divorced from the actual needs of society, kids, youth, students, families, parents, etc.
And when teachers started to actually teach kids politics got in the way. (Woo history is spooky, let's ban books, CRT and so on.)
It's a very unenviable position for everyone involved.
Germany is big on the vocational model. It seems to be working for them. But with such social support net probably everything would "work".
As long as the underlying causes are not addressed these conflicts between the interests of stronger/weaker students can't be resolved fairly, and every kind of tracking will be just different kind of bad workarounds with different trade-offs.
Yeah, I have no problem helping them to pass. I’m just saying that a student who has gained the level of proficiency that would satisfy the state’s standards and who has no other interest in English class or college could be using his time much more profitably in vocational or apprenticeship classes than in 12th grade English.
Y'know, I've had similar thought a few years back, but applied to higher education:
Everyone wants to go to university to not look like a rube, despite many university having over 30% failures per year. 18-years old would rather waste 2 years studying litterature than not having went at all -my country's universities cost between 4 and 400€per year, so the individual cost is mostly of opportunity-. Thus there ought to be some vocational university, built around a system of "major/minor" akin to the US (or akin to what I imagine the US to be, whatever): Major in plumbering, Minor in philosophy. Major as an electrician, Minor in history. Enjoy the higher part of higher-ed, but still get a useful job at the end (instead of starting again 2 or 3 times until you manage a diploma).
On the other hand, I recently discovered that my science university had a wood-working department, so maybe "vocational higher-ed" exist already and I wasn't aware (perhaps because there isn't much demand for it, actually)
I think the issue is that status has become so unlinked from usefulness of the education - if you want to be financially well-off, training in a trade is better than almost any university degree
As Pas notes, Germany has a system that largely resembles your final paragraph (France - sort of - does, too). But as much as I would support it (state university English prof here) a comprehensive vocational/college-prep split in the U.S. would make race and class disparities so in-your-face that I doubt it would survive. Instead we encourage everyone to “go to college” (meaning about four or five different things, depending on institution) where most schools end up being credentialing factories for lower middle-class clerical work and caring professions.
Not speaking for Scott, of course, but it would seem to be more promising for American society if there were more reasonable, intelligent Republicans than crazed, uneducated wingnuts. More Mitt Romneys and fewer Majorie Taylor Greens.
Putting aside Republican or Democrat labels,, I personally find it hard to see the appeal of being socially conservative. Things that most Americans now accept as normal, and even essential, like women voting, civil rights, recognition of Native American rights, mixed race marriages, Social Security and other safety net programs, homosexual relationships between consenting adults, marriage equality, and on and on, were opposed by the conservatives of the era, sometimes even in later eras.
So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling.
I noticed somewhere down below that you posted a comment condemning something as "dystopian as fuck". It occurs to me that if you apply that feeling to many of the measures that progressives propose and conservatives oppose, you'll likely have accurately modeled the mindset of such conservatives on those measures.
If one of those measures seems hard for you to see as dystopian, you might also need to consider the consequences of carrying out those measures. Possibly while assuming conservative premises; possibly while merely assuming basic economics. (The latter consequences are frequently and helpfully labelled as "unintended" in the literature.)
I think the other comments about how historically conservatives opposed progressive efforts that we now see as lamentable (eugenics, etc.) are very valuable and key to the question of "why would anyone choose to be socially conservative". But I do think that you've identified something key here, which is that current American "conservatism" has a strong reactionary streak - a lot of main stream conservatives seem to still be fighting to undo changes to society that are broadly recognized as positive.
Some of those changes, like gay marriage, are still relatively recent but incredibly popular. Others like access to birth control are sufficiently longstanding that changing the law of the land can't be seen as conservative in a Chesterton's fence sense. Ultimately, I think this generates - at least in the US - a sense that "conservatism" isn't a very robust position, when in fact the opposite is true - that to be a conservative is a perfectly historically aware political position, but one that doesn't see eye to eye with some mainstream US politicians who identify as "conservative".
I'm 100% in favor of people having access to birth control. But in terms of Chesterson's Fence, the impacts of something like birth control aren't going to be quickly apparent. There are people who believe that the American birth rate should be higher than it is. (I'm not one of them.) There are also those who point out that birth control can potentially alter women's mate selection.
https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(09)00263-8#:~:text=Such%20monthly%20shifts%20in%20mate,mid%2Dcycle%20change%20in%20preferences.
One idea that seems obvious to me that some people are resistant to is that some social changes can take generations for their implications to fully manifest.
I do agree that that’s where a lot of the conservative bordering on reactionary thought comes in, but it’s not at all clear to me that “this has had clear positive effects for three generations” but maybe it’s actually bad counts as an example of Chesterton’s fence - it might actually be bad, but at some point enough time has passed the reversion to older policies isn’t really “conservative”.
" “this has had clear positive effects for three generations” but maybe it’s actually bad counts as an example of Chesterton’s fence"
While I'm very much in favor of people being in control of their own bodies, there are other people who contest the assertion that birth control has had 'clear positive effects for three generations.' They worry that there are not enough young workers to support those on Social Security. They seem to favor continual population growth to some extent. Or at least that people have more children in each generation who do not, then, produce grandchildren but who still work.
*I* think the world is wildly over-populated. But there *are* people who lament falling birth rates and who believe that they will lead to a crisis eventually in a few decades.
"but at some point enough time has passed the reversion to older policies isn’t really “conservative”.
That's part of the sticking point. *How* do we determine what is 'enough time?' There are some people who argue for very short time frames being sufficient and some who sincerely argue for very long time frames being required.
Lets say that private gun ownership helps prevent a dictatorial takeover. Lets say the average dictatorial takeover attempt happens every 120 years. And lets assume, arguendo, that, absent a dictatorial takeover, disarmament of a population offers benefits in terms of fewer people being killed.
For how long would disarmament need to be "successful" before we can say that we've successfully torn down Chesterson's Fence? I'd argue for a timeframe of greater than 150 years in this case. However there are quite a lot of people who would scoff at such a long time frame.
I think this is very true. There's a very real sense in which a lot of modern reaction is LARPing, or more a desire to return to a previous social arrangement they no longer have any organic connection to.
So, on sexual norms for example, the Baby Boomers changed a lot of sexual norms during the 60's. Now a lot of Millennials are entering their late 30's and early 40's without stable relationships and they're noting a lot of problems with the new sexual norms. The desire to go back to the pre-Boomer sexual norms, however, isn't really conservative because they have no organic, living connection to the pre-Boomer generations; the Silent and Greatest generations are long gone. In fact, if you look around reactionary thinkers, you'll notice a lot of highly educated former leftists living...not leftist but very blue/coastal lives. A yearning for things they've read about but rarely genuinely experience.
Access to birth control is a case of taking down the fence, getting gored reliably and repeatedly, and then just declaring mission accomplished and moving on.
What is the analogy to the goring in the birth control case?
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling."
Why would you want to kill millions of kulaks?
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling" say the people responsible for the Noyades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes
"The drownings at Nantes (French: noyades de Nantes) were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, that occurred between November 1793 and February 1794. During this period, anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, was cast into the river Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes. Before the drownings ceased, as many as four thousand or more people, including innocent families with women and children, died in what Carrier himself called "the national bathtub"."
Today's anodyne "right side of history" is yesteryear's "extremely radical bleeding-edge social change which has everyone up in arms, sometimes literally". Some of us just don't want to live life in that kind of volatile fast lane. Give me a solid base of fundamentals first - widespread material abundance, housing and jobs, security and stability - and *then* maybe I'll have some bandwidth to spare worrying about what new forms of sexuality and altered mental states to allow inside the Overton window. It's putting the kitchen table before the horse, to use a mixed metaphor.
Although I've always wondered if living in SF is a big part of me being relatively socially conservative. It's one thing to cheer on #LoveMeansLove or whatever from the safety of a bumper sign, yard sticker, or social media bio. Another to actually live with the crazies, look around at the carnival of fantastical absurdities *in practice*, and say...not for me, thanks. Perhaps there's a bit of a thermostatic/reactionary relationship between social permissiveness and living situation: back when I used to live in a small conservative town, I was definitely way more all-in on progessive-everything. (And New Atheism. Embarrassing times.) Temperamentally contrarian, I suppose...
ETA: I very much wish for a sane GOP again, though. The current incarnation is basically a rent-seeking apparatus for conservatism; people who are too epistemically-stubborn to bend the knee to liberal orthodoxy get branded as heretics, so where else are they supposed to spend protest votes? Vibes matter so much more than actual concrete policies, sadly. (Or perhaps Feature Not Bug.)
Well, famous ideas on the left also include eugenics and forced sterilizations, the gulag and Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, Cabrini Green and "the projects," CHAZ and Defund The Police, BLM riots and torching downtown Portland business to...um...something to do with justice I'm sure.
Conservatives are generally reluctant to embrace *all* new ideas -- that's what "conservattive" means. Just like mom is reluctant to embrace most of the new ideas of teenage boys to jump off the roof safely. We know enthusiasts are wrong about whether their ideas will lead to peace 'n' love 'n' plenty or unforeseen freaking disaaster about 90% of the time[1]. The fact that every now and then one of their new ideas works out just fine means that, yes, both mom and conservatives do end up on the wrong side of history from time to time.
--------------------
[1] FTX seemed like a brilliant idea about a year ago, right? And all these sticks-in-the-mud financial conservatives would've growled dyspeptically and advised you to wait and see before investing everything you'd ever saved. Same idea.
Prohibition also goes on the list of bad left-wing ideas.
Is Prohibition left-wing? I would have thought it analogous to modern anti-drug laws, which are generally classified as right-wing.
Anti-drug laws initially received strong support from the African American community. Prohibition was strongly framed as a 'Women's issue."
I don't know that 'left' vs 'right' wing are really good organizing schemas here, but even if those laws are coded, today, as 'right wing' they were, at the time they were initiated, often strongly supported by groups who are not associated with the Right Wing. It might be better to label them as authoritarian-centrist in origin.
Prohibition was the first major project of the Women's Suffrage movement once they had the vote and had to decide what to vote for. And to the extent that it had male adherents, they were mostly on the progressive left of the day, trying to Make People Better by enlightened coercion. You'll find a few extreme religious conservatives on the side of prohibition as well, but they weren't driving the movement.
The conservative take on alcohol is moderation, not prohibition, at least in most of the Western world. We've been drinking since the dawn of civilization; no need for hasty or drastic change.
While you're absolutely right about the left side of the Prohibition movement, I think you're underselling the right. A good chunk of Prohibitionism was driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, in a way that in the modern world would definitely code as right.
There was also a serious strain of the really vicious racism of that era, where drunk black people were likened to beasts and we needed to ban alcohol to protect society. I don't think that readily maps onto modern political divisions, it's simply too alien.
All of which is to say that I think Prohibition was bipartisan and broadly popular.
Being against immigration was a progressive tenet back then.
You think there was no one on the left in favor of drug laws?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
I'd seen Prohibition attributed to progressives, but the real story is more complicated. There were people on the left and the right supporting it. It was a Protestant vs. Catholic thing. There was a feminist aspect because women were legally apt to be dependent on their husbands, so an alcoholic husband was a disaster.
Perhaps the impulse to take charge of people for their own good isn't actually partisan. It can crop up anywhere.
I completely agree with your first paragraph.
But as for the rest, like Ryan W. said above, "survivorship bias". And not just that: you're almost advocating for the intellectual equivalent of "might makes right" - whatever idea survives is by definition good, and therefore what you want to have been believing all along. Which I find to be a profoundly dangerous concept, straight out of 1984.
100 years ago, it was considered progressive to take children away from backwards, primitive, uneducated tribal nationalists, and raise them according to modern progressive beliefs, because it was believed that that was what was best for the child and best for society. Today, it feels to me like we're heading toward the same place, just this time aimed at social conservatives instead of at American Indians. "Kill the Indian, save the man.", except applied to the Red Tribe. That feels very dangerous to me, even though it's easy to look up individual cases where it seems justified. It feels especially dangerous because currently the only brakes come in the form of "identity", which is vague and malleable and can be a net imperialistically cast over a population to claim that they have no right to their way of life. (Compare to "Ukrainians don't exist".)
In this particular case, I am definitely a social "conservative", in the sense that I think change might be needed, but we need to go slowly and carefully and be certain of what we're doing. (As opposed to a "reactionary" who is against change, or a "progressive" who thinks the benefits of change outweigh the possible costs (move fast and break things (being sure to fix them later)), or a "radical" who believes in scrapping the whole mess and starting over from scratch.)
With regard to "gay marriage" as a progressive idea/victory, that is in fact the victory of an old socially conservative institution. Marriage, despite all the criticisms and sexual politics theories, and despite what we ourselves have tried to hack away at it, has survived.
So it's ironic in one sense that "yes please, we want to be bound by the shackles of social conservatism in this case" is touted as progressive winning.
Marriage as an institution for a reason; it's existed for thousands of years in a recognizable format, and it exists across multiple cultures. Before you try to change it, you need to figure out what purpose it serves. This is especially true if marriage is a legal institution with benefits.
As a conservative, there are things we want to encourage:
1. Monogamous relationships
2. Having children
3. Children being supported by their biological parents (and, in turn, supporting them when they age)
Gay marriage helps 1 while it harms 2 and 3. You might think that the trade-off is worth it, but understand that there are reasons that other people might not accept that trade-off. Is this unfair to gays? Yes, but nothing is ever going to make the base biological truth 'you are attracted to someone with whom you can't produce offspring' fair.
There are adoptive families, also. Your model seems to exclude those? But given how horrid our foster system is, foster parents seem to be doing an important service.
Also, I think there's the view that encouraging stable relationships is a social positive from an STD standpoint.
Also, people exist in stable relationships even without official recognition. Recognition helps enormously with things like filing taxes, inheritance, social support, etc.
How does gay marriage harm 2?
This implies either that gay people would have children if they couldn't marry, or that gay marriage somehow discourages other people from having children. Maybe you have an alternative explanation that isn't completely absurd.
Not the OP, but lots of closeted gay people got married and had kids in the bad old days. It was what you did, so they did it. That this is gone is a good thing, IMO, but there's a clear mechanism where it results in less kids.
But that's an effect of the social acceptance and decriminalization of homosexuality, not of gay marriage specifically.
Presumably, there's a spectrum from straight to bi to gay, and people pick partners based on a number of criteria which can be influenced by social factors. If society encourages picking a partner based on short term factors like 'attractiveness' and 'how good they are in bed', then presumably the partner selection will skew differently than if society encourages picking partners based on long term factors, such as (importantly for this discussion) whether you can produce children. And we understand this, it's one of the reasons we have restrictions on intermarriage with close relatives; no matter how much you love your sibling, the risk that it will produce bad offspring is too great so it's successfully been made taboo.
The problem is that we've removed the taboos associated with sex to the point where 'I want to have sex with [x]' is an identity, and have pushed that short term gratification of sex outweighs their long-term thinking. And this produces its own tragedies; most people don't get to marry someone that's a perfect match, and that's a part of being human. And so, increasingly, when the sex fades or the relationship hits a small rocky patch, the lifetime partnership of marriage is thrown away, and both individuals involved are almost certainly never going to fully make up what was lost in terms of time and effort.
Gay marriage is a small part of the larger values problem of short term versus long term thinking, and the whole problem is that it plays out over generations. The genie isn't going to go back into the bottle, at least not by force and not without a lot of time. I think at this point the best we can hope for is a live and let live situation (though there will be idiots on both sides that try to use the law as a bludgeon to force things). The best way to get through this is to keep our civic institutions neutral and let people live by their own consciences whenever possible.
There's an issue with 3--there are many children where this isn't possible, due to death and abuse. I guarantee you those children are better off with a same-sex couple than with abusive parents or in continuous foster care. 2 has a lesser issue that same-sex couples can still have children through surrogates or donors, but I don't know how common that is.
There's definitely an issue with abuse, and there are definitely some horrible parents and some wonderful foster parents. It still doesn't change the underlying incentives.
A hypothetical question: supposed we randomized babies. Each day, we take all babies born on that day and gave each of them to a randomized mother that gave birth that day. Would you expect this system to be better or worse than the current one? I don't think there's any reason to doubt that people treat their own children better (or, more properly, no worse than) children of others; someone that abuses their own kids is never going to do better with the kids of others. Yes, there are abusive or otherwise poor parents, but the proper solution is not to open parenting up to more people, but to make parenting and marriage more of a serious decision entered into willingly and cooperatively.
I consider a good friend of mine, a progressive that I regularly (but civilly) don't see eye-to-eye with, as one of the strongest and most moral people I know. As a young adult, he slept around. One of his partners decided to trap him with a child. He wanted nothing more to do with her, but he fought to keep himself in the child's life (and got really lucky with lawyers). On the one hand, the child is lucky to have a father that cares for him enough to fight to stay in the child's life, but the child is still unfairly burdened with being conceived as pawn and being passed back and forth between parents.
We've created a system that encourages this by trivializing marriage and reducing romance to sexual attractiveness. Raising a child, even your own child, is properly a full-effort lifetime partnership between two people. Just as my friend's partner tried to force things on my friend, surrogacy messes with this; can you ever be completely sure that your partner has the same investment in the outcome?
And yes, there will always be worst case scenarios such as the death of one or both parents, but by minimizing the number of cases where society has to step in we can conserve effort and resources for those worst-case scenarios.
Sure it'd be great to stop parental abuse and children being born out of wedlock. And in the six millennia of recorded history, no one has found a way to do that. Maybe we should consider some alternative options so that children in those situations have more opportunities to have loving parents. And man, try saying to someone who was adopted that their parents didn't love them as much as they would a biological child. I'll be the reaction is great.
Your argument against surrogacy is bizarre. Woman decides to have a child with no input from the man and then forces him to support the child. Therefore two men or two women who together decide to use a surrogate to have one of their biological child will run into the same issues. Heck, stepparents are a thing in straight marriages. I guess they're all under suspicion, too?
And while there is more to romance than sexual attraction, sexual attraction is absolutely part of it. A gay man can have a more romantic relationship with another man than he can a woman he has zero attraction to (And vice versa for lesbians). In fact, I must ask: is allowing same sex couples to marry what caused the trivialization of marriage, or had that already happened? If the latter, perhaps you should focus your objection on whatever caused that, as it seems like a much more fundamental problem.
I can't find the link, but I read a piece by a Catholic who came to the conclusion that gay marriage is good because marriage is good.
He had to convince himself first (I don't remember how) that support for gay marriage wasn't a matter of anti-Catholic prejudice.
I gotta admit that the official Catholic explanations of marriage have influenced my thinking. They're good enough that even removing the divine teleology, they still work! :-)
I was trying to find who used the phrase first. This interesting piece makes an attempt: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/the-phrase-the-wrong-side-of-history-around-for-more-than-a-century-is-getting-weakened-with-overuse.html
Here's another, arguing along somewhat similar lines: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/21/the-wrong-side-of-history-has-become-a-crowded-place-time-to-rethink
"The wrong side/right side of history" is the Victorian View of Evolution. There used to be the proposition that evolution unfolded over vast swathes of time, getting better and better, until it culminated in us, the Pinnacle of Creation.
That view is gone now. Evolution doesn't have a telos ending in the Pinnacle of Creation, it is a process about survival. A 'better' organism is not one that is more advanced than its ancestors and now wears spats and a monocle, it is one that thrives in the particular environment it inhabits and replaces less efficient organisms.
So the view that history has a telos and a tidy "right side" and "wrong side" needs to be abandoned, as happened to the naive view of ever-onward, ever-upward, progress of the Tree of Creation under the shade of the banner with a strange device, Excelsior!
It was more common for the view of history to be one of *decline* than of progress to the right side, that once upon a time there had been a Golden Age or in the time of our grandfathers virtue reigned and the Republic was firmly founded, but every generation since has been declining and becoming decadent.
Which of those is the 'correct' view? Can you judge?
I think we don't know what direction history is moving, especially over the long haul.
Indeedy. The idea that Western liberal ideas are in any way universal is silly. They aren't even universal in the West.
I'm inclined to think that autocracy-- we're in charge because we're us-- is the easy human default.
I could also bet that we're moving towards increasing power for both good and ill.
One implication of your last sentence seems to be that one should choose to believe in whatever will be popular some amount of time in the future. That seems to be an odd way of generating beliefs about politics, especially those that depend on beliefs about facts (eg the nature of people). Maybe one could justify believing whatever is currently popular in all kinds of way, but being on the wrong side of history doesn’t have a start date. So you’re on the wrong side of history even if you would be the first person to take the right side. So all the arguments in favor of believing whatever is currently popular don’t support that way of thinking. And history doesn’t really seem to have an end. So how do you know that everyone on the human side of things isn’t on the wrong side of the history that the AI World Machine will write to itself? (Or pick your favorite dystopian result -- Nazi resurgence, techno-feudalism, whatever.)
So maybe you just meant that as rhetoric -- “don’t be a social conservative because progressives will win the current fights”? Or is it in the nature of a threat -- “don’t be a social conservative because, if you are, I’ll label you as being on the wrong side of history”?
Not a social conservative, by the way, but friends with many.
I see in another part of this thread that you have withdrawn the comment about being on the wrong side of history, so kindly disregard my thoughts about it.
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling."
This is survivorship bias. I think you're selecting for those leftist causes that survived and then tracing them backwards. This is going to bias your thinking towards the conclusion 'change is always good.'
I mean, I'm not socially conservative (and 'social conservativism isn't the monolith that some people try to paint it as) but it's worth remembering that the eugenics movement was a Progressive cause in its era. The 'pro-human-evolution book' in the Scopes Monkey trial was viscously racist and probably should have been removed for that reason alone.
Regarding 'homosexual relationships,' there's a wide range of behavior here. Everything from "two or more people lovingly committed to one another" to "random hookups in bathhouses by a minority of individuals that allowed the proliferation of HIV and massive death."
The STD rate even today is higher among gay men than the average population. (And the STD rate among strict lesbians is lower than the population average.)
For that matter, prior to things like condoms, antibiotics, modern germ theory, STD testing, etc. sex with multiple partners would be much more costly socially and individually. Prior to WWII or so, the majority of people died from transmissible disease. Even current levels of cleanliness are modern. Indoor plumbing, much less hot water, mostly didn't exist when our norms and values were forged. It's problematic to take modern values and read them back onto people who didn't have our technology.
Also, what about David Riemer? He had a botched circumcision so he was given a sex change operation and raised as a girl. It was assumed that gender was entirely socially constructed so this would be fine. It turns out that gender identity seems to be inborn to an extent. David went back to living as a guy and eventually killed himself from stress. And we learned from that, but it's an example of an idea that was on the wrong side of history.
Conservative cultures have more gender parity in certain professions like programming than more liberal ones. There seems to be some level of biological preference in the average male towards working with things and in the average woman towards working with subjects. But the notion of 'structural sexism' basically requires an axiomatic belief that men and women are identical and that any difference in outcome is 'structural sexism.' Is there any reason, expressed in the definition of 'structural sexism' that men being several inches taller than women on average would not be considered 'structural sexism?'
Belief in "structural sexism" only requires a belief that differences between men and women are not morally weighted in the sense that "men are better/more deserving people." (Some believers in structural sexism even believe there are differences and they're weighted in the *opposite* way, which is kind of a problem!)
> personally find it hard to see the appeal of being socially conservative.
As an atheist from a very socially conservative country, I, like you, used to be like that. Then life happened, and I learnt that people are (generally) not stupid, or, to be rather more accurate, people are on average no more stupid than you are. Similar to the people who say "I have no need for philosophy", they always go on and invent their own (bad) version of a philosophy-ish, people who have no need for tradition go on and invent their own extremly bad and untested tradition. If you think other people have done a bad job at figuring out a just society, then boy oh boy, are you in for a surprise when you try to figure it out yourself.
This is one of the best things I have read on the matter : https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/. Basically, to summarize it in a slightly computer-science-y way : Tradition is the cumulative cache where every single human before you have, unconsciously, put their experience and mistakes. Yes, there is going to be dumb things and outdated info in there, just like the internet, any public library, any panel of experts, and etc etc etc, that's why you need to have a Cache-Invalidation algorithm, but this algorithm can't be just be "Throw all elements of the cache into the trash bin", because this way you're missing out on useful info. Like a wise man once said :
'''"The only perfectly rational algorithm for truth in arbitary environments is a brute force search over all possible hypothesis."""
That is, bias is not bad, it's good. It's amazing. Occam's razor is bias, intuition and common sense is bias. Bias culls the search tree. It's **unexamined bias** that is bad, because it culls the search tree without (concious) you ever knowing, so it cuts away your options behind your back. But that doesn't mean to throw it away entirely, just be aware of it and its typical blindspots whatever they may be.
Tradition is a sort of "momentum"y bias, always goes in the direction that have worked so far, it has its place and its weight. It can't be always right, because humans are always wrong and dumb, and therefore any aggregation of them is still more or less wrong and dumb. But it can't be always wrong either, because humans are not *that* wrong and dumb. The problem is that you don't know in advance when is which, progressives like to always imagine themselves as "Tradition : The Good Parts", but they frequently invent monstrosities and take bad parts out of other traditions as well. Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence.
>Things that most Americans now accept as normal, and even essential
Come on, I can give you a list of things that most people in my country would find normal and essential, you won't be pleased :).
You don't get to rail against tradition then turn around and argue from tradition. People in the US accept those things because they have become tradition, and people in general are too uncritical and fearful of challenging traditions or even arguing with them. This very point, seemingly in agreement with you, is actually contradicting you. Because those things you listed are actually traditions now, so their acceptance by the majority is not a good argument for them by your own standards.
>women voting
Opposed by the majority of women when it was first advocated in the US, and extremly unfair because voting rights for **men** were tied to their military service. For the 50 years between its acceptance in 1920-ish and the abolishing of the draft in 1970-ish it was a massive inequality between women and men, one of them has to fight and "prove" themselves (like men are always asked to), the other simply has to exist to get the same right. Hardly "progressive", if by progressive you mean fair and not punishing people for how they were born.
> marriage equality
You mean homosexuals getting married ? Oh that's dumb as well, I oppose it now, despite having been on the advocating side previously. Not out of any spite or hard feelings towards gay guys and lesbian gals, but simply because it doesn't make any sense. Marriage is a heterosexual institution through and through, it exists because when women get pregnant their men can't know for sure if the kid is his and\or the women can't know for sure if the man isn't going to run away (possibly invoking his own uncertainty). Marriage exists to solve this particular prisoner's dilemma, one of many thorny ones that arise in male-female interactions. How successful is it ? that's another matter entirely, and it depends on the particular algorithms and protocols the particular culture-dependant marriage institution chose, but that's the general problem all marriages are trying to solve.
Gay and lesbian couples can't beget children of their own. I can sort of squint and see a comparable problem in lesbian marriage where the agreed-upon mother chooses a different sperm than those the 2 chose together, but honestly it feels fake and contrived and I can't imagine why would the other woman feel anger or hurt if her wife can't get pregnant by her anyway.
Other benefits for marriage can be obtained outside of it, there is no reason not to.
>So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over?
Because history doesn't have a direction. To think otherwise is deeply naive and childish. It's an irresistible temptation, I know, the data points are just scattered there, just begging for a straight line to be drawn through them from initial state to final state. No such thing. History is an extremly complex dynamical system, there is no moral arc or soul in there.
A steel man of your statement would be something to the likes of :
>Why would you want to be against the path of history that, when measured by the Rawls' veil of ignorance standard of making the most identity-agnostic good, is optimal ?
And the answers to that would be : because it's not always optimal, not by some objective functions anyway. Take the 2 most conservative opinions I hold for example : (1) That feminism is an unredeemable trash of an ideology, and (2) that gay marriages are somewhat dumb and unnecessary. The first is clearly the Rawl winner, if I held a veil on your genitals and made you forget what your sex was, would you honestly - Honestly - support the vast majority of feminism given __Anything__ I throw at you ? Anything ? r/4thwavewomen ? I know that I will not, I know that when I see ways of speech and thought that mimics feminism but reverses the men-women arrow, I'm intensely disgusted and angered, even though I'm not a woman, but I recognize the other half of my species as a precious and valuable part. So the intense disgust and anger I feel when I see feminist ways of speech and thought is, plausibly, not just my own identity-borne reaction because I belong to the group targeted by it, but (at least in part) a Rawls' reaction.
The second one is more grey, I can easily imagine myself in Rawls' pre-birth heaven, not knowing whether I will turn out straight or gay, saying "yeah whatever let them have marriage it's not like straights have exclusive copyright", but I can also easily imagine myself seeing that marriage doesn't serve any useful function as far as I can see and just ask why, why ask for marriage when you don't need it, it was invented for a problem that you don't ever face.
Honestly, my conservatism doesn't ever feel like conservatism, it feels like better progressivism. Progressivism central tenet for me was always about Rawls' veil of ignorance, which is just the Golden Rule from ethics but slighltly rephrased. Traditional progressivism (hehe) has a slight problem, it has some identities (straight, men) that it seemingly gives 0 fucks about, it has a child-like desire to imitate what it gains nothing in imitating (Gay Marriage, Men Can Get Pregnant Too). It has intense and irrational disgust towards perfectly good values that deserve better. My conservatism is just a patch to those issues.
Sterile heterosexual couples have been allowed to get married. People don't seem to have a problem with that, so why is higher odds of not having children a problem with homosexual marriage?
One of the major functions of marriage is mutual aid for the adults. It isn't just about children.
You're right. There are a lot of cases where we accept deviations from traditional-traditional marriage for heterosexual couples. I see 2 reasons to still be opposed to homosexual marriages :
1- It doesn't involve breaches of privacy. Heterosexual marriages that don't beget children do so for private reasons (medical, personal, financial, etc...) that would be very rude to ask about. Not so for homosexual marriages, it's very easy to determine which homosexual couple won't have any children of their own : all of them. No other info needed. I think this makes a difference.
2- Selective Relaxation, this is a term I made up but it describes something that happens a lot of times elsewhere. Like for example, in countries where they still have a monarch, you will find that they have relaxed a lot of things that used to be a must such as the absolute powers at the disposal of a monarch and things like that, yet they don't often relax other things like the fact that monarchs must get married to other monarchs or that they have a fancy palace or that they participate in fancy ceremonies and so on.
That is, people are sometimes ok with relaxing or abandoning entirely some parts of tradition, but not other parts, based on the percieved "distance" or amount of deviation. Allowing sterile men and women to marry, allowing non-sterile men and women who nonetheless don't want children to marry, those sound like very minor deviations. Allowing 2 women or 2 men to marry, this sounds like it's a radical departure from how even the most gay-friendly societies in history has treated gay relationships.
And of course, it's not about "allowing", people are allowed to do whatever they please with each other. It's about recognition, I don't recognize such a marriage, not as much as I do a heterosexual one anyway. Where does my opinion matter ? This thread and nowhere else.
>One of the major functions of marriage is mutual aid for the adults
This is one of the "other benefits of marriage" that I talked about, and I think it would be valuable to find a name for institutions and relationships that serve them without being named "marriage". Calling every life-long partnership "marriage" is just dumbing yourself down. If the nation state only grants certain desirable rights to married people, then the solution is to tell the state in no uncertain terms to get through its thick coercive head that unmarried people should get those rights too, not to convince it that things that don't look like marriage are also marriage.
Call whatever legal rights the gays want by a boring legal name ("Cohabitation Rights" or "Privileged Kin Rights" or whatever) and make them grantable to every pair of people who <go through certain boring legal procedures>. Those pairs would happen to include married straight couples, but also perhaps unmarried straight couples, gay couples, 2 brothers, 2 sisters, a man and his mother, a man and his dog, etc....
1. It's rude to ask anyone where they got their children.
2. I grant that there's a limit to how much change people want, and gay marriage crosses a line. I just can't see that it's a line worth defending.
Lack of gay marriage has a high cost for a fair number of gay people, and also some heterosexuals, since insisting on heterosexual leads to some gay people marrying heterosexuals in the hopes that the homosexuality will wear off, which it pretty much doesn't. I'm not going to say that never happens because I can't know, but it isn't reasonable to expect it.
I agree that marriage isn't only about the couple involved, it's also about the couple being acknowledged as married.
There seem to be people who have "fluid" sexuality that varies over their life, but they also seem to be no more in control of it than people with fixed sexuality are. It sounds strictly worse imho.
"Other benefits for marriage can be obtained outside of it, there is no reason not to."
There are lots of objections to this. One is that taxes for same sex couples can be awful. My wife is a CPA and has complained loudly about trying to explain a couple sharing finances to the IRS, especially when they filed as a couple in their state and as individuals on the federal level. Things like revocable trusts are also more expensive than marriage licenses.
I would add that there were some in the wake of the AIDS crisis who wanted to encourage sexual fidelity among same-sex couples and hoped the incentive of marriage might facilitate that.
Also, there are things like adoption. And some gay and lesbian individuals have children from a previous marriage.
Also, we allow marriages of people who are past child-bearing age. If creating biological children were the only purpose to marriage, perhaps we shouldn't do that? But nobody does fertility checks prior to issuing marriage licenses.
Perhaps there was some more optimal arrangement, but 'same sex marriage' was at least a 'good enough' resolution to the outstanding issues.
OK, I'll take a stab at arguing for same-sex marriage. :-)
I'd say that as an atheist you shouldn't reason teleologically. Marriage doesn't exist *to* solve a particular problem, it exists *and* solves a particular problem, and other problems too. The big other one being that many humans have a desire to find a life partner and settle down with them, and that even more who don't desire this, are still better off doing it even though they don't realize it. (In my personal experience, anyway.) Whatever bit that gets flipped in the brain to turn off heterosexuality, doesn't seem to affect this desire at all. And society, being another clunky bit of evolution, tends to equate "life partnership" to marriage, such that the easiest way to fit same-sex couples in, is to let them be married.
There is an argument that the existence of same-sex marriage inherently de-emphasizes the raising of children, and I'm sympathetic to that. But I would suggest that it's not causation, but correlation. That is, I agree that modern American society is becoming less and less supportive of having and raising children well, and that this has happened alongside the push for same-sex marriage. But I have seen nothing to persuade me that the former is caused by the latter. Rather, it seems to me that they're both products of progressive ideology, and one is bad and the other is good. (California law might be crazy in a lot of ways, but it gave us "right on red", a distinct civilizational advance.)
If you think gays and lesbians shouldn't be allowed to marry because "it doesn't make sense" to you, then don't ever kid yourself that you exhibit "better progessivism," because that is total bullshit. If two consenting adults want to enter into a legally and socially recognized partnership, which confers benefits like joint property ownership and medical next-of-kin rights, that's none of your sad-face fucking business, whether it "makes sense" to you or not.
Congratulations, your response is the lamest one I've gotten so far.
I agree, but it shouldn't be called 'marriage'.
Jon, you misunderstand me. It's indeed none of my sad-face fucking business whether Alice and Carol want to enter into a marriage, or if Bob and Charlie want to, if by that you mean I can't stop them. I happen to believe that states, not as in "Texas and California" but as in "Germany and Brazil", are an immoral rubbish institutions, and that using their coercive power for anything except the most life-threatening of situations and in the tightest of bounds is also immoral and vile.
But I didn't get from your original post that you're merely against the tendency of some (most?) conservatives' to rush to the state to beg it to defend their tradition, indeed if I did I would have (1) Aggressively agreed, since this issue ***affects*** me more than you can ever imagine (2) Gave you examples where progressives do their own fair share of crying-to-nanny-state, to disillusion you of the strange notion that progressives are somehow more enlightened or freedom-loving in general.
But the way I understood your original post is "I don't know how can conservatism ever make sense to someone remotely smart or educated", so I replied to let you know that not only *some* conservatism can totally make sense to someone who is not a total 20-IQ cave man, it can make sense to this man who used to intensely hate it and associate it with a lot of things he most hates in life, and still has a somewhat complicated relationship with it.
How can feminism be not the total girl-boss bad ass ideology that some progressives seem to think it always is ? by being a straight man on the receiving end of its frequent girl-bossism. How can gay marriages not make sense ? Easy, you have to stop thinking of marriage as a fancy contract that happens to involve weddings and some intimacy, and start thinking of it as an institution created by men and women to solve a very specific men-women problem, a "treaty" if you will, between a man and a woman, one that doesn't make sense except between a man and woman.
Am I wrong ? of course I am, trivially so. Until we perfect Brain2Brain communication we're always wrong about each other and what we believe and whose values are better, that's why living in states is so immoral, it centralizes questions of value and forces the various groups comprising society to fight it out for the 1 "dominant" group that will impose its values upon all others. Fortunately, I'm not going around banning feminism and disallowing gay marriages (ok, I admit that if I have the power I will be very slightly tempted to ban at least the egregious feminism I see online, but I would violently resist myself and they would have to do something especially egregious to force my hand). This is my own opinion that holds sway nowhere other than my own dominion : my mind and extensions thereof.
While I don't think Bi_Gates wrote it as well as he could, and I'm not convinced by it, the thesis that changing the focus of marriage from a joint-family process focused on producing heirs to a strictly voluntary partnership focused on romance drove a lot of the decline in marriage, at least in the West, has a pretty decent pedigree.
Also, this clearly offended you. While I haven't read anything terribly offensive by you, deeply offensive thing get posted here all the time, by all sides and I'd like to think that we can handle them respectfully. To a rough approximation, and I'm open to being corrected here, the overwhelming majority of countries and people in the globe do not accept homosexual marriage and find Bi_Gates' type arguments persuasive. (1) If you can't hear these arguments without taking offense, you're greatly restricting your ability to communicate with most of the world.
(1) https://i.insider.com/530c964269bedd34767aab09
Very well put. Respectful and clear. I love SSC. Or ACX, or whatever we’re calling it now. Good work.
I'm not a conservative, but I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.
A foundational conservative insight is that societies are very complex and hard to understand fully. This means the effect from small changes are hard to predict, and large changes mean playing russian roulette with society.
The conclusion is not to be against all changes, but to change in small steps, observe what happened, and then do the next step based on what you learned, if it still seems a good idea.
The gradual introduction of gay marriage over a few decades is a good example of that process. I think preserving gay marriage is the normal conservative position in 2022.
I also think you cherry pick the "wrong side of history" cses. Conservatives were certainly on the right side of history in rejecting communism, naziism, eugenics, and probably many other crazy ideas forgotten by history.
This is something I can agree with...
Yeah. Conservatism, at least as it is understood in the US and Canada, seems now to mostly be an egoistic individualism and myopic populism (at least if populism means it's popular with your base)...
I’d say that is its portrayal in the media. I know many social conservatives, but none who fit those descriptions. They are mainly very family-focused, sometimes to the point of being pretty disconnected from politics entirely.
Well, at least online most "Conservatives" come off in this way though (at least on Canadian Twitter)...
Can I propose a thought experiment?
It's 2060. Congress has just legalized pedophilia. Only ignoramuses consider it "harmful" -- when you look up psychological concepts in textbooks, you find that pedophilia is, by definition, healthy, for both people involved. There's a ton of research to support this (although some bigoted weirdos don't think the studies were very good). It was always ridiculous to claim children "can't give consent"; kids give and refuse consent to all sorts of things, all the time, and we respect it. (Should I go on?) A flower shop in Maine is being sued by a 30-year-old woman because they refused to create a floral arrangement for her 1-year anniversary with her 10-year-old boyfriend. If your friends thought you were on the flower shop's side, you probably wouldn't get invited to book club. TV shows that treat pedophiles as dangerous predators "haven't aged well". Famous people punished for pedophilia in the past are considered civil rights icons.
Of course, this will never happen. It's a complete fantasy. Just a thought experiment. The slippery slope fallacy is a classic tool of manipulative rhetoric, and it would be shameful for me to deploy it here. In fact, in the real world, the sexual ethics affirmed by the majority of people in the US in 2022 is exactly the same as it will be in 2060. Although sexual ethics has shifted a good deal in the last hundred years, it has, at last, reached its final, true and correct form. So a thought experiment like what I've proposed is impossible.
Still. Are you capable of putting yourself in the thought experiment? Imagine if the impossible happened, and social liberals in the US generally decided that pedophilia is the same kind of thing as homosexuality. Would you continue to hold to your outdated 2022 code of sexual ethics? Even though that would make you a social conservative, on the wrong side of history? Or would you stay on the right side of history, and believe what everybody else believes?
This doesn't necessarily prevent your thought experiment from being a useful exercise, but I'd like to point out that the whole consent issue is a pretty big disanalogy to the other issues brought up by the previous poster. I've never heard anyone argue against (say) homosexuality on the grounds that homosexuals are somehow not competent to consent to things. And society has a consistent stance that children aren't able to give legal consent *in general*, not only for sex (e.g. contracts with children are not enforceable), so if society reversed that stance then there should be a bunch of other changes, too.
I think it's highly noteworthy that I can't come up with a good way to *fix* your thought experiment. That is, I'm trying to think of some activity that would be nearly-universally considered unacceptable behavior today, *even if* everyone involved gave consent and was considered competent to give consent in general. Typical crimes like stealing have an obvious non-consent objection. I can think of several activities that *some* people would consider unacceptable today (e.g. drugs, polygamy, prostitution) but all the ones I can think of have significant proponents as well.
I mean, I guess you can say that society just lowers the age of consent from 18 to 10 or something, although that should affect a ton of other things besides sex, and so many people will consider it objectionable for reasons that have nothing to do with sexual mores (e.g. 10-year-olds dropping out of school and being saddled with credit card debt).
I've read science fiction in which the line between childhood and adulthood was defined by passing a competence test, rather than by age. This didn't strike me as obviously bad, though obviously it depends on how the test works.
"I think it's highly noteworthy that I can't come up with a good way to *fix* your thought experiment. That is, I'm trying to think of some activity that would be nearly-universally considered unacceptable behavior today, *even if* everyone involved gave consent and was considered competent to give consent in general."
Very late here on my part, but I'm surprised nobody pointed this out so I'll do it: the obvious example is dueling. It used to be considered acceptable to murder a guy, even if he was unwilling to die, as long as you gave him a fair shake at doing *you* in at the same time and he consented to the operation. This is no longer considered okay, and has very few proponents (but ought to be legal).
Euthanasia is a similar thing, but much trickier for various reasons; a duel is simply a matter of two consenting men in good health and with equal arms and thus should not pose any kind of issue in a consent-based framework.
That's a very on-point example. Thanks.
That's a nice example.
My quick gut response is that I feel differently depending on whether refusing a duel lowers your social status. (Which obviously means that my main objection there is the hypothetical social mores, not the hypothetical laws per se.)
Similarly, I feel differently about a society where 18-year-olds are allowed to have sex and a society where any 18-year-old who refuses an offer of sex becomes a social pariah.
A man refusing a duel is more like a woman *putting out*, that is, it's known to lower the social status in some circumstances but not others. I feel like you probably wouldn't want to restrict women's ability to consent to sex based on this, so I think that whole line of argument is a blind alley.
I think polygamy is the plausible one. You can imagine a big social progressive push to allow marriage equality for the poly - someone like the UUs coming out and starting religious ceremonies for plural marriages, arguing from the Hebrew Scripture or something. Follow it with a strong pushback and a bunch of state referendums stating that marriage is a partnership between two people, and you've pretty much got the scene set as it was in the middle aughts. Get a popular Will and Grace style sitcom where the polycule is having wholesome shenanigans, with the occasional very special episode about the bigotry they face. Right thinking progressive people gradually come to believe that they aren't being fair to the poly and that the poly are oppressed, which makes them into the cause of the moment. A few years later the plural marriage referendums start going the other way, and a few years after that you get another Obergefell and a cakeshop refusing to bake a cake for a poly ceremony.
Five years after that, boy-girl marriages are still the norm, but you have a small percent of poly marriages and no one thinks it's a big deal. And your 2022 person dropped into a boy-boy-girl-girl-nb ceremony is shocked, and has to decide whether to keep their damn mouth shut or out themselves as one of *those* people.
I think it works.
What about cutting off healthy limbs and replacing them with artificial limbs? Effectively nobody advocates even allowing this today, because wanting this with today's artificial limbs is seen as pretty conclusive evidence of legal incompetence, but it's easy to see this potentially changing -- or not changing! -- with advancing technology.
I wish I hadn't mentioned pedophilia... Really, the point of the thought experiment is that everybody is either a social conservative or just amoral, and you can pick any issue where you currently agree with the majority.
That aside, let me suggest that our society is actually pretty mixed up about consent. Different tribes talk about it very differently, and everybody applies it inconsistently.
For instance, libertarians take the idea of consent to financial transactions very seriously, and get all mad about getting taxed because it's like being made to buy something without consent. But for some reason, liberals who, if they were talking about sexual ethics, would take consent very seriously, don't see this libertarian perspective as worthwhile at all. And if you want another example of this same dynamic, look at the coronavirus vaccine.
I have to think that consent really isn't the core principle it sometimes seems to be. Everybody seems to pull it out when convenient and forget about it otherwise.
I just explained that *every* example I can think of has the same problem. Can you think of one that doesn't?
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I mostly think of consent as being sufficient to make something OK, but not always necessary. I can tow your car if you consent. I can also tow your car if it is parked illegally, whether you consent or not. Some circumstances require consent, some don't.
I think libertarians *do* have a valuable view on taxes, but my impression is that even libertarians think that taxes are fine in a voluntary association; e.g. a book club can charge a fee for membership, as long as people can choose whether to be members or not. In the same way, once we've agreed that someone has the rights to some land, it is legit for them to say you need to pay them if you want to use that land. In a perfect world, if you didn't like their terms, you'd just go somewhere else--Scott has this story about an archipelago where every island has different rules, and you can choose which island to live on or start your own island. The practical problem, of course, is that we don't have unlimited land. So if you don't want the government to tax you, I first want to hear your philosophy of how land rights/sovereignty are supposed to work in a world with limited land.
My take on vaccines is that it's a public safety issue; by refusing to take a vaccine, you're endangering everyone around you, similar to driving drunk. (Again, this could be fixed if you moved to a magically separate island, and THEN I'd say it's your call, but we don't have unlimited land.) You could argue about how strong the public safety interest is vs. how strong your interest in controlling your own body is, but the public has at least *some* legitimate interest at stake here; by interacting with other people without being vaccinated, you are negatively affecting a non-consenting party.
Minor aside in an otherwise interesting discussion which seems to be rediscovering the concept of externalities, your last paragraph is true only for very few vaccines.
My argument assumes that the vaccine in question protects against a contagious disease. It was my impression that that is typical for a vaccine. You're saying it's only a minority of vaccines?
Yes. This inconsistent valuing of consent bothers me, also.
To some extent, I think this harkens back to Scott's "The Ideology is Not the Movement" essay where fighting the outgroup and protecting the ingroup is more important than any consistent ethical stance.
Children are generally allowed to consent to things which are not considered harmful or impactful. So posit technological changes which reduce the physical harms, impacts, and social externalities related to sex, including STDs and pregnancy, as well as any emotional impacts.
"(e.g. contracts with children are not enforceable)"
Sure, but to use that analogy it's not a criminal act to have a child sign a contract, either. The problem with contracts is that, if enforced, they are impactful. So our hypothetical should include a world where sex was not impactful.
Not sure how far I want to go with this analogy, but I could see something like this happening in a very science fiction sense.
To take things full circle, 300 years ago lots of men having sex with other men would have transmitted STDs. Most people died of transmissible diseases, so the fear was understandably much greater. Things like condoms, antibiotics, and STD testing likely helped make same sex relationships more socially acceptable.
If you prefer a less charged and threatening analogy, rules about alcohol in vehicles will likely change with self-driving cars. And who knows, maybe people of 2122 will look at the laws that their ancestors had regarding open containers of alcohol in cars and view those laws as draconian and primitive, because they don't acknowledge the risks that drunk driving posed to the people of our era.
Dealing with the emotional impacts poses a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, because messing with your emotions seems like something that should, itself, require consent. For example, taking a drug that increases sex drive and mixing it into your date's drink without their consent seems pretty rapey.
I already view open-container laws as taking an in-principle perfectly fine behavior and sacrificing it on the altar of making it easier to *enforce* the rule we actually care about, which is no driving while impaired. Which I think is a fine tradeoff to make (though maybe I would feel differently if I liked drinking). But I certainly won't shed any tears if it becomes legal after the practical reason goes away.
"Dealing with the emotional impacts poses a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem,"
Oh, absolutely. But raising kids already involves a lot of manipulation on the part of parents, and parents pursuing harm reduction strategies for their children is often though not always encouraged. Consider the problem hand-waved away by whatever mechanism you would accept, just so that the hypothetical works. Emotional testing finds certain people won't be harmed. Or we develop technology which allows people to rewrite their brains as adults, which obviates any trauma. Or what we call 'trauma' is in some people is caused, in part, by the value that we put on sex such that acceptance of people's sexual history makes some interactions less traumatic.
Whatever. The precise mechanism isn't important to the example. Just that we assume it exists.
I'm also fine with open container laws for the reasons that you mention. Maybe my point there was too subtle. We have rules and we have reasons for rules. When the reasons underlying the rules change, people tend to not acknowledge that change. They simply paint people from previous ages as being stupid or primitive or whatever, rather than reacting rationally to the scarcity and danger of our times. Casual historical analysis is rife with the primary attribution error.
To rephrase the matter, we are privileged to live in modern times and are frequently unaware of our privilege when judging past societies.
"For example, taking a drug that increases sex drive and mixing it into your date's drink without their consent seems pretty rapey.,"
Think of it in terms of harm mitigation. We support people too young to give consent getting the HPV vaccine. Or an IUD. Or, if they are pregnant, an abortion. Many people currently support harm reduction strategies. And that's well and good. But with enough harm reduction strategies (voluntarily pursued) we alter people's views in regards to the originally harmful activity. Jumping off a bridge is stigmatized. Bungee jumping is a fun, recreational activity.
If we can understand this concept as regards physical harm, then insert whatever plot device you want and extend the metaphor to emotional harm.
OK, you have convinced me this works as a hypothetical if you inject enough magic.
My 30-second reaction is that there's probably a lot of current crimes that I'd be willing to legalize if some miraculous technology somehow guarantees no harm to anyone involved (including intangible harms).
You know, I actually find future normalization of pedophilia quite plausible -- at least, if it happens in the context of various tech advances that seem like they might well happen by 2060. For example;
Functional brain age, like gender, becomes something we can manipulate via surgery and drugs. There are many wonderful things about the child brain. Tremendous neuroplasticity. Ability to easily learn certain things, for instance new languages, probably various programming languages or the 2060 equivalent. Joyfulness and energy. A fresh, novel point of view about absolutely everything. Lantern consciousness rather than spotlight consciousness. So in 2060 there might be people who elect to be part child: their body and part of their brain would be 8 years old, but another part of their brain 30 years old. Puberty can easily be brought about if the person wishes it. It's not hard to see the case for making marriage to one of these multi-age people.
-Or, most of the earth's human population might have merged their brains with AI, or with part of each other's brains, or both. All would be functional geniuses. An 8 year old who was part of this network would not be anything like the 8 year olds of now. Marrying one might look just fine to most everybody. Marrying one of the few remaining 8 year olds whose brain is not part of the shared genius brain might also seem OK. At that point, unenhanced human beings might look to us the way cats do now -- they're pets, without human rights.
Dystopian as fuck.
Yeah. That's how the future looks to me. I don't worry that much about genius AI doing us in. I think AI & related technologies will transform human life so much that for me, at least, it would be bleak and monstrous -- life as I know it would be gone. But maybe I feel that way because it's just too big a stretch for me. Maybe it's just a step along the way to our species evolving into homo deus. Who am I to say that's not worth doing?
You may feel some pride in having crafted some novel "thought experiment," but what you're hypothesizing was raised constantly 20 years ago when the battle for marriage equality was being fought here in California. Literally the first words out of the mouth of many conservatives was "If we let fags marry, and the next thing you know, they're going to want to make it legal to marry little kids!"
This instinctive association between gay men and pedophilia is due in part to that bastion of conservatism, the Catholic Church, where over the years priests sexually assaulted not hundreds, or evens thousands, but literally tens of thousands of children over the years worldwide. The Popes, of course did everything in their power to combat it -- and by "it," I mean the truth and disclosures about the abuse, not the abuse itself.
So when you not-so-subtly suggest that one very reasonable thing -- two consenting adults engaging in a legally and socially-recognized partnership, which confers benefits like joint property ownership and medical next-of-kin rights -- can lead down the road to adults preying on prepubescent children, which is widely and justifiably reviled and illegal, I'm not going rub my chin and say, "Well, dude's got a point."
You may be interested to know that if you go back a bit further in history, to the 70s, advocating for legal paedophilia was fairly prominent among a number of "progressive" movements.
Yes, it was. The leader of the UK branch of Stonewall advocated for it too, back in the day. No idea what his current stance is.
"This instinctive association between gay men and pedophilia is due in part to that bastion of conservatism, the Catholic Church, where over the years priests sexually assaulted not hundreds, or evens thousands, but literally tens of thousands of children over the years worldwide."
And so the mask comes off. Farmer Jon was "just asking questions". He wants to know how we can possibly tolerate all those horrible bad evil wicked Republican-voters on here, when everybody knows they're fascist racist Nazis because the most wicked person in the entire world and throughout all of history has been the White Christian Cis Het Man.
You're the one leaping to "how dare you say gays' want to fuck kids!" when nobody else was saying that. Isn't that rather like that example I've seen elsewhere, when people start 'defending' Jewish people on the grounds of "This character is represented as being miserly and has particular facial features - JEWS YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT JEWS YOU ANTI-SEMITE!" So... you mean that goblins are Jews, Orcs are Jews, fairytale boogeymen are Jews?
If you immediately identify "hobgoblin in a fairy tale" as Jewish, maybe you are the one with the anti-Semitism problem. If you immediately identify "gay means paedophile", maybe you are the one with the anti-gay problem.
I'm sorry, I seem to have picked an example that's too sensitive. My point isn't to suggest any similarity between homosexuality and pedophilia, which are very different things.
But look. In 1900, I would have made this thought experiment about divorce. And you would have taken the same, "How dare you?" tone, suggesting that it's beyond the pale for me to imply that there's any similarity between letting priests marry (or whatever it was) and letting people get divorced.
And in 1950, I would have made this thought experiment about homosexuality. And you would have taken the same, "How dare you?" tone, suggesting that it's beyond the pale for me to imply that there's any similarity between letting people get divorced and letting gay people have sex with each other.
So now, in 2022, not being ironic, please forget I ever mentioned pedophilia, and instead, pick something else that both you and social conservatives agree is morally wrong. Cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, suicide, whatever. Call it X.
If, during your lifetime, X is legalized and anti-Xers find themselves facing uncomfortable social pressure at dinner parties, losing their jobs and getting sued, what will you do? Will you become a social conservative, and keep your anti-X stance? Or will you change your mind? I'm presuming that you don't think the current US liberal ethical system is the final, perfect one which will never change, but maybe I'm wrong and that's what you think.
I'll jump to the end of the argument; you're smart enough to see it from here already. If you would hold firm in the face of social pressure, then you're already a social conservative; it's just that the ethical system you want to conserve happens to be the one currently held by the majority. If you would change your mind and yield to social pressure, then it seems like you don't really believe in right and wrong at all. Like, something was bad, and then some people wrote some words on the Internet and now that thing is good: not really a concept of "good" and "bad" that means much.
Just trying to get you to consider that maybe you and social conservatives aren't that different. Maybe they're just liberals from the 1950s and you're a conservative from the 2060s.
(And hey! At least, if it ever does happen -- which I genuinely think is very, very unlikely -- that pedophilia gets legalized and becomes widely accepted, I can count on you to stand with us against it. That's a win, in my book.)
One angle is to consider how attitudes were to sex with children in the past. In the UK, I'm not aware there were any laws against it until the 18th century, although no doubt anyone caught might well face rough justice from locals, as virginity of their daughters was valued by most people, besides the poorest or the most debased, who might even sell their offspring's sexual services as soon as they possibly could!
During the 18th century a ridiculous superstition arose that sex with innocent youngsters would transfer VD from the adult participant to them. (I believe a similar outbreak of this absurd belief was seen in recent years in South Africa.) So a law was enacted that made carnal knowledge of an infant aged seven or under a capital offence.
I think from then until the mid-19th century the de facto age of consent was around age 10 to 12 (for heterosexual sex of course - By a statute of Henry VIII, sodomy, with men or women, including oral sex, was a capital offence in England until the 1860s!)
Towards the end of the 19th century, motivated by scandals involving child prostitutes, the age of consent was raised to 14, and later in the 20th century to 16, where it is in the UK today for both sexes.
I guess attitudes over time have depended on how much children were valued. In the past, for poor children, that was often not very much, if at all! Incidently, although the church had frowned on sodomy previously, Henry VIII introduced his law mainly because he feared that sodomy and oral sex were being increasingly used for birth control, and there would soon be a shortage of stalwart young men for his armed services. So his law was also the result of valuing the next generation in his own way!
I'll jump right to my point: of course I'd oppose pedophilia! As well as cannibalism, bestiality, and any other repugnant topics you want to list. I don't choose my values based on "uncomfortable societal pressures at dinner parties." I'm a farmer and live in the reddest county in Southern California, and I'm surrounded Trump voters and Newsom-hating rednecks. I'm not conforming to some Bay Area group think.
I don't have to hypothesize about 2060, I'm living in 2022, and in my 50+ years of living, social conservatives have been all about trying to limit the choices and freedoms of others. whether it be the people they loved, the clothes they wore, the music they listened to, the plants they smoked (tobacco was fine, weed deserved a prison sentence). And on and on. You don't need to construct elaborate "thought experiments". Conservatives have not been on the side of compassion, kindness and genuine desire to help those less fortunate. If they had been, I'd vote for motherfuckers.
You're right that it's kind of offensive to suggest that somebody would change their ethical views because of social pressure. What I want you to see is that your original comment sounds like you're being critical of social conservatives for refusing to do exactly that. According to you, they "opposed" "things that most Americans now accept as normal"; they're "on the wrong side of history". You're criticizing the other side for not bowing to peer pressure, but if the roles were reversed, you yourself wouldn't bow to peer pressure.
Whether or not one side is more compassionate, kind or freedom-loving than the other is a separate matter; you didn't mention that stuff in your original comment, and you don't get to move the goalposts.
In the future, unless you believe that it's good and noble to forsake your ethical principles in order to fit in with society, don't criticize other people for not doing it. It comes across as unreasonable.
No cannibal sex? I thought inclusivity was a virtue.
Hell yeah. I love people all across the political spectrum, I just happen to live in a conservative area. My response was to a comment asking if I'd cave to "uncomfortable pressure at a dinner party." I organize our annual Oldtimers Picnic, I'm a fluent speaker of the Native language of our area, my family has been here since 1898, and this election season I put up campaign signs on my farm for two local candidates I supported the most -- both Republicans.
Your "angry closeted liberal" implication is a country mile off the mark.
I think the point here is slightly different. “Why be on the wrong side of history?” proves too much. If embraced fully, it would say “Well, that future generation is probably right. As long as the children consent, who are we to get in the way?” Matthew doesn’t think the scenario is likely, but there’s nothing in “Don’t be on the wrong side of history” which would make it apply to euthanasia but not pedophilia.
There's been waaaay to much obsession with the term "be on the wrong side of history." Just discard that if that's the sticking point. I withdraw that comment.
The point is, the arc of human social behavior should, and tends, to keep moving towards a more just, compassionate and fair society for all. That has never been a stated goal of social conservatives. But it is for progressives. Has every proposed progressive idea been sound? No. But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced is like saying that "defund the police" was ever widely embraced. Hint: it wasn't. It was just a slogan to be shouted against authoritarian and abusive law enforcement agencies. Some police departments have had their budgets cut, and some funds have been moved to mental health interventions, but widespread phasing out of police departments has not and will not happen any time soon.
Euthanasia is a compassionate option for fully informed people in the last stages of palliative care or unremitting pain. Pedophilia is adults preying upon prepubescent children and it will never be compassionate or kind, no matter how many times people speculate that, "Well, you never know, progressives in the future. . . "
Liberals move society along that arc. Conservatives prevent society from straying from that arc. Both are important. The 20th century showed what happened when you allow radicals to run roughshod over conservatives. The mountains of skulls speak for themselves.
Also, this
"But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced is like saying that "defund the police" was ever widely embraced."
is factually incorrect. 30 states adopted forced sterilization laws. A poll in 1937 found 2 in 3 people supported sterilizations of criminals and "mental defectives". It absolutely was widespread.
It's pretty damn convenient for your argument that every policy turns out to be "it was just a slogan for a special use-case, not widespread support" when it's in your favour and "every single conservative ever has believed and wanted this" when it's not in your favour.
"Euthanasia is a compassionate option for fully informed people in the last stages of palliative care or unremitting pain."
Canada is discussing euthanising infants:
https://cps.ca/en/documents/position/medical-assistance-in-dying
To the arc of human social behaviour: as I see it, the big three social movements of progressivism in the twentieth century are racial equality, gender equality and communism. Two out of three ain’t bad. Conservatism’s thing is mostly resisting social movements, so I’ll give it a point for protecting capitalism (the only area where it really achieved what it wanted), but it loses a point for fascism. So progressivism does do better, but not overwhelmingly so in this sense.
To stated aims: fairness, compassion and justice for all are the stated aims of lots of people who claim abortion is murder. I don’t think stated aims are what you’re really after here.
I really don’t get the claim that fascism was a conservative thing. Fascism was atheist, so Christian democrats (Europe’s homegrown social conservatives) were not facials. (They had debates and splits about whether to ally with fascists.) What am I missing?
"the big three social movements of progressivism in the twentieth century"
Racial equality is *late* 20th Century Progressivism and debatably mid century, post World War II, certainly not early 20th century. Classic Liberals arguably did more to promote racial equality in the early 20th century. Even if many Classic Liberals were closet racists, they at least fought for equality before the law and generally limited the political impact that their racism might have on others.
Also, statements like 'equality' are problematically simple. There are relatively few people in 2022 who favor laws that *deliberately promote* racial inequality.
Progressives, Classic Liberals, and some social conservatives in the 21st century believed that integration and civil rights were important. Derrick Bell, who was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement and founder of Critical Race Theory, posits that classic liberalism, integration, and equality before the law were/are insufficient or improper to sufficiently end racism and that incursions on freedom of speech and other diminishments of individual rights are needed to achieve that end. That's one example of a stance that distinguishes some Progressives from Classic Liberals and Social Conservatives. Progressives are distinguished by the mechanisms they are willing to employ and the value tradeoffs that they are willing to make in service of a goal like racial equality. And any of those mechanisms could have unintended consequences, moral costs, or fail at their goal.
It's not enough to want racial equality to be a Progressive in 2022. You need to favor it over other desirable virtues.
"Conservatism’s thing is mostly resisting social movements"
Conservativism tends to argue for slow and bottom-up change rather than top-down change. Though "social conservatives" are not heterogenous and it's possible to 'conserve' lots of different things.
Conservatives are not absolutely resistant to change and do change over time.
"but it loses a point for fascism"
Fascism is a hard thing to categorize. And not to defend Italian Fascism but the Nazis were outliers as fascists. Historically, most fascists were not racial supremacists. The Romans certainly were not.
Nazi-ism had some conservative elements regarding gender. It drew on Progressive eugenics. It was opposed by the European aristocracy, even though it made strong attempts to court them. It was opposed by classic liberals and some Religious Conservatives. The problem is that Social Conservatives are not consistently racial conservatives and that fact is typically ignored by Progressives. Social Conservativism is a heterogenous category and 1940s Progressives were very capable of being racist.
Nazi-ism had wider philosophical appeal than most modern leftists want to admit. It was collectivist and leveling and opposed to private business which was outside the party/state. Those tend to be authoritarian-leftist values. But Nazi-ism had a very much restricted in-group and a brutal treatment of its outgroups. Mussolini started out as a Marxist and didn't have to change that much to embrace fascism. The thing about Nazi-ism is that people try to fit it onto a left-right spectrum and claim that it failed because it was 'extreme right.' It wasn't. Nazi-ism's greatest failings were on a tribal vs universal spectrum. They treated their outgroups brutally. If the left-right spectrum is not twisted to defend a particular viewpoint then Nazis might be more accurately called centrist authoritarian.
"That has never been a stated goal of social conservatives."
A more "just" and "fair" society has certainly been the goal of *some* social conservatives. "Social Conservative" is a big wastebasket category and not everyone who gets assigned to that category put themselves there, which makes discussion difficult.
The problem is that there are different standards of justice and fairness. These may include:
Egalitarianism
Comensurability
Equity
Expectation
Precedent or Tradition
Consent
Equality
Filial Piety
So you need to unpack the values expressed by the word 'justice' before it means anything because there are plenty of people who are not Progressive who also use the word and claim to value Justice and Fairness, but do not consider Progressive values to be either Just or Fair.
"But claiming that eugenics was once widely embraced"
... did you MISS the 1930s-1940s? Heck, outside of Nazi Germany both Sweden and California had significant eugenics programs. Yes, eugenics was once widely embraced by people who called themselves "Progressives." Similarly, Nazism and Fascism was opposed by many aristocrats and some religious conservatives as well as classic liberals. In its own rhetoric, Nazi-ism painted itself as a 'middle way' between Communism and the Weimar Republic. After the fact, those who favored collective politics figured it would look bad to have all the collectivist governments engaged in horrible and authoritarian practices, so the Nazis got rebranded as 'far right.' Rebranding of Nazis as 'far right' was pure damage control.
Rebranding of Nazis as 'far right' was a deliberate policy of the Nazis once Hitler gained control of the party. And in fact he actively purged leftists from the Nazi Party, including ones who used to be influential, making it actually a far right party.
As I understand it, crime statistics are so badly collected that we can't tell whether there's a connection between defunding the police and a crime wave.
"Our idea?" How the hell did you ever get the idea that I supported defunding the police? Because I support many progressive causes, like not putting polluting industries in neighborhoods of color, or offering free school lunches to all kids, that doesn't mean I EVER supported abolishing or even strongly reducing funding for law enforcement. I have assisted our local Police League on Night Out events and helped the Sheriff's Dept. apprehend an arsonist. Have you?
Stop making wild assumptions about people you don't know.
Joe Biden never supported "defunding the police," and what are the names of these "big city Democrat mayors who changed their minds?"
Law enforcement is not the best choice to take the lead on mental health crises. That's a fact. Far too many people have called the police themselves for help, and then got killed by the police who responded. Do you think that's a positive outcome?
Justice reform should be a continual, ongoing process. We should always try to do better in how we treat people, both victims and suspects, who may actually be innocent, and how we work to prevent crime in the first place. That's not the same as "defund the police" which I've never supported. Direct your rant elsewhere, because you've missed the target.
I'm pretty sure there's selection bias there, "people advocated for a thing and then got it" gets remembered, "people advocated for a thing and failed" doesn't.
Weirdly no one has explicitly mentioned religion in a reply so far, so I'll put it here. As a disclaimer, I'm agnostic, but go to an evangelical Christian church. I'll be trying to give my best understanding of that view from my perspective, but this is a second-hand interpretation, and I'm leaving out a lot of the parts about God.
Suppose, if you will, that you were really sad. Your life was sort of a mess, and you felt empty. You were trying to find happiness, but it just wasn't quite being found. I think this is pretty common.
Then, some weird dude with a book tells you to read the book, and like, maybe it will make you happy. And you're like "nope." And then you're still sad. So finally you sit down and read the book. And then you go meet the weird dude and his weird friends, and they all read the book and seem happy, so you keep reading the book. And things get a little better.
And eventually they tell you "Hey, maybe instead of just reading the book you should try doing the things the book tells you to." And you're like, "hey, reading the book worked, so maybe I'll try it." And you try it. And slowly you get this feeling of meaning in your life, and you're happy. And you look at all the stuff you did before you read the book and think "wow, that was pretty dumb, glad I'm not doing that anymore."
And there's a whole bunch of stuff in the book that you didn't do before, but the book says that stuff is bad too. So you say "well gee, maybe I should try and tell people not to do that stuff either, because it's bad too." So when someone says "let's legalize that stuff" you say "no that's bad," and when someone says "let's outlaw that stuff" you say "yup, let's stop that stuff." Because you're consistent, you're also against the bad stuff that you did before.
Okay, storytime's over. But this is sort of the story that I hear from everyone at my church. They were sad, found Jesus, now they're happy, and they trust that the stuff the Bible tells them is bad is bad, and they want to stop other people from hurting themself/others with that bad stuff. And they really do seem happy with their religion, so I think the story is true (though there's stuff with faith, and maybe supernatural intervention that I'm glossing over, depending on how much you believe in God).
I think that if that story describes your life, then opposing the stuff that the Bible says is bad sort of makes sense. Especially if the Bible tells you "hey, there's this entity out there that wants bad stuff to happen, so that's why these otherwise nice people are pushing for it." And if your interpretation of the bible says that homosexuality, drugs, porn, divorce etc is bad, then you're going to oppose it, even if you lose the fights.
Last time I checked the research, religious people were happier than agnostics and atheists.
This. The only thing I’d add is to imagine genuinely believing that you have an eternal soul, there is a god, he spoke through a specific book, and that failing to follow its directions takes your soul to eternal damnation. Wouldn’t that cause you to worry enormously that, say, your homosexual child’s soul is damned for eternity? While I don’t believe those things, I have friends in exactly that situation. Their initial desperation has mellowed to tearful sorrow, but you can imagine the discussions that initial desperation caused. Again, start from where they do an much of the rest makes sense.
I don't know of any religion in which you get sent to hell for having homosexual tendencies, only of religions in which you get sent to hell for homosexual acts.
Even Christianity is not a religion where you get sent to hell for homosexual acts, as long as you are saved (and that's even assuming that you do get sent to hell for homosexual acts if you're *not* saved which depends on your hermeneutics). Some brands of Christians, including in particular Evangelicals, tend to forget this though.
From the Terrace of Lust, 'Purgatorio', "The Divine Comedy":
"(F)or in the middle of the flaming road
came people moving in the opposite direction
who had me staring, all absorbed.
There I can see that every shade of either group
makes haste to kiss another, without stopping,
and is content with such brief salutation,
just as, within their dark-hued files,
one ant will put its face up to the other's,
perhaps to inquire of his path and fortune.
When they have ceased their friendly greeting,
before they take a new step to continue,
each one makes an effort to outshout the rest.
The new ones cry: 'Sodom and Gomorrah!'
and the others: 'Pasiphaë crawls into the cow
so that the bull may hasten to her lust.'
…'But, so may your greatest longing
soon be satisfied and the heaven take you in
that is so full of love and holds the widest space,
'tell me, that I may trace it on my pages,
who you are and who is in that throng
which is even now receding at your backs?'
…'Those, who come not with us, all offended
the same way Caesar did, for which, in triumph,
he once heard "queen" called out against him.
'Thus they move on crying "Sodom,"
as you heard, in self-reproach.
And with their shame they fan the flames.
'Hermaphroditic was our sin.
Because we did not follow human law,
but ran behind our appetites like beasts,
'when, in our disgrace, we move off from the others
we shout her name who made herself a beast
inside the beast-shaped rough-hewn wood.
And just because I love the sound and look of the Occitan here, have Arnaud's speech from the same canto:
"Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,
qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.
Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan.
Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!"
Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina."
140 'Your courteous question pleases me so much
141 I neither can nor would conceal myself from You.
142 'I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way.
143 I see with grief past follies and I see,
144 rejoicing, the joy I hope is coming.
145 'Now I pray You, by that power
146 which guides You to the summit of the stairs,
147 to remember, when the time is fit, my pain.'
148 Then he vanished in the fire that refines them.
(Substack, please give us comment formatting for the love of Mike!)
Wasn't Dante's teacher in hell for being homosexual?
Oh well, that's such an important distinction, that's for clarifying. And here I thought religious people were inflicting their ridiculous beliefs everyone, but it turns out they only believe in eternal suffering and damnation if you're a real gay, not gay adjacent.
Is the distinction between having pedophilia impulses and actually commiting pedophilia important? What about the distinction between wanting to kill someone and actually doing so? Its seems strange to mock the distinction between thought and deed as generally unimportant, since that distinction is the foundation of morality -- what distinguishes humans from animals who simply always act on on whatever impulse they have.
Amidst this chaotic swirl of opposing commentary, allow me to mention Carl Pham that I have read and enjoyed many of your posts. You have a clear and succinct style, and I have yet to read one of your comments that I felt was subpar.
I may not agree with all your positions, but they are well-stated and I think that you have a keen intellect.
Religious conservatives say "Oh we don't hate you and think you'll burn in hell forever because you're gay, we'll only feel that way if you actually express your deeply-felt sexuality and love someone of the same gender." I get the distinction. You can spend your life in lonely torment and still get in our heaven club, but if you kiss another man, it's off to hell you go. How beautiful and sacred.
And stop equating consenting adults engaging in sexual behavior with pedophilia and murder, for fuck's sake. There's an enormous difference. I'm not even gay, but as soon as someone begins their argument by analogizing consensual adult same sex relations to fucking a dog or eating babies or killing people or something equally abhorrent, you know they're trying to hide their bigotry behind a tattered sheet of rationalist absurdity.
If you are sincerely baffled by, and want to understand, social (and especially religious) conservatives and don’t claim be baffled merely as a way of signaling your moral superiority, then this distinction is one you should spend time trying to understand and not ridicule.
It is a huge divider between their world view and a more secular world view. From their perspective, the gay who tries sincerely and with all the effort he can muster to avoid acting on his gayness will be forgiven where an inveterate sinner will not; and of course, there’s always the chance that he succeeds in not sinning. There’s no difference between the sin of homosexual acts and any other sin in those respects. But for a more secular world view, this amounts to something like denying who you are, staying in the closet, or being the jackbooted thug to your own oppression. And it seems to me that many (not just on the left) view those as secular sins.
I don’t think the two world views can be brought together in the sense of some middle ground being found. But mutual understanding and tolerance can get us a long way.
I understand how this point of view works and I still think it is ridiculous and catastrophizes homosexuality in particular among all sins. There are plenty of socially conservative Christians who are totally accepted by their peers despite building their lives around sins and sinful tendencies like materialism, anger, pride, self-righteousness, all of which are called out just as strongly as the various forms of sexual immorality in the New Testament. Why just focus on the guy with a gay marriage as the one who is unacceptable? It's purely because of extra-Biblical considerations.
Yes, I abbreviated, so as not to have to be specific about the situation. It was not a case where mere tendencies were at issue, though resisting the tendencies were exactly what my friends wanted, if I have successfully translated what they told me about it.
I get your point, and I appreciate your explaining it in a reasonable and measured way. I have family members who find great comfort and meaning in religion. I know the sense of community they find while attending church.
I'm a man of science, however, and that invisible Sky Daddy nonsense is crazy talk to me. Prayers are as efficacious as writing letters to Santa. Belief in some kind of Devil or Satan is even weirder. It's as real as Voldemort or Sauron.
American social policy should be about getting the possible outcomes for all Americans, not obliging religious beliefs.
I agree, though might not phrase it quite as harshly. That said, OP was asking why someone would hold conservative beliefs, and I was trying to illustrate the internal narrative that I think can lead to it
The status quo bias in defending one's belief system is insanely strong. It's more important than one's own life (after all, what gives meaning to life if not what one arrived at as beliefs about life).
Worldviews are memes, and they fight hard for their mindshare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAyR2R14BSg
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-162-transcript?rq=162
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-163-transcript?rq=163
"So why would you want to be on the wrong side of history over and over and over? Baffling."
So "reasonable, intelligent Republican" means "accepts social progressivism"? I don't know if Mitt Romney accepts every single element of social progressivism, but we'll see how it all ends up.
As to "The wrong side of history", gay marriage succeeded by adopting the very social conservatism you decry. "We're just ordinary people like you, we fall in love like you, and we want to get married and have the white picket fence life like you, so why can't we get married just like you?" was the messaging, and the "actually I want monogamish not monogamy if I ever do get married which is unlikely" element was told to sit down and shut up so as not to scare the normies. Andrew Sullivan was very strong on "the conservative case for gay marriage".
All the victories have been achieved by appeals to "This is not a slippery slope, this will not lead to greater liberalisation and weaker bonds, this is just extending what already exists to a new group of people who want to settle down and live ordinary lives".
people driven by emotions were persuaded by appeals to their emotions. who would have thought? :)
Intelligence is (currently) something that we as humans value a lot. And of course it is.
And AGI will take us to the limits of intelligence and the place it holds of value in our society.
However, there must be intelligence that is beyond language, and therefore unable to be selected for in our quest to optimize AGI. Powerful knowledge like the non-dualistic thinking within the Zen koans, mystic experience, and all other subjective qualia that is like a black box to our dialectic observational powers.
In a distant future, when our minds are shaped by augmented AGI (instead of by social and entertainment media), what will become of this unspeakable knowledge?
Is the end goal of our society to have selected completely for intelligence or human-ness?
Because as I see it, human-ness includes all the unspeakable knowledge that can't be entered solely into a language system. That is, unless we develop AE, artificial emotion, or something ridiculous like that. I believe feeling and the body are more than just stimuli to steer our grey mass of an intelligence center away from things that are too hot or too cold. They are part of the ecosystem we call a human being.
So I wanted to ask the readers here who I know will have some great takes: What will happen to a society that selects only for intelligence that fits into the bounds of language?
I want to first tidy up your phrasing a bit. I think that what you mean by "Intelligence that can't be put into language" is something more like Tacit Knowledge or Implicit Know-How or Praxis or Gestalt or whatever phrase anyone anywhere tried to cook up to get a hold on this slippery concept.
The reason "Can't be put into Language" is not enough is because there is already a lot of things that computers already do (and others that they can be taught to do) that can't be put into language arleady. Language is extremly limited, it's not a high bar to be not expressible in it. The framing "Can't be Made Explicit" is better, or - even better in this case where we're discussing computers - "Can't be operationalized as an Algorithm".
As to what will happen to whatever knowledge, intelligence, ways of thought, etc... that can't be algorithmized, well, *is* there such a thing ? Programs and Machines are extremly general ways of viewing the world, they're literally just Input->Output mappings on symbols. What is those things that your brain or any orgain in your body does that can't be summarized into "takes some chemicals, does some things, produces different chemicals" ? That's a program, the symbols are different sure (chemical elements instead of 0s and 1s), and the machines are different (cells instead of logic gates), but it's computation by any reasonable definition.
Anything your brain can do, a computer can too. Because your brain is a computer, and any physical system that takes things and transforms them to other things according to some "mechanical" rules is a computer.
So in the Ideal, I don't think you have to worry. Of course in practice, you may have to worry. Maybe the AGI we will end up developing this century or the next is actually a very robotic and mechanical-sounding creature, in this case all bets are off. It's always possible to make an AI that don't understand Love or Family or some horror like that, and it's always possible to give it control over all of society, then maybe we will all turn into p-zombies\slaves or maybe some will have the capacity to go underground and fight. But this is a crazy amount of assumptions.
From among the examples you chose here :
>non-dualistic thinking
>Zen koans
>mystic experience
How common are those things among humans even now ? Even humans are not that great at non-explicit knowledge and fuzzy thinking, computers and AI can actually teach us a thing or two or 10^9 about different and alien ways of thought.
There's no reason to think that AGI will be limited to "intelligence that fits into the bounds of language". Even present-day AI things like Stable Diffusion's img2img can take input and deliver output that is non-linguistic.
I think you're reading too much Star Wars robotics into AGI. AGI is a fancy way of saying advanced statistics applied to the body of human writing. What I see AGI lacking, is basic context.
Hm, I think quite the opposite is true. What we have is endless amount of context. What AGI is lacking the feedback loop to put things into that context, to have values (you might argue that this is the missing context, I think these are more like instrumental goals), to deliberate on input according to its values and all the context it has learned.
I'm prepared to believe that there are aspects of human-ness that cannot be expressed in human language. However, I don't believe the limitations of language as you describe them exist. Those are limitations of *our* language, and to some degree, our intelligence. If we were to become more intelligent, I think we will find that everything is able to be communicated by medium-agnostic information.
Hmm yeah that's an interesting idea. So like, if there was an intelligence that was able to observe both the speed and position of particles, and developed its own language to communicate that, then hypothetically there would be nothing outside the bounds of its language... I feel like there's something missing here though that I can't find the words for :)
I don't understand what it would mean for some knowledge or intelligence to be beyond language, or why you'd expect that to happen. Language basically works by taking a mental concept and attaching an arbitrary label to it, right? What's stopping you from attaching an arbitrary label to whatever-example?
I'm confused, there is all sorts of knowledge that is beyond language. (beyond is not a good word here, let's say orthogonal to language.) This includes math and shapes and faces and geometry and... Take a map as a simple example, sure you could describe a map with enough words, but it would be useless.
None of those are "beyond language" in a sense that would prevent an AI from understanding or working with them, and in fact computers are arguably already better at those than humans are.
There's *some* sense in which it would be reasonable to describe those as non-linguistic, but that seems like obviously not the distinction Dasloops is driving towards.
I think if you focus exclusively on reasoning you're already on your way to being a rationalist. And down the road there inevitably be MetaMed and Basililks. You'll find EA alluring and further down that road there inevitably will be FTX, Alameda and lots of things like them. You'll entertain repugnant conclusions (and worse, repugnant premises) and you won't care because reasoning is your God.
I don't think, though, that society as a whole will ever select only for intelligence. And while that is the case, all will be well.
Yeah good points. I'm sure that as we write this some brave researcher is already creating SBF-3, an AGI with the potential to take on even more risk, stimulants, and Bronze-III League.
It's true that intelligence will never become the entire cake. There will always be a slice of those other values we need to make us functioning human beings. I think the reason we as a species have prioritized intelligence comes down to energy/money/ability to live better. It's led to technology that has enriched certain entrepreneurial types and raised our quality of life. Will there ever be a point where the limits of this are reached, and we are left wanting for our more human qualities we left far behind us?
I remember an SSC post that raised a hypothesis that was something like: "the USSR collapsed because its citizens realised that not only were they unhappy, but most other citizens were unhappy too."
Does anybody have a link to that post?
In a communist society everyone knows everyone else is unhappy, it's not a secret. Of course, a lot of it is communicated via humor (of the gallows variety in particular), art of varying degrees of legality, and so on.
The thing that matters is whether those who will be called to punish dissenters, would reliably do so. If there are doubts about it, the cascade can start.
I don't know what post you have in mind. The idea sounds similar to Timur Kuran (1991) on how the end of preference falsification fuelled the 1989 revolutions. Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2010422
a bit tangential, but here's a video about the fall of the USSR due to its low-productivity economy finally in ~1985 running off the cliff as cheap oil runs out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrZ1eMlzwhc
Could be this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/ but you might be thinking about the other Scott A: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410
The post I remember talked more directly about the collapse of the USSR. But maybe I am just misremembering the post you linked. Thanks!
Question for phantasics (people who can see mental imagery in their "mind's eye"): does mental imagery look like the after-images you get when you stare at a red light and then close your eyes and see green? Is it similar in vividness and/or apparent location?
It shows in a non-place, unless I choose to place it somewhere in the world (in an AR-like manner), in which case it's localized in space but still on a separate "layer" - or perhaps, the non-place takes the qualities of a part of my visual field. It's hard to describe but it's quite unlike visual perception.
If I really insist on asking "if I imagine an apple, where is the apple", I'd say it is simultaneously inside my skull and floating in space - but a different space than the physical one, like seeing the apple on a screen in a videogame.
When in a half-awake state, it is possible to confuse the "mind's eye" with actual vision. While fully awake they appear to be two different... senses, so to speak.
I don't know how to describe it non-circularly, but it's not like after-images.
It depends on what type of mental images I'm conjuring :
1- Actual things or people I saw in the past, then it's going to be pretty much a direct recall if it's recent enough, it's not going to contain all the details of course, but then again neither is your eyes picking up on all the details when it sees something. Recall of such images works as if you mind-travelled your eye alone to the time when you saw it.
2- Verbal descriptions from novels or talking people, then it's a lot more hazy and dream-like. You're filling a lot from incomplete wordings. If the novel is describing a character, then inevitably the actor\actress who played that character in the film\series is going to feature in my imagination too, unless the descriptions conflict then I'm synthesizing a new person entirely. The image is even shifting and changing things all the time as I get updated descriptions.
Thanks for all the replies! I was trying to imagine what it would be like to have visual mental imagery, and I thought maybe it was like seeing afterimages except you can consciously control them. But it sounds like it's not.
I can do the auditory equivalent ("picture" or "audialize" a song or a person's voice in my head), but I would say that *is* similar to the auditory equivalent of afterimages. If there's been a ringing noise and then it stops, it can be hard to tell whether it's actually stopped and you're imagining it, and if you consciously try to imagine the sound then I think it makes the distinction even more difficult.
In my experience: mental images do not look like afterimages. There is a great variety of levels of detail and richness but in extreme cases the realism and detail is (or feels like it is) at the level of a photograph. They don't seem to usually appear at any particular location -- or any location at all! -- relative to my "actual" visual field except if I close my eyes they sometimes feel like they're right in front of me. I mostly have trouble maintaining a mental image for a long period of time, usually they are like quick flashes.
Relatedly, my theory of aphantasia is that being able to visualize (and "audialize", etc) ideas is fundamental to the way the brain works, but there are mechanisms to suppress it so we stay focused on reality, and sometimes those mechanisms work maybe a little too well. This theory was prompted by hearing on this site from an aphantastic person who had photorealistic dreams and could sometimes visualize when half-asleep.
I like to think I have a fairly good ability to visualize, and I can confidently say that for me, it's not like afterimages at all. Afterimages feel like physically seeing something. Visualizing doesn't feel like it goes through my eyes. I can visualize something in 3D surrounding me, including behind me, so it doesn't have the apparent location of an afterimage.
The best non-visual comparison I have been able to think of is reading a text silently but imagining it in the voice of someone familiar. It doesn't feel like it goes through your ears, and you don't physically hear it, but you maintain an awareness of the qualities of the voice. You can apply those qualities of the voice to a new set of text that you've never heard the person read. I'm not sure if that's a helpful comparison; I'm now wondering if there exists a sort of auditory aphantasia. There probably does.
I've never stared at a red light long enough to assess the afterimage (seems dangerous!), but mental imagery for me has these qualities:
-lower fidelity than original, nowhere near "photographic"
-unquantifiable broad-strokes details (e.g. I can visualize a chain, but not a chain of exactly X links, for meaningfully large values of X)
-image "appears" in the upper third of field of view, not directly in focus, "above" eyes
-much easier to pattern-match to an existing close-enough cached image than to create something new from scratch; "visualize an apple" -> image of a specific apple, not $PLATONIC apple.
Dreams function basically the same as waking visual perception, so the hardware isn't insufficient; I also notice that "mind's ear" functions significantly better, and it's fairly easy to cache hours-long concerts or whatever. So perhaps weak "mind's eye" is a function of actual-eyesight being not that great. I'm used to seeing the world fuzzily, so of course my conjured visions will be the same way, how could they not? (Now I'm curious whether bothering to wear my glasses regularly improves mental imagery...)
Plausible-sounding speculative psychology, I like it. Indeed, why don't people look down while contemplating? It definitely helps if I also close my eyes, although that might have as much to do with appropriating resources ordinarly reserved for $PERCEPTION_VISUAL subroutine. I'd imagine that it's also easier to visualize if one could easily block out hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting too. Does sensory deprivation improve mental modeling of sensing?
Yeah, I think I am just bad at shape-rotation in general (and correlated scores on IQ-type tests confirm this is my weakest strength). So it's hard to "hold" an image, nevermind actually manipulating it. Without a substrate to anchor that idea on (e.g. sketching out a visual idea on paper, or locking it down in words), the idea doesn't really wanna stay fixed in possibility-space indefinitely.
Lyrics I conjecture take advantage of that hardwired human propensity to run "human voice recognition" at an extremely high priority level, even for languages that one doesn't actually know. Lots more salient Schelling points scattered throughout the music. Orchestral is harder - I "know" Bach's Brandenburg Concertos "by heart", but would have difficulty playing the whole thing out with no prompting. Simpler melody-heavy music like videogame stuff, I think is easier, maybe because it's got lots of pattern-recognition hooks (motifs) that help "chunk" the data more manageably. Which maybe implies long music is stored as serial-linked small discrete data packets, rather than giant filesize packets commensurate with the length. Epistemic status: wild conjecture!
I mostly describe myself as aphantastic because I can’t generate visualisations either intentionally or in response to a prompt, and there’s only one very specific circumstance in which I would see a visualisation at all.
However, because there IS a specific circumstance I can answer your question (for me) - the visualisations that I see when lying down, very relaxed, and about to drop off to sleep are like poorly-drawn versions of real objects - similar to what you might experience when wearing a really terrible pair of glasses. They are lacking in detail and surrounded by fuzz, but the colours are right and they move like real objects
So, "visualize an apple" is a task I cannot do, not in a way that produces an experience remotely similar to vision.
But "remember the apple I sliced up before supper" is a task that activates something like vision, (and something like each of the other senses, too.)
How much of sensory imagination is remixed sensory memory?
Question for people who know they can see mental imagery and those who know they cannot: how the heck can you tell [the difference]?
I can at will enter a mental state where I believe I can "see" things which are not present, but I can simultaneously hold the belief that I am not in any sense experiencing a visual phenomenon; neither as one does during ordinary experience nor during dream-like hallucinations nor during paranoia-like hallucinations. I can report a great number of different visual phenomena as being part of my "mental imagery" but I am dubious about some combinations (e.g. "orange-green"). Does that make me aphantasic or not? Can anyone convince me that there are actually two different conditions which can be compared, or is it just a competition between confabulations for a single self-same ability?
>I can at will enter a mental state where I believe I can "see" things which are not present.
That’s the difference. I can’t enter that state at will, though in limited circumstances I will just naturally enter it. And some people just can’t enter it at all.
I don’t think you can count as aphantastic if you can generate any sort of visualisations on purpose
I think last thread someone mentioned trying to imagine the word 'blue' written in red. That's nearly impossible for me; the word 'blue' IS the color blue when I think of it.
It is extremely rare for me to be able to imagine any non-visual information alongside visual. I remember songs as pure sound playing in a featureless void. I've had maybe five dreams that included sound, maybe three that included any kind of feeling (such that a dream where I was snapping my fingers becomes extraordinarily memorable for having both).
It IS a little difficult but I was able to do it. As an encore, it was much easier to imagine 'red' written in blue - perhaps because I had practice, but I think more likely because I normally write using blue or sometimes black ink.
Does someone have a link for what 'phantasic' means? If it means 'seeing' something in my mind... then doesn't everyone do that?
Most people can do it, but those who can't are called "aphantasic", so "phantasic" refers to the majority who can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
It's more like looking at a painting or drawing of the object than actually looking at the object. That's the best way of describing what I see. It's not made of brush-strokes, exactly, but there are a finite number of brush-strokes / details. And the painting changes - as time passes it is drawn in different ways.
No, mental imagery isn't a negative, it's like a photograph with progressively less clear edges. If I imagine an apple, it's a red apple with a brown stem and a white lens-flare spot to the top-left where the light is shining off of it. It's sitting on my counter, which is white or light-blue, and which is shifting between uniform plastic or patterned tile. The oven in the corner is black with no other details. It;'s got the burners but is distinctly lacking the metal covers for them. I can pan up to see the green luminescence of the oven's digital clock but can't read what the numbers are, it's mostly just a green glow.
I can focus on any given object to make it look correct, but doing so will cost me the apple.
The biggest difference for me is that anything I am imagining is flicking from one viewpoint to another, one style to another, very quickly, rather than persisting for a long time and gradually fading. Something like this: https://80.lv/articles/movie-to-cartoon-la-la-land-remade-with-stable-diffusion/ but now the camera is also jumping from location to location, half the image is usually missing, and colors are rare.
I'm only partly phantasic, but when I focus a lot I can generate images in my mind's eye, however, they're on another plane of existence. I can sort of, say, conjure an image of an apple, and answer questions about it's appearance without having to add new detail as asked (does it have a stem?, where is the light coming from? Those questions already have an answer as soon as I generated the image.) But I cannot answer, for example, "does the apple occupy more of your visual space than this other (real) apple? There is no correspondence between the real visual space and the imagined visual space. If you believe tulpa communities however, developing that particular skill to the point that you can subconsciously "confuse" real images with imagined ones is possible.
No, mental imagery is an entirely separate experience from even the most basic visual stimuli. I'd hesitate to compare them in vividness, because that implies they might have a relative brightness to real vision, which is not the case. For example, it's extremely difficult for me to imagine a familiar room, but in almost complete darkness. But in terms of how well I would be able to describe details of a mental image, a retinal afterimage is maybe roughly comparable on vividness, even if that feels like comparing apples and oranges.
It doesn't have a location in my visual field.
Can you imagine the sound of someone's voice, or the melody of a familiar song, or the smell or taste of pine or lemons? Visual imagination bears the same relationship to visual perception as these other imaginations do to the other perceptions (and perhaps the same as imagination generally does to actual belief), though I find visual imagination easier than most other sensory imagination.
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250/comment/10448181.
15 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 17 % on November 14)
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
45 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged).
40 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 38 % on November 14).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Only important change from the previous update is that now it is clear Democrats will lose their House majority. On November 14 it was merely highly likely.
So, I want to use the space created by such unusually short update to address frequent pushback that I am defining Ukrainian victory too narrowly.
I think it is important to pay attention to what Ukrainians themselves define as their victory, not to choose a baseline of “victory means they were not beaten as badly as was expected by many Western commentators, who ate up Russian propaganda about the strength of the Russian army and also thought that Ukrainian army will disintegrate like Afghans after American pullback”**
Conveniently, at the recent G20 meeting in Indonesia, Zelensky (speaking remotely, of course), enumerated Ukrainian peace proposal in ten points. Here it is, in English, on the official website of the office of the Ukrainian president: https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ukrayina-zavzhdi-bula-liderom-mirotvorchih-zusil-yaksho-rosi-79141. (here is the same speech but with points added at the beginning in the form of a numbered list: https://english.nv.ua/nation/president-zelenskyy-s-10-point-peace-formula-full-text-of-speech-to-g20-in-bali-50284154.html).
Among other things, Zelensky demands, as a condition for peace, withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, which for him obviously includes Crimea. He did not say the word “Crimea” in the speech, but “Russia must reaffirm the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the framework of the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the applicable international legally binding documents. It is not up to negotiations” doesn’t leave any room for another interpretation.
So, if the war would end in a ceasefire which would gave Ukraine de facto control over all of its internationally recognized territory with the exception of Crimea, and Crimea would NOT be recognized as a Russian territory, but would remain as an illegally occupied part of Ukraine, I would count that as an Ukrainian victory, but nevertheless, it would mean that Ukraine agreed to moderate its current demands.
Technically speaking, even if Crimea would be returned to Ukraine, but “Special Tribunal regarding the crime of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” would not be established, that would also be a step down from what Ukraine now demands.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
**Time for a bragging section: I think my prewar prediction of what will happen basically held up well, although not completely and it was less quantitatively rigorous than these updates. I did not post it here, but if someone is interested, I am happy to (badly) translate it from Czech so you might judge for yourself.
Interesting. I think you should stay with "your" definitions of victory and not with Zelensky's recent speeches - those are better seen as bargaining chips/rhetoric. - Logically, the speech seem to demand Crimea back, but if he really meant it, he would simply say it. Saying instead "Russia must reaffirm the territorial integrity of Ukraine within the framework of the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the applicable international legally binding documents” does leave MUCH more room for interpretation. ;) - I want to see Putin loose, ofc. So I do see your 40% of Russian victory (if that is keeping territory occupied in 2022) as too high. But you may be right, Putin seems to be at least as optimistic. This expert agrees kind of: https://slantchev.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/countering-the-russian-narratives/
But he ends: "The Ukrainians will have to win this war on the ground to compel Putin to adjust his goals. It will be a long war." - Still: "The West will stay."
And I do not see any chance of victory for Russia against the West. NATO used less than 2% of its potential, yet.
OTOH your definitions of victory seem to imply that getting Putin back to before 22.2.22 would be consistent with Ukraine winning AND loosing. Maybe better put up separate definitions for "winning" the 2014 aggression and the 2022 war resp.? Putin might loose the one but "win" the other.
Fyi, I am not changing my definitions. I quoted Zelensky only as a counter to frequent pushback I am getting from people defining Ukrainian victory as something like "Ukraine is not wholly occupied by Russia after the war", which is a standard by which Ukrainian victory would be more than 90 % assured, but it bears little relationship to why and how is the war actually being fought (e.g. Russians do not have enough troops to occupy the whole country even if professional Ukrainian army would magically disappear).
My definition of Ukrainian victory (which btw. includes return to prewar status quo) is based on Ukraine achieving most but not necessarily all of its war aims.
I am fine. - Just got the impression that "Ukraine returns to prewar status quo" is also an description of your "Ukraine loses"-scenario. If Russia gets to keep Crimea. - Which may then also be a scenario for your "both sides get to an agreement". - Zvi had some definitions, https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-7-more-data-and-peace-terms. ("Ukraine just survives" - is "minor Russian victory" in his concept). But whatever, betting markets are out there to tax the BS: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-post-11-longer-term-predictions.
When are we going to get some serious (any?) reporting on the relative economic performances of states/countries as a (possible) function of COVID repose (public and private)? For example, one has an informal impression that FL/TX did better than CA/NY. Is there data? What about among European countries with different responses
"When are we going to get some serious (any?) reporting on the relative economic performances of states/countries as a (possible) function of COVID repose (public and private)?"
alesziegler's answer is a good one.
This is one of the many times where I find it helpful to remember that the original name of the subject was "political economy."
You can rest assured there will be zillions od studies coming to wildly different conclusions from each other.
Yes, I would expect this to be an extremely active area of research in various areas of political science and economics during this coming generation. One problem with such research is that a lot of countries did very similar things. For example, lockdowns and masking policies were very commonly employed. This makes it difficult to determine what actually worked. OTOH, even first-world countries had very different death rates, so perhaps it's possible to tease some signal out of the mass of data. If nothing else, let's try to find out what South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan did to keep their death rates so low.
I would expect difficulty in comparing death rates across different countries. It's the standard problem, if you've got a 90-year-old in hospital with four different problems and then they catch covid and die, is that a covid death or not?
You are asking a different and more difficult question. Ideally my explanatory variable is actual behavior over time regardless of whether it was mandatory or voluntary. But of course having lost of people die of COVID is a drag on economic performance so there are tricky problems of identification to address.
Enrico Fermis asks: "Where are they?" :)
Hello and welcome to the ACX invisible orbiting space station. Today the bomb bay is full of 25 Truth Bombs. Each Truth Bomb must be armed with a truth. The bomb, which is intelligent and aware, must be persuaded to accept this truth claim as proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or it will not arm. When dropped, a Truth Bomb causes everyone within 100 m of the impact point to believe that truth for 24 hours if they did not do so before. And our invisible orbiting space station can drop Truth Bombs anywhere in the world with pinpoint accuracy.
So, what Truth Bombs do you want to drop on the world, and where do you want to drop them?
ADDED: If the question becomes more interesting with bombs that have permanent effects (or maybe permanent effects that are subject to ordinary counter-persuasion,) feel free to consider that case instead.
Well, since I'm not sure I know the truth, I think the best way would be to demonstrate fallibilism. Invite the most radical political ideologues with absolute certainty and then have them drop truth bombs. Either they will proven correct, in which case I will accept the truth, or they will not, in which case they will hopefully become less certain and more willing to see all sides.
You know less about people's motivations than you think, especially for people you don't know.
Lots of political possibilities here, if you could land them.
Any system which treats women as second class citizens is deeply immoral, and then target the major Muslim capitals. Or Mecca during the Hajj.
Genocide is bad, mmm'kay? And drop a few on Beijing.
The best possible thing that could happen to Russia is for Vladimir Putin to die, followed by peace and trade with the west, and drop a few in Moscow.
Probably a bunch more. The problem would be that those are true for me, but for the Russian revanchist or Chinese imperialist or devout Wahhabist the truth is literally the opposite, and I don't see how to square that circle.
Skip outside of politics and I think I'm at a loss.
I agree. The bombs would not arm. Those claims are feel good claims aka BSP. (most human and chimp history all war was genocide, ofc, and self-evidently "good", if you won). And shallow at that. (The best for Russia ...). And women? Are special. Not 2nd class. Clausewitz "Vom Kriege" - read the preface by his wife.
My first thought was to program it with "no divine thing exists" and drop it on the Vatican for Sunday Mass.
Fortunately, we have established the principle of "ex opere operato" so this has no effect on the validity of the sacrament, even if the minister doubts for the duration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_opere_operato
Try again! 😉🙏✝
The only reason I picked Sunday mass is there would be a large number of Christians there at the time.
Yeah but the Vatican is full of Catholics, and Catholics are...well, catholic. There's a certain flexibility of application despite a general firmness of principle. If you were to proffer a time machine, and absolutely prove that life began on Earth as single celled protozoans 800 million years ago, and evolved gradually thereafter, the great mass of Catholics are not going to freak out.
Yes, well, Genesis is clearly meant as metaphor, we already knew that centuries ago, and God works in mysterious ways, who's to say He did not put forth His hand to tweak the DNA slightly this way and that as it slowly tumbled and mutated over the millenia? Go over there and bother the fundamentalists, those are the guys with a seriously brittle worldview that might shatter if you whack it with a living trilobite you carried back (forward?) from the deep past in your carry-on luggage.
Catholic: "According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the 'Big Bang' and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5–4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_and_the_Catholic_Church#Pope_Benedict_XVI
Take away its blue check. And if that doesn't work, have HR send it in for sensitivity training.
Is that not enough?
TANSTAAFL. Not only does keeping it in mind prevent many personal and collective follies, it also answers about 80% of the questions that begin "Why don't they...?"
However, this truth would never work with the truth bombs. Nobody ever comes to understand it except by direct and usually painful personal experience. It's generally impossible to persuade other people of this truth unless they've had appropriate experience, so there's no way I'd be able to convince a bomb fresh from the factory with no experience at all.
Unless you are thinking of a very specific and narrow version of this idea, basically every economist understands this idea, and most of them without (probably) needing to learn it "painfully".
I certainly think _I_ understand it, and I come from a pretty privileged background and don't think I've had very many "personally painful" life lessons.
It might be true that without such an experience, one won't understand it viscerally but only intellectually, but I think that's probably true of just about everything. Most things are only understood/known intellectually unless you have experienced them in a way that activates other kinds of human knowledge/feeling/etc.
Well, yeah, I'd say a shocking number of economistgs at best understand it abstractly and in circumstances where it doesn't conflict with their pet theories. Otherwise it's hard to explain MMT.
About your understanding, I have no idea, but yes I would a priori consider it on shaky grounds if you have no personal experience buttressing it, just as I would consider the opinion of a virgin (however well read) on issues of sex to be on shaky grounds.
That of course doesn't mean I assume you're wrong, nor that you would fail to exhibit grit if the concept conflicted with your hopes. Some people do very well under fire, even the first time. But veterans are generally more reliable.
Nevertheless, I fully agree I would have been more accurate if I'd said "Almost nobody" or "Rather a depressingly small number of people" isntead of "nobody." It was a rhetorical flourish.
I do however stand by my conclusion that I would be unable to persuade an intelligent bomb of the principle, through pure rhetoric and dazzling logic.
I guess, I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that if that's they way you are meaning "to know" something, then basically no one "knows" hardly anything and its a sort of trivial point. Most people will probably only get that kind of really visceral understanding of a small number of concepts, especially in modern times.
Kind of bouncing from one extreme to the other, aren't we? You start off saying you're confident you understand a broad hard and (what is usually considered an) unhappy truth notwithstanding relatively few (your words) relevant experiences, and then we bounce right over to but what can any of us really know about anything?
Yikes. I'm going to prefer hanging out in the middle here. Yes, I think it's hard to really grasp the principle of TANSTAAFL until you've had some (generally not happy) life experience to drive home that truth -- e.g. been lied to once or twice by hucksters or politicians promising you A Free Lunch and lost time, money, or opportunity believing them.
But also yes once you've been around a while, aren't completely wet behind the years, I think most people build up a pretty solid experimental data set about what the world is like on a wide variety of topics to some moderate degree, and on one or two in quite some depth, and usually in their area of 10,000 Hours they are at least moderately skeptical of A Free Lunch.
I didn't say nobody ever learns the rule, I just said it is learned annoyingly slowly and usually with at least some collateral damage to one's bonhomie, so it'd be great if a truth bomb or Vulcan mind meld could just sort of impart the wisdom without people having to learn it the hard way. I mean, I kind of wish someone had exploded this particular truth bomb on me about 40 years ago, would've saved a certain amount of wear 'n' tear on the soul, left the escutcheon with fewer dings and scrawled obcene graffitti.
I'm arguing that lots of people have a very good understanding of lots of topics (including TANSTAAFL), but very few people have the _visceral_ gut level understanding you describe. You are the one saying you don't "really" understand something without painful personal experience. I think that that is one way of getting a different kind of understanding on a topic, but I don't think it's necessary to have that painful personal experience to "know" or "understand" something.
I'd argue most people "know/understand" lots of things, but if having the kind of knowledge that comes from painful personal experience is what counts, then no, most modern people "know" (in the sense that they have experienced a painful personal lesson on the topic) very few things. But that's your definition of "know" not mine.
To summarize, you claimed that almost no one understands TANSTAAFL because they haven't had painful lessons on the topic, I used the fact that very few modern humans have painful lessons on almost any topic to demonstrate that I think that's a silly definition to use for "to know", and that lots of people know lots of things without it, and so we should therefore believe that lots of people also understand TANSTAAFL
I'm not sure I can go much beyond 1+1=2.
I guess the really cheeky answer would be "Truth Bombs are a waste of public funding". Beyond a reasonable doubt is a very hard standard to hit, and if you can hit it I doubt you need the bomb.
I guess the best thing to do is prime it with the workings of an entire language and drop it on all the countries that don't speak it. Behold, Universal Communication every 24 hours.
School subjects in general, actually. Why waste thirteen years of everybody's lives when we can teach them instantly through explosions.
That's a tough one.
The radius means you can only change the minds of a small number of people, which means that to accomplish anything they probably need to be important, powerful people - almost certainly politicians.
And powerful politicians often have al sorts of daft beliefs about questions of value and interpretation and the likely consequences of difference policies, but those seem outside the scope of this sort of bomb.
The only place I can see the kind of narrow, purely factual, objective question that my interpretation of this question allows resolving, where the answer is provable to a standard sufficient to convince a rational bomb, but seems not to be believed by a lot of powerful politicians, is climate change.
So, boring and obvious as it is, I think the best use is going to be to work out, say, five facts about the probability distributions of consequences of not doing more, sooner, to tackle climate change, that lie in the (surprisingly large) gap between "probably beyond reasonable doubt using the state of the art of contemporary scientific research" and "universally accepted by senior world leaders", load them into five bombs each, and drop them on sites at which senior politicians (especially US, Chinese, Indian and Brazilian ones) are gathered.
I think it depends on the level on which the bomb operates. For example, "You will one day die and be forgotten" might be a truth that politicians accept intellectually, but some emotional part of them could be accurately modeled as being ignorant of the future/convinced that if they build themselves a big enough metaphorical pyramid they will achieve something meaningfully similar to immortality. Are there common truths which we _know_, but don't intuitively _accept_, with which the truth bombs could be loaded to (temporarily) produce better people?
You can't actually prove that one beyond a reasonable doubt until everyone forgets about Socrates and Caesar, and Tutenkhamun.
I think heat-death-of-the-universe arguments work even before then.
"Forgotten" requires there to still be the capacity for memory. One of those "exception that proves the rule" phrases.
Hmm, if the bomb must be persuaded, I can't quite is it as an oracle of truth. But I could use it to validate possibly flawed arguments that I'm not clever enough to refute myself. Maybe an application for AI safety.
One problem is that it's not clear to me if the target of the bomb necessarily becomes aware of the new belief. If I bomb my neighbor with how the minute waltz is usually completed in around two minutes, but the topic doesn't comes so that they don't have a chance to think about it in the next 24h, does the bomb have any effect? Will he notice and remember that he was truth bombed for a day?
I think I'd like to play with the intelligence more than I'd like to drop the bombs though. I have questions!
It matters a lot if:
a. The truth bombs are actually truth oracles (they can't be misled) or are at least much better at reasoning than humans.
b. The truth bombs overwrite humans' beliefs vs convincing them in a way that also is based on the truth and quality of evidence of the claim.
Can I convince a bomb that the morally right thing for humans to do is to give me all their money, and then drop it someplace with a lot of rich people?
Re: (a) Truth bombs are clever and knowledgeable, but they are not infallible. An able persuader with enough skewed evidence can persuade a truth bomb to believe things that aren't true.
Re: (b) Truth bombs overwrite their subjects beliefs temporarily rather than actually persuading them of the truth of the beliefs in question. But the subjects do remember believing what they were made to believe, and some may investigate the matter further and come to be persuaded after the fact, but not many.
Would have been nice to get one of those to drop on COP26... The truth that mixed nuts are usually mostly peanuts and therefore a scam! Ban mixed nuts.
The one truth: there is no truth, only models and opinions of various degrees of accuracy. Where accuracy is determined by explanatory and predictive power.
What about mathematics?
mathematics or humans doing mathematics?
I would drop them all on myself, loaded with the truths about twenty-five important issues on which I'm doubtful.
How are you going to prime them? At the point you can convince the bomb of something beyond all reasonable doubt, you don't need it.
I don't know, are they truth bombs or are they just "be convinced by a reasonably persuasive argument" bombs? The original problem specification is a bit internally contradictory on this point. If the bombs can be convinced by good arguments to spread falsehoods as easily as truths then please just drop them in the ocean, I have no use for them.
Fair - I can't work out a way to specify this hypothetical that won't let me use the bombs for verification rather than persuasion, but which also won't let me use them to spread persuasive falsehoods.
I think the most interesting version to me is "you are an omniscient entity, which can only interact with the world via these bombs, and can only prime them with facts that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt using facts already publicly available to humans", but looking above that doesn't seem to have been Jonas's intent.
Anyone have any experience with getting modafanil in the UK without it being outrageously expensive? Recommendations for suppliers?
So, this might be a silly question, but what causes insulin to break down, and why isn't such a compound part of the standard diabetic toolkit.
I know that insulin doesn't stay in your bloodstream forever (that's how they measure how well your pancreas is functioning if your T1 diabetic). I'm not entirely clear on what actually causes the breakdown, since one unit of insulin can handle pretty different amounts of carbohydrates in the blood for different people.
Secondly, if it is some sort of chemical reaction, could it be manufactured so that you could use it after you accidentally take too much insulin? If not, why not, and if so, where might one purchase such things?
You have asked an important and interesting question. Here's a nice, but older, review:
https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/19/5/608/2530817
Some of the main points:
1) Insulin doesn't survive in the bloodstream itself very long, minutes typically. It gets taken up by cells of various types (most often liver and kidney) by receptors on the surface. It's then sometimes brought inside the cell, where it can affect various cell processes, or be degraded. But also it's sometimes released again. So excess insulin isn't really floating around the bloodstream, it's mostly bound to receptors on or in various cells, from which it can be re-released in response to...something. There's nothing in this article that suggests anyone knows exactly how and why insulin moves from place to place, meaning what biochemical signals cause it, but the authors believe it's an important aspect of how insulin works and is regulated.
2) The main initial degradation of insulin seems to be cleavage of the polypeptide strand[1] at a number of places by the "insulin degrading enzyme" (IDE), which is present in a wide variety of tissues, usually in the cytosol (meaning it's not usually membrane-bound or present in some specific organelle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin-degrading_enzyme
The fragments IDE produces may have their own biochemical signalling role, meaning the level of insulin fragments may be a signal to other metabolic processes. Final degradation of the fragments may take place in lysosomes, little destructo-pods all cells have that can generally degrade proteins.
3) IDE appears to have a number of *other* functions besides degrading insulin[2], so you would want to be careful interfering with its behavior, as it appears tied into a web of processes, which is alas all too typical for biochemistry -- everything is connected to everything, you tug on one strand of the spiderweb and things seemingly very distant are affected.
In answer to your final question, yes, it is a chemical reaction, and in fact a very simple one: just the hydrolysis of the peptide bonds holding the amino acids in the insulin chain together. Second-year students in chemistry degrees learn this reaction, and it's easy to do in a lab. But of course the body is careful not to allow destruction of proteins willy nilly, so the reaction is very carefully controlled by only being done via an enzyme (IDE), which only destroys certain proteins that fit into its active site. The activity of IDE, like the activity of all enzymes, can be turned up or down by the binding of other molecules to various sites on the enzyme, and it's in this way that the body maintains control of IDE's activity.
You can't easily introduce IDE into yourself. If you ate or drank it, it would just be promptly digested. If you injected it into the bloodstream, it may or may not work, since it depends on a certain environment to function (including pH, presence at certain concentrations of certain "cofactors," including at least one metal ion). It'd be like expecting a CPU to work after it was removed from the motherboard. And besides all that, the insulin is mostly not in the bloodstream at all, it's on the surface of cells, and sometimes inside them. It's extremely difficult to introduce foreign molecules into cells, because cells are very careful what they allow to cross their membranes. You can do it with very small molecules that can slip through the cracks, essentially, or hijack some transporter mechanisms, but none of these would work to bring a big enzyme into the cell. (Plus you also need to persuade the surface-bound insulin to be transported inside the cell.)
That all said, as mentioned almost all enzymes have small molecules that turn their activity up and down, so that they can be controlled by the body, and these small molecules stand a much better chance of being introduced externally -- e.g. by injection -- and crossing into cells where they can do their work. So people are definitely working on this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-019-0271-0.epdf
By and by here might be a drug that makes its way into the market, but it will probably be a while, because this enzyme lies at the heart of a lot of complex biochemistry. People will try various ways to tweak its activity, and they'll work just fine in the test tube, then fail in animal studies or on rare occasion clinical trials about 99.99% of the time. Still, someday it might very well happen.
-------------
[1] Insulin is a small protein, a "polypeptide" strand of amino acids held together by peptide bonds.
[2] The Wikipedia article observes that people have become quite interested in the role IDE may have in Alzheimer's, since it also degrades the protein the accumulation of which has been traditionally hypothesized to lead to Alzheimer's.
Thank you very much for explaining all of this, this was just what I was looking for.
I'm not an endocrinologist and my understanding here is very shallow, but let me take a guess and then if someone knows more then they can correct me.
Usually substances are either excreted by the kidneys, metabolized by enzymes in the liver, or metabolized by enzymes in the cells that absorb and use them.
Enzymes are very finicky, and you usually can't just stick a bunch of them in the bloodstream and expect them to survive and do the same thing they would do within a cell. Usually you would want to find a drug that gets absorbed by cells and makes the enzyme stronger or weaker, but this usually takes some time to work, and getting the dose of this drug wrong would be at least as danger as getting the dose of insulin wrong.
My understanding (again, not an expert!) is that the acknowledged antidote for insulin poisoning is glucagon, a hormone that does ~ the opposite of insulin.
An insulin overdose leading to low blood sugar and an altered level of consciousness is treated by EMS in two main ways: either injection of sugar (glucose) or glucagon. They each have their advantages and disadvantages.
The major reason why low blood sugar is bad is that cells in your body (most notably your brain) require fuel to operate. Though some cells can use things other than glucose as fuel, high levels of insulin in the body shut down your body's production of them, too. Like with a fire, a lack of fuel is about as harmful as a lack of oxygen for continued operation.
The preferred way to treat this in the field is with administration of glucose (specifically dextrose). This needs to be done into the bloodstream, typically via an IV. For adults we typically administer 25g of sugar in a 10%, (rarely)25%, or 50% concentration, known as D10, D25, or D50 respectively. There are risks and benefits.
The biggest risk in this process is extravasation where the drug you are giving leaks out at the administration site and into issue. This fluid is hypertonic and will effectively pickle your live tissues, possibly cause necrosis and loss of the limb being used.. Using a lower-concentration formula is now preferred because it both causes harm more slowly if extravasation occurs, and the larger volume being administered will make it more obvious.
On the down-side, low-concentration IV dextrose takes longer to administer (though in-practice you end up needing less of it). The larger volume may also be a risk if someone is a dialysis patient as the extra fluid may be a problem.
Glucagon is a hormone which causes (among other things) your liver to release more sugar through glycogenolysis (not to be confused with glycolysis, glycogenesis, or gluconeogenesis.). Glucagon can be given into the blood stream directly, or as a mist into the nose or an injection into a muscle. This makes it great for people where you can't get an IV established, and the low volume (roughly 1mL) avoids the risk of volume overload. It has several down-sides. It takes much longer to take effect, perhaps 10x as long. It cannot work if the patient has exhausted glycogen stores. And it costs a lot. Instead of a few dollars for a dextrose preparation, you are looking at hundreds of dollars.
So glucagon can be used, but it is a second-tier option for EMS providers in the field.
So my understand of glucagon is that it doesn't exactly do the opposite of insulin. Basically it triggers the kidneys to produce a bunch of extra glucose. This is basically equivalent to eating a bunch of sugar, except that it can easily be done to an unconscious person. This isn't quite the opposite, in that it doesn't stop sugar from leaving the bloodstream into non-brain cells, it just pumps out a bunch of extra sugars.
This is pretty effective still for when you went hypoglycemic though, and the general strategy of "eat a ton of high carb, low fat/protein foods" is pretty effective against a short-acting overdose.
My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a great way to counteract a long-acting overdose besides "be super careful and eat snacks every hour or two" until the 24 hour time window passes. Obviously, eating every 24 hours isn't particularly condusive to sleep. Then again, maybe it's just not necessary since now using an insulin pump can easily prevent such things (as they don't use long-acting)
I'm pretty sure it's the liver not kidneys that primarily releases glucose in response to glucagon. The liver stores glucose as glycogen.
I think there’s good odds to at you’re right and I’m wrong
Does anyone know how you'd start a small manufacturing business? Like, with a company that makes power tools - how does someone decide to found it? How does he get funding and a minimal viable product and get it off the ground? I'm somewhat familiar with the tech startup ecosystem, but how does it work for old-fashioned brick and mortar manufacturing businesses?
(Backstory: I'm thinking of writing a short story about Uncle Vernon's backstory, which made me wonder: How do you start a drill company?)
I know a bit about how this is done in the aerospace industry. It generally starts by establishing a Name for yourself as the best in the business at making some specialized widget, say a helium pressure regulator tough enough to survive a rocket launch without leaking. Ideally, you'd do this as an employee of a large manufacturing firm, where they would pay for it and introduce you to all their internal and external customers for that sort of widget. But you can do it as a university project, or in your basement workshop or local makerspace or whatever, though that does make achieving name recognition a bit harder.
Then you take the leap of faith, quit your day job, take out a second mortgage on your home, and start talking to potential customers, investors, and bankers. If things line up, the endorsements from potential customers will convince enough investors and bankers that you'll get a reasonable amount of start-up capital.
You can pretty much buy your factory from McMaster-Carr, either online or through their magnificent print catalog. Okay, it's a *slight* exaggeration to say that McMaster sells entire factories by mail order, but not much. Point is, there are people in the business of exchanging their factory-stuff for your money, and they don't make themselves hard to find or difficult to deal with.
Hire a few good people, maybe people you know from your old day job, maybe graduates from the local trade school. The Mark I Widget was something you could make yourself, so you don't need too much specialized talent here and you can train them as they go. Make a few prototype widgets.
If you're doing this for aerospace customers, they'll want to see those widgets tested very thoroughly. You can do that in-house, if you document everything properly, but it may be easier to just go to someone like National Technical Systems that specializes in guaranteeing that, yep, that widget can survive the shakiest rocket launch we've heard of and still work flawlessly. Or not, in which case back to the drawing board.
Then go back to all those potential customers you talked to earlier, with prototype widget and test reports in hand, and explain that yes, $80,000 is a lot for a widget but yours will just plain work. They've probably been getting lots of grief from their generic widgets, so they might sign on to buy a few from a specialist. First sale is critical, because that lets you go to the next customer with prototype, test reports, and flight heritage.
Maybe it doesn't work, and you lose your home and have to go back to the day job. But if it does work, you can have a stable, profitable business making widgets to the end of your days, or try to branch out into thingamajigs and doohickeys. Or you can sell out and retire to a life of ease.
For an amusing case study. Zeppo Marx quit his day job as an entertainer to start a small manufacturing firm along these lines, and his signature product (the Marman clamp) is still vital to the aerospace industry for ensuring reliable payload separation during space launches. And for that matter, the aforementioned National Technical Systems started out as two engineers in a garage, who'd made a name for themselves not building widgets, but testing them. I think Zeppo also had a partner during the early days of his venture; this is definitely something where you want to share the load if at all possible.
What a great comment. Thanks for sharing.
There are probably many ways to start. One way is to make something for a larger business, we make door handles for Ford. A second way is to find a niche market that is not covered by larger manufacturers. A third is to invent something completely new, that we didn't know we needed. A fourth is ...
You might want to look into how Linus Tech tips went from just a tech YouTuber to having a side business making their own ratcheting screwdriver.
While I recommend anyone should watch the series of videos on it (it's incredibly interesting), I think it's an importantly different (although certainly related) thing in that LTT doesn't actually _make_ any part of the screwdriver. They were very intensely involved in the design of it, but 100% of the actual manufacturing is being contracted out.
Smallish scale first depending on how much capital. There are some pretty serious industrial machines you can get for $100-200k. Say some plastic moulding machine.
So say you work at a plastics plant and do some side projects on weekends. Those take off and you decide to quit and get a bank loan and buy your own used machine. That either works or it I doesn’t. If it works you might expand to other products/machines.
They don’t make power drills, but here is a company that has basically blogged the whole history of starting a publishing and then tool making company. As well as several discussions of other tool makers they appreciate.
https://blog.lostartpress.com/category/crucible-tool/
idk, my bet is that (for drills) you'd start with custom bits. It feels like you could probably manufacture a custom bit yourself with moderate machining tools, and then as demand picked up you'd branch out into more and more bits, and eventually drills themselves. But this is pure speculation
Yeah, for what it's worth I grew up in an area that had tons of small, family-owned tool and die shops that contracted out for rush orders when the larger supply chain had gaps. That business all went away in the late 90s as China's manufacturing got better and quicker, but for a time it was very common for, say, a dairy farmer in Northwestern PA to have a small machine shop doing custom manufacturing as a profitable side business.
It's still around to some extent. Our routering bit suppliers are relatively small companies in Texas and Wisconsin.
What is the value of Scott writing a "modest proposal" for Republicans if he doesn't support the party? Feels like a bad idea to write such a thing if he thinks it's helpful advice.
It’s a nod to the classic “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift.
Third paragraph of the post: "I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you. "
Wasn't Tucker Carlson using "class" before Scott wrote that post?
I only know about this because of the meme:
https://youtu.be/DOodQ14CEuo?t=16
Doesn't Carlson's piece explain why "Conservatives" are so hot on Woke-ism, CRT, Wars on Crime, Drugs, and Terror, "open borders," etc.?
There's plenty of irony to go around.
Imagine someone who does not support a specific party, but is interested in better governance. What a wild idea.
Scott is a Democrat who hates Republicans. See his above quote from his Modest Proposal article.
I think this is a wild mischaracterization.
He says he hates Republicans in the article, and quoted himself saying that in rely to the OP
Sure, he might have not meant it. He sometimes votes for a Republican or two on Election Day. I hope he didn’t mean it; it’d be disappointing. But I suspect he did. I thought he meant it when he first published the article and i think he means it now
Honestly I don't think Scott _hates_ Republicans at all, that particular rhetorical flourish notwithstanding. He believes they're right about some things, and wishes they were right about more things.
*Republican Party
In principle one should want a R Congress and Administration to enact the same policies as a D Congress and Administration. Of course if you only get one wish, you want the R's to change to favor something D's already favor (immigration?) and D's to change to favor something R's already favor (remove obstacles to fossil fuel development?).
Most people only like some of their favoured party’s platform. So in theory a non-preferred party could become many people’s preferred party just by changing one major aspect of their platform
When you say Rs, do you mean the politicians or the voters? I'd love for the voters to change to support more of my policy preferences, but that is a very hard thing to do. As for the politicians ... if they voted in line with my policy preferences they would all lose their primaries.
That's okay. Most of the Republican politicians seem to hate the policy preferences of their voters.
Utilitarianism is out. Deontology is in. No more biting the bullet on the murderous transplant surgeon, we bite the bullet on the murderer at the door now. That means always saying good ideas.
How about "no biting bullets"? Use virtue ethics when rules feel iffy. So, no murderer at the door, no murdering patients, basically no murder, except possibly in self-defense.
People bite bullets, because they want ethics to be algorithmic, to give determinate answers. "Don't bite bullets" means "don't do things that seem subjectively wrong to you on some intuitive basis"...but then everyone is running off their own intuition, without any coordination. Theres a reason ethics is still unsolved.
what's the surgeon / murderer thing?
They're both used as extreme examples of each philosophical position, made to highlight where they break down.
Utilitarianism -> should a surgeon murder a healthy patient to transplant their organs to five dying patients, thereby saving an expected 4 lives?
Deontology -> a murderer is at your door asking where your neighbour (who he intends to kill) currently is. Do you have to tell him the truth?
"Do you have to tell him the truth?"
St. Augustine says yes, because lying is a worse harm that kills the soul than merely killing the body is harmful. A guy who says "Yes, of course" when you ask him "So would you choose to have someone tell the murderer after you the truth?" is at least biting the bullet there:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1312.htm
"They add also a case with which to urge not only those who are devoted to the Divine Books, but all men and common sense, saying, Suppose a man should take refuge with you, who by your lie might be saved from death, would you not tell it? If a sick man should ask a question which it is not expedient that he should know, and might be more grievously afflicted even by your returning him no answer, will you venture either to tell the truth to the destruction of the man's life, or rather to hold your peace, than by a virtuous and merciful lie to be serviceable to his weak health? By these and such like arguments they think they most plentifully prove, that if occasion of doing good require, we may sometimes tell a lie."
... Since then by lying eternal life is lost, never for any man's temporal life must a lie be told. And as to those who take it ill and are indignant that one should refuse to tell a lie, and thereby slay his own soul in order that another may grow old in the flesh; what if by our committing theft, what if by committing adultery, a person might be delivered from death: are we therefore to steal, to commit whoredom? They cannot prevail with themselves in a case of this kind: namely, if a person should bring a halter and demand that one should yield to his carnal lust, declaring that he will hang himself unless his request be granted: they cannot prevail with themselves to comply for the sake of, as they say, saving a life. If this is absurd and wicked, why should a man corrupt his own soul with a lie in order that another may live in the body, when, if he were to give his body to be corrupted with such an object, he would in the judgment of all men be held guilty of nefarious turpitude? "
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1313.htm
"But I am not persuaded that it is right to unearth them [heretics, the Donatists] out of their hiding places by our telling lies. For to what end do we take such pains in tracking them out and running them down, but that having taken them and brought them forth into open day, we may either teach them the truth, or at least having convicted them by the truth, may not allow them to hurt others? To this end, therefore, that their lie may be blotted out, or shunned, and God's truth increased. How then by a lie shall I rightly be able to prosecute lies? Or is it by robbery that robberies and by sacrilege that sacrileges, and by adultery that adulteries, are to be prosecuted? But if the truth of God shall abound by my lie, are we too to say, Let us do evil that good may come? A thing which you see how the Apostle detests. For what else is, Let us lie, that we may bring heretic liars to the truth, but, Let us do evil that good may come? Or, is a lie sometimes good, or sometimes a lie not evil? Why then is it written, You hate, Lord, all that work iniquity; You will destroy all that speak leasing. For he has not excepted some, or said indefinitely, You will destroy them that speak leasing; so as to permit some, not all, to be understood: but it is an universal sentence that he has passed, saying, You will destroy all who speak leasing. Or, because it is not said, You will destroy all who speak all leasing, or, who speak any leasing whatsoever; is it therefore to be thought that there is place allowed for some lie; to wit, that there should be some leasing, and them who speak it, God should not destroy, but destroy them all which speak unjust leasing, not what lie soever, because there is found also a just lie, which as such ought to be matter of praise, not of crime?"
Later developments in theology said "Yes, lying is terrible, but maybe telling the guys who want to kill your neighbour where your neighbour lives is not so great either, so here are some guidelines as to how to get around that without lying lying":
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3110.htm
"Reply to Objection 4. A lie is sinful not only because it injures one's neighbor, but also on account of its inordinateness, as stated above in this Article. Now it is not allowed to make use of anything inordinate in order to ward off injury or defects from another: as neither is it lawful to steal in order to give an alms, except perhaps in a case of necessity when all things are common. Therefore it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever. Nevertheless it is lawful to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back, as Augustine says (Contra Mend. x)."
Reply to Objection 5. A man does not lie, so long as he has a mind to do what he promises, because he does not speak contrary to what he has in mind: but if he does not keep his promise, he seems to act without faith in changing his mind. He may, however, be excused for two reasons. First, if he has promised something evidently unlawful, because he sinned in promise, and did well to change his mind. Secondly, if circumstances have changed with regard to persons and the business in hand. For, as Seneca states (De Benef. iv), for a man to be bound to keep a promise, it is necessary for everything to remain unchanged: otherwise neither did he lie in promising—since he promised what he had in his mind, due circumstances being taken for granted—nor was he faithless in not keeping his promise, because circumstances are no longer the same. Hence the Apostle, though he did not go to Corinth, whither he had promised to go (2 Corinthians 1), did not lie, because obstacles had arisen which prevented him.
Reply to Objection 6. An action may be considered in two ways. First, in itself, secondly, with regard to the agent. Accordingly a jocose lie, from the very genus of the action, is of a nature to deceive; although in the intention of the speaker it is not told to deceive, nor does it deceive by the way it is told. Nor is there any similarity in the hyperbolical or any kind of figurative expressions, with which we meet in Holy Writ: because, as Augustine says (Lib. De Mend. v), "it is not a lie to do or say a thing figuratively: because every statement must be referred to the thing stated: and when a thing is done or said figuratively, it states what those to whom it is tendered understand it to signify."
The surgeons are probably a reference to involuntary organ donation, a famous counterargument to utilitarianism, and the murderer at the door is probably a reference to a famous counterargument to absolute deontology.
I noticed the sudden switch to something like rule utilitarianism or deontology. Or was it sudden ? Maybe it's been bubbling under for ages. My efforts to sell (something like) deontology to the rationalsphere didn't go to well in the past , so why the change?
Rule utilitarianism and absolute deontology aren't the same. Absolute deontology says "never lie", but rule utilitarianism allows, maybe insists, that you break rules if the stairs are very high and the evidence is very good.
I disagree with this. Rule Utilitarianism is defined by an insistence you never break the rules, with this prohibition justified with reference to some greater good than the situation you're currently in:
1) eg1 because breaking the rules I'm any circumstance whatsoever means nobody trusts you to uphold the rules ever again (cf defecting on an iterated prisoner's dilemma).
2) eg2 because the sort of situation the rules covers is one where people frequently reach the wrong conclusion because of the stakes or because of cognitive biases
If your Utilitarianism system says you can sometimes break the rules then you have Act Utilitarianism by definition (most Rule Utilitarians have multiple 'orders' of rules so that they have rules which explain when you can break other rules - I'm not talking about that, but rather a situation where you say 'Screw the rules, I'm doing what's right'). Act Utilitarianism plus a bunch of rule-like heuristics is a perfectly respectable moral system, but the OP was asking about the difference between Rule Utilitarianism and Deontology and I think the claim that they are different because you can break the rules in one but not the other might lead to confusion.
Neither 1, nor 2, is an absolute. Regarding 1, people aren't necessarily going to hate you forever if you break one rule one time. Regarding 2, people frequently reach the wrong decision, but not always.
I think elsewhere you note that there is no single thing that is 'Rule Utilitarianism' and I agree with you absolutely - there's a bunch of perfectly sensible systems which satisfy the critera to be called Rule Utilitarianism which allow you to eg break the rule 'Don't lie because people will distrust you' because of a meta-rule '... unless people will forgive you quickly' or whatever.
But then I think you're not actually 'breaking' a rule, you're following the precepts of a higher-order rule.
But if you introduce a meta- rule which says 'Any rule can be ignored if ignoring it produces more total happiness' then this just collapses into Act Utilitarianism - that's why it is important, on a point of taxonomy, that the 'rules' in Rule Utilitarianism are regarded as being just as binding as the 'rules' in Deontology
I've slightly lost sight of whether these contributions are helpful or if I'm just splitting hairs!
Incidentally, I keep noticing that Rationalists are discussing these issues in terms of virtue theory, as if the ultimate payoff is to be well thought of. But utilitarianism is about utility for it's own sake, and deontology is about rules for their own sake, and virtue ethics is about virtue for its own sake.
> Rule utilitarianism and absolute deontology aren't the same. Absolute deontology says "never lie", but rule utilitarianism allows, maybe insists, that you break rules if the stairs are very high and the evidence is very good.
Deontology doesn't say "never lie", it says "[insert rules here]".
It's entirely possible to be a deontologist and have principles a bit more complicated than "never lie". For instance you could have "never lie, unless telling the truth presents an immediate danger to life or limb". By building sensible and reasonable exceptions into your moral rules in advance, you can dissolve most of the dumb paradoxes that undergraduate philosophy wants to throw at you.
I would say that rule utilitarianism is a subspecies of deontology. Deontology tells you to follow moral rules/heuristics, and rule utilitarianism tells you how to pick the rules.
To be slightly pedantic, I don't think Rule Utilitarianism is a subspecies of Deontology - I think it is more like a point of overlap between Utilitarianism and Deontology on an imaginary Venn diagram of possible moral positions.
In Utilitarianism you do things because doing so leads to the greatest happiness. In Deontology you do things because a set of rules dictates what is moral, although *why* those particular rules are moral depends on the particular version of Deontology you follow.
The obvious overlap in the two systems is when you follow a particular set of rules *because it leads to the greatest happiness*, and we call this 'Rule Utilitarianism'
Yes, that's how I see it. Benthamite utilitarianism<--rule utilitarianism --> absolute deontology.
I said *absolute* deontology.
Only Siths deal in absolutes.
Is absolute deontology a version of deontology in which no rule is allowed to be more than six words long?
Rule utilitarianism doesn’t really “say” anything. it can say whatever you want depending on what baggage you bring into it.
Yes, it's a range of positions.
Isn't having two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas better than having one party with reasonable-sounding ideas?
On this note, I feel the same way about telling people to vote. From a "do anything it takes to win" perspective, it only makes sense to tell people to vote if you're confident they'll vote for your preferred party.
Politics is demand-driven by voters, not supply-driven by party elites. To any given fixed reference frame of values, one party getting better will likely mean the other party getting worse. This is because the same demand exists in the electorate for core ideas and policy preferences, you're just moving it around. I don't think there are going to be two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas, period.
Politics is demand driven in the sense that the electorate demands certain things of its politicians. The problem is that it rarely gets them, because politicians in most countries, especially today, form a coherent political caste that actually agrees on a lot of things, seldom including what people want. There's thus a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, such that electorates turn to new suppliers (Brexit, Le Pen, Trump etc. etc.) as a way of sending signals to the traditional parties, who of course have no interest in listening.
Let me modestly draw attention to an article of mine earlier this year that attempted to deal with this question:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/why-dont-the-people-vote-like-theyre
> Politics is demand-driven by voters, not supply-driven by party elites.
Well, I don't think that's entirely true. At best, it's a complicated tug-of-war between voter interests and party elite interests. There's a definite principal-agent tension between the desires of the actual voter base and the desires of the sorts of people who wind up holding the power in political parties.
(I can think of all sorts of examples right now but I'm loath to share them because I feel like I'd derail the thread into discussions of particular examples.)
Part of the restoring force in this tension is articles bubbling up that say "Hey guys, you are totally out of whack with the concerns of actual voters". Scott's article is part of this system.
>I don't think there are going to be two parties with reasonable-sounding ideas, period.
No, but I'd settle for one.
Voting is a buy in to democracy and I prefer parties that have to deal with that. That also buy in to that.
Just my guess, but Because this party he likes won't win every election anyways. If the Republicans took that advice, he would like parts of both parties. He wants a world with two good choices for candidates.
I commented above about how politics is demand-driven^^ basically if Republicans talk more about class, Democrats will talk about it less. I think that's probably not good, especially if Republicans are using this class discourse cynically.
Counterexample: Both parties have converged on a ton of formerly very contentious issues. To use an obvious example, slavery was once a contentious enough issue to trigger a civil war, but now, both parties are 100% on board with keeping it illegal. Democrats favoring womens sufferage does not cause Republicans to oppose it. The war on drugs is bipartisan policy--a vote among only Democrats or only Republicans would not end it. And so on.
I don't buy that talking more about an issue will cause the other party to talk about it less. Are there any other issues where this has happened in the past?
Besides, it's not like Democrats are talking about class now. And on the occasion they do, they fundamentally misunderstand it, thinking that economic class is the only thing that matters.
You seem to be implying that there's some sort of zero-sum game going on, such that any given person should either want to help the Republicans as much as possible or else want to harm the Republicans as much as possible?
A question is if you could get the party you disagree with on many issues to change on one of them if that meant victory, would or should you?
Not exactly, just that if someone is generally opposed to the Republican Party, it's an interesting thing to try and come up with ways they can help themselves win.
EAs (like me) have definitely pushed back against political involvement but tbh I have met plenty of (mostly younger) EAs who think politics are worthy of EA money. IMO it's borderline impossible to make a persuasive EA argument for electing representatives since they vote on so many different issues / there's no guarantee their vote changes anything. I'm a bit more optimistic about EA funds going to support campaigns for ballot initiatives.
Riffing off what Scott says below:
(1) I do think EA community does have an instinctual feeling that the Democratic party is their natural ally because of all the values they share in common, whereas the Republicans are just profit-maximising, environment-destroying, climate denialists, science denialists, anti-reproductive justice, anti-immigration, anti-fun and all that right-thinking people believe and love, etc. So of course if they're going to donate to anyone, it's going to be a Democrat/the Democratic Party.
Bankman-Fried was not an exception here, in fact I was *more* surprised to find that Ryan Salame had donated to the Republicans. Because of the entire scandal, everyone is going to be reading the tea leaves about his donations to various causes; for instance, did he set up/donate to GAP to give his brother a cushy sinecure as head? That may sound mean to say, but it's a question that always arises when family members are involved with "getting lots of money from my family to run this thing".
(2) I thought the Carrick Flynn backing was a bad idea the moment I read about it. It does seem that Bankman-Fried/other donors had a slate of candidates and most of them did okay:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/11/15/23460684/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-crypto-democrats-campaign
"The bulk of Bankman-Fried’s donations, however, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, which supported 25 candidates focused on pandemic prevention this year. So far, most have won their races. Among those candidates were Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who won a tough reelection campaign in a bellwether district, and Maxwell Frost, who will represent Florida as the first Gen Z member of Congress."
The donations to Republicans seem to be mostly to people who were supportive of crypto and/or supportive of a (lenient?) regulation scheme. So again, the question of self-interest arises. It's more obvious (in hindsight) here, but it also gets to be asked about his donations to Democrats and good causes, in light of what he said to Kelsey Piper about needing to create a good reputation so people will like you so you win, and being able to spout off the shibboleths of Western liberalism/progressivism.
Most of the politicians who got a donation seem to be shedding them in order to disassociate themselves from the bad karma:
https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/15/politicians-sam-bankman-fried-donations-ftx-charity/
Speaking of the Oregon election, the woman who defeated Carrick Flynn for the nomination won, though it was close enough - 50% of the vote to the Republican opponent 48% - and the media take on it seems to be that the EA/Bankman-Fried donations hurt rather than helped because *everyone*, Democrat rivals as well as Republican, made hay out of "outsiders spending millions to influence our election!" So even if selected, I don't think Flynn could have won this seat.
(3) I think EA getting involved with politics is a very bad idea. That makes them just one more lobbying group. There's always going to be an overlap, but I think specifically donating to any one party or even both/several parties should be left up to individual donors rather than the movement as a whole or in part doing it. Even bilateral donations are iffy. Donating mostly to one party is endorsing that party. Charities and churches shouldn't - and are not supposed to - endorse particular parties or candidates.
This is the big question now for EA - is it a charity or charitable organisation, as it started off? Or has it shifted focus, emphasis, and purpose to being something else? Because if it's going to be a lobbying group amongst all the other groups, and this site has a breakdown of who is giving what for lobbying interests:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
Top spenders? The Chambers of Commerce.
Health related lobbying? Health spends the most, broken down here:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/sectors/summary?cycle=2022&id=H
Total Spent for Health, 2022: $537,324,722
Total Spent for Health, 2022
Number of clients: 1,727
Number of Lobbyists: 3,065/Percent of Former Government Employees 46.69%)Number of
Top spenders out of *that* - Pharmaceuticals/Health Products
So pandemic prevention is small fry in that pond, and sure "candidates will owe them something and will listen to them about pandemics" - the same way they have the Pfizer lobbyist pencilled in to visit after your pandemic pitch.
Hell, even my country spends money lobbying your politicians!
Tourism Ireland Total Spending $11,176,210
This was a combination of:
1. SBF donated to the Democratic party for his own reasons, probably relating to it being the family business (his mother was some kind of Democratic operative) and wanting regulators on his side. Since all his other donations were under the EA heading, this got calculated under the EA heading, but probably wasn't what anyone else would have chosen.
2. Some combination of SBF and institutional EA spent a lot of money trying to get Carrick Flynn elected to Congress. He was a long-time EA with lots of experience in pandemic prevention and AI alignment, and they thought having one of those people in Congress might be high-leverage. This didn't work and is now retrospectively considered a bad idea. Later they pivoted strategies to spending much less noticeable amounts of money on lots of different smaller races with people more tangentially linked to EA. I don't know how this is going, but I think of it more as "get our people into key positions" rather than "support Big Democrat".
3. Mostly SBF, but with some support from institutional EA, has (had?) a PAC in DC, "Guarding Against Pandemics", that does biosecurity work. The people involved are political veterans, and my understanding of how the sausage gets made is that they donate to candidates, and then they're in the door as a friendly special interest and those candidates owe them something and will listen to them about pandemics. People who know more than I do say it's better PR to have one group that only works with Democrats and another that only works with Republicans. GAP is the "only work with Democrats" one, and EA started with that one because SBF's family was veteran Democrat operatives and knew how to make it work, plus Democrats seemed more value-aligned. I don't know if anyone ever got around to starting the "only works with Republicans" one, although there are rumors that SBF's co-founder Ryan Salame donated a lot of money to Republicans and this was probably something along these lines.
I think that with FTX out of the picture, EA will continue doing some things along these lines but probably only at like 10% of the scale.
"Scott Aaronson, who defended FTX's donations in passing as achieving the effective altruism goal of "avoiding fascism."
That poor guy is his own special case. He is a very anxious, nervous person who is in a constant state of hypervigilance about being literally pogrommed any second now. He is all too easily convinced that that guy I drove past standing on the street corner who looked funny at me is itching to pull on the jackboots and pack him and his family off to Treblinka.
Thus he'd pay any amount of money, even to the Devil himself, to be protected from that and he does think the Democrats are his best chance of protection, so hell yeah let FTX give them donations!
I want to defend Scott A. a little bit here, because he is near and dear to my heart regardless of the ideological nonsense he happens to believe (and who among us doesn't believe at least some?), he is a nerd, he loves computers, he is agreeble and was\is (excessively?) socially anxious, he's one of mine. He is also outstandingly heretic-welcoming and compassionate towards his outgroup, perhaps even more than this Scott.
Weird that you brought up the Jewish angle, I never saw him play it that way. "Fascism" from him means the boring old same as when most US uber-liberals use it : The other party gets a little more authoritarian (as opposed to when *they* get a little more authoritarian, which happens all the time).
All in all, Scott Aaron is awesome, this is coming from someone on a hard 180 to most everything S.A. believes in, and this thread is a little too harsh on him.
I'm not laughing at him or trying to belittle him. I feel a little sorry for him, because he posts stuff that shows just how tightly-wound he is (e.g. the airport anecdote where he talks about that feeling he had that 'oh yes of course finally it happens that I'm dragged off in chains' - I'm paraphrasing off memory here, exact quote not that) so it's clear that he has a lot of anxiety about "Them" coming to get "Us".
"Us" may be Jews, or more broadly non-Christians, non-whites, liberals, progressives - basically anyone not White Cis Het Christian Male. So I discount anything he says re: fascism etc. a little because of my perception of his anxiety leading him to exaggerate something that may or may not have happened as a Definite Present Threat.
The bog-standard "vote blue or else" commentary I see (Tumblr, Twitter at second hand, Reddit, etc.) is of course "vote for the Democrats to keep the Fascists (Republicans) out of power or else the torture conversion camps for women and minorities will be set up in your town!" so again par for the course.
Fascist and Fascism have become worn-out terms, like racist and transphobe and all the rest of the list. It's gone to the stage that if I were seeing "Adolf Hitler is a fascist, I'm warning you all!" for the first time ever, I'd automatically think "That Hitler guy must be doing something right" because "fascist" gets thrown around to mean "doesn't agree 100% with my political positions".
> The other party gets a little more authoritarian (as opposed to when *they* get a little more authoritarian, which happens all the time).
Yeah, I remember Gore whipping up the crowd to ‘Fight like hell or we’re not going to have a country anymore.” before sending them to the Capitol to nudge the VP into not certifying the election in 2001.
What a mess that was.
Oh wait a minute; he *was* the VP and when the Supreme Court said no to a recount he said “it’s over” and certified W’s win. (By 500 votes in Florida)
It's always, **always**, possible to pick the worst incident ever committed by $OUTGROUP to throw at anybody who says both sides suck, it's unoriginal and doesn't mean anything.
Resist this fallacy, when somebody says both sides suck, the correct way to interpret this is as an average. You won't ever respond to someone who says that humans are 70 KG on average with the protest that your $RANDOM_ACQUAINTANCE is actually 100 KG, or that another one is an amazing 50 KG, or whatever unusual weights and non-average body plans you happen to know.
Your criticism can be better steelmanned to "In my own weighted average function, refusing to believe in the results of the election counts far more than any other data point", and that's fair, unfortunately a lot of people don't share that view, including ~=~half of your own country and lots of others from the outside as well. So, while the sight of feces in that beautiful white building might have been shocking and a little bit sad, it doesn't meaninfully change that both US parties as well as all nation states everywhere love authoritarianism and gravitates to it as their natural low-energy configuration.
Anytime you find yourself thinking that the other party is uniquely bad, look at them winning 50% of the vote on average, that can only mean 2 things (1) 50% of your country is on average mad or deluded or evil (2) your standards can't be all what matters. (2) might be a bitter pill to swallow, but it's the more merciful option when you think about it.
I’ve been working on understanding Trump voters for a while now. WoollyAI gave me a hint to their motivation. They aren’t my out group tho. They are friends and relatives that I love.
Those capped words preceded by a dollar sign, are they constants defined in an include file? Yes that was a joke. No malice intended.
What is the coordinating with giant corporations to silence dissidents about?
I remember the health emergency lockdown. The CDC did get the lethality of Covid wrong. It was less bad than anticipated but plenty of vulnerable people did die.
I don’t think erring on the side of caution is a Stalin-like move.
Edit
An interesting bit of information I learned about Stalin today; Some people think his fatal stroke was caused by Warfrin put in his wine by members of the Politburo. An assassination.
It's strange to me to think that the party where "Israel is our greatest ally" is a shibboleth is the one to be worried about rounding up the Jews.
This, frankly. "rounding up the jews" has a depressingly bipartisan history, it's not an inherently right-wing position and the Republicans are *very* pro Israel... (though maybe the worry is that Trumpism might break that?)
The worry is some combination of "Jews are great but only if they stay the fuck in Israel" and "We support Israel but only because it helps us immanentize the eschaton" red heifer BS.
The opposing worry is that "Jews are great except for those fanatical Zionists who insist in living in an occupied territory / war zone when Manhattan is right here". There's somewhat of a shortage of people, even Jewish people I think, who enthusiastically support both a thriving Jewish community in Jerusalem and one in New York.
Many of SBF's donations benefited EA, but as an individual he can put his money wherever he wishes. I don't think EA is in the business of nagging philanthropist billionaires who already support EA to get them to stop donating any money to their less effective preferred causes; it would certainly risk burning bridges.
IIRC the numbers, it was far from "most" that went to political donations. It might have been most of the actually realised donations, since a lot of promises turned to smoke, but the expectation was than multiple billions would be going to EA causes over the next few years while a few hundred mil went to politics.
Also, again, "effective altruism", to the extent it is an entity at all, wasn't deciding where SBF donated his money
This would be relevant if EA knew he was doing fraud. As such it isn't.
Not sure what SBF's strategy was, but there are two possible paths to impact: 1. cause the better side to win, and 2. get on the side of whoever's going to win.
About approach 1:
> ask Mike Bloomberg how many votes $500 million buys
It helps to be able to choose who you support from a wide pool. It's a lot more expensive to buy votes for Mike Bloomberg than to buy votes for the few best candidates out there (though I do agree that even still this might not be a very good approach).
About approach 2:
> it drowns in a sea of other donations
SBF was one of the biggest democratic donors nationwide, so I imagine he had substantial sway with the politicians he supported.
> there's no guarantee that candidates you support will even try to keep their promises anyway
Yeah, I guess. There's no guarantee anyone will do anything... but if they hope to run again in the future, they will want to be seen as cooperating with funders, right?
To address your point more generally: yes, there are a lot of EAs who think supporting political campaigns is worthwhile, though I suspect many would disagree with SBF's approach. You might be interested in reading about the Carrick Flynn campaign (funded mostly by FTX but with contributions from many EAs) which was a high-profile loss.
My impression is that EA is a small enough field that someone who donates over $100m to EA causes is going to rank high on a list of important EA donors, regardless of where else he donates.
I'll posit that EA is taking the most effective course in praising and celebrating the amounts their donors give, and in not criticizing donors for not giving more, or for not giving to EA only. I know EA philosophy can lead to conclusions like that, and that a number of EAs wrestle with feelings of guilt and scrupulosity, but whenever I've seen this type of choice mentioned explicitly, it's always been to warn against this form of extremism. That said, I'm not technically EA, I don't live in the Bay Area, I don't go to their meetings, I have no idea what they say in person to each other.
And for the rest of this thread, I'll take a principled stand that we shouldn't normalize taking actions against people in response to their political donations (no matter how much some of us may sometimes want to rain fire and brimstone down on the heads of a particular party and all who support it). That is to say, money is speech, and Mozilla forcing out Brendan Eich was bad, and EA distancing itself from SBF simply because SBF donated to Biden would be bad.
(As opposed to EA distancing itself from SBF because SBF was an unethical scammer who made money by pumping worthless cryptocurrencies, which would have been a great reason to hold his money at arms' length. EA would have been much better off if those donations had been anonymized. Something something "when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth".)
>money is speech
Eh, slight disagree here. Money is action far more than it is speech. Part of my reasons to support 99.99999999999% unrestricted freedom of speech is that it's so harmless a freedom, unlike a lot of other freedoms there is usually so little we lose by allowing anyone to say anything. Speech is action too, I know, but it's far more slow-acting and ineffective than most actions, let alone **money**, let alone **Big money**, like the scale SBF was apparently giving away.
I still rally behind your conclusion because I hate witch-rituals, I hate it when a group near-unanimously finds out about something private an individual was doing and retaliates against them. Just the mere form of it worries and repulses me.
So, yes to your principled stand, but no to basing it on "Money Is Speech" because it's somewhat weak and doesn't even convince a free speech maniac like me. But, just No To Witch Hunts, No to sniffing around your group members' private beliefs and outing them publicly when you find something spicy. (But let us not forget to note, with the usual cynicism, that some spicy beliefs are more equal than others, and that - for example - from the set {Spicy LGBT Causes, Spicy Anti-LGBT Causes}, only one is going to get you witch-hunted and fired, with very high probability. As your mention of Brenden Eich allude to.)
I see where you're coming from, and I half-agree? I'm partly just trying on this position to see how it fits. :-) And with that said...
Money isn't technically speech, but it's the potential for speech on any scale other than the smallest. And yes, I'll buy that speech is a sub-type of action, and that we've carved out a line roughly around it, but not completely overlapping, saying that the stuff inside should be protected. More generally, money is potential for action, and sometimes action counts as "speech".
So it seems that what I'm arguing is that donating money to an entity that will spend it on speech should count as speech. (And donating money to an entity that will feed the hungry should count as feeding the hungry, ... genocide ... genocide, etc.) In particular, I'd say that political donations, especially donating to candidates (as opposed to parties), should count as speech and not action. I do not see how our political system would function at all, otherwise. (Not that I'd describe it as "functional" in isolation, but there's worse out there.)
Are you talking about SBF's and/or FTX's personal donations to Joe Biden and the Democrats (not a band name), or some other donations?
My take on this is that the issue is not that EA takes billionaire cash. If there is a supply of cash that billionaires are willing to give for ego massaging then my platonic ideal of EA (which is very much not what exists) would simply give them the ego massage and then use the money for the best cause.
The issue is they don't REALIZE the issue and its implications. If they're functioning to some degree as elite prestige generators they need to realize that and how it can corrupt the mission. Establish red lines. Work towards changing the prestige economy. Etc.
Empirically, many billionaires sure do seem to donate a lot of money to charity (eg Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Dustin Moskovitz, etc). Am I missing some reason why that doesn't answer this concern?
Is the idea that anyone who donates large sums to charity must be acting altruistically, so we can automatically trust that Bill-Gates-level donors must be using their money in nice ways?
That seems like a pretty naive assumption. Past a certain point of wealth, you've maxed out material consumption and can pretty much only use your money to buy relationships and influence-- for the use of your loser family members and clients who might need a position on somebody's board someday, for future lobbying if you need certain legislation implemented, to have a retinue of powerful people you can call if you need to arrange a favor or to have some charges dropped.
Charitable donations are one obvious way you buy those kinds of relationships, hence I would expect even Ebenezer-Scrooge himself to be donating heavily to nonprofits if he reached Bill Gates' level of wealth. No reason for us to assume that he wouldn't allow his charitable cash to corrupt its recipients; in fact, isn't corrupting them kind of the whole point?
No, I think it does, for those 3 guys. But SBF's profile and situation are quite different. Buffet and Gates are old guys, and became wealthy before they became philanthropists. Moskovitz isn't old, and I'm not clear how wealthy he already was when he became a philanthropist, but it does seem like it was after some substantial success, and after founding a company he expected to lead to even more success (and it did). SBF, on the other, seems to have set out to make money in order to fund EA -- so he had to be both Get Rich as Shit Guy and Major Effective Altruist. To me, sounds very hard to start both those jobs at once. Plus he was making his money with crypto, which seems to me a way of making money that's especially far removed from serving the public. The other guys got rich by providing goods and services people liked -- so providing goods and services to people in another way, via philanthropy, isn't such a huge step. But dealing in crypto has a very different feel. I do not understand crypto well at all, but it seems to have a smoke and mirrors aspect to it -- you have to make sure people *believe* in your form of crypto, or else it can turn into nothing -- plus crypto is less subject to scrutiny and regulation by government, plus it is the preferred form of money for various criminal undertakings. So the whole feel of crypto is kind of glitzy and narcissistic and sociopathic. Seems like a pretty long walk from winning at crypto to helping the world -- whereas the walk from Berkshire Hathaway is quite short.
I don't think claims about different motivations stemming from "providing goods vs making money far away from public use" holds up, since the two founders of Givewell are former traders at Bridgewater, unless you're narrowly making the point about only crypto.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to be a trader and have a deep commitment to helping the world. There are probably researchers who are secretly committing fraud and plagiarism in their own work, but meanwhile helping their students to do great, honest research. People are complicated, and some are capable of functioning in vastly different ways in different settings.
What I am saying is that most
people have a characteristic modality that they is a good fit for them and they tend to function that way in most areas. And trading crypto sounds like a modality of functioning that is very far removed from responsible philanthropy. It’s a big stretch — being capable of it isn’t impossible, but it’s rare.
Note that Karnovsky majored in social studies as an undergrad and Hassenfeld in religion — *then* they went in to become traders. That’s an indication both are capable functioning in the 2 different modes I’m talking about.
I wouldn't necessarily trust the WHO's stance on this, given how they eg. handled Covid. Someone else coming along and solving problems they've failed at with far less money would make them look very bad so they have an incentive to badmouth him.
Having said that, it sounds like you did a bunch of your own research too, so maybe the Gates foundation has been incompetent? I'd really really struggle to believe they haven't been a net positive though.