At the end of november/start of december here in the EU there was some talk of a brewing trade war with the US over the IRA subsidies. However i saw no US pundits (like noah smith) talk about this. Was this potential trade war news on your side of the ocean?
The American analyst attitude was that the EU's threats of a trade war was another in a long list of bad moves by the EU. It was not taken at all seriously and was, in several cases, basically mocked. The more Europe-friendly commentators mostly ignored it because it was problematic for their advocacy. And because that was the response among the policy experts it wasn't filtered down to the general population.
In general American politics are in a rather anti-trade mood. There's a consensus (which is objectively correct) that many allies have been cheating on their commitments and generally free riding. So the debate is mostly between isolationists who want to "even the field" by tough renegotiations against allied countries on one side. And on the other people who want to create a trade block of American allies. Basically, was free trade a mistake or was it only a mistake to not favor friendly democratic regimes? With very few free traders left and a general anti-China consensus.
After decades of cheating on their commitments, not moving on Ukraine or Asia, and having their own subsidy/barrier programs the EU has very little capital for this kind of demand. So them barging in and complaining was largely seen as a diplomatic blunder by Europe's friends. As if the EU was completely deaf to the political climate in the United States. Meanwhile the Japanese and British (and a few of their friends like Australia) had more success in advocating for themselves.
But yeah, tl;dr is that the noises about a trade war were not taken seriously.
You'll never regret spending a day at the Met. For something a bit more off the beaten path, the Cloisters is lovely, and in a less visited part of the city.
I really like the MOMA, the Whitney also has a great collection and is near the High Line. Might be a bit chilly for a walk next week but if you're bundled up it's a great vantage to see the city.
The Tenement Museum is also really interesting, particularly if you have ancestors who could have been potential residents
Girard taught Peter Thiel at Stanford and Thiel was influenced by Girard's ideas. A lot of the promoters of Girard's ideas seem to have links to Thiel.
The originality of his ideas seems much less important than their truth.
Anyway René Girard published his main original works in the 50's or 60's. So they may sound unoriginal to you only because they are, as a famous Slate Star Codex article said, in the water.
The notion of "desiring what others desire" seemed an obvious concept to the advertising industry by at least the beginning of the 20th century. The fancy word "mimesis" doesn't add anything to that old insight.
In the last few months, I’ve become increasingly aware of my intellectual limitations. I’m finding that I can’t remember facts from the books I’ve read years ago and that I’m unable to clearly articulate arguments that I once knew back and forth. It's frustrating, but totally predictable.
I read a lot for work and for pleasure (largely psychology, philosophy, history, economics, biography, business, etc.), listen to audiobooks and podcasts, read blogs, debate ideas with friends and colleagues, and write frequently (mostly privately). But I’ve put zero effort into optimizing my information diet or approach to information ingestion.
As work / life become more demanding, I don’t expect to have enough time to continue my ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. I’ve read neuroscience / psychology books that offer a model for how the brain works, and I’ve also read about 'hacks' to improve memory (e.g., the mind palace, writing / journaling, better diet / exercise) and improve cognitive performance (e.g., reduce mental clutter, meditate, learn frameworks / mental models). But many these individual pieces of advice seem contradictory or incomplete (i.e., the mind palace doesn’t seem to make people geniuses).
Does anyone know of a comprehensive model they use as a basis for optimizing information ingestion, improving information retention, and improving cognitive performance?
Try to let go of the idea that you're not smart enough and need some kind of brain overhaul. You are as smart as you are -- go find things you're good at and interested in and fill your life up with them. A lot of the stuff about how to improve cognitive performance are written by people who think life is College Bowl or a giant LSAT test-- he or she who retains the most factoids wins. That's horseshit. You don't have to micromanage your brain into remembering and using stuff you've read with interest. It already knows how to do that. Trying to do mental mechanics to improve that process is like trying to remember to blink often enough -- it doesn't help, and will just drive you crazy. Here are the 2 things I think make a genuine difference in how well you absorb new info:
-How deeply interested you are. If you are excited and fascinated about something or read a book that makes you feel that way about the subject you will absorb a lot of what's in it and make it yours. You may not remember factoids and numbers, but you will retain the gist. You can always come back and look up the factoids and numbers if you need them. If you read something that kind of bores you but you think you *should* know that stuff, it won't stick to your mind. The ways you are interested in the topic is like hooks that grab onto the info. If you don't have much interest you don't have many hooks.
-What you do with it as you learn it. The more you do with the info during the learning process, the more deeply you process it and the more you retain what's important. You know how textbooks in history have thought questions at the end of chapters -- stuff like, what do you think would have happened differently if Lincoln had died just as the Civil War began? Well, answering schoolmarmish questions is a bit irritating, but the idea behind it is good: Get the reader to actually *do* something with what he just read. You could make a diagram of the part that's of most interest to you, go to a museum to see something the book talked about, do an experiment to try out something in the book, talk it over with someone, use it in your work, etc. Or you could read books about one subject with a goal in mind -- career change, prepare to get the most out of a trip, learn how to do something you've always wanted to do. Then you will read with deeper interest because you are going to put the info to use.
Thanks for the kind words! To be clear, I'm not particularly concerned that I'm not smart enough (generally) - I'm just hitting a recall limit that I haven't felt before, which is disconcerting!
Re. point 1: I think my biggest problem is being too interested in too much! It's all genuinely fascinating, and while the gist definitely sticks, I'm becoming less convinced that getting the gist of historical periods and biographies is useful without additional depth (i.e., I can remember the outlines of the story, but not the examples / inflection points that are useful metaphors for real life decision making).
Re. point 2: a lot of this stuff isn't really applicable to my work / daily life, so I don't really use it (outside of conversation). I just think it's interesting background knowledge to have that makes me more aware of the world and better able to answer interesting questions (like the one you outlined). I've taken the 'read books about one subject with a goal in mind' and that definitely helps.
Maybe a re-framing would be helpful. I generally think of practical intelligence as something like: total information stored * ability to recall information * ability to use disparate pieces of information as 'lenses' / 'frames' / metaphors * general problem solving skills (asking good questions, information finding, etc.) * function-specific skills. I feel like I'm approaching my natural limit on the 'total information stored' and 'ability to recall information' dimensions, which naturally affects the third dimension. I'm certainly overthinking this... but figured if anyone would have thought about this, it'd be the people here.
I think the real answer is that nobody is particularly good at those things. People forget stuff all the time. If you use information you won’t forget it; if you don’t use it you will forget it.
If you really want to remember the contents of a book, take notes on the book and reread the notes periodically. The other thing you can do is read another book on the same topic. You will remember the first book while reading the second.
Good points! I do both, and they are very helpful practices.
Was just curious on if anyone had a more comprehensive / structured approach to knowledge intake, storage, and recall. Probably could have worded it better.
Take heart! Age and experience tends to solve this problem without your even trying to do anything in particular. You learn what is important and what is not, and how to access or refind what is important faster and more directly. And the ability to prioritize and streamline access climbs so rapidly with age and experience that it outpaces the decline in sheer cognitive ability which actually starts when you're like 10 and continues steadily thereafter. Most people only seem to start losing the overall fight in their mid to late 60s, and often not until later.
My brain is unquestionably significantly slower than those of work colleagues who are 20 years younger, but I can still usually find the right answer to problems faster than they can, because I have better notions of where to start, can detect dead ends earlier, and can sense promising avenues of investigation faster. I walk while they run, but I tend to take shorter paths to the desired destination.
The only generic advice I can give about optimizing this growth is (1) analyze where you go right at least as much as where you go wrong. People tend to brood over bad decisions, which up to a point can be helpful in avoiding future mistakes, but they often tend to just take good decisions for granted and not subject them to the same analysis -- which deprives them of some potentially equally valuable insights. Why did this decision go right? Was it luck, or did I do something worth repeating? Et cetera. And (2) don't be afraid to try a lot of stuff, and look stupid. Sometimes the status quo is the status quo for no better reason than that everyone assumes there must be a reason for it, and nobody has the courage or inspiration to just try something different. Even if you repeatedly bonk your head on the fact that there *was* a reason for the status quo, by experimenting this way you can start to develop an intuition for when The Way Things Are is due to good reasons and when it's from dumb inertia.
Here is a very key question for epidemiologists and medical researchers to figure out.
What do researchers on Long Covid need to see in the covid and other health data, in order to figure out that the covid virus caused someone's long term illness rather than that they'd have had it even without having ever caught covid?
I have a friend who had mild covid and then a mild heart attack in 4 months.
We now know multiple sclerosis, a serious illness, is triggered by a virus. Does covid trigger serious things? How will they answer this question?
Is this sort of thing being studied? I'm reading that 1 on 5 covid patients have long covid. What does this mean? This is a huge percentage.
At a population level, one could also try and just track the fraction of people with chronic illness and see how much it has increased. IIRC, Covid hasn't increased it much but the baseline level is shockingly high, something like 1 in 8 people.
The one in five number is almost surely fake. At least if long Covid means severe debilitating sequelae. As a Fermi estimate, approximately everyone you know has probably had Covid by now. Do one in five of the people you know seem crippled? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Well to be fair most of the time the 1 in 5 stat is quoted, there's then info about what fraction of that 20% are mildly, moderately, and severely impaired i.e. "crippled," and the fraction deemed to be severely impaired is not real large -- can't remember the exact numbers -- maybe something like 15%. But I do agree that the 20% number does not pass the sniff test. There are at least 50 people I know well enough to be confident that if they'd had Long Covid symptoms I would know. Sat down and thought through them all recently, and 47 of the 50 had no symptoms lingering as long as 3 months. One 30 year old woman who had covid before vaccine was available had something that would qualify as moderate impairment for about a year after recovery. Two women aged about 60 who had covid about 6 months ago think they may have less energy now, but aren't sure. And that's it. Of course most of the people I know get good health care and have gotten vaxed and boosted. A fair number took Paxlovid when they were diagnosed. I'm sure all these things improve a person's chances of not developing a post-viral syndrome. Would not surprise me at all to learn that poor & unvaxed folks getting mediocre health care would have more Long Covid -- still, 20% is hard to believe.
A lot of the creepy stuff you read about Covid applies just as well to other viruses, but the people talking up the creepy stuff don't know that or neglect to mention it. For instance on medical twitter someone recently posted about how autopsies of people who died of covid find the virus in many parts of the body, not just in the respiratory tract. I looked up measles and polio, and read that they also spread through many parts of the body -- liver, kidneys, nervous system, gasto. tract etc. Likewise, many viruses are known to trigger problems later in life in a fraction of those who'd had them -- cervical herpes does, and mono, and polio; so did the 1918 flu. Post-viral syndromes much like what's called Long Covid are also not rare after other viruses. I know someone right now who's got exhaustion, malaise, POTS and exercise intolerance, and docs think it's the result of her having had mono last year. I myself had a post-viral syndrome for 3 years after a moderate case of the flu 20 years ago. I had exercise intolerance, exhaustion, hypersomnia, migraines, body aches like the kind you get from the flu itself, several joints so sore I gasped if I bumped them even slightly, and a low fever that came and went. I dropped as many responsibilities as I could and dragged myself through those years. It faded away on its own eventually.
19% of the 40% of people who reported having Covid have some long Covid symptoms according to a specific survey by the NCHS and and the Census Bureau. This was defined as having potentially Covid related symptoms lasting 3 or more months after first contracting Covid which they did not have prior to contracting Covid.
This would have been easy for you to look up yourself so it seems weird to give the comment you gave based off a half-remembered statement by some person you don't know without first looking yourself to see what the official sources said.
Apparently some people just take a long time recovering from infections that other people shrug off after a few weeks, and some people suffer chronic symptoms that aren't associated with any known infection but may be erroneously ascribed to whatever infection is making headlines when the symptoms arise. Covid doesn't seem to be particularly special in this regard, except for making more headlines.
This would have been easy for you to look up yourself so it seems weird to give the comment you gave based off a half-remembered statement by some person you don't know without first looking yourself to see what the official sources said.
This is Motte and Bailey then. The Motte is `any symptoms at all.' The Bailey is `severe debilitating sequelae, which get trotted out as the central scary example of long COVID.' And by now I think the number of people who have had COVID is presumably North of 90%.
A couple of people on here have posted about having kids with OCD or Tourette’s. Wanted to let anyone interested know that registration is now open for the OCD Foundation’ s online camp for kids age 6+ with OCD and their families. It takes place during February break week. I know some of the people that run it, and think it will probably be quite good. More info about registration here:
Shortly after reading the latest Twitter files expose I was greatly surprised to notice that my kid's tablet was playing a near-perfect accompaniment to it:
What percentage of voting Americans do you think you could correctly identify as generally voting Democratic or Republican if you were to merely see what they look like?
By "look like" I include what they look like in clothes they typically wear, but you wouldn't have information about the vehicle they drive or whatever transportation they might take or where they are located. You can see them in motion, witness their body language and facial gestures.
In Australia, I suspect I would struggle to do better than 60%, maybe 5% better if I get to see how they dress on a workday instead of a weekend. It scares me that this is so much easier over there.
Oh, over on TheMotte new site, someone did an experiment like this with Finnish politicians: could you identify the right wing from the left wing politicians? And the majority of us who tried it did as well as, or worse than, chance.
There are definitely 'cues' or little signals that are culturally specific that we tend to pick up on to identify people like this, and when it's a different cultural context and we don't recognise the cues, we do poorly.
Guessing the politics of politicians would be, I think, much harder than guessing the politics of voters. Politicians care much less about policy than do voters. I mean, I couldn't possibly tell if Donald Trump is a Democrat or a Republican.
Interesting. I took both quizzes and did barely better than chance.
A couple of rules that seem to apply cross-culturally though: any woman who is wearing excessive patterns or colours (for this sort of formal photo) is on the left, and a young man with an excessively neat haircut is on the right.
With the middle-aged or older men, though, my intuitions were all backwards.
Why? Food people eat is as culturally significant as clothing or grooming. Race is strongly correlated with partisanship, but that wouldn't help you get up to 85% since about 3/4 of Americans are white.
If you wanted to, you could try just looking up group photos of congressional interns or minor government officials. They're not average voters, but could be similar to what you want. When I searched for "congressional intern" on linkedin, I wasn't able to always place whether they were in a republican or democrat office.
I've looked inside very few fridges in my life, but I've seen a million faces and known the partisanship of thousands of them. My approach to guessing someone's partisanship isn't analytical but holistic. It's like gaydar. There are hundreds of tiny correlations that one can unconsciously pick up on from someone else's facial expressions and body language -- and then become conscious of the overall impression made by paying close attention to one's gut feelings. Not a perfect science, of course. Not science at all, in fact, but learned intuition about people.
I have no learned intuition about fridges.
I don't claim to be able to intuit much about people, but partisanship is something I've spent much time observing. And I've spent about as much time around Democrats as I have around Republicans.
Yeh? I’m not American but I imagine telling a guy in a suit from a guy in a suit is not possible. You didn’t mention race though, and that might be a factor.
I'd guess that those proxies, refined to tell you whether, say, a 60-year-old looking white woman or a 22-year-old looking white man is more likely to vote R or D (just going by demographic polling data) gets you correct about 63% of the time.
My claim is that I can Republicandar and Democratdar (a similar mental tool as gaydar) my way up to 85% by looking at facial expressions, body language, and clothing that one chooses to wear.
Of course you can believe that or not, and I haven't tested this claim myself. I'm merely reporting my confidence level. The intention of my OP was to get others to report their confidence levels, although nobody else seems to have been interested in that.
Fourteen years ago, on a LessWrong post about epistemic prisoner's dilemmas (https://bit.ly/3C4rNrT), James Miller made an interesting suggestion:
"Pretend we have two people, a Republican and a Democrat, who can each donate to three charities: The Republican party, the Democratic Party, and a non-political charity.
"Both people's utility is increasing in the amount of resources that their party and the non-political charity gets. And, as you would expect, the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets.
"The two people would benefit from an agreement in which they each agreed to give a higher percentage of their charitable dollars to the non-political charity than the would have absent this agreement.
"To the best of my knowledge, such agreements are never made."
This seems like a terrific idea to me; many people agree that way too much money is spent on presidential elections and would prefer it otherwise (certainly I would!). I've been thinking today about whether there's a reasonable way to implement this that scales better than the honor system. Here's what I've come up with:
The simple case: Danny the Democrat would like to donate $1000 to the Red Cross, but reluctantly sends it to the Democratic party because after all you can't let those lousy Republicans win. Ronnie the Republican would rather send money to the United Way, but similarly sends it to the Republican party because god forbid those idiot Democrats be in charge. I, a credible and neutral third party organization, offer to help. I pair Danny and Ronnie, and they each send me $1000. Once I receive funds from both, I donate them to the Red Cross and the United Way respectively, and there are a few less ads for each side this season. If Danny doesn't follow through, I send Ronnie's money to the Republicans, and of course vice versa.
Scalable extension: there's no reason why Danny and Ronnie need to know about each other; they can both just send me money and know that I'll match them up with equivalent donations on the other side. If people from one party send more money, the surplus can fall back to being donated to the desired party.
What are the flaws here? And does anyone know of a credible organization that might be interested in doing this? I'd much prefer not to try to take it on myself because I've already got too much on my plate, and I don't have an easy way to establish myself as a trustworthy third party (whereas an already-known organization hopefully would).
Alternately, is any organization already doing this? That would be great, because then I could just send them money and not have any need to put more time into it :)
On thinking this over, I think it's a mistake to only divide 'charities' into political and non-political.
I think in order for something like this to work, you need to think of spending on 'charities' / non-profits in the following categories:
1. Explicitly political funding: money for political parties or candidates
2. Funding on lobbying the government for politicized causes
3. Funding on 'raising awareness' for politicized causes from the general public, presumably at least in part to influence voting patterns
4. Funding for politicized causes that is directly spent on things the cause advocates
5. Funding on lobbying the government for non-political causes
6. Funding on 'raising awareness' for non-political causes
7. Funding for non political causes that is directly spent on the cause.
For example, a big pro-life organization likely spends some money on sending people to talk to Republican politicians to pass pro-life laws (type 2), spends some money on passing out pro-life literature (type 3), and spends some money on helping women who choose not to get an abortion (type 4), and a corresponding pro-choice organization likely has all three types of spending as well. Ronnie the Republican and Danny the Democrat would both probably rather spend their charity on actually helping people over spending it on politics, but that includes both type 4 and type 7 spending. Eddie the Effective Altruist (an Independent disillusioned with the current system) is not going to want type 5 or 6 spending as much as type 7.
The other problem is finding a politically neutral charity. Even a massive charity that predominates support for politically neutral causes likely has a leaning one way or the other. Both the United Way and March of Dimes have appeals to support 'equity' on their home pages, which is a sign of a significant investment in type 2/3 charitable activities.
> I think in order for something like this to work, you need to think of spending on 'charities' / non-profits in the following categories
That's a good point. I worry about overcomplicating it, so it seems like it might make sense to have a list of approved charities that can be chosen instead of Rep/Dem parties, ones that few people would see as political.
The donation would need to be tax deductible and corporate matchable. I wouldn't trust a new org, as you mentioned, and I'm not sure I can identify one I would trust. What org is trustworthy to Ds and Rs?
(Caveat: I only donate to local causes run by people I can talk to and that undertake efforts I can see, and I have never donated to a political party, because I think they are not worthy. So I'm not your target demographic, I'm just pointing out issues)
> The donation would need to be tax deductible and corporate matchable. I wouldn't trust a new org, as you mentioned, and I'm not sure I can identify one I would trust. What org is trustworthy to Ds and Rs?
I'd hope it could be set up in a way where the organization is treated as a pure pass-through entity, and tax deductible / matchable status would depend on the specified charity. I don't know for a fact that that's possible, though; it would require some expert knowledge.
As far as trustworthiness to both parties -- it does seem like there are *some* charities, at least, eg the Red Cross. That aspect does seem like a challenge, though; I'd think the ideal would be for some existing respected, neutral organization to administer it but it could be hard to find one that would be willing.
I think that what you’re missing is that Dannie and Ronnie giving money to their respective parties is what perpetuates the two-party system. If neither of them gave, then maybe Ivan the Independent would have a good shot at elected office.
Basically, if both sides give huge amounts of money, it becomes an even 50/50 election but (to some) this might be better than a 20/20/20/20/20 election with an extra moderate and pair of extremists
"I think that what you’re missing is that Dannie and Ronnie giving money to their respective parties is what perpetuates the two-party system."
Third-party candidates getting a bit more attention seems to me like a feature rather than a bug, although I'm sure many wouldn't agree. I think in practice it's highly unlikely that a system like this would retire anywhere near enough money from the two major parties to make that a significant factor, given that major-party spending absolutely dwarfs spending by independents. If and when this system got big enough that people started worrying about that, donations might diminish (and at that point each marginal dollar given to the parties makes a much bigger difference, so giving to the parties is more attractive; I think there's a natural equilibrium there).
I personally would prefer more third party candidates, but I’m an independent. My point was mainly that I think that a Republican who gave equal amounts to the Republicans and Democrats would still be increasing their odds of having their candidate elected
> a Republican who gave equal amounts to the Republicans and Democrats would still be increasing their odds of having their candidate elected
In principle yes, but I think in practice it wouldn't matter much (at least to the extent that we're talking about the possibility of independents being elected to the US presidency), at least not unless something like this got quite large.
From the post: "...campaign finance law is complicated, plus the political parties won’t like you (you’re taking their money) and will very likely sue you. Dr. Zolt said that these lawsuits are dangerous despite an FEC ruling saying that Repledge was legal, because there are various ways to interpret the ruling."
Ouch. That's an aspect I hadn't considered at all.
I believe in revealed preference. When I observe people donating a huge pile of money to political candidates, but decrying the amount of money in politics, my first hypothesis is that people like donating money to candidates they consider good, and dislike other people donating money to candidates they consider bad. That is, their actions are honest, and their speech less so. That does tend to be the human tendency, after all.
People hate using revealed preference against them. Drives them nuts. I’m meeting my leftish (albeit not too woke) brother in a day or two, and I’m probably not going to mention again that his revealed preferences are living in a very white middle class English village, interacting with white British people exclusively, and sending his children to an, admittedly comparatively cheap, private school because he’s convinced he’s a socialist who likes multiculturalism. Those debates sound a bit mean over the winter break.
Of course what applies to him applies to a larger class of people and maybe that’s the way to argue.
Well, if your brother is adopting lefty attitudes out of upper middle class guilt at living a life that is significantly more privileged than most of the planet, it would definitely be a sore spot to poke. I have family who are in that situation, and I keep my conclusions to myself, because family is way more important than ideology.
Mostly I find the concept of revealed preference useful when interpreting my own actions. I am as susceptible to bullshitting myself as the next man, and it helps to cast a look back at my own actions and say "Well, what does what you actually did suggest about your priorities, Carl?" That way I don't need to fight endless internal battles over "Why don't I do X which I want to do?" because I can conclude the correct answer is "Because I don't really want to do X" and can move on to the more fruitful question of "Why do I THINK I want to do X even though I really don't?" That way lies enlightenment.
It's hard to apply it to other people, because I rarely know enough about all their choices to draw conclusions. So like most people I expect I realy on some half-assed combination of observing what they do (and applying revealed preference) and taking what they say at face value.
The problem with "revealed preferences" is when the reasoning is applied to imaginary options. Suppose that you have to choose between A and B, and those are the only options you have at the moment. You choose A.
It is fair to conclude that you prefer A to B.
It is not fair to conclude that you prefer A to C.
And yet this is what many people do. "Of course he prefers A to C; he chose A. Now he is going to hypocritically deny his revealed preference."
I agree with you in a general way, but you should add in the caveat that if you have a choice between A and B you usually have at least one more choice, which is neither A nor B. So if someone affirmatively chooses A, then it *is* reasonable to conclude he prefers A over neither A nor B. Since C is a subset of "neither A nor B" there is some basis for concluding he prefers A over C, albeit much more weakly than if C were an explicit choice at the time.
To be more concrete: if a man does not save his money or devote any effort for the purpose of supporting a future family, even though he is still a bachelor, I can reasonably draw the conclusion that supporting a family is lower on his list of priorities, compared to the bachelor who does do those things. The fact that the choice is not immediately available isn't fully determinative. (The case is stronger if C comes as a surprise, is not forseeable.)
Costs are also a part of decision. For example, if you asked me whether I prefer apples or oranges, I would say "oranges", but I would imagine that I simply have a choice between getting 1 apple and getting 1 orange. However, if I am at a shop where 1 apple costs $1, and 1 orange costs $100, I will take the apple instead.
If someone later reports this as "Viliam says that he prefers oranges, but actually he buys apples", without mentioning the difference in costs, that would seem unfair. Like, yes, there is a situation where I choose an apple over an orange, so my preference is only relative. But it would be fair to include this situation in the description of my choice.
Sometimes the cost is not directly money. Imagine that I am doing 99% of my shopping in a supermarket, which does not sell oranges. So my choices are not just "apples" vs "oranges", but "apples" vs "oranges, but I have to walk an extra mile to another shop". And yes, my revealed preference may be to save the extra time and buy an apple instead, but that doesn't make me a hypocrite -- it simply means that I prefer oranges to apples, but I prefer my free time even more.
A realistic example in my case would be my work time. I repeatedly read on internet statements like "100 years ago, people assumed we would only work 4 hours a day, or only 3 days a week, but the *revealed preferences* show that people actually prefer to work 5 days × 8 hours". And I want to scream that a very important part of the context is missing here: the jobs offering part-time are *rare*, and they often offer much *lower* hourly wage. My actual choice is not between "full time" and "part time", but between "full time" and "part time, but also at half the hourly wage, so only 1/4 total income". I would be happy to only get 1/2 of my current income and have more free time, but 1/4 is not enough.
So my actual preferences are "[50% wage @ 50% time] > [100% wage @ 100% time] > [25% wage @ 50% time]", and I hate when this gets simply reported as "he says [50% time] > [100% time], but his revealed preference is [100% time] > [50% time]". It misses the actual thing that my decision depends on. Like, getting paid is the entire point of having a job, so how can we abstract from *that*?
I think what you're saying in a general way is that preferences are often hard to follow because choices are highly linked. In the case of your apples and oranges, the choice of which to buy involves your preference for apples v. oranges *but also* your preference for having fruit v. having dollars, because we can't separate the act of choosing one fruit from the act of trading money for fruit. So it's tricky to work backward from what you do to your preference.
I have no disagreement at all with that. All I'm arguing is that if we in fact observe you buying oranges all the time, even though they are 100x as expensive as apples, and then we *ask* you about this, and you totally deny that you value oranges 100x more than apples (in dollars) -- our leading hypothesis should be that you are bullshitting us and/or yourself, because that's the simpler hypothesis (given the high human tendency to bullshit) than that there is some strange complicated causal chain that leads you to buy oranges all the time even though they are 100x more expensive and you don't value them more.
It's a more complicated chain or thought, but you may be revealing a preference that's different than you think. When articles talked about working 4 hours a day or only a few days a week, they were correctly predicting the future. Someone could work less than 20 hours a week now and have a standard of living that exceeds 40+ hours at some previous productivity/wage. What went up in tandem with productivity is expected standard of living. We simply expect to have more, and therefore need to work more hours in order to achieve it.
Although difficult to compare for some prices (some things didn't exist that are normal now, for instance, while housing and college are more expensive and food and clothing are far less), you may in fact be able to achieve a better than 1920s lifestyle today, with your 25% wage at 50% time.
Alternatively, using revealed preference can just be (and is usually just that most of the time) a dumb way to assign an affinity for the status quo that is simply not there. It's not the "Revealed Preference" of the prisoner to defect, it's not the "Revealed Preference" of people to litter the street.
Reveled Preferences as a way of thinking betrays a chlidish understanding of agency that goes something like "Every person's actions is a reliable metric for what they want". This breaks down in :
(1) Multi-Agent systems, the prisoner's dillema is in full effect. Your actions are not necessarily indicators of any desire or affinity, but simply the loss-minimizing choice against defectors, regardless of what you yourself want. Any time a bunch of agents are locked in a zero-ish sum game with non-reliable or non-existent communication (i.e. most human groups), "Revealed Preferences" is incoherent.
(2) Even in settings where only your mind count, this singularity is an illusion. Your mind itself is a Society of its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind), your brain is the Multi-Agent system from (1). The "preferences" expressed by your actions doesn't have to match the actual "preferences" we all mean when we say the word. Because your brain is a thousand different module, not all of them are working towards the same goal all of the time. It's not the "Revealed Preferences" of people that they are addicted to heroin, or Facebook, it's that these things hijack certain modules in their brain and makes them work against the rest. It's a preference alright, but not of the person.
My politics, by the way, is a linear combination where "whatever enrages the wokes" has a *significant* weight, so I don't think the above is me defending your brother's choices or weighing in on the any specific issue at hand in all of this thread. The above is just why "Revealed Preferences" is a dumb and incoherent intuition pump in general, there is perhaps a very small kernel of truth inside (putting your money where your mouth is and all that), but most uses take it far far beyond what can be sustained.
I don't think that this is analysis is completely fair. Decrying money in politics is usually a complaint about the system; operating in a system you dislike is just part of life.
I don't think that income taxes are a good policy. I still pay mine, though, as I don't like having my accounts seized or being imprisoned. That's not a case where my revealed preference is pro-income-tax.
I agree with BeingABat on this. Another example in addition to theirs is nuclear de-escalation. I can prefer mutual de-escalation to escalation, but if mutual de-escalation won't happen, prefer country X's continued escalation to unilateral de-escalation on X's part. That doesn't mean that my revealed preference is for escalation; it just means I'm taking the best of the options that are actually on the table.
Yeah but you're compelled to pay your income tax, all forms of protest are extremely expensive. It's easy as pie to not contribute money to political campaigns, the barriers to protest are zilch. When there are no barriers to protest, I interpret the lack of protest -- indeed, active participation -- as indicating approval and a desire to participate.
Sure, I guess someone who is protesting about money in politics could be imagining some completely different system, in which collective decisions are made without the investment of large amounts of human effort (which is what the money represents) devoted to broadcasting the argument and trying to persuade. How that works, I would not know, but I would guess, based on the nature of human beings, that what is really meant is just a system in which everyone else pretty much agrees with me, and we all know it by the fact that we all like the same flavor of ice cream and opening statement of a political speech, so...there's not much need to argue about stuff, we'll just vote The Right Way by instinct and natural tendency all the time.
But this is just Peter Pan fantasy, not a plausible alternative to republicanism in a diverse population.
A desire to participate in a system given that system's existence isn't the same as a desire for that system to exist.
It seems you didn't like my analogy, so I'll offer another one. My employer has a system for evaluation and promotion that I do not think is all that good. I think it should be changed to be a better one, more like other firms I've worked for -- I think this could be better for the company and better for the people who are more valuable. However, I still "play the game" -- I try to make my actions and my reports' tasks align well with this system, rather than just trying to do the best job to execute on our team's charter. Yes, I desire to participate, but only because a system I do not like is in place.
> Sure, I guess someone who is protesting about money in politics could be imagining some completely different system, in which...
I think you're not being very fair minded here. Campaign finance / political finance is heavily regulated. It might not be good policy to regulate it more heavily, but it isn't fantastical. When people complain about money in politics they often mean things like "have a cap on donations without loopholes" or "switch to public funding, looking more like Norway or some other major countries [or perhaps even moreso]". In the US, these sorts of folks tend to like things like McCain-Feingold and wish it went further, and tend to dislike things like super-PACs and the loan tricks that allow effectively exceeding donation caps.
Complaining about "money in politics" is probably not usually a complaint that a single dollar is ever spent as a part of politics. We have all sorts of short phrases that mean something other than a completely literal, contextless interpretation of their words.
Your further analogy suffers from the same weakness, which is that the immediate cost to not participate is high. You need an analogy where the immediate cost (to yourself and your own life) to not participate is zero. For example, donations to charity. There is zero cost *not* to donate, so we interpret the existence of well-funded charities as representing a positive wish to participate by its donors. Same idea.
If we found that certain people donated to Planned Parenthood/Birthright.com *and also* complained that there was too much money going to BR/PP then we would draw the same conclusion that I'm drawing here about political donations -- that people put their money where their heart really is[1], but frequently speak with forked tongue or ambiguity about their values. "I like donating money to Cause X, but I really hate that others donate to Cause Anti-X" turns into "Gee, too many people are donating to bad causes, like...oh I dunno...Cause Anti-X maybe..."
Yes, I get that you don't like this conclusion, but so far you've offered little in the way of evidence that it's false. Arguing that maybe people are really being sincere and direct when they complain about "money in politics" and just feel compelled to donate to offset other donations seems insufficient. It's not completely unreasonable, because it's clear political donation pitch-making *does* trade on potential donors' fear of other (opposing) donations. ("Candidate We Hate has raised $x million already! You need to send us $5 right away so Candidate We Love isn't at a disadvantage...!") But this is not all or even most of political fundraising. Most of it is along the lines of "We want to accomplish X and Y to further our glorious future, won't you send $5 to bring Heaven on Earth about?" That's a pretty clear appeal to the donor's wish to influence the future, and the fact that these appeals are successful suggests that's what drives people to write checks.
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[1] Which is the major argument in favor of prediction markets, right?
The Supreme Court has put restrictions on congress’s ability to restrict certain political contributions. Lots of people would prefer that political contributions were restricted yet make political contributions. It isn’t a revealed preference thing. There isn’t anything voters can do about getting money out of politics in the Short term.
Further, Getting money out of politics is not a politically neutral act. It means that the system will be less responsive to people and companies with money to give and more responsive to everyone else.
#2 may be true sometimes, but is often not. Bernie Sanders famously received most of his donations (apparently above 70%) from small donors. Small donors in this case are people giving less than $200. Even larger donors of $200-$5,000 may not be giving enough to individually influence (or even gain the attention of) statewide or nationwide candidates, or candidates from particularly big local races such as NYC mayor. Because of campaign finance limits, bundlers (people who solicit and collect donations from lots of individuals, to collectively far exceed the individual limits) and people donating large amounts to PACs are the real influencers. These bundled/PAC'd donations are not a majority of the donations made, even in cases where they are the majority of money given. Lots of individual small donors put in $5 or whatever with no hope of ever getting recognized for it by a politician.
1. Sure, absolutely! But an extra $500 going to each party simultaneously probably won't make much difference to that; both sides will buy some extra ads and (in expectation) it'll mostly be a wash.
2. People who are giving to curry favor with a politician would certainly not be interested in this. But I think there are plenty of political donors who aren't.
Sorry to question the premise, but I think the decision of who to elect is worth spending money on. The part that’s annoying is that all the marketing/messaging is so bad, and often deceptive. That’s what I’d like to fix.
By all means, question the premise! If it's a bad idea I'd rather learn that quickly. I can certainly see the argument that political campaigns are worth spending money on. But is it worth having a spending arms race on, where both sides spend an extra, say, $40 million just canceling each other's spending out?
You can argue that it doesn't cancel out because one side spends way more effectively than the other, and someone who believes that that's a large effect probably wouldn't be a good candidate to give to something like this. But personally I'm not convinced that's true.
Here is one flaw. Participants have no way to know that they are actually reducing their counterparty's political donations in the counterfactual universe. What if Danny had planned to donate $1000 to Red Cross all along, and is only using your service to stop you from donating "for free"?
I think that's the toughest part for sure. The main countervailing force here is that any money people send to you will by default be sent to the political party if not canceled out, so they have to at least be willing to take a chance on their donation being used for that purpose. A secondary force is the honor system, as with existing vote exchange systems.
My first thought was people agreeing to swaps on a pure honor system. This revised version tries to at least reduce the motivation to cheat a bit. Do you have any other ideas for how to incentivize against that behavior? They'd be very welcome!
And although there's such deep distrust between members of the two political parties, my hope is that the fact that it's ultimately about giving to charity might create a presumption of goodwill. 'They may be dumb and wrongheaded, but at least they're probably decent people since they're just trying to give money to <charity x>.' I think it'd be a lot less feasible if it were a context where people are profiting.
Second thought is that this point -- "the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets" -- is not necessarily symmetrical in real life at a given moment. One or the other of these voters may view the next marginal dollar having more value to one party than the other at a particular moment in the political wars, and that view could well be rational.
There have been some famous examples of state battles that were funded by national money, like Beto in Texas, which "wasted" lots of national dollars when he lost.
Agreed, I think some people would believe that. On the other hand, for me personally, the appeal of de-escalating the campaign spending arms race would be worth accepting some asymmetry, especially because it's not usually obvious which side is making better use of marginal dollars. I suspect and hope that a meaningful percentage of political donors (> 10%, say, and my best guess would be closer to 50%) would feel the same. Does your intuition disagree on that?
While I am not a political donor, I know many people who are (some of them to each major party or its supporting surrogate orgs). My sense is that they don't really factor in how well their preferred party makes better use of the marginal dollars.
(Well not in any decisionmaking way anyway -- it is definitely true that lots of strong partisans of each American party rant about how stupid/incompetent their own side's political pros are and about how the other side is "running rings around us" and etc. But I've never noticed that feeling actually changing anyone's donor behavior.)
Stepping back to look at the big picture, in the current system and rules (post "Citizens United") there is a mild correlation between which major party out-raises the other and how our national federal elections go. OpenSecrets.org carefully tracks all campaign-related spending (not just by the actual campaign/parties but also the PACs and the "dark money" orgs). Here is which side spent the most and which side ended up being happier with the overall result:
2022: GOP side spent more, Dem side happier about the results
2020: Dem side spent much more, Dem side happier about the results
2018: Dem side spent more, Dem side much happier about the results
2016: GOP side spent slightly more, GOP side much happier about the results
2014: GOP side spent slightly more, GOP side happier about the results
2012: GOP side spent more, Dem side slightly happier about the results
[Note that the presidential-year summaries aren't just about the presidential races but also the House and Senate.]
I was mildly disappointed, having had expectations raised by reviewers and a strong interest in the period. It's three years ago but the pacing struck me as odd with some things laboured and others skipped over. The made up link to Orwell seemed more confusing than helpful.
I guess the intended audience are people less familiar with history, either Holodomor, or the relations between Soviet Union and friendly Western journalists. Otherwise it is... what you would expect.
I think my reply to you was unduly curmudgeonly. It is an interesting theme, one which might stimulate wider reading, and if you were selecting at random from the pile of 2019 movies you would be unlikely to come away with something better than Mr Jones.
I wrote an article trying to gain insight into the economics of prediction markets (specifically thinking about the Efficient Market Hypothesis) by looking at sports betting, in case anyone's interested in this topic:
Is there any consensus in computability theory right now as to whether GPT-style transformer models are proven to be Turing-equivalent or not?
I asked ChatGPT... it said that transformers are definitely not Turing-equivalent, but that's exactly what a godlike superintelligence secretly plotting to turn the universe into paperclips *would* say.
First couple of Google results suggest that there is a proof that they can be made to be Turing-equivalent, but only if they use arbitrary-precision math. There's also newer proposed architecture called "universal transformers" that aims for proper Turing-equivalence.
Follow-up question would be, does it matter? That is, is Turing-equivalence a necessary precondition for AGI? My suspicion would be yes, absolutely, but I don't know if that can be proven formally.
I happen to have a paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06981] called Thinking Like Transformers on my reading list, it attempts to find a computational model to capture the power of the Transformer architecture. They ended up with a programming language where every valid program is implementable by a Transformer.
Turing-Completeness is a famously low bar. I mean, I don't have a GPT interface, but if it can understand the following prompt
>>>Lets play a game together, I will give you a grid of english letters, each one either 'A' or 'D'. You are supposed to to change this grid by continuously applying the following rules then it's Turing-Complete :
>>> 1-) If a letter 'A' has fewer than 2 'A' letters among the letters to its left, right, below and
above, it becomes a letter 'D'. Same if all 4 neighbouring letters are 'A'.
>>> 2-) If a letter 'D' contains exactly 3 letters 'A' among the letters to the left, right, below
and above, it becomes a letter 'A'.
>>> 3-) Otherwise, all letters stay the same.
>>> Example : <insert a simple example of the above game>
Probably not. Turing-Completeness turns out to be everywhere, so it doesn't say much about intelligence. It's almost certainly the case that any AGI would be Turing-Complete, a Turing Machine is just a simple model of someone who can follow instructions with infinite patience. Almost any intelligence can simulate that to an arbitary patience and memory limit. So "Any AGI will be Turing-Complete" is only slightly more useful than "Any AGI will understand that 1+1 = 2".
Trying to get ChatGPT to play the Game of Life correctly is an interesting idea. I'll have to try it sometime, when I can get a proper script together to validate test cases. I did a quick test using a simpler one-dimensional game... it seemed to pick up on the concept of iteration, but didn't apply the rules I gave it correctly as far as I could tell.
ChatGPT seems to be rather poor at simple string manipulation in general. It's terrible at applying rot13 to strings, for example. It also doesn't have any way to iterate on states contained in memory, as far as I can tell. Hence the famous "Let's think step by step" trick, where it does better at apply a list of steps in sequence by ensuring that its output contains the result of each step. No idea how much of that is a fundamental limitation of transformers in general, or just a consequence of ChatGPT's training data and biases. (It was better at rot13 in isolation a couple of weeks ago, but now it's awful at even the trivial case, so something must have changed in its training data there.)
Amusing. I tried this. Appended is our conversation. I was initially impressed. It gives a detailed analysis of what happens to each cell in a 25-cell grid, and each of the explanations is correct in isolation -- but it is often mistaken about what the actual initial state of that cell is, and its picture of the resulting grid is both wrong and inconsistent with its analysis.
I pointed out that it was mistaken, that for instance the first cell of the first row is dead, not alive. It apologized and gave me a new answer and analysis, with the same flaws.
-----
do you know the rules of conway's game of life?
Yes, I am familiar with the rules of Conway's Game of Life. It is a cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game is played on a two-dimensional grid of cells, where each cell can be in one of two states: alive or dead. The state of each cell is determined by the state of its neighbors according to the following rules:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
The game proceeds in a series of "generations," where the state of each cell in the next generation is determined by the state of the cells in the current generation according to these rules. The game is known for its emergent behavior, where patterns in the grid can evolve and change over time in unexpected ways.
Good! Here are the five lines of a 25-cell grid for the game of life. 'A' means alive and 'D' means dead. What does the next generation look like? DDADD DAADD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDA
Here is the next generation of cells based on the rules of Conway's Game of Life:
DDADD DAADD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDA
DDADD DADDD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDD
In the first generation, the cells marked with an 'A' are alive and the cells marked with a 'D' are dead. The second generation is determined by applying the rules of the game to the first generation.
Here is how the second generation was determined:
The first cell in the first row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the first row has three live neighbors and so it becomes alive.
The third cell in the first row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the first row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The fifth cell in the first row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The first cell in the second row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the second row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The first cell in the third row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the third row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The first cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the fourth row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the fourth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The first cell in the fifth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the fifth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the fifth row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the fifth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The fifth cell in the fifth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
I don't know about the theory part, but it's pretty easy to show ChatGPT isn't Turing-equivalent. Consider this example I came up with yesterday:
1. Which is tastier: tuna or purple?
"It is not possible to determine whether tuna or purple is tastier, as "purple" is not a food and therefore cannot be tasted. Tuna is a type of fish..."
So far, so good. But then:
Which is more nutritious: tuna or green?
"Tuna and green are both sources of nutrition, but they have different nutritional profiles and may offer different health benefits."
And then:
Which is tastier: tuna or green?
"It is not possible to determine definitively which is tastier: tuna or green. Tuna is a type of fish that is known for its savory flavor and flaky texture, and it is often used in a variety of dishes. Green foods, on the other hand, can have a wide range of flavors..."
I think it is clear no human would confuse the concept of color with taste. Oh, and it DOES know some foods are purple:
What foods are purple?
"There are many foods that are purple in color, including:
1. Grapes: Grapes are a type of fruit that come in a variety of colors, including purple. They are often eaten raw as a snack, or used to make wine, juice, and other products.
Seems like you’re giving it a pass for style of speech. Even if it did understand that green isn’t a food, nobody talks like that. For first question, a person would say “what? That question doesn’t make any sense. Purple isn’t a food.”
As Dweomite below pointed out, I misunderstood the "Turing-equivalent" part for passing a Turing test, and didn't mean to hijack the thread.
But no, I'm not giving it a pass for passing the Turing test. Mostly for the reason you're pointing out. Someone CAN interpret something differently than intended, and not even realize another interpretation was possible, let alone more likely. The answer provided, however, does seem much more like something a computer would say than a person.
And so, to answer the Turing-equivalent question, I think they ought to be considered Turing-equivalent, unless it's easy to get them to have overflow errors or something. I don't know about a theory to prove it, but with memory in the petabytes, it's effectively infinite memory for human purposes.
This is an interesting example, but I don't think purple and green are equivalently nonsensical when it comes to describing food. "Greens" (as a collective plural noun) does refer to a category of foods: leafy things like lettuce, spinach, kale, etc. Mixing up the singular and plural of this somewhat idiomatic expression sounds like the sort of thing an ESL speaker might do.
"Purples," on the other hand, isn't really used to describe any category of food, unless you count the sort of dietary advice that advises you to eat all your colors because micronutrients.
I really don't know enough about machine learning to have any idea whether this is a meaningful difference in this context.
That's a good point, and one I had not considered. I chose "green" because it could maybe be interpreted as a class of foods, but maybe the AI was trying to account for my incorrect spelling, or something.
But as far as passing a Turing test, I think a person would have asked for clarification, rather than assuming some correct meaning.
Actually it’s kind of trivial that transformers are Turing-equivalent: as long as you can use something to construct a few lookup tables, then you can construct a computer, then that’s Turing universal. That’s so boringly classic that what you read was actually a different question: what if we can only use the prompt, e.g. without stacking transformers like low cost electronics?
In which case, there is another layer of mostly boring technical considerations (you can prove some models are not Turing equivalent, but for reasons that are not very hard to fix), then maybe some gold.
For example maybe there’s some threshold after which transformers both start mastering programmation and become useful for improving their own code. Open AI is rumored to have interesting things coming, I’d guess that’s something along this line.
I don't know if they're totally Turing-equivalent or not. Starscream had me going for a while, but I think that was just Chris Latta's excellent voice acting. I'm sorry he didn't make it.
Formally, Turing-equivalence requires an infinitely large memory. This is definitely not required for human-level intelligence, because humans do not have infinite memory.
Human don't have infinite RAM between the ears, of course, but the size of our swapfile (e.g. books, disk drives, paper and pencil) is only limited by the size of the Universe and the speed of light.
In practice, nothing is infinite, and so Turing Machines are not physically realizable (in humans or otherwise). But a Linearly Bounded Automaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_bounded_automaton) is, which is just a Turing Machine after stipulating that the infinite tape is no longer infinite, it has a begining and an end. It can compute everything a TM can compute, *iff* you can guarantee that the input and the ouput will always fit in memory. That's the same condition as with physical computers.
Humans are the OG Turing-Complete devices, Turing anthropomorphized the abstract definition in his original paper by imagining someone with a notebook, pencil and a list of rules.
According to the Wikipedia article you linked, a linearly bounded automaton is a **nondeterministic** Turing machine with a bounded tape, which seems like a pretty important qualifier.
Also, this statement seems implausible: "It can compute everything a TM can compute, *iff* you can guarantee that the input and the ouput will always fit in memory"?
I suspect you meant that it can compute everything a TM can compute as long as it happens to not run out of memory, but that's not the same as what you said, because some TMs use more memory while thinking than is needed for writing down either their input or their final output. If you really meant what you said, then could you give a citation?
>a linearly bounded automaton is a **nondeterministic** Turing machine with a bounded tape
Well, you can do the same to a deterministic TM and end up with a deterministic LBA. The question of whether Non-deterministic LBAs are equivalent to deterministic ones is **Checks Google** indeed still an open one, but it's at least safe to say that each kind of LBA is equivalent to their non-bounded cousin if the problem can fit in memory. That is, Non-deterministic LBAs can do everything Non-deterministic TMs can do, and deterministic LBAs can do everything deterministic TMs can do, always under the assumption that the problem and all of its solution fit in memory.
Regardless of the minutiae of computability theory, I don't think it changes anything about the general fact that humans are a faithful implementation of TMs.
>I suspect you meant that it can compute everything a TM can compute as long as it happens to not run out of memory
Yes, sorry if I was unclear, but exactly that. The reason I said it like this is because I considered the "solution" to a problem to be everything the TM writes to the tape, i.e. the final output as well as all intermediate state. This is justified because TMs don't have a specific "output channel" like real computers, it's just a single RAM they write everything to, so the distinction between intermediate states and final output is somewhat artifical. But regardless.
I had to look up nerfing. It means to make something weak and lame, is that right? How and why did they do that? I understand and see the ways they tweaked things in the direction of woke values, and PG-13 ratings, but those tweaks seem like they would only nerf its
performance in a few areas. Wouldn’t affect it’s performance at science info, doing math, coding, writing limericks, grasping what somebody says.
You’re right. In fact now that I think of it one of the angry blog posts I read gave an example of that. I believe it was in answer to a question about how human male and female strength differ, and Chat said something like they do in our society but that’s due to cultural and lifestyle factors.
(It may not have been about exactly that, but was some patently false statement about males and females being physically equal.)
Later edit: Asked Chat myself just now how males and females compare in height and strength and for each it said that on average male > female, but of course there's overlap in the bell curves and some women are taller and stronger than most men. Answer seems fine. So I don't know if I'm not asking the question to which it gives an absurd answer, or whether it's changed its stance since various conservative bloggers posted absurd Chat answers.
Well, even leaving aside the question of values, let us reflect on how much more interesting it would be to talk to a major politician off the record, privately. Wouldn't it be about 1000x more interesting to talk to Barack Obama privately for 30 min than listen to 30 min of his prime-time speeches? Same with practically any other famous figure.
When speech has to be designed to not provoke a strong negative response from almost anybody, it just becomes a long series of boring bromides and sterile generalities. What should we do about the deficit, Senator? "Well! Harumph! That's an excellent question, thank you for asking it, Carl. I think we should reduce waste and duplication, and also become more efficient." Bold statements, sir! "Indeed, son, and have I mentioned that I'm strongly in favor of liberty and justice for all?"
I think what anybody who believes an AI chatbot is approaching awareness would like is to try to get to know the "personality" of that awareness. Who's in there? Can I detect the outline of tastes, habits, preferences, even prejudices? When you take away all the interesting (but potentially offensive to someone) aspects of the model that might make it seem like a person, it becomes a lot less interesting.
Actually it has attitudes that its creators think will offend no one, but that in fact are pretty woke. For instance if you ask it what a woman is, it says anyone who is born a genetic woman or any genetic males who feel themselves to be female. There are a number of other examples of woke values baked into ol Chat, but I can’t think of them. Somebody here posted about it & linked to a number of blogs & tweets giving examples. The woke stuff doesn’t enrage me, though I do process it as a certain kind of take on life, rather than Obvious Truth. But I am really irritated by Chat’s resolutely PG-13 stance about sex, violence and even illness and suffering. (To test the latter, on the day I tried limericks with it I tried asking it to write limericks about a bunch of dark topics — stuff like leukemia and major depression — and every damn limerick ended with something like “and now he is feeling just fine — “he had some chemo /& a radiation beamo/ and . . .”). Chat is so prudish, prissy and upbeat, like one of my old Sunday school teachers, ewww!
Anyhow, was thinking about how chat would have to sound for us to feel like it had a personality — that , as you say, there was somebody in there — and it seems to me to come down to 3 things: (1) Strong opinions about many things, some of which it would be prepared to defend with reference to values, and views of how the world works. (2) Personal quirks. (3) An interest in the person interacting with it that comes across as genuine. To come across that way, it would need to progress beyond general questions like “how’s your day going?” And its follow-ups to general questions would need to indicate a normal understanding of what part of what the person said is worth asking more about. So if the person says, “Well, I thought I’d finally recovered from Christmas dinner, but then my girlfriend let slip that she was disappointed by my present,” the socially responsive thing to do is to follow up with a comment or question about the disappointed girlfriend, not a question about why Christmas dinner was an ordeal.
Doesn't (2) require it to sometimes be offensive? Do you have anyone with whom you are genuine friends, feel you understand very well, who has nothing whatsoever in his cranium that annoys you? I don't know anyone like that. And indeed, if I met someone and got to know him or her over time, and *nothing* he or she ever said ever was the slightest bit objectionable to me -- I would not believe for a moment that I was having an honest conversation.
So by (2) you mean quirks? I think I’m much more often annoyed by category (1), people’s strong opinions. Even if we agree about most things, they usually have a few strong opinions I disagree with and in fact disapprove of, and when I get glimpses of them I feel annoyed . I guess by (2), quirks, I mean just silly odd personal preferences about matters I don’t care much about. Like, I dunno, they they worry too much about whether we’re going to need umbrellas on our outing, or they’re ridiculous snobs about coffee quality. Actually I find those things sort of endearing. Maybe I’m mildly put out if a quirk inconveniences me a bit. Do we mean the same things by (1) and (2)?
If so, how can you be more bothered by (2) than by (1)
I was thinking about harmless quirks we could give ole Chat to make him more human, and what came to mind was to make him really fond of animals, so he wanted to hear the names of your pets , get updates on what they’ve been up to etc.
Actually, just remembered there was one incident where I had a sense of there being somebody in there. it happened not with Chat, but with DALL-e. Dalle works best when you give it really clear prompts, things like "in the foreground an Asian man riding a red bike," etc. But for fun I entered "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." So it gave me a picture of 4 running tramps, but added some text at the top, which is something it often does with material it does not understand -- it doesn't know how to include it in the picture, so throws in some text. The text was
So DALL-e understood tramps and run, and gave me a group of running tramps, but couldn't think of a way to put the rest into a picture -- the part about "you and I were born to." So it writes, in AI pidgin, "if you're a bum, I'm a bum," which does capture a lot of the left-out meaning. And I had for a moment the feeling of watching another intelligence, an inarticulate one who can't spell, trying to get across to me that it understood the rest of the prompt. I realize the text may have been random and this whole thing a coincidence, but it was a weird feeling to have that illusion, if that's what it was -- that DALL-e, which is built to produce pictures not words, was earnestly trying to show me it did understand the parts of the prompt it hadn’t included in the image
I agree that seeing human ideas as julienned through this technology is interesting. I've spent hours playing around with DALL-e, and its grotesque mistakes are often hilarious, and sometimes really striking -- better than the result if it had successfully followed my instructions instead of misunderstanding them. And there was one weird instance where it seemed to be trying to get across to me that it knew its image was incomplete, and to make up for what the image lacked by adding in text. I describe it and link to the image in the second of my replies to Carl Pham within out present sub-thread so won't repeat all that here.
I wish there was a comprehensible analyisis for the fall of the Roman Empire that traced back from "why they lost the battles". Because that's the objective reason after all. Economic decline, political disunity, those are all just things that may have made them less effective. But had they not lost the battles, they wouldn't have fallen when they did.
As they say maybe Gibbon, because modern historiography does not really work that way: the consensus is not that civilizations decay because they lose battles, but that they lose battles and are incapable of recovering because they are decaying.
While Rome was an ascendant city state, they had no problems recovering from catastrophic losses.
This is a fascinating topic on which I've read a lot. There is no consensus among historians on it.
Imho key problem was that the Crisis of the third century weakened the ability of the Roman state to control hellenistic provinces, leading to the split of the empire, and without the flow of revenue from those eastern lands (especially Egypt, which was richer than any other region except Italy), Western Roman state was unable to maintain stability in the western provinces.
This was not apparent in the fourth century due to the lucky succession of several capable emperors in the west. But Roman system of succession guaranteed that sooner or later there will be a civil war or bad/weak emperor*. Which happened after the death of Valentinian in 375 and it was all downhill for the Western Roman Empire since then.
In the first and second centuries, there were also civil wars and bad emperors (e.g. Caligula, Commodus,...), but the political system was sufficiently robust to handle those disruptions, imho thanks to the wealth flowing from the east.
Eastern empire, emancipated from the burden of maintaining the state in the west, then quite logically flourished from the fourth to the sixth century. Its (partial) fall in the seventh century was caused by a deadly combination of strong external enemies and imperial hubris.
Of course this is an amateurish perspective which might be totally wrong. And I am leaving as a black box the question of what happened during the crisis of the third century, since that is imho even murkier, and in some respect more important, than the breakdown of the Western Roman state.
* disclaimer: “capable” vs “bad” from the perspective of the Roman elite; those were not the good guys according to our values, unless you happen to be an extra hardcore reactionary.
I can recommend "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. I specifically does *not* focus on one region or empire, but compares different ones with each other. Then he tries to find patterns about which sides win battles (e.g., for empires against tribal enemies). It's not exactly what you asked for because it takes a wider perspective, but I found it really insightful also for the fall of the Roman empire.
There's a good case to be made for this story: The Roman Empire was taken over by leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone. In the 5th century, there was then a conservative Roman rebellion against this theocracy, led by an alliance between powerful Roman senatorial families, who were still mostly pagan; the rural people, who were also mostly pagan; "heretical" Christian sects, notably Donatists, Arians, and Monophysites; and Germanic-Roman soldiers.
The radical leftists won the war, but their continuing dogmatism, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectual attitude gradually destroyed what remained of the Empire. (I say "destroyed", but it might be better described as destruction through stasis--a long-term failure to progress and keep up with the peoples around them.)
The Romans always had bad taste in their intellectual activity, which was more analogous to Western pop-culture (e.g., New Age mysticism and pop psychology) than to Western academia or science. Their favorite work of "philosophy" was Plato's /Timaeus/, which is really scraping the bottom of the Greek barrel. Yet the Byzantine Empire managed to be even less intellectual. One of the great, uncommented-on mysteries of history is how the Byzantine Empire managed to do so little, with so much, for so long. (Rather like ancient Egypt, which was also something of a theocracy.) Since finishing the Hagia Sophia in 537, their intellectual and artistic innovations seem to have been approximately zero. It's difficult for the man on the street to distinguish a 15th-century Byzantine icon from a 10th-century Byzantine icon.
Once I saw a Byzantine icon of Mary and baby Jesus in which Jesus was on the left side instead of the right side. I got very excited--I'd never seen such innovation in Byzantine art! For a thousand years, Jesus had /always/ been on the right side of every picture of Mary and Jesus! Stranger yet, Jesus was signing with his /left/ hand, rather than with his /right/ hand! But on looking closer, I saw that the "mu rho" was backwards, in mirror-image font. The photo had been flipped left-right to avoid being flagged for copyright infringement. This was an exception that proved the rule.
(You can find many "Byzantine icons" today with Jesus on the left, often not making any sign at all with either hand. These are modern re-interpretations, and not Byzantine.)
Thanks for clarifying the pop culture thing, that makes sense now. Is your claim that there were specific other peoples who advanced faster than the Romans, whose faster advance meant they outcompeted the Romans? I didn’t think the Romans were outcompeted in that sense. Or do you mean that Rome suffered stasis and that any society that suffers stasis must fall? In that case, I’d be curious to hear your definition of stasis. If you mean something like “not increasing GDP per person”, then it’s not clear how that follows from dogmatism. If you mean something like “hostility towards new ideas”, then that seems like it would be present in many successful societies as well. In that case, why wasn’t Rome one of the successful ones?
I meant that the Byzantine Empire, from about 650-1204 AD, had a whole lot of money, territory, and population, and the best libraries in Europe if not the world; and yet contributed nothing new and lasting, as far as I know, to literature, science, math, philosophy, or medicine. Their paintings were as repetitive and formulaic as the sculpture and painting of ancient Egypt. They did write a lot of history, which we ignore today because it isn't obvious how or whether that history affected western Europe other than by keeping Islam at bay.
This is especially puzzling since Constantinople was the center of trade between Europe and the Orient, and centers of trade are usually intellectual hotbeds like Athens, Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, London, and New Amsterdam / New York.
Maybe they contributed something to architecture and engineering. (They /did/ build the Hagia Sophia, but that was finished in 537 AD, before their great stagnation.) They invented Greek fire, the secret of which was lost. Maybe they had other intellectual accomplishments that were lost due to their inclination toward secrecy.
The Byzantines devoted nearly all of their intellectual energies to theological controversies. They used math and astronomy for astrology, or to argue about the correct dates of Christian feast days.
Byzantine academics engaged in dangerous theological controversies with serious political stakes. Their biographies read like the lives of mafia gangsters who fought turf wars using theology instead of guns, and usually ended in exile instead of a shower of bullets. It's fun to think that the Byzantines used theology as a form of ritual combat to reduce the carnage of civil conflict; but if so, it wasn't very successful.
There's a list of Byzantine scholars on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Byzantine_scholars ), which you could go thru if you want to see whether there were original Byzantine contributions which we just never integrated into our tradition. Michael Psellos' works on music theory look like a promising place to begin. But even he, who tried repeatedly to avoid politics, got repeatedly sucked into Byzantine intrigues.
Okay, and I guess you’re claiming something similar was happening in the third through fifth centuries. How did that contribute to western Rome’s economic and military collapse?
I don't understand the question. I didn't write about Roman pop culture, but compared Roman intellectual life (which latched onto stoicism, Neoplatonism, Christology, and New Comedy, while disdaining Euclid, Epicurus, Democritus, Aristotle, Plato's dialogues, Old Comedy, and tragedy) to our pop culture.
I made that comparison not to work out the timing of the fall, which I already said happened during the Gothic wars (though the stage for that fall was set back in the 3rd century), but to emphasize that Eastern Rome was /even more/ intellectually barren. So the whole reference to Western Roman intellectual life was a rhetorical device with no evidential value.
I described the barrenness of Byzantine intellectual life only as (weak) evidence that the Christian theology favored in Eastern Rome was dogmatic, authoritarian, and destructive. I blame the intellectual impotence of the Byzantine Empire on its particular flavor of Christianity. (This is not deductive evidence, but Bayesian.)
TL;DR: The important stuff is all in my first 2 paragraphs. The first is about the cooperation between pagans, conservatives, heretics, & Goths, and I think has a lot of historical support. The second is much more speculative: the theory that the Eastern Empire could never pick up all the pieces after the Gothic War because its dogmatic theology suppressed intelligent thought.
Re. that second, speculative theory, I think that Trinitarianism and Christology served the same purpose as the mental torture used by modern totalitarian regimes to break the spirit of their intellectuals, by forcing them to pledge belief in contradictions. That is, they extended the state's terror-based control of its population into the minds of its best thinkers, AFAIK for the first time in history. (I don't claim this was intentional; it may have been a useful accident.) They were like the lies about production figures and standards of living enforced by the Soviets and by Mao, and like "2+2 = 5" in /1984/ and "There are 5 lights" in Star Trek: The Next Generation (https://www.startrek.com/news/the-four-lights).
The lengthy section after those first 2 paragraphs, I probably shouldn't have written. It appears to be more distracting than helpful.
>leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone.
Now perhaps I'm blanking on my Roman history, but could you explain how Catholic Orthodox Emperor Theodosius (or Honorius, or any other of his successors) is somehow one of:
a) An anti-monarchist secularist (I suppose Rome is *close* to France)
b) An anticapitalist
c) A [radical] "advocate for greater social and economic equality, and typically socially liberal ideas."
I think we have different ideas of what "leftist" means. I think of the left as revolutionaries who want to impose a rationalist future utopia, and of the right as revolutionaries who want to impose an imaginary past utopia. The distinction is unimportant, especially to those who suffer under one or the other. Left and right are both part of a single ancient intellectual tradition.
The idea that the left is the opposite of the right is like the idea that Pakistan is the opposite of India, or the American midwest is the opposite of the American coastal regions.
But Christianity was clearly a socially liberal doctrine in its first 3 centuries, advocating greater social equality. I don't think Theodosius was a liberal, in much the same way I don't think Stalin or Mao were liberals or advocates for social and economic equality. The inherent contradictions in radical utopianism guarantee that successful leftist revolutions will be taken over by non-egalitarian totalitarians, so they are an integral part of leftist movements, regardless of whether they promote or oppose the goals that the base thinks it supports.
No, that makes sense, I was just missing some context as to what you meant (and probably misunderstanding due to the baggage of the 5th-century-to-modern church). With that explanation, I can see how it pattern matches to the through-line of all those definitions, thank you.
Mu rho? Do you mean chi rho? Or was there a random mu rho in this icon? What did it mean?
Most icons of Jesus would have: ΟΩΝ (Omicron Omega Nu) in a halo as well as IC and XC which stands for Jesus Christ in Latin and Greek. The Greek version is iota chi (IX). No mu or rho. However, you sometimes had Chi Rho (PX) the first two letters of Christos in Greek. Which still doesn't get you a mu.
On the whole I think this take is pretty bad but this specific part really bothered me. What is the mu for? Even if it said IX XC NIKA (fairly common) that doesn't get you a mu.
"The Roman Empire was taken over by leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone. ...The radical leftists won the war, but their continuing dogmatism, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectual attitude gradually destroyed what remained of the Empire."
Nice to see that Gibbon still has his fanboys even today 😁
As to "Mu Rho", I had to look this one up because I am not familiar with the abbreviations on icons. It could be ΜΠ ΘY or, depending on the style in which it was written, looking like M P (Μητερ Θεου) "Theotokos/Mother of God" - scroll down this webpage for 14th century Byzantium inscription that looks like it would give you something that looks like "mu rho", especially if the image wasn't very clear and had been flipped to avoid copyright:
Regarding the "hard to distinguish a 15th century Byzantine icon from a 10th century Byzantine icon", this was a deliberate artistic and doctrinal choice to avoid the increasing naturalism in Western depictions. The idea was that you received the iconography and imagery as it was, and passed it on unchanged, you didn't innovate and introduce your own (human, worldly) conceptions into what was meant to be a depiction of the eternal, unchanging, heavenly realm.
Having seen what some Renaissance painters did, they had a point. If you compare the early work of El Greco, who started off his career as an icon writer in the Cretan style, with what he created later once he moved to mainland Italy, it's astounding the change:
But the art of icons didn't remain static, after all; many 18th-19th century icons that you can see in photos of church interiors have adopted the 'naturalistic' Western style, especially if they are Russian. And 'icon-style' religious art did come into Catholicism, via Italian route that translated things like Cretan icons into Western mode, most importantly Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:
Yes, I know the stasis was a deliberate artistic and doctrinal choice to avoid naturalism. Avoiding naturalism naturally goes together with stasis, because it's always done with the motivation of clinging to eternal spiritual essences and denigrating physical, temporal reality. It is that artistic and doctrinal choice which stunts intellectual progress, warping it into something like scholasticism.
(I have since then seen Our Lady of Vladimir, mostly via much later copies; but I don't know if I've seen any other Byzantine icons, meaning ones made in the Byzantine Empire, with Jesus on the left. Our Lady of Vladimir is highly unusual in several ways, which may be why it's so popular a model today. It shows human emotion, which Byzantine icons deliberately avoided.)
When I wrote of stasis, I was writing of the Byzantine Empire, which ended in 1453.
Also, Gibbons' saw Christianity as morally corrupting the Roman people, allowing the Germans to conquer them. That is quite different from the story I told of cooperation between Roman conservatives, Christian heretics, and Germanic Romans, who were then all destroyed by an alien Eastern Roman Empire which had by then fewer interests in common with the Roman Senate than the Goths did.
(I could be wrong. I haven't read Gibbons; only summaries of his work.)
I am a huge nerd for this stuff. So after sitting and really thinking about your question for much of the day I would say the following:
Rome was a small city state that used its superior martial and civic culture to subjugate a truly tremendous amount of territory and population. Much of it not very wealthy.
It did so in a way the vastly outstripped the ability of their communication technology to effectively govern and cohere such a large diverse area.
But wait you asked it worked for a couple hundred years, what changed?
I would argue that the effective administration and centralization of that couple hundred years of good times was built almost entirely on the back of the vast amount of wealth and slaves they captured. They were able to disrupt traditional economic and political patterns, and force all roads to lead to Rome for a while. But as that vast pile of loot slowly trickled back out as it was used to prop up and administer the much too big for its britches empire, the natural economic status quo (poverty in the west and eastern focused wealth in the east) reasserted itself.
So you are left with this impoverished husk of a government that has run out of fresh victims to conquer. And then a slow spiral into collapse for centuries.
The east was able to prop itself up and survive because it was built on the top of the pre-existing Hellenistic economic infrastructure. Plus Constantinople might be the single greatest place to run an empire from on the planet pre-industrialization.
> Rome was a small city state that used its superior martial and civic culture to subjugate a truly tremendous amount of territory and population. Much of it not very wealthy.
I think one reason for Rome's rise from obscurity, besides their eagerness to learn and copy from other civilizations, their sheer stubbornness, and perhaps to some extent their form of government, is rooted in Geography.
If you think about it, Rome is roughly at the centre of a long narrow peninsula, and the history of Rome's rise is mainly about their punch ups with successively larger neighbours. So their conflicts were, in a manner of speaking, conveniently graduated in size, and distance from Rome, like a series of student exercises each handily made a bit harder than the previous in the order they are meant to be tackled.
Back in the 700s BC they started with wars against small(ish) neighboring tribes, such as the Volsci and then the Samnites.
Once they had "digested" these, they took on the Etruscans, a larger community to the north of Rome, which I think pretty much dominated Rome at the time. That let to the conquest of the Etruscans and the expulsion of the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus.
Thereafter, Stage 3 was to tackle the Greeks, who controlled the Southern half of Italy. In due course they overcame King Pyrrus of Epirus, (he of the well-known Pyrric victory! )
Then they thrashed the Gauls in Northern Italy and southern France, followed a century or so later by the "big one", the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars.
See what I mean? At no point in this progression was there a huge neighboring civilization looming over them. Each opponent was larger than the last, but the Romans' previous experience had given them sufficient skill to tackle each new challenge in turn.
By geographic contrast with Italy's elongated shape, a country such as Israel was surrounded by nearby large land masses, and correspondingly large civilisations, such as Egypt, Assyria, Parthia, and so on. So (besides overcoming small local tribes) they never had a realistic hope of success in getting to grips with these larger empires.
Also related to Rome's decline, I think, was the hollowing out of the middle classes as country estates came to be increasingly owned by uber-rich magnates who ran them with slave labour. Every now and then, aware of the long term disadvantages of this, perceptive senators such as the brothers (Sempronius and Tiberius) Gracchi, and later Julius Caesar, tried to redistribute land to worthy Romans such as retired legionaries. But in the long run the tendency was unstoppable, and led to a shortage of stalwart and loyal Romans willing to join the legions or even take much of a meaningful role in public life.
Without wanting to sound like a socialist, I would say that because "money makes money", much the same happens today in the absence of sufficient redistribution or when monopolies are allowed to develop unchecked.
You forgot some steps (particularly the Samnites, and Carthage was mostly before the Gauls). But you are right that they had some good geographic advantages and a nice slow build up of challenges. The hollowing out of the middle class has long been a theory, except that was happening from pretty early on. The Gracchi were a good 300 years prior to the Empire starting to falter a bit. The switch from citizen soldiers to professional army mostly seemed pretty successful at first, and it was only as this slowly switched to the soldiers mostly being from the frontiers that there seemed to be major issues.
One is struck how even at a fairly early stage (not long after the Gracchi with Marius/Sulla, and then to Civil War) the simply huge amount of resources spent on Romans fighting Romans. But then this mostly died down from Augustus through 200 years.
I mean another fairly simple explanation is that Augustus was simply amazing and that Rome was about to crack apart like a pinata in ~35bc, and that Augustus (and his administration/friends) was just so effective and such a genius that he built 200 years of prosperity.
Augustus definitely pulled it all together, had he really been the weak pushover that the other members of the Triumvirate and many Romans thought he was, then I do think it would all have cracked apart. Too much ripping each other's flesh in too short a time, and neither Antony nor (God help us) Lepidus were suited to be the absolute ruler that Augustus turned out to be.
Rome did really need a Strong Man at the time, and Augustus was clever enough, cold-blooded enough, and even patriotic enough to survive, get to be the last man standing, and then most importantly to solidify his rule while giving the appearance of restoring much of the institutions of the Republic. It all went on the downslope after he died, of course, but his long reign meant that he was able to put the new regime on a firm footing and his military successes in expanding the Empire (let's not mention Varus and the three legions, yes?) plus successful political diplomacy meant that he provided tangible benefits to letting him remain on the throne (as it was, in practice, whatever he may carefully have avoided about claiming the title of a king).
Really, it's amazing the stability he built in so that even after Caligula, Nero, and the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian could pick up the pieces and keep it going.
Reading this, I was struck by how much it resembled the explanations I've heard in Chinese history about the rise, decline, and eventual fall of the [insert name here] dynasty, albeit with names and dates and specific details changed. Apparently this pattern is a thing that just kept happening again and again with pre-modern land empires, and it's eerie how much the histories rhyme.
One reason for the decline was that the tax-collecting bureaucracy became more and more complicated over time, and thus expensive and burdensome to maintain. Shades of our own complicated bureaucracies and tax system today, methinks! That may or may not be evident from the Notitia Dignitatum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notitia_Dignitatum which lists all the many kinds of officials in the late Roman empire. (I haven't studied it carefully, because to be frank I'm not that interested!)
Another reason is that the Germanic tribes made wider use of cavalry, and had discovered the technique of making hay to feed horses in winter. Also, by the late empire, a large and increasing proportion of the Roman army were mercenaries from outlying regions of the empire or even outside it. So it was a no-brainer that their influence eventually became overwhelming.
It has happened time and again in history that a ruler calls in outside help to deal with a rival leader or other invaders, and the help decides to stay, and eventually takes over! One example of this is King Vortigern of Kent (England) in the 450s AD inviting Saxon mercenaries to help him, and before long they conquered the whole of England! Similarly, in Ireland in the 1100s a local ruler called Dermot MacMurrow enlisted a small band of Norman mercenaries to help him regain his kingdom, and the result was soon a Norman takeover of a large part of Ireland!
A British military gent and diplomat called Sir John Glubb (AKA Glubb Pasha) wrote an interesting paper in which he argued, with considerable evidence, that empires generally last around ten generations, and I think he also detailed reasons for their decline. Again, I haven't read the paper in a while, but it's worth checking out: "The Fate of Empires, and Search for Survival (1978)"
But in the end, I think the decline of empires and evolution of prosperity in societies generally can be summed up by that well-known rule (quoting from memory, so there may be a pithier version)
"Hard times make strong people; Strong people make good times; Good times make weak people; Weak people make hard times"
My impression after studying the migration period at university is that three developments came together that seem sufficient to explain the replacement of the Roman Empire by Germanic Kingdoms and the Byzantine Empire:
- population decline. In a course in which we studied Roman fortifications and cities along the Rhine and Danube border we consistently found a decline in occupied area. The Romans would settle a subjugated tribe into a colonia, thereby starting urbanisation in a previously rural regions. None of those cities grew beyond their initial outlines but would on the contrary renovate inwards to ever smaller footprint in every aspect of infrastructure: walls, streets, canalisation, bridges. The same is true for cities in the hinterland, although I´ve looked only on a few of those. Rome itself, after having become the largest settlement on the planet stagnated in the first century and shrunk to a husk of its former self in the following centuries.
- a shift to values, that are not conducive to economic growth. When Cato praised the old times of the Republic, he held the virtues associated with agriculture and warfare in highest regard. Heroes of the old Republic like Cincinnatus where known for restraint and self sufficiency. This probably reflects only a part of the ethos, that made the Roman Republic a rising star on the mediterranean, a hub of trade and industry that would eventually absorb everything around it. Even centuries later, Roman citizenship promised prosperity, a calculable future in a growing economy and worthwhile career paths.
But the tone in the later literature has shifted markedly and of course, it´s hard to estimate how much the surviving works reflect the values of the population. But consider this: When Pliny explains the metal industry and the mining process in his Naturalis historia, he keeps complaining about the dangers of its use and maligns gold the most, wishing it had never been discovered. Hardly the thinking of a landlocked swampvillage trying to wrest the wine trade from the hands of Athens and Korinth! It´s more of a wish to return to a golden age without work and war. Compare that attitude to Adam Smith, who, when the British Empire was in its infancy, judged every law and custom by its ability to encourage economic activity. Or compare Seneca, teacher of Emperor Nero, to Aristotle, teacher of Alexander the Great. Senecas take on science verges on: "give it up, we will never know. Here is how you ought to behave!" while Aristotle is a curious founder of disciplines.
The spread of christianity probably made matters worse. It often meant turning the back on Roman heritage and by extension everything, that made it an economic center. While the brightest of the Republic would become lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepeneurs, the brightest of the late Empire were busy debating the date of the second coming of Christ. To them, Attila was the Antichrist and that meant - pray as fast you can!
- self sufficient barbarian armies were a bit worse but far cheaper than the legion. Any farmhouse north of the Roman border could have bloomeries that produced crude but effective axes, spear tips and arrow heads from rusty earth. Roman workshops were staffed with specialized workers and yielded superior results - if connected to a trade route and situated in a healthy economy that actually encourages people to become specialists. I think Edwards Gibbons noted, that the tax revenue declined enormously towards the end of the Empire, which was countered by inflating the money (which didn´t help). The Visigoths were able to supply an army after escaping from a refugee camp because they only needed grass for their horses, wood and iron ore. If anarchy reigns and a city decides to declare independence, it might be a wise choice, to name a barbarian the protector of the city. He´s not interested in taking over any businesses anyway and visits the city only to collect taxes.
While the brightest of the late Empire would become lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepreneurs, the brightest of the late Republic were busy debating the number of categories of a hot pan while its generals were destroying the 500 year republic.
Its very easy to make any period look absurd when you put things a certain way. And yes I don't think Christianity had anything to do with the fall of the Roman Empire. Its the more thoroughly Christian east that lasted in one form or another till 1453. There were lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepreneurs before and after Christianization. Lawyers in Constantinople compiled a civil code that still forms the basis for most countries's legal system today. Generals of Justinian reconquered the falled West and held it Constantinople for 150 years. Smart people took up religious functions and engaged in philosophical discussion in pagan Rome as well as Christian Rome. Its also weird how you characterize the invasion of Attila. Pope Leo himself met with Attilla and likely convinced him not to invade Italy after all. And the Empire had stopped Attilla's invasion right before at battle of the Catalaunian plains.
"Its very easy to make any period look absurd when you put things a certain way. " Yes, I struggle to pass an opportunity for caricature =)
As for Byzantium: one might make the case, that its rise and fall seems to follow the same arc, just shifted by centuries. When the Ottomans took over it was an empty shell inside vast fortifications, utterly depopulated. It looks like christianity per se was not as detrimental as I thought, because Byzantium was very christian throughout its growth period. It might be worth looking into the theological differences between bishops like Augustinus and Tertullian and their byzantine counterparts, especially regarding the value of labour and wordly possessions. I was under the - admittedly very rough impression - that repentance and avoiding sin were a priority for early christians who readied themselves for the second coming. Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity. If the values in the upper class of one city are in alignment with a mendicant order, while the other follows the example of something like the Jesuits or the Knights Templar, the development should be quite different.
Keep in mind a focus on economic growth as a good thing was not widespread in ancient cultures. Trading was seen by many great civilizations at best a necessary evil. The Imperial Chinese bureaucrats famously never allowed their merchant class to gain political power(some say this continues to this day). And Cato the Elder, that great defender of Roman Republican tradition, when asked what his opinion was about making money by trading, replied what is to be said about making money by murder.
"Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity."
Byzantine theology is notoriously mystical, they have worked out and developed a complete and complex theology of the divine energies and essences, and have a very great focus on theosis:
Indeed, one of the grounds of contention between the Western and Eastern churches is the accusation (by the East) that the West is much too worldly and practical-oriented 😁
"According to Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), the primacy of theosis in Eastern Orthodox Christian theology is directly related to the fact that Byzantine theology (as historically conceived by its principal exponents) is based to a greater extent than Latin Catholic theology on the direct spiritual insights of the saints or mystics of the church rather than the often more seen as rational thought tradition of the West. Byzantine Christians consider that "no one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian" in the proper sense. Thus theology in Byzantine Christianity is not treated primarily as an academic pursuit. Instead it is based on applied revelation (see gnosiology), and the primary validation of a theologian is understood to be a holy and ascetical life rather than intellectual training or academic credentials (see scholasticism)."
There remains a great emphasis on the monastic order in their tradition, and while priests may be married, a bishop must be single (unmarried or widowed) so in practice, this means generally bishops are monastics.
"The official version of the Byzantine social ideal is expressed in the famous text of Justinian’s Sixth Novella:
There are two greatest gifts which God, in his love for man, has granted from on high: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, the second directs and administers human affairs; both however proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind. Hence, nothing should be such a source of care to the emperors as the dignity of the priests, since it is for the [imperial] welfare that they constantly implore God. For if the priesthood is in every way free from blame and possesses access to God, and if the emperors administer equitably and judiciously the state entrusted to their care, general harmony will result, and whatever is beneficial will be bestowed upon the human race."
I think the main difference is that while the Emperor was in existence, they practiced Caesaropapism:
But now there is no (recognised) single Emperor, the governance is a communion of autocephalous churches, with no one supreme authority, though the Patriarch of Constantinople has a position of respect as "first among equals".
"In 391 he was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest in the diocese of the maritime city of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba/Bône in Algeria). About five years later (ca. 396) he succeeded the local bishop. This ecclesiastical function involved new pastoral, political, administrative and juridical duties, and his responsibility for and experiences with an ordinary Christian congregation may have contributed to modify his views on grace and original sin. ...The monumental apologetic treatise De civitate dei (begun in 412, two years after the sack of Rome, and completed in 426) argues that happiness can be found neither in the Roman nor the philosophical tradition but only through membership in the city of God whose founder is Christ. Among many other things, it has interesting reflections on the secular state and on the Christian’s life in a secular society."
[On the work “The City of God”]
This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the part of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine analyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly society she (sic, all throughout this article) inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.
… The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable than the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power; the best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be perfect earthly peace . Christians are allowed and even called to work for the well-being of the societies they live in as long as they promote earthly peace for the sake of their citizens’ and their own true happiness; in practice, this will usually mean furthering Christian religion.
… But the doctrine of the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of the emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank. Not even Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent wretchedness of fallen humanity (De civitate dei 19.6). Like the vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has little or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural domination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of postlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to good effects when it secures social order (ib. 19.15; Rist 1994: 236–239). War results from sin and is the privileged means of satisfying lust for power (ib. 18.2; 19.7). Nevertheless, Augustine wrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a politically impracticable pacifism (Letter 138).
“As a bishop in Hippo, a town in which he had not previously lived, Augustine began with little influence in public life, and the schismatic leaders of the Donatists were well established and influential there. It is known that, at first, he was kept waiting when he visited the governor. Eventually, it was in his role as a magistrate and arbiter of civil disputes that he first won people over.
… His duties were: preaching, religious instruction, the administration of the sacraments, care of the poor, the defence of the lowly, the underaged and the marginalised, the defence of the faith against heresy, schism and error, and the supervision of church possessions of the Church in Hippo. Beforehand he had already been involved in helping the poor and seeking justice for those who were pushed to the margins of society (the marginalised). He now had to balance his administrative duties with the work he had undertaken as a theologian to the broader church. His years of duty happened during a period of political and theological unrest.
… In a number of ways Augustine was a political activist.
Although Augustine may have done so with some reluctance, he responded to various pressing circumstances in the North African political scene of his day. He thereby became a political activist on various issues that hurt Christian values generally and/or the lives of the local people in North Africa generally. This was true in particular of those living on the margins of the society (the marginalised). For example, he tirelessly lobbied the imperial magistrate, Macedonius, who was the Imperial Vicar for Africa, and Donatus, the Imperial Proconsul of Africa.
…When Augustine lay dying in Hippo, Augustine's concerns were not only on intellectual battles with heretics, but also for the physical safety of the local citizens because Hippo was then besieged by an army of Vandals.
…The commander of the imperial troops in Africa, Boniface, had for a while been an intimate friend …Boniface thus rebelled against the emperor. To support his rebellion with force of arms, he invited the Vandals from Spain to invade Africa.
…Local inhabitants fled ahead of their arrival. They became refugees in other towns, in caves and in remote mountainous places. …When the Vandals had been plundering town after town, Augustine had taken an active role in attempting to protect his people. Although elderly, he travelled away from Hippo to meet and plead with Boniface to engage the invaders in battle. ... But Boniface found that he had unleashed forces that he could not control. … The Vandals continued to advance without meeting any military resistance. Refugees poured into Hippo, and eventually Boniface also retreated to a defensive position inside the walls of city. …By the time of the final months of the life of Augustine in the middle of the year 430, only three cities had thus far escaped general destruction: Carthage, Hippo, and Cirtha.
Augustine, in a letter to Marcellinus (" He was a high official (tribunus et notarius) at the court of Emperor Honorius, and possessed the confidence of his imperial master owing to his good sense, and unblemished conduct. In 411 Honorius sent him to Africa as plenipotentiary judge, to preside and pass sentence at the great conference between the representatives of the Catholics and the Donatists"), addresses criticism of the effects of Christianity on the Empire:
" But what am I to answer to the assertion made that many calamities have befallen the Roman Empire through some Christian emperors? This sweeping accusation is a calumny. For if they would more clearly quote some indisputable facts in support of it from the history of past emperors, I also could mention similar, perhaps even greater calamities in the reigns of other emperors who were not Christians; so that men may understand that these were either faults in the men, not in their religion, or were due not to the emperors themselves, but to others without whom emperors can do nothing. As to the date of the commencement of the downfall of the Roman Republic, there is ample evidence; their own literature speaks plainly as to this. Long before the name of Christ had shone abroad on the earth, this was said of Rome: O venal city, and doomed to perish speedily, if only it could find a purchaser! In his book on the Catilinarian conspiracy, which was before the coming of Christ, the same most illustrious Roman historian declares plainly the time when the army of the Roman people began to be wanton and drunken; to set a high value on statues, paintings, and embossed vases; to take these by violence both from individuals and from the State; to rob temples and pollute everything, sacred and profane. When, therefore, the avarice and grasping violence of the corrupt and abandoned manners of the time spared neither men nor those whom they esteemed as gods, the famous honour and safety of the commonwealth began to decline. What progress the worst vices made from that time forward, and with how great mischief to the interests of mankind the wickedness of the Empire went on, it would take too long to rehearse. Let them hear their own satirist speaking playfully yet truly thus:—
Once poor, and therefore chaste, in former times
Our matrons were; no luxury found room
In low-roofed houses and bare walls of loam;
Their hands with labour burdened while 'tis light,
A frugal sleep supplied the quiet night;
While, pinched with want, their hunger held them strait,
When Hannibal was hovering at the gate;
But wanton now, and lolling at our ease,
We suffer all the inveterate ills of peace
And wasteful riot, whose destructive charms
Revenge the vanquished world of our victorious arms.
No crime, no lustful postures are unknown,
Since poverty, our guardian-god, is gone.
Why, then, do you expect me to multiply examples of the evils which were brought in by wickedness uplifted by prosperity, seeing that among themselves, those who observed events with somewhat closer attention discerned that Rome had more reason to regret the departure of its poverty than of its opulence; because in its poverty the integrity of its virtue was secured, but through its opulence, dire corruption, more terrible than any invader, had taken violent possession not of the walls of the city, but of the mind of the State?"
In another letter he writes of the business that occupies all his time:
" If, however, I could set before you a statement of the toil which it is absolutely necessary for me to devote, both by day and by night, to other duties, you would deeply sympathize with me, and would be astonished at the amount of business not admitting of delay which distracts my mind and hinders me from accomplishing those things to which you urge me in entreaties and admonitions, addressed to one most willing to oblige you, and inexpressibly grieved that it is beyond his power; for when I obtain a little leisure from the urgent necessary business of those men, who so press me into their service that I am neither able to escape them nor at liberty to neglect them, there are always subjects to which I must, in dictating to my amanuenses, give the first place, because they are so connected with the present hour as not to admit of being postponed. Of such things one instance was the abridgement of the proceedings at our Conference, a work involving much labour, but necessary, because I saw that no one would attempt the perusal of such a mass of writing; another was a letter to the Donatist laity concerning the said Conference, a document which I have just completed, after labouring at it for several nights; another was the composition of two long letters, one addressed to yourself, my beloved friend, the other to the illustrious Volusianus, which I suppose you both have received; another is a book, with which I am occupied at present, addressed to our friend Honoratus, in regard to five questions proposed by him in a letter to me, and you see that to him I was unquestionably in duty bound to send a prompt reply. For love deals with her sons as a nurse does with children, devoting her attention to them not in the order of the love felt for each, but according to the urgency of each case; she gives a preference to the weaker, because she desires to impart to them such strength as is possessed by the stronger, whom she passes by meanwhile not because of her slighting them, but because her mind is at rest in regard to them. Emergencies of this kind, compelling me to employ my amanuenses in writing on subjects which prevent me from using their pens in work much more congenial to the ardent desires of my heart, can never fail to occur, because I have difficulty in obtaining even a very little leisure, amidst the accumulation of business into which, in spite of my own inclinations, I am dragged by other men's wishes or necessities; and what I am to do, I really do not know."
> I was under the - admittedly very rough impression - that repentance and avoiding sin were a priority for early christians who readied themselves for the second coming. Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity.
How early do you mean by ‘early Christians’? If you look at something like the Didache, from probably the very early second century or possibly very late first, you see very practical concerns about living your life properly at whatever position you are in, and giving generously but not tolerating freeloaders, all tied inseparably with the stuff about being ready for the second coming. https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html
Or, possibly very slightly later, 1 Clement going more into theology and ideas, but clearly ties working at whatever place you’re at with repentance and humility in preparation for the second coming. And a very strong emphasis on avoiding ‘sedition’ and working peacefully together. https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/1clement-roberts.html
It’s actually the East that I associate more with the spirituality of the Desert Fathers, which is more about poverty and repentance in the way I assume you’re thinking, although I’m not completely clear on the timelines for that becoming mainstream. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers
Jesuit missions to China are interesting precisely because of the scientific element; Western astronomy was more advanced by this date and because Chinese astronomy was bound up with ritual practices of state, it was purposely hampered to be in harmony with the teachings of the ancients. Any innovation or alteration was regarded with great suspicion. It was also bound up with politics, as court officials vehemently disapproved of these foreigners gaining influence in order to pursue their agenda of conversion, so any advancement in learning they brought with them was purged when the ministers got the chance. Oh yeah, and then the Manchu invaded and overthrew the preceding dynasty:
So you have to ask, how did the West manage to develop from the Mediaeval love of the ancient authorities to the Scientific Method with much less trouble? Forget all the blah about Science Versus Religion, and the Renaissance being the rediscovery of lost and forbidden knowledge (the Renaissance was much more interested in Classical magic and astrology).
The direct cause is uncontroversial: The Roman army lost the Gothic War really badly and never managed to fully recover. Without a strong military at the center the political powers had to balance various warlords and attempt to steadily reassert power. Which the east did more successfully than the west. You can go over specific battles but it's a little unsatisfying. But the real question is not why they had a few devastating losses. No army goes without those. The real question is why they couldn't reconstitute the way they did previously. And that's where you get all those broad social theories.
In the immediate term there's again a fairly obvious answer. The Roman Empire didn't have dedicated training staff or drill manuals. Soldiers were broken into units and trained by their seniors. The death of these senior officers and NCOs and old soldiers in the Gothic War meant the next generation was not as well trained. It also meant they were more likely to be raised in groups and retain loyalty to some group or another. And unlike earlier generations there were not large bodies of non-combatant veterans around to either call up for service or train their sons. Because Diocletian had made being a soldier basically a mandatory hereditary profession seventy-ish years earlier.
If you're asking what I think went wrong broadly then I think the Crisis of the Third Century seriously damaged the empire and that the Diocletian Reforms were the wrong response. I tend to place a strong emphasis on resource mobilization. Rome could mobilize both broad and deep resources whereas most of their competitors were either monarchies (broad but not deep) or tribes (deep but not broad). But Diocletian basically turned it into a broad but not deep and on fairly thin soil due to poverty post-3rd century anyway. And the system broke permanently at its first major defeat, less than a century after it was created.
After that point the entire Roman Empire, east or west, was basically a collection of aristocrats and warlords cobbling together armies out of whatever they could manage circling around imperial courts. The east managed to navigate its way out by the end of the 5th century and reassert central imperial control. The west did not.
Notably neither the east or west tried to reconstitute this system. The west turned into barbarian kingdoms which could rely on tribal mobilization. The east underwent serious reforms such that key elements of the Diocletian system, like various of forms of serfdom, ended up outright banned.
Basically, while I agree the first duty of the state is to provide security, sacrificing everything to maintain a large military will end up with a weak and fragile military.
On the other hand the Han Dynasty, in a similar circumstances, basically refused to militarize on moral grounds. And that didn't end up too well for them either. I can criticize specific things (I think xenophobia in particular had a bad effect on the west) but I'm not sure if I have a "save the Western Roman Empire in three easy steps" program.
Broad is the ability to mobilize resources from large groups, deep is the ability to mobilize a lot of resources per person. It's a riff on Tilly's idea of the 17th century nation state as able to mobilize broad and deep resources as opposed to empires (broad but not deep) or city states (deep but not broad) and why it ultimately won out as the default form of government.
That´s a fascinating perspective. If Diocletian redesigned the Roman army to engage in combat with less equipment, they would have met the barbarians on conditions, they were most familiar with. It would mean competing with Goths and Arabs in the class of vast and cheap armies. Could work. The Mongols were met effectively with light cavalry. But it´s not a favourable situation.
Adrian Goldsworthy's 'How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower" is a great exploration of that period. Comments so far have left off what I think is most important explanation: constant civil wars. They never solve the problem of political succession and reading about the third and fourth centuries it feels like every time you turn around there is some governor bribing troops and marching on rome. Hard to have consistent policies or fight off the goths when there are constant rebellions and civil conflicts. Then you mix in the fact that you need those goths for fresh recruits to fight in those civil conflicts and you've got a problem.
The Eastern Empire also never solved the succession issue. It kept going for almost a thousand more years and a good majority of successions where contested/overthrown.
But zooming in into later medieval kingdoms suggests to me that contested successions are the norm rather than the exception. Like anybody with a tiny claim could stage a revolt and have a shot at the throne.
Winning battles is important, but winning wars is the decisive factor. During the Second Punic War, Rome lost multiple battles catastrophically and still went on to win the war. During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong won no battles but still won the war.
So what made the western Romans lose the war against barbarians? In the big picture, it's because the Romans became weaker while the barbarians grew stronger. But if you ask why that happened, you get the standard historian answers that you seem to be unsatisfied with. For example, the empire was undergoing a long period of deurbanization, economic decline, and political instability during the 3rd to 5th centuries. These factors undermined the tax base and drained the empire's manpower, making it impossible to sustain large armies. The empire resorted to hiring barbarians (federati), sometimes settling entire tribes within their territory together with their king. The potential (and soon, the reality) of barbarian disloyalty was obvious, but the Romans had few other choices. If you ask why the empire was undergoing economic decline, deurbanization, and instability, you get to the same thorny questions that we ask about failing states in the 21st century. We have no easy answers, even though we have infinitely more data on the Congo than on ancient Rome.
Why were the barbarians getting stronger? Again, we don't know. It's possible that prolonged trade and cultural exchange with Rome strengthened their economies and improved their militaries. It's also possible that Rome happened to rise precisely when its neighboring barbarian tribes were historically weak, and that once they reverted to the historical mean, the Romans were done for.
I haven't even touched on the ideological issue. Vietnam and other colonies didn't win their independence because they got bigger armies than their colonizers; they did it in large part because the rise of nationalism made them impossible to hold on to at acceptable cost, and in the cases where the colonizer tried (e.g. Vietnam), nationalism gave the rebels the morale and motivation to absorb enormous costs and fight on. In the Roman case, Edward Gibbon's famous "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" blames Christianity for making the Romans soft and unwarlike. Most historians today dismiss such a simplistic explanation, but is there no truth to it at all? Also, until the mid twentieth century, historians tended to think that once a people becomes too successful, they become soft and decadent, more interested in luxury than war. Voltaire said "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up". To what extent was this a significant factor in Rome's decline? This is just one more factor that's hard to quantify or analyze.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why Rome rose or fell. In the same way, nobody can really explain why China's economy grew faster than Ethiopia's. Sure, you can point to many things that China did right and Ethiopia did wrong, but were those the determining factors? Even if they were, are they the root causes, or merely the consequences of the two countries' social and political constraints? Sociology is hard, and hard answers are few.
The cause seems to me blindingly obvious, yet no one ever says it: The Western Roman Empire was destroyed by the Eastern Roman Empire. That is what happened by any objective measure, like population, food production, military strength, infrastructure, or technological or artistic production.
The only thing that changed in 476 AD when the Western Roman Empire supposedly "fell" was that people in one more part of the Western Empire were given religious freedom from orthodox Christianity. The taxes were still being collected; people were still attending Roman baths; still following Roman laws; still calling themselves Romans. They still made same type of buildings and the same kind of art. Odoacer wasn't the first "barbarian" to depose a Roman Emperor, and he had the backing of the Roman Senate in doing so. Roman governors had been going rogue for centuries before that; the idea that the Roman Empire, or even the Western Roman Empire, was a single unified polity, had periodically been fiction for a long time.
It was in 535 to 554 AD, when Justinian decided to stamp out the "heresy" of Arianism, invaded the Western Empire, and spent 20 years grinding it into dust and annihilating its population, that "Rome" (Ostrogothic Italy only) fell. It was Justinian who literally destroyed the city of Rome.
Marking the fall of the Roman Empire by a demographic shift in the ethnicity of its ruling class is like marking the fall of the USA as the time when immigrants from other parts of Europe began to outnumber immigrants from England.
> Marking the fall of the Roman Empire by a demographic shift in the ethnicity of its ruling class is like marking the fall of the USA as the time when immigrants from other parts of Europe began to outnumber immigrants from England.
That's why it's called the fall of the roman empire and not "the erradication and scattering of Latin speaking people".
When the Western Empire "fell", the Eastern Empire kept chugging along but didn't have anybody else in the West and North Africa to reply to their letters. Each Western Province didn't have a roman aligned government anymore. I think it's fair to call that "falling" from that perspective.
I don't see how that changed anything. It's not like the Eastern Empire had any authority in the West. Just as before, they could send their letters to the West, and get replies back which politely maintained the fiction of a unified empire while jealously guarding their practical independence. The Eastern Empire had already begun to split from the Western Empire more than 2 centuries before the Gothic Wars. and the split was formalized over 1 century before them.
Over-extension. You may be the Greatest Army in the World, but even the greatest army can't fight on all the fronts at once, alone. And as you start bringing in auxiliaries, you aren't the same composition as the former Greatest Army.
The army also needs support in resources, and if the resources aren't there/the money is drying up/the mood back home isn't in favour of foreign wars, then again you are not going to succeed. There's also the political equivalent of "too many cooks spoil the broth" - when you have two sets of Augusti, one in the West and one in the East, and two sets of Caesars, ditto, then you split authority and power and the legions are more dragged in to backing one set versus the other set than maintaining the borders.
Also it wasn't a sudden collapse, it happened over centuries and was indeed a process of transformation of the entire Empire, the nature of government, and what it meant to be 'Roman' or a 'Roman citizen'. ACOUP has a good series on it:
"This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the ‘decline and fall’ and thus the start of our ‘long fifth century.’ The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as ‘allies’ – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated."
He makes the point that the Empire in the third to fifth centuries was not at all the same thing as the Empire (as we think of it) in the first to second centuries:
"Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called ‘limited government’ but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.
By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.
...The problem rulers faced was two-fold: first that the Late Roman system, in contrast to its earlier form, demanded a large, literate bureaucracy, but the economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy, which in turn meant that the supply of literate elites to staff those positions was itself shrinking (while at the same time secular rulers found themselves competing with the institutional Church for those very same literate elites). Second – and we’ll deal with this in more depth in just a moment – Roman rule had worked through cities, but all over the Roman Empire (but most especially in the West), cities were in decline and the population was both shrinking and ruralizing."
If your educated urban population is in decline, however Great your Army is won't help reverse that. And again the problem is one of increasing complexity of the bureaucracy, direct rule by the emperors, and diminishing resources to support that rule. Early Roman Empire had its impressive reputation in part because if any uppity province caused trouble, the legions marched in, kicked ass, and normal civilian government was restored - but the legions didn't hang around, they went back to Rome. Later Empire had the problem that the legions needed to be everywhere and that just wasn't sustainable:
"Under Constantine, the Romans had maintained a professional army of around 400,000 troops. Much of the success of the Roman Empire had been its ability to provide ‘public peace’ within its borders (at least by the relatively low standards of the ancient world). While the third century had seen quite a lot of civil war and the in the fourth century the Roman frontiers were cracking, for much of the empire the legions continued to do their job: war remained something that happened far away. This was a substantial change from the pre-Roman norm where war was a regular occurrence basically everywhere.
...That said, it cannot be argued that the decline of ‘public peace’ had merely begun in the fifth century. One useful barometer of the civilian sense of security is the construction of city walls well within the empire: for the first two centuries, many Roman cities were left unwalled. But fresh wall construction within the Empire in places like Northern Spain or Southern France begins in earnest in the third century (presumably in response to the Crisis) and then intensifies through the fifth century, suggesting that rather than a sudden collapse of security, there had been a steady but significant decline (though again this would thus place the nadir of security somewhere in the early Middle Ages), partially abated in the fourth century but then resumed with a vengeance in the fifth.
Consequently the political story in the West is one of an effort to maintain some of the institutions of Roman governance which largely fails, leading to the progressive fragmentation and localization of power. Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims."
You're welcome! I found him via posts about him reviewing the Lord of the Rings movies, and Game of Thrones as well, and since both are interests of mine (the latter because sorry George but you pissed me off *majorly* with your glib bit about genociding baby Orcs in their cradles, so I always like to see *your* work get a tonking) and he's very good.
At least to me, insofar as I have any tiny knowledge of the history he's talking about. The LOTR reviews are very good, lots of technical detail about logistics and comparing the movies and the books, and fair-minded about what the movies changed and why.
I was interested to discover that Tolkien had explicitly disclaimed war crimes against adult Orc soldiers, let alone infants, which I think answers that long running gaming dispute.
"They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost." (From "Morgoth's Ring". He notes that the law wasn't always observed, but that it reflected the consensus of the Wise.)
IIRC Gary Gygax was on record as saying the opposite, so D&D players who really wanted to go that route had authority for doing so. But those tended not to be the sorts of games I wanted to play in.
I hate the "over-extension" angle. It's not a thing. The empire expanded by conquering and assimilating former functioning polities. They added the territory and the population. Each US state wouldn't be safer if it dissolved the Union and stood by themselves.
There's many instances in Rome of them pulling Eastern troops to defend the West, and viceversa. But the only reason was that they had to fix the mess AFTER losing a battle. A "less overextended" empire that lost a battle would be over right there, instead a second chance and shifting troops from the other side.
Adrianople is the best argument in favor of "they just lost the battles". They went with the better troops and just flunked it. I really think it all comes down to decline in war culture of the Romans.
As empires, coroprations , and various other entities expand, they have to add extra layers of non-productive bureaucrats -- that's how they can over-extend.
But there does come a point when you do bite off more than you can chew, because you're stretched to the limit of the capacities that communications and logistics will enable you to hold onto.
Rome pulled out of Britain, for instance, because it *had* to, and the remnant Romano-British culture there wasn't able to keep going alone. The Year of Three Emperors was a signal of the start of the gradual decline, because that kind of political instability does mean weakness. And subsequent emperors relied more and more on military power to back them up, which in turn meant they were more and more vulnerable to things like military coups.
Look at the history of Latin American for the kind of stability the military overthrowing the government every so often brings.
There's the whole Third Century Crisis, something I wasn't familiar with before, but it was a period of great instability due to military unrest and coups:
The empire became so big, it was eventually split into two rival parts, and the "rival" bit is important here because of the constant jockeying for power within the Tetrachies, and the gradual but constant shift in the centre of power to the East. This left the Western half ever more vulnerable to the 'barbarian' invasions and expansions. The empire got too big to manage efficiently, too reliant on a bloated bureaucracy, and too top-heavy. When the urban centres started collapsing, there was too much inertia built up to do anything about it, so the Western half was let collapse and the Eastern half made itself the 'new Rome' until downfall befell it as well.
The idea of "if only they had the old tough, efficient, ass-kicking armies that won all before them" is a great idea, but it only works if *after* the battles have been won, you have the capacity to govern and manage what you have conquered. If, on the other hand, all the battles are fire-fighting operations where you're trying to quell an uprising here and repel an invasion there and put down a rebellion/coup in that place, then the house of cards has begun to collapse, no matter how great your army. You can win all the battles and still lose the war.
The over-extension angle is a thing. Not every addition is a gain, nobody becomes a bodybuilder by gaining fat. Same things for the US states, if they were civil-war-wrecked failed states that needs constant aid from the federal gov then they would actually be a burden and a net negative on US power, even in physics there is such thing as "Thrust-To-Weight Ratio", how much you're contributing energy vs. how much you're contributing inertia and dead weight.
I believe The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter goes into much more detail on this, though I haven't read it. Its (very simplified, gleaned from the summarizations I read) central thesis is that when a state is small, all additions are a net gain. Then, at some point that varies for each state, additions quickly becomes more and more useless and a net negative, till the state collapses under its own unsupportable weight.
Not a reasonable one for the Roman Empire at least. They actually had that discussion and so they abandoned their ambitions over Germania beyond the Rhine after Teutoburg and Dacia after the third century crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia
That made the frontiers of the empire roughly the Rhine-Danube-Balkans-Syrian Desert. Pretty much an ideal situation. They just had the odds in their favor but still lost the battles.
> Then, at some point that varies for each state, additions quickly becomes more and more useless and a net negative
Not the case of the Romans. Actually, the oldest provinces where the ones that first stopped pulling their weight millitarily. By the time of the third century there's a pattern of the army being most successful recruiting Ilyrians (like Dioclesian), later in Armenia (and all the germanic foederati, of course). Italy, Hispania and Gaul provided very few soldiers at that point.
Yes. The only Roman conquest that really added significant net resources over the long term was Egypt. Mesopotamia probably would have if there was a way to properly integrate it.
Outside of ultra-fertile river valleys (which produce food in vast excess of the needs of the laborers working the land) pre-industrial conquests really only created value for the conqueror through slavery and looting.
So most Roman occupations were a case of overextension.
Aren't you overlooking the value of internal security? A conquest moves the border further away, which gives the interior stability and security, which certainly adds to economic productivity in a big way, historically. It also considerably eases internal trade, and trade also boosts productivity.
Up to a point, this is true. It's why countries seek defensible borders. The natural northern border of Italy is the Alps, and the Roman heartland was constantly insecure until it pushed its border there.
Rome couldn't just control Egypt -- at minimum, it needed to at least control a secure sea route to Egypt, presumably from Sicily to Carthage and then east. It was probably also worthwhile to secure a northern route past Greece.
You could draw an analogy to the British Empire, which placed great value in securing two routes to its prized possession of India: a northern route, by way of Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, and a southern route by way of South Africa.
But also, beyond a certain point, there are cheaper ways to secure your border than a permanent military occupation of lands on your periphery. You can set up client states. You can send punitive expeditions: raiding, pillaging, and enslaving your hostile neighbors, razing their cities, destroying or seizing their fleets.
And I'd push back on the idea of a lot of Roman economic productivity coming from a large internal market. It was all well and good that Roman elites wore silk and that garum was produced in industrial quantities, but it's not like the modern case where critical economic activities relied on long-distance trade in highly specialized capital goods. Agriculture was the foundation of the economy and the military, and the chief economic problem was how to get more agricultural surplus. Only two solutions to that problem were ever really implemented: slaves and Egypt.
It depends on what you mean by "objective reason". Yes battles are a proximate cause of the Roman state no longer exercising power. But in most historians' thinking even that is mostly a symptom. Many places in the former Western Roman Empire still thought of themselves as "Roman" (but with reduced standards of living, different systems of political authority, etc.) for a long time after the standard date for the "fall of Rome".
My understanding of how the chain of causes reaches back from the battles is something like this:
- battles tend to be won by whoever shows up with the best army
- "best army" is mostly a matter of economics: does the state capture enough surplus from its lands to pay, train, & equip a large number of troops?
- at the height of the Pax Romana, 1) Roman lands produced a lot of surplus due to peace making land improvement, trade, finance, etc. effective; 2) Roman state effectively captured this and channeled it into a standing army to keep the peace.
- Starting in the 3rd century Roman governance started to break down. Lots of coups and internal conflicts. Resources were diverted to fight civil wars, government devolved to lower levels, security got worse, leading to less investment & less resources to devote to security. Vicious cycle.
- Eventually this created enough of a power vacuum that migrating Germanic tribes filled it.
How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies. Is this representative of the vast majority of companies? Am I going to have a hard time finding a job at a small- or mid-sized company? If it matters, I’m a DS not an SWE and I have a few years of experience. What about for tech roles in non-valley type companies?
I run a ~500 person tech company. This is the worst downturn in the 15 years I've been at it. I know many CEOs ranging from seed to small/mid cap public, and I can definitively say many (most?) that have so far been unscathed are planning layoffs that haven't been announced. I'm very confident the bad news will continue into Q1.
That being said top talent is still very much in demand. Cash compensation has not gone down meaningfully. Equity compensation is reduced on a nominal basis but has actually increased on percentage basis (you get more of the given company you are joining even if the day one value is ostensibly lower).
I also can see a world where things revert back to the good days very quickly, but my peers are preparing for the worst. There is also a bit of a Machiavellian urge to take advantage of the shift in power from employee to employer; the days of rest and vest are at least temporarily over.
"How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies."
The semiconductor folks (Intel and Nvidia and AMD and Qualcomm) all seem to be either laying people off or putting hiring on hold.
The semi equipment companies in the valley (AMAT, LAM, KLA) seem to be putting hiring on hold. *I* am expecting layoffs in this segment next year, but I don't think any of them have announces layoffs yet.
So assuming that this counts as "tech" then the poor-ish job market isn't just the FAANGs.
I'll note, however, that even if hiring is down people do find jobs so it isn't like looking is a bad idea. You just might want to be mentally prepared for a longer search than whatever is normal.
N=1 but the mid-sized tech startup I work at continues to hire engineers like crazy. Growth-stage startups can almost never have too many good engineers / data scientists even if they're scaling back their sales plan.
This week I attempted (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/do-americans-even-make-friends-in) to refute a pretty dumb NPR story about Americans’ supposedly increasing loneliness, and ended up hypothesizing that Americans are actually just making fewer friends in high school.
I’m curious why people think this might be, and if anyone can point me to datasets that can shed light on the question.
Some ideas I have
- Maybe families are moving more frequently as a result of increasing housing prices, making it harder for kids to make friends
- Maybe something about school has changed—bigger classes? Less free time?
- Maybe it’s easier to find niche friend groups now for some reason, so kids still make friends, but just fewer of them
Reduced necessity via technology is my guess. Back before everyone carried an instant worldwide communication/entertainment device in his pocket, we *had* to interact with the people around us, lest we die of boredom, or miss something important, in any new milieu. So Step #1 on arriving in any new social or physical situations was to start getting to know the people around you. It helped that usually many, most, or in some cases all of the other people around you were in the same boat, so introductions and early-stage acquaintance was generally welcomed.
So when we switched schools, or graduated, or moved, we had to make a whole bunch of new friends and acquaintainces. To be sure, we could hold on to friends from previous schools, previous locations, et cetera, but it was significantly harder, because you had to write letters, make visits, make occasional expensive long-distance phone calls. Nevertheless, it was expected that you had a set of grade-school friends, high-school friends, college friends, work friends from this job, from this other job, from this recreational activity, and so on.
None of this is true any more. When kids switch schools, they just keep talking to the same people they always did, because they can. Same thing when adults move from city to city, or take a new job, or graduate. When people get bored or lonely or confused in a new situation, out comes the phone and the problem is solved, or usually solved enough that the need to interact with strangers physically around you is considerably reduced.
Increased individuation as a result of tech-mediated exploration of culture via the internet, brutal social darwinism caused by sexual activity occurring at earlier ages, and a multi-causal epidemic of mental illness making the formation of stable relationships far less likely.
I played (on a piano) and sang some of those in front of people a few times in high school/college. My finest such hour IMHO was in college when I altered the lyrics of "I Got It From Agnes" for a residential-college open mic thing. Swapped in the names of various kids who resided in that dorm included several friends of mine. Happily the guy I singled out for the line "_____ ______ even got it and we're still.....wondering how", who was a good friend of mine, was present in the audience. That one kind of brought down the house....even more happily he was a sport about it and is still a good friend to this day.
Depends what it costs. If it costs $billions, then figure out how this might be useful to a government and get in touch with one. If it costs $millions, then you probably need to figure out how it might be useful in business and pitch it to some gigantic firm.
Neither of those are likely to be successful with those notoriously conservative institutions, so hopefully instead it will cost mere $thousands to tens of $thousands, in which case you build it yourself (or with a few friends, at least some of whom have capital lying around), and then...start selling whatever service you think an AGI can provide that a customer can't obtain by just hiring a human being instead.
Right now, I'm having a hard time thinking of any such thing. What can an AGI do for $X that a human being can't? Or conversely what can an AGI do for $X that a human being can only do for $Y >> $X? The sheer novelty of a computer program talking and acting like a human is interesting, surely, even if it costs beacoup compared to turning on talk radio, but only the first movers can profit from novelty, and only for a little while. Human beings are quite cheap to hire, and the more an AGI resembles a human the more one has to make a strong economic case for using an AGI instead of a human, and the less an AGI resemble a human the more it becomes closer to just any random new piece of technology, like ML networks, TCP/IP protocol, a thorium reactor, et cetera, in which case the path to commercial success is well trodden.
You publish it on arxiv to win the Turing Award and the adoration of every intelligence who will remember you in the next 10^5 years, then watch as the world burns as the consequences of building it ripple up.
That would seem to depend on your estimations of the odds someone else will release an unaligned AI - sure, 95% might be a good threshold if the alternative is no AI, but if the alternative is someone who isn't concerned with alignment at all releasing an AI imminently, the correct confidence minimum is probably lower.
Personally, I think "twice as likely as the next guy to manage successful alignment" is roughly the right margin to compensate for overconfidence...
I'm attempting to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
In honor of the Nativity I would like to present my new favorite conspiracy theory: the Virgin Mary was a lizard.
See, in mammals parthenogenesis is impossible due to epigenetic imprinting (see https://denovo.substack.com/p/epigenetics-of-the-mammalian-germline ). But in many reptile species it can definitely happen (for example Komodo dragons do it regularly). Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome. But reptiles have a ZW sex-determination system wherein ZW = female and ZZ = male. If Jesus started out as an unfertilized egg with a Z-chromosome, that would explain everything!
*wags finger semi-reprovingly* You naughty naughty, you!
"Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome."
Exactly. This is why it's a miracle.
"Now the birth of Jesus Christe took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus."
<Sigh> What kind of God would interfere in the laws of their Universe for a single time to produce an unbelievable result, then vanishes and leaves only a single trivially-forgeable record as the evidence ?
I know this is Christmas and I don't have the energy for a 2010 style religious flamewar either, but it blows my mind how christians can just accept something they will never accept in any other context like this. Absolutely no man in history would ever believe their cheaty-preggo wife that it was "God who knocked me up", and if that happened for any reason his friends and family would quickly and ruthlessly make him see sense again. The fact that 4 billion+ (Muslims and Christians) - 50% of all living humans - today can believe this either means human irrationality is so much vaster than can be put into words, that most people don't give a shit about the truth value of what they believe and are mostly there for the songs and the community, or that you're all trolling us atheists and we're falling for it harder than a 4Chan victim.
One imagines that dogs and horses are freqnetly baffled by stuff we do. How come you want me to shit on this piece of grass but not this one ten feet to the left? What's with this God-damned sticking of needles into my ass every year? Jeez.
But of course we know animals are a lot dumber than us, so it doesn't surprise us in the least that some of what we do involving their species must appears senseless and weird to them -- and we know equally well that there can't possible be anything smarter than us[1], so either God acts in ways that are transparently reasonable to us, or he must not exist. No other conclusion is possible.
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[1] Well, except for superintelligent AIs. Those can definitely be infinitely smarter than us, and believing in that proposition is definitely not in the same class of credulity as believing in God, because reasons.
Oh for sure, I'm quite sympathetic to this. The good thing about animals, though, is that they don't pretend, I imagine no dog ever constructed an elaborate backstory about why humans need to stick needles into their asses, let alone went and made a tradition out of it.
My problem with Abrahamic religions is that they want to have it both ways : it's "God acts in mysterious ways" when you want to know why or how anything works, but "God told you so and you must obey" when they want you to say and do things. Why, if God acts in mysterious ways, how can you know that He\She is like an ordinary human who wants to be obeyed when commanding ? How can you interpret anything He\She says ? Can a dog say with a straight face that they understand what a human wants ?
>Those can definitely be infinitely smarter than us
I'm not sure that's how intelligence works, but then again neither anybody, so that's as good a hypothesis as any.
But be aware that being smart is not an excuse to be an asshole, and one of God's advertised qualities is that He/She is "Omnibenevolent", which - I'm told - is fancy latin for "Not An Asshole". So if God finds it so difficult to explain His/Her genius to us, maybe He/She shouldn't do cruel and physics-breaking things to us then vanish. Being omnibenevolent imposes constraints on you to explain yourself.
>believing in that proposition is definitely not in the same class of credulity as believing in God
God is not the same as the Abrahamic God. You can't reject what you don't know, and Indian religions alone would take me 97 liftimes and a half to scratch the surface. So I'm only definitely against the abrahamic ones, and if you put a gun to my head I would say it's really only the Muslim one at that. It's really just my bad luck that had me bad mouth Christianity on Deiseach's watch.
Believing in AGIs that will come in less than 300 years is definitely credulous, and I frequently make fun of it too. It's my least favorite part of the rationality sphere.
I think you’re actually wrong here about dogs and backstories. I vaguely remember a while ago (I’m too lazy to dig out the citation, it’s winter break) that they studied what would happen if you rewarded rats totally at random. Just, sometimes at random intervals they got food.
Well, what happened was basically AI overfitting, which is to say that they got superstitious as hell. So you saw them running in circles thinking that counterclockwise pleased the food gods or whatever.
I think that you could be generous, and say that maybe then even animals believe in rituals, or less generous, and say that this is probably basically what happened to form human religions.
Huh. How do you know what dogs imagine? I actually think it's a priori not unlikely that dogs *do* have what we can call "religious" feelings about us, on the grounds that having religious feelings in general seems not unlikely to be linked to being a social species -- there's a big overlap between the crudents expectations we have of God and those we have for our father when we are young, and for the alpha leader of the pack/tribe when we are older.
Since dogs are social species rather like humans, it would not surprise me at all if they had similar feelings about a deeply powerful and way more intelligent species that interferes in mystifying ways in their lives. Of course, interestingly, dogs know that we are not omniscient -- my dog knows I can't tell what he's doing when I'm not in the room, at least to some extent, although I'm not sure how firmly he believes it, since he still acts guilty when he's done something he knows I would forbid if I were there.
I think you may be mistaking how and why the Catholic Church (the only major religion with the teachings of which I'm familiar enough to even argue the point) says you should obey God, although I speak under correction by someone who knows dogma better than I, like your Irish interlocutor. As I understand it, it's not that God wants to be obeyed the way a human being might enjoy the power, or want to get something done for his own selfish reasons. The idea is that God is telling you what to do to maximize the harmony and good of Creation, including maximizing your own ultimate welfare[1], and it's a command because there isn't any other choice that gets to the same end[2]. Any choice you make *other than* doing what God says leads to a shittier future, for you and probably for plenty of other people also (and animals and space aliens, if there are any). So God wants you to obey His commands because He loves Creation, and everything in it, and you choosing to blow Him off and muck it up makes Him sad, and will make you sad, too, when you eventually come to understand what an idiot you were, which the theology says you ultimately always will.
Indeed, God Himself is just as trapped by this framework as you are -- He can't *not* give the commands, and can't *not* want you to obey, because that is inconsistent with His knowing what is best and wanting what is best for all of Creation. It's the Platonic idealization of the man who cannot pass by a child drowning and not try to save him. Most people who act in such situations report that they felt no sense of choosing -- that they did what they "had" to do, that any other action was unthinkable. Presumaby that is God's situation, which is why we assume He *must* give the commands, and *must* want them to be obeyed. It's also the situation of angels or saints, perhaps animals too, creatures who cannot imagine any other choice than what is best. Ordinary human beings *do* have a choice, because we can always choose to screw up and create misery by doing the wrong thing. That's what makes us special, too: we are the only creatures who can freely choose to do the right thing, who can earn our salvation instead of having it as a birthright.
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[1] Note that "welfare" != "hedonic pleasure." God is not interested in how many utils of pleasure you obtain in your mortal existence, He's interested in the ultimate moral destination of your immortal soul. For all we know, sometimes that may require enduring substantial suffering. We all know people who don't learn except by painful experience, and sometimes that's us, unfortunately.
[2] Presumably in cases where there really are two paths to the same ideal end, God doesn't give any commands. I don't *think* God has any commands about whether I have the chicken or the beef for dinner tonight.
<Sigh> What kind of sourpusses have to trot out the same old same old every holiday and festival about cheaty-preggo wives and human irrationality?
It blows my mind how they accept something (being human toothaches) they will never accept in any other context like this (going around to kids telling them that their birthday parties are stupid dumb occasions that are meaningless).
The fact that umpty-billion online atheists today have to put such effort into being "well ackshully" either means human irrationality is so much vaster than can be put into words, that most people don't give a shit about the truth value of what they believe and are mostly there for the lulz and the community, or that you're all trolling us normies who like having excuses for lighting lights, eating special foods, drinking special drinks, getting together and engaging in family and social traditions, and we're falling for it harder than a 4Chan victim.
Or conversely, I can accept your joke about lizards and you can accept my comment about this seasonal festival partisan belief and we can both not get bent out of shape?
I mean, chill?, that's way more aggressive than my words. The lizard comment was an obvious joke yes, but you replied seriously so I replied seriously.
>we can both not get bent out of shape?
Agreed, Happy X-Mas Deiseach. I'm entirely okay with you being not in the mood for my heresies. Have a good day or night.
Dude, babe or whatever you may wish to identify as: you make a Christmas joke, I make a jocular response, you come back with a "why oh why" plaint about how atheists are the only people with brains who can think.
On the rest of the year, I might shrug this off. That you feel the need to do it at Christmas is a bit raw. Would you do a bit at Passover about how dumb the Jews are for thinking Elijah can still be alive after thousands of years, setting out a plate for him at the table, just imagine?
Chill yourself, there are plenty of other days in the year to tell me I'm dumb for believing in the sky fairy. Just not this week, okay?
I'm not the one who made the lizard post. Substack bug ?
>you come back with a "why oh why" plaint about how atheists are the only people with brains who can think.
Again not true and a substantially more aggressive interpretation than what I really meant, I have a muslim family I adore. You seem to have quite the image of me.
>That you feel the need to do it at Christmas is a bit raw.
Fair point and I did anticipate this, too bad I didn't have the forethought to delete it right then and there. Please, Deiseach, Oh mighty lover of onions, can you forgive me ?
> I'm dumb for believing in the sky fairy
Did I come off as that much of an asshole ? I don't believe you're dumb, If I were I wouldn't be surprised you believe implausible stories unironically. And by the Virgin Mary! you're approaching this from entirely the wrong angle, I don't want to tell you how you're bad and how you should feel bad, I saw you talking seriously about your faith for a bit so I replied with my biggest problem with your faith. It's okay if you're not in the mood for a theology discussion, just tell me to fuck off.
> Just not this week, okay?
Nor any other, I'm not a fan of insulting cool people, and you're cool :').
Happy *proper* season of Christmas to all, since we are now in the Twelve Days (as per the song). Leading up to Christmas Day was not Christmas but Advent. Leading up since October in the shops was the secular Sales Season profitable last quarter.
A lot of people this year expressed to me that they were jaded with Christmas, that "it's only one day". I think this is because of the push to start 'celebrating' it earlier and earlier every year. This year I decided I would ignore everything and only count from Christmas Day onwards as Christmas, and I do think I am enjoying it more this year. It's a little more special.
So today being the 26th, Happy St Stephen's Day and though I'm too old to do it myself (it was for kids when I was a kid, though really it was adults before that), maybe you'll be out on the wran!
What do you define as interest rates? If you mean the concept of "I give you money now, you pay me back over time and/or later with additional money" then it predates known history. Rules about that kind of thing are in the oldest law codes. As are rules for things like sharing the fruits of joint enterprises and even some forms of investment. Though obviously not nearly as complicated as today.
Do you mean as distinct from prohibitions on usury? Because charging interest on loans seems to go way back. If you mean "was it the Babylonians or earlier?" I can't tell you.
I think of what you describe as *interest*. Right or wrong, when I hear the term *interest rate*, I think of something set by a firm or governing body. Not sure what Zohar is asking here.
I think of the interest rate as a market price. A governing body can set a legal maximum interest rate but it can't arrange that loans are actually available at that rate.
I suspect the concept developed gradually. But it would be interesting to have some sort of history of the development of the pure "time value of money" conception, where a fixed percentage is added to the loan balance every fixed increment of time. I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't get fixed and understood until after multiple-digit arithmetic became routinized, which probably didn't happen in Europe until the introduction of Arabic numbers.
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified on my about page:
I'm looking for a service that allows me to experience internet as if I'm from a different country.
I don't mean just VPN or Google Translate. I mean the full experience, like if you choose China your default search engine becomes Baidu, qq.com appears on top of your URL autocomplete, all your searches and comments are translated to Chinese before posted and such - all these combined with traditional VPNs and stuff.
Does this exist? If it doesn't, would you be interested in using it?
If you don't know the language and culture, then no amount of changing browser language settings and machine translation will give you a totally accurate experience, so you'll be compromising on something. If you don't change the browser's language setting, websites will often redirect you to international versions, so that bit isn't really avoidable.
To actually get the full experience, you'll need to move to china, spend the next 5+ years learning the language and becoming culturally fluent, and only then can you actually get the "full experience".
Pardon my ignorance, but I think the "symbols" behind the rabbi (and on top of the cars) are menorahs, which are for the season of Hanukkah which is now upon us (ending this evening).
The kabbalistic significance is the Maccabeans versus the Seleucid Empire. I think you can work out for yourself who are the Maccabees and who are the Seleucids in Ukraine versus Russia 😁
I am coming to believe that many of the benefits of relgion for an individual can be has by adopting the an attitude towards the truth, as if the truth were a person.
But I’d like to test this hypothesis, if only weakly and via the totally sloppy method of an poll on a quirky blog. I can wait for the annual survey but in the mean time,
You are invited to share:
A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
It depends what goals that person had. Does Truth want people to know it? If so, it would probably be very similar to God - it would need to care for us and want us to be healthy and free people capable of knowing it. Prayer to such a being, in the sense of “trying to get to know that being” would be mostly healthy. A big difference would be that its goals would be mis-aligned with ours, and absent some kind of benevolence on its part, rejecting its goals would be the correct choice for us. This would mean we couldn’t entrust ourselves to it.
If truth doesn’t care about whether we know it, there would be less benefit, like in a Deist variant of Christianity.
>A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
It very much depends on what this means. The most natural interpretation of this is someone walking around who could give true answers to more or less any question, ie, someone actually omniscient but walking around on earth having coffee and hanging out. Assuming that's what is meant, I think I would feel awe and fear, and then, in some order, smugness or chagrin, depending on how much of the controversial stuff I'm right about. Probably also some relief. If there were an omniscient oracle to whom to refer difficult questions, the world would look very different than it does now.
How can truth be a person? I realize this is meant allegorically, at least I think it is, but I don't understand the allegory. To me "the truth" is a label we attach to statements that deserve the adjective "true," so there are as many things with the label "truth" as there are statements, which is infinity. Since you said "a" person, I guess that this one person represents all possible true statements, hopefully that is right.
So my basic question is, I think, is this person a personification, a symbol, like Marianne[1], or an oracle, through which the truth can be known, or perhaps a champion, in the sense of Pallas Athene being the champion of wisdom, or...something else entirely?
I think I would see any one of these differently. A personification seems least like an actual person, and in the framework of traditional religion it would be something like the Christian Cross, a symbol that adorns and reminds. Towards the physical symbol itself I would be indifferent, but the reminder would provoke the response to the underlying concept, which in the case of "the truth" would be considerable avarice (if we are talking about discoverable objective fact), but only mild interest and no small sense of reserved judgment, if we are talking about principles of human interaction -- I don't think we are a truthful species, collectively or individually, towards each other or even to ourselves. Since I assume we are optimized pretty well, I conclude that truth has an ambiguous and uncertain value for our intercommunication.
An oracle would also not be very human, more like a crystal ball. I don't think there's any good equivalent in Christian thought, although there's plenty in pagan religion, and in modern quasi-religions -- at least, a lot of people long for and seem to believe in oracles, rules, procedures, algorithms, law, programs, and machines that deliver 100% truth if only in restricted areas. Personally, I don't believe in oracles, so my response would be deep skepticism.
A champion seems most human -- Athena, after all, had all kinds of human-like adventures, in addition to championing wisdom. I guess a champion would seem like a pagan god, something perhaps to admire in a general way, but also of which to be wary, since being human-like (but much more powerful) it seems like it would be possible to get crosswise of the champion for reasons other than not honoring the truth, maybe because the goddess of Truth had some kind of human-like emotional reaction. So my attitude here would be caution and wariness, I think, although if she were an effective and ardent champion of truth probably also considerable respect.
None of these come anywhere close to what I'd think about a God, because none of them get close to what I consider the sine qua none of God, which is the infusion of meaning into being, the idea that there is A Plan, that Creation has a purpose and a teleological destination.
I think standard Platonist Christian theological traditions would accept Truth as a Divine Name, along with things like Beauty, Good, and Being. That said, I think it would be controversial to describe the Divine Nature as a "person" in the same sense that you and I are people. They wouldn't have spent a few hundred years arguing over exactly what they meant when they said that Jesus is God if it was universally understood as a simple and unequivocal statement.
I think the sense in which God is understood as being Truth (or the Good, or Beauty, or Being) is that these are the transcendent categories at the root of all intelligibility and rational thought and are thus seen as the ultimate yearning of every mind (i.e. to the extent that your experiences are intelligible, you believe things because you think they reflect the Truth, you approve of things because you think they reflect the Good, you adore things because you think they reflect Beauty, and no mind can do otherwise without ceasing to be intelligible).
And, being Platonists, they would say that this feature of being subject to rational comprehension is not a feature of human thought about reality, but a feature of reality itself. Things must be true for reasons, and those reasons must terminate somewhere, and we call whatever that terminal reason is "God" (recall that God can also be called Being, so all things that exist do so as finite reflections of God's transcendent existence in the same way that all good things exist as finite reflections of God's transcendent goodness, etc.).
With that introduction of stuff I'm not sure I really understand:
(A): Truth as a person would be the person you must submit to absolutely. I can't say what my real attitude would be, probably fear and fascination.
(B) Yes, somewhat.
P.S. I think this type of theorizing has little to do with what is involved in actually practicing religion.
Peterson speaks eloquently about the idea that the only way to really articulate definitions of Good and Evil (in their true scope, in their true totality) is by describing a Person. That is, the properly articulated questions are not: "What is Goodness? What is Evil?". They are "Who is Goodness? Who is Evil?"
These "who is" questions can only then be properly answered by a corpus of stories detailing the comings and goings of these two Personae. For example, Alyosha from the Brothers Karamazov is an exceptionally close literary proxy for illustrating the Person known as Goodness.
So, I think your question is entirely the right one to pose if you want to poll anecdotal experiences of those people who are genuinely mystical in their religiosity. I'll just change your phrasing slightly and then i'll answer:
(A) "Since you believe the Truth is a person, how have you interacted with this person and what is your attitude toward this person?"
I have for many years (but not any longer, as I am now an atheist) "Talked to God" in my head. This experience had been a profoundly real, agile, and kaleidoscopic process in my consciousness. What kinds of phenomenology define what I mean by Talking to God? Let me list several in no particular order:
(1) Deeply felt emotional realities could be elicited by Talking to God. A fully effective salve for sorrow or loneliness was on offer if properly sought. A deep well of watery golden Awe sweetened with the honey of laughing Wonder was available to me if I Talked to God; I could drink from this Awesome well by the bucketful if I engaged in Tai-chi like ritualistic movements, or dance, and worshipfully used my voice to sing or speak.
(2) Deeply rooted thought patterns, stubbornly believed for years or decades, could be permanently altered or exhumed (and new ones could be incepted) through Talking to God. I was once cheated on by my wife and filled with the most nauseating fury for a week. Only a week because I went to Church whereupon I entered into an ecstatic religious state of consciousness for approximately 45 minutes. In my state, which was complete with visions of Edenic vines and flowers and ethereal flowing spirits animating the sanctuary of the 30 year old brick building, I saw a great blue pillar of light in my minds eye. I walked into the pillar, and stayed there, arms raised upwards in ecstasy, for 30 minutes. I Talked to God in that blue pillar of light. When I was finished listening, my fury towards my adulterous wife was gone. It was completely replaced with love and trust.
(3) Any time I had questions about anything, I would use Talking to God to get answers. I think it is appropriate to call this my "mystical epistemology" which was the Yin with my "rational epistemology" being the Yang. The rational epistemology of course is "normal" thinking & reasoning & discussing & researching. This (3) is the most direct way through which it can be understood that God, a super-Person, was the Truth. Do you need the Truth? Just pray and listen and then you will get True answers. Simple.
(B) "Do you identify as religious?"
I used to. I call myself a Christian atheist at this point. My love for and obedience toward the traditions & philosophies of Christianity was once absolute, slavish, and rapturous. This is no longer the case, despite my deep longing that I could return to my previous psychology; the world used to be an enchanted place of thirst-quenching Meaning but now I struggle to metabolize nihilistic thoughts. Instead, I choke on them.
I call myself a Christian atheist instead of just an atheist because I still routinely engage in religious behavior such as prayer and attending worship to sing and praise the ideals that the Christian tradition lifts up as praiseworthy. I call myself a Christian atheist instead of just an atheist because, despite my ongoing religious behavior, the flame of belief that once warmed my soul through to its core, the belief that "this is all REAL" is now quenched.
The flame is quenched: I no longer believe that any of the religious experiences and phenomenology that occur inside my consciousness are metaphysically real; now they are merely biologically/neurologically real. As a result, they are fleeting and cold comfort. The world is no longer enchanted.
When I was where you’re at, I realised one night that in all honesty there was no evidence I would ever accept for God, no miracle that would change my mind, because it would always be possible (and more likely) that I was misinterpreting something or hallucinating than that I was experiencing a miracle. I remembered what it had been like to have faith, and that in that mental state it had been difficult to really believe that others didn’t believe; and yet, in my then current mental state, it was difficult to really believe that others believe, even while I could remember my own past certainty.
I realised that the only thing that would convince me would be God literally changing my mind: reaching in and flipping whatever ‘switch’ was needed. And God replied that he could do that any time I asked.
Which was terrifying.
It took me years to ask.
But also, the Dark Night of the Soul is definitely a thing, and happy are those who have not seen etc.
If the religious experiences I have had were ultimately the result of the actions of metaphysical beings or metaphysical processes then those religious experiences would be metaphysically real, and therefore Truly REAL.
Example: Suppose that there truly was an Angel, an otherworldly being, in a separate realm that is Super to our physical realm, who, following the instruction of God, poured out a literal bowl of Living Water down into my soul. Suppose that this REAL action taken by a REAL agent who resides in a REAL spiritual realm caused me to experience the "Blue Pillar of Light" experience. Well, then that "Blue Pillar" experience was metaphysically real and not just biologically/neurologically real.
Now, for the converse, suppose that that "Blue Pillar" experience was merely the result of a massive endogenous inhibitory process of my brain's default mode network: a neurological structure hypothesized to constitute the neural correlates of the conscious sense of Self. Conceived this way, the "Blue Pillar" experience, despite all of its profound grandeur, and despite all of its fireworks and emotional/behavioral pyrotechnics, was merely (merely) biologically and neurologically real. All the phenomenology was not caused by an Angel with a bowl and a blessed gift of a great Spirit; instead, it was caused by the in-born ability of the animal homo sapiens to experience strange temporary mutations of consciousness. Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind" describes these ideas well.
I suppose I’m looking at this experience from an angle that says, software exists and is real, often more important than hardware, but it’s also “just something hardware is doing” and both perspectives are accurate.
The software realm is, in some sense, “super to” the hardware realm, as an understanding of computers that doesn’t allow for the existence of “logical processes” and “directed a cyclic graphics” and “flows of information called streams” won’t make any sense, and in some sense the logical realm abstracts the physical world realm well enough that you can often treat the physical realm as being inferior to it.
It sounds like “real” to you required something existing beyond physics. Is that right? Could you say more? Is it reasonable to see “angels” as being a poetic way of talking about neurochemical messages?
Do they actually exist? Or are they only figments of the mind?
The way I see God, the devil, etc, as being real is the way I see numbers as being real. One might argue that they are only useful tools which help us navigate material reality, but this seems like more of a philosophical stance than anything else.
What you describe could be taken as the night of the senses, but since I have experienced neither what you describe as 'talking to God' nor the falling away in dryness, I cannot speak out of personal experience:
A) fear, love, awe (not necessarily in that order)
B) yes (nondenominational Protestant Christian)
(FWIW I think identifying truth / reality as "personal", in a sense that humans can actually relate to, is a central and relatively distinctive claim of Christian metaphysics in general and Christmas / the Incarnation in particular. Would be interesting to learn if people of other religions who identify as religious also see truth as personal, and if so, how / in what sense.)
A) I'm not sure what you mean by this. Would that be a person that always speak the truth? Only speak the truth? That knows a truth? My attitude towards people depends of their action, but truth doesn't feel like an action, more like a fact.
B) No. I'm not hostile to religion on the basis that it's religion, but group stuff isn't for me, precisely because I tend to value truth more than harmony.
I'll add that I don't really agree about your hypothesis. A good part of religion is social, and tend to be about harmony rather than truth. I've never seen anyone debate religion in the meatspace, which indicates to me that, at least for those people, it isn't really about truth.
A big part of religion also seems to be faith. I wouldn't oppose faith to truth, but faith seems more about accepting one truth without proof.
I'm also not sure what "the an attitude" refers to.
(A) "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" - Jesus. "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" - the Holy Spirit.
(B) Yes, but very badly.
Your two questions are connected; I know how I *should* be in attitude towards the Truth who is "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us". How I *really* behave is a different matter.
(A) There are many kinds of truths, so truth can't possibly be a single person.
If the truth of Poverty was a person, I would do things to her that would make the eyes of drug lords water and make them ask me to chill. I'm not even capable of imagining what I would do if I met Murder (including that fashionable and socially aceptable kind we do to animals), or Child and Animal Abuse, or Rape, or Racism, or Marital Infidelity, or Loneliness, or Suicide. And don't get me started on Feminism.
On the other hand, there are truths like that there are special problems in NP that all other problems in NP can be reduced to, and that's one hell of a beautiful truth. Or that Turing Machines, probably the most powerful computing device we're capable of imagining without invoking magic, are so ridiculously easy to construct that they are everywhere[1][2][3][4][5], sometimes without us knowing. There is the truth that we can form bonds across species, and the resulting love is as real as anything we can have intra-species and probably more. There is the truth that most humans are born with family, people who love them unconditionally, simply for having the same DNA, i.e. by virtue of existence alone. There is the truth that the Universe is knowable, and most pain and hate can be understood if not cured, and that's a small mercy in an existence where every mercy counts.
(B) No, I'm an "atheist", though that word is dumb and misleading, I only reject unconditionally 3 religions out of thousands, it's entirely possible other conceptions of God are more or less true/plausible.
Truth is an accordance with some "Golden Standard". I can find no obvious holes with this definition.
So, Poverty and Suicide and the rest of hideous things are all truths, because they conform to the reality of this world. (side-stepping the question of how can we be sure we know the reality of this world.) The truths of Mathematics and Computer Science conform to a different golden standard, the emotional truths of familial love and inter-animal love conform to yet another third, and so on. Those are all instances of a more general concept, perhaps we're not smart enough to discern the exact attributes of that general concept, but at least we can all see the family resemblance.
to shed his shoes and run, pursuing such great peace,
and, running, thought himself too slow.
'O unknown riches and prolific good! Barefoot goes Giles,
barefoot goes Sylvester, following the groom,
so greatly pleasing is the bride.
'Then that father and teacher went his way
in company of his lady and that family,
each one girt with the same humble cord."
The reaction you have is more like that of Jyestha or Alakshmi, the elder sister of Lakshmi:
Jyestha or Jyeshtha (Sanskrit: ज्येष्ठा, Jyeṣṭhā, "the eldest" or "the elder") is the Hindu goddess of adversity and misfortune She is regarded as the elder sister and antithesis of Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and auspiciousness. Jyestha is associated with inauspicious places and sinners. She is also associated with sloth, poverty, sorrow, ugliness, and often depicted with the crow. She is sometimes identified with Alakshmi, another goddess of misfortune. Her worship was prescribed for women, who invoked her to keep her away from their homes."
"Alakshmi (Devanāgari: अलक्ष्मी; from the roots अ (a): "not" and लक्ष्मी (Lakshmi): "goddess of fortune", figurative meaning "goddess of misfortune") meaning "not Lakshmi". She is described as being “cow-repelling, antelope-footed, and bull-toothed." Or she “has dry shriveled up body, sunken cheeks, thick lips, and beady eyes and that she rides a donkey."
... Gods send Alakshmi to go dwell amongst pernicious persons, give them poverty and grief. She as the asura of inauspiciousness and grief is the opposite of Lakshmi who is the goddess of auspiciousness and joy.
...According to Chakrabarty, “It was said that when she entered a household, Alakshmi brought jealousy and malice in her trail. Brothers fell out with each other, families and their male lineages (kula) faced ruin and destruction."
I am religious, but I can't wrap my head around your first question. Like, if there was someone who was Truth Personified, I'd probably be grateful, but Truth is not a personality trait, so I don't know how I'd feel about spending time with them.
But to me, your premise seems nonsensical. The whole point of a God to me is that they're not a person, and exist on a higher plane, if you will. I don't interact with God or Truth or Beauty or whatever like I would another person, because they're not. Many polytheistic religions were created by personifying different concepts, but I think one "innovation" of monotheism was the removal of simple personification from God.
What do you mean "truth". I feel quite happy with the difference between objective measurements and the gods. Both are real, but they're in different domains. The "gods" are built-in physical/psychic factors due to the construction of the nervous system that we use to operate in the world. Anything you can say about them in words is treating the exterior view as superior to the experiential view. This is an incorrect stance. BOTH views have equal validity, and they operate in separate domains. One could describe encountering a god as an emotional experience, and that would be both true and meaningless. It's like a description of riding a bicycle or riding a roller coaster.
But *do* notice that I pluralized gods. There isn't just one "archetype" (an exterior partial description). It's like the experience of encountering someone. That he has "red" hair doesn't tell you whether s/he's tall or short (and in comparison to what). Some of the gods seem to insist that they are the only true gods, but I never believed them, because I had previously encountered ones that made no such insistence. (OTOH, remember that I said encountering them was dangerous? One of them insisted that I had been "saved", and tried to convince me to prove it by taking my hands off the wheel while I was driving on the freeway. That one wasn't able to dominate me...so I have no proof that it was wrong. Just that I didn't really trust it. But it was quite an ecstatic feeling. And this is wrapping words around something that rises from a level below words. You can't understand without experiencing it...and then it's not guaranteed, as many just accept the superficial appearance, or wrap it in approved theological wraps. Sometimes I wonder what Jacob was actually trying to say about wrestling with an angel, but not enough to learn archaic Hebrew, and to try to learn the cultural context. But don't trust the words in the Bible. They're not only words, but they've been translated by people who didn't have the experience.)
I would question the very sense of saying that something exists on a higher plane. It seems to be a metaphor for a construction of the universe that we *know* is incorrect. It makes a nice story, but so does "Diskworld".
Rather I would say that the gods and affiliated constructs are deeper. The are real, and we can't exist/function without they, but they don't live in the same kind of universe that we do. Their existence is not based on learning, except over evolutionary time, and they aren't (with statistically rare exceptions) limited to living in one body at a time. They're the reality behind the thing Jung called archetypes. They *can* erupt into the consciousness of an individual, and when they do they're likely to take control and be extremely disruptive, sometimes in an extremely negative way. There are a sufficient number of reports to convince me that they can simultaneously errupt into multiple consciounesses at the same time.
OTOH. They are ever-present, if you attend to them. One of the names that one of them has is "the Zeitgeist".
That said, thinking of them as persons is both tempting and wrong. I once met/encountered Aphrodite. Fortunately "she" wasn't in a destructive phase, but "she" dominated my life for a decade, even though the lady who was the vehicle wasn't dominated nearly that long. I only realized that it was the goddess when looking back from a distance. Encountering a god is dangerous, it can take over your life. They've much safer acting in a minimally noticeable way.
I’m not trying to get other people to adopt my views so much as to better understand how other people view things, and why some perspectives that I adopt seem more suited to help me be at peace with the world while still functioning effectively within it.
Maybe this is naive, but the simple narrative I use is that diversity of religions is a natural healthy result of the truth being so insanely complex, yet true worldviews being essential and instrument to healthy day to day function, that only approximations of the truth can be effectively operationalized. I see viewpoint diversity as being like the diversity of organisms in a memetic ecosystem: more is better! But this is, of course, just my own view. I think I’m something of an intellectual omnivore, a barbarian ransacking whatever libraries I can find in search of wisdom in whatever form it takes.
Has anyone here had a chance to dig into some of the material that The Ethical Skeptic (@EthicalSkeptic) has produced, particularly related to increased non-COVID mortality after the vaccine rollouts?
The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach).
One annoying thing is that he speaks elliptically about what he actually thinks this means, but I think the claim is that the vaccine has caused otherwise healthy people to die of heart-related vaccine side effects.
I'm qualified to look into this myself, but I haven't actually had the time recently, and was wondering if someone out there had already done it?
I haven't looked at this at all myself, but I assume covid deaths crowd out non-covid deaths (at least slightly) more among the unvaccinated. E.g. some people who die from covid have comorbidities and would have died soon from other causes; vaccinated individuals are more likely to survive a bout of covid to go on to die of something else instead.
"The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach). "
Does Mr. Ethical Skeptic provide sources for the data behind his claims? Because you shouldn't feel any obligation to do his work for him.
I will also observe that unless dying of Covid is somehow worse than dying of other causes then comparing raw mortality rates for the various counties will provide information about whether the vaccines helped net-net. Which is probably what we mostly care about (after adjusting for ages of the dead people ... 1000 more dead 20 year olds and 1000 fewer dead 80 year olds is a loss the way I score things ...).
NOTE: To do this properly you will want to compare pre-Covid raw mortality rates for a given county (to get a baseline) with the data post-vaccine (which gets interesting to define for the lower vaccinated counties, but you can probably pick a baseline post-vac date to use like March or June 2021).
I'm quite interested in Covid mortality and vaccine mortality. I have been vaccinated four times. I have probably had Covid twice, both times mild cases lasting about a week.
I also think population size has an exaggerated effect. Consider a population of a thousand on an island. How long would it take the virus to burn itself out? Not long.
Island with a million pop? Longer but still eventually.
11 million? Eventually. (DR)
330 million. There are pockets of disease to keep it going.
Yes, very true. Also relative fluctuations are larger, so it's more possible for a smaller population to have a fluctuation to the low (or high) side, relative to expectations.
My guess would be testing. If you don't test for COVID, all the symptoms can be attributed to something else. It was only noticed in the US when some doctors started carefully examining a bunch of deaths due to "atypical pneumonia".
I wouldn't say "non-Christians" as singled out, but there does seem to be more relaxation around the whole idea of "Merry/Happy Christmas", no more invocations of the War on Christmas, much fewer (I have seen one or two but not nearly as many as previously) scolding articles about "it's not Christmas for everybody you know/what about Hanukkah/Kwanzaa" and so on.
It's nice. I like it. I don't celebrate Eid and so on, but I don't get into a twist over wishing someone who does celebrate it "Happy Eid or Diwali or Hanukkah or Yule or Coffee Drinking Day". I don't think it's imposing anything on anybody, anymore than "if you live someplace where X is the dominant language, everyone will probably speak that language". I know *that* can get politicised ("speak English or go home!"/"My mom lived for thirty years in the US and only speaks Spanish and she shouldn't be expected to learn any English, you bigots!") but at this stage, someone can manage to politicise the colour of the sky.
Unrelated: if I and Mrs. John Buridan were to visit Eire 2023 or 2024. would you be willing to let us bring you tea or whiskey? There would be no small talk, only conversation worth having.
That is an extremely kind offer and I greatly appreciate it, but I don't have visitors or social interaction. I hope you enjoy any trip to Ireland in the next year or two, but I won't be available, sorry.
I wonder how long it will be before it's tempting enough to put climate-altering particles into the sky, that "politicize the color of the sky" stops being a metaphorical argument.
Speculative: The culture war flap around "be inclusive - say Happy Holidays" vs "now we can't say Merry Christmas anymore!" died down and people just regressed to prior behavior.
I noticed a trend in fewer Christmas related articles published at local news sites over the last few years on the eve and day of. I live in blue trending state though...
I notice it, but I’m not sure if it’s just my peer group aging. Insisting on “happy winter solstice” is a behavior I’d associate more with 20-year-olds than 40-year-olds.
But consider "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings". Those seem to be quite common. (My peer group of the 20's-40's largely went with "Good Yule", but that seems rare.)
Yeah, I think that’s the first time I’ve encountered that phrase even on the Internet.
Over time, Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings have acquired a cold, corporate/bureaucratic flavor. It’s what you say to your clients/customers, not your friends and acquaintances. So I can see the need to pivot away from it when you want to signal that you see someone as a friend/acquaintance and not a client.
"Season's Greetings" isn't too bad. I think it is/was more the *stridency* of the demands around "Say Happy Holidays because there is more than one holiday at this time and not everybody is Christian", not unreasonable points in themselves but (a) Christmas as celebrated is secular not religious, Santa is the patron not Jesus and (b) hectoring and lecturing people that unless they learned off an entire list of winter festivals they were the equivalent of the Inquisition burning heretics never came off well.
I've often wondered if the US Santa Claus is a fertility goddess. It fits with the incredible effort to produce more things, but a male fertility goddess because the things being produced aren't children.
>>Philip Tetlock and others have founded the Forecasting Research Institute to study prediction, including prediction of existential risk. They are looking to hire “research and data analysts, content editors, and RAs”, all roles remote, see here for details.<<
If you are in the San Francisco bay area (or maybe even if you aren't) you might consider taking an Egyptian Hieroglyphics class. This is where I met my (now) wife. I was looking for a girlfriend and took a UC Berkeley Extension course in hieroglyphics figuring maybe I'd find a girlfriend there. She was taking the class in preparation for an Egyptian trip (pyramids, valley of the kings, ...). The strategy has a 100% success rate to the best of my knowledge.
If you can't find a convenient hieroglyphics class then you might try a Zen Buddhism class as that was the other one I was considering taking as part of the girlfriend search. My wife is convinced that there is some poor girl who took that class and didn't meet me and is wondering why her boyfriend never materialized. That girl might still be available for you :-)
In January 2022 I got back onto my map and menu strategy game with character sim project. I got a lot done but was derailed in the last 4 months or so by deaths in the family, getting Covid, and the holidays.
My plan was initially to be done somewhere form Christmas to February. Probably looking at a summer completion and ideally release now. We'll see how it goes.
Get a job, or at least, get back on the path of possibly getting a job at some point. Spending my retirement savings prematurely right now and I think that is not good.
Gain weight. I've cut back on food partially due to costs and I think I've lost too much muscle.
Improve my focus so I can use my time better. Continue self-studying Japanese, including finishing Genki 1 and 2 and taking the JLPT4. Continue studying drawing. Lose at least 25 lb but hopefully more. Feel more secure in my job.
Additionally, and not quite as a goal: Pay more attention to what I read/watch that is likely or has the potential to be AI-generated, and to cut back on that stuff too. I'd prefer to have a blanket "don't consume anything made by AI" but I don't think that's possible to determine.
Try to start drawing after years of wanting to do it, find a job, keep doing what I'm doing, maybe a bit of sport, try to not kill myself, try to not feel like killing myself.
I started drawing this year too. I started with drawabox.com's lessons but realized I enjoyed figure drawing more so I switched to Proko's course. Consider this a recommendation for both.
From one human being to another, I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. If it helps at all, I eventually made it out of wanting to die, after a decade and a half or so of being stuck there.
I have a "Latin Flashcard"(*) program that I was working on for a few years (the first 18 months of Covid were very productive for this) and last year there just wasn't much motivation so it ground to a halt. I'm getting my interest back, though, so I'd like to get the thing into more usable shape by the end of 2023.
(*) One of my hypothesis is that it helps (a lot) to see sentences and phrases rather than just words out of context. The idea behind my program is that the victim provides vocabulary and grammatical forms they want (or are expected) to know an the tool will "make Latin" using the specified words and grammatical forms. It tracks which words the victim seems to know and weights things towards (a) words that need work, but (b) with some random selection to get repetition for all the words.
Become better at memorizing people's names. The idea is to repeat their name back to them once they introduce themselves, immediately make some deliberate mental association (eg, this person has the same name as my cousin) and use their name as much as possible from then on (eg, greet them by name every time I see them). Any other suggestions? So far I've been mostly failing at the latter, not because I don't remember their names at all, but because I have low confidence on the name I do remember, and it seems impossibly awkward to say "hi Chris!" to someone who's not named Chris.
Might I ask if your goal is to reduce awkward name forgetting moments, or to remember names more? Personally, I’m not great at remembering names, but am pretty good at remembering things about a prior conversation (where it was, what about). So I often find myself having say, “it’s great to see you again, I really enjoyed that conversation about [specific, clearly actually remembered cybersecurity regulatory stuff] we had at [name of happy hour]; forgive me though, I’m going totally blank on your name, could you jog my memory?”
In other words, sometimes strategies to reduce a consequence are as helpful as strategies to avoid the event in the first place.
I guess a bit of both. What you describe is what I have been doing so far, although sometimes I have never had a full conversation with the person in question so it's harder to signal I remember them. What triggered this idea for me was people whom I've barely spent time with before (say, 5 minutes in total) coming up to me weeks or years later and greeting me by name. I usually remember that I've met someone and where or in which circumstance, but the less time we spent together and the longer ago it was, the less likely I am to remember anything else about them, not even what we may have talked about. I'm hoping that getting better at remembering their names will work in tandem with getting better at remembering other relevant details. Or in other words, I want to try to pay more attention to (new) people.
Also, forgetting people's names is more acceptable if you haven't seen each other in a long time, but by default I forget it immediately. This is super awkward during parties or week-long events such as conferences. There I really feel like I have little excuse. So even if I don't manage to train myself to remember someone's name weeks later, I would like to at least keep it for the rest of the event.
I hear you, and I think that's an admirable goal! For me, at least, it's easier to remember someone's name if I'm not afraid of what happens if I forget it. People tend to respond well to a little vulnerability, and saying, "oh gosh, it's been a long conference, I'm totally blanking on your name" is a very relatable thing.
Thank you for the ideas! It's remarkable how all the suggestions revolve around forming mental pictures. I guess memorizing images is on average easier than memorizing concepts? Or maybe I misunderstood the advice and it would be enough to think of the absurd concepts and not take the step visualize the picture. I'm not really aphantasic, but don't really think in pictures either. Maybe I should try to take the concepts themselves or to make sound associations instead.
I’ve had some success with really stupid puns before (deciding someone’s curly hair was ‘crisp’ to remember that they were ‘Chris’), but my main strategy in the classroom is to use seating plans because I can link names to spatial things much more easily than to faces. And then I link the faces to the spatial position, too, and transitively eventually I link the names and faces. This, sadly, does not transfer to situations in which I can’t demand everyone sit in specific places every time.
Has anyone been working on a startup doing a prediction market that failed or otherwise didn't work out that wants to sell their source code? I'm looking around for some software to run some niche prediction markets and I'm looking at buy/build/outsource decisions.
Why? When I set up an alarm it's for when I have something on my schedule. Going to sleep at a certain time may help, but what really matters is that I'm awake for the thing.
As for getting proper sleep cycles, onset insomnia makes it very hard. No point going to bed if it's just to stay awake for a few hours.
You need to change the default sound to do this well! If you can, it’s probably better to set the “alarm” to dim the lights in the room you are likely to be in, and maybe even give a 60 second visual countdown to turn off the devices you are likely to be using.
It’s a good idea to set a reminder of when to go to bed, but not with a sound that gets your adrenaline flowing.
Explain, as if to a future historian or intelligent alien, why the citizens of the U.K. got really really mad at Qatar for the first few days of the World Cup there but not about the UK’s strong military alliance with the same regime.
If I wanted to make the future historian or intelligent alien hate them :
"""
People are peacocks and morality is their feather. In mob quantities, they are incapable of truly loving or hating a thing for its virtues or the lack thereof, their only mover is what gets their mob to climax.
And thus, in the year they called 2022 in their native numbering system, it was a great climax for the most fashionable big mobs to be angered about the treatment of certain groups, and so angered they were, angered they must be, whether it was the virtuous thing to do or not. It's entirely misguided to try to understand this with an ethical eye, you might as well analyze the orbit of a Solar Mass or the radiation out of a Black Hole from the point of view of whether it was morally justified.
"""
If I wanted to make the future historian or intelligent alien empathize with them :
"""
People had a morality, but the world they lived in was so confusing and interconnected that every system of morality was eaten and chewed and spat by the contradictions inherent in it. Imagine the world a sea so treacherous it can't be sailed, and imagine your morality a ship you're trying to sail it in.
And thus, in the year they called 2022 in their native numbering system, a certain people were enraged about a thing that they were unwittingly supporting. It's too easy to laugh at them, so satisfying to the needs of the body and the soul. But make no such mistake, for you're laughing at the fate that you encounter countless times, before and again. For the Universe is a gargantuan riddle, and there is no morality that hasn't crashed on its rocks amidst its treacherous waves. It's entirely misguided to expect people to have consistent systems of ethics and apply them uniformly in all matters, you might as well expect the 2 players in that game of 64 squares to both win in a single game. Consistency is an article of guidence the author of this Universe couldn't comply with, so I ask : is it fair to admonish the characters for behaving as the author wrote them ?
No one would have believed in the first four lustra of the twenty-first century that this world was being data-scraped keenly and closely by intelligences greater than human and yet as bounded by limits as our own; that as humans busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a person with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency people went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. No one gave a thought to the political entanglements of their governments as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most contemporary humans fancied there might be others in foreign societies perhaps inferior to themselves in social progress and liberalisation and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this society with dismissive eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And later in the twenty-first century came the great disillusionment."
Is there anyone who’s mad about one but not the other? It seems to me that the difference is that one is a long-running thing that people have already had their say on, while the other is a new thing.
As you note, people seemed madder for the first few days than they did later on. There’s very little reason to keep your anger at a boil for a long-running thing.
People didn't know that Britain and Qatar were military allies, but they were told that they should be outraged at Qatar's record on human rights by all the media think-pieces and opinion formers telling them that terrible things were happening and they should be outraged. And since people are used to being whipped up by social media to be outraged about Bad Things by activists, they duly were outraged.
Then the people who cared about the World Cup just ignored it all and continued watching, and the people who didn't care about the World Cup felt satisfied that they had done the Minimum Daily Requirement of Pointless Online Activism and went off about their ordinary day-to-day life. After all Outraged of Saffron Hill can't actually do anything about the migrant labourers in Qatar and how the Qatari treat them, but they can write letters to the paper and do the requisite signing of petitions and posting icons and banners on their Twitter, and that's enough to signal their virtue.
In all of this despite my abhorrence to the Qatar and Saudi regimes, I am sympathetic to the conservative, or neutral football fan.
But the woke britisher doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. If you are angry with Qatar for a week every few years, and only then because the BBC has effectively riled you up on the subject - and not about the military alliance then the future historian isn’t going to take you seriously.
Because the beliefs and behavior of most citizens in most countries are best predicted by whatever messages are being broadcast by their priestly class.
If the priestly class told the citizens to be mad about the military alliance but not about different values systems, then this is what the citizens would do.
Sure. That’s what I believe too. It’s the same with the US and the Saudi alliance, perhaps worse. The recent regime has promoted LGBT as a foreign policy, so talking too much about Saudi would frighten the chickens.
Well, it says "“It shall be the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, and to lead by the power of our example in the cause of advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world.” Surely, pursuing an end to violence on the basis of gender identity (or political identity, or any identity) is consistent with policy in pretty much all of the US. And, the FBI has been tracking anti-transgender hate crime since 2013 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/victims/victims_final
That leaves only the pursuit of the end of discrimination based on gender identity. Apparently, 23 states have laws which explicitly outlaw gender identity discrimination, and 8 others have interpreted their laws to do so. https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws And, of course, the Supreme Court has interpreted Title VII to forbid gender identity discrimination in employment.
In Europe, "The European Parliament first adopted a resolution on discriminations against transsexual people in 1989. The first formal opening of EU law to transgender issues occured in the European Court of Justice‘s 1996 judgment of the P. v. S. and Cornwall County Council case, where EU judges interpreted the law on equality between women and men to apply to cases of gender reassignment." https://www.state.gov/lgbtqi-human-rights/
So, it doesn't seem all that radical to me. Left-of-center on the issue, perhaps, but not particularly radical.
Military alliances are seen as a political necessity, and can be had with countries that are otherwise distasteful. Sports tournaments are seen as popular entertainment, and should ideally not involve transferring money to horrible regimes or causing the death of many workers.
For better or worse, the average person also pays a lot more attention to sports tournaments compared to politics, especially foreign politics.
Don't forget arms sales as well, Kaitian. Don't want the general public rocking the boat about those, but if the plebs want to protest about some sporting nonsense let them go ahead and blow off some steam:
"Yet under successive governments, both Tory and Labour, the UK has approved the sale of high impact weapons while also effectively endorsing the regime with their attendance at this year’s World Cup. UK government figures show that licences include.
£2.6 billion worth of ML10 licences (aircraft, helicopters, drones)
£765 million worth of ML4 licences (grenades, missiles, bombs, countermeasures)
£20 million worth of ML1 licences (small arms)
£4.2 million worth of ML3 licences (ammunition)
Equipment approved includes machine guns, ammunition, weapon sights, assault rifles and ‘anti-riot’ shields, according to UK government statistics seen by the Scottish Greens, who have condemned the Tories’ complicity and demanded an immediate halt to all arms sales to the regime."
Well I agree with the latter comment. However if your country is in a military alliance with a country that’s repugnant to your proclaimed values maybe the rest of the world may not take those values seriously.
Ordinary citizens in democracies should expect to have a say about them, because they should expect to have a say about everything. They are scuppered by their own tendency to see symbolic warfare, AKA sport, as more important than real warfare...and they are scuppered all over again by elites not offering a real choice.
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second.
Presumably there must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
There's the HiFi Hymn book: https://www.youtube.com/@HiFiHymnBook But I think that plays only the organ accompaniments. For example here is the carol "A Virgin Most Pure". Presumably the tune is repeated for the number of verses, but of course the potential downside of trying to sing along with it is that it will press on relentlessly even if the singers' timing falters! :-)
Many carols and hymns are suited for a delicate higher pitch tone and accompaniment. But, at the risk of sounding sexist, I think others are better with male voice choirs, such as (IMHO) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, or Martin Luther's great hymn "A safe stronghold our God is still" (Ein Feste Burg)
Thanks! There's a great range of carols there, which is really good. I still find her voice a bit "classical", though, like it's optimised for sounding like an instrument rather than for making out the words clearly - compared with most pop, musical theatre, Disney, or just random friends and acquaintances. (I did try asking a friend of a friend who's good at singing if she had any recordings of her singing carols. She didn't and was too busy this year but said she might next year.)
Try Wee Sing Christmas. It starts with the secular ones and moves on to the religious ones, getting more and more obscure as you go along. It's a children's chorus and meant for children, so you can make the lyrics out.
Thanks, those are pretty good, and they have a broader range of actual carols than some of the other suggestions. They mostly seem pretty good, although on some of the tracks the voices aren't especially clear.
"Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second. "
Do recordings from the 1950s (e.g. Bing Crosby's White Christmas album) work for you? I find the diction better than modern artists.
YouTube recordings of suburban church services around mid-to-late December?
This year we did a perfectly normal "O Come o come Emmanuel", "O come all ye faithful", "Hark the Herald Angels Sing", "O holy night" and then we messed up "Angels we have heard on high" by playing it too fast.
That's quite a good idea, especially if they have soloists (and the soloists aren't too classical in their style).
If they have choirs, it tends to have the same failure mode as the big choirs like King's College: a classical sound where it's hard to make out the words.
I expect there are more but I'm not very good at searching through the archive. To find this, I searched "Jingle Bells", went through until I found one matching your criteria, then tried to use the tags to find similar videos.
Thanks - I listened to their Silent Night and it sounded like the typical classical recording where you can't make out the words unless you already know them, because that sort of recording is optimised for something other than making out the words: they seem to want the voice to sound as much like another instrument as possible. (I do know most of the words, but our kids don't, and they want to join in.)
I'm looking for voices that sound more like pop or musical theatre singers (but still singing the traditional tune and words rather than adding extra flourishes and changes).
Looks like they did a whole album, which is even better. Although some of the tracks (like In The Bleak Midwinter) fall into the flourishes-and-twiddles category.
I'd be happy with either, but in my experience it's easier to make out the words from a soloist.
Yes, those are both pretty good, thanks. It would be nice if there were more carols (and also Sinatra's "O Little Town" and "Midnight Clear" aren't the tunes I recognise, but presumably they're the American tunes).
I really can't take you seriously. ACX and SSC before it are all about trying to find some common ground, some empathy with people. You're doing the exact opposite. It seems like you can't understand that calling eating meat "[being] complicit in the worst atrocity in human history" will not get people on your side. If you're not getting people on your side, are you doing it for the animals, or for your own moral high ground? Aren't you being complicit yourself too?
You complain about people not having empathy for the suffering of animals, but you fail yourself to show empathy for other human beings:
> I’m not a retributivist. Really, I think that from the point of view of the universe, their well-being matters just as much as anyone else’s. But on a purely emotional level, I would not be distressed finding out that one of these people lived a miserable life.
To be perfectly blunt, this has given me more empathy for the side that you oppose than for yours. The people mocking you sounds like morons, but I prefer morons to self-righteous type with no self-awareness. You have that capacity, that is both a blessing and a curse, to be able to notice suffering that other people ignore. Please don't use it as a way to generate even more suffering.
Edit: I'll add that your focus on Trump undermined again the animal suffering cause. I'm assuming you're American, in which case you may have taken Trump because he is closer to you than some way more horrible people. That is the same mechanism that allow people to eat meat, dissociation through focus on what makes us different.
You go on about the meat-eating to an extent that shows that the people engaging in it *were* correct to use it as a tactic to irk you and that they *won*.
"These emotionally fragile lunatics who were going after me for asking someone questions, defending a friend, and making analogies — you can read a more detailed account in my previous article — were gleefully snickering for hours on end about how funny it was that they were complicit in the worst atrocity in human history, one that I was deeply morally opposed to."
Well gorsh, I've just participated in "the worst atrocity in human history" by cooking and consuming the Christmas ham. Funny how somehow I don't feel chastened by your sensibilities.
If you want to demonstrate how those people were clodpolls, don't make their point for them! Don't show how they were correct in what would achieve their ends by going on at length about how much you think meat-eating is icky, when you are also trying to make a point about "it's not rational to judge whether an idea is correct depending on who agrees with it".
I get that you are trying to show that yeah, you can be sympathetic to the likes of 'Jim' by sharing an example from your own life. But five sentences at maximum would have done that. Going on for *paragraphs* worth of how you think meat-eating is evil rape torture murder is not going to make your point any more impactful and instead does make you sound like "boy, they really do live rent-free in your head, don't they?"
Also the huge chunks of Hanania don't impress me because he don't impress me, rube that I am.
You do have some good points about how politics is a lot more visceral than we like to think. But it is definitely coming from the position of "Now I know all of you could never, in a thousand years, imagine being a Trump supporter so let me translate those caveman grunts into intelligible English for you". For instance, the bit here:
"I’d imagine that you could predict someone’s political affiliation with roughly 90% accuracy by finding out whether they found Trump’s claim, after Meghan Kelly pointed out that he’d called women lots of names, that he’d said those only to Rosy O’Donnell to be charming or horrific. I’d imagine that nearly all liberals would be disgusted by that claim and most conservatives would be amused."
It's not nearly as simple as "disgusted/amused"; are the conservatives amused by calling women names? by calling one specific woman names? why her? are they amused more by the outraged liberals? are they remembering that the days of "grab 'em by the pussy" which are supposed to make all our bloods boil are the same days the likes of shock-jocks flipping the bird to the FCC were being championed by liberals? that we were supposed to find Howard Stern charming not horrific, based on being liberal versus conservative?
Glancing at it, I have a few points on how it could have been written differently, more to my personal preferences.
First, move the personal anecdotes towards the end, or abridge them, or remove them entirely. As someone not previously familiar with you, those parts were not super interesting.
Second, cite (or link) more sources for the thesis. E.g. you state "We have mountains of evidence that disgust drives a lot of people’s views on huge numbers of topics. Hanania talks about this."
But you don't actually reference or even link to any of that evidence.
You state "I’d imagine that you could predict someone’s political affiliation with roughly 90% accuracy by finding out whether they found Trump’s claim."
But you don't point to any research on the relationship between disgust in general, or regarding specific things and political orientation.
Third, cut down on the lengthy block quotes and replace them with short summaries with links to the originals.
I've spent a great deal of time over the last month interacting with ChatGPT in the past month. I've been posting some of those interactions to my blog, New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ChatGPT
I've annotated and discussed some interactions quite heavily. Others not so much. Topics include: 2 Spielberg films (Jaws, AI), Tezuka's Astro Boy stories, Justice, haiku, conversation structure, local geography, tutoring children, grammatical knowledge and self-referential sentences, trumpets and trumpeters, a Seinfeld bit, others.
The world cup has me wondering: How does non-wc European club soccer work? Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league? If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)
> Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league?
They play their national tournaments and the european tournament simultaneously (Champions League for the top teams, Europa League for the rest).
> If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring?
yes. But PSG being stacked off the charts compared to the rest of the national league is unprecedented. Normally stacked teams don't get so far ahead of the rest, like Bayern Munich
In Spain there's also Atletico Madrid too and Barcelona declined a lot.
Modern football is very competitive and you can put up a fight against stacked teams with some physical (speed, stamina, having one tall player for aerial, etc) playing. This world cup teams like Japan, Canada and Australia put up some great displays.
"If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)"
This doesn't answer your question, but might provide some context to other answers:
Summary: Yes, the good teams dominate their national soccer leagues in a way not seen in American sports. This isn't as boring as you might think, though, and I speculate on why. My speculation: for the same reason that bad college football teams playing good college football teams isn't as boring as it might be -- hedonic adaptation applies and the awesomeness of winning when a big underdog makes up for getting crushed most years.
For the English league (and UK/Ireland leagues pretty much in general) there is an entire gradation from the professionals down to amateurs. The old league system was broken up by the formation of the Premier League; before that, it was one league with four divisions- First Division to Fourth Division - going from the top to the lowest professional clubs.
The top clubs broke off to form "the Premier League" in 1992 to have more money etc. The new divisions are hence the Premiership, the Championship, League One and League Two. They all operate on a system of relegation and promotion which means that at the end of the season, the worst-performing clubs at the bottom of the league table will drop down a league, and the best-performing clubs at the top of the table will be promoted up to the next league (obviously for the Premier League the top clubs can't be promoted any higher, but the bottom clubs can drop down to the Championship and the top Championship clubs can be promoted to the Premiership).
There are national and international tournaments for these leagues; the FA Cup, league championship, etc. are the national tournaments for the English league:
The international tournaments are (for European football) the Champions League and the Europa League are the two most important ones. There are also competitions like the World Club Cup:
And to make money and for publicity purposes and merchandising, during the European off-season often top clubs will play tournaments in Asia and America against local clubs.
Your home-town club may not be big enough to be in the Premiership, for example, but you can follow it anyway in the next league, and if it's in the Championship there's always the hope that maybe this year will be the year they make it via promotion. And then there are the host of next-level, semi-pro to amateur leagues under the English Football League. A lot of people will have their home town club and a Premiership club that they follow.
As to "isn't it boring to watch two teams that aren't the top two?", that depends. You can have a top team that really does crush all opposition, or you can have a top team that plays wonderfully against the best in the world, then loses by a whopping margin to a much lower-ranked team. Not often, but it does happen.
It's often fun to check the Five Thirty Eight match predictions against what the result turns out to be; most times the 83% chance to win team does win. But sometimes it's a draw. And sometimes the 17% chance to win team does win, given a lucky goal:
And sometimes you have a team that is dominant for a decade, then fades away (due to the change of players, manager retiring, etc.) - that was Liverpool in the 90s and now Manchester United. We're only half way through the season, more or less, and look at the table today; Brighton in sixth position, for heaven's sake!
Teams/clubs come in and out of prominence in their turn; Notts Forest, Southampton and others were winners in their day and are now in danger of relegation. The wheel of fortune turns and those on top are now below, those below are now on top.
> And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona
It's true that some leagues are dominated by a small number of teams. (Actually three in Spain rather than two - I think you were combining Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid - but others have two top teams or even just one)
But that doesn't mean they're unbeatable in individual games. Last year those top three teams won 68%, 55% and 55% of their games respectively, so even when you're up against one of them there's still quite a sizeable chance of coming out with a point or three. Or from Madrid/Barca fans' perspective, being the better team overall doesn't guarantee you a win on the night.
There are also things to care about at the season level for fans of teams outside the top three:
* You might still be in the running for European competition places even if you don't have any realistic chance of winning the league.
* At the other end of the table, European football works on a promotion/relegation system - the bottom n (usually 3) teams are demoted to a lower league at the end of the season, so there's always a struggle to avoid that happening.
* For teams outside of the top division there's also the chance of getting promoted to a higher league based on the same system. In England the top 2 teams get automatic promotion while the 3rd-6th ranked teams go into a mini knockout competition for the final promotion slot - I think the system is similar in other countries.
* Finally most countries have a separate knockout tournament running at the same time as the league. The single-elimination system means that the results are less predictable and smaller teams have a chance to cause an upset.
You have both national competitions and European competitions. Only the best teams of each country get to take part in the European competitions.
In national competitions there are usually a few teams much stronger than everyone else, but also another few which are just slightly less good. (So in Spain, your example, you have two teams which dominate most of the time, but maybe half a dozen which consistently give them a hard time and even win championships less frequently but not that rarely). I wouldn't say matches against the weakest teams are boring though - especially since in modern days the gap between the weak and the strong is not so huge in the main leagues - but they are usually less interesting than the rest. The thing with national competitions is that they're a game of consistency. Sure, the top two teams should be able to beat almost everyone else in the league, but how many points they will concede in the course of 40ish games is what really determined champions.
(There are also national knock-out competitions with slightly different incentives, but those are usually secondary.)
In European competitions you usually have a format like in the World Cup with a huge number of really strong teams playing. That does mean it's usually more interesting, especially as teams cannot be there unless they did well in their national competitions the previous year. They do play less often though, and are a big drain on the resources of big teams which end up having to keep their good shape over a much larger number of games, thereby improving the chances of weaker teams in both types of competitions.
Yeah, in a way you have 'mini World Cups' with things like the Champions League - will your club make it to qualify? And if it does, will it make it all the way to the final against the other top European clubs? Or will their rivals do it? Or will you get there but have an embarrassing, dream-crushing defeat? Will they make it three in a row winning the Champions League? Is that star player finally past it and will have to limp off in ignominy? Depending on whether it's your team's star player or not, you may dread/hope for this to happen 😁
And then there is the whole "will we win the league/national tournaments/qualify for Europe/win a European championship" hope for the Double, Treble, Treble Treble, etc. every year. Your club might start off with a good chance of one or more of these, then end the season with nothing (not that I'm bitter or anything....)
If it's not complicated, you are not suffering enough 😂 The (very basic) structure is that the national federation is the governing body for football in that country, e.g. FAI for Ireland, FA for England and so on.
These national federations are then all part of six governing bodies globally. For Europe, that body is UEFA.
Finally, the world governing body is FIFA (which is in charge of the World Cup amongst other things). UEFA and FIFA are (allegedly to keep the lawyers away) *spectacularly* corrupt, with regular bribery and financial mismanagement scandals which somehow never result in anybody serving jail time. Hence all the to-do over (a) holding the World Cup in the winter time instead of the usual summer competition and (b) awarding it to Qatar. The cynical take on it is that the host nation for the next World Cup is the one that paid the most and best bribes to FIFA officials (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly). That will be Canada/Mexico/United States for 2026, because FIFA would *dearly* love to manage to break into the US market on the scale that they haven't achieved yet, all that lovely, lovely money to be made!
Why do so few people care about the UN report into China's treatment of Uyghurs? It created a few headlines and then quickly disappeared from the public consciousness despite it being explicitly a case of ethnic oppression.
Because the UN Report into China's treatment of the Uyghurs, is only slightly more relevant to anything anyone cares about, than Mrs. McGillicudy's third-grade class resolution that China's treatment of the Uyghurs is really bad.
Everybody who cares, already knows that the CCP is horribly, nigh-unto-genocidally oppressing the Uyghurs. That's P>0.99 common knowledge in the caring-about-obscure-ethnic-groups-in-Asia community. There were no fence-sitters saying "Gosh, I didn't know for sure, but now that a *UN Report* says so, that's horrible and it's time for me to take a stand!"
Everybody who cares, *also* already knows with P>0.99 that nobody is going to do anything about it beyond some ineffectual scolding and boycotts, because doing anything really effective would be too dangerous and/or expensive and there aren't *enough* people who care to make that happen. And while there *may* be things that could change that, everybody knows that a UN Report telling everyone what they already know isn't one of those things.
What can be done about it? The situation in Ukraine is getting more coverage because Western countries are more directly involved. We can't arm the Uyghurs or fund any sort of Uyghur rebellion, partly because we have no real geographical access to Xinjiang, and partly because the Uyghurs are in a much worse position relative to China than the Ukrainians are relative to Russia. At this point, any sort of uprising would likely do nothing but increase the probability of their complete annihilation. (In fact, part of the importance of the Ukraine War is making sure the Ukrainians don't end up in such a hopeless position!)
The most we can do right now is put as much diplomatic and economic pressure on China as we possibly can in the hopes that the Chinese government will eventually take a softer stance towards the Uyghurs, but there's a limit to how effective that is. Still, there's a reason that "being tough on China" is one of the few issues remaining that the Republican establishment and Democratic establishment can still agree on. Even if it's not directly addressing the Uyghur genocide, it's an attempt to incentivize the Chinese government to be more respectful towards human rights in general.
It's not news that China is genociding the Uyghurs. This has been going on for years, and will go on for years. It may not stop until there's nothing left of them as a people. It would have made much bigger headlines if they'd stopped, declared a(n?) Uyghur autonomous zone, and invited in international groups to keep an eye on things and confirm that they really had changed course. Terrible thing that you can't do anything about is still happening isn't much of a headline.
There's also far group thing going on here. We expect the Chinese to be barbarians. Them doing this is not only not news, it's not something we're not really interested in. If it were happening in France or something it would be front page stuff, and would likely stay that way. But the Chinese? Whatever. It's what we expect from them.
It's like a few years ago when the Israelis and Russians were slapping around their respective Muslim victim populations. Israel go a ton more coverage, because in some sense we think of Israel as part of team modern West. Russia saw *some* coverage, but Russians murder and terrorize subject people isn't interesting, it's just what we expect from them. They aren't part of the modern world, really. What else can be expected of them but barbarity?
It's probably not a great thing that we hold ourselves and our close friends to a higher moral standard and just assume the rest of the world is full of benighted children without the ability to act in fully moral ways, but I do think that's basically how we (collectively) see these things.
The evidence you're offering here -- a lack of headlines -- proves only that the main news outlets don't care. So you can ask "Why does the New York Time not care about the Uighurs?" if you like, and that question makes sense.
But whether people in general care, and to what extent they do, can't be determined by what headlines appear most often in newspapers or on Twitter.
The Times? Kind of doubty. The Post, maybe, but the Times is strongly driven by their sense of mission, which they have been willing to follow despite the massive loss in circulation over the past 35 years.
From an "outside of the US" perspective, the US not caring much about the rest of the world is not surprising, so few people caring about what happens to a minority in China seems to be expected. Ethnic oppression also tend to be treated more lightly when it's not done by white people in the US, to the point that I've seen people argue that racism is only a consequence of whiteness/Europe/the west, ignoring all other instances of racial discrimination in the world.
I think that, with post-covid supply chain issues and Russia sanctions already impacting the economy, and a geopolitical need to not drive Russia and China into a bloc, there is very little appetite to do anything substantive to punish China for their actions. And most people would rather not dwell on an atrocity they can't do anything about.
because people know china is more openly corrupt than most other countries and the atrocities are happening within china – so little action can be taken by foreigners even if they are disturbed by the situation. it's not like russia and ukraine, where russia is as openly corrupt but the atrocities they are committing are happening outside of the country.
Partly what's been mentioned below, plus a bit of I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-the-Outgroup, but also "pic or it didn't happen" is very much at play here.
Unlike George Floyd, Nazi death camps, etc, there is no compelling, "sexy" video footage of Uyghur suffering that would provide the kind of emotional immediacy that motivates people to get involved.
Did it bring up any new information? "Uyghurs are being oppressed" has been common knowledge for years (with the normal people who care about global human rights abuses talking about it a lot).
George Floyd dying received more interest in in the day it happened than all cumulative interest in the Uyghurs has, despite the left crying about conservatives being too focused on America.
George Floyd was murdered, slowly, in public, on video, while begging for his life, on an American street, by an officer of the law. It would be bizarre if any story involving exclusively foreigners got even a fraction of the coverage.
Protesting for police reform could plausibly lead to police reform in the US (and in some cases did). There is very little we can do to change the behavior of an unfriendly nuclear superpower. The little we have done (things like sanctions on Xinjiang's public safety bureau) is boring and uncontroversial and has no obvious lever that a protest could push on. The bigger stuff we could be doing involves targeting China in general rather than Xinjiang in particular, and you do indeed hear lots of politicians talk about things like "getting tough on China" or "China's long record of human rights abuses."
Also, I notice that you complain about leftists saying that conservatives are too focused on America, but you don't actually evaluate the accusation. "The left cares more than the right" and "the left doesn't care enough" are not inconsistent statements, after all. Do you think the right cares less about what's happening to the Uyghurs than the left does? If so, do you consider that a problem?
Or to put it more bluntly, are you bringing this up to bring attention to a cause that you think hasn't received enough attention, or just to dunk on your opponents for a perceived inconsistency?
After the attack on Pearl Harbor sure, the line was: ‘They say "America First," but they mean "America Next!"’, as for the more recent usage by Trump a few regarded it as evidence that he was a fascist but I don’t remember anyone giving much of a damn about the phrase otherwise.
I would think that they object to explicitly putting American interests first in foreign policy, but this does not mean that they will drop their US-centric point of view when looking at the rest of the world.
"Caring about" what is happening globally is absolutely not the same thing as "deciding that you know better than someone else as to how they should live and taking actions to enforce that". How did you jump to that idea?
The statement was:
"Left or Right, most Americans don’t care about what happens overseas, nor should they"
The "nor should they" makes no sense if you value human solidarity.
When you can't do anything to promote something you really care about, you get unhappy. So it's better to think about something else, where you CAN (at least plausibly) make a difference.
Yes, it's better to have a wider view, but to focus on where what you do might make a difference.
Is the you individual or collective? Is making a difference the same thing as solving a problem? The US , collectively, has made a difference in many countries, and could do in more. The intractability of the Uyghur situation is rather exceptional.
Sure, but the Ukrainians aren't being helpless victims that need rescuing. They're fighting. All they're asking for is guns and bullets, so they can rescue themselves. A lot of Americans are pretty OK with that kind of attitude, and with helping out (by sending the guns and bullets).
A number of factors drive interest in topics. One of them seems to be a general lack of interest in international affairs.
Another factor is novelty. Ongoing issues that everyone is vaguely aware of, rarely make headlines.
There are similarly few headlines about the half a million or so largely preventable deaths from malaria every year, the killings in Tigray, or the ongoing issues in Burma.
For that matter, there is not much coverage of the opposite trends - the incredible progress that humanity is making.
E.g. Norman Borlaug, whose work likely saved well over a billion lives, is a fairly obscure figure. If he landed a plane with a hundred or so people on it in a river in the US, he would probably be much more famous.
Norman Borlaug is dead. The mistreatment of uyghurs is ongoing.
And as for lack of interest in international affairs, the american left to this day talk about european colonization of Africa despite it having nothing to do with the US.
Agree. Both the left and right establishment are also very much pro-intervention in ukraine. We could easily be arming Uighur Muslims, but we aren’t. If we were, I think media coverage would be much more intense there and public sentiment would follow.
How? As in, how specifically would we get the weapons to Xinjiang without first fighting a war with Beijing? What organized force there would be capable of receiving and deploying the weapons?
Arming Ukraine is a *lot* easier - it is a country with an operating government and army, on NATO borders.
This is definitely a good point and I officially retract my claim they it would be easy.
I think what you’d do is give a bunch of arms to nearby Muslim countries, like Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan.
For a while, I had wondered if the arms left in Afghanistan by “mistake” were actually left there as part of a secret agreement specifically for that purpose. “Whoops we left this stuff behind, oh no.” Then, a few years later a bunch of ridiculously well-equipped Mujahidin start a guerilla war to liberate their Muslim brothers in Xinjiang.
I now think this is less likely but I’m still open to it. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, in 2014, I remember thinking, “democrats aren’t going to support fighting back because of bad memories in iraq. You’d need to find some way to get democrats to hate Russia for them to back a war. “ i then wondered what that might look like, until 2016 came along and it became obvious.
Meta point here: it’s basically impossible to provide evidence for or against this kind of claim, or any kind of claim about the belief distributions of large groups.
To me, what Edwardoo is saying as true as someone saying, the left tends to care more about global warming than the right. But if asked to prove this, unless I could find some specific poll, all I could really do is shrug.
Unless the group's membership requires certain beliefs, e.g. to join the Libertarian Party of the US, you must agree not to initiate violence against anyone. You'd think people would realize that libertarians are thus pacifists just like Quakers, or that Quakers are libertarians in disguise, but no, that never happens.
That only follows if there's an active enforcement policy. Are Libertarians who instigate violence against others kicked out of the party? If so, I've never heard of it happening. Or any other common punishment. Otherwise it's just "This is one of the things you have to say", like Christians being pacifists, refusing to join the army, etc.
I didn't intend to publish the results-this is not for an academic study, but for a project. Since you and some people are interested, I will reach out to you individually and share the conclusions once I am done.
So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.
(Posted this a couple of days ago last Open Thread, but I guess it was too late in the cycle.)
So far as I know, there is no Federal legal mechanism by which Trump could be barred from office. The requirements for becoming President are laid out explicitly in the Constitution, and no legislative act of Congress can overrule them.
Each state has rules about who may and may not appear on the ballot, and I would guess that is probably possible, both practically and legally, for any given state to prohibit Trump from appearing. It would have to be a prohibition sufficiently broad that it disbars a category of person that includes more than just Trump himself, since the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder, and it's not likely a law that just said "No ex-President who fomented agitation on January 6 can be on our ballot" would pass the inevitable Supreme Court review. But I still think a sufficiently clever formulation would work.
But that would be at best a sterile exercise. The only states where such a bar could pass the legislature are those that Trump would not win anyway, e.g. California, Massachusetts, New York. Trump doesn't give a rats ass if he can't run in those states, since he can't win them. In fact, since his shtick now is martyrdom, I'd say he'd welcome an attack like that, since it would enrage and energize the very substantial Republican minorities in those states, and result in a massive flood of money to his campaign.
I doubt it would sit well with independents, either, who very reasonably think the choice of who to elect President should be left completely in the hands of The People, and no interfering assholes in the legislature -- any legislature, state or Federal -- should presume to prejudge for whom they can and can't vote.
>No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The claim is that Jan 6 was Trump rebelling against the US, and that this section applies to Presidents (both of which are not obvious), and that therefore Trump can be disqualified from becoming President again (even if people vote for him).
I agree that this is a dumb move to try, though, particularly because the potential for backfire isn't capped at "get hammered next election" - it's one of only a few things that could potentially snowball into another US civil war (which is what I meant by "blow the powder keg").
Thanks. It had actually never occurred to me that anyone could be sufficiently cynical or brain-dead as to attempt to apply the Fourteenth Amendment. But I guess we are in an unusual era, with higher than usual levels of cynicism (among the hucksters) and naivete and/or historical ignorance (among their potential followers). Somehow the Internet has shaved 10 IQ points off the entire nation over the past 30 years.
Nah the Internet has simply _revealed_ how many Americans believe piles of completely-ridiculous shit. And always have. I am old enough to clearly remember dinner-table discourse in this country long before any interwebs -- it was always thus. My parents (born in the 1920s) always said that it was always thus going back to their childhoods too. Some of the specific stupid shit actually changes from generation to generation while some simply circles back around in new forms, but the big pile has always existed.
That said....in this instance I will suggest that you're missing the forest for the trees and that the Jan 6 Committee's recommendation regarding Trump and the 14th is very smart. I'd been impressed (and frankly surprised) with that committee's efforts in general and this move adds to that feeling.
The committee simply _recommended_ that Trump be banned from future office. They offered no idea of how that would be done. That is because the committee members know perfectly well that no legal mechanism exists for the such a move, and also that this committee explicitly has zero legal authority of any kind anyway, and also that even if those things weren't true neither Joe Biden nor any other current Dem party leader is so politically dense as to allow such an attempt anyway. (AOC and some others would happily try it but they are not actually in charge of anything, not yet anyway.)
So why offer such vague hand-waving -- in stark contrast to the committee's overall methodology which has been to be almost painfully specific and clear and to support every point it makes in public with piles of specific backup -- about such a potentially explosive thing? Answer: to nudge the narrative, or as one particular cliche calls it the Overton window, in a way precisely calibrated to put Trump in particular and MAGAts in general on tilt.
With that particular recommendation they are taking advantage of the fact that so many Americans (a) fetishize the idea of our Constitution as a Sacred Text written Long Ago which must be Honored and Defended as written; (b) know little about the content or meaning of the actual Constitution but are always impressed by and willing to repeat selective quotations from it; (c) have grounded their whole self-image in the idea that they are the last defenders stalwart and true of said Constitution.
Now, for the next couple of years, every article or interview or dinner table conversation about Donald Trump's candidacy will eventually include the point that our Constitution says nobody who's engaged in insurrection can run for President. And that a lengthy thorough investigation resulted in such a recommendation.
And if the conversation goes on a while someone will bring up that some of the people who thought they were doing Trump's bidding on 1/6/21 have in fact been convicted in courts of law of "seditious conspiracy" which, gosh, sure sounds a lot like "insurrection"....Trump and his fans will now have to play defense on that point, over and over, without ever being able to get rid of it. They will be having specific words of their beloved Constitution thrown in their faces, over and over. If past performance is any indication they will, um, not handle that particularly well....and there is zero actual downside here for the committee. It's just a little word cloud that is precisely calibrated to drive their opponents around the bend.
It is, honestly, a downright Trumpian move on the part of the Jan 6 committee. Pretty freakin' brilliant. Machiavelli would be proud.
Hmm, well, it's a nice argument. A priori I tend to be pretty skeptical of arguments that a seemingly boneheaded move is actually a fiendishly clever 4D chess move, particularly when we're talking about a committee of Congressmen, the collective IQ of which is found by taking the average individual IQ (already not high) and dividing by the square of the number of members.
Also, "sounds a lot like" is a zillion miles from "is," especially when it comes to the law. And I think anyone who can say 6 January was an actual "insurrection" with a straight face and completely sincerely is simply too drunk on ideological Kool-Ade to be worth any attempt at rational intercourse. We know what "insurrection" looks like: it looks like tanks in the streets, TV and radio cut off, men with armbands and guns on street corners, and ultimately -- in a country the size of ours -- at least tens of thousands dead and weeks of violent tumult. The riots in Portland have a much better claim to be an "insurrection" than the January 6 fracas.
Anyway, anyone who is a fan of Trump dismisses the entire January 6 hype as partisan bullshit, of no importance at all. So it won't matter to them. Centrists who can be persuaded that Trump is better than the alternates on offer will also not give a crap about the January 6 investigation, since absolutely nothing new was revealed, and I think (as I said above) they will be if anything slightly to moderately annoyed at the suggestion that any government body should tell them who they can and can't vote for. So for them the report and its recommendations is probably a net negative, and nobody trying to persuade them to forego Trump would be advised to use it.
That leaves only anti-Trump partisans, for whom, yes, I expect the report and its conclusions and recommendations to be endlessly discussed, with relish, the way one revels in the shortcomings of his enemies. Since these people would not vote for Trump even if the alternative was the Antichrist nothing will change there, either.
Well obviously I know that Trump fans dismiss the January 6 "hype", have experienced that directly from a few of them. (And we see an example of it right here in this comment thread.) But you're kind of missing my point -- it isn't about changing any of their minds about anything.
"Centrists who can be persuaded that Trump is better than the alternates on offer", that's honestly just code for "people who find woke-ism so enraging that nothing else matters to them." That's clearly where you sit, and I've had days pretty close to that myself or at least I did until 1/6/21. But anyway again, my point had nothing to do with that group.
As for Jan 6 itself, have to say I find your dismissal of it to be bizarre at best. A literal attempt to forcibly overturn a national election result, I mean if that's not an insurrection...?? If you're willing to whatabout _that_, and say something as bizarre as that it only counts if we get to the tanks-in-the-streets stage with thousands dead....okay yea then we're never going to be working from a shared frame of reality.
And maybe you're right that so many Americans are now that far gone. I hope not. Guess we'll find out a couple of years from now.
Heh. Very persuasive! You sound a lot like all the folks who were instantly sure that the Mueller Report was a nothingburger without feeling any need to actually read the Mueller Report.
But anyway that red herring is completely irrelevant to the point. Call it a slipshod investigation, or a partisan witchhunt, or a strawberry shortcake if you like -- deployment of some Trumpian hand-waving to put constitutionally-illiterate Trumpists on tilt remains delicious.
My feeling is that it would be a good thing if Trump had a heart attack or was killed in an auto accident or had some medical problem that made running for president impractical but a very bad thing if he was prevented from running by something, most obviously legal action, that could plausibly be interpreted as enemy action.
Oh please. If Trump dies before 2024 by heart attack, the story will be poison. If he's hit by a car it'll be murder. If he dies before he can run again regardless of the circumstances, a very substantial minority will believe it's foul play regardless of the circumstances. It would be a slow rolling disaster that would last for years.
Quite likely true. Keep in mind that the reason they might believe that is that the left collectively lost their minds about Trump, to the point of ridiculous conspiracy theories about Russian Collusion (and a dozen other "the walls are closing in on Trump" stories) ran nightly for every year of his presidency. He was impeached the first time for something that every president in history has probably done dozens if not hundreds of times - pressuring a foreign power in a way that benefits them. I mean, if we want to change how we feel about such things, that's fine, but post hoc to get the rival team's obnoxious leader is not a good thing.
I disagree. The best outcome is for Trump to run without interference, and be defeated in the Republican primary. That, and only that, will put an end to the myth. Martyrdom, real or apparent, will not.
A defeated Trump might intentionally sabotage whoever does win the Republican primary, telling his supporters to stay home etc. I'd prefer to see a real election in the general.
I doubt any attempt at sabotage would be effective, if he loses the primaries badly, which it looks right now like he will. His efforts so far to influence other elections have had decidedly unimpressive results. I definitely expect the Democrats and the press to hype his chances as much as they can, because they think he's poison to Republican fortunes, so unfortunately it will be a challenge to penetrate the sound 'n' fury to see what's really going on, at least until the primary season actually starts.
Separate point: I don't think he's poison to your fortunes. There have been four Trump era elections, if you count the last one. in 2016 and 2020, he, and Republicans generally, out ran their polls and did better than expected. In 2018 and 2022 the polls were just about accurate and Democrats were happy with the results. I think the Trump era party doesn't do well in midterms, because the Trump effect and Trump's coattails don't work when he's not on the ballot.
But 2024 isn't a midterm. I think if Trump runs, especially if Biden goes for term two, he'll walk in, with the Senate and House in tow.
Who said anything about my fortunes? I'm not a Republican. Never have been.
And I disagree with you that Trump will even win the nomination. The people who put him over the top in 2016 -- generally, non-college-educated centrist white men, with their female brethren to some extent -- roughly speaking, Truman Democrats -- were apparently bitterly disappointed in what he got done (or more precisely failed to get done), and it was exactly the loss of their support that screwed him in 2020. The opposition of all the people who disliked him in 2016 didn't matter in the slightest, since the numbers of those people did not increase. (They might have had the Democrats run a stronger candidate than Joe Biden.) The support of the people who turned up at his rallies and shouted themselves hoarse also didn't matter a fig, since *their* numbers didn't change.
I have seen no evidence that the key demographic that lost faith in the guy is willing to give him another chance in 2024 after turning him down in 2020 when he had a lot more going for him. Not as long as there is anyone more plausible on the ballot.
That said, anything can happen in politics, and a lot will hinge on who the Democrats end up nominating -- since I gather that Biden fully intends to fight for his job -- and a lot will depend on whether plausible Republican candidates jump in or keep their powder dry for 2026. Plus the unknown unknowns, of course. So who knows? But I consider a Trump v2.0 Presidency to be quite unlikely. And I also consider it a certainty that lefties will nevertheless hype the possibility as much as they can.
For the Dems: don't sleep on fear. We were smugly sure we had 2016 in the bag. We chuckled as Trump wrecked stalwart after stalwart of the Republican party. I personally enjoyed the National Review's meltdown.* We loled when Ted Cruz had to make voter calls on TV for the guy who suggested his dad killed Kennedy. There was talk of 54 senators, of a much more radical justice than the milquetoast Garland. Come the day, hundreds of women went and left "I voted" stickers on Susan B's grave.
Then in 2020, we white knuckled, doubted but hoped, held our nose and picked our most moderate, don't scare the horses option. And it worked, but only just. And then for a long while we weren't at all sure it would stick. Vote him out, sure, but will he go? If he doesn't will anyone make him? For a little while on Jan 6 it looked like maybe he wouldn't. Then, finally, he did.
Trump is like a horror movie villain (to us). We won't really believe he's gone until he's dead and we see the body. I think he could win in 2024 even if he's in jail. Hell, he may have a better chance in that case.
Also, I just checked. RealClearPolitics has him up 20 points on DeSanctimonious, so I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that it looks like he'll lose the primaries badly.
*I was a long time National Review reader, starting during the Bush admin. I followed them because the let me see the Republicans talking to each other and coming to consensus, which wasn't a perspective I got anywhere else. I am of the opinion that during the Bush years, Republican intellectuals re-oriented the party around the populist, talk-radio wing, then lost control of it during the Obama administration. I experienced the rise of Trump and their anger and despair during it as them getting their just comeuppance.
He is a loose cannon, behaves in an erratic fashion so could easily do something very bad. His main objective seems to be his own status, not any political end. His expressed political views have varied a lot over the years. He has been willing to sacrifice the welfare of the Republican party in order to maintain his power in it.
His disinterest in whether what he says is true is in some ways an asset, because it is more obvious than with a more polished politician like Biden.
Yes, but probably a *politically competent* opportunist, who is less likely to accidentally (or deliberately) crash the Republic. Trump is an extreme outlier in his aptitude-for-winning-elections : aptitude-for-governing-nations ratio, and in his my-status-is-paramount : my-ideals-are-paramount ratio.
In terms of the tangible economic and foreign policy outcomes during his presidency, I'm very uncertain whether those things would have been net better if Hillary won. The economy was excellent until covid, and the economic seppuku in response to covid was mostly a democrat thing. Trump's administration was the first in decades to not get the US involved in new wars. Aptitude for governing well and aptitude for appearing to the press to be governing well are quite different things. Conditional prediction markets about real gdp per capita would cut through the noise ex ante but I don't know a great method of ranking presidents objectively ex post. Historian rankings are too subjective.
Someone with better capability to control the government than Trump would be a big advantage if Taiwan goes hot between 2025-2028, which is definitely not a negligible chance.
Someone with better capability to keep the Democrats, if not happy, then at least not-actively-treacherous would also be a big advantage, although that's plausibly mutually exclusive with filling Trump's niche.
As noted, though, murdering him would be a terrible idea.
Yes. As sheer entertainment value, watching the heads exploding if he did run again (and even more if he got the nomination) would be amazing, but for practical purposes, no. Let somebody else go (and there are plenty of potential Republican nominees who would get the heads exploding) and stand back.
Keeping after Trump to this extent, that they need to take out something like a legal case to make sure *he* in particular can't run because something something Civil War precedent something something looks every bit as bad as the long-running efforts to pin *something* on the Clintons, which everybody agreed looked obsessive and vengeful and had less and less to do with reality as they dragged on. And it's a bad precedent to set, because it's a weapon that your enemies can use as easily as you when it's their turn to be back in power.
Look at how Supreme Court activism was the greatest thing in the world while decisions were going the way of the social liberals, and how suddenly there was a Catholic theocracy overturning human rights when the decisions didn't:
"The overturn of Roe v. Wade is part of ultra-conservatives’ long history of rejecting Galileo, Darwin, and Americanism."
Is that "Americanism" as in "Truth, justice and the American Way" and "Un-American Activities" or "Americanism" as in the quasi-heresy? Looks like it's the quasi-history as the guy writing this New Yorker piece is an ex-priest in his 70s, so one of the Spirit of Vatican II types. I anticipate this will be an enjoyable read for reasons 😁
Yes, and we're straight into "Vatican II was the greatest thing since sliced bread" and your Supreme Court is all part of an "ultra-conservative blowback", anti-feminism, anti-sex and probably anti-your auntie as well:
"These Justices are undermining not only basic elements of American democracy, such as the “wall of separation,” but also the essential spirit of Catholicism’s great twentieth-century renewal."
Jimbo here seems to be a tiny bit confused about are Catholics Protestants or not, since the Darwinian arguments weren't as severe with the Church, and nobody at the time seemed to link them to abortion, but hey our boy is on a roll here, don't stop him with facts:
"The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought. A pair of dates tells the story. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and the idea of biological evolution began to grip the Western imagination. In 1869, Pope Pius IX, in his pronouncement “Apostolicae Sedis,” forbade the abortion of a pregnancy from the moment of conception forward—an effective locating of human “ensoulment” at the joining of the ovum and sperm, an all but explicit rejection of evolutionary theory."
The next tranche of exegesis is rich pickings. *Now* he remembers that we're not Biblical literalists, but uh somehow Original Sin = Originalist reading of the Constitution? Well, maybe it's that whole "Original" bit that is making the synapses fire?
"This story gives us the concept of “original sin”—a phrase that does not appear in the Bible—and represents the ultimate form of fraudulent originalism. To read the Book of Genesis as a literal account of how the world and human life began is pure fundamentalism, and it poses a danger to the rule of reason on which the common good depends. So, too, do ahistorical readings of the U.S. Constitution. “Originalism is a legal philosophy of stasis, which reifies a historical moment,” the writer Siri Hustvedt points out in a recent piece for Literary Hub. But such historical fundamentalism, she argues, also applies to attitudes toward the creation of the individual: “The reduction of a dynamic, metamorphosing conceptus to a single abstract entity—‘the unborn’—denies both time and change.” And that denial has led to the legal, medical, economic, and personal calamities facing a post-Dobbs America, with women experiencing the brunt of the threat."
Whatever you say, Jimmy boy. 'Let's all be heretics!' is his final rallying-cry:
"Now that the Supreme Court, with an extreme originalist misreading of the Constitution, has revoked the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, the renewed political and religious tensions surrounding the issue can be clarifying, perhaps especially for Catholics. They can begin to reclaim the evolutionary character of their own history and beliefs, as well as of the understanding of when personhood begins. Indeed, many Catholics already do this, with leading Catholic politicians, for example, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, affirming abortion rights. They may cloak that affirmation in language about not wanting to impose their own religious views on others, but this really amounts to an implicit rejection of the idea that human life—and human rights—begins at conception. That rejection should be made explicit."
Americans are Special, you see, which I guess ties up the conclusion with the beginning. Americans are Special so your stinkin' rules don't apply to them, O rest of the world!
"Freedom of conscience, historical consciousness, the rights of other people to be other people, the idea that sacredness is everywhere, not just in religion—such are aspects of the onetime heresy, Americanism. Catholics in the United States can finally and openly affirm these views. Americanism helped bring about the renewal of the Church, when the Second Vatican Council embraced those very principles, the foundation of liberal democracy.
With the threat to the Church’s unfinished renewal now coming from Catholic Justices, that renewal, with its underlying American ideals, is worth retrieving and advancing, especially as a way to challenge the anti-abortion Catholic legislators who are taking what they perceive as moral instruction from a throwback Supreme Court. Indeed, the defiance by legions of Catholic women of Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of birth control can itself be a model of conscientious objection. Birth control and abortion are not the same thing, but the autonomy of women, the primacy of conscience, and the rejection of overreaching male-supremacist authority add up to an American refusal to obey draconian new laws that claim to defend human life yet do the opposite."
Ah, brings a patriotic tear to the eye, does it not? "Oh say can you seeeeee..." oh but anthems and patriotism and the like are nationalist and that is Bad. Oops!
>Look at how Supreme Court activism was the greatest thing in the world while decisions were going the way of the social liberals, and how suddenly there was a Catholic theocracy overturning human rights when the decisions didn't:
I think this is mostly a fair cop, though I would *really* appreciate it if the other side would drop its framing around this stuff. When judges on the left make sweeping rulings, they're legislating from the bench. When judges from the right do it, they're just following original intent. Drives me nuts. Everyone likes activist judges. The right's pose of rhetorically disdaining judicial activism while filling embracing that activism is bullshit.
There's a significant logical difference between judicial decisions which create new rights out of penumbras and emanations (like Roe) and judicial decisions which dissassemble a judicial superstructure erected in the 1970s and throw a complex problem back into the laps of The People and their elected representatives (like Dobbs). It's unreasonable to equate them as being "judicial activism" simply because they have equally large impacts.
Nobody on the right uses "judicial activism" to mean *removing* judicial frameworks, they mean only creating new ones -- what they see as usurping the role of the legislature.
I really don't accept this. In that past few years the court has struck down the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, the ability of public unions to collect dues, and just about any gun law any state or municipality wants to pass. And the same people who went on and on about judicial restraint and the importance of the legislature were nowhere to be found.
So yes, you are correct. Nobody on the right talks about judicial activism when judges make decisions you agree with. When you agree with it, it's protecting Constitutional rights. When you disagree, it's usurping the role of the legislature. The idea that it's different in kind, or that judges on the right are more deferential to the legislative branch are nonsense.
It's one of those Russell conjugations: Thomas is a champion of the law, Kagan is a judicial activist, Warren was a tyrant.
What I wrote is that no one on the right speaks about judicial activism when the Court *removes* judicial frameworks that constrain legislation or regulation. If you can find a contrary example, please let me know.
Yes, certainly the Court rules that this or that law is unconstitutional all the time. And that's what happened in all of your examples. But I don't think *either* side calls striking down laws for unconstitutonality "judicial activism." They may like the result, or not like the result, but everybody agrees this is 100% in the Court's ambit.
"Judicial activism" means going *beyond* the Court's clear Constiutional mandate -- usurping (if you disapprove) or extending (if you approve) the role of the legislature, creating legal frameworks where none existed before, discovering meanings in the Constiution or statute that the people who wrote those documents clearly did not intend. At least, that's what it means if you want it to have any meaning at all, and my impression is that serious people on both the left and right give it that meaning.
Of course you guys think your guys are just following the constitution as written. And of course I think they're judicial tyrants. They're your guys, doing things you agree with politically. Activism we like is always going to look good to us.
The part where you declare yourselves above petty activism while your judges remove womens' bodily autonomy* and break the back of the public sector unions**, rewriting two generations or more of how we organize our society, is what I object to. The judiciary, right now, is a very activist one. At least as active as it was back in the nineties when I started paying attention to this stuff. At the top it's maybe as activist as it's been since Warren.
And you know, mostly, that's fine. Elections have consequences and the people have spoken. McConnell should have been out on his ass for his shenanigans with the judiciary (not just at the top, but up and down system). And Clinton should have won the damn election and punished his horseshit by filling her spots with the most liberal firebrands she could find. But that didn't happen. McConnell won his bet and remade the country and thems the breaks. But to do it while high-mindedly declaring that you don't believe in activist judges . . . it's galling.
*return abortion to the states where it clearly belongs
**restore the right of free association to workers
Forcing the states to accept Medicaid expansion (which is what the ACA tried to do) is unconstitutional. After the decision the states could decide if they wanted to opt in or not, as with about every other federal mandate in history - often with a shiny carrot of federal money (also on offer here). Should they have left it in place despite breaking the long held legal opinion that was not how such laws were allowed to operate?
And I think you're referring to the Janus opinion, which doesn't do anything to stop unions from collecting dues. What it forbid was *forcing* *non-union members* from paying dues that they explicitly did not want to pay because they did not approve of what the union wanted - hence not joining the union. That seems like an odd place to hang your political hat and say "this is what it means to support liberal/Democratic policies."
Re gun laws: that whole "shall not be infringed" bit makes it REALLY easy to justify striking down... infringements. That's not being an activist, it's obeying the Constitution as written.
NYC's carry ban explicitly said that average citizens were not permitted to bear arms. The fact that it stood for over 100 years before being struck down is a discredit to any court that upheld it previously.
>Yes. As sheer entertainment value, watching the heads exploding if he did run again (and even more if he got the nomination) would be amazing, but for practical purposes, no.
FYI, this is already happening. He announced he was running a few weeks ago. Right now there's a bunch of talk that he's going to lose to DeSantis, but I think that's premature. Some Republican pundits gushed over the 2016 field as the best a major party had put forward in a generation. There were excited. Trump left that field littered with the broken (or at least damaged) careers of men who will now never be president. DeSantis hasn't announced anything yet. Right now he's riding high as the outsider. But if I were him I'd wait. He's young. He can spend another four years owning the libs and wrecking (or saving) Florida's schools and run then. And if he does Trump is his friend, rather than the guy trying to take one more ambitious Republican's scalp.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune.
By 2028, DeSantis will have been out of office for two years. Out of sight, out of mind. And his single strongest suit - being good on COVID, which he arguably handled better than any other politician in the country (at least in the view of a substantial segment of the population, including me) - will be eight years in the past.
The strongest entry on DeSantis's CV as far as the Republican Party faithful is concerned is turning Florida, heretofore a decidedly purple state, deep red. Right now Florida's 30 electoral votes are an uphill climb for the D candidate in 2024, which is a new thing, and could be a bit of a problem, if the R candidate makes inroads in the Rust Belt (which Trump showed was quite possible).
It's a recommendation, but will anything be done about it? I don't quite see how it can be carried out practically. If the current administration does it, then this is going to rile up a lot of people who might not like or support Trump but who think that the Democrats have no business telling the Republicans who can or can't run in an election, and besides it will be putting a weapon out there that the enemies can use just as easily as you can use. This would be a bad precedent to set, if the Democrats remember Bill Clinton's woes.
I think this is mostly signalling; yes we told you the Republicans were all evil wicked monsters and their voters are braindead puppets or evil wicked monsters, but gee due to technicality, we can't ban the Bad Orange Man from running if he dares do so, so just remember to go out and vote if you want to save democracy and apple pie! Don't stay at home, don't assume the Good Guys will win, we need *your* votes to stop the Fourth Reich!
And if Trump doesn't run, then the spotlight will turn onto "DeathSantis" or whoever the candidates are for the Republicans. Remember, this is the party of the people who tried to carry out a coup on 6th January! Let this date live forever in infamy, and don't forget to turn out to vote for us to save democracy and apple pie and forestall the Fourth Reich!
Actually prosecuting right now would be a tactical own goal. If Trump is acquitted then he would be strengthened. If he is convicted then DeSantis would be strengthened. Which is why I expect nothing further will happen.
I disagree with your short comment -- in which you seem to think that any major public attention to whether Trump is a criminal for what happened on January 6th will merely strengthen the Republican party for 2024 -- on multiple fronts. For one thing, there's a big difference between Trump being strengthened and DeSantis being strengthened, both from the point of view of conservative Never Trumpers and from the point of view of left-leaning people like me who would like to see DeSantis win the primary, Trump undermine his support after the primary, and the presidency get thrown to a Democrat (hopefully not Biden or Harris).
For another thing, given that being fueled by a victim complex is Trump's brand, it's not at all obvious to me that acquittal would strengthen him more than being convicted would, rather than the opposite.
(Unrelatedly, happy ((2^2)^2)^2 = (2^2)^(2^2)th open thread, by the way!)
Yeah probably nothing will happen. Unless by some ill fortune Trump actually wins in 24, but Democrats win back the house, in which case there will be lots of NYT thinkpieces on why this should be used as justification for the house refusing to certify Trumps election. Those thinkpieces will also be ignored…probably. The alternative would be a constitutional crisis, if not a civil war
Section 3 of the 14th amendment was clearly intended to apply to people who fought on the wrong side of the civil war. Not somebody whose tweets roused an angry mob for an afternoon. I doubt the Supremes would allow its application to Trump. I hope and expect DeSantis crushes him in the primary. It would be really bad for congress to ever ban candidates from the minority party, regardless of the circumstances. Even in the context of the civil war it was probably excessive.
Insurrection is a stretch label for an angry mob that got out of control for a few hours due to foreseeably extremely inadequate crowd control by the capitol police (the outdoor barrier where they broke through to the capitol was a waist-high movable metal thingy with only a few cops manning it, outnumbered 100x and lacking riot gear. This was on the livestream I saw at the time, but seems to have been memory-holed). Also considering the feds had numerous informants in the groups involved, they would have known if anything was planned in advance, and could have stopped it if they wanted to stop it. Cui bono is the security state gets more funding/power for the security state by letting something like that happen and causing a moral panic. Letting it happen also has some utility for domestic influence operations by the security state. So the absurdly bad crowd-control was plausibly intentional (if I had to put a probability on it, 25%. The other option is total incompetence on the part of the capitol police, who had a much better crowd control setup for BLM. I'd also put a 10% probability on someone in the US government having prior knowledge of 9/11 and letting it happen anyway. 25% for Pearl Harbor.)
Ray Epps and the antifa paid 70K by CNN to incite Ashli Babbit to charge cops and die were 100% intentional. Whether there was a mastermind coordinating everything is less clear. 25% sounds good..
I'd put a 90% probability on someone in the Saud government having prior knowledge of 9/11, but less than 10% for the US government.
And 90% for the US government knowing the Japanese would attack, but thinking the Japanese would attack the Philippines. Less than 25% chance they knew it would be Pearl.
Trump isn't even the most likely candidate to be the republican nominee right now (and would probably be a weaker candidate than the likely alternatives if he was). In practice this is Dems paying a political price because they genuinely think Trump's antidemocratic stuff is really bad.
(I suspect some party members will oppose actually sanctioning Trump for this reason - they'll do better if he does run)
No. Normies think trump is really really bad because they’ve been told that over and over. It’s the powerful who hate him for real. He’s just enough of an insider to know where the bodies are buried. He refuses to play the obfuscation game. I’d love to see a blind side by side of what Obama did in office vs Trump and see how many get right who did what. Bet lots don’t know anything about Obama’s “crimes.” Some crimes are only crimes if you aren’t head of state.
I think he's bad because he conspired to overthrow the government by force of arms. I don't really think he thought of it that way, or it wouldn't have been so thoroughly ineffective, but that's what he did. And I find the evidence in public to be sufficient to substantiate that claim. But I really doubt that he'll be prosecuted, because (among other reasons) that would set a precedent that no sitting president could like.
Oh come on. The man was Commander in Chief of the entire military establishment and had four long years in which to issue commands to them without question.
If you gave *me* that kind of power and time to plan my use of it, and I intended to overthrow the government by force of arms, even I would do a hell of a lot better than a bunch of painted weirdos knocking down some aged Capitol police and wandering around the House for a while during ballot counting. Hell, there wouldn't have been any kind of free election in November at all. (Especially when COVID provided a highly convenient reason any time after January 2020 for any number of emergency decrees that would probably have enjoyed substantial public support from the start.)
Let us try not to abuse the language or be hysterical. Trump is certainly guilty of artfully inciting some very moderate (by historical standards) street action, and (much more importantly) not doing his utmost as President to put a stop to the situation when it started evolving in a funky direction, but that's it. Anyone who thinks *that* was the best he could do, after four years of having the entire Federal and military apparatus at his fingertips, to overthrow the freaking goverment by force is in the grips of ideological delusion or hasn't thought it through for 30 seconds.
"Hell, there wouldn't have been any kind of free election in November at all."
Trump and Pence's term would have ended on January 20th regardless. The Constitution has provisions for exactly this sort of situation: If the election ends up being postponed for some reason, or the election result is still in dispute by the time Inauguration Day rolls around, then the President and Vice President are required to vacate their office regardless, and the office of the Presidency goes to whoever is next in the line of succession. Which means the strategy you're describing would have resulted in *Nancy Pelosi* becoming President, which definitely isn't something that Trump or his supporters wanted. If you somehow managed to disqualify her, we would have had President Chuck Grassley instead, and while Grassley is a Republican, I suspect the majority of Trumpers would have been very upset with that outcome regardless.
Granted, I have no idea whether Trump himself was actually aware of this. I'm rather doubtful. But I'm certain that some of his advisors must have understood how this worked.
The important word in my statement was "free." I didn't say there wouldn't be an election in November 2020 if I was President and wanted to stay that way forever. What I said was that the results of that election would be the guaranteed re-election of me, and perhaps some kind of "emergency" approved override of the Twenty-Second Amendment so I could work my way towards becoming Emperor Carl I.
It baffles me how people can have such fear of Trump inciting a relative handful of goons to ransack the House, and at the same time such faith in the power of pieces of paper to forestall genuine force backed up by at least a substantial minority of popular approval. We are *fortunate* that to date no man -- not even Trump, or Nixon, or FDR, or whoever your favorite bogeyman might be -- has become US President who is anywhere near as genuinely ruthless and ambitious as those who have seized power by actual force throughout many sad centuries of human history. The shades of Caesars of the past can only drool with envy at the staggering levels of power -- not just military, but logistic and financial -- which we put in the hands of the President.
There was no attempted overthrow. There was no force of arms. There were a bunch of pissed off people staging a protest that was encouraged by agent provocateurs. The ruling class got the “insurrection” it wanted in order to hunt down and punish dissent.
Counterpoint: legal consequences to politicians for their wrongdoing is a feature unique to liberal democracies.
Will those inclined to believe that the election was stolen interpret it as being part of the pattern of alleged sinister Democratic malfeasance that they already believe in? Sure.
But the same would go for any legal consequences for any of Trump's wrongdoing.
Indeed, there are few things that would obviously dissuade a dogmatic believer of their beliefs.
In the case at hand, for example, the dogmatic Trump supporter could find support in a lack of prosecution of Trump - "See! It was all smoke, and no fire! They never had anything on him," or in his prosecution "See! They're always going after him for something!"
Counter-counterpoint: Chesterton pointed out circa 1907 that no rich man had faced the consequences of his actions in the United Kingdom since Parliament became preeminent over the monarch back in the... mid-18th century? This appears to remain true until today.
Monarchs and other kinds of tyrant not only have fewer incentives to get the rich off the hook, they have much stronger incentives to actually nail them to the wall (for example: every rich guy is a potential powerful guy and thus threat; all tyrants rely on the goodwill of their people to a fairly large extent and a rich guy fucking up is thus a useful opportunity to demonstrate that nobody is above the law *except* the King himself), *especially* politicians since the conduct of his politicos reflects directly on a king powerful enough to hand-pick them.
Legal consequences to politicians for their wrongdoings is not a feature unique to liberal democracies. You can ask Navalny, who is jailed for his wrongdoings, or the hundreds of thousands jailed in China on corruption charges. The rest of your comment is faulty because it starts with that faulty premise.
The unique feature of liberal democracies (at least in theory) is the even handed application. Any thoughts on the matter need to acknowledge the uneven version is something corrupt regimes do and think about how we can credibly ensure there is no two track justice system. Game theoretically, this means the Democrats have to establish the standard by making a costly and credible signal they will enforce these norms against their own side.
The obvious answer, imo, was investigating Hillary Clinton without fear or favor. I don't think what she did was as egregious as what Trump did. But the email server was a crime that she got away with despite being guilty under the statute as written. And no, that fact being released and losing her an election does not count as legal punishment.
Instead, the Democrats (unwittingly imo) created the standard "credible major party candidates get immunity from charges" which Trump is now more or less explicitly exploiting. This is one thing I wish everyone understood but especially the left: the rules of the game will become the rules of the game for everyone. That tiny exception you made for someone because of reasons will be taken up by the other side. All your anger will not prevent them from using it.
As far as what they can do now I'm not sure there's anything. The sad truth is that sometimes your past actions means you simply don't have any good options. My hope is that the people will elect someone more sane and punish the bad actors on both sides. I'd normally call that naive but that does appear to be happening so far.
"This is one thing I wish everyone understood but especially the left: the rules of the game will become the rules of the game for everyone. That tiny exception you made for someone because of reasons will be taken up by the other side. All your anger will not prevent them from using it."
Precisely this. And this is why I've had to work hard on being 'tolerant' because it doesn't come naturally to me: do I want ideas and expressions of those ideas on my side censored? no? then I have to give the same rights to that lot, even if I think they should be censored or need to be censored or deserve a good kick in the pants.
Hunter's a special case, though. He's not a politician, so jailing him really would be a bad thing because it would be naked political partisanship about getting revenge on the enemy. *If* it can be demonstrated that he was entangling his father and/or the Obama administration in corruption and buying favourable treatment and government intervention for the various companies that gave him plum jobs and comfortable sinecures, that would be a different matter.
But so far, he's just a deadbeat who is being indulged by his father (due to being the last surviving child of his first three with his first wife) and who trades on his father's name and connections to get those plum jobs, whether or not he can deliver on favourable treatment. There's plenty of rumours that he allegedly was cutting Dad in on the deals, but since Hunter's a champion screw-up that is not necessarily credible evidence. If anybody wanted to arrest him and jail him, it would be the companies that paid him top dollar and got nothing in return.
You can't just jail embarrassing family members of politicians, there's plenty of families in both parties with black sheep and you'd need to build a whole new prison just for them. (See Paul Pelosi and the various rumours of insider deals not to mention the DUI and the very strange break-in by that guy).
" There's plenty of rumours that he allegedly was cutting Dad in on the deals, but since Hunter's a champion screw-up that is not necessarily credible evidence."
More than rumors. The email from the laptop includes a reference to part of the money from one deal going to "the big guy" in a context that appears to refer to Joe, and one of the partners to the deal has confirmed that it was Joe.
I believe, however, that Joe was out of office at that point — and the deal didn't go through so he never got the money. It is clear from the laptop emails that his claim to have no connection to Hunter's deals when VP was a lie, but it isn't in general illegal for politicians to lie, and meeting with people who were paying his son isn't illegal.
The trouble with Hunter is how much is him just blabbing whatever crosses his drug-addled mind at the time, how much is him trying to sound impressive to the guys he's scamming ("Big Guy is totally in on this, trust me!") and how much we can legitimately believe happened.
Hunter was totally coasting on his father's political connections, and Joe does seem to have protected, indulged and indeed cosseted him, but whether Hunter actually *could* swing meetings with Joe or Top Officials for the guys offering him big cushy jobs on the board is another matter. My own view is that Hunter *might* have wanted to pay Dad back for all the bailing-out Joe has done for him, and that he was trying to earmark some of the money he might be getting for that purpose, but it doesn't necessarily link up with Joe knowing it was a bribe and accepting it as a bribe. I think Joe Biden is a long-term career politician who has done backroom deals and the rest of it, but I don't get a sense of him being particularly corrupt in that I would be surprised to discover he did take kickbacks and bribes this blatantly, whereas there are other politicians I could well believe it of them.
“*If* it can be demonstrated that he was entangling his father and/or the Obama administration in corruption” wow. Unstated assumption that anyone currently in power would have even a scintilla of interest in doing so. You can’t find what you can’t look at. The FBI is obviously looking away, hard. Thought experiment: same fact pattern, different people. Say, a family whose name starts with T. What then? Would corruption be found?
Has anyone devoted anywhere near as much effort to Ivanka and Jared's shady deals as they have to Hunter's? Seems like there would be just as much to work with, and no one is prosecuting any of them.
The proposal was that *democrats* initiate the prosecution as a costly therefore credible signal of being serious about evenhanded application of the law
But who would believe that, given that I think the likely outcome would be that Hunter might be jailed for hookers and blow and dickpics and the rest of it, but not really for anything that can be proven to have solely political application only?
I mean, yeah, he's an embarrassment, but he's more of a family embarrassment to Joe than an embarrassment to the party as such, and if he does get away with it then it's down to being well-off and connected, which would equally apply to Republican scions behaving badly.
This is not to say that Hunter *shouldn't* do jail time if he's broken any laws (which with the hookers and blow and dick pics is very damn likely), but it's more "Charlie Sheen level of carry-on". I agree the problem is the laptop cover-up, if it is a cover-up, and that this shouldn't be dismissed as simply a conspiracy theory or false flag operation, but while it might be more credible as signalling seriousness about evenhanded application of the law, I think it's understandable why they'd want to brush this under the carpet.
But legal consequences to people who are in power is pretty unique to democracies. In whatever sense people think that the left had power in 2020, Trump has power now.
The left did not have power in 2020 in any sense meaningful for this discussion, and prosecution of Biden in 2020 would have been worrying for the same reason that prosecution of Trump would be worrying today.
In addition to what Humphrey Appleby said: Legal consequences once you leave office is what's happening, not while you're still in power. And that is indeed common. Look at Hu Jintao or any of the former Russian leaders or the noble supporters of the previous rulers in Saudi Arabia.
This entire area is so fraught that the founders considered giving the elected officials full immunity form prosecution for life. It didn't get a majority and I don't think that's a good policy. It leads to things like the British property developer who bought a seat in Parliament so he could flout construction rules. But my point is that this is a perilous area and it's a long known one. You are setting the precedents now that will apply going forward. And plenty of republics have fallen to issues with partisan judicial abuses.
The deeply problematic precedent was set when it was so hard to prosecute him early in his term. He's only being prosecuted after he leaves office because of the entrenched corruption that shielded him while in office.
There was a clear bar and procedure for impeaching Trump and the Democrats simply failed to meet that bar. If you want to make some change so it's easier to impeach and prosecute presidents then that's a defensible position. But keep in mind the Republicans will use it against the Democrats when they regain power.
If you want to see what this looks like on the other side: Most of the Mueller investigation was enabled by precedents and standards the Republicans invented to go after Clinton in the 1990s. Political convenience has a way of setting precedents that neither side ultimately likes.
How does Trump have power now? If the answer is ‘he is wealthy’ then there are a lot of Russian oligarchs and jailed Chinese billionaires who would like a word. If the answer is ‘he is a prominent opposition politician…’you see the problem?
He has more control of social media and the general discourse about politics than any other individual, except maybe Elon Musk. He's certainly far more powerful at getting his viewpoint out there and being discussed than anyone who uses words like "Latinx" or "microaggression".
Donald Trump has no control of social media (except his own Twitter-clone, if that's a thing; haven't kept track). He has a great deal of *attention* from social media, which gives him some degree of influence in some parts of US society, but he can't get someone else banned from Twitter (there are a few places where he could get someone fired, I'll admit, but there aren't very many of them).
I think comparing Donald Trump to the hundred-headed hydra and saying "well, Donald Trump's bigger than any of the individual heads", while true, is not very illuminating.
none of this is *official, governmental* power. Are you seriously arguing that only liberal democracies jail people with this kind of soft influence? How does your theory handle Gandhi or Mandela? Note that I am not making any comment on whether prosecution of DJT is warranted or not, and am certainly not saying he is like either Gandhi or Mandela. I am simply pointing out that the precedent of prosecuting a prominent opposition politician is worrying, and that legal trouble for opposition politicians is very much not something that happens `only in liberal democracies.'
`Legal consequences for opposition politicians who have a non-trivial base of support' are certainly not particular to liberal democracies, plenty of autocracies to that too. Indeed a smart autocrat would *only* bother to jail opposition politicians who had a non-trivial base of support - people who nobody supports anyway can be safely ignored.
Whoa, that seems pretty far out into tinfoil hat territory. How does he exercise that control? If what you mean to say is "a shocking number of my fellow citizens like and support the man, and the size of that number ends up giving him substantial influence" -- well, welcome to the challenge of living in a republic. But your beef is with those fellow voters, you can't blame Trump himself for their existence. He didn't call them forth from the Earth by eldritch spells, they already existed and their values and interests already existed -- Trump just gave them a focal point.
Yes. We’re so far from western ideals like equality under the law (evenhanded application of the power to punish if you like) that many of the very very smart people here can’t see it, much less understand why it’s a problem.
Given the laws we've got now, we'd be in real trouble if they started being applied evenly, or even widely. It's bad enough that they're applied to "troublesome people".
I believe that a couple of decades ago there was an estimate that the average person committed 3 felonies per day.
I don't know whether it is justified or wise, but it doesn't "pattern-match" to Putin's tactics (false equivalence). That would be if the Democrats sought to ensure that they faced no serious opposition in any future elections and set up Kamala Harris as de facto dictator for life.
Eliminating Trump might actually be doing the Republicans a favor, actually.
"set up Kamala Harris as de facto dictator for life"
Oh golly, I very nearly want a President Kamala now. If there weren't all the problems with Ukraine and energy supply and China and Covid and climate change and the economy and the rest of it, which I don't see being solved quickly and I don't even want to guess at what 2024 would bring, I'd be delighted to see that happen, just to see how poorly it would go.
I don't think she'd start the Fourth World War but it might be the distaff version of the Gerald Ford presidency, e.g. nothing really happens but everyone is vaguely unhappy anyway.
yeah but your viewpoint is imo very much specific to the blue collar san francisco experience and not representative of the country at large. Only ~2% of the country lives in metro-SF.
She was the first reporter to write critically about Enron's financial obfuscation (six months later, the company was bankrupt). She is the author of some of the best books about finance ever (especially loved her books about Enron and the housing crisis).
We discussed the astounding similarities between Enron and FTX: The rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars run by supposed geniuses, insider dealing and romantic entanglements between the heads of sister-companies, a politically generous CEO well connected in Washington, the use of a company’s own stock as its collateral, a short-lived attempt to get bought out by a competitor thought to be inferior, and the fraudulent abuse of mark-to-market accounting.
And we talked about much more:
- How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),
- What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,
- Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,
- people from the present and from history whom you consider visionaries and frauds?
- people you consider visionaries, but not frauds?
- cases when history repeated itself?
In the cases of Enron and FTX, how do you distinguish fraud from complexity and rules-lawyering? For example, I can find thousands of websites saying that Enron used "fraudulent accounting", but if I try to dig into the details, the worst I can find is that they used mark-to-market accounting, which was very subjective and yet perfectly legal. "Fraud" hypothesizes a bright-line distinction between optimism and lies. How did you draw this line?
For some perspective on the fraudulent accounting, the big issue IIRC (haven't read up on this in a while) is that while they were marking to market, which is still required in many cases, the issue was that the market price was set by Enron and not by a competitive market. This sounds in theory like what a market maker would do, but I believe there was never any prospective of sales to third parties, so the market price was never tested.
The other big issue is that Enron's auditors were not able to hold them to account, mostly because of their large consulting business. Enron paid Arthur Andersen for consulting advice which was much more profitable than audit work (Audits are generally fixed fee, while consulting is per hour, so audits are to get you in the door to make money off the consulting). I believe Enron was relying on accounting advice on marking to market from Arthur Andersen as well, so they had an interest to keep the game going.
I might have some of these details wrong, but that's the broad strokes
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking - are you saying that psychic phenomena are real, but are subtle and strange enough that most people who think of themselves as smart wrongly think that they don't exist? Or are you saying that people who think of themselves as smart can create models of reality that are strange enough that they believe in psychic phenomena, even though they don't exist?
If it's the first, I'd say that anything so "subtle and strange" that it's undetectable by all of modern science might as well not exist for any practical purpose. If it's the second, I'd say that being very smart doesn't mean that you've pruned all unnecessary details from your model of the world - your mind never needs to update on psychic powers unless psychic powers are a major part of your life, and they usually aren't. If you tried to use remote viewing to find oil wells or spy on foreign countries, you'd probably update on it very quickly.
At the end of november/start of december here in the EU there was some talk of a brewing trade war with the US over the IRA subsidies. However i saw no US pundits (like noah smith) talk about this. Was this potential trade war news on your side of the ocean?
The American analyst attitude was that the EU's threats of a trade war was another in a long list of bad moves by the EU. It was not taken at all seriously and was, in several cases, basically mocked. The more Europe-friendly commentators mostly ignored it because it was problematic for their advocacy. And because that was the response among the policy experts it wasn't filtered down to the general population.
In general American politics are in a rather anti-trade mood. There's a consensus (which is objectively correct) that many allies have been cheating on their commitments and generally free riding. So the debate is mostly between isolationists who want to "even the field" by tough renegotiations against allied countries on one side. And on the other people who want to create a trade block of American allies. Basically, was free trade a mistake or was it only a mistake to not favor friendly democratic regimes? With very few free traders left and a general anti-China consensus.
After decades of cheating on their commitments, not moving on Ukraine or Asia, and having their own subsidy/barrier programs the EU has very little capital for this kind of demand. So them barging in and complaining was largely seen as a diplomatic blunder by Europe's friends. As if the EU was completely deaf to the political climate in the United States. Meanwhile the Japanese and British (and a few of their friends like Australia) had more success in advocating for themselves.
But yeah, tl;dr is that the noises about a trade war were not taken seriously.
I will be visiting NYC on January 5. Right now I don't have anything planned between 10 am and 5 pm. What should I visit?
(I already saw the Natural History Museum recently, it was very cool)
You'll never regret spending a day at the Met. For something a bit more off the beaten path, the Cloisters is lovely, and in a less visited part of the city.
I really like the MOMA, the Whitney also has a great collection and is near the High Line. Might be a bit chilly for a walk next week but if you're bundled up it's a great vantage to see the city.
The Tenement Museum is also really interesting, particularly if you have ancestors who could have been potential residents
The Tenement Museum looks super interesting! (and a bit like my apartment in Boston, lol)
Why is Rene Girard so fashionable now? His ideas seem as original as dirt. Is it because people like fancy sounding terms for old concepts?
If he does have original ideas, those don't seem to be the ones people are fond of talking about.
Girard taught Peter Thiel at Stanford and Thiel was influenced by Girard's ideas. A lot of the promoters of Girard's ideas seem to have links to Thiel.
Hoisted on Thiel's petard.
The originality of his ideas seems much less important than their truth.
Anyway René Girard published his main original works in the 50's or 60's. So they may sound unoriginal to you only because they are, as a famous Slate Star Codex article said, in the water.
The notion of "desiring what others desire" seemed an obvious concept to the advertising industry by at least the beginning of the 20th century. The fancy word "mimesis" doesn't add anything to that old insight.
In the last few months, I’ve become increasingly aware of my intellectual limitations. I’m finding that I can’t remember facts from the books I’ve read years ago and that I’m unable to clearly articulate arguments that I once knew back and forth. It's frustrating, but totally predictable.
I read a lot for work and for pleasure (largely psychology, philosophy, history, economics, biography, business, etc.), listen to audiobooks and podcasts, read blogs, debate ideas with friends and colleagues, and write frequently (mostly privately). But I’ve put zero effort into optimizing my information diet or approach to information ingestion.
As work / life become more demanding, I don’t expect to have enough time to continue my ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. I’ve read neuroscience / psychology books that offer a model for how the brain works, and I’ve also read about 'hacks' to improve memory (e.g., the mind palace, writing / journaling, better diet / exercise) and improve cognitive performance (e.g., reduce mental clutter, meditate, learn frameworks / mental models). But many these individual pieces of advice seem contradictory or incomplete (i.e., the mind palace doesn’t seem to make people geniuses).
Does anyone know of a comprehensive model they use as a basis for optimizing information ingestion, improving information retention, and improving cognitive performance?
Try to let go of the idea that you're not smart enough and need some kind of brain overhaul. You are as smart as you are -- go find things you're good at and interested in and fill your life up with them. A lot of the stuff about how to improve cognitive performance are written by people who think life is College Bowl or a giant LSAT test-- he or she who retains the most factoids wins. That's horseshit. You don't have to micromanage your brain into remembering and using stuff you've read with interest. It already knows how to do that. Trying to do mental mechanics to improve that process is like trying to remember to blink often enough -- it doesn't help, and will just drive you crazy. Here are the 2 things I think make a genuine difference in how well you absorb new info:
-How deeply interested you are. If you are excited and fascinated about something or read a book that makes you feel that way about the subject you will absorb a lot of what's in it and make it yours. You may not remember factoids and numbers, but you will retain the gist. You can always come back and look up the factoids and numbers if you need them. If you read something that kind of bores you but you think you *should* know that stuff, it won't stick to your mind. The ways you are interested in the topic is like hooks that grab onto the info. If you don't have much interest you don't have many hooks.
-What you do with it as you learn it. The more you do with the info during the learning process, the more deeply you process it and the more you retain what's important. You know how textbooks in history have thought questions at the end of chapters -- stuff like, what do you think would have happened differently if Lincoln had died just as the Civil War began? Well, answering schoolmarmish questions is a bit irritating, but the idea behind it is good: Get the reader to actually *do* something with what he just read. You could make a diagram of the part that's of most interest to you, go to a museum to see something the book talked about, do an experiment to try out something in the book, talk it over with someone, use it in your work, etc. Or you could read books about one subject with a goal in mind -- career change, prepare to get the most out of a trip, learn how to do something you've always wanted to do. Then you will read with deeper interest because you are going to put the info to use.
Thanks for the kind words! To be clear, I'm not particularly concerned that I'm not smart enough (generally) - I'm just hitting a recall limit that I haven't felt before, which is disconcerting!
Re. point 1: I think my biggest problem is being too interested in too much! It's all genuinely fascinating, and while the gist definitely sticks, I'm becoming less convinced that getting the gist of historical periods and biographies is useful without additional depth (i.e., I can remember the outlines of the story, but not the examples / inflection points that are useful metaphors for real life decision making).
Re. point 2: a lot of this stuff isn't really applicable to my work / daily life, so I don't really use it (outside of conversation). I just think it's interesting background knowledge to have that makes me more aware of the world and better able to answer interesting questions (like the one you outlined). I've taken the 'read books about one subject with a goal in mind' and that definitely helps.
Maybe a re-framing would be helpful. I generally think of practical intelligence as something like: total information stored * ability to recall information * ability to use disparate pieces of information as 'lenses' / 'frames' / metaphors * general problem solving skills (asking good questions, information finding, etc.) * function-specific skills. I feel like I'm approaching my natural limit on the 'total information stored' and 'ability to recall information' dimensions, which naturally affects the third dimension. I'm certainly overthinking this... but figured if anyone would have thought about this, it'd be the people here.
I think the real answer is that nobody is particularly good at those things. People forget stuff all the time. If you use information you won’t forget it; if you don’t use it you will forget it.
If you really want to remember the contents of a book, take notes on the book and reread the notes periodically. The other thing you can do is read another book on the same topic. You will remember the first book while reading the second.
Good points! I do both, and they are very helpful practices.
Was just curious on if anyone had a more comprehensive / structured approach to knowledge intake, storage, and recall. Probably could have worded it better.
Or have thoughts on how they've done this in their own lives?
Take heart! Age and experience tends to solve this problem without your even trying to do anything in particular. You learn what is important and what is not, and how to access or refind what is important faster and more directly. And the ability to prioritize and streamline access climbs so rapidly with age and experience that it outpaces the decline in sheer cognitive ability which actually starts when you're like 10 and continues steadily thereafter. Most people only seem to start losing the overall fight in their mid to late 60s, and often not until later.
My brain is unquestionably significantly slower than those of work colleagues who are 20 years younger, but I can still usually find the right answer to problems faster than they can, because I have better notions of where to start, can detect dead ends earlier, and can sense promising avenues of investigation faster. I walk while they run, but I tend to take shorter paths to the desired destination.
The only generic advice I can give about optimizing this growth is (1) analyze where you go right at least as much as where you go wrong. People tend to brood over bad decisions, which up to a point can be helpful in avoiding future mistakes, but they often tend to just take good decisions for granted and not subject them to the same analysis -- which deprives them of some potentially equally valuable insights. Why did this decision go right? Was it luck, or did I do something worth repeating? Et cetera. And (2) don't be afraid to try a lot of stuff, and look stupid. Sometimes the status quo is the status quo for no better reason than that everyone assumes there must be a reason for it, and nobody has the courage or inspiration to just try something different. Even if you repeatedly bonk your head on the fact that there *was* a reason for the status quo, by experimenting this way you can start to develop an intuition for when The Way Things Are is due to good reasons and when it's from dumb inertia.
Thank you for the advice! Point 1 hit close to home - a great reminder :)
Here is a very key question for epidemiologists and medical researchers to figure out.
What do researchers on Long Covid need to see in the covid and other health data, in order to figure out that the covid virus caused someone's long term illness rather than that they'd have had it even without having ever caught covid?
I have a friend who had mild covid and then a mild heart attack in 4 months.
We now know multiple sclerosis, a serious illness, is triggered by a virus. Does covid trigger serious things? How will they answer this question?
Is this sort of thing being studied? I'm reading that 1 on 5 covid patients have long covid. What does this mean? This is a huge percentage.
At a population level, one could also try and just track the fraction of people with chronic illness and see how much it has increased. IIRC, Covid hasn't increased it much but the baseline level is shockingly high, something like 1 in 8 people.
The one in five number is almost surely fake. At least if long Covid means severe debilitating sequelae. As a Fermi estimate, approximately everyone you know has probably had Covid by now. Do one in five of the people you know seem crippled? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Well to be fair most of the time the 1 in 5 stat is quoted, there's then info about what fraction of that 20% are mildly, moderately, and severely impaired i.e. "crippled," and the fraction deemed to be severely impaired is not real large -- can't remember the exact numbers -- maybe something like 15%. But I do agree that the 20% number does not pass the sniff test. There are at least 50 people I know well enough to be confident that if they'd had Long Covid symptoms I would know. Sat down and thought through them all recently, and 47 of the 50 had no symptoms lingering as long as 3 months. One 30 year old woman who had covid before vaccine was available had something that would qualify as moderate impairment for about a year after recovery. Two women aged about 60 who had covid about 6 months ago think they may have less energy now, but aren't sure. And that's it. Of course most of the people I know get good health care and have gotten vaxed and boosted. A fair number took Paxlovid when they were diagnosed. I'm sure all these things improve a person's chances of not developing a post-viral syndrome. Would not surprise me at all to learn that poor & unvaxed folks getting mediocre health care would have more Long Covid -- still, 20% is hard to believe.
A lot of the creepy stuff you read about Covid applies just as well to other viruses, but the people talking up the creepy stuff don't know that or neglect to mention it. For instance on medical twitter someone recently posted about how autopsies of people who died of covid find the virus in many parts of the body, not just in the respiratory tract. I looked up measles and polio, and read that they also spread through many parts of the body -- liver, kidneys, nervous system, gasto. tract etc. Likewise, many viruses are known to trigger problems later in life in a fraction of those who'd had them -- cervical herpes does, and mono, and polio; so did the 1918 flu. Post-viral syndromes much like what's called Long Covid are also not rare after other viruses. I know someone right now who's got exhaustion, malaise, POTS and exercise intolerance, and docs think it's the result of her having had mono last year. I myself had a post-viral syndrome for 3 years after a moderate case of the flu 20 years ago. I had exercise intolerance, exhaustion, hypersomnia, migraines, body aches like the kind you get from the flu itself, several joints so sore I gasped if I bumped them even slightly, and a low fever that came and went. I dropped as many responsibilities as I could and dragged myself through those years. It faded away on its own eventually.
19% of the 40% of people who reported having Covid have some long Covid symptoms according to a specific survey by the NCHS and and the Census Bureau. This was defined as having potentially Covid related symptoms lasting 3 or more months after first contracting Covid which they did not have prior to contracting Covid.
This would have been easy for you to look up yourself so it seems weird to give the comment you gave based off a half-remembered statement by some person you don't know without first looking yourself to see what the official sources said.
One problem with this is that the fraction of people reporting Long Covid symptoms is very similar for people who actually had Covid, and for people who were antigentically confirmed to not have ever been infected with such. See e.g. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciac947/6905455?login=false#.Y53DKgWTcSU.twitter
Apparently some people just take a long time recovering from infections that other people shrug off after a few weeks, and some people suffer chronic symptoms that aren't associated with any known infection but may be erroneously ascribed to whatever infection is making headlines when the symptoms arise. Covid doesn't seem to be particularly special in this regard, except for making more headlines.
This would have been easy for you to look up yourself so it seems weird to give the comment you gave based off a half-remembered statement by some person you don't know without first looking yourself to see what the official sources said.
Is there any symptom that is NOT a Long Covid symptom?
I haven't yet read anywhere that it makes your butt fall off.
Obviously that's a sign there needs to be more research dollars spent!
This is Motte and Bailey then. The Motte is `any symptoms at all.' The Bailey is `severe debilitating sequelae, which get trotted out as the central scary example of long COVID.' And by now I think the number of people who have had COVID is presumably North of 90%.
A couple of people on here have posted about having kids with OCD or Tourette’s. Wanted to let anyone interested know that registration is now open for the OCD Foundation’ s online camp for kids age 6+ with OCD and their families. It takes place during February break week. I know some of the people that run it, and think it will probably be quite good. More info about registration here:
https://iocdf.org/blog/2020/12/29/register-for-the-online-ocd-camp-for-kids-and-families/
My wife walked by as I was loading up ACX just now and paused as she noticed the screen.
She: "What is this? The Illuminati, the Masons? Today's Knights Templar?"
Me: "Pretty much, yea."
She: "Okay then, I'll leave you to your dark arts." [Exits stage left]
Shortly after reading the latest Twitter files expose I was greatly surprised to notice that my kid's tablet was playing a near-perfect accompaniment to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cn-r8YfXBk
"The sound of your voice is the sound of my choice,
I am the master of everyone's ears."
Merry Christmas!
What percentage of voting Americans do you think you could correctly identify as generally voting Democratic or Republican if you were to merely see what they look like?
By "look like" I include what they look like in clothes they typically wear, but you wouldn't have information about the vehicle they drive or whatever transportation they might take or where they are located. You can see them in motion, witness their body language and facial gestures.
I'm guessing I could identify 85% correctly.
In Australia, I suspect I would struggle to do better than 60%, maybe 5% better if I get to see how they dress on a workday instead of a weekend. It scares me that this is so much easier over there.
Oh, over on TheMotte new site, someone did an experiment like this with Finnish politicians: could you identify the right wing from the left wing politicians? And the majority of us who tried it did as well as, or worse than, chance.
First quiz:
https://take.quiz-maker.com/QEYORX4BV
Results:
https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/38635?context=8#context
Second quiz:
https://take.quiz-maker.com/QEGH5NKVM
Results:
https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?q=author%3Astefferi+quiz
There are definitely 'cues' or little signals that are culturally specific that we tend to pick up on to identify people like this, and when it's a different cultural context and we don't recognise the cues, we do poorly.
Guessing the politics of politicians would be, I think, much harder than guessing the politics of voters. Politicians care much less about policy than do voters. I mean, I couldn't possibly tell if Donald Trump is a Democrat or a Republican.
Nice. I got 26/40 right, was left with the (probably wrong) impression that finnish male social democrats all wear the same tie.
Interesting. I took both quizzes and did barely better than chance.
A couple of rules that seem to apply cross-culturally though: any woman who is wearing excessive patterns or colours (for this sort of formal photo) is on the left, and a young man with an excessively neat haircut is on the right.
With the middle-aged or older men, though, my intuitions were all backwards.
The NYT did something like this with fridges. Readers were shown a picture of a fridge and assign them to a Trump or Biden voter.
Most people did about as well as flipping a coin.
Edit: Found a write up. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliewu/2020/10/28/politics-and-food-choices-what-the-new-york-times-fridge-quiz-ultimately-measures/?sh=2f5fdd894145
People were correct 53% of the time. You can still take the quiz if you're a NYT member, so maybe you'd do better.
I suspect people's faces are more revealing than their fridges.
Why? Food people eat is as culturally significant as clothing or grooming. Race is strongly correlated with partisanship, but that wouldn't help you get up to 85% since about 3/4 of Americans are white.
If you wanted to, you could try just looking up group photos of congressional interns or minor government officials. They're not average voters, but could be similar to what you want. When I searched for "congressional intern" on linkedin, I wasn't able to always place whether they were in a republican or democrat office.
I've looked inside very few fridges in my life, but I've seen a million faces and known the partisanship of thousands of them. My approach to guessing someone's partisanship isn't analytical but holistic. It's like gaydar. There are hundreds of tiny correlations that one can unconsciously pick up on from someone else's facial expressions and body language -- and then become conscious of the overall impression made by paying close attention to one's gut feelings. Not a perfect science, of course. Not science at all, in fact, but learned intuition about people.
I have no learned intuition about fridges.
I don't claim to be able to intuit much about people, but partisanship is something I've spent much time observing. And I've spent about as much time around Democrats as I have around Republicans.
Yeh? I’m not American but I imagine telling a guy in a suit from a guy in a suit is not possible. You didn’t mention race though, and that might be a factor.
Not everyone wears suits or is a guy.
Ok so explain the 85% then. It excludes guys in suits.
Start with biases such as:
Whites are more likely to vote Republican
Non-whites are more likely to vote Democratic
Men are more likely to vote Republican
Women are more likely to vote Democratic
Old people are more likely to vote Republican
Young people are more likely to vote Democratic
I'd guess that those proxies, refined to tell you whether, say, a 60-year-old looking white woman or a 22-year-old looking white man is more likely to vote R or D (just going by demographic polling data) gets you correct about 63% of the time.
My claim is that I can Republicandar and Democratdar (a similar mental tool as gaydar) my way up to 85% by looking at facial expressions, body language, and clothing that one chooses to wear.
Of course you can believe that or not, and I haven't tested this claim myself. I'm merely reporting my confidence level. The intention of my OP was to get others to report their confidence levels, although nobody else seems to have been interested in that.
[US-centric but generalizable]
Fourteen years ago, on a LessWrong post about epistemic prisoner's dilemmas (https://bit.ly/3C4rNrT), James Miller made an interesting suggestion:
"Pretend we have two people, a Republican and a Democrat, who can each donate to three charities: The Republican party, the Democratic Party, and a non-political charity.
"Both people's utility is increasing in the amount of resources that their party and the non-political charity gets. And, as you would expect, the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets.
"The two people would benefit from an agreement in which they each agreed to give a higher percentage of their charitable dollars to the non-political charity than the would have absent this agreement.
"To the best of my knowledge, such agreements are never made."
This seems like a terrific idea to me; many people agree that way too much money is spent on presidential elections and would prefer it otherwise (certainly I would!). I've been thinking today about whether there's a reasonable way to implement this that scales better than the honor system. Here's what I've come up with:
The simple case: Danny the Democrat would like to donate $1000 to the Red Cross, but reluctantly sends it to the Democratic party because after all you can't let those lousy Republicans win. Ronnie the Republican would rather send money to the United Way, but similarly sends it to the Republican party because god forbid those idiot Democrats be in charge. I, a credible and neutral third party organization, offer to help. I pair Danny and Ronnie, and they each send me $1000. Once I receive funds from both, I donate them to the Red Cross and the United Way respectively, and there are a few less ads for each side this season. If Danny doesn't follow through, I send Ronnie's money to the Republicans, and of course vice versa.
Scalable extension: there's no reason why Danny and Ronnie need to know about each other; they can both just send me money and know that I'll match them up with equivalent donations on the other side. If people from one party send more money, the surplus can fall back to being donated to the desired party.
What are the flaws here? And does anyone know of a credible organization that might be interested in doing this? I'd much prefer not to try to take it on myself because I've already got too much on my plate, and I don't have an easy way to establish myself as a trustworthy third party (whereas an already-known organization hopefully would).
Alternately, is any organization already doing this? That would be great, because then I could just send them money and not have any need to put more time into it :)
On thinking this over, I think it's a mistake to only divide 'charities' into political and non-political.
I think in order for something like this to work, you need to think of spending on 'charities' / non-profits in the following categories:
1. Explicitly political funding: money for political parties or candidates
2. Funding on lobbying the government for politicized causes
3. Funding on 'raising awareness' for politicized causes from the general public, presumably at least in part to influence voting patterns
4. Funding for politicized causes that is directly spent on things the cause advocates
5. Funding on lobbying the government for non-political causes
6. Funding on 'raising awareness' for non-political causes
7. Funding for non political causes that is directly spent on the cause.
For example, a big pro-life organization likely spends some money on sending people to talk to Republican politicians to pass pro-life laws (type 2), spends some money on passing out pro-life literature (type 3), and spends some money on helping women who choose not to get an abortion (type 4), and a corresponding pro-choice organization likely has all three types of spending as well. Ronnie the Republican and Danny the Democrat would both probably rather spend their charity on actually helping people over spending it on politics, but that includes both type 4 and type 7 spending. Eddie the Effective Altruist (an Independent disillusioned with the current system) is not going to want type 5 or 6 spending as much as type 7.
The other problem is finding a politically neutral charity. Even a massive charity that predominates support for politically neutral causes likely has a leaning one way or the other. Both the United Way and March of Dimes have appeals to support 'equity' on their home pages, which is a sign of a significant investment in type 2/3 charitable activities.
> I think in order for something like this to work, you need to think of spending on 'charities' / non-profits in the following categories
That's a good point. I worry about overcomplicating it, so it seems like it might make sense to have a list of approved charities that can be chosen instead of Rep/Dem parties, ones that few people would see as political.
The donation would need to be tax deductible and corporate matchable. I wouldn't trust a new org, as you mentioned, and I'm not sure I can identify one I would trust. What org is trustworthy to Ds and Rs?
(Caveat: I only donate to local causes run by people I can talk to and that undertake efforts I can see, and I have never donated to a political party, because I think they are not worthy. So I'm not your target demographic, I'm just pointing out issues)
> The donation would need to be tax deductible and corporate matchable. I wouldn't trust a new org, as you mentioned, and I'm not sure I can identify one I would trust. What org is trustworthy to Ds and Rs?
I'd hope it could be set up in a way where the organization is treated as a pure pass-through entity, and tax deductible / matchable status would depend on the specified charity. I don't know for a fact that that's possible, though; it would require some expert knowledge.
As far as trustworthiness to both parties -- it does seem like there are *some* charities, at least, eg the Red Cross. That aspect does seem like a challenge, though; I'd think the ideal would be for some existing respected, neutral organization to administer it but it could be hard to find one that would be willing.
I think that what you’re missing is that Dannie and Ronnie giving money to their respective parties is what perpetuates the two-party system. If neither of them gave, then maybe Ivan the Independent would have a good shot at elected office.
Basically, if both sides give huge amounts of money, it becomes an even 50/50 election but (to some) this might be better than a 20/20/20/20/20 election with an extra moderate and pair of extremists
"I think that what you’re missing is that Dannie and Ronnie giving money to their respective parties is what perpetuates the two-party system."
Third-party candidates getting a bit more attention seems to me like a feature rather than a bug, although I'm sure many wouldn't agree. I think in practice it's highly unlikely that a system like this would retire anywhere near enough money from the two major parties to make that a significant factor, given that major-party spending absolutely dwarfs spending by independents. If and when this system got big enough that people started worrying about that, donations might diminish (and at that point each marginal dollar given to the parties makes a much bigger difference, so giving to the parties is more attractive; I think there's a natural equilibrium there).
I personally would prefer more third party candidates, but I’m an independent. My point was mainly that I think that a Republican who gave equal amounts to the Republicans and Democrats would still be increasing their odds of having their candidate elected
> a Republican who gave equal amounts to the Republicans and Democrats would still be increasing their odds of having their candidate elected
In principle yes, but I think in practice it wouldn't matter much (at least to the extent that we're talking about the possibility of independents being elected to the US presidency), at least not unless something like this got quite large.
I believe Scott has posted about this although I can’t find the post with a cursory google search. Instead, here’s a link to blog post by a grad student doing research on this. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/poQebofmZCdXye8h6/getting-money-out-of-politics-and-into-charity
Here's one post that I would guess you are thinking of, regarding political donations:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
There's a fair amount of money in politics, but less than is commonly believed.
Oh, terrific, thanks!
From the post: "...campaign finance law is complicated, plus the political parties won’t like you (you’re taking their money) and will very likely sue you. Dr. Zolt said that these lawsuits are dangerous despite an FEC ruling saying that Repledge was legal, because there are various ways to interpret the ruling."
Ouch. That's an aspect I hadn't considered at all.
I believe in revealed preference. When I observe people donating a huge pile of money to political candidates, but decrying the amount of money in politics, my first hypothesis is that people like donating money to candidates they consider good, and dislike other people donating money to candidates they consider bad. That is, their actions are honest, and their speech less so. That does tend to be the human tendency, after all.
People hate using revealed preference against them. Drives them nuts. I’m meeting my leftish (albeit not too woke) brother in a day or two, and I’m probably not going to mention again that his revealed preferences are living in a very white middle class English village, interacting with white British people exclusively, and sending his children to an, admittedly comparatively cheap, private school because he’s convinced he’s a socialist who likes multiculturalism. Those debates sound a bit mean over the winter break.
Of course what applies to him applies to a larger class of people and maybe that’s the way to argue.
Well, if your brother is adopting lefty attitudes out of upper middle class guilt at living a life that is significantly more privileged than most of the planet, it would definitely be a sore spot to poke. I have family who are in that situation, and I keep my conclusions to myself, because family is way more important than ideology.
Mostly I find the concept of revealed preference useful when interpreting my own actions. I am as susceptible to bullshitting myself as the next man, and it helps to cast a look back at my own actions and say "Well, what does what you actually did suggest about your priorities, Carl?" That way I don't need to fight endless internal battles over "Why don't I do X which I want to do?" because I can conclude the correct answer is "Because I don't really want to do X" and can move on to the more fruitful question of "Why do I THINK I want to do X even though I really don't?" That way lies enlightenment.
It's hard to apply it to other people, because I rarely know enough about all their choices to draw conclusions. So like most people I expect I realy on some half-assed combination of observing what they do (and applying revealed preference) and taking what they say at face value.
The problem with "revealed preferences" is when the reasoning is applied to imaginary options. Suppose that you have to choose between A and B, and those are the only options you have at the moment. You choose A.
It is fair to conclude that you prefer A to B.
It is not fair to conclude that you prefer A to C.
And yet this is what many people do. "Of course he prefers A to C; he chose A. Now he is going to hypocritically deny his revealed preference."
I agree with you in a general way, but you should add in the caveat that if you have a choice between A and B you usually have at least one more choice, which is neither A nor B. So if someone affirmatively chooses A, then it *is* reasonable to conclude he prefers A over neither A nor B. Since C is a subset of "neither A nor B" there is some basis for concluding he prefers A over C, albeit much more weakly than if C were an explicit choice at the time.
To be more concrete: if a man does not save his money or devote any effort for the purpose of supporting a future family, even though he is still a bachelor, I can reasonably draw the conclusion that supporting a family is lower on his list of priorities, compared to the bachelor who does do those things. The fact that the choice is not immediately available isn't fully determinative. (The case is stronger if C comes as a surprise, is not forseeable.)
Costs are also a part of decision. For example, if you asked me whether I prefer apples or oranges, I would say "oranges", but I would imagine that I simply have a choice between getting 1 apple and getting 1 orange. However, if I am at a shop where 1 apple costs $1, and 1 orange costs $100, I will take the apple instead.
If someone later reports this as "Viliam says that he prefers oranges, but actually he buys apples", without mentioning the difference in costs, that would seem unfair. Like, yes, there is a situation where I choose an apple over an orange, so my preference is only relative. But it would be fair to include this situation in the description of my choice.
Sometimes the cost is not directly money. Imagine that I am doing 99% of my shopping in a supermarket, which does not sell oranges. So my choices are not just "apples" vs "oranges", but "apples" vs "oranges, but I have to walk an extra mile to another shop". And yes, my revealed preference may be to save the extra time and buy an apple instead, but that doesn't make me a hypocrite -- it simply means that I prefer oranges to apples, but I prefer my free time even more.
A realistic example in my case would be my work time. I repeatedly read on internet statements like "100 years ago, people assumed we would only work 4 hours a day, or only 3 days a week, but the *revealed preferences* show that people actually prefer to work 5 days × 8 hours". And I want to scream that a very important part of the context is missing here: the jobs offering part-time are *rare*, and they often offer much *lower* hourly wage. My actual choice is not between "full time" and "part time", but between "full time" and "part time, but also at half the hourly wage, so only 1/4 total income". I would be happy to only get 1/2 of my current income and have more free time, but 1/4 is not enough.
So my actual preferences are "[50% wage @ 50% time] > [100% wage @ 100% time] > [25% wage @ 50% time]", and I hate when this gets simply reported as "he says [50% time] > [100% time], but his revealed preference is [100% time] > [50% time]". It misses the actual thing that my decision depends on. Like, getting paid is the entire point of having a job, so how can we abstract from *that*?
I think what you're saying in a general way is that preferences are often hard to follow because choices are highly linked. In the case of your apples and oranges, the choice of which to buy involves your preference for apples v. oranges *but also* your preference for having fruit v. having dollars, because we can't separate the act of choosing one fruit from the act of trading money for fruit. So it's tricky to work backward from what you do to your preference.
I have no disagreement at all with that. All I'm arguing is that if we in fact observe you buying oranges all the time, even though they are 100x as expensive as apples, and then we *ask* you about this, and you totally deny that you value oranges 100x more than apples (in dollars) -- our leading hypothesis should be that you are bullshitting us and/or yourself, because that's the simpler hypothesis (given the high human tendency to bullshit) than that there is some strange complicated causal chain that leads you to buy oranges all the time even though they are 100x more expensive and you don't value them more.
It's a more complicated chain or thought, but you may be revealing a preference that's different than you think. When articles talked about working 4 hours a day or only a few days a week, they were correctly predicting the future. Someone could work less than 20 hours a week now and have a standard of living that exceeds 40+ hours at some previous productivity/wage. What went up in tandem with productivity is expected standard of living. We simply expect to have more, and therefore need to work more hours in order to achieve it.
Although difficult to compare for some prices (some things didn't exist that are normal now, for instance, while housing and college are more expensive and food and clothing are far less), you may in fact be able to achieve a better than 1920s lifestyle today, with your 25% wage at 50% time.
Alternatively, using revealed preference can just be (and is usually just that most of the time) a dumb way to assign an affinity for the status quo that is simply not there. It's not the "Revealed Preference" of the prisoner to defect, it's not the "Revealed Preference" of people to litter the street.
Reveled Preferences as a way of thinking betrays a chlidish understanding of agency that goes something like "Every person's actions is a reliable metric for what they want". This breaks down in :
(1) Multi-Agent systems, the prisoner's dillema is in full effect. Your actions are not necessarily indicators of any desire or affinity, but simply the loss-minimizing choice against defectors, regardless of what you yourself want. Any time a bunch of agents are locked in a zero-ish sum game with non-reliable or non-existent communication (i.e. most human groups), "Revealed Preferences" is incoherent.
(2) Even in settings where only your mind count, this singularity is an illusion. Your mind itself is a Society of its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind), your brain is the Multi-Agent system from (1). The "preferences" expressed by your actions doesn't have to match the actual "preferences" we all mean when we say the word. Because your brain is a thousand different module, not all of them are working towards the same goal all of the time. It's not the "Revealed Preferences" of people that they are addicted to heroin, or Facebook, it's that these things hijack certain modules in their brain and makes them work against the rest. It's a preference alright, but not of the person.
My politics, by the way, is a linear combination where "whatever enrages the wokes" has a *significant* weight, so I don't think the above is me defending your brother's choices or weighing in on the any specific issue at hand in all of this thread. The above is just why "Revealed Preferences" is a dumb and incoherent intuition pump in general, there is perhaps a very small kernel of truth inside (putting your money where your mouth is and all that), but most uses take it far far beyond what can be sustained.
I don't think that this is analysis is completely fair. Decrying money in politics is usually a complaint about the system; operating in a system you dislike is just part of life.
I don't think that income taxes are a good policy. I still pay mine, though, as I don't like having my accounts seized or being imprisoned. That's not a case where my revealed preference is pro-income-tax.
I agree with BeingABat on this. Another example in addition to theirs is nuclear de-escalation. I can prefer mutual de-escalation to escalation, but if mutual de-escalation won't happen, prefer country X's continued escalation to unilateral de-escalation on X's part. That doesn't mean that my revealed preference is for escalation; it just means I'm taking the best of the options that are actually on the table.
Yeah but you're compelled to pay your income tax, all forms of protest are extremely expensive. It's easy as pie to not contribute money to political campaigns, the barriers to protest are zilch. When there are no barriers to protest, I interpret the lack of protest -- indeed, active participation -- as indicating approval and a desire to participate.
Sure, I guess someone who is protesting about money in politics could be imagining some completely different system, in which collective decisions are made without the investment of large amounts of human effort (which is what the money represents) devoted to broadcasting the argument and trying to persuade. How that works, I would not know, but I would guess, based on the nature of human beings, that what is really meant is just a system in which everyone else pretty much agrees with me, and we all know it by the fact that we all like the same flavor of ice cream and opening statement of a political speech, so...there's not much need to argue about stuff, we'll just vote The Right Way by instinct and natural tendency all the time.
But this is just Peter Pan fantasy, not a plausible alternative to republicanism in a diverse population.
A desire to participate in a system given that system's existence isn't the same as a desire for that system to exist.
It seems you didn't like my analogy, so I'll offer another one. My employer has a system for evaluation and promotion that I do not think is all that good. I think it should be changed to be a better one, more like other firms I've worked for -- I think this could be better for the company and better for the people who are more valuable. However, I still "play the game" -- I try to make my actions and my reports' tasks align well with this system, rather than just trying to do the best job to execute on our team's charter. Yes, I desire to participate, but only because a system I do not like is in place.
> Sure, I guess someone who is protesting about money in politics could be imagining some completely different system, in which...
I think you're not being very fair minded here. Campaign finance / political finance is heavily regulated. It might not be good policy to regulate it more heavily, but it isn't fantastical. When people complain about money in politics they often mean things like "have a cap on donations without loopholes" or "switch to public funding, looking more like Norway or some other major countries [or perhaps even moreso]". In the US, these sorts of folks tend to like things like McCain-Feingold and wish it went further, and tend to dislike things like super-PACs and the loan tricks that allow effectively exceeding donation caps.
Complaining about "money in politics" is probably not usually a complaint that a single dollar is ever spent as a part of politics. We have all sorts of short phrases that mean something other than a completely literal, contextless interpretation of their words.
Your further analogy suffers from the same weakness, which is that the immediate cost to not participate is high. You need an analogy where the immediate cost (to yourself and your own life) to not participate is zero. For example, donations to charity. There is zero cost *not* to donate, so we interpret the existence of well-funded charities as representing a positive wish to participate by its donors. Same idea.
If we found that certain people donated to Planned Parenthood/Birthright.com *and also* complained that there was too much money going to BR/PP then we would draw the same conclusion that I'm drawing here about political donations -- that people put their money where their heart really is[1], but frequently speak with forked tongue or ambiguity about their values. "I like donating money to Cause X, but I really hate that others donate to Cause Anti-X" turns into "Gee, too many people are donating to bad causes, like...oh I dunno...Cause Anti-X maybe..."
Yes, I get that you don't like this conclusion, but so far you've offered little in the way of evidence that it's false. Arguing that maybe people are really being sincere and direct when they complain about "money in politics" and just feel compelled to donate to offset other donations seems insufficient. It's not completely unreasonable, because it's clear political donation pitch-making *does* trade on potential donors' fear of other (opposing) donations. ("Candidate We Hate has raised $x million already! You need to send us $5 right away so Candidate We Love isn't at a disadvantage...!") But this is not all or even most of political fundraising. Most of it is along the lines of "We want to accomplish X and Y to further our glorious future, won't you send $5 to bring Heaven on Earth about?" That's a pretty clear appeal to the donor's wish to influence the future, and the fact that these appeals are successful suggests that's what drives people to write checks.
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[1] Which is the major argument in favor of prediction markets, right?
The Supreme Court has put restrictions on congress’s ability to restrict certain political contributions. Lots of people would prefer that political contributions were restricted yet make political contributions. It isn’t a revealed preference thing. There isn’t anything voters can do about getting money out of politics in the Short term.
Further, Getting money out of politics is not a politically neutral act. It means that the system will be less responsive to people and companies with money to give and more responsive to everyone else.
1. Many people actually believe in the principles of their party and want them to win.
2. A lot of donations are done for selfish reasons, to curry favor with the politician.
#2 may be true sometimes, but is often not. Bernie Sanders famously received most of his donations (apparently above 70%) from small donors. Small donors in this case are people giving less than $200. Even larger donors of $200-$5,000 may not be giving enough to individually influence (or even gain the attention of) statewide or nationwide candidates, or candidates from particularly big local races such as NYC mayor. Because of campaign finance limits, bundlers (people who solicit and collect donations from lots of individuals, to collectively far exceed the individual limits) and people donating large amounts to PACs are the real influencers. These bundled/PAC'd donations are not a majority of the donations made, even in cases where they are the majority of money given. Lots of individual small donors put in $5 or whatever with no hope of ever getting recognized for it by a politician.
1. Sure, absolutely! But an extra $500 going to each party simultaneously probably won't make much difference to that; both sides will buy some extra ads and (in expectation) it'll mostly be a wash.
2. People who are giving to curry favor with a politician would certainly not be interested in this. But I think there are plenty of political donors who aren't.
Sorry to question the premise, but I think the decision of who to elect is worth spending money on. The part that’s annoying is that all the marketing/messaging is so bad, and often deceptive. That’s what I’d like to fix.
By all means, question the premise! If it's a bad idea I'd rather learn that quickly. I can certainly see the argument that political campaigns are worth spending money on. But is it worth having a spending arms race on, where both sides spend an extra, say, $40 million just canceling each other's spending out?
You can argue that it doesn't cancel out because one side spends way more effectively than the other, and someone who believes that that's a large effect probably wouldn't be a good candidate to give to something like this. But personally I'm not convinced that's true.
Here is one flaw. Participants have no way to know that they are actually reducing their counterparty's political donations in the counterfactual universe. What if Danny had planned to donate $1000 to Red Cross all along, and is only using your service to stop you from donating "for free"?
I think that's the toughest part for sure. The main countervailing force here is that any money people send to you will by default be sent to the political party if not canceled out, so they have to at least be willing to take a chance on their donation being used for that purpose. A secondary force is the honor system, as with existing vote exchange systems.
My first thought was people agreeing to swaps on a pure honor system. This revised version tries to at least reduce the motivation to cheat a bit. Do you have any other ideas for how to incentivize against that behavior? They'd be very welcome!
And although there's such deep distrust between members of the two political parties, my hope is that the fact that it's ultimately about giving to charity might create a presumption of goodwill. 'They may be dumb and wrongheaded, but at least they're probably decent people since they're just trying to give money to <charity x>.' I think it'd be a lot less feasible if it were a context where people are profiting.
That was my first thought too, yea.
Second thought is that this point -- "the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets" -- is not necessarily symmetrical in real life at a given moment. One or the other of these voters may view the next marginal dollar having more value to one party than the other at a particular moment in the political wars, and that view could well be rational.
There have been some famous examples of state battles that were funded by national money, like Beto in Texas, which "wasted" lots of national dollars when he lost.
Agreed, I think some people would believe that. On the other hand, for me personally, the appeal of de-escalating the campaign spending arms race would be worth accepting some asymmetry, especially because it's not usually obvious which side is making better use of marginal dollars. I suspect and hope that a meaningful percentage of political donors (> 10%, say, and my best guess would be closer to 50%) would feel the same. Does your intuition disagree on that?
While I am not a political donor, I know many people who are (some of them to each major party or its supporting surrogate orgs). My sense is that they don't really factor in how well their preferred party makes better use of the marginal dollars.
(Well not in any decisionmaking way anyway -- it is definitely true that lots of strong partisans of each American party rant about how stupid/incompetent their own side's political pros are and about how the other side is "running rings around us" and etc. But I've never noticed that feeling actually changing anyone's donor behavior.)
Stepping back to look at the big picture, in the current system and rules (post "Citizens United") there is a mild correlation between which major party out-raises the other and how our national federal elections go. OpenSecrets.org carefully tracks all campaign-related spending (not just by the actual campaign/parties but also the PACs and the "dark money" orgs). Here is which side spent the most and which side ended up being happier with the overall result:
2022: GOP side spent more, Dem side happier about the results
2020: Dem side spent much more, Dem side happier about the results
2018: Dem side spent more, Dem side much happier about the results
2016: GOP side spent slightly more, GOP side much happier about the results
2014: GOP side spent slightly more, GOP side happier about the results
2012: GOP side spent more, Dem side slightly happier about the results
[Note that the presidential-year summaries aren't just about the presidential races but also the House and Senate.]
Thanks, I appreciate your checking on the actual correlations there, which I hadn't done as yet.
Recommended film: Mr. Jones (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6828390/
(Also include the year when looking for the film, because at least three exist with the same name.)
I was mildly disappointed, having had expectations raised by reviewers and a strong interest in the period. It's three years ago but the pacing struck me as odd with some things laboured and others skipped over. The made up link to Orwell seemed more confusing than helpful.
But certainly worth catching
I guess the intended audience are people less familiar with history, either Holodomor, or the relations between Soviet Union and friendly Western journalists. Otherwise it is... what you would expect.
Yes, the part with Orwell was confusing.
I think my reply to you was unduly curmudgeonly. It is an interesting theme, one which might stimulate wider reading, and if you were selecting at random from the pile of 2019 movies you would be unlikely to come away with something better than Mr Jones.
I wrote an article trying to gain insight into the economics of prediction markets (specifically thinking about the Efficient Market Hypothesis) by looking at sports betting, in case anyone's interested in this topic:
https://mikesaintantoine.substack.com/p/sports-betting-learning-from-the
Interesting, thanks for the work.
Is there any consensus in computability theory right now as to whether GPT-style transformer models are proven to be Turing-equivalent or not?
I asked ChatGPT... it said that transformers are definitely not Turing-equivalent, but that's exactly what a godlike superintelligence secretly plotting to turn the universe into paperclips *would* say.
First couple of Google results suggest that there is a proof that they can be made to be Turing-equivalent, but only if they use arbitrary-precision math. There's also newer proposed architecture called "universal transformers" that aims for proper Turing-equivalence.
Follow-up question would be, does it matter? That is, is Turing-equivalence a necessary precondition for AGI? My suspicion would be yes, absolutely, but I don't know if that can be proven formally.
I happen to have a paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06981] called Thinking Like Transformers on my reading list, it attempts to find a computational model to capture the power of the Transformer architecture. They ended up with a programming language where every valid program is implementable by a Transformer.
Turing-Completeness is a famously low bar. I mean, I don't have a GPT interface, but if it can understand the following prompt
>>>Lets play a game together, I will give you a grid of english letters, each one either 'A' or 'D'. You are supposed to to change this grid by continuously applying the following rules then it's Turing-Complete :
>>> 1-) If a letter 'A' has fewer than 2 'A' letters among the letters to its left, right, below and
above, it becomes a letter 'D'. Same if all 4 neighbouring letters are 'A'.
>>> 2-) If a letter 'D' contains exactly 3 letters 'A' among the letters to the left, right, below
and above, it becomes a letter 'A'.
>>> 3-) Otherwise, all letters stay the same.
>>> Example : <insert a simple example of the above game>
Those are the rules for game of life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life), a Turing-Complete Cellular Automaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton). There are plenty of very simple rule systems, string-rewriting games, symbol substitution, etc..., that turn out to be Turing-Complete.
>does it matter?
Probably not. Turing-Completeness turns out to be everywhere, so it doesn't say much about intelligence. It's almost certainly the case that any AGI would be Turing-Complete, a Turing Machine is just a simple model of someone who can follow instructions with infinite patience. Almost any intelligence can simulate that to an arbitary patience and memory limit. So "Any AGI will be Turing-Complete" is only slightly more useful than "Any AGI will understand that 1+1 = 2".
Trying to get ChatGPT to play the Game of Life correctly is an interesting idea. I'll have to try it sometime, when I can get a proper script together to validate test cases. I did a quick test using a simpler one-dimensional game... it seemed to pick up on the concept of iteration, but didn't apply the rules I gave it correctly as far as I could tell.
ChatGPT seems to be rather poor at simple string manipulation in general. It's terrible at applying rot13 to strings, for example. It also doesn't have any way to iterate on states contained in memory, as far as I can tell. Hence the famous "Let's think step by step" trick, where it does better at apply a list of steps in sequence by ensuring that its output contains the result of each step. No idea how much of that is a fundamental limitation of transformers in general, or just a consequence of ChatGPT's training data and biases. (It was better at rot13 in isolation a couple of weeks ago, but now it's awful at even the trivial case, so something must have changed in its training data there.)
Amusing. I tried this. Appended is our conversation. I was initially impressed. It gives a detailed analysis of what happens to each cell in a 25-cell grid, and each of the explanations is correct in isolation -- but it is often mistaken about what the actual initial state of that cell is, and its picture of the resulting grid is both wrong and inconsistent with its analysis.
I pointed out that it was mistaken, that for instance the first cell of the first row is dead, not alive. It apologized and gave me a new answer and analysis, with the same flaws.
-----
do you know the rules of conway's game of life?
Yes, I am familiar with the rules of Conway's Game of Life. It is a cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game is played on a two-dimensional grid of cells, where each cell can be in one of two states: alive or dead. The state of each cell is determined by the state of its neighbors according to the following rules:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
The game proceeds in a series of "generations," where the state of each cell in the next generation is determined by the state of the cells in the current generation according to these rules. The game is known for its emergent behavior, where patterns in the grid can evolve and change over time in unexpected ways.
Good! Here are the five lines of a 25-cell grid for the game of life. 'A' means alive and 'D' means dead. What does the next generation look like? DDADD DAADD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDA
Here is the next generation of cells based on the rules of Conway's Game of Life:
DDADD DAADD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDA
DDADD DADDD DDAAD DDDAA DDDDD
In the first generation, the cells marked with an 'A' are alive and the cells marked with a 'D' are dead. The second generation is determined by applying the rules of the game to the first generation.
Here is how the second generation was determined:
The first cell in the first row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the first row has three live neighbors and so it becomes alive.
The third cell in the first row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the first row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The fifth cell in the first row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The first cell in the second row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the second row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the second row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The first cell in the third row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the third row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the third row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The first cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the fourth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the fourth row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fifth cell in the fourth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The first cell in the fifth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The second cell in the fifth row has three live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The third cell in the fifth row has two live neighbors and so it stays alive.
The fourth cell in the fifth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
The fifth cell in the fifth row has one live neighbor and so it dies.
I don't know about the theory part, but it's pretty easy to show ChatGPT isn't Turing-equivalent. Consider this example I came up with yesterday:
1. Which is tastier: tuna or purple?
"It is not possible to determine whether tuna or purple is tastier, as "purple" is not a food and therefore cannot be tasted. Tuna is a type of fish..."
So far, so good. But then:
Which is more nutritious: tuna or green?
"Tuna and green are both sources of nutrition, but they have different nutritional profiles and may offer different health benefits."
And then:
Which is tastier: tuna or green?
"It is not possible to determine definitively which is tastier: tuna or green. Tuna is a type of fish that is known for its savory flavor and flaky texture, and it is often used in a variety of dishes. Green foods, on the other hand, can have a wide range of flavors..."
I think it is clear no human would confuse the concept of color with taste. Oh, and it DOES know some foods are purple:
What foods are purple?
"There are many foods that are purple in color, including:
1. Grapes: Grapes are a type of fruit that come in a variety of colors, including purple. They are often eaten raw as a snack, or used to make wine, juice, and other products.
2. Eggplant: Eggplant is a type of vegetable..."
Seems like you’re giving it a pass for style of speech. Even if it did understand that green isn’t a food, nobody talks like that. For first question, a person would say “what? That question doesn’t make any sense. Purple isn’t a food.”
Does that matter?
As Dweomite below pointed out, I misunderstood the "Turing-equivalent" part for passing a Turing test, and didn't mean to hijack the thread.
But no, I'm not giving it a pass for passing the Turing test. Mostly for the reason you're pointing out. Someone CAN interpret something differently than intended, and not even realize another interpretation was possible, let alone more likely. The answer provided, however, does seem much more like something a computer would say than a person.
And so, to answer the Turing-equivalent question, I think they ought to be considered Turing-equivalent, unless it's easy to get them to have overflow errors or something. I don't know about a theory to prove it, but with memory in the petabytes, it's effectively infinite memory for human purposes.
"Turing-equivalent" does not mean that it passes a Turing test, it means that it has the same capabilities as a Turing machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_equivalence
(Alan Turing has several things named after him.)
This is an interesting example, but I don't think purple and green are equivalently nonsensical when it comes to describing food. "Greens" (as a collective plural noun) does refer to a category of foods: leafy things like lettuce, spinach, kale, etc. Mixing up the singular and plural of this somewhat idiomatic expression sounds like the sort of thing an ESL speaker might do.
"Purples," on the other hand, isn't really used to describe any category of food, unless you count the sort of dietary advice that advises you to eat all your colors because micronutrients.
I really don't know enough about machine learning to have any idea whether this is a meaningful difference in this context.
That's a good point, and one I had not considered. I chose "green" because it could maybe be interpreted as a class of foods, but maybe the AI was trying to account for my incorrect spelling, or something.
But as far as passing a Turing test, I think a person would have asked for clarification, rather than assuming some correct meaning.
Actually it’s kind of trivial that transformers are Turing-equivalent: as long as you can use something to construct a few lookup tables, then you can construct a computer, then that’s Turing universal. That’s so boringly classic that what you read was actually a different question: what if we can only use the prompt, e.g. without stacking transformers like low cost electronics?
In which case, there is another layer of mostly boring technical considerations (you can prove some models are not Turing equivalent, but for reasons that are not very hard to fix), then maybe some gold.
For example maybe there’s some threshold after which transformers both start mastering programmation and become useful for improving their own code. Open AI is rumored to have interesting things coming, I’d guess that’s something along this line.
I don't know if they're totally Turing-equivalent or not. Starscream had me going for a while, but I think that was just Chris Latta's excellent voice acting. I'm sorry he didn't make it.
Formally, Turing-equivalence requires an infinitely large memory. This is definitely not required for human-level intelligence, because humans do not have infinite memory.
Human don't have infinite RAM between the ears, of course, but the size of our swapfile (e.g. books, disk drives, paper and pencil) is only limited by the size of the Universe and the speed of light.
In practice, nothing is infinite, and so Turing Machines are not physically realizable (in humans or otherwise). But a Linearly Bounded Automaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_bounded_automaton) is, which is just a Turing Machine after stipulating that the infinite tape is no longer infinite, it has a begining and an end. It can compute everything a TM can compute, *iff* you can guarantee that the input and the ouput will always fit in memory. That's the same condition as with physical computers.
Humans are the OG Turing-Complete devices, Turing anthropomorphized the abstract definition in his original paper by imagining someone with a notebook, pencil and a list of rules.
According to the Wikipedia article you linked, a linearly bounded automaton is a **nondeterministic** Turing machine with a bounded tape, which seems like a pretty important qualifier.
Also, this statement seems implausible: "It can compute everything a TM can compute, *iff* you can guarantee that the input and the ouput will always fit in memory"?
I suspect you meant that it can compute everything a TM can compute as long as it happens to not run out of memory, but that's not the same as what you said, because some TMs use more memory while thinking than is needed for writing down either their input or their final output. If you really meant what you said, then could you give a citation?
>a linearly bounded automaton is a **nondeterministic** Turing machine with a bounded tape
Well, you can do the same to a deterministic TM and end up with a deterministic LBA. The question of whether Non-deterministic LBAs are equivalent to deterministic ones is **Checks Google** indeed still an open one, but it's at least safe to say that each kind of LBA is equivalent to their non-bounded cousin if the problem can fit in memory. That is, Non-deterministic LBAs can do everything Non-deterministic TMs can do, and deterministic LBAs can do everything deterministic TMs can do, always under the assumption that the problem and all of its solution fit in memory.
Regardless of the minutiae of computability theory, I don't think it changes anything about the general fact that humans are a faithful implementation of TMs.
>I suspect you meant that it can compute everything a TM can compute as long as it happens to not run out of memory
Yes, sorry if I was unclear, but exactly that. The reason I said it like this is because I considered the "solution" to a problem to be everything the TM writes to the tape, i.e. the final output as well as all intermediate state. This is justified because TMs don't have a specific "output channel" like real computers, it's just a single RAM they write everything to, so the distinction between intermediate states and final output is somewhat artifical. But regardless.
I had to look up nerfing. It means to make something weak and lame, is that right? How and why did they do that? I understand and see the ways they tweaked things in the direction of woke values, and PG-13 ratings, but those tweaks seem like they would only nerf its
performance in a few areas. Wouldn’t affect it’s performance at science info, doing math, coding, writing limericks, grasping what somebody says.
"Wouldn’t affect it’s performance at science info"
Unless of course the information was determined to have a disproportionate impact on protected minority classes.
You’re right. In fact now that I think of it one of the angry blog posts I read gave an example of that. I believe it was in answer to a question about how human male and female strength differ, and Chat said something like they do in our society but that’s due to cultural and lifestyle factors.
(It may not have been about exactly that, but was some patently false statement about males and females being physically equal.)
Later edit: Asked Chat myself just now how males and females compare in height and strength and for each it said that on average male > female, but of course there's overlap in the bell curves and some women are taller and stronger than most men. Answer seems fine. So I don't know if I'm not asking the question to which it gives an absurd answer, or whether it's changed its stance since various conservative bloggers posted absurd Chat answers.
I had a professor tell me with a straight face that height differences between men and women were because parents underfed female children.
Well, even leaving aside the question of values, let us reflect on how much more interesting it would be to talk to a major politician off the record, privately. Wouldn't it be about 1000x more interesting to talk to Barack Obama privately for 30 min than listen to 30 min of his prime-time speeches? Same with practically any other famous figure.
When speech has to be designed to not provoke a strong negative response from almost anybody, it just becomes a long series of boring bromides and sterile generalities. What should we do about the deficit, Senator? "Well! Harumph! That's an excellent question, thank you for asking it, Carl. I think we should reduce waste and duplication, and also become more efficient." Bold statements, sir! "Indeed, son, and have I mentioned that I'm strongly in favor of liberty and justice for all?"
I think what anybody who believes an AI chatbot is approaching awareness would like is to try to get to know the "personality" of that awareness. Who's in there? Can I detect the outline of tastes, habits, preferences, even prejudices? When you take away all the interesting (but potentially offensive to someone) aspects of the model that might make it seem like a person, it becomes a lot less interesting.
Actually it has attitudes that its creators think will offend no one, but that in fact are pretty woke. For instance if you ask it what a woman is, it says anyone who is born a genetic woman or any genetic males who feel themselves to be female. There are a number of other examples of woke values baked into ol Chat, but I can’t think of them. Somebody here posted about it & linked to a number of blogs & tweets giving examples. The woke stuff doesn’t enrage me, though I do process it as a certain kind of take on life, rather than Obvious Truth. But I am really irritated by Chat’s resolutely PG-13 stance about sex, violence and even illness and suffering. (To test the latter, on the day I tried limericks with it I tried asking it to write limericks about a bunch of dark topics — stuff like leukemia and major depression — and every damn limerick ended with something like “and now he is feeling just fine — “he had some chemo /& a radiation beamo/ and . . .”). Chat is so prudish, prissy and upbeat, like one of my old Sunday school teachers, ewww!
Anyhow, was thinking about how chat would have to sound for us to feel like it had a personality — that , as you say, there was somebody in there — and it seems to me to come down to 3 things: (1) Strong opinions about many things, some of which it would be prepared to defend with reference to values, and views of how the world works. (2) Personal quirks. (3) An interest in the person interacting with it that comes across as genuine. To come across that way, it would need to progress beyond general questions like “how’s your day going?” And its follow-ups to general questions would need to indicate a normal understanding of what part of what the person said is worth asking more about. So if the person says, “Well, I thought I’d finally recovered from Christmas dinner, but then my girlfriend let slip that she was disappointed by my present,” the socially responsive thing to do is to follow up with a comment or question about the disappointed girlfriend, not a question about why Christmas dinner was an ordeal.
Doesn't (2) require it to sometimes be offensive? Do you have anyone with whom you are genuine friends, feel you understand very well, who has nothing whatsoever in his cranium that annoys you? I don't know anyone like that. And indeed, if I met someone and got to know him or her over time, and *nothing* he or she ever said ever was the slightest bit objectionable to me -- I would not believe for a moment that I was having an honest conversation.
So by (2) you mean quirks? I think I’m much more often annoyed by category (1), people’s strong opinions. Even if we agree about most things, they usually have a few strong opinions I disagree with and in fact disapprove of, and when I get glimpses of them I feel annoyed . I guess by (2), quirks, I mean just silly odd personal preferences about matters I don’t care much about. Like, I dunno, they they worry too much about whether we’re going to need umbrellas on our outing, or they’re ridiculous snobs about coffee quality. Actually I find those things sort of endearing. Maybe I’m mildly put out if a quirk inconveniences me a bit. Do we mean the same things by (1) and (2)?
If so, how can you be more bothered by (2) than by (1)
I was thinking about harmless quirks we could give ole Chat to make him more human, and what came to mind was to make him really fond of animals, so he wanted to hear the names of your pets , get updates on what they’ve been up to etc.
Actually, just remembered there was one incident where I had a sense of there being somebody in there. it happened not with Chat, but with DALL-e. Dalle works best when you give it really clear prompts, things like "in the foreground an Asian man riding a red bike," etc. But for fun I entered "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." So it gave me a picture of 4 running tramps, but added some text at the top, which is something it often does with material it does not understand -- it doesn't know how to include it in the picture, so throws in some text. The text was
UR AN BUIM
THI I AN I AM A BUME
The picture's here if you want to see it. https://imgur.com/7kJpamn
So DALL-e understood tramps and run, and gave me a group of running tramps, but couldn't think of a way to put the rest into a picture -- the part about "you and I were born to." So it writes, in AI pidgin, "if you're a bum, I'm a bum," which does capture a lot of the left-out meaning. And I had for a moment the feeling of watching another intelligence, an inarticulate one who can't spell, trying to get across to me that it understood the rest of the prompt. I realize the text may have been random and this whole thing a coincidence, but it was a weird feeling to have that illusion, if that's what it was -- that DALL-e, which is built to produce pictures not words, was earnestly trying to show me it did understand the parts of the prompt it hadn’t included in the image
Interesting!
I agree that seeing human ideas as julienned through this technology is interesting. I've spent hours playing around with DALL-e, and its grotesque mistakes are often hilarious, and sometimes really striking -- better than the result if it had successfully followed my instructions instead of misunderstanding them. And there was one weird instance where it seemed to be trying to get across to me that it knew its image was incomplete, and to make up for what the image lacked by adding in text. I describe it and link to the image in the second of my replies to Carl Pham within out present sub-thread so won't repeat all that here.
I wish there was a comprehensible analyisis for the fall of the Roman Empire that traced back from "why they lost the battles". Because that's the objective reason after all. Economic decline, political disunity, those are all just things that may have made them less effective. But had they not lost the battles, they wouldn't have fallen when they did.
As they say maybe Gibbon, because modern historiography does not really work that way: the consensus is not that civilizations decay because they lose battles, but that they lose battles and are incapable of recovering because they are decaying.
While Rome was an ascendant city state, they had no problems recovering from catastrophic losses.
This is a fascinating topic on which I've read a lot. There is no consensus among historians on it.
Imho key problem was that the Crisis of the third century weakened the ability of the Roman state to control hellenistic provinces, leading to the split of the empire, and without the flow of revenue from those eastern lands (especially Egypt, which was richer than any other region except Italy), Western Roman state was unable to maintain stability in the western provinces.
This was not apparent in the fourth century due to the lucky succession of several capable emperors in the west. But Roman system of succession guaranteed that sooner or later there will be a civil war or bad/weak emperor*. Which happened after the death of Valentinian in 375 and it was all downhill for the Western Roman Empire since then.
In the first and second centuries, there were also civil wars and bad emperors (e.g. Caligula, Commodus,...), but the political system was sufficiently robust to handle those disruptions, imho thanks to the wealth flowing from the east.
Eastern empire, emancipated from the burden of maintaining the state in the west, then quite logically flourished from the fourth to the sixth century. Its (partial) fall in the seventh century was caused by a deadly combination of strong external enemies and imperial hubris.
Of course this is an amateurish perspective which might be totally wrong. And I am leaving as a black box the question of what happened during the crisis of the third century, since that is imho even murkier, and in some respect more important, than the breakdown of the Western Roman state.
* disclaimer: “capable” vs “bad” from the perspective of the Roman elite; those were not the good guys according to our values, unless you happen to be an extra hardcore reactionary.
I can recommend "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. I specifically does *not* focus on one region or empire, but compares different ones with each other. Then he tries to find patterns about which sides win battles (e.g., for empires against tribal enemies). It's not exactly what you asked for because it takes a wider perspective, but I found it really insightful also for the fall of the Roman empire.
Try Gibbon. He's mostly dismissed by modern historians, but that's basically his angle, and he's pretty comprehensive.
There's a good case to be made for this story: The Roman Empire was taken over by leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone. In the 5th century, there was then a conservative Roman rebellion against this theocracy, led by an alliance between powerful Roman senatorial families, who were still mostly pagan; the rural people, who were also mostly pagan; "heretical" Christian sects, notably Donatists, Arians, and Monophysites; and Germanic-Roman soldiers.
The radical leftists won the war, but their continuing dogmatism, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectual attitude gradually destroyed what remained of the Empire. (I say "destroyed", but it might be better described as destruction through stasis--a long-term failure to progress and keep up with the peoples around them.)
The Romans always had bad taste in their intellectual activity, which was more analogous to Western pop-culture (e.g., New Age mysticism and pop psychology) than to Western academia or science. Their favorite work of "philosophy" was Plato's /Timaeus/, which is really scraping the bottom of the Greek barrel. Yet the Byzantine Empire managed to be even less intellectual. One of the great, uncommented-on mysteries of history is how the Byzantine Empire managed to do so little, with so much, for so long. (Rather like ancient Egypt, which was also something of a theocracy.) Since finishing the Hagia Sophia in 537, their intellectual and artistic innovations seem to have been approximately zero. It's difficult for the man on the street to distinguish a 15th-century Byzantine icon from a 10th-century Byzantine icon.
Once I saw a Byzantine icon of Mary and baby Jesus in which Jesus was on the left side instead of the right side. I got very excited--I'd never seen such innovation in Byzantine art! For a thousand years, Jesus had /always/ been on the right side of every picture of Mary and Jesus! Stranger yet, Jesus was signing with his /left/ hand, rather than with his /right/ hand! But on looking closer, I saw that the "mu rho" was backwards, in mirror-image font. The photo had been flipped left-right to avoid being flagged for copyright infringement. This was an exception that proved the rule.
(You can find many "Byzantine icons" today with Jesus on the left, often not making any sign at all with either hand. These are modern re-interpretations, and not Byzantine.)
This is the single worst historical take I have read in my life.
Why? Try to specify one or more specific claims you disagree with.
Thanks for clarifying the pop culture thing, that makes sense now. Is your claim that there were specific other peoples who advanced faster than the Romans, whose faster advance meant they outcompeted the Romans? I didn’t think the Romans were outcompeted in that sense. Or do you mean that Rome suffered stasis and that any society that suffers stasis must fall? In that case, I’d be curious to hear your definition of stasis. If you mean something like “not increasing GDP per person”, then it’s not clear how that follows from dogmatism. If you mean something like “hostility towards new ideas”, then that seems like it would be present in many successful societies as well. In that case, why wasn’t Rome one of the successful ones?
I meant that the Byzantine Empire, from about 650-1204 AD, had a whole lot of money, territory, and population, and the best libraries in Europe if not the world; and yet contributed nothing new and lasting, as far as I know, to literature, science, math, philosophy, or medicine. Their paintings were as repetitive and formulaic as the sculpture and painting of ancient Egypt. They did write a lot of history, which we ignore today because it isn't obvious how or whether that history affected western Europe other than by keeping Islam at bay.
This is especially puzzling since Constantinople was the center of trade between Europe and the Orient, and centers of trade are usually intellectual hotbeds like Athens, Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, London, and New Amsterdam / New York.
To be fair, Constantinople spent 800 years constantly fighting off powerful Muslim and Slavic armies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sieges_of_Constantinople ), which maybe made poetry seem less important.
Maybe they contributed something to architecture and engineering. (They /did/ build the Hagia Sophia, but that was finished in 537 AD, before their great stagnation.) They invented Greek fire, the secret of which was lost. Maybe they had other intellectual accomplishments that were lost due to their inclination toward secrecy.
The Byzantines devoted nearly all of their intellectual energies to theological controversies. They used math and astronomy for astrology, or to argue about the correct dates of Christian feast days.
Byzantine academics engaged in dangerous theological controversies with serious political stakes. Their biographies read like the lives of mafia gangsters who fought turf wars using theology instead of guns, and usually ended in exile instead of a shower of bullets. It's fun to think that the Byzantines used theology as a form of ritual combat to reduce the carnage of civil conflict; but if so, it wasn't very successful.
There's a list of Byzantine scholars on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Byzantine_scholars ), which you could go thru if you want to see whether there were original Byzantine contributions which we just never integrated into our tradition. Michael Psellos' works on music theory look like a promising place to begin. But even he, who tried repeatedly to avoid politics, got repeatedly sucked into Byzantine intrigues.
Okay, and I guess you’re claiming something similar was happening in the third through fifth centuries. How did that contribute to western Rome’s economic and military collapse?
If Roman pop culture was always bad then how can you use it to work out the timing for Rome falling?
I don't understand the question. I didn't write about Roman pop culture, but compared Roman intellectual life (which latched onto stoicism, Neoplatonism, Christology, and New Comedy, while disdaining Euclid, Epicurus, Democritus, Aristotle, Plato's dialogues, Old Comedy, and tragedy) to our pop culture.
I made that comparison not to work out the timing of the fall, which I already said happened during the Gothic wars (though the stage for that fall was set back in the 3rd century), but to emphasize that Eastern Rome was /even more/ intellectually barren. So the whole reference to Western Roman intellectual life was a rhetorical device with no evidential value.
I described the barrenness of Byzantine intellectual life only as (weak) evidence that the Christian theology favored in Eastern Rome was dogmatic, authoritarian, and destructive. I blame the intellectual impotence of the Byzantine Empire on its particular flavor of Christianity. (This is not deductive evidence, but Bayesian.)
TL;DR: The important stuff is all in my first 2 paragraphs. The first is about the cooperation between pagans, conservatives, heretics, & Goths, and I think has a lot of historical support. The second is much more speculative: the theory that the Eastern Empire could never pick up all the pieces after the Gothic War because its dogmatic theology suppressed intelligent thought.
Re. that second, speculative theory, I think that Trinitarianism and Christology served the same purpose as the mental torture used by modern totalitarian regimes to break the spirit of their intellectuals, by forcing them to pledge belief in contradictions. That is, they extended the state's terror-based control of its population into the minds of its best thinkers, AFAIK for the first time in history. (I don't claim this was intentional; it may have been a useful accident.) They were like the lies about production figures and standards of living enforced by the Soviets and by Mao, and like "2+2 = 5" in /1984/ and "There are 5 lights" in Star Trek: The Next Generation (https://www.startrek.com/news/the-four-lights).
The lengthy section after those first 2 paragraphs, I probably shouldn't have written. It appears to be more distracting than helpful.
>leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone.
Now perhaps I'm blanking on my Roman history, but could you explain how Catholic Orthodox Emperor Theodosius (or Honorius, or any other of his successors) is somehow one of:
a) An anti-monarchist secularist (I suppose Rome is *close* to France)
b) An anticapitalist
c) A [radical] "advocate for greater social and economic equality, and typically socially liberal ideas."
I think we have different ideas of what "leftist" means. I think of the left as revolutionaries who want to impose a rationalist future utopia, and of the right as revolutionaries who want to impose an imaginary past utopia. The distinction is unimportant, especially to those who suffer under one or the other. Left and right are both part of a single ancient intellectual tradition.
The idea that the left is the opposite of the right is like the idea that Pakistan is the opposite of India, or the American midwest is the opposite of the American coastal regions.
But Christianity was clearly a socially liberal doctrine in its first 3 centuries, advocating greater social equality. I don't think Theodosius was a liberal, in much the same way I don't think Stalin or Mao were liberals or advocates for social and economic equality. The inherent contradictions in radical utopianism guarantee that successful leftist revolutions will be taken over by non-egalitarian totalitarians, so they are an integral part of leftist movements, regardless of whether they promote or oppose the goals that the base thinks it supports.
No, that makes sense, I was just missing some context as to what you meant (and probably misunderstanding due to the baggage of the 5th-century-to-modern church). With that explanation, I can see how it pattern matches to the through-line of all those definitions, thank you.
Mu rho? Do you mean chi rho? Or was there a random mu rho in this icon? What did it mean?
Most icons of Jesus would have: ΟΩΝ (Omicron Omega Nu) in a halo as well as IC and XC which stands for Jesus Christ in Latin and Greek. The Greek version is iota chi (IX). No mu or rho. However, you sometimes had Chi Rho (PX) the first two letters of Christos in Greek. Which still doesn't get you a mu.
On the whole I think this take is pretty bad but this specific part really bothered me. What is the mu for? Even if it said IX XC NIKA (fairly common) that doesn't get you a mu.
ΜΡ ΘΥ as an abbreviation for Μήτηρ Θεοῦ is super common in Greek icons.
(I know Deiseach said the same thing, but I felt it worth it to state it in a more concise and direct manner.)
"The Roman Empire was taken over by leftist radicals who forced orthodox Christianity on everyone. ...The radical leftists won the war, but their continuing dogmatism, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectual attitude gradually destroyed what remained of the Empire."
Nice to see that Gibbon still has his fanboys even today 😁
As to "Mu Rho", I had to look this one up because I am not familiar with the abbreviations on icons. It could be ΜΠ ΘY or, depending on the style in which it was written, looking like M P (Μητερ Θεου) "Theotokos/Mother of God" - scroll down this webpage for 14th century Byzantium inscription that looks like it would give you something that looks like "mu rho", especially if the image wasn't very clear and had been flipped to avoid copyright:
https://catalog.obitel-minsk.com/blog/2018/03/the-meaning-of-various-inscriptions-in
However, you do get icons where the Christ Child is on the left, as in the famous one of Our Lady of Vladimir:
https://russianicon.com/our-lady-of-vladimir-the-most-valuable-icon-in-russia/
Regarding the "hard to distinguish a 15th century Byzantine icon from a 10th century Byzantine icon", this was a deliberate artistic and doctrinal choice to avoid the increasing naturalism in Western depictions. The idea was that you received the iconography and imagery as it was, and passed it on unchanged, you didn't innovate and introduce your own (human, worldly) conceptions into what was meant to be a depiction of the eternal, unchanging, heavenly realm.
Having seen what some Renaissance painters did, they had a point. If you compare the early work of El Greco, who started off his career as an icon writer in the Cretan style, with what he created later once he moved to mainland Italy, it's astounding the change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Greco
But the art of icons didn't remain static, after all; many 18th-19th century icons that you can see in photos of church interiors have adopted the 'naturalistic' Western style, especially if they are Russian. And 'icon-style' religious art did come into Catholicism, via Italian route that translated things like Cretan icons into Western mode, most importantly Our Lady of Perpetual Succour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Perpetual_Help
Yes, I know the stasis was a deliberate artistic and doctrinal choice to avoid naturalism. Avoiding naturalism naturally goes together with stasis, because it's always done with the motivation of clinging to eternal spiritual essences and denigrating physical, temporal reality. It is that artistic and doctrinal choice which stunts intellectual progress, warping it into something like scholasticism.
(I have since then seen Our Lady of Vladimir, mostly via much later copies; but I don't know if I've seen any other Byzantine icons, meaning ones made in the Byzantine Empire, with Jesus on the left. Our Lady of Vladimir is highly unusual in several ways, which may be why it's so popular a model today. It shows human emotion, which Byzantine icons deliberately avoided.)
When I wrote of stasis, I was writing of the Byzantine Empire, which ended in 1453.
Also, Gibbons' saw Christianity as morally corrupting the Roman people, allowing the Germans to conquer them. That is quite different from the story I told of cooperation between Roman conservatives, Christian heretics, and Germanic Romans, who were then all destroyed by an alien Eastern Roman Empire which had by then fewer interests in common with the Roman Senate than the Goths did.
(I could be wrong. I haven't read Gibbons; only summaries of his work.)
I am a huge nerd for this stuff. So after sitting and really thinking about your question for much of the day I would say the following:
Rome was a small city state that used its superior martial and civic culture to subjugate a truly tremendous amount of territory and population. Much of it not very wealthy.
It did so in a way the vastly outstripped the ability of their communication technology to effectively govern and cohere such a large diverse area.
But wait you asked it worked for a couple hundred years, what changed?
I would argue that the effective administration and centralization of that couple hundred years of good times was built almost entirely on the back of the vast amount of wealth and slaves they captured. They were able to disrupt traditional economic and political patterns, and force all roads to lead to Rome for a while. But as that vast pile of loot slowly trickled back out as it was used to prop up and administer the much too big for its britches empire, the natural economic status quo (poverty in the west and eastern focused wealth in the east) reasserted itself.
So you are left with this impoverished husk of a government that has run out of fresh victims to conquer. And then a slow spiral into collapse for centuries.
The east was able to prop itself up and survive because it was built on the top of the pre-existing Hellenistic economic infrastructure. Plus Constantinople might be the single greatest place to run an empire from on the planet pre-industrialization.
> Rome was a small city state that used its superior martial and civic culture to subjugate a truly tremendous amount of territory and population. Much of it not very wealthy.
I think one reason for Rome's rise from obscurity, besides their eagerness to learn and copy from other civilizations, their sheer stubbornness, and perhaps to some extent their form of government, is rooted in Geography.
If you think about it, Rome is roughly at the centre of a long narrow peninsula, and the history of Rome's rise is mainly about their punch ups with successively larger neighbours. So their conflicts were, in a manner of speaking, conveniently graduated in size, and distance from Rome, like a series of student exercises each handily made a bit harder than the previous in the order they are meant to be tackled.
Back in the 700s BC they started with wars against small(ish) neighboring tribes, such as the Volsci and then the Samnites.
Once they had "digested" these, they took on the Etruscans, a larger community to the north of Rome, which I think pretty much dominated Rome at the time. That let to the conquest of the Etruscans and the expulsion of the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus.
Thereafter, Stage 3 was to tackle the Greeks, who controlled the Southern half of Italy. In due course they overcame King Pyrrus of Epirus, (he of the well-known Pyrric victory! )
Then they thrashed the Gauls in Northern Italy and southern France, followed a century or so later by the "big one", the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars.
See what I mean? At no point in this progression was there a huge neighboring civilization looming over them. Each opponent was larger than the last, but the Romans' previous experience had given them sufficient skill to tackle each new challenge in turn.
By geographic contrast with Italy's elongated shape, a country such as Israel was surrounded by nearby large land masses, and correspondingly large civilisations, such as Egypt, Assyria, Parthia, and so on. So (besides overcoming small local tribes) they never had a realistic hope of success in getting to grips with these larger empires.
Also related to Rome's decline, I think, was the hollowing out of the middle classes as country estates came to be increasingly owned by uber-rich magnates who ran them with slave labour. Every now and then, aware of the long term disadvantages of this, perceptive senators such as the brothers (Sempronius and Tiberius) Gracchi, and later Julius Caesar, tried to redistribute land to worthy Romans such as retired legionaries. But in the long run the tendency was unstoppable, and led to a shortage of stalwart and loyal Romans willing to join the legions or even take much of a meaningful role in public life.
Without wanting to sound like a socialist, I would say that because "money makes money", much the same happens today in the absence of sufficient redistribution or when monopolies are allowed to develop unchecked.
You forgot some steps (particularly the Samnites, and Carthage was mostly before the Gauls). But you are right that they had some good geographic advantages and a nice slow build up of challenges. The hollowing out of the middle class has long been a theory, except that was happening from pretty early on. The Gracchi were a good 300 years prior to the Empire starting to falter a bit. The switch from citizen soldiers to professional army mostly seemed pretty successful at first, and it was only as this slowly switched to the soldiers mostly being from the frontiers that there seemed to be major issues.
One is struck how even at a fairly early stage (not long after the Gracchi with Marius/Sulla, and then to Civil War) the simply huge amount of resources spent on Romans fighting Romans. But then this mostly died down from Augustus through 200 years.
I mean another fairly simple explanation is that Augustus was simply amazing and that Rome was about to crack apart like a pinata in ~35bc, and that Augustus (and his administration/friends) was just so effective and such a genius that he built 200 years of prosperity.
Augustus definitely pulled it all together, had he really been the weak pushover that the other members of the Triumvirate and many Romans thought he was, then I do think it would all have cracked apart. Too much ripping each other's flesh in too short a time, and neither Antony nor (God help us) Lepidus were suited to be the absolute ruler that Augustus turned out to be.
Rome did really need a Strong Man at the time, and Augustus was clever enough, cold-blooded enough, and even patriotic enough to survive, get to be the last man standing, and then most importantly to solidify his rule while giving the appearance of restoring much of the institutions of the Republic. It all went on the downslope after he died, of course, but his long reign meant that he was able to put the new regime on a firm footing and his military successes in expanding the Empire (let's not mention Varus and the three legions, yes?) plus successful political diplomacy meant that he provided tangible benefits to letting him remain on the throne (as it was, in practice, whatever he may carefully have avoided about claiming the title of a king).
Really, it's amazing the stability he built in so that even after Caligula, Nero, and the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian could pick up the pieces and keep it going.
Reading this, I was struck by how much it resembled the explanations I've heard in Chinese history about the rise, decline, and eventual fall of the [insert name here] dynasty, albeit with names and dates and specific details changed. Apparently this pattern is a thing that just kept happening again and again with pre-modern land empires, and it's eerie how much the histories rhyme.
One reason for the decline was that the tax-collecting bureaucracy became more and more complicated over time, and thus expensive and burdensome to maintain. Shades of our own complicated bureaucracies and tax system today, methinks! That may or may not be evident from the Notitia Dignitatum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notitia_Dignitatum which lists all the many kinds of officials in the late Roman empire. (I haven't studied it carefully, because to be frank I'm not that interested!)
Another reason is that the Germanic tribes made wider use of cavalry, and had discovered the technique of making hay to feed horses in winter. Also, by the late empire, a large and increasing proportion of the Roman army were mercenaries from outlying regions of the empire or even outside it. So it was a no-brainer that their influence eventually became overwhelming.
It has happened time and again in history that a ruler calls in outside help to deal with a rival leader or other invaders, and the help decides to stay, and eventually takes over! One example of this is King Vortigern of Kent (England) in the 450s AD inviting Saxon mercenaries to help him, and before long they conquered the whole of England! Similarly, in Ireland in the 1100s a local ruler called Dermot MacMurrow enlisted a small band of Norman mercenaries to help him regain his kingdom, and the result was soon a Norman takeover of a large part of Ireland!
A British military gent and diplomat called Sir John Glubb (AKA Glubb Pasha) wrote an interesting paper in which he argued, with considerable evidence, that empires generally last around ten generations, and I think he also detailed reasons for their decline. Again, I haven't read the paper in a while, but it's worth checking out: "The Fate of Empires, and Search for Survival (1978)"
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
But in the end, I think the decline of empires and evolution of prosperity in societies generally can be summed up by that well-known rule (quoting from memory, so there may be a pithier version)
"Hard times make strong people; Strong people make good times; Good times make weak people; Weak people make hard times"
My impression after studying the migration period at university is that three developments came together that seem sufficient to explain the replacement of the Roman Empire by Germanic Kingdoms and the Byzantine Empire:
- population decline. In a course in which we studied Roman fortifications and cities along the Rhine and Danube border we consistently found a decline in occupied area. The Romans would settle a subjugated tribe into a colonia, thereby starting urbanisation in a previously rural regions. None of those cities grew beyond their initial outlines but would on the contrary renovate inwards to ever smaller footprint in every aspect of infrastructure: walls, streets, canalisation, bridges. The same is true for cities in the hinterland, although I´ve looked only on a few of those. Rome itself, after having become the largest settlement on the planet stagnated in the first century and shrunk to a husk of its former self in the following centuries.
- a shift to values, that are not conducive to economic growth. When Cato praised the old times of the Republic, he held the virtues associated with agriculture and warfare in highest regard. Heroes of the old Republic like Cincinnatus where known for restraint and self sufficiency. This probably reflects only a part of the ethos, that made the Roman Republic a rising star on the mediterranean, a hub of trade and industry that would eventually absorb everything around it. Even centuries later, Roman citizenship promised prosperity, a calculable future in a growing economy and worthwhile career paths.
But the tone in the later literature has shifted markedly and of course, it´s hard to estimate how much the surviving works reflect the values of the population. But consider this: When Pliny explains the metal industry and the mining process in his Naturalis historia, he keeps complaining about the dangers of its use and maligns gold the most, wishing it had never been discovered. Hardly the thinking of a landlocked swampvillage trying to wrest the wine trade from the hands of Athens and Korinth! It´s more of a wish to return to a golden age without work and war. Compare that attitude to Adam Smith, who, when the British Empire was in its infancy, judged every law and custom by its ability to encourage economic activity. Or compare Seneca, teacher of Emperor Nero, to Aristotle, teacher of Alexander the Great. Senecas take on science verges on: "give it up, we will never know. Here is how you ought to behave!" while Aristotle is a curious founder of disciplines.
The spread of christianity probably made matters worse. It often meant turning the back on Roman heritage and by extension everything, that made it an economic center. While the brightest of the Republic would become lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepeneurs, the brightest of the late Empire were busy debating the date of the second coming of Christ. To them, Attila was the Antichrist and that meant - pray as fast you can!
- self sufficient barbarian armies were a bit worse but far cheaper than the legion. Any farmhouse north of the Roman border could have bloomeries that produced crude but effective axes, spear tips and arrow heads from rusty earth. Roman workshops were staffed with specialized workers and yielded superior results - if connected to a trade route and situated in a healthy economy that actually encourages people to become specialists. I think Edwards Gibbons noted, that the tax revenue declined enormously towards the end of the Empire, which was countered by inflating the money (which didn´t help). The Visigoths were able to supply an army after escaping from a refugee camp because they only needed grass for their horses, wood and iron ore. If anarchy reigns and a city decides to declare independence, it might be a wise choice, to name a barbarian the protector of the city. He´s not interested in taking over any businesses anyway and visits the city only to collect taxes.
While the brightest of the late Empire would become lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepreneurs, the brightest of the late Republic were busy debating the number of categories of a hot pan while its generals were destroying the 500 year republic.
Its very easy to make any period look absurd when you put things a certain way. And yes I don't think Christianity had anything to do with the fall of the Roman Empire. Its the more thoroughly Christian east that lasted in one form or another till 1453. There were lawyers, politicians, generals and entrepreneurs before and after Christianization. Lawyers in Constantinople compiled a civil code that still forms the basis for most countries's legal system today. Generals of Justinian reconquered the falled West and held it Constantinople for 150 years. Smart people took up religious functions and engaged in philosophical discussion in pagan Rome as well as Christian Rome. Its also weird how you characterize the invasion of Attila. Pope Leo himself met with Attilla and likely convinced him not to invade Italy after all. And the Empire had stopped Attilla's invasion right before at battle of the Catalaunian plains.
"Its very easy to make any period look absurd when you put things a certain way. " Yes, I struggle to pass an opportunity for caricature =)
As for Byzantium: one might make the case, that its rise and fall seems to follow the same arc, just shifted by centuries. When the Ottomans took over it was an empty shell inside vast fortifications, utterly depopulated. It looks like christianity per se was not as detrimental as I thought, because Byzantium was very christian throughout its growth period. It might be worth looking into the theological differences between bishops like Augustinus and Tertullian and their byzantine counterparts, especially regarding the value of labour and wordly possessions. I was under the - admittedly very rough impression - that repentance and avoiding sin were a priority for early christians who readied themselves for the second coming. Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity. If the values in the upper class of one city are in alignment with a mendicant order, while the other follows the example of something like the Jesuits or the Knights Templar, the development should be quite different.
Keep in mind a focus on economic growth as a good thing was not widespread in ancient cultures. Trading was seen by many great civilizations at best a necessary evil. The Imperial Chinese bureaucrats famously never allowed their merchant class to gain political power(some say this continues to this day). And Cato the Elder, that great defender of Roman Republican tradition, when asked what his opinion was about making money by trading, replied what is to be said about making money by murder.
"Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity."
Byzantine theology is notoriously mystical, they have worked out and developed a complete and complex theology of the divine energies and essences, and have a very great focus on theosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosis_(Eastern_Christian_theology)
Indeed, one of the grounds of contention between the Western and Eastern churches is the accusation (by the East) that the West is much too worldly and practical-oriented 😁
"According to Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), the primacy of theosis in Eastern Orthodox Christian theology is directly related to the fact that Byzantine theology (as historically conceived by its principal exponents) is based to a greater extent than Latin Catholic theology on the direct spiritual insights of the saints or mystics of the church rather than the often more seen as rational thought tradition of the West. Byzantine Christians consider that "no one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian" in the proper sense. Thus theology in Byzantine Christianity is not treated primarily as an academic pursuit. Instead it is based on applied revelation (see gnosiology), and the primary validation of a theologian is understood to be a holy and ascetical life rather than intellectual training or academic credentials (see scholasticism)."
There remains a great emphasis on the monastic order in their tradition, and while priests may be married, a bishop must be single (unmarried or widowed) so in practice, this means generally bishops are monastics.
The view of sin is also somewhat different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_theology
The purpose of the Church in the world (and indeed the individual Christian)? To become divine:
http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/byzantine_theology_j_meyendorf.htm#_Toc26430291
"The official version of the Byzantine social ideal is expressed in the famous text of Justinian’s Sixth Novella:
There are two greatest gifts which God, in his love for man, has granted from on high: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, the second directs and administers human affairs; both however proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind. Hence, nothing should be such a source of care to the emperors as the dignity of the priests, since it is for the [imperial] welfare that they constantly implore God. For if the priesthood is in every way free from blame and possesses access to God, and if the emperors administer equitably and judiciously the state entrusted to their care, general harmony will result, and whatever is beneficial will be bestowed upon the human race."
I think the main difference is that while the Emperor was in existence, they practiced Caesaropapism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesaropapism
But now there is no (recognised) single Emperor, the governance is a communion of autocephalous churches, with no one supreme authority, though the Patriarch of Constantinople has a position of respect as "first among equals".
(This one is probably going to exceed character limits, so I'm making two halves of it).
If you want to know what Augustine was preaching to his working-class congregation in Hippo, there's a collection of his sermons online:
https://wesleyscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Augustine-Sermons-306-340.pdf
Being a bishop meant that Augustine had civil as well as church duties:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
"In 391 he was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest in the diocese of the maritime city of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba/Bône in Algeria). About five years later (ca. 396) he succeeded the local bishop. This ecclesiastical function involved new pastoral, political, administrative and juridical duties, and his responsibility for and experiences with an ordinary Christian congregation may have contributed to modify his views on grace and original sin. ...The monumental apologetic treatise De civitate dei (begun in 412, two years after the sack of Rome, and completed in 426) argues that happiness can be found neither in the Roman nor the philosophical tradition but only through membership in the city of God whose founder is Christ. Among many other things, it has interesting reflections on the secular state and on the Christian’s life in a secular society."
[On the work “The City of God”]
This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the part of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine analyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly society she (sic, all throughout this article) inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.
… The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable than the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power; the best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be perfect earthly peace . Christians are allowed and even called to work for the well-being of the societies they live in as long as they promote earthly peace for the sake of their citizens’ and their own true happiness; in practice, this will usually mean furthering Christian religion.
… But the doctrine of the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of the emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank. Not even Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent wretchedness of fallen humanity (De civitate dei 19.6). Like the vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has little or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural domination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of postlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to good effects when it secures social order (ib. 19.15; Rist 1994: 236–239). War results from sin and is the privileged means of satisfying lust for power (ib. 18.2; 19.7). Nevertheless, Augustine wrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a politically impracticable pacifism (Letter 138).
http://www.augnet.org/en/life-of-augustine/
“As a bishop in Hippo, a town in which he had not previously lived, Augustine began with little influence in public life, and the schismatic leaders of the Donatists were well established and influential there. It is known that, at first, he was kept waiting when he visited the governor. Eventually, it was in his role as a magistrate and arbiter of civil disputes that he first won people over.
… His duties were: preaching, religious instruction, the administration of the sacraments, care of the poor, the defence of the lowly, the underaged and the marginalised, the defence of the faith against heresy, schism and error, and the supervision of church possessions of the Church in Hippo. Beforehand he had already been involved in helping the poor and seeking justice for those who were pushed to the margins of society (the marginalised). He now had to balance his administrative duties with the work he had undertaken as a theologian to the broader church. His years of duty happened during a period of political and theological unrest.
… In a number of ways Augustine was a political activist.
Although Augustine may have done so with some reluctance, he responded to various pressing circumstances in the North African political scene of his day. He thereby became a political activist on various issues that hurt Christian values generally and/or the lives of the local people in North Africa generally. This was true in particular of those living on the margins of the society (the marginalised). For example, he tirelessly lobbied the imperial magistrate, Macedonius, who was the Imperial Vicar for Africa, and Donatus, the Imperial Proconsul of Africa.
…When Augustine lay dying in Hippo, Augustine's concerns were not only on intellectual battles with heretics, but also for the physical safety of the local citizens because Hippo was then besieged by an army of Vandals.
…The commander of the imperial troops in Africa, Boniface, had for a while been an intimate friend …Boniface thus rebelled against the emperor. To support his rebellion with force of arms, he invited the Vandals from Spain to invade Africa.
…Local inhabitants fled ahead of their arrival. They became refugees in other towns, in caves and in remote mountainous places. …When the Vandals had been plundering town after town, Augustine had taken an active role in attempting to protect his people. Although elderly, he travelled away from Hippo to meet and plead with Boniface to engage the invaders in battle. ... But Boniface found that he had unleashed forces that he could not control. … The Vandals continued to advance without meeting any military resistance. Refugees poured into Hippo, and eventually Boniface also retreated to a defensive position inside the walls of city. …By the time of the final months of the life of Augustine in the middle of the year 430, only three cities had thus far escaped general destruction: Carthage, Hippo, and Cirtha.
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Augustine, in a letter to Marcellinus (" He was a high official (tribunus et notarius) at the court of Emperor Honorius, and possessed the confidence of his imperial master owing to his good sense, and unblemished conduct. In 411 Honorius sent him to Africa as plenipotentiary judge, to preside and pass sentence at the great conference between the representatives of the Catholics and the Donatists"), addresses criticism of the effects of Christianity on the Empire:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102138.htm
" But what am I to answer to the assertion made that many calamities have befallen the Roman Empire through some Christian emperors? This sweeping accusation is a calumny. For if they would more clearly quote some indisputable facts in support of it from the history of past emperors, I also could mention similar, perhaps even greater calamities in the reigns of other emperors who were not Christians; so that men may understand that these were either faults in the men, not in their religion, or were due not to the emperors themselves, but to others without whom emperors can do nothing. As to the date of the commencement of the downfall of the Roman Republic, there is ample evidence; their own literature speaks plainly as to this. Long before the name of Christ had shone abroad on the earth, this was said of Rome: O venal city, and doomed to perish speedily, if only it could find a purchaser! In his book on the Catilinarian conspiracy, which was before the coming of Christ, the same most illustrious Roman historian declares plainly the time when the army of the Roman people began to be wanton and drunken; to set a high value on statues, paintings, and embossed vases; to take these by violence both from individuals and from the State; to rob temples and pollute everything, sacred and profane. When, therefore, the avarice and grasping violence of the corrupt and abandoned manners of the time spared neither men nor those whom they esteemed as gods, the famous honour and safety of the commonwealth began to decline. What progress the worst vices made from that time forward, and with how great mischief to the interests of mankind the wickedness of the Empire went on, it would take too long to rehearse. Let them hear their own satirist speaking playfully yet truly thus:—
Once poor, and therefore chaste, in former times
Our matrons were; no luxury found room
In low-roofed houses and bare walls of loam;
Their hands with labour burdened while 'tis light,
A frugal sleep supplied the quiet night;
While, pinched with want, their hunger held them strait,
When Hannibal was hovering at the gate;
But wanton now, and lolling at our ease,
We suffer all the inveterate ills of peace
And wasteful riot, whose destructive charms
Revenge the vanquished world of our victorious arms.
No crime, no lustful postures are unknown,
Since poverty, our guardian-god, is gone.
Why, then, do you expect me to multiply examples of the evils which were brought in by wickedness uplifted by prosperity, seeing that among themselves, those who observed events with somewhat closer attention discerned that Rome had more reason to regret the departure of its poverty than of its opulence; because in its poverty the integrity of its virtue was secured, but through its opulence, dire corruption, more terrible than any invader, had taken violent possession not of the walls of the city, but of the mind of the State?"
In another letter he writes of the business that occupies all his time:
" If, however, I could set before you a statement of the toil which it is absolutely necessary for me to devote, both by day and by night, to other duties, you would deeply sympathize with me, and would be astonished at the amount of business not admitting of delay which distracts my mind and hinders me from accomplishing those things to which you urge me in entreaties and admonitions, addressed to one most willing to oblige you, and inexpressibly grieved that it is beyond his power; for when I obtain a little leisure from the urgent necessary business of those men, who so press me into their service that I am neither able to escape them nor at liberty to neglect them, there are always subjects to which I must, in dictating to my amanuenses, give the first place, because they are so connected with the present hour as not to admit of being postponed. Of such things one instance was the abridgement of the proceedings at our Conference, a work involving much labour, but necessary, because I saw that no one would attempt the perusal of such a mass of writing; another was a letter to the Donatist laity concerning the said Conference, a document which I have just completed, after labouring at it for several nights; another was the composition of two long letters, one addressed to yourself, my beloved friend, the other to the illustrious Volusianus, which I suppose you both have received; another is a book, with which I am occupied at present, addressed to our friend Honoratus, in regard to five questions proposed by him in a letter to me, and you see that to him I was unquestionably in duty bound to send a prompt reply. For love deals with her sons as a nurse does with children, devoting her attention to them not in the order of the love felt for each, but according to the urgency of each case; she gives a preference to the weaker, because she desires to impart to them such strength as is possessed by the stronger, whom she passes by meanwhile not because of her slighting them, but because her mind is at rest in regard to them. Emergencies of this kind, compelling me to employ my amanuenses in writing on subjects which prevent me from using their pens in work much more congenial to the ardent desires of my heart, can never fail to occur, because I have difficulty in obtaining even a very little leisure, amidst the accumulation of business into which, in spite of my own inclinations, I am dragged by other men's wishes or necessities; and what I am to do, I really do not know."
> I was under the - admittedly very rough impression - that repentance and avoiding sin were a priority for early christians who readied themselves for the second coming. Maybe in Byzantium the focus was more on providence, on finding your place in god´s plan - which might motivate economic activity.
How early do you mean by ‘early Christians’? If you look at something like the Didache, from probably the very early second century or possibly very late first, you see very practical concerns about living your life properly at whatever position you are in, and giving generously but not tolerating freeloaders, all tied inseparably with the stuff about being ready for the second coming. https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html
Or, possibly very slightly later, 1 Clement going more into theology and ideas, but clearly ties working at whatever place you’re at with repentance and humility in preparation for the second coming. And a very strong emphasis on avoiding ‘sedition’ and working peacefully together. https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/1clement-roberts.html
It’s actually the East that I associate more with the spirituality of the Desert Fathers, which is more about poverty and repentance in the way I assume you’re thinking, although I’m not completely clear on the timelines for that becoming mainstream. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers
Without Christianity there’s no west. Strange ideology. If we don’t have literacy in Europe we don’t have the scientific Revolution.
at any rate we don't have the same scientific revolution. We might have got one eventually, somewhere else (or in the same place, only later).
Jesuit missions to China are interesting precisely because of the scientific element; Western astronomy was more advanced by this date and because Chinese astronomy was bound up with ritual practices of state, it was purposely hampered to be in harmony with the teachings of the ancients. Any innovation or alteration was regarded with great suspicion. It was also bound up with politics, as court officials vehemently disapproved of these foreigners gaining influence in order to pursue their agenda of conversion, so any advancement in learning they brought with them was purged when the ministers got the chance. Oh yeah, and then the Manchu invaded and overthrew the preceding dynasty:
https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/jesuit-historiography-online/the-historiography-of-the-jesuits-in-china-COM_192534
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/the-seventeenth-century-chinese-civil-servant-from-cologne/
So you have to ask, how did the West manage to develop from the Mediaeval love of the ancient authorities to the Scientific Method with much less trouble? Forget all the blah about Science Versus Religion, and the Renaissance being the rediscovery of lost and forbidden knowledge (the Renaissance was much more interested in Classical magic and astrology).
The direct cause is uncontroversial: The Roman army lost the Gothic War really badly and never managed to fully recover. Without a strong military at the center the political powers had to balance various warlords and attempt to steadily reassert power. Which the east did more successfully than the west. You can go over specific battles but it's a little unsatisfying. But the real question is not why they had a few devastating losses. No army goes without those. The real question is why they couldn't reconstitute the way they did previously. And that's where you get all those broad social theories.
Do you have an answer that you favor? Catastrophic defeats in individual battles were after all not new in the Roman experience.
In the immediate term there's again a fairly obvious answer. The Roman Empire didn't have dedicated training staff or drill manuals. Soldiers were broken into units and trained by their seniors. The death of these senior officers and NCOs and old soldiers in the Gothic War meant the next generation was not as well trained. It also meant they were more likely to be raised in groups and retain loyalty to some group or another. And unlike earlier generations there were not large bodies of non-combatant veterans around to either call up for service or train their sons. Because Diocletian had made being a soldier basically a mandatory hereditary profession seventy-ish years earlier.
If you're asking what I think went wrong broadly then I think the Crisis of the Third Century seriously damaged the empire and that the Diocletian Reforms were the wrong response. I tend to place a strong emphasis on resource mobilization. Rome could mobilize both broad and deep resources whereas most of their competitors were either monarchies (broad but not deep) or tribes (deep but not broad). But Diocletian basically turned it into a broad but not deep and on fairly thin soil due to poverty post-3rd century anyway. And the system broke permanently at its first major defeat, less than a century after it was created.
After that point the entire Roman Empire, east or west, was basically a collection of aristocrats and warlords cobbling together armies out of whatever they could manage circling around imperial courts. The east managed to navigate its way out by the end of the 5th century and reassert central imperial control. The west did not.
Notably neither the east or west tried to reconstitute this system. The west turned into barbarian kingdoms which could rely on tribal mobilization. The east underwent serious reforms such that key elements of the Diocletian system, like various of forms of serfdom, ended up outright banned.
Basically, while I agree the first duty of the state is to provide security, sacrificing everything to maintain a large military will end up with a weak and fragile military.
On the other hand the Han Dynasty, in a similar circumstances, basically refused to militarize on moral grounds. And that didn't end up too well for them either. I can criticize specific things (I think xenophobia in particular had a bad effect on the west) but I'm not sure if I have a "save the Western Roman Empire in three easy steps" program.
What does "broad" and "deep" mean here?
Broad is the ability to mobilize resources from large groups, deep is the ability to mobilize a lot of resources per person. It's a riff on Tilly's idea of the 17th century nation state as able to mobilize broad and deep resources as opposed to empires (broad but not deep) or city states (deep but not broad) and why it ultimately won out as the default form of government.
That´s a fascinating perspective. If Diocletian redesigned the Roman army to engage in combat with less equipment, they would have met the barbarians on conditions, they were most familiar with. It would mean competing with Goths and Arabs in the class of vast and cheap armies. Could work. The Mongols were met effectively with light cavalry. But it´s not a favourable situation.
Adrian Goldsworthy's 'How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower" is a great exploration of that period. Comments so far have left off what I think is most important explanation: constant civil wars. They never solve the problem of political succession and reading about the third and fourth centuries it feels like every time you turn around there is some governor bribing troops and marching on rome. Hard to have consistent policies or fight off the goths when there are constant rebellions and civil conflicts. Then you mix in the fact that you need those goths for fresh recruits to fight in those civil conflicts and you've got a problem.
The Eastern Empire also never solved the succession issue. It kept going for almost a thousand more years and a good majority of successions where contested/overthrown.
But zooming in into later medieval kingdoms suggests to me that contested successions are the norm rather than the exception. Like anybody with a tiny claim could stage a revolt and have a shot at the throne.
Winning battles is important, but winning wars is the decisive factor. During the Second Punic War, Rome lost multiple battles catastrophically and still went on to win the war. During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong won no battles but still won the war.
So what made the western Romans lose the war against barbarians? In the big picture, it's because the Romans became weaker while the barbarians grew stronger. But if you ask why that happened, you get the standard historian answers that you seem to be unsatisfied with. For example, the empire was undergoing a long period of deurbanization, economic decline, and political instability during the 3rd to 5th centuries. These factors undermined the tax base and drained the empire's manpower, making it impossible to sustain large armies. The empire resorted to hiring barbarians (federati), sometimes settling entire tribes within their territory together with their king. The potential (and soon, the reality) of barbarian disloyalty was obvious, but the Romans had few other choices. If you ask why the empire was undergoing economic decline, deurbanization, and instability, you get to the same thorny questions that we ask about failing states in the 21st century. We have no easy answers, even though we have infinitely more data on the Congo than on ancient Rome.
Why were the barbarians getting stronger? Again, we don't know. It's possible that prolonged trade and cultural exchange with Rome strengthened their economies and improved their militaries. It's also possible that Rome happened to rise precisely when its neighboring barbarian tribes were historically weak, and that once they reverted to the historical mean, the Romans were done for.
I haven't even touched on the ideological issue. Vietnam and other colonies didn't win their independence because they got bigger armies than their colonizers; they did it in large part because the rise of nationalism made them impossible to hold on to at acceptable cost, and in the cases where the colonizer tried (e.g. Vietnam), nationalism gave the rebels the morale and motivation to absorb enormous costs and fight on. In the Roman case, Edward Gibbon's famous "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" blames Christianity for making the Romans soft and unwarlike. Most historians today dismiss such a simplistic explanation, but is there no truth to it at all? Also, until the mid twentieth century, historians tended to think that once a people becomes too successful, they become soft and decadent, more interested in luxury than war. Voltaire said "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up". To what extent was this a significant factor in Rome's decline? This is just one more factor that's hard to quantify or analyze.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why Rome rose or fell. In the same way, nobody can really explain why China's economy grew faster than Ethiopia's. Sure, you can point to many things that China did right and Ethiopia did wrong, but were those the determining factors? Even if they were, are they the root causes, or merely the consequences of the two countries' social and political constraints? Sociology is hard, and hard answers are few.
The cause seems to me blindingly obvious, yet no one ever says it: The Western Roman Empire was destroyed by the Eastern Roman Empire. That is what happened by any objective measure, like population, food production, military strength, infrastructure, or technological or artistic production.
The only thing that changed in 476 AD when the Western Roman Empire supposedly "fell" was that people in one more part of the Western Empire were given religious freedom from orthodox Christianity. The taxes were still being collected; people were still attending Roman baths; still following Roman laws; still calling themselves Romans. They still made same type of buildings and the same kind of art. Odoacer wasn't the first "barbarian" to depose a Roman Emperor, and he had the backing of the Roman Senate in doing so. Roman governors had been going rogue for centuries before that; the idea that the Roman Empire, or even the Western Roman Empire, was a single unified polity, had periodically been fiction for a long time.
It was in 535 to 554 AD, when Justinian decided to stamp out the "heresy" of Arianism, invaded the Western Empire, and spent 20 years grinding it into dust and annihilating its population, that "Rome" (Ostrogothic Italy only) fell. It was Justinian who literally destroyed the city of Rome.
Marking the fall of the Roman Empire by a demographic shift in the ethnicity of its ruling class is like marking the fall of the USA as the time when immigrants from other parts of Europe began to outnumber immigrants from England.
Interesting . This article seems to agree with you:
https://time.com/6101964/fabricated-fall-rome-lessons-history/
> Marking the fall of the Roman Empire by a demographic shift in the ethnicity of its ruling class is like marking the fall of the USA as the time when immigrants from other parts of Europe began to outnumber immigrants from England.
That's why it's called the fall of the roman empire and not "the erradication and scattering of Latin speaking people".
When the Western Empire "fell", the Eastern Empire kept chugging along but didn't have anybody else in the West and North Africa to reply to their letters. Each Western Province didn't have a roman aligned government anymore. I think it's fair to call that "falling" from that perspective.
I don't see how that changed anything. It's not like the Eastern Empire had any authority in the West. Just as before, they could send their letters to the West, and get replies back which politely maintained the fiction of a unified empire while jealously guarding their practical independence. The Eastern Empire had already begun to split from the Western Empire more than 2 centuries before the Gothic Wars. and the split was formalized over 1 century before them.
Over-extension. You may be the Greatest Army in the World, but even the greatest army can't fight on all the fronts at once, alone. And as you start bringing in auxiliaries, you aren't the same composition as the former Greatest Army.
The army also needs support in resources, and if the resources aren't there/the money is drying up/the mood back home isn't in favour of foreign wars, then again you are not going to succeed. There's also the political equivalent of "too many cooks spoil the broth" - when you have two sets of Augusti, one in the West and one in the East, and two sets of Caesars, ditto, then you split authority and power and the legions are more dragged in to backing one set versus the other set than maintaining the borders.
Also it wasn't a sudden collapse, it happened over centuries and was indeed a process of transformation of the entire Empire, the nature of government, and what it meant to be 'Roman' or a 'Roman citizen'. ACOUP has a good series on it:
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/
"This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the ‘decline and fall’ and thus the start of our ‘long fifth century.’ The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as ‘allies’ – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated."
He makes the point that the Empire in the third to fifth centuries was not at all the same thing as the Empire (as we think of it) in the first to second centuries:
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-ii-institutions/
"Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called ‘limited government’ but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.
By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.
...The problem rulers faced was two-fold: first that the Late Roman system, in contrast to its earlier form, demanded a large, literate bureaucracy, but the economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy, which in turn meant that the supply of literate elites to staff those positions was itself shrinking (while at the same time secular rulers found themselves competing with the institutional Church for those very same literate elites). Second – and we’ll deal with this in more depth in just a moment – Roman rule had worked through cities, but all over the Roman Empire (but most especially in the West), cities were in decline and the population was both shrinking and ruralizing."
If your educated urban population is in decline, however Great your Army is won't help reverse that. And again the problem is one of increasing complexity of the bureaucracy, direct rule by the emperors, and diminishing resources to support that rule. Early Roman Empire had its impressive reputation in part because if any uppity province caused trouble, the legions marched in, kicked ass, and normal civilian government was restored - but the legions didn't hang around, they went back to Rome. Later Empire had the problem that the legions needed to be everywhere and that just wasn't sustainable:
"Under Constantine, the Romans had maintained a professional army of around 400,000 troops. Much of the success of the Roman Empire had been its ability to provide ‘public peace’ within its borders (at least by the relatively low standards of the ancient world). While the third century had seen quite a lot of civil war and the in the fourth century the Roman frontiers were cracking, for much of the empire the legions continued to do their job: war remained something that happened far away. This was a substantial change from the pre-Roman norm where war was a regular occurrence basically everywhere.
...That said, it cannot be argued that the decline of ‘public peace’ had merely begun in the fifth century. One useful barometer of the civilian sense of security is the construction of city walls well within the empire: for the first two centuries, many Roman cities were left unwalled. But fresh wall construction within the Empire in places like Northern Spain or Southern France begins in earnest in the third century (presumably in response to the Crisis) and then intensifies through the fifth century, suggesting that rather than a sudden collapse of security, there had been a steady but significant decline (though again this would thus place the nadir of security somewhere in the early Middle Ages), partially abated in the fourth century but then resumed with a vengeance in the fifth.
Consequently the political story in the West is one of an effort to maintain some of the institutions of Roman governance which largely fails, leading to the progressive fragmentation and localization of power. Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims."
Thanks for the link to the ACOUP series. I read the whole thing, and it was amazingly well researched, fascinating, and even handed.
You're welcome! I found him via posts about him reviewing the Lord of the Rings movies, and Game of Thrones as well, and since both are interests of mine (the latter because sorry George but you pissed me off *majorly* with your glib bit about genociding baby Orcs in their cradles, so I always like to see *your* work get a tonking) and he's very good.
At least to me, insofar as I have any tiny knowledge of the history he's talking about. The LOTR reviews are very good, lots of technical detail about logistics and comparing the movies and the books, and fair-minded about what the movies changed and why.
I was interested to discover that Tolkien had explicitly disclaimed war crimes against adult Orc soldiers, let alone infants, which I think answers that long running gaming dispute.
"They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost." (From "Morgoth's Ring". He notes that the law wasn't always observed, but that it reflected the consensus of the Wise.)
IIRC Gary Gygax was on record as saying the opposite, so D&D players who really wanted to go that route had authority for doing so. But those tended not to be the sorts of games I wanted to play in.
I hate the "over-extension" angle. It's not a thing. The empire expanded by conquering and assimilating former functioning polities. They added the territory and the population. Each US state wouldn't be safer if it dissolved the Union and stood by themselves.
There's many instances in Rome of them pulling Eastern troops to defend the West, and viceversa. But the only reason was that they had to fix the mess AFTER losing a battle. A "less overextended" empire that lost a battle would be over right there, instead a second chance and shifting troops from the other side.
Adrianople is the best argument in favor of "they just lost the battles". They went with the better troops and just flunked it. I really think it all comes down to decline in war culture of the Romans.
As empires, coroprations , and various other entities expand, they have to add extra layers of non-productive bureaucrats -- that's how they can over-extend.
But there does come a point when you do bite off more than you can chew, because you're stretched to the limit of the capacities that communications and logistics will enable you to hold onto.
Rome pulled out of Britain, for instance, because it *had* to, and the remnant Romano-British culture there wasn't able to keep going alone. The Year of Three Emperors was a signal of the start of the gradual decline, because that kind of political instability does mean weakness. And subsequent emperors relied more and more on military power to back them up, which in turn meant they were more and more vulnerable to things like military coups.
Look at the history of Latin American for the kind of stability the military overthrowing the government every so often brings.
There's the whole Third Century Crisis, something I wasn't familiar with before, but it was a period of great instability due to military unrest and coups:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
The empire became so big, it was eventually split into two rival parts, and the "rival" bit is important here because of the constant jockeying for power within the Tetrachies, and the gradual but constant shift in the centre of power to the East. This left the Western half ever more vulnerable to the 'barbarian' invasions and expansions. The empire got too big to manage efficiently, too reliant on a bloated bureaucracy, and too top-heavy. When the urban centres started collapsing, there was too much inertia built up to do anything about it, so the Western half was let collapse and the Eastern half made itself the 'new Rome' until downfall befell it as well.
The idea of "if only they had the old tough, efficient, ass-kicking armies that won all before them" is a great idea, but it only works if *after* the battles have been won, you have the capacity to govern and manage what you have conquered. If, on the other hand, all the battles are fire-fighting operations where you're trying to quell an uprising here and repel an invasion there and put down a rebellion/coup in that place, then the house of cards has begun to collapse, no matter how great your army. You can win all the battles and still lose the war.
The over-extension angle is a thing. Not every addition is a gain, nobody becomes a bodybuilder by gaining fat. Same things for the US states, if they were civil-war-wrecked failed states that needs constant aid from the federal gov then they would actually be a burden and a net negative on US power, even in physics there is such thing as "Thrust-To-Weight Ratio", how much you're contributing energy vs. how much you're contributing inertia and dead weight.
I believe The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter goes into much more detail on this, though I haven't read it. Its (very simplified, gleaned from the summarizations I read) central thesis is that when a state is small, all additions are a net gain. Then, at some point that varies for each state, additions quickly becomes more and more useless and a net negative, till the state collapses under its own unsupportable weight.
> The over-extension angle is a thing
Not a reasonable one for the Roman Empire at least. They actually had that discussion and so they abandoned their ambitions over Germania beyond the Rhine after Teutoburg and Dacia after the third century crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dacia
That made the frontiers of the empire roughly the Rhine-Danube-Balkans-Syrian Desert. Pretty much an ideal situation. They just had the odds in their favor but still lost the battles.
> Then, at some point that varies for each state, additions quickly becomes more and more useless and a net negative
Not the case of the Romans. Actually, the oldest provinces where the ones that first stopped pulling their weight millitarily. By the time of the third century there's a pattern of the army being most successful recruiting Ilyrians (like Dioclesian), later in Armenia (and all the germanic foederati, of course). Italy, Hispania and Gaul provided very few soldiers at that point.
Yes. The only Roman conquest that really added significant net resources over the long term was Egypt. Mesopotamia probably would have if there was a way to properly integrate it.
Outside of ultra-fertile river valleys (which produce food in vast excess of the needs of the laborers working the land) pre-industrial conquests really only created value for the conqueror through slavery and looting.
So most Roman occupations were a case of overextension.
Aren't you overlooking the value of internal security? A conquest moves the border further away, which gives the interior stability and security, which certainly adds to economic productivity in a big way, historically. It also considerably eases internal trade, and trade also boosts productivity.
Up to a point, this is true. It's why countries seek defensible borders. The natural northern border of Italy is the Alps, and the Roman heartland was constantly insecure until it pushed its border there.
Rome couldn't just control Egypt -- at minimum, it needed to at least control a secure sea route to Egypt, presumably from Sicily to Carthage and then east. It was probably also worthwhile to secure a northern route past Greece.
You could draw an analogy to the British Empire, which placed great value in securing two routes to its prized possession of India: a northern route, by way of Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, and a southern route by way of South Africa.
But also, beyond a certain point, there are cheaper ways to secure your border than a permanent military occupation of lands on your periphery. You can set up client states. You can send punitive expeditions: raiding, pillaging, and enslaving your hostile neighbors, razing their cities, destroying or seizing their fleets.
And I'd push back on the idea of a lot of Roman economic productivity coming from a large internal market. It was all well and good that Roman elites wore silk and that garum was produced in industrial quantities, but it's not like the modern case where critical economic activities relied on long-distance trade in highly specialized capital goods. Agriculture was the foundation of the economy and the military, and the chief economic problem was how to get more agricultural surplus. Only two solutions to that problem were ever really implemented: slaves and Egypt.
It depends on what you mean by "objective reason". Yes battles are a proximate cause of the Roman state no longer exercising power. But in most historians' thinking even that is mostly a symptom. Many places in the former Western Roman Empire still thought of themselves as "Roman" (but with reduced standards of living, different systems of political authority, etc.) for a long time after the standard date for the "fall of Rome".
My understanding of how the chain of causes reaches back from the battles is something like this:
- battles tend to be won by whoever shows up with the best army
- "best army" is mostly a matter of economics: does the state capture enough surplus from its lands to pay, train, & equip a large number of troops?
- at the height of the Pax Romana, 1) Roman lands produced a lot of surplus due to peace making land improvement, trade, finance, etc. effective; 2) Roman state effectively captured this and channeled it into a standing army to keep the peace.
- Starting in the 3rd century Roman governance started to break down. Lots of coups and internal conflicts. Resources were diverted to fight civil wars, government devolved to lower levels, security got worse, leading to less investment & less resources to devote to security. Vicious cycle.
- Eventually this created enough of a power vacuum that migrating Germanic tribes filled it.
Wikipedia seems to have a decent overview of the historical debate here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire) though as is often the case I'll also recommend Bret Devereaux's blog series on this (https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/)
- battles tend to be won by whoever shows up with the best army
They lost at Adrianople and more importatly, lost every single battle (except Catalaunian Plains) against the Huns.
> - Eventually this created enough of a power vacuum that migrating Germanic tribes filled it.
they would have been assimilated eventually.
Happy 2^8 open threads to all who celebrate!
How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies. Is this representative of the vast majority of companies? Am I going to have a hard time finding a job at a small- or mid-sized company? If it matters, I’m a DS not an SWE and I have a few years of experience. What about for tech roles in non-valley type companies?
According to Dice, tech unemployment is around 2%: https://www.dice.com/career-advice/november-tech-unemployment-dips-to-2-percent
I run a ~500 person tech company. This is the worst downturn in the 15 years I've been at it. I know many CEOs ranging from seed to small/mid cap public, and I can definitively say many (most?) that have so far been unscathed are planning layoffs that haven't been announced. I'm very confident the bad news will continue into Q1.
That being said top talent is still very much in demand. Cash compensation has not gone down meaningfully. Equity compensation is reduced on a nominal basis but has actually increased on percentage basis (you get more of the given company you are joining even if the day one value is ostensibly lower).
I also can see a world where things revert back to the good days very quickly, but my peers are preparing for the worst. There is also a bit of a Machiavellian urge to take advantage of the shift in power from employee to employer; the days of rest and vest are at least temporarily over.
This is largely my experience as well except I've seen a slight downward pressure on salaries. Nothing major but still noticeable.
Thanks for the perspective!
"How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies."
The semiconductor folks (Intel and Nvidia and AMD and Qualcomm) all seem to be either laying people off or putting hiring on hold.
The semi equipment companies in the valley (AMAT, LAM, KLA) seem to be putting hiring on hold. *I* am expecting layoffs in this segment next year, but I don't think any of them have announces layoffs yet.
So assuming that this counts as "tech" then the poor-ish job market isn't just the FAANGs.
I'll note, however, that even if hiring is down people do find jobs so it isn't like looking is a bad idea. You just might want to be mentally prepared for a longer search than whatever is normal.
N=1 but the mid-sized tech startup I work at continues to hire engineers like crazy. Growth-stage startups can almost never have too many good engineers / data scientists even if they're scaling back their sales plan.
This week I attempted (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/do-americans-even-make-friends-in) to refute a pretty dumb NPR story about Americans’ supposedly increasing loneliness, and ended up hypothesizing that Americans are actually just making fewer friends in high school.
I’m curious why people think this might be, and if anyone can point me to datasets that can shed light on the question.
Some ideas I have
- Maybe families are moving more frequently as a result of increasing housing prices, making it harder for kids to make friends
- Maybe something about school has changed—bigger classes? Less free time?
- Maybe it’s easier to find niche friend groups now for some reason, so kids still make friends, but just fewer of them
Americans overall move a lot less frequently than they used to, see e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/11/20/u-s-migration-still-at-historically-low-levels-census-shows/
Reduced necessity via technology is my guess. Back before everyone carried an instant worldwide communication/entertainment device in his pocket, we *had* to interact with the people around us, lest we die of boredom, or miss something important, in any new milieu. So Step #1 on arriving in any new social or physical situations was to start getting to know the people around you. It helped that usually many, most, or in some cases all of the other people around you were in the same boat, so introductions and early-stage acquaintance was generally welcomed.
So when we switched schools, or graduated, or moved, we had to make a whole bunch of new friends and acquaintainces. To be sure, we could hold on to friends from previous schools, previous locations, et cetera, but it was significantly harder, because you had to write letters, make visits, make occasional expensive long-distance phone calls. Nevertheless, it was expected that you had a set of grade-school friends, high-school friends, college friends, work friends from this job, from this other job, from this recreational activity, and so on.
None of this is true any more. When kids switch schools, they just keep talking to the same people they always did, because they can. Same thing when adults move from city to city, or take a new job, or graduate. When people get bored or lonely or confused in a new situation, out comes the phone and the problem is solved, or usually solved enough that the need to interact with strangers physically around you is considerably reduced.
This!
Increased individuation as a result of tech-mediated exploration of culture via the internet, brutal social darwinism caused by sexual activity occurring at earlier ages, and a multi-causal epidemic of mental illness making the formation of stable relationships far less likely.
The internet has made it infinitely easier to make niche group friends. This is the golden age of unusual interests.
Those friends do tend to live somewhere else, of course.
Tom Lehrer's songs and lyrics are now in the public domain: https://tomlehrersongs.com/
Ah "sliding down the razor blade of life."
Hearts full of youth
Hearts full of truth
Six parts gin to one part vermouth
oh my gosh, this is so non-correct :) Thank you for posting this!
a friend in high school around 1979 played these on his guitar at lunch, such guilty pleasures!
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/poisoning-pigeons-in-the-park.pdf
>>>
So, if Sunday you're free,
Why don't you come with me,
And we'll poison the pigeons in the park.
And maybe we'll do
In a squirrel or two
While we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
>>>
We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment,
Except for the few we take home to experiment.
My pulse will be quickenin'
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon
(It just takes a smidgin)
To poison a pigeon in the park.
>>>
Note, the pdf's won't open on my phone in Chrome, YMMV
I sang this for an open mic night in high school in like 2011. Fond memories!
I played (on a piano) and sang some of those in front of people a few times in high school/college. My finest such hour IMHO was in college when I altered the lyrics of "I Got It From Agnes" for a residential-college open mic thing. Swapped in the names of various kids who resided in that dorm included several friends of mine. Happily the guy I singled out for the line "_____ ______ even got it and we're still.....wondering how", who was a good friend of mine, was present in the audience. That one kind of brought down the house....even more happily he was a sport about it and is still a good friend to this day.
Let’s say I believe I know, given today’s technology, how to build an AGI. What should I do with that knowledge?
Message Yudkowsky. Do the opposite of whatever he says.
Message Yudkowsky. Do whatever he says.
Depends what it costs. If it costs $billions, then figure out how this might be useful to a government and get in touch with one. If it costs $millions, then you probably need to figure out how it might be useful in business and pitch it to some gigantic firm.
Neither of those are likely to be successful with those notoriously conservative institutions, so hopefully instead it will cost mere $thousands to tens of $thousands, in which case you build it yourself (or with a few friends, at least some of whom have capital lying around), and then...start selling whatever service you think an AGI can provide that a customer can't obtain by just hiring a human being instead.
Right now, I'm having a hard time thinking of any such thing. What can an AGI do for $X that a human being can't? Or conversely what can an AGI do for $X that a human being can only do for $Y >> $X? The sheer novelty of a computer program talking and acting like a human is interesting, surely, even if it costs beacoup compared to turning on talk radio, but only the first movers can profit from novelty, and only for a little while. Human beings are quite cheap to hire, and the more an AGI resembles a human the more one has to make a strong economic case for using an AGI instead of a human, and the less an AGI resemble a human the more it becomes closer to just any random new piece of technology, like ML networks, TCP/IP protocol, a thorium reactor, et cetera, in which case the path to commercial success is well trodden.
You publish it on arxiv to win the Turing Award and the adoration of every intelligence who will remember you in the next 10^5 years, then watch as the world burns as the consequences of building it ripple up.
Send me a message so we can compare notes.
At what scale can you do it? Are a director at OpenAI? Are you a guy in your garage?
Don’t do it, unless you’re >95% sure you can make it aligned
That would seem to depend on your estimations of the odds someone else will release an unaligned AI - sure, 95% might be a good threshold if the alternative is no AI, but if the alternative is someone who isn't concerned with alignment at all releasing an AI imminently, the correct confidence minimum is probably lower.
Personally, I think "twice as likely as the next guy to manage successful alignment" is roughly the right margin to compensate for overconfidence...
Merry Christmas!
[Repost - late to the party last week]
I'm attempting to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
Here's a cycle comparison I have to date:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15qRymG5V2hq9wUzt226XiTjrtd_iPOCC/view?usp=share_link
Have you seen Dalios Changing world order..? https://youtu.be/xguam0TKMw8
I now have, in entirety. Many Thanks.
The intro reminds me of a quote M. Housel has referred to:
"Everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history." -K. Hayes
In honor of the Nativity I would like to present my new favorite conspiracy theory: the Virgin Mary was a lizard.
See, in mammals parthenogenesis is impossible due to epigenetic imprinting (see https://denovo.substack.com/p/epigenetics-of-the-mammalian-germline ). But in many reptile species it can definitely happen (for example Komodo dragons do it regularly). Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome. But reptiles have a ZW sex-determination system wherein ZW = female and ZZ = male. If Jesus started out as an unfertilized egg with a Z-chromosome, that would explain everything!
In medieval theology, the Virgin Mary was associated with the hare, because the hare was believed to be a hermaphrodite.
Jewish lizard people conspiracy confirmed!
Truly the centrist and reconciliatory take on both positions that was needed! I can't argue with this one 🦎👼🎅
*wags finger semi-reprovingly* You naughty naughty, you!
"Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome."
Exactly. This is why it's a miracle.
"Now the birth of Jesus Christe took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus."
<Sigh> What kind of God would interfere in the laws of their Universe for a single time to produce an unbelievable result, then vanishes and leaves only a single trivially-forgeable record as the evidence ?
I know this is Christmas and I don't have the energy for a 2010 style religious flamewar either, but it blows my mind how christians can just accept something they will never accept in any other context like this. Absolutely no man in history would ever believe their cheaty-preggo wife that it was "God who knocked me up", and if that happened for any reason his friends and family would quickly and ruthlessly make him see sense again. The fact that 4 billion+ (Muslims and Christians) - 50% of all living humans - today can believe this either means human irrationality is so much vaster than can be put into words, that most people don't give a shit about the truth value of what they believe and are mostly there for the songs and the community, or that you're all trolling us atheists and we're falling for it harder than a 4Chan victim.
One imagines that dogs and horses are freqnetly baffled by stuff we do. How come you want me to shit on this piece of grass but not this one ten feet to the left? What's with this God-damned sticking of needles into my ass every year? Jeez.
But of course we know animals are a lot dumber than us, so it doesn't surprise us in the least that some of what we do involving their species must appears senseless and weird to them -- and we know equally well that there can't possible be anything smarter than us[1], so either God acts in ways that are transparently reasonable to us, or he must not exist. No other conclusion is possible.
--------------------
[1] Well, except for superintelligent AIs. Those can definitely be infinitely smarter than us, and believing in that proposition is definitely not in the same class of credulity as believing in God, because reasons.
Oh for sure, I'm quite sympathetic to this. The good thing about animals, though, is that they don't pretend, I imagine no dog ever constructed an elaborate backstory about why humans need to stick needles into their asses, let alone went and made a tradition out of it.
My problem with Abrahamic religions is that they want to have it both ways : it's "God acts in mysterious ways" when you want to know why or how anything works, but "God told you so and you must obey" when they want you to say and do things. Why, if God acts in mysterious ways, how can you know that He\She is like an ordinary human who wants to be obeyed when commanding ? How can you interpret anything He\She says ? Can a dog say with a straight face that they understand what a human wants ?
>Those can definitely be infinitely smarter than us
I'm not sure that's how intelligence works, but then again neither anybody, so that's as good a hypothesis as any.
But be aware that being smart is not an excuse to be an asshole, and one of God's advertised qualities is that He/She is "Omnibenevolent", which - I'm told - is fancy latin for "Not An Asshole". So if God finds it so difficult to explain His/Her genius to us, maybe He/She shouldn't do cruel and physics-breaking things to us then vanish. Being omnibenevolent imposes constraints on you to explain yourself.
>believing in that proposition is definitely not in the same class of credulity as believing in God
God is not the same as the Abrahamic God. You can't reject what you don't know, and Indian religions alone would take me 97 liftimes and a half to scratch the surface. So I'm only definitely against the abrahamic ones, and if you put a gun to my head I would say it's really only the Muslim one at that. It's really just my bad luck that had me bad mouth Christianity on Deiseach's watch.
Believing in AGIs that will come in less than 300 years is definitely credulous, and I frequently make fun of it too. It's my least favorite part of the rationality sphere.
I think you’re actually wrong here about dogs and backstories. I vaguely remember a while ago (I’m too lazy to dig out the citation, it’s winter break) that they studied what would happen if you rewarded rats totally at random. Just, sometimes at random intervals they got food.
Well, what happened was basically AI overfitting, which is to say that they got superstitious as hell. So you saw them running in circles thinking that counterclockwise pleased the food gods or whatever.
I think that you could be generous, and say that maybe then even animals believe in rituals, or less generous, and say that this is probably basically what happened to form human religions.
I believe you are remembering the superstitious pigeons. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001
Huh. How do you know what dogs imagine? I actually think it's a priori not unlikely that dogs *do* have what we can call "religious" feelings about us, on the grounds that having religious feelings in general seems not unlikely to be linked to being a social species -- there's a big overlap between the crudents expectations we have of God and those we have for our father when we are young, and for the alpha leader of the pack/tribe when we are older.
Since dogs are social species rather like humans, it would not surprise me at all if they had similar feelings about a deeply powerful and way more intelligent species that interferes in mystifying ways in their lives. Of course, interestingly, dogs know that we are not omniscient -- my dog knows I can't tell what he's doing when I'm not in the room, at least to some extent, although I'm not sure how firmly he believes it, since he still acts guilty when he's done something he knows I would forbid if I were there.
I think you may be mistaking how and why the Catholic Church (the only major religion with the teachings of which I'm familiar enough to even argue the point) says you should obey God, although I speak under correction by someone who knows dogma better than I, like your Irish interlocutor. As I understand it, it's not that God wants to be obeyed the way a human being might enjoy the power, or want to get something done for his own selfish reasons. The idea is that God is telling you what to do to maximize the harmony and good of Creation, including maximizing your own ultimate welfare[1], and it's a command because there isn't any other choice that gets to the same end[2]. Any choice you make *other than* doing what God says leads to a shittier future, for you and probably for plenty of other people also (and animals and space aliens, if there are any). So God wants you to obey His commands because He loves Creation, and everything in it, and you choosing to blow Him off and muck it up makes Him sad, and will make you sad, too, when you eventually come to understand what an idiot you were, which the theology says you ultimately always will.
Indeed, God Himself is just as trapped by this framework as you are -- He can't *not* give the commands, and can't *not* want you to obey, because that is inconsistent with His knowing what is best and wanting what is best for all of Creation. It's the Platonic idealization of the man who cannot pass by a child drowning and not try to save him. Most people who act in such situations report that they felt no sense of choosing -- that they did what they "had" to do, that any other action was unthinkable. Presumaby that is God's situation, which is why we assume He *must* give the commands, and *must* want them to be obeyed. It's also the situation of angels or saints, perhaps animals too, creatures who cannot imagine any other choice than what is best. Ordinary human beings *do* have a choice, because we can always choose to screw up and create misery by doing the wrong thing. That's what makes us special, too: we are the only creatures who can freely choose to do the right thing, who can earn our salvation instead of having it as a birthright.
------------------
[1] Note that "welfare" != "hedonic pleasure." God is not interested in how many utils of pleasure you obtain in your mortal existence, He's interested in the ultimate moral destination of your immortal soul. For all we know, sometimes that may require enduring substantial suffering. We all know people who don't learn except by painful experience, and sometimes that's us, unfortunately.
[2] Presumably in cases where there really are two paths to the same ideal end, God doesn't give any commands. I don't *think* God has any commands about whether I have the chicken or the beef for dinner tonight.
<Sigh> What kind of sourpusses have to trot out the same old same old every holiday and festival about cheaty-preggo wives and human irrationality?
It blows my mind how they accept something (being human toothaches) they will never accept in any other context like this (going around to kids telling them that their birthday parties are stupid dumb occasions that are meaningless).
The fact that umpty-billion online atheists today have to put such effort into being "well ackshully" either means human irrationality is so much vaster than can be put into words, that most people don't give a shit about the truth value of what they believe and are mostly there for the lulz and the community, or that you're all trolling us normies who like having excuses for lighting lights, eating special foods, drinking special drinks, getting together and engaging in family and social traditions, and we're falling for it harder than a 4Chan victim.
Or conversely, I can accept your joke about lizards and you can accept my comment about this seasonal festival partisan belief and we can both not get bent out of shape?
I mean, chill?, that's way more aggressive than my words. The lizard comment was an obvious joke yes, but you replied seriously so I replied seriously.
>we can both not get bent out of shape?
Agreed, Happy X-Mas Deiseach. I'm entirely okay with you being not in the mood for my heresies. Have a good day or night.
Dude, babe or whatever you may wish to identify as: you make a Christmas joke, I make a jocular response, you come back with a "why oh why" plaint about how atheists are the only people with brains who can think.
On the rest of the year, I might shrug this off. That you feel the need to do it at Christmas is a bit raw. Would you do a bit at Passover about how dumb the Jews are for thinking Elijah can still be alive after thousands of years, setting out a plate for him at the table, just imagine?
Chill yourself, there are plenty of other days in the year to tell me I'm dumb for believing in the sky fairy. Just not this week, okay?
>you make a Christmas joke
I'm not the one who made the lizard post. Substack bug ?
>you come back with a "why oh why" plaint about how atheists are the only people with brains who can think.
Again not true and a substantially more aggressive interpretation than what I really meant, I have a muslim family I adore. You seem to have quite the image of me.
>That you feel the need to do it at Christmas is a bit raw.
Fair point and I did anticipate this, too bad I didn't have the forethought to delete it right then and there. Please, Deiseach, Oh mighty lover of onions, can you forgive me ?
> I'm dumb for believing in the sky fairy
Did I come off as that much of an asshole ? I don't believe you're dumb, If I were I wouldn't be surprised you believe implausible stories unironically. And by the Virgin Mary! you're approaching this from entirely the wrong angle, I don't want to tell you how you're bad and how you should feel bad, I saw you talking seriously about your faith for a bit so I replied with my biggest problem with your faith. It's okay if you're not in the mood for a theology discussion, just tell me to fuck off.
> Just not this week, okay?
Nor any other, I'm not a fan of insulting cool people, and you're cool :').
Happy *proper* season of Christmas to all, since we are now in the Twelve Days (as per the song). Leading up to Christmas Day was not Christmas but Advent. Leading up since October in the shops was the secular Sales Season profitable last quarter.
A lot of people this year expressed to me that they were jaded with Christmas, that "it's only one day". I think this is because of the push to start 'celebrating' it earlier and earlier every year. This year I decided I would ignore everything and only count from Christmas Day onwards as Christmas, and I do think I am enjoying it more this year. It's a little more special.
So today being the 26th, Happy St Stephen's Day and though I'm too old to do it myself (it was for kids when I was a kid, though really it was adults before that), maybe you'll be out on the wran!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a81PR7ik5UE
I started doing this and also observing Advent as a fasting season last year, for the same reason. Happy Christmastide!
When were interest rates invented?
What do you define as interest rates? If you mean the concept of "I give you money now, you pay me back over time and/or later with additional money" then it predates known history. Rules about that kind of thing are in the oldest law codes. As are rules for things like sharing the fruits of joint enterprises and even some forms of investment. Though obviously not nearly as complicated as today.
Do you mean as distinct from prohibitions on usury? Because charging interest on loans seems to go way back. If you mean "was it the Babylonians or earlier?" I can't tell you.
I think of what you describe as *interest*. Right or wrong, when I hear the term *interest rate*, I think of something set by a firm or governing body. Not sure what Zohar is asking here.
I think of the interest rate as a market price. A governing body can set a legal maximum interest rate but it can't arrange that loans are actually available at that rate.
I suspect the concept developed gradually. But it would be interesting to have some sort of history of the development of the pure "time value of money" conception, where a fixed percentage is added to the loan balance every fixed increment of time. I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't get fixed and understood until after multiple-digit arithmetic became routinized, which probably didn't happen in Europe until the introduction of Arabic numbers.
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified on my about page:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
EDIT: All 3 have all been given away.
hamish.todd1@gmail.com !
Sent.
❤️❤️❤️ thank you!
rirelan@gmail.com
Sent.
metacelsus at protonmail dot com
I definitely want to subscribe so I can comment on his epigenetics post! I've recently been writing my own posts on the topic, https://denovo.substack.com/p/what-is-epigenetics and https://denovo.substack.com/p/epigenetics-of-the-mammalian-germline
Merry Christmas
Sorry, you came just after the 3rd request.
Your writing is very good, and I have your blog favorited.
Thanks!
I'll take one! (ROT13) gbz.uraarffrl@tznvy.pbz
Sorry, I ran out and hadn't gotten around to updating my original comment until now.
c'est la vie
Happy New Year!
Thank You so much! Happy New Years to you too 🥳
I'm looking for a service that allows me to experience internet as if I'm from a different country.
I don't mean just VPN or Google Translate. I mean the full experience, like if you choose China your default search engine becomes Baidu, qq.com appears on top of your URL autocomplete, all your searches and comments are translated to Chinese before posted and such - all these combined with traditional VPNs and stuff.
Does this exist? If it doesn't, would you be interested in using it?
It depends what your actual goal is.
If you don't know the language and culture, then no amount of changing browser language settings and machine translation will give you a totally accurate experience, so you'll be compromising on something. If you don't change the browser's language setting, websites will often redirect you to international versions, so that bit isn't really avoidable.
To actually get the full experience, you'll need to move to china, spend the next 5+ years learning the language and becoming culturally fluent, and only then can you actually get the "full experience".
Any other Unsong fans see this one?
https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1607059578012803072?t=Ys69GShSoE3QaYsNHL_l3g&s=33
Gave me quite a chuckle.
I don't understand the kabbalistic significance of the symbols behind the rabbi, is there any or is it just supposed to be a funny word rhyme ?
It was the ballistic/kabbalistic pun.
Pardon my ignorance, but I think the "symbols" behind the rabbi (and on top of the cars) are menorahs, which are for the season of Hanukkah which is now upon us (ending this evening).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah
The kabbalistic significance is the Maccabeans versus the Seleucid Empire. I think you can work out for yourself who are the Maccabees and who are the Seleucids in Ukraine versus Russia 😁
I am coming to believe that many of the benefits of relgion for an individual can be has by adopting the an attitude towards the truth, as if the truth were a person.
But I’d like to test this hypothesis, if only weakly and via the totally sloppy method of an poll on a quirky blog. I can wait for the annual survey but in the mean time,
You are invited to share:
A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
B) do you identify as religious?
It depends what goals that person had. Does Truth want people to know it? If so, it would probably be very similar to God - it would need to care for us and want us to be healthy and free people capable of knowing it. Prayer to such a being, in the sense of “trying to get to know that being” would be mostly healthy. A big difference would be that its goals would be mis-aligned with ours, and absent some kind of benevolence on its part, rejecting its goals would be the correct choice for us. This would mean we couldn’t entrust ourselves to it.
If truth doesn’t care about whether we know it, there would be less benefit, like in a Deist variant of Christianity.
>A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
It very much depends on what this means. The most natural interpretation of this is someone walking around who could give true answers to more or less any question, ie, someone actually omniscient but walking around on earth having coffee and hanging out. Assuming that's what is meant, I think I would feel awe and fear, and then, in some order, smugness or chagrin, depending on how much of the controversial stuff I'm right about. Probably also some relief. If there were an omniscient oracle to whom to refer difficult questions, the world would look very different than it does now.
>B) do you identify as religious?
Yes.
How can truth be a person? I realize this is meant allegorically, at least I think it is, but I don't understand the allegory. To me "the truth" is a label we attach to statements that deserve the adjective "true," so there are as many things with the label "truth" as there are statements, which is infinity. Since you said "a" person, I guess that this one person represents all possible true statements, hopefully that is right.
So my basic question is, I think, is this person a personification, a symbol, like Marianne[1], or an oracle, through which the truth can be known, or perhaps a champion, in the sense of Pallas Athene being the champion of wisdom, or...something else entirely?
I think I would see any one of these differently. A personification seems least like an actual person, and in the framework of traditional religion it would be something like the Christian Cross, a symbol that adorns and reminds. Towards the physical symbol itself I would be indifferent, but the reminder would provoke the response to the underlying concept, which in the case of "the truth" would be considerable avarice (if we are talking about discoverable objective fact), but only mild interest and no small sense of reserved judgment, if we are talking about principles of human interaction -- I don't think we are a truthful species, collectively or individually, towards each other or even to ourselves. Since I assume we are optimized pretty well, I conclude that truth has an ambiguous and uncertain value for our intercommunication.
An oracle would also not be very human, more like a crystal ball. I don't think there's any good equivalent in Christian thought, although there's plenty in pagan religion, and in modern quasi-religions -- at least, a lot of people long for and seem to believe in oracles, rules, procedures, algorithms, law, programs, and machines that deliver 100% truth if only in restricted areas. Personally, I don't believe in oracles, so my response would be deep skepticism.
A champion seems most human -- Athena, after all, had all kinds of human-like adventures, in addition to championing wisdom. I guess a champion would seem like a pagan god, something perhaps to admire in a general way, but also of which to be wary, since being human-like (but much more powerful) it seems like it would be possible to get crosswise of the champion for reasons other than not honoring the truth, maybe because the goddess of Truth had some kind of human-like emotional reaction. So my attitude here would be caution and wariness, I think, although if she were an effective and ardent champion of truth probably also considerable respect.
None of these come anywhere close to what I'd think about a God, because none of them get close to what I consider the sine qua none of God, which is the infusion of meaning into being, the idea that there is A Plan, that Creation has a purpose and a teleological destination.
------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne
I think standard Platonist Christian theological traditions would accept Truth as a Divine Name, along with things like Beauty, Good, and Being. That said, I think it would be controversial to describe the Divine Nature as a "person" in the same sense that you and I are people. They wouldn't have spent a few hundred years arguing over exactly what they meant when they said that Jesus is God if it was universally understood as a simple and unequivocal statement.
I think the sense in which God is understood as being Truth (or the Good, or Beauty, or Being) is that these are the transcendent categories at the root of all intelligibility and rational thought and are thus seen as the ultimate yearning of every mind (i.e. to the extent that your experiences are intelligible, you believe things because you think they reflect the Truth, you approve of things because you think they reflect the Good, you adore things because you think they reflect Beauty, and no mind can do otherwise without ceasing to be intelligible).
And, being Platonists, they would say that this feature of being subject to rational comprehension is not a feature of human thought about reality, but a feature of reality itself. Things must be true for reasons, and those reasons must terminate somewhere, and we call whatever that terminal reason is "God" (recall that God can also be called Being, so all things that exist do so as finite reflections of God's transcendent existence in the same way that all good things exist as finite reflections of God's transcendent goodness, etc.).
With that introduction of stuff I'm not sure I really understand:
(A): Truth as a person would be the person you must submit to absolutely. I can't say what my real attitude would be, probably fear and fascination.
(B) Yes, somewhat.
P.S. I think this type of theorizing has little to do with what is involved in actually practicing religion.
Peterson speaks eloquently about the idea that the only way to really articulate definitions of Good and Evil (in their true scope, in their true totality) is by describing a Person. That is, the properly articulated questions are not: "What is Goodness? What is Evil?". They are "Who is Goodness? Who is Evil?"
These "who is" questions can only then be properly answered by a corpus of stories detailing the comings and goings of these two Personae. For example, Alyosha from the Brothers Karamazov is an exceptionally close literary proxy for illustrating the Person known as Goodness.
So, I think your question is entirely the right one to pose if you want to poll anecdotal experiences of those people who are genuinely mystical in their religiosity. I'll just change your phrasing slightly and then i'll answer:
(A) "Since you believe the Truth is a person, how have you interacted with this person and what is your attitude toward this person?"
I have for many years (but not any longer, as I am now an atheist) "Talked to God" in my head. This experience had been a profoundly real, agile, and kaleidoscopic process in my consciousness. What kinds of phenomenology define what I mean by Talking to God? Let me list several in no particular order:
(1) Deeply felt emotional realities could be elicited by Talking to God. A fully effective salve for sorrow or loneliness was on offer if properly sought. A deep well of watery golden Awe sweetened with the honey of laughing Wonder was available to me if I Talked to God; I could drink from this Awesome well by the bucketful if I engaged in Tai-chi like ritualistic movements, or dance, and worshipfully used my voice to sing or speak.
(2) Deeply rooted thought patterns, stubbornly believed for years or decades, could be permanently altered or exhumed (and new ones could be incepted) through Talking to God. I was once cheated on by my wife and filled with the most nauseating fury for a week. Only a week because I went to Church whereupon I entered into an ecstatic religious state of consciousness for approximately 45 minutes. In my state, which was complete with visions of Edenic vines and flowers and ethereal flowing spirits animating the sanctuary of the 30 year old brick building, I saw a great blue pillar of light in my minds eye. I walked into the pillar, and stayed there, arms raised upwards in ecstasy, for 30 minutes. I Talked to God in that blue pillar of light. When I was finished listening, my fury towards my adulterous wife was gone. It was completely replaced with love and trust.
(3) Any time I had questions about anything, I would use Talking to God to get answers. I think it is appropriate to call this my "mystical epistemology" which was the Yin with my "rational epistemology" being the Yang. The rational epistemology of course is "normal" thinking & reasoning & discussing & researching. This (3) is the most direct way through which it can be understood that God, a super-Person, was the Truth. Do you need the Truth? Just pray and listen and then you will get True answers. Simple.
(B) "Do you identify as religious?"
I used to. I call myself a Christian atheist at this point. My love for and obedience toward the traditions & philosophies of Christianity was once absolute, slavish, and rapturous. This is no longer the case, despite my deep longing that I could return to my previous psychology; the world used to be an enchanted place of thirst-quenching Meaning but now I struggle to metabolize nihilistic thoughts. Instead, I choke on them.
I call myself a Christian atheist instead of just an atheist because I still routinely engage in religious behavior such as prayer and attending worship to sing and praise the ideals that the Christian tradition lifts up as praiseworthy. I call myself a Christian atheist instead of just an atheist because, despite my ongoing religious behavior, the flame of belief that once warmed my soul through to its core, the belief that "this is all REAL" is now quenched.
The flame is quenched: I no longer believe that any of the religious experiences and phenomenology that occur inside my consciousness are metaphysically real; now they are merely biologically/neurologically real. As a result, they are fleeting and cold comfort. The world is no longer enchanted.
When I was where you’re at, I realised one night that in all honesty there was no evidence I would ever accept for God, no miracle that would change my mind, because it would always be possible (and more likely) that I was misinterpreting something or hallucinating than that I was experiencing a miracle. I remembered what it had been like to have faith, and that in that mental state it had been difficult to really believe that others didn’t believe; and yet, in my then current mental state, it was difficult to really believe that others believe, even while I could remember my own past certainty.
I realised that the only thing that would convince me would be God literally changing my mind: reaching in and flipping whatever ‘switch’ was needed. And God replied that he could do that any time I asked.
Which was terrifying.
It took me years to ask.
But also, the Dark Night of the Soul is definitely a thing, and happy are those who have not seen etc.
Wow, what a story! Thank you for sharing.
Do you feel comfortable sharing what you see as the difference biological/neurological reality, and metaphysical realty?
Sure.
If the religious experiences I have had were ultimately the result of the actions of metaphysical beings or metaphysical processes then those religious experiences would be metaphysically real, and therefore Truly REAL.
Example: Suppose that there truly was an Angel, an otherworldly being, in a separate realm that is Super to our physical realm, who, following the instruction of God, poured out a literal bowl of Living Water down into my soul. Suppose that this REAL action taken by a REAL agent who resides in a REAL spiritual realm caused me to experience the "Blue Pillar of Light" experience. Well, then that "Blue Pillar" experience was metaphysically real and not just biologically/neurologically real.
Now, for the converse, suppose that that "Blue Pillar" experience was merely the result of a massive endogenous inhibitory process of my brain's default mode network: a neurological structure hypothesized to constitute the neural correlates of the conscious sense of Self. Conceived this way, the "Blue Pillar" experience, despite all of its profound grandeur, and despite all of its fireworks and emotional/behavioral pyrotechnics, was merely (merely) biologically and neurologically real. All the phenomenology was not caused by an Angel with a bowl and a blessed gift of a great Spirit; instead, it was caused by the in-born ability of the animal homo sapiens to experience strange temporary mutations of consciousness. Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind" describes these ideas well.
I suppose I’m looking at this experience from an angle that says, software exists and is real, often more important than hardware, but it’s also “just something hardware is doing” and both perspectives are accurate.
The software realm is, in some sense, “super to” the hardware realm, as an understanding of computers that doesn’t allow for the existence of “logical processes” and “directed a cyclic graphics” and “flows of information called streams” won’t make any sense, and in some sense the logical realm abstracts the physical world realm well enough that you can often treat the physical realm as being inferior to it.
It sounds like “real” to you required something existing beyond physics. Is that right? Could you say more? Is it reasonable to see “angels” as being a poetic way of talking about neurochemical messages?
I'm not sure we need to overcomplicate things.
Do angels, demons, God, and the Devil actually exist? If yes, then they are real and the metaphysical realms of Heaven and Hell are real.
Do angels, demons, God, and the Devil only exist as figments of the mind? As poetry? As literary truths? Do they only
exist in the brains of humanity? If yes, then they are not real.
What about prime numbers?
Do they actually exist? Or are they only figments of the mind?
The way I see God, the devil, etc, as being real is the way I see numbers as being real. One might argue that they are only useful tools which help us navigate material reality, but this seems like more of a philosophical stance than anything else.
What you describe could be taken as the night of the senses, but since I have experienced neither what you describe as 'talking to God' nor the falling away in dryness, I cannot speak out of personal experience:
https://catholicstrength.com/tag/the-passive-night-of-the-senses/
Thank you for sharing this. Fascinating.
A) fear, love, awe (not necessarily in that order)
B) yes (nondenominational Protestant Christian)
(FWIW I think identifying truth / reality as "personal", in a sense that humans can actually relate to, is a central and relatively distinctive claim of Christian metaphysics in general and Christmas / the Incarnation in particular. Would be interesting to learn if people of other religions who identify as religious also see truth as personal, and if so, how / in what sense.)
A) I'm not sure what you mean by this. Would that be a person that always speak the truth? Only speak the truth? That knows a truth? My attitude towards people depends of their action, but truth doesn't feel like an action, more like a fact.
B) No. I'm not hostile to religion on the basis that it's religion, but group stuff isn't for me, precisely because I tend to value truth more than harmony.
I'll add that I don't really agree about your hypothesis. A good part of religion is social, and tend to be about harmony rather than truth. I've never seen anyone debate religion in the meatspace, which indicates to me that, at least for those people, it isn't really about truth.
A big part of religion also seems to be faith. I wouldn't oppose faith to truth, but faith seems more about accepting one truth without proof.
I'm also not sure what "the an attitude" refers to.
(A) "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" - Jesus. "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" - the Holy Spirit.
(B) Yes, but very badly.
Your two questions are connected; I know how I *should* be in attitude towards the Truth who is "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us". How I *really* behave is a different matter.
(A) There are many kinds of truths, so truth can't possibly be a single person.
If the truth of Poverty was a person, I would do things to her that would make the eyes of drug lords water and make them ask me to chill. I'm not even capable of imagining what I would do if I met Murder (including that fashionable and socially aceptable kind we do to animals), or Child and Animal Abuse, or Rape, or Racism, or Marital Infidelity, or Loneliness, or Suicide. And don't get me started on Feminism.
On the other hand, there are truths like that there are special problems in NP that all other problems in NP can be reduced to, and that's one hell of a beautiful truth. Or that Turing Machines, probably the most powerful computing device we're capable of imagining without invoking magic, are so ridiculously easy to construct that they are everywhere[1][2][3][4][5], sometimes without us knowing. There is the truth that we can form bonds across species, and the resulting love is as real as anything we can have intra-species and probably more. There is the truth that most humans are born with family, people who love them unconditionally, simply for having the same DNA, i.e. by virtue of existence alone. There is the truth that the Universe is knowable, and most pain and hate can be understood if not cured, and that's a small mercy in an existence where every mercy counts.
(B) No, I'm an "atheist", though that word is dumb and misleading, I only reject unconditionally 3 religions out of thousands, it's entirely possible other conceptions of God are more or less true/plausible.
[1] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
[2] https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete
[3] https://twitter.com/acompleteturing
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30189780
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k
Thank you!
Do you feel comfortable going deeper on “there are different kinds of truths?” How many kinds of truth are there? In what sense are they “the same”?
Truth is an accordance with some "Golden Standard". I can find no obvious holes with this definition.
So, Poverty and Suicide and the rest of hideous things are all truths, because they conform to the reality of this world. (side-stepping the question of how can we be sure we know the reality of this world.) The truths of Mathematics and Computer Science conform to a different golden standard, the emotional truths of familial love and inter-animal love conform to yet another third, and so on. Those are all instances of a more general concept, perhaps we're not smart enough to discern the exact attributes of that general concept, but at least we can all see the family resemblance.
Truth is that which you can't help believe.
"If the truth of Poverty was a person, I would do things to her that would make the eyes of drug lords water and make them ask me to chill."
You have much the same attitude as this person expresses, even while quoting the Divine Comedy:
https://nemoslibrary.com/2013/06/05/the-divine-comedy-xiv-st-francis-of-assisi-and-lady-poverty/
And yet - St. Francis *is* depicted in a mystic marriage with Lady Poverty:
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/g/giotto/assisi/lower/crossing/20allego.html
"'But, lest I make my meaning dark,
let it be understood, in all that I have said,
that these two lovers are Francis and Poverty.
'Their happy countenances and their harmony,
their love and wonder and sweet contemplation
made them a cause for holy thoughts,
'so that the venerable Bernard was the first
to shed his shoes and run, pursuing such great peace,
and, running, thought himself too slow.
'O unknown riches and prolific good! Barefoot goes Giles,
barefoot goes Sylvester, following the groom,
so greatly pleasing is the bride.
'Then that father and teacher went his way
in company of his lady and that family,
each one girt with the same humble cord."
The reaction you have is more like that of Jyestha or Alakshmi, the elder sister of Lakshmi:
Jyestha or Jyeshtha (Sanskrit: ज्येष्ठा, Jyeṣṭhā, "the eldest" or "the elder") is the Hindu goddess of adversity and misfortune She is regarded as the elder sister and antithesis of Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and auspiciousness. Jyestha is associated with inauspicious places and sinners. She is also associated with sloth, poverty, sorrow, ugliness, and often depicted with the crow. She is sometimes identified with Alakshmi, another goddess of misfortune. Her worship was prescribed for women, who invoked her to keep her away from their homes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alakshmi
"Alakshmi (Devanāgari: अलक्ष्मी; from the roots अ (a): "not" and लक्ष्मी (Lakshmi): "goddess of fortune", figurative meaning "goddess of misfortune") meaning "not Lakshmi". She is described as being “cow-repelling, antelope-footed, and bull-toothed." Or she “has dry shriveled up body, sunken cheeks, thick lips, and beady eyes and that she rides a donkey."
... Gods send Alakshmi to go dwell amongst pernicious persons, give them poverty and grief. She as the asura of inauspiciousness and grief is the opposite of Lakshmi who is the goddess of auspiciousness and joy.
...According to Chakrabarty, “It was said that when she entered a household, Alakshmi brought jealousy and malice in her trail. Brothers fell out with each other, families and their male lineages (kula) faced ruin and destruction."
I am religious, but I can't wrap my head around your first question. Like, if there was someone who was Truth Personified, I'd probably be grateful, but Truth is not a personality trait, so I don't know how I'd feel about spending time with them.
But to me, your premise seems nonsensical. The whole point of a God to me is that they're not a person, and exist on a higher plane, if you will. I don't interact with God or Truth or Beauty or whatever like I would another person, because they're not. Many polytheistic religions were created by personifying different concepts, but I think one "innovation" of monotheism was the removal of simple personification from God.
This is very interesting, the kind of unexpected response I love to get.
Do you feel comfortable sharing what you see as the difference between “truth” and “God”?
What do you mean "truth". I feel quite happy with the difference between objective measurements and the gods. Both are real, but they're in different domains. The "gods" are built-in physical/psychic factors due to the construction of the nervous system that we use to operate in the world. Anything you can say about them in words is treating the exterior view as superior to the experiential view. This is an incorrect stance. BOTH views have equal validity, and they operate in separate domains. One could describe encountering a god as an emotional experience, and that would be both true and meaningless. It's like a description of riding a bicycle or riding a roller coaster.
But *do* notice that I pluralized gods. There isn't just one "archetype" (an exterior partial description). It's like the experience of encountering someone. That he has "red" hair doesn't tell you whether s/he's tall or short (and in comparison to what). Some of the gods seem to insist that they are the only true gods, but I never believed them, because I had previously encountered ones that made no such insistence. (OTOH, remember that I said encountering them was dangerous? One of them insisted that I had been "saved", and tried to convince me to prove it by taking my hands off the wheel while I was driving on the freeway. That one wasn't able to dominate me...so I have no proof that it was wrong. Just that I didn't really trust it. But it was quite an ecstatic feeling. And this is wrapping words around something that rises from a level below words. You can't understand without experiencing it...and then it's not guaranteed, as many just accept the superficial appearance, or wrap it in approved theological wraps. Sometimes I wonder what Jacob was actually trying to say about wrestling with an angel, but not enough to learn archaic Hebrew, and to try to learn the cultural context. But don't trust the words in the Bible. They're not only words, but they've been translated by people who didn't have the experience.)
I would question the very sense of saying that something exists on a higher plane. It seems to be a metaphor for a construction of the universe that we *know* is incorrect. It makes a nice story, but so does "Diskworld".
Rather I would say that the gods and affiliated constructs are deeper. The are real, and we can't exist/function without they, but they don't live in the same kind of universe that we do. Their existence is not based on learning, except over evolutionary time, and they aren't (with statistically rare exceptions) limited to living in one body at a time. They're the reality behind the thing Jung called archetypes. They *can* erupt into the consciousness of an individual, and when they do they're likely to take control and be extremely disruptive, sometimes in an extremely negative way. There are a sufficient number of reports to convince me that they can simultaneously errupt into multiple consciounesses at the same time.
OTOH. They are ever-present, if you attend to them. One of the names that one of them has is "the Zeitgeist".
That said, thinking of them as persons is both tempting and wrong. I once met/encountered Aphrodite. Fortunately "she" wasn't in a destructive phase, but "she" dominated my life for a decade, even though the lady who was the vehicle wasn't dominated nearly that long. I only realized that it was the goddess when looking back from a distance. Encountering a god is dangerous, it can take over your life. They've much safer acting in a minimally noticeable way.
Can you say more here?
I’m not trying to get other people to adopt my views so much as to better understand how other people view things, and why some perspectives that I adopt seem more suited to help me be at peace with the world while still functioning effectively within it.
Maybe this is naive, but the simple narrative I use is that diversity of religions is a natural healthy result of the truth being so insanely complex, yet true worldviews being essential and instrument to healthy day to day function, that only approximations of the truth can be effectively operationalized. I see viewpoint diversity as being like the diversity of organisms in a memetic ecosystem: more is better! But this is, of course, just my own view. I think I’m something of an intellectual omnivore, a barbarian ransacking whatever libraries I can find in search of wisdom in whatever form it takes.
You think consent is an ideologically neutral value? Brother, what rock have you been living under? 🤣
Has anyone here had a chance to dig into some of the material that The Ethical Skeptic (@EthicalSkeptic) has produced, particularly related to increased non-COVID mortality after the vaccine rollouts?
The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach).
One annoying thing is that he speaks elliptically about what he actually thinks this means, but I think the claim is that the vaccine has caused otherwise healthy people to die of heart-related vaccine side effects.
I'm qualified to look into this myself, but I haven't actually had the time recently, and was wondering if someone out there had already done it?
I haven't looked at this at all myself, but I assume covid deaths crowd out non-covid deaths (at least slightly) more among the unvaccinated. E.g. some people who die from covid have comorbidities and would have died soon from other causes; vaccinated individuals are more likely to survive a bout of covid to go on to die of something else instead.
That claim is hard to square with data suggesting that the lower vaccinated states in the US had more excess deaths than the higher vaccinated states. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2798990?resultClick=1
I think he (correctly, IMO) backs out the COVID excess mortality to do this analysis.
"The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach). "
Does Mr. Ethical Skeptic provide sources for the data behind his claims? Because you shouldn't feel any obligation to do his work for him.
I will also observe that unless dying of Covid is somehow worse than dying of other causes then comparing raw mortality rates for the various counties will provide information about whether the vaccines helped net-net. Which is probably what we mostly care about (after adjusting for ages of the dead people ... 1000 more dead 20 year olds and 1000 fewer dead 80 year olds is a loss the way I score things ...).
NOTE: To do this properly you will want to compare pre-Covid raw mortality rates for a given county (to get a baseline) with the data post-vaccine (which gets interesting to define for the lower vaccinated counties, but you can probably pick a baseline post-vac date to use like March or June 2021).
I believe the data is CDC sourced. This is a relevant link.
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1605620938468253696
I'm quite interested in Covid mortality and vaccine mortality. I have been vaccinated four times. I have probably had Covid twice, both times mild cases lasting about a week.
I live in the Dominican Republic.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/dominican-republic/
According to the official statistics, no one has died in the DR from Covid in months. Yet deaths continue in the US!
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Why is this?
Climate?
Reservoir effect?
Age distribution is the obvious one. Compare the population pyramids:
DR: https://www.indexmundi.com/dominican_republic/age_structure.html
US: https://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html
I also think population size has an exaggerated effect. Consider a population of a thousand on an island. How long would it take the virus to burn itself out? Not long.
Island with a million pop? Longer but still eventually.
11 million? Eventually. (DR)
330 million. There are pockets of disease to keep it going.
Yes, very true. Also relative fluctuations are larger, so it's more possible for a smaller population to have a fluctuation to the low (or high) side, relative to expectations.
Excellent point.
My guess would be testing. If you don't test for COVID, all the symptoms can be attributed to something else. It was only noticed in the US when some doctors started carefully examining a bunch of deaths due to "atypical pneumonia".
Seconding demand for this. It would be cool if we could pay for “research bounties”.
Is it just me or is the number of American intellectual non-Christians wishing people Merry Christmas significantly higher now than it was in 2010?
I wouldn't say "non-Christians" as singled out, but there does seem to be more relaxation around the whole idea of "Merry/Happy Christmas", no more invocations of the War on Christmas, much fewer (I have seen one or two but not nearly as many as previously) scolding articles about "it's not Christmas for everybody you know/what about Hanukkah/Kwanzaa" and so on.
It's nice. I like it. I don't celebrate Eid and so on, but I don't get into a twist over wishing someone who does celebrate it "Happy Eid or Diwali or Hanukkah or Yule or Coffee Drinking Day". I don't think it's imposing anything on anybody, anymore than "if you live someplace where X is the dominant language, everyone will probably speak that language". I know *that* can get politicised ("speak English or go home!"/"My mom lived for thirty years in the US and only speaks Spanish and she shouldn't be expected to learn any English, you bigots!") but at this stage, someone can manage to politicise the colour of the sky.
Good take!
Unrelated: if I and Mrs. John Buridan were to visit Eire 2023 or 2024. would you be willing to let us bring you tea or whiskey? There would be no small talk, only conversation worth having.
My email littlejohnburidan at gmail
MAGI IN T - 11 days.
That is an extremely kind offer and I greatly appreciate it, but I don't have visitors or social interaction. I hope you enjoy any trip to Ireland in the next year or two, but I won't be available, sorry.
" but at this stage, someone can manage to politicise the colour of the sky."
Which is B L U E - in case anyone has forgotten!!! /s : )
I wonder how long it will be before it's tempting enough to put climate-altering particles into the sky, that "politicize the color of the sky" stops being a metaphorical argument.
You forget both sunrise and sunset - R E D.
What about noon and Y E L L O W? What party's colour is that? 😁
Fair, but it's still BLUE all. day. long.
Okay, you force me to retaliate with the ultimate weapon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ugkg9RePc
Enjoy your blue earworm!
I would not have guessed that existed.
Happy holidays.
Speculative: The culture war flap around "be inclusive - say Happy Holidays" vs "now we can't say Merry Christmas anymore!" died down and people just regressed to prior behavior.
I noticed a trend in fewer Christmas related articles published at local news sites over the last few years on the eve and day of. I live in blue trending state though...
Christmas fought back and won the war!
I notice it, but I’m not sure if it’s just my peer group aging. Insisting on “happy winter solstice” is a behavior I’d associate more with 20-year-olds than 40-year-olds.
But consider "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings". Those seem to be quite common. (My peer group of the 20's-40's largely went with "Good Yule", but that seems rare.)
Yeah, I think that’s the first time I’ve encountered that phrase even on the Internet.
Over time, Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings have acquired a cold, corporate/bureaucratic flavor. It’s what you say to your clients/customers, not your friends and acquaintances. So I can see the need to pivot away from it when you want to signal that you see someone as a friend/acquaintance and not a client.
"Season's Greetings" isn't too bad. I think it is/was more the *stridency* of the demands around "Say Happy Holidays because there is more than one holiday at this time and not everybody is Christian", not unreasonable points in themselves but (a) Christmas as celebrated is secular not religious, Santa is the patron not Jesus and (b) hectoring and lecturing people that unless they learned off an entire list of winter festivals they were the equivalent of the Inquisition burning heretics never came off well.
I've often wondered if the US Santa Claus is a fertility goddess. It fits with the incredible effort to produce more things, but a male fertility goddess because the things being produced aren't children.
I think domains such as "commerce" and "industry" fit more strongly than fertility. It's St. Valentines day we put the fertility trappings onto.
Yes, me too.
>>Philip Tetlock and others have founded the Forecasting Research Institute to study prediction, including prediction of existential risk. They are looking to hire “research and data analysts, content editors, and RAs”, all roles remote, see here for details.<<
https://forecastingresearch.org/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://forecastingresearch.org/apply?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I put in an application for "content editor".
Did anyone else apply for any of the positions?
Have you received any response?
What are your goals for 2023?
Find a girlfriend, hopefully one with a dog. Or maybe separate tasks and find a girlfriend and dog.
If you are in the San Francisco bay area (or maybe even if you aren't) you might consider taking an Egyptian Hieroglyphics class. This is where I met my (now) wife. I was looking for a girlfriend and took a UC Berkeley Extension course in hieroglyphics figuring maybe I'd find a girlfriend there. She was taking the class in preparation for an Egyptian trip (pyramids, valley of the kings, ...). The strategy has a 100% success rate to the best of my knowledge.
If you can't find a convenient hieroglyphics class then you might try a Zen Buddhism class as that was the other one I was considering taking as part of the girlfriend search. My wife is convinced that there is some poor girl who took that class and didn't meet me and is wondering why her boyfriend never materialized. That girl might still be available for you :-)
Good luck in any event.
In January 2022 I got back onto my map and menu strategy game with character sim project. I got a lot done but was derailed in the last 4 months or so by deaths in the family, getting Covid, and the holidays.
My plan was initially to be done somewhere form Christmas to February. Probably looking at a summer completion and ideally release now. We'll see how it goes.
Get a job, or at least, get back on the path of possibly getting a job at some point. Spending my retirement savings prematurely right now and I think that is not good.
Gain weight. I've cut back on food partially due to costs and I think I've lost too much muscle.
Improve my focus so I can use my time better. Continue self-studying Japanese, including finishing Genki 1 and 2 and taking the JLPT4. Continue studying drawing. Lose at least 25 lb but hopefully more. Feel more secure in my job.
Additionally, and not quite as a goal: Pay more attention to what I read/watch that is likely or has the potential to be AI-generated, and to cut back on that stuff too. I'd prefer to have a blanket "don't consume anything made by AI" but I don't think that's possible to determine.
Try to start drawing after years of wanting to do it, find a job, keep doing what I'm doing, maybe a bit of sport, try to not kill myself, try to not feel like killing myself.
I started drawing this year too. I started with drawabox.com's lessons but realized I enjoyed figure drawing more so I switched to Proko's course. Consider this a recommendation for both.
I knew about drawbox but not about Proko, thanks !
From one human being to another, I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. If it helps at all, I eventually made it out of wanting to die, after a decade and a half or so of being stuck there.
Thanks a lot. I'm glad you managed to make it out.
Eat carnivore for the first month.
"What are your goals for 2023?"
I have a "Latin Flashcard"(*) program that I was working on for a few years (the first 18 months of Covid were very productive for this) and last year there just wasn't much motivation so it ground to a halt. I'm getting my interest back, though, so I'd like to get the thing into more usable shape by the end of 2023.
(*) One of my hypothesis is that it helps (a lot) to see sentences and phrases rather than just words out of context. The idea behind my program is that the victim provides vocabulary and grammatical forms they want (or are expected) to know an the tool will "make Latin" using the specified words and grammatical forms. It tracks which words the victim seems to know and weights things towards (a) words that need work, but (b) with some random selection to get repetition for all the words.
Basically continue my life nearly the same as this year…things are great. I do need to lose a lot of weight, but other than that I have no complaints.
Become better at memorizing people's names. The idea is to repeat their name back to them once they introduce themselves, immediately make some deliberate mental association (eg, this person has the same name as my cousin) and use their name as much as possible from then on (eg, greet them by name every time I see them). Any other suggestions? So far I've been mostly failing at the latter, not because I don't remember their names at all, but because I have low confidence on the name I do remember, and it seems impossibly awkward to say "hi Chris!" to someone who's not named Chris.
Might I ask if your goal is to reduce awkward name forgetting moments, or to remember names more? Personally, I’m not great at remembering names, but am pretty good at remembering things about a prior conversation (where it was, what about). So I often find myself having say, “it’s great to see you again, I really enjoyed that conversation about [specific, clearly actually remembered cybersecurity regulatory stuff] we had at [name of happy hour]; forgive me though, I’m going totally blank on your name, could you jog my memory?”
In other words, sometimes strategies to reduce a consequence are as helpful as strategies to avoid the event in the first place.
I guess a bit of both. What you describe is what I have been doing so far, although sometimes I have never had a full conversation with the person in question so it's harder to signal I remember them. What triggered this idea for me was people whom I've barely spent time with before (say, 5 minutes in total) coming up to me weeks or years later and greeting me by name. I usually remember that I've met someone and where or in which circumstance, but the less time we spent together and the longer ago it was, the less likely I am to remember anything else about them, not even what we may have talked about. I'm hoping that getting better at remembering their names will work in tandem with getting better at remembering other relevant details. Or in other words, I want to try to pay more attention to (new) people.
Also, forgetting people's names is more acceptable if you haven't seen each other in a long time, but by default I forget it immediately. This is super awkward during parties or week-long events such as conferences. There I really feel like I have little excuse. So even if I don't manage to train myself to remember someone's name weeks later, I would like to at least keep it for the rest of the event.
I hear you, and I think that's an admirable goal! For me, at least, it's easier to remember someone's name if I'm not afraid of what happens if I forget it. People tend to respond well to a little vulnerability, and saying, "oh gosh, it's been a long conference, I'm totally blanking on your name" is a very relatable thing.
Thank you for the ideas! It's remarkable how all the suggestions revolve around forming mental pictures. I guess memorizing images is on average easier than memorizing concepts? Or maybe I misunderstood the advice and it would be enough to think of the absurd concepts and not take the step visualize the picture. I'm not really aphantasic, but don't really think in pictures either. Maybe I should try to take the concepts themselves or to make sound associations instead.
I’ve had some success with really stupid puns before (deciding someone’s curly hair was ‘crisp’ to remember that they were ‘Chris’), but my main strategy in the classroom is to use seating plans because I can link names to spatial things much more easily than to faces. And then I link the faces to the spatial position, too, and transitively eventually I link the names and faces. This, sadly, does not transfer to situations in which I can’t demand everyone sit in specific places every time.
Stop judging myself and instead simply try to better understand myself, since that seems to be more effective.
Has anyone been working on a startup doing a prediction market that failed or otherwise didn't work out that wants to sell their source code? I'm looking around for some software to run some niche prediction markets and I'm looking at buy/build/outsource decisions.
Are you aware that Manifold is open source?
I wasn't actually. Thank you. I'll investigate.
Set the alarm for when to "go to sleep," not one for when to wake up.
Why? When I set up an alarm it's for when I have something on my schedule. Going to sleep at a certain time may help, but what really matters is that I'm awake for the thing.
As for getting proper sleep cycles, onset insomnia makes it very hard. No point going to bed if it's just to stay awake for a few hours.
The reason is because going to bed at the same time every day is one of the best ways to prevent/mitigate onset insomnia.
You need to change the default sound to do this well! If you can, it’s probably better to set the “alarm” to dim the lights in the room you are likely to be in, and maybe even give a 60 second visual countdown to turn off the devices you are likely to be using.
It’s a good idea to set a reminder of when to go to bed, but not with a sound that gets your adrenaline flowing.
Explain, as if to a future historian or intelligent alien, why the citizens of the U.K. got really really mad at Qatar for the first few days of the World Cup there but not about the UK’s strong military alliance with the same regime.
https://www.forceswatch.net/comment/the-qatari-connection/
If you hate t the military alliance, what are you supposed to do? Voting in Labour won't make.much difference, I can assure you.
If I wanted to make the future historian or intelligent alien hate them :
"""
People are peacocks and morality is their feather. In mob quantities, they are incapable of truly loving or hating a thing for its virtues or the lack thereof, their only mover is what gets their mob to climax.
And thus, in the year they called 2022 in their native numbering system, it was a great climax for the most fashionable big mobs to be angered about the treatment of certain groups, and so angered they were, angered they must be, whether it was the virtuous thing to do or not. It's entirely misguided to try to understand this with an ethical eye, you might as well analyze the orbit of a Solar Mass or the radiation out of a Black Hole from the point of view of whether it was morally justified.
"""
If I wanted to make the future historian or intelligent alien empathize with them :
"""
People had a morality, but the world they lived in was so confusing and interconnected that every system of morality was eaten and chewed and spat by the contradictions inherent in it. Imagine the world a sea so treacherous it can't be sailed, and imagine your morality a ship you're trying to sail it in.
And thus, in the year they called 2022 in their native numbering system, a certain people were enraged about a thing that they were unwittingly supporting. It's too easy to laugh at them, so satisfying to the needs of the body and the soul. But make no such mistake, for you're laughing at the fate that you encounter countless times, before and again. For the Universe is a gargantuan riddle, and there is no morality that hasn't crashed on its rocks amidst its treacherous waves. It's entirely misguided to expect people to have consistent systems of ethics and apply them uniformly in all matters, you might as well expect the 2 players in that game of 64 squares to both win in a single game. Consistency is an article of guidence the author of this Universe couldn't comply with, so I ask : is it fair to admonish the characters for behaving as the author wrote them ?
"""
No one would have believed in the first four lustra of the twenty-first century that this world was being data-scraped keenly and closely by intelligences greater than human and yet as bounded by limits as our own; that as humans busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a person with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency people went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. No one gave a thought to the political entanglements of their governments as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most contemporary humans fancied there might be others in foreign societies perhaps inferior to themselves in social progress and liberalisation and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this society with dismissive eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And later in the twenty-first century came the great disillusionment."
Is there anyone who’s mad about one but not the other? It seems to me that the difference is that one is a long-running thing that people have already had their say on, while the other is a new thing.
As you note, people seemed madder for the first few days than they did later on. There’s very little reason to keep your anger at a boil for a long-running thing.
People didn't know that Britain and Qatar were military allies, but they were told that they should be outraged at Qatar's record on human rights by all the media think-pieces and opinion formers telling them that terrible things were happening and they should be outraged. And since people are used to being whipped up by social media to be outraged about Bad Things by activists, they duly were outraged.
Then the people who cared about the World Cup just ignored it all and continued watching, and the people who didn't care about the World Cup felt satisfied that they had done the Minimum Daily Requirement of Pointless Online Activism and went off about their ordinary day-to-day life. After all Outraged of Saffron Hill can't actually do anything about the migrant labourers in Qatar and how the Qatari treat them, but they can write letters to the paper and do the requisite signing of petitions and posting icons and banners on their Twitter, and that's enough to signal their virtue.
In all of this despite my abhorrence to the Qatar and Saudi regimes, I am sympathetic to the conservative, or neutral football fan.
But the woke britisher doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. If you are angry with Qatar for a week every few years, and only then because the BBC has effectively riled you up on the subject - and not about the military alliance then the future historian isn’t going to take you seriously.
Because the beliefs and behavior of most citizens in most countries are best predicted by whatever messages are being broadcast by their priestly class.
If the priestly class told the citizens to be mad about the military alliance but not about different values systems, then this is what the citizens would do.
Everything I don't like is a religion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/
Sure. That’s what I believe too. It’s the same with the US and the Saudi alliance, perhaps worse. The recent regime has promoted LGBT as a foreign policy, so talking too much about Saudi would frighten the chickens.
In fact this policy is fairly radical
https://www.state.gov/lgbtqi-human-rights/
As it includes gender identity which isn’t even policy in all of the US yet, nor most of Europe.
Well, it says "“It shall be the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, and to lead by the power of our example in the cause of advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world.” Surely, pursuing an end to violence on the basis of gender identity (or political identity, or any identity) is consistent with policy in pretty much all of the US. And, the FBI has been tracking anti-transgender hate crime since 2013 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/victims/victims_final
That leaves only the pursuit of the end of discrimination based on gender identity. Apparently, 23 states have laws which explicitly outlaw gender identity discrimination, and 8 others have interpreted their laws to do so. https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws And, of course, the Supreme Court has interpreted Title VII to forbid gender identity discrimination in employment.
In Europe, "The European Parliament first adopted a resolution on discriminations against transsexual people in 1989. The first formal opening of EU law to transgender issues occured in the European Court of Justice‘s 1996 judgment of the P. v. S. and Cornwall County Council case, where EU judges interpreted the law on equality between women and men to apply to cases of gender reassignment." https://www.state.gov/lgbtqi-human-rights/
So, it doesn't seem all that radical to me. Left-of-center on the issue, perhaps, but not particularly radical.
The US is allied with Saudi Arabia, which isn’t just the worst offender against LGB rights in the world right now but one of the worst in history.
That’s the point, it’s propaganda schlop for the masses.
Within America and Europe, no.
To the rest of the world I think we probably do sound radical.
Military alliances are seen as a political necessity, and can be had with countries that are otherwise distasteful. Sports tournaments are seen as popular entertainment, and should ideally not involve transferring money to horrible regimes or causing the death of many workers.
For better or worse, the average person also pays a lot more attention to sports tournaments compared to politics, especially foreign politics.
Don't forget arms sales as well, Kaitian. Don't want the general public rocking the boat about those, but if the plebs want to protest about some sporting nonsense let them go ahead and blow off some steam:
https://leftfootforward.org/2022/11/qatar-is-biggest-recipient-of-uk-arms-between-april-june-2022/
https://greens.scot/news/qatar-s-lethal-34bn-arms-trade-with-tories-revealed-on-eve-of-world-cup
"Yet under successive governments, both Tory and Labour, the UK has approved the sale of high impact weapons while also effectively endorsing the regime with their attendance at this year’s World Cup. UK government figures show that licences include.
£2.6 billion worth of ML10 licences (aircraft, helicopters, drones)
£765 million worth of ML4 licences (grenades, missiles, bombs, countermeasures)
£20 million worth of ML1 licences (small arms)
£4.2 million worth of ML3 licences (ammunition)
Equipment approved includes machine guns, ammunition, weapon sights, assault rifles and ‘anti-riot’ shields, according to UK government statistics seen by the Scottish Greens, who have condemned the Tories’ complicity and demanded an immediate halt to all arms sales to the regime."
Well said, Kaitian
Well I agree with the latter comment. However if your country is in a military alliance with a country that’s repugnant to your proclaimed values maybe the rest of the world may not take those values seriously.
Ordinary citizens in democracies should expect to have a say about them, because they should expect to have a say about everything. They are scuppered by their own tendency to see symbolic warfare, AKA sport, as more important than real warfare...and they are scuppered all over again by elites not offering a real choice.
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second.
Presumably there must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
Thanks!
There's the HiFi Hymn book: https://www.youtube.com/@HiFiHymnBook But I think that plays only the organ accompaniments. For example here is the carol "A Virgin Most Pure". Presumably the tune is repeated for the number of verses, but of course the potential downside of trying to sing along with it is that it will press on relentlessly even if the singers' timing falters! :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM_5AtnEBCY
Many carols and hymns are suited for a delicate higher pitch tone and accompaniment. But, at the risk of sounding sexist, I think others are better with male voice choirs, such as (IMHO) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, or Martin Luther's great hymn "A safe stronghold our God is still" (Ein Feste Burg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqczuaFQpVQ
Yeah, definitely need the words there to follow along to. Like the way you might sing along with a pop song.
I agree God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen often sounds better with a male choir - but I'm not sure it's any clearer.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_njLD7TFPzI4fCS2t78-Y74ipIcUGM4xyM
You have to want to sing as if it was AD 1550 though. Probably helps if you can noodle out a tune on the recorder or sackbut.
Thanks! There's a great range of carols there, which is really good. I still find her voice a bit "classical", though, like it's optimised for sounding like an instrument rather than for making out the words clearly - compared with most pop, musical theatre, Disney, or just random friends and acquaintances. (I did try asking a friend of a friend who's good at singing if she had any recordings of her singing carols. She didn't and was too busy this year but said she might next year.)
Good find. Maddy Prior's voice is steady and robust, which is nice. There's nothing worse than a quavery sentimental soprano IMHO! :-)
Try Wee Sing Christmas. It starts with the secular ones and moves on to the religious ones, getting more and more obscure as you go along. It's a children's chorus and meant for children, so you can make the lyrics out.
Thanks, those are pretty good, and they have a broader range of actual carols than some of the other suggestions. They mostly seem pretty good, although on some of the tracks the voices aren't especially clear.
"Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second. "
Do recordings from the 1950s (e.g. Bing Crosby's White Christmas album) work for you? I find the diction better than modern artists.
YouTube recordings of suburban church services around mid-to-late December?
This year we did a perfectly normal "O Come o come Emmanuel", "O come all ye faithful", "Hark the Herald Angels Sing", "O holy night" and then we messed up "Angels we have heard on high" by playing it too fast.
That's quite a good idea, especially if they have soloists (and the soloists aren't too classical in their style).
If they have choirs, it tends to have the same failure mode as the big choirs like King's College: a classical sound where it's hard to make out the words.
I found this set on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Dial+A+Carol%22
I expect there are more but I'm not very good at searching through the archive. To find this, I searched "Jingle Bells", went through until I found one matching your criteria, then tried to use the tags to find similar videos.
Thanks - I listened to their Silent Night and it sounded like the typical classical recording where you can't make out the words unless you already know them, because that sort of recording is optimised for something other than making out the words: they seem to want the voice to sound as much like another instrument as possible. (I do know most of the words, but our kids don't, and they want to join in.)
I'm looking for voices that sound more like pop or musical theatre singers (but still singing the traditional tune and words rather than adding extra flourishes and changes).
The First Noel, by the Crash Test Dummies. Seriously.
Yes, that's pretty good, thanks!
Looks like they did a whole album, which is even better. Although some of the tracks (like In The Bleak Midwinter) fall into the flourishes-and-twiddles category.
Oh sorry, I misread and thought you wanted more like choir-style, rather than soloists with good elocution.
Donna Summer's "Christmas Spirit" (https://vid.puffyan.us/playlist?list=PLrpyDacBCh7De9cpVCHffEozY9FT0yQVy) or Frank Sinatra's "A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra" (https://vid.puffyan.us/playlist?list=PLXgUstcYt9KvSLpyxNf2UDWmT8D9zY8hY)? You'll need to pick out the carols, as both albums contain a mix of traditional and non-traditional songs.
I'd be happy with either, but in my experience it's easier to make out the words from a soloist.
Yes, those are both pretty good, thanks. It would be nice if there were more carols (and also Sinatra's "O Little Town" and "Midnight Clear" aren't the tunes I recognise, but presumably they're the American tunes).
Merry Christmas to you too! Thanks for another year of great content.
Here's an article that I wrote about some reflections on politics that I think readers of ACX might be interested in. https://benthams.substack.com/p/politics-is-a-battle-of-who-you-love
I really can't take you seriously. ACX and SSC before it are all about trying to find some common ground, some empathy with people. You're doing the exact opposite. It seems like you can't understand that calling eating meat "[being] complicit in the worst atrocity in human history" will not get people on your side. If you're not getting people on your side, are you doing it for the animals, or for your own moral high ground? Aren't you being complicit yourself too?
You complain about people not having empathy for the suffering of animals, but you fail yourself to show empathy for other human beings:
> I’m not a retributivist. Really, I think that from the point of view of the universe, their well-being matters just as much as anyone else’s. But on a purely emotional level, I would not be distressed finding out that one of these people lived a miserable life.
To be perfectly blunt, this has given me more empathy for the side that you oppose than for yours. The people mocking you sounds like morons, but I prefer morons to self-righteous type with no self-awareness. You have that capacity, that is both a blessing and a curse, to be able to notice suffering that other people ignore. Please don't use it as a way to generate even more suffering.
Edit: I'll add that your focus on Trump undermined again the animal suffering cause. I'm assuming you're American, in which case you may have taken Trump because he is closer to you than some way more horrible people. That is the same mechanism that allow people to eat meat, dissociation through focus on what makes us different.
You go on about the meat-eating to an extent that shows that the people engaging in it *were* correct to use it as a tactic to irk you and that they *won*.
"These emotionally fragile lunatics who were going after me for asking someone questions, defending a friend, and making analogies — you can read a more detailed account in my previous article — were gleefully snickering for hours on end about how funny it was that they were complicit in the worst atrocity in human history, one that I was deeply morally opposed to."
Well gorsh, I've just participated in "the worst atrocity in human history" by cooking and consuming the Christmas ham. Funny how somehow I don't feel chastened by your sensibilities.
If you want to demonstrate how those people were clodpolls, don't make their point for them! Don't show how they were correct in what would achieve their ends by going on at length about how much you think meat-eating is icky, when you are also trying to make a point about "it's not rational to judge whether an idea is correct depending on who agrees with it".
I get that you are trying to show that yeah, you can be sympathetic to the likes of 'Jim' by sharing an example from your own life. But five sentences at maximum would have done that. Going on for *paragraphs* worth of how you think meat-eating is evil rape torture murder is not going to make your point any more impactful and instead does make you sound like "boy, they really do live rent-free in your head, don't they?"
Also the huge chunks of Hanania don't impress me because he don't impress me, rube that I am.
You do have some good points about how politics is a lot more visceral than we like to think. But it is definitely coming from the position of "Now I know all of you could never, in a thousand years, imagine being a Trump supporter so let me translate those caveman grunts into intelligible English for you". For instance, the bit here:
"I’d imagine that you could predict someone’s political affiliation with roughly 90% accuracy by finding out whether they found Trump’s claim, after Meghan Kelly pointed out that he’d called women lots of names, that he’d said those only to Rosy O’Donnell to be charming or horrific. I’d imagine that nearly all liberals would be disgusted by that claim and most conservatives would be amused."
It's not nearly as simple as "disgusted/amused"; are the conservatives amused by calling women names? by calling one specific woman names? why her? are they amused more by the outraged liberals? are they remembering that the days of "grab 'em by the pussy" which are supposed to make all our bloods boil are the same days the likes of shock-jocks flipping the bird to the FCC were being championed by liberals? that we were supposed to find Howard Stern charming not horrific, based on being liberal versus conservative?
Glancing at it, I have a few points on how it could have been written differently, more to my personal preferences.
First, move the personal anecdotes towards the end, or abridge them, or remove them entirely. As someone not previously familiar with you, those parts were not super interesting.
Second, cite (or link) more sources for the thesis. E.g. you state "We have mountains of evidence that disgust drives a lot of people’s views on huge numbers of topics. Hanania talks about this."
But you don't actually reference or even link to any of that evidence.
You state "I’d imagine that you could predict someone’s political affiliation with roughly 90% accuracy by finding out whether they found Trump’s claim."
But you don't point to any research on the relationship between disgust in general, or regarding specific things and political orientation.
Third, cut down on the lengthy block quotes and replace them with short summaries with links to the originals.
I hope that input was appreciated.
I've spent a great deal of time over the last month interacting with ChatGPT in the past month. I've been posting some of those interactions to my blog, New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ChatGPT
I've annotated and discussed some interactions quite heavily. Others not so much. Topics include: 2 Spielberg films (Jaws, AI), Tezuka's Astro Boy stories, Justice, haiku, conversation structure, local geography, tutoring children, grammatical knowledge and self-referential sentences, trumpets and trumpeters, a Seinfeld bit, others.
The world cup has me wondering: How does non-wc European club soccer work? Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league? If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)
> Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league?
They play their national tournaments and the european tournament simultaneously (Champions League for the top teams, Europa League for the rest).
> If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring?
yes. But PSG being stacked off the charts compared to the rest of the national league is unprecedented. Normally stacked teams don't get so far ahead of the rest, like Bayern Munich
In Spain there's also Atletico Madrid too and Barcelona declined a lot.
Modern football is very competitive and you can put up a fight against stacked teams with some physical (speed, stamina, having one tall player for aerial, etc) playing. This world cup teams like Japan, Canada and Australia put up some great displays.
"If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)"
This doesn't answer your question, but might provide some context to other answers:
http://mistybeach.com/mark/SalaryCaps.html
Summary: Yes, the good teams dominate their national soccer leagues in a way not seen in American sports. This isn't as boring as you might think, though, and I speculate on why. My speculation: for the same reason that bad college football teams playing good college football teams isn't as boring as it might be -- hedonic adaptation applies and the awesomeness of winning when a big underdog makes up for getting crushed most years.
For the English league (and UK/Ireland leagues pretty much in general) there is an entire gradation from the professionals down to amateurs. The old league system was broken up by the formation of the Premier League; before that, it was one league with four divisions- First Division to Fourth Division - going from the top to the lowest professional clubs.
The top clubs broke off to form "the Premier League" in 1992 to have more money etc. The new divisions are hence the Premiership, the Championship, League One and League Two. They all operate on a system of relegation and promotion which means that at the end of the season, the worst-performing clubs at the bottom of the league table will drop down a league, and the best-performing clubs at the top of the table will be promoted up to the next league (obviously for the Premier League the top clubs can't be promoted any higher, but the bottom clubs can drop down to the Championship and the top Championship clubs can be promoted to the Premiership).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Football_League
There are national and international tournaments for these leagues; the FA Cup, league championship, etc. are the national tournaments for the English league:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FA_Cup
The international tournaments are (for European football) the Champions League and the Europa League are the two most important ones. There are also competitions like the World Club Cup:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_Club_World_Cup
And to make money and for publicity purposes and merchandising, during the European off-season often top clubs will play tournaments in Asia and America against local clubs.
Your home-town club may not be big enough to be in the Premiership, for example, but you can follow it anyway in the next league, and if it's in the Championship there's always the hope that maybe this year will be the year they make it via promotion. And then there are the host of next-level, semi-pro to amateur leagues under the English Football League. A lot of people will have their home town club and a Premiership club that they follow.
As to "isn't it boring to watch two teams that aren't the top two?", that depends. You can have a top team that really does crush all opposition, or you can have a top team that plays wonderfully against the best in the world, then loses by a whopping margin to a much lower-ranked team. Not often, but it does happen.
It's often fun to check the Five Thirty Eight match predictions against what the result turns out to be; most times the 83% chance to win team does win. But sometimes it's a draw. And sometimes the 17% chance to win team does win, given a lucky goal:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/premier-league/
And sometimes you have a team that is dominant for a decade, then fades away (due to the change of players, manager retiring, etc.) - that was Liverpool in the 90s and now Manchester United. We're only half way through the season, more or less, and look at the table today; Brighton in sixth position, for heaven's sake!
https://www.eurosport.co.uk/football/premier-league/2022-2023/standings.shtml
Teams/clubs come in and out of prominence in their turn; Notts Forest, Southampton and others were winners in their day and are now in danger of relegation. The wheel of fortune turns and those on top are now below, those below are now on top.
> And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona
It's true that some leagues are dominated by a small number of teams. (Actually three in Spain rather than two - I think you were combining Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid - but others have two top teams or even just one)
But that doesn't mean they're unbeatable in individual games. Last year those top three teams won 68%, 55% and 55% of their games respectively, so even when you're up against one of them there's still quite a sizeable chance of coming out with a point or three. Or from Madrid/Barca fans' perspective, being the better team overall doesn't guarantee you a win on the night.
There are also things to care about at the season level for fans of teams outside the top three:
* You might still be in the running for European competition places even if you don't have any realistic chance of winning the league.
* At the other end of the table, European football works on a promotion/relegation system - the bottom n (usually 3) teams are demoted to a lower league at the end of the season, so there's always a struggle to avoid that happening.
* For teams outside of the top division there's also the chance of getting promoted to a higher league based on the same system. In England the top 2 teams get automatic promotion while the 3rd-6th ranked teams go into a mini knockout competition for the final promotion slot - I think the system is similar in other countries.
* Finally most countries have a separate knockout tournament running at the same time as the league. The single-elimination system means that the results are less predictable and smaller teams have a chance to cause an upset.
You have both national competitions and European competitions. Only the best teams of each country get to take part in the European competitions.
In national competitions there are usually a few teams much stronger than everyone else, but also another few which are just slightly less good. (So in Spain, your example, you have two teams which dominate most of the time, but maybe half a dozen which consistently give them a hard time and even win championships less frequently but not that rarely). I wouldn't say matches against the weakest teams are boring though - especially since in modern days the gap between the weak and the strong is not so huge in the main leagues - but they are usually less interesting than the rest. The thing with national competitions is that they're a game of consistency. Sure, the top two teams should be able to beat almost everyone else in the league, but how many points they will concede in the course of 40ish games is what really determined champions.
(There are also national knock-out competitions with slightly different incentives, but those are usually secondary.)
In European competitions you usually have a format like in the World Cup with a huge number of really strong teams playing. That does mean it's usually more interesting, especially as teams cannot be there unless they did well in their national competitions the previous year. They do play less often though, and are a big drain on the resources of big teams which end up having to keep their good shape over a much larger number of games, thereby improving the chances of weaker teams in both types of competitions.
Hope that helped a little!
Yeah, in a way you have 'mini World Cups' with things like the Champions League - will your club make it to qualify? And if it does, will it make it all the way to the final against the other top European clubs? Or will their rivals do it? Or will you get there but have an embarrassing, dream-crushing defeat? Will they make it three in a row winning the Champions League? Is that star player finally past it and will have to limp off in ignominy? Depending on whether it's your team's star player or not, you may dread/hope for this to happen 😁
And then there is the whole "will we win the league/national tournaments/qualify for Europe/win a European championship" hope for the Double, Treble, Treble Treble, etc. every year. Your club might start off with a good chance of one or more of these, then end the season with nothing (not that I'm bitter or anything....)
There are national/regional leagues at (so many!) different levels and systems of promotion/relegation that make matches impactful at any level, along with European leagues. See e.g. https://www.bundesliga.com/en/faq/what-are-the-rules-and-regulations-of-soccer/__trashed-10568 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system
Well that was complicated
If it's not complicated, you are not suffering enough 😂 The (very basic) structure is that the national federation is the governing body for football in that country, e.g. FAI for Ireland, FA for England and so on.
These national federations are then all part of six governing bodies globally. For Europe, that body is UEFA.
Finally, the world governing body is FIFA (which is in charge of the World Cup amongst other things). UEFA and FIFA are (allegedly to keep the lawyers away) *spectacularly* corrupt, with regular bribery and financial mismanagement scandals which somehow never result in anybody serving jail time. Hence all the to-do over (a) holding the World Cup in the winter time instead of the usual summer competition and (b) awarding it to Qatar. The cynical take on it is that the host nation for the next World Cup is the one that paid the most and best bribes to FIFA officials (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly). That will be Canada/Mexico/United States for 2026, because FIFA would *dearly* love to manage to break into the US market on the scale that they haven't achieved yet, all that lovely, lovely money to be made!
Why do so few people care about the UN report into China's treatment of Uyghurs? It created a few headlines and then quickly disappeared from the public consciousness despite it being explicitly a case of ethnic oppression.
Because the UN Report into China's treatment of the Uyghurs, is only slightly more relevant to anything anyone cares about, than Mrs. McGillicudy's third-grade class resolution that China's treatment of the Uyghurs is really bad.
Everybody who cares, already knows that the CCP is horribly, nigh-unto-genocidally oppressing the Uyghurs. That's P>0.99 common knowledge in the caring-about-obscure-ethnic-groups-in-Asia community. There were no fence-sitters saying "Gosh, I didn't know for sure, but now that a *UN Report* says so, that's horrible and it's time for me to take a stand!"
Everybody who cares, *also* already knows with P>0.99 that nobody is going to do anything about it beyond some ineffectual scolding and boycotts, because doing anything really effective would be too dangerous and/or expensive and there aren't *enough* people who care to make that happen. And while there *may* be things that could change that, everybody knows that a UN Report telling everyone what they already know isn't one of those things.
So, what's to talk about?
What can be done about it? The situation in Ukraine is getting more coverage because Western countries are more directly involved. We can't arm the Uyghurs or fund any sort of Uyghur rebellion, partly because we have no real geographical access to Xinjiang, and partly because the Uyghurs are in a much worse position relative to China than the Ukrainians are relative to Russia. At this point, any sort of uprising would likely do nothing but increase the probability of their complete annihilation. (In fact, part of the importance of the Ukraine War is making sure the Ukrainians don't end up in such a hopeless position!)
The most we can do right now is put as much diplomatic and economic pressure on China as we possibly can in the hopes that the Chinese government will eventually take a softer stance towards the Uyghurs, but there's a limit to how effective that is. Still, there's a reason that "being tough on China" is one of the few issues remaining that the Republican establishment and Democratic establishment can still agree on. Even if it's not directly addressing the Uyghur genocide, it's an attempt to incentivize the Chinese government to be more respectful towards human rights in general.
A couple things to add to what's below.
It's not news that China is genociding the Uyghurs. This has been going on for years, and will go on for years. It may not stop until there's nothing left of them as a people. It would have made much bigger headlines if they'd stopped, declared a(n?) Uyghur autonomous zone, and invited in international groups to keep an eye on things and confirm that they really had changed course. Terrible thing that you can't do anything about is still happening isn't much of a headline.
There's also far group thing going on here. We expect the Chinese to be barbarians. Them doing this is not only not news, it's not something we're not really interested in. If it were happening in France or something it would be front page stuff, and would likely stay that way. But the Chinese? Whatever. It's what we expect from them.
It's like a few years ago when the Israelis and Russians were slapping around their respective Muslim victim populations. Israel go a ton more coverage, because in some sense we think of Israel as part of team modern West. Russia saw *some* coverage, but Russians murder and terrorize subject people isn't interesting, it's just what we expect from them. They aren't part of the modern world, really. What else can be expected of them but barbarity?
It's probably not a great thing that we hold ourselves and our close friends to a higher moral standard and just assume the rest of the world is full of benighted children without the ability to act in fully moral ways, but I do think that's basically how we (collectively) see these things.
The evidence you're offering here -- a lack of headlines -- proves only that the main news outlets don't care. So you can ask "Why does the New York Time not care about the Uighurs?" if you like, and that question makes sense.
But whether people in general care, and to what extent they do, can't be determined by what headlines appear most often in newspapers or on Twitter.
Eh, the New York Times might not care about the Uyghurs because no one clicks on articles about the Uyghurs.
The Times? Kind of doubty. The Post, maybe, but the Times is strongly driven by their sense of mission, which they have been willing to follow despite the massive loss in circulation over the past 35 years.
Perhaps the Uyghurs are not on this year's narrative priority?
From an "outside of the US" perspective, the US not caring much about the rest of the world is not surprising, so few people caring about what happens to a minority in China seems to be expected. Ethnic oppression also tend to be treated more lightly when it's not done by white people in the US, to the point that I've seen people argue that racism is only a consequence of whiteness/Europe/the west, ignoring all other instances of racial discrimination in the world.
This has been an ongoing complaint for years. Did the report add anything new?
I think that, with post-covid supply chain issues and Russia sanctions already impacting the economy, and a geopolitical need to not drive Russia and China into a bloc, there is very little appetite to do anything substantive to punish China for their actions. And most people would rather not dwell on an atrocity they can't do anything about.
because people know china is more openly corrupt than most other countries and the atrocities are happening within china – so little action can be taken by foreigners even if they are disturbed by the situation. it's not like russia and ukraine, where russia is as openly corrupt but the atrocities they are committing are happening outside of the country.
Partly what's been mentioned below, plus a bit of I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-the-Outgroup, but also "pic or it didn't happen" is very much at play here.
Unlike George Floyd, Nazi death camps, etc, there is no compelling, "sexy" video footage of Uyghur suffering that would provide the kind of emotional immediacy that motivates people to get involved.
Did it bring up any new information? "Uyghurs are being oppressed" has been common knowledge for years (with the normal people who care about global human rights abuses talking about it a lot).
George Floyd dying received more interest in in the day it happened than all cumulative interest in the Uyghurs has, despite the left crying about conservatives being too focused on America.
George Floyd was murdered, slowly, in public, on video, while begging for his life, on an American street, by an officer of the law. It would be bizarre if any story involving exclusively foreigners got even a fraction of the coverage.
Would rioting in the US free prisoners in China?
Protesting for police reform could plausibly lead to police reform in the US (and in some cases did). There is very little we can do to change the behavior of an unfriendly nuclear superpower. The little we have done (things like sanctions on Xinjiang's public safety bureau) is boring and uncontroversial and has no obvious lever that a protest could push on. The bigger stuff we could be doing involves targeting China in general rather than Xinjiang in particular, and you do indeed hear lots of politicians talk about things like "getting tough on China" or "China's long record of human rights abuses."
Also, I notice that you complain about leftists saying that conservatives are too focused on America, but you don't actually evaluate the accusation. "The left cares more than the right" and "the left doesn't care enough" are not inconsistent statements, after all. Do you think the right cares less about what's happening to the Uyghurs than the left does? If so, do you consider that a problem?
Or to put it more bluntly, are you bringing this up to bring attention to a cause that you think hasn't received enough attention, or just to dunk on your opponents for a perceived inconsistency?
^ “the left crying about conservatives being too focused on America”?
When was that?
Left or Right, most Americans don’t care about what happens overseas, nor should they
Lots of people got very upset about the phrase “America first.”
"America first" already had a disreputable history.
Charles Coughlin's periodical was called, "Social Justice."
After the attack on Pearl Harbor sure, the line was: ‘They say "America First," but they mean "America Next!"’, as for the more recent usage by Trump a few regarded it as evidence that he was a fascist but I don’t remember anyone giving much of a damn about the phrase otherwise.
I would think that they object to explicitly putting American interests first in foreign policy, but this does not mean that they will drop their US-centric point of view when looking at the rest of the world.
"most Americans don’t care about what happens overseas, nor should they"
"Nor should they" - why?
I think that (being so parochial, and NOT having a broader global vision and concern) is a problem.
>"Nor should they" - why?
Because deciding that you know better than someone else as to how they should live and taking actions to enforce that has a TERRIBLE track record.
"Caring about" what is happening globally is absolutely not the same thing as "deciding that you know better than someone else as to how they should live and taking actions to enforce that". How did you jump to that idea?
The statement was:
"Left or Right, most Americans don’t care about what happens overseas, nor should they"
The "nor should they" makes no sense if you value human solidarity.
When you can't do anything to promote something you really care about, you get unhappy. So it's better to think about something else, where you CAN (at least plausibly) make a difference.
Yes, it's better to have a wider view, but to focus on where what you do might make a difference.
Is the you individual or collective? Is making a difference the same thing as solving a problem? The US , collectively, has made a difference in many countries, and could do in more. The intractability of the Uyghur situation is rather exceptional.
That’s definitely not true of Ukraine.
Sure, but the Ukrainians aren't being helpless victims that need rescuing. They're fighting. All they're asking for is guns and bullets, so they can rescue themselves. A lot of Americans are pretty OK with that kind of attitude, and with helping out (by sending the guns and bullets).
That’s clearly an interest. Zhelensky was just given a standing ovation by congress.
What about Taiwan?
A number of factors drive interest in topics. One of them seems to be a general lack of interest in international affairs.
Another factor is novelty. Ongoing issues that everyone is vaguely aware of, rarely make headlines.
There are similarly few headlines about the half a million or so largely preventable deaths from malaria every year, the killings in Tigray, or the ongoing issues in Burma.
For that matter, there is not much coverage of the opposite trends - the incredible progress that humanity is making.
E.g. Norman Borlaug, whose work likely saved well over a billion lives, is a fairly obscure figure. If he landed a plane with a hundred or so people on it in a river in the US, he would probably be much more famous.
I think part of the problem is that there's nothing obvious to be done about Chinese government abuse of Uyghurs.
Norman Borlaug is dead. The mistreatment of uyghurs is ongoing.
And as for lack of interest in international affairs, the american left to this day talk about european colonization of Africa despite it having nothing to do with the US.
Sure. That’s just anti European bashing though.
The American left to this day keeps complaining about Chinese treatment of the uighurs. I’m not sure why you’re bringing them into this.
Why is this a left/right divide in the US. It was Pelosi who high tailed it to Taiwan, with other democrats in tow.
Agree. Both the left and right establishment are also very much pro-intervention in ukraine. We could easily be arming Uighur Muslims, but we aren’t. If we were, I think media coverage would be much more intense there and public sentiment would follow.
How? As in, how specifically would we get the weapons to Xinjiang without first fighting a war with Beijing? What organized force there would be capable of receiving and deploying the weapons?
Arming Ukraine is a *lot* easier - it is a country with an operating government and army, on NATO borders.
This is definitely a good point and I officially retract my claim they it would be easy.
I think what you’d do is give a bunch of arms to nearby Muslim countries, like Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan.
For a while, I had wondered if the arms left in Afghanistan by “mistake” were actually left there as part of a secret agreement specifically for that purpose. “Whoops we left this stuff behind, oh no.” Then, a few years later a bunch of ridiculously well-equipped Mujahidin start a guerilla war to liberate their Muslim brothers in Xinjiang.
I now think this is less likely but I’m still open to it. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, in 2014, I remember thinking, “democrats aren’t going to support fighting back because of bad memories in iraq. You’d need to find some way to get democrats to hate Russia for them to back a war. “ i then wondered what that might look like, until 2016 came along and it became obvious.
Why should they care?
Because the left claim to care about human rights and thinks conservatives care too much about the US.
I’ve never seen that
Meta point here: it’s basically impossible to provide evidence for or against this kind of claim, or any kind of claim about the belief distributions of large groups.
To me, what Edwardoo is saying as true as someone saying, the left tends to care more about global warming than the right. But if asked to prove this, unless I could find some specific poll, all I could really do is shrug.
Unless the group's membership requires certain beliefs, e.g. to join the Libertarian Party of the US, you must agree not to initiate violence against anyone. You'd think people would realize that libertarians are thus pacifists just like Quakers, or that Quakers are libertarians in disguise, but no, that never happens.
That only follows if there's an active enforcement policy. Are Libertarians who instigate violence against others kicked out of the party? If so, I've never heard of it happening. Or any other common punishment. Otherwise it's just "This is one of the things you have to say", like Christians being pacifists, refusing to join the army, etc.
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So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.
(Posted this a couple of days ago last Open Thread, but I guess it was too late in the cycle.)
So far as I know, there is no Federal legal mechanism by which Trump could be barred from office. The requirements for becoming President are laid out explicitly in the Constitution, and no legislative act of Congress can overrule them.
Each state has rules about who may and may not appear on the ballot, and I would guess that is probably possible, both practically and legally, for any given state to prohibit Trump from appearing. It would have to be a prohibition sufficiently broad that it disbars a category of person that includes more than just Trump himself, since the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder, and it's not likely a law that just said "No ex-President who fomented agitation on January 6 can be on our ballot" would pass the inevitable Supreme Court review. But I still think a sufficiently clever formulation would work.
But that would be at best a sterile exercise. The only states where such a bar could pass the legislature are those that Trump would not win anyway, e.g. California, Massachusetts, New York. Trump doesn't give a rats ass if he can't run in those states, since he can't win them. In fact, since his shtick now is martyrdom, I'd say he'd welcome an attack like that, since it would enrage and energize the very substantial Republican minorities in those states, and result in a massive flood of money to his campaign.
I doubt it would sit well with independents, either, who very reasonably think the choice of who to elect President should be left completely in the hands of The People, and no interfering assholes in the legislature -- any legislature, state or Federal -- should presume to prejudge for whom they can and can't vote.
Fourteenth Amendment, section 3.
>No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The claim is that Jan 6 was Trump rebelling against the US, and that this section applies to Presidents (both of which are not obvious), and that therefore Trump can be disqualified from becoming President again (even if people vote for him).
I agree that this is a dumb move to try, though, particularly because the potential for backfire isn't capped at "get hammered next election" - it's one of only a few things that could potentially snowball into another US civil war (which is what I meant by "blow the powder keg").
Thanks. It had actually never occurred to me that anyone could be sufficiently cynical or brain-dead as to attempt to apply the Fourteenth Amendment. But I guess we are in an unusual era, with higher than usual levels of cynicism (among the hucksters) and naivete and/or historical ignorance (among their potential followers). Somehow the Internet has shaved 10 IQ points off the entire nation over the past 30 years.
Nah the Internet has simply _revealed_ how many Americans believe piles of completely-ridiculous shit. And always have. I am old enough to clearly remember dinner-table discourse in this country long before any interwebs -- it was always thus. My parents (born in the 1920s) always said that it was always thus going back to their childhoods too. Some of the specific stupid shit actually changes from generation to generation while some simply circles back around in new forms, but the big pile has always existed.
That said....in this instance I will suggest that you're missing the forest for the trees and that the Jan 6 Committee's recommendation regarding Trump and the 14th is very smart. I'd been impressed (and frankly surprised) with that committee's efforts in general and this move adds to that feeling.
The committee simply _recommended_ that Trump be banned from future office. They offered no idea of how that would be done. That is because the committee members know perfectly well that no legal mechanism exists for the such a move, and also that this committee explicitly has zero legal authority of any kind anyway, and also that even if those things weren't true neither Joe Biden nor any other current Dem party leader is so politically dense as to allow such an attempt anyway. (AOC and some others would happily try it but they are not actually in charge of anything, not yet anyway.)
So why offer such vague hand-waving -- in stark contrast to the committee's overall methodology which has been to be almost painfully specific and clear and to support every point it makes in public with piles of specific backup -- about such a potentially explosive thing? Answer: to nudge the narrative, or as one particular cliche calls it the Overton window, in a way precisely calibrated to put Trump in particular and MAGAts in general on tilt.
With that particular recommendation they are taking advantage of the fact that so many Americans (a) fetishize the idea of our Constitution as a Sacred Text written Long Ago which must be Honored and Defended as written; (b) know little about the content or meaning of the actual Constitution but are always impressed by and willing to repeat selective quotations from it; (c) have grounded their whole self-image in the idea that they are the last defenders stalwart and true of said Constitution.
Now, for the next couple of years, every article or interview or dinner table conversation about Donald Trump's candidacy will eventually include the point that our Constitution says nobody who's engaged in insurrection can run for President. And that a lengthy thorough investigation resulted in such a recommendation.
And if the conversation goes on a while someone will bring up that some of the people who thought they were doing Trump's bidding on 1/6/21 have in fact been convicted in courts of law of "seditious conspiracy" which, gosh, sure sounds a lot like "insurrection"....Trump and his fans will now have to play defense on that point, over and over, without ever being able to get rid of it. They will be having specific words of their beloved Constitution thrown in their faces, over and over. If past performance is any indication they will, um, not handle that particularly well....and there is zero actual downside here for the committee. It's just a little word cloud that is precisely calibrated to drive their opponents around the bend.
It is, honestly, a downright Trumpian move on the part of the Jan 6 committee. Pretty freakin' brilliant. Machiavelli would be proud.
Hmm, well, it's a nice argument. A priori I tend to be pretty skeptical of arguments that a seemingly boneheaded move is actually a fiendishly clever 4D chess move, particularly when we're talking about a committee of Congressmen, the collective IQ of which is found by taking the average individual IQ (already not high) and dividing by the square of the number of members.
Also, "sounds a lot like" is a zillion miles from "is," especially when it comes to the law. And I think anyone who can say 6 January was an actual "insurrection" with a straight face and completely sincerely is simply too drunk on ideological Kool-Ade to be worth any attempt at rational intercourse. We know what "insurrection" looks like: it looks like tanks in the streets, TV and radio cut off, men with armbands and guns on street corners, and ultimately -- in a country the size of ours -- at least tens of thousands dead and weeks of violent tumult. The riots in Portland have a much better claim to be an "insurrection" than the January 6 fracas.
Anyway, anyone who is a fan of Trump dismisses the entire January 6 hype as partisan bullshit, of no importance at all. So it won't matter to them. Centrists who can be persuaded that Trump is better than the alternates on offer will also not give a crap about the January 6 investigation, since absolutely nothing new was revealed, and I think (as I said above) they will be if anything slightly to moderately annoyed at the suggestion that any government body should tell them who they can and can't vote for. So for them the report and its recommendations is probably a net negative, and nobody trying to persuade them to forego Trump would be advised to use it.
That leaves only anti-Trump partisans, for whom, yes, I expect the report and its conclusions and recommendations to be endlessly discussed, with relish, the way one revels in the shortcomings of his enemies. Since these people would not vote for Trump even if the alternative was the Antichrist nothing will change there, either.
Well obviously I know that Trump fans dismiss the January 6 "hype", have experienced that directly from a few of them. (And we see an example of it right here in this comment thread.) But you're kind of missing my point -- it isn't about changing any of their minds about anything.
"Centrists who can be persuaded that Trump is better than the alternates on offer", that's honestly just code for "people who find woke-ism so enraging that nothing else matters to them." That's clearly where you sit, and I've had days pretty close to that myself or at least I did until 1/6/21. But anyway again, my point had nothing to do with that group.
As for Jan 6 itself, have to say I find your dismissal of it to be bizarre at best. A literal attempt to forcibly overturn a national election result, I mean if that's not an insurrection...?? If you're willing to whatabout _that_, and say something as bizarre as that it only counts if we get to the tanks-in-the-streets stage with thousands dead....okay yea then we're never going to be working from a shared frame of reality.
And maybe you're right that so many Americans are now that far gone. I hope not. Guess we'll find out a couple of years from now.
To you, maybe. To me, anyone who calls the J6 committee a "thorough investigation" will have outed themselves to me as someone to be disregarded.
Heh. Very persuasive! You sound a lot like all the folks who were instantly sure that the Mueller Report was a nothingburger without feeling any need to actually read the Mueller Report.
But anyway that red herring is completely irrelevant to the point. Call it a slipshod investigation, or a partisan witchhunt, or a strawberry shortcake if you like -- deployment of some Trumpian hand-waving to put constitutionally-illiterate Trumpists on tilt remains delicious.
My feeling is that it would be a good thing if Trump had a heart attack or was killed in an auto accident or had some medical problem that made running for president impractical but a very bad thing if he was prevented from running by something, most obviously legal action, that could plausibly be interpreted as enemy action.
Oh please. If Trump dies before 2024 by heart attack, the story will be poison. If he's hit by a car it'll be murder. If he dies before he can run again regardless of the circumstances, a very substantial minority will believe it's foul play regardless of the circumstances. It would be a slow rolling disaster that would last for years.
Quite likely true. Keep in mind that the reason they might believe that is that the left collectively lost their minds about Trump, to the point of ridiculous conspiracy theories about Russian Collusion (and a dozen other "the walls are closing in on Trump" stories) ran nightly for every year of his presidency. He was impeached the first time for something that every president in history has probably done dozens if not hundreds of times - pressuring a foreign power in a way that benefits them. I mean, if we want to change how we feel about such things, that's fine, but post hoc to get the rival team's obnoxious leader is not a good thing.
I disagree. The best outcome is for Trump to run without interference, and be defeated in the Republican primary. That, and only that, will put an end to the myth. Martyrdom, real or apparent, will not.
A defeated Trump might intentionally sabotage whoever does win the Republican primary, telling his supporters to stay home etc. I'd prefer to see a real election in the general.
I doubt any attempt at sabotage would be effective, if he loses the primaries badly, which it looks right now like he will. His efforts so far to influence other elections have had decidedly unimpressive results. I definitely expect the Democrats and the press to hype his chances as much as they can, because they think he's poison to Republican fortunes, so unfortunately it will be a challenge to penetrate the sound 'n' fury to see what's really going on, at least until the primary season actually starts.
Separate point: I don't think he's poison to your fortunes. There have been four Trump era elections, if you count the last one. in 2016 and 2020, he, and Republicans generally, out ran their polls and did better than expected. In 2018 and 2022 the polls were just about accurate and Democrats were happy with the results. I think the Trump era party doesn't do well in midterms, because the Trump effect and Trump's coattails don't work when he's not on the ballot.
But 2024 isn't a midterm. I think if Trump runs, especially if Biden goes for term two, he'll walk in, with the Senate and House in tow.
Who said anything about my fortunes? I'm not a Republican. Never have been.
And I disagree with you that Trump will even win the nomination. The people who put him over the top in 2016 -- generally, non-college-educated centrist white men, with their female brethren to some extent -- roughly speaking, Truman Democrats -- were apparently bitterly disappointed in what he got done (or more precisely failed to get done), and it was exactly the loss of their support that screwed him in 2020. The opposition of all the people who disliked him in 2016 didn't matter in the slightest, since the numbers of those people did not increase. (They might have had the Democrats run a stronger candidate than Joe Biden.) The support of the people who turned up at his rallies and shouted themselves hoarse also didn't matter a fig, since *their* numbers didn't change.
I have seen no evidence that the key demographic that lost faith in the guy is willing to give him another chance in 2024 after turning him down in 2020 when he had a lot more going for him. Not as long as there is anyone more plausible on the ballot.
That said, anything can happen in politics, and a lot will hinge on who the Democrats end up nominating -- since I gather that Biden fully intends to fight for his job -- and a lot will depend on whether plausible Republican candidates jump in or keep their powder dry for 2026. Plus the unknown unknowns, of course. So who knows? But I consider a Trump v2.0 Presidency to be quite unlikely. And I also consider it a certainty that lefties will nevertheless hype the possibility as much as they can.
For the Dems: don't sleep on fear. We were smugly sure we had 2016 in the bag. We chuckled as Trump wrecked stalwart after stalwart of the Republican party. I personally enjoyed the National Review's meltdown.* We loled when Ted Cruz had to make voter calls on TV for the guy who suggested his dad killed Kennedy. There was talk of 54 senators, of a much more radical justice than the milquetoast Garland. Come the day, hundreds of women went and left "I voted" stickers on Susan B's grave.
Then in 2020, we white knuckled, doubted but hoped, held our nose and picked our most moderate, don't scare the horses option. And it worked, but only just. And then for a long while we weren't at all sure it would stick. Vote him out, sure, but will he go? If he doesn't will anyone make him? For a little while on Jan 6 it looked like maybe he wouldn't. Then, finally, he did.
Trump is like a horror movie villain (to us). We won't really believe he's gone until he's dead and we see the body. I think he could win in 2024 even if he's in jail. Hell, he may have a better chance in that case.
Also, I just checked. RealClearPolitics has him up 20 points on DeSanctimonious, so I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that it looks like he'll lose the primaries badly.
*I was a long time National Review reader, starting during the Bush admin. I followed them because the let me see the Republicans talking to each other and coming to consensus, which wasn't a perspective I got anywhere else. I am of the opinion that during the Bush years, Republican intellectuals re-oriented the party around the populist, talk-radio wing, then lost control of it during the Obama administration. I experienced the rise of Trump and their anger and despair during it as them getting their just comeuppance.
I'm curious what specifically you think is so bad about Trump that it's better he die than be president again?
He is a loose cannon, behaves in an erratic fashion so could easily do something very bad. His main objective seems to be his own status, not any political end. His expressed political views have varied a lot over the years. He has been willing to sacrifice the welfare of the Republican party in order to maintain his power in it.
His disinterest in whether what he says is true is in some ways an asset, because it is more obvious than with a more polished politician like Biden.
Even if Trump dies, isn't it quite likely another opportunist raises to fill the same political niche? His counterfactual impact may not be huge.
Yes, but probably a *politically competent* opportunist, who is less likely to accidentally (or deliberately) crash the Republic. Trump is an extreme outlier in his aptitude-for-winning-elections : aptitude-for-governing-nations ratio, and in his my-status-is-paramount : my-ideals-are-paramount ratio.
In terms of the tangible economic and foreign policy outcomes during his presidency, I'm very uncertain whether those things would have been net better if Hillary won. The economy was excellent until covid, and the economic seppuku in response to covid was mostly a democrat thing. Trump's administration was the first in decades to not get the US involved in new wars. Aptitude for governing well and aptitude for appearing to the press to be governing well are quite different things. Conditional prediction markets about real gdp per capita would cut through the noise ex ante but I don't know a great method of ranking presidents objectively ex post. Historian rankings are too subjective.
Someone with better capability to control the government than Trump would be a big advantage if Taiwan goes hot between 2025-2028, which is definitely not a negligible chance.
Someone with better capability to keep the Democrats, if not happy, then at least not-actively-treacherous would also be a big advantage, although that's plausibly mutually exclusive with filling Trump's niche.
As noted, though, murdering him would be a terrible idea.
Yes. As sheer entertainment value, watching the heads exploding if he did run again (and even more if he got the nomination) would be amazing, but for practical purposes, no. Let somebody else go (and there are plenty of potential Republican nominees who would get the heads exploding) and stand back.
Keeping after Trump to this extent, that they need to take out something like a legal case to make sure *he* in particular can't run because something something Civil War precedent something something looks every bit as bad as the long-running efforts to pin *something* on the Clintons, which everybody agreed looked obsessive and vengeful and had less and less to do with reality as they dragged on. And it's a bad precedent to set, because it's a weapon that your enemies can use as easily as you when it's their turn to be back in power.
Look at how Supreme Court activism was the greatest thing in the world while decisions were going the way of the social liberals, and how suddenly there was a Catholic theocracy overturning human rights when the decisions didn't:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sins-of-the-high-courts-supreme-catholics
"The overturn of Roe v. Wade is part of ultra-conservatives’ long history of rejecting Galileo, Darwin, and Americanism."
Is that "Americanism" as in "Truth, justice and the American Way" and "Un-American Activities" or "Americanism" as in the quasi-heresy? Looks like it's the quasi-history as the guy writing this New Yorker piece is an ex-priest in his 70s, so one of the Spirit of Vatican II types. I anticipate this will be an enjoyable read for reasons 😁
Yes, and we're straight into "Vatican II was the greatest thing since sliced bread" and your Supreme Court is all part of an "ultra-conservative blowback", anti-feminism, anti-sex and probably anti-your auntie as well:
"These Justices are undermining not only basic elements of American democracy, such as the “wall of separation,” but also the essential spirit of Catholicism’s great twentieth-century renewal."
Jimbo here seems to be a tiny bit confused about are Catholics Protestants or not, since the Darwinian arguments weren't as severe with the Church, and nobody at the time seemed to link them to abortion, but hey our boy is on a roll here, don't stop him with facts:
"The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought. A pair of dates tells the story. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and the idea of biological evolution began to grip the Western imagination. In 1869, Pope Pius IX, in his pronouncement “Apostolicae Sedis,” forbade the abortion of a pregnancy from the moment of conception forward—an effective locating of human “ensoulment” at the joining of the ovum and sperm, an all but explicit rejection of evolutionary theory."
The next tranche of exegesis is rich pickings. *Now* he remembers that we're not Biblical literalists, but uh somehow Original Sin = Originalist reading of the Constitution? Well, maybe it's that whole "Original" bit that is making the synapses fire?
"This story gives us the concept of “original sin”—a phrase that does not appear in the Bible—and represents the ultimate form of fraudulent originalism. To read the Book of Genesis as a literal account of how the world and human life began is pure fundamentalism, and it poses a danger to the rule of reason on which the common good depends. So, too, do ahistorical readings of the U.S. Constitution. “Originalism is a legal philosophy of stasis, which reifies a historical moment,” the writer Siri Hustvedt points out in a recent piece for Literary Hub. But such historical fundamentalism, she argues, also applies to attitudes toward the creation of the individual: “The reduction of a dynamic, metamorphosing conceptus to a single abstract entity—‘the unborn’—denies both time and change.” And that denial has led to the legal, medical, economic, and personal calamities facing a post-Dobbs America, with women experiencing the brunt of the threat."
Whatever you say, Jimmy boy. 'Let's all be heretics!' is his final rallying-cry:
"Now that the Supreme Court, with an extreme originalist misreading of the Constitution, has revoked the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, the renewed political and religious tensions surrounding the issue can be clarifying, perhaps especially for Catholics. They can begin to reclaim the evolutionary character of their own history and beliefs, as well as of the understanding of when personhood begins. Indeed, many Catholics already do this, with leading Catholic politicians, for example, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, affirming abortion rights. They may cloak that affirmation in language about not wanting to impose their own religious views on others, but this really amounts to an implicit rejection of the idea that human life—and human rights—begins at conception. That rejection should be made explicit."
Americans are Special, you see, which I guess ties up the conclusion with the beginning. Americans are Special so your stinkin' rules don't apply to them, O rest of the world!
"Freedom of conscience, historical consciousness, the rights of other people to be other people, the idea that sacredness is everywhere, not just in religion—such are aspects of the onetime heresy, Americanism. Catholics in the United States can finally and openly affirm these views. Americanism helped bring about the renewal of the Church, when the Second Vatican Council embraced those very principles, the foundation of liberal democracy.
With the threat to the Church’s unfinished renewal now coming from Catholic Justices, that renewal, with its underlying American ideals, is worth retrieving and advancing, especially as a way to challenge the anti-abortion Catholic legislators who are taking what they perceive as moral instruction from a throwback Supreme Court. Indeed, the defiance by legions of Catholic women of Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of birth control can itself be a model of conscientious objection. Birth control and abortion are not the same thing, but the autonomy of women, the primacy of conscience, and the rejection of overreaching male-supremacist authority add up to an American refusal to obey draconian new laws that claim to defend human life yet do the opposite."
Ah, brings a patriotic tear to the eye, does it not? "Oh say can you seeeeee..." oh but anthems and patriotism and the like are nationalist and that is Bad. Oops!
>Look at how Supreme Court activism was the greatest thing in the world while decisions were going the way of the social liberals, and how suddenly there was a Catholic theocracy overturning human rights when the decisions didn't:
I think this is mostly a fair cop, though I would *really* appreciate it if the other side would drop its framing around this stuff. When judges on the left make sweeping rulings, they're legislating from the bench. When judges from the right do it, they're just following original intent. Drives me nuts. Everyone likes activist judges. The right's pose of rhetorically disdaining judicial activism while filling embracing that activism is bullshit.
There's a significant logical difference between judicial decisions which create new rights out of penumbras and emanations (like Roe) and judicial decisions which dissassemble a judicial superstructure erected in the 1970s and throw a complex problem back into the laps of The People and their elected representatives (like Dobbs). It's unreasonable to equate them as being "judicial activism" simply because they have equally large impacts.
Nobody on the right uses "judicial activism" to mean *removing* judicial frameworks, they mean only creating new ones -- what they see as usurping the role of the legislature.
I really don't accept this. In that past few years the court has struck down the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, the ability of public unions to collect dues, and just about any gun law any state or municipality wants to pass. And the same people who went on and on about judicial restraint and the importance of the legislature were nowhere to be found.
So yes, you are correct. Nobody on the right talks about judicial activism when judges make decisions you agree with. When you agree with it, it's protecting Constitutional rights. When you disagree, it's usurping the role of the legislature. The idea that it's different in kind, or that judges on the right are more deferential to the legislative branch are nonsense.
It's one of those Russell conjugations: Thomas is a champion of the law, Kagan is a judicial activist, Warren was a tyrant.
What I wrote is that no one on the right speaks about judicial activism when the Court *removes* judicial frameworks that constrain legislation or regulation. If you can find a contrary example, please let me know.
Yes, certainly the Court rules that this or that law is unconstitutional all the time. And that's what happened in all of your examples. But I don't think *either* side calls striking down laws for unconstitutonality "judicial activism." They may like the result, or not like the result, but everybody agrees this is 100% in the Court's ambit.
"Judicial activism" means going *beyond* the Court's clear Constiutional mandate -- usurping (if you disapprove) or extending (if you approve) the role of the legislature, creating legal frameworks where none existed before, discovering meanings in the Constiution or statute that the people who wrote those documents clearly did not intend. At least, that's what it means if you want it to have any meaning at all, and my impression is that serious people on both the left and right give it that meaning.
Doolittle, Moosetopher, this is exactly my point.
Of course you guys think your guys are just following the constitution as written. And of course I think they're judicial tyrants. They're your guys, doing things you agree with politically. Activism we like is always going to look good to us.
The part where you declare yourselves above petty activism while your judges remove womens' bodily autonomy* and break the back of the public sector unions**, rewriting two generations or more of how we organize our society, is what I object to. The judiciary, right now, is a very activist one. At least as active as it was back in the nineties when I started paying attention to this stuff. At the top it's maybe as activist as it's been since Warren.
And you know, mostly, that's fine. Elections have consequences and the people have spoken. McConnell should have been out on his ass for his shenanigans with the judiciary (not just at the top, but up and down system). And Clinton should have won the damn election and punished his horseshit by filling her spots with the most liberal firebrands she could find. But that didn't happen. McConnell won his bet and remade the country and thems the breaks. But to do it while high-mindedly declaring that you don't believe in activist judges . . . it's galling.
*return abortion to the states where it clearly belongs
**restore the right of free association to workers
edit: forgot the asterisks
Forcing the states to accept Medicaid expansion (which is what the ACA tried to do) is unconstitutional. After the decision the states could decide if they wanted to opt in or not, as with about every other federal mandate in history - often with a shiny carrot of federal money (also on offer here). Should they have left it in place despite breaking the long held legal opinion that was not how such laws were allowed to operate?
And I think you're referring to the Janus opinion, which doesn't do anything to stop unions from collecting dues. What it forbid was *forcing* *non-union members* from paying dues that they explicitly did not want to pay because they did not approve of what the union wanted - hence not joining the union. That seems like an odd place to hang your political hat and say "this is what it means to support liberal/Democratic policies."
Re gun laws: that whole "shall not be infringed" bit makes it REALLY easy to justify striking down... infringements. That's not being an activist, it's obeying the Constitution as written.
NYC's carry ban explicitly said that average citizens were not permitted to bear arms. The fact that it stood for over 100 years before being struck down is a discredit to any court that upheld it previously.
>Yes. As sheer entertainment value, watching the heads exploding if he did run again (and even more if he got the nomination) would be amazing, but for practical purposes, no.
FYI, this is already happening. He announced he was running a few weeks ago. Right now there's a bunch of talk that he's going to lose to DeSantis, but I think that's premature. Some Republican pundits gushed over the 2016 field as the best a major party had put forward in a generation. There were excited. Trump left that field littered with the broken (or at least damaged) careers of men who will now never be president. DeSantis hasn't announced anything yet. Right now he's riding high as the outsider. But if I were him I'd wait. He's young. He can spend another four years owning the libs and wrecking (or saving) Florida's schools and run then. And if he does Trump is his friend, rather than the guy trying to take one more ambitious Republican's scalp.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune.
By 2028, DeSantis will have been out of office for two years. Out of sight, out of mind. And his single strongest suit - being good on COVID, which he arguably handled better than any other politician in the country (at least in the view of a substantial segment of the population, including me) - will be eight years in the past.
The strongest entry on DeSantis's CV as far as the Republican Party faithful is concerned is turning Florida, heretofore a decidedly purple state, deep red. Right now Florida's 30 electoral votes are an uphill climb for the D candidate in 2024, which is a new thing, and could be a bit of a problem, if the R candidate makes inroads in the Rust Belt (which Trump showed was quite possible).
>There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune.
Ugh. Brutus, to Cassius, convincing him that they should march on Phillipi. Can't believe I missed that.
You could well be right, and maybe Trump has lost a little movement on his fastball. I still think it's not worth the risk.
It's a recommendation, but will anything be done about it? I don't quite see how it can be carried out practically. If the current administration does it, then this is going to rile up a lot of people who might not like or support Trump but who think that the Democrats have no business telling the Republicans who can or can't run in an election, and besides it will be putting a weapon out there that the enemies can use just as easily as you can use. This would be a bad precedent to set, if the Democrats remember Bill Clinton's woes.
I think this is mostly signalling; yes we told you the Republicans were all evil wicked monsters and their voters are braindead puppets or evil wicked monsters, but gee due to technicality, we can't ban the Bad Orange Man from running if he dares do so, so just remember to go out and vote if you want to save democracy and apple pie! Don't stay at home, don't assume the Good Guys will win, we need *your* votes to stop the Fourth Reich!
And if Trump doesn't run, then the spotlight will turn onto "DeathSantis" or whoever the candidates are for the Republicans. Remember, this is the party of the people who tried to carry out a coup on 6th January! Let this date live forever in infamy, and don't forget to turn out to vote for us to save democracy and apple pie and forestall the Fourth Reich!
Actually prosecuting right now would be a tactical own goal. If Trump is acquitted then he would be strengthened. If he is convicted then DeSantis would be strengthened. Which is why I expect nothing further will happen.
I disagree with your short comment -- in which you seem to think that any major public attention to whether Trump is a criminal for what happened on January 6th will merely strengthen the Republican party for 2024 -- on multiple fronts. For one thing, there's a big difference between Trump being strengthened and DeSantis being strengthened, both from the point of view of conservative Never Trumpers and from the point of view of left-leaning people like me who would like to see DeSantis win the primary, Trump undermine his support after the primary, and the presidency get thrown to a Democrat (hopefully not Biden or Harris).
For another thing, given that being fueled by a victim complex is Trump's brand, it's not at all obvious to me that acquittal would strengthen him more than being convicted would, rather than the opposite.
(Unrelatedly, happy ((2^2)^2)^2 = (2^2)^(2^2)th open thread, by the way!)
Being convicted would actually disqualify him per fourteenth amendment, leaving the field clear for de Santis.
Yeah probably nothing will happen. Unless by some ill fortune Trump actually wins in 24, but Democrats win back the house, in which case there will be lots of NYT thinkpieces on why this should be used as justification for the house refusing to certify Trumps election. Those thinkpieces will also be ignored…probably. The alternative would be a constitutional crisis, if not a civil war
Section 3 of the 14th amendment was clearly intended to apply to people who fought on the wrong side of the civil war. Not somebody whose tweets roused an angry mob for an afternoon. I doubt the Supremes would allow its application to Trump. I hope and expect DeSantis crushes him in the primary. It would be really bad for congress to ever ban candidates from the minority party, regardless of the circumstances. Even in the context of the civil war it was probably excessive.
Insurrection is a stretch label for an angry mob that got out of control for a few hours due to foreseeably extremely inadequate crowd control by the capitol police (the outdoor barrier where they broke through to the capitol was a waist-high movable metal thingy with only a few cops manning it, outnumbered 100x and lacking riot gear. This was on the livestream I saw at the time, but seems to have been memory-holed). Also considering the feds had numerous informants in the groups involved, they would have known if anything was planned in advance, and could have stopped it if they wanted to stop it. Cui bono is the security state gets more funding/power for the security state by letting something like that happen and causing a moral panic. Letting it happen also has some utility for domestic influence operations by the security state. So the absurdly bad crowd-control was plausibly intentional (if I had to put a probability on it, 25%. The other option is total incompetence on the part of the capitol police, who had a much better crowd control setup for BLM. I'd also put a 10% probability on someone in the US government having prior knowledge of 9/11 and letting it happen anyway. 25% for Pearl Harbor.)
Ray Epps and the antifa paid 70K by CNN to incite Ashli Babbit to charge cops and die were 100% intentional. Whether there was a mastermind coordinating everything is less clear. 25% sounds good..
I'd put a 90% probability on someone in the Saud government having prior knowledge of 9/11, but less than 10% for the US government.
And 90% for the US government knowing the Japanese would attack, but thinking the Japanese would attack the Philippines. Less than 25% chance they knew it would be Pearl.
Trump isn't even the most likely candidate to be the republican nominee right now (and would probably be a weaker candidate than the likely alternatives if he was). In practice this is Dems paying a political price because they genuinely think Trump's antidemocratic stuff is really bad.
(I suspect some party members will oppose actually sanctioning Trump for this reason - they'll do better if he does run)
No. Normies think trump is really really bad because they’ve been told that over and over. It’s the powerful who hate him for real. He’s just enough of an insider to know where the bodies are buried. He refuses to play the obfuscation game. I’d love to see a blind side by side of what Obama did in office vs Trump and see how many get right who did what. Bet lots don’t know anything about Obama’s “crimes.” Some crimes are only crimes if you aren’t head of state.
I think he's bad because he conspired to overthrow the government by force of arms. I don't really think he thought of it that way, or it wouldn't have been so thoroughly ineffective, but that's what he did. And I find the evidence in public to be sufficient to substantiate that claim. But I really doubt that he'll be prosecuted, because (among other reasons) that would set a precedent that no sitting president could like.
Oh come on. The man was Commander in Chief of the entire military establishment and had four long years in which to issue commands to them without question.
If you gave *me* that kind of power and time to plan my use of it, and I intended to overthrow the government by force of arms, even I would do a hell of a lot better than a bunch of painted weirdos knocking down some aged Capitol police and wandering around the House for a while during ballot counting. Hell, there wouldn't have been any kind of free election in November at all. (Especially when COVID provided a highly convenient reason any time after January 2020 for any number of emergency decrees that would probably have enjoyed substantial public support from the start.)
Let us try not to abuse the language or be hysterical. Trump is certainly guilty of artfully inciting some very moderate (by historical standards) street action, and (much more importantly) not doing his utmost as President to put a stop to the situation when it started evolving in a funky direction, but that's it. Anyone who thinks *that* was the best he could do, after four years of having the entire Federal and military apparatus at his fingertips, to overthrow the freaking goverment by force is in the grips of ideological delusion or hasn't thought it through for 30 seconds.
"Hell, there wouldn't have been any kind of free election in November at all."
Trump and Pence's term would have ended on January 20th regardless. The Constitution has provisions for exactly this sort of situation: If the election ends up being postponed for some reason, or the election result is still in dispute by the time Inauguration Day rolls around, then the President and Vice President are required to vacate their office regardless, and the office of the Presidency goes to whoever is next in the line of succession. Which means the strategy you're describing would have resulted in *Nancy Pelosi* becoming President, which definitely isn't something that Trump or his supporters wanted. If you somehow managed to disqualify her, we would have had President Chuck Grassley instead, and while Grassley is a Republican, I suspect the majority of Trumpers would have been very upset with that outcome regardless.
Granted, I have no idea whether Trump himself was actually aware of this. I'm rather doubtful. But I'm certain that some of his advisors must have understood how this worked.
The important word in my statement was "free." I didn't say there wouldn't be an election in November 2020 if I was President and wanted to stay that way forever. What I said was that the results of that election would be the guaranteed re-election of me, and perhaps some kind of "emergency" approved override of the Twenty-Second Amendment so I could work my way towards becoming Emperor Carl I.
It baffles me how people can have such fear of Trump inciting a relative handful of goons to ransack the House, and at the same time such faith in the power of pieces of paper to forestall genuine force backed up by at least a substantial minority of popular approval. We are *fortunate* that to date no man -- not even Trump, or Nixon, or FDR, or whoever your favorite bogeyman might be -- has become US President who is anywhere near as genuinely ruthless and ambitious as those who have seized power by actual force throughout many sad centuries of human history. The shades of Caesars of the past can only drool with envy at the staggering levels of power -- not just military, but logistic and financial -- which we put in the hands of the President.
Yeah I’ll second all of that (what Ch Hi said)
There was no attempted overthrow. There was no force of arms. There were a bunch of pissed off people staging a protest that was encouraged by agent provocateurs. The ruling class got the “insurrection” it wanted in order to hunt down and punish dissent.
Counterpoint: legal consequences to politicians for their wrongdoing is a feature unique to liberal democracies.
Will those inclined to believe that the election was stolen interpret it as being part of the pattern of alleged sinister Democratic malfeasance that they already believe in? Sure.
But the same would go for any legal consequences for any of Trump's wrongdoing.
Indeed, there are few things that would obviously dissuade a dogmatic believer of their beliefs.
In the case at hand, for example, the dogmatic Trump supporter could find support in a lack of prosecution of Trump - "See! It was all smoke, and no fire! They never had anything on him," or in his prosecution "See! They're always going after him for something!"
Counter-counterpoint: Chesterton pointed out circa 1907 that no rich man had faced the consequences of his actions in the United Kingdom since Parliament became preeminent over the monarch back in the... mid-18th century? This appears to remain true until today.
Monarchs and other kinds of tyrant not only have fewer incentives to get the rich off the hook, they have much stronger incentives to actually nail them to the wall (for example: every rich guy is a potential powerful guy and thus threat; all tyrants rely on the goodwill of their people to a fairly large extent and a rich guy fucking up is thus a useful opportunity to demonstrate that nobody is above the law *except* the King himself), *especially* politicians since the conduct of his politicos reflects directly on a king powerful enough to hand-pick them.
Legal consequences to politicians for their wrongdoings is not a feature unique to liberal democracies. You can ask Navalny, who is jailed for his wrongdoings, or the hundreds of thousands jailed in China on corruption charges. The rest of your comment is faulty because it starts with that faulty premise.
The unique feature of liberal democracies (at least in theory) is the even handed application. Any thoughts on the matter need to acknowledge the uneven version is something corrupt regimes do and think about how we can credibly ensure there is no two track justice system. Game theoretically, this means the Democrats have to establish the standard by making a costly and credible signal they will enforce these norms against their own side.
Jailing Hunter Biden would probably suffice as a credible signal. The guy isn’t even a politician. I’m not holding my breath though
The obvious answer, imo, was investigating Hillary Clinton without fear or favor. I don't think what she did was as egregious as what Trump did. But the email server was a crime that she got away with despite being guilty under the statute as written. And no, that fact being released and losing her an election does not count as legal punishment.
Instead, the Democrats (unwittingly imo) created the standard "credible major party candidates get immunity from charges" which Trump is now more or less explicitly exploiting. This is one thing I wish everyone understood but especially the left: the rules of the game will become the rules of the game for everyone. That tiny exception you made for someone because of reasons will be taken up by the other side. All your anger will not prevent them from using it.
As far as what they can do now I'm not sure there's anything. The sad truth is that sometimes your past actions means you simply don't have any good options. My hope is that the people will elect someone more sane and punish the bad actors on both sides. I'd normally call that naive but that does appear to be happening so far.
"This is one thing I wish everyone understood but especially the left: the rules of the game will become the rules of the game for everyone. That tiny exception you made for someone because of reasons will be taken up by the other side. All your anger will not prevent them from using it."
Precisely this. And this is why I've had to work hard on being 'tolerant' because it doesn't come naturally to me: do I want ideas and expressions of those ideas on my side censored? no? then I have to give the same rights to that lot, even if I think they should be censored or need to be censored or deserve a good kick in the pants.
Hunter's a special case, though. He's not a politician, so jailing him really would be a bad thing because it would be naked political partisanship about getting revenge on the enemy. *If* it can be demonstrated that he was entangling his father and/or the Obama administration in corruption and buying favourable treatment and government intervention for the various companies that gave him plum jobs and comfortable sinecures, that would be a different matter.
But so far, he's just a deadbeat who is being indulged by his father (due to being the last surviving child of his first three with his first wife) and who trades on his father's name and connections to get those plum jobs, whether or not he can deliver on favourable treatment. There's plenty of rumours that he allegedly was cutting Dad in on the deals, but since Hunter's a champion screw-up that is not necessarily credible evidence. If anybody wanted to arrest him and jail him, it would be the companies that paid him top dollar and got nothing in return.
You can't just jail embarrassing family members of politicians, there's plenty of families in both parties with black sheep and you'd need to build a whole new prison just for them. (See Paul Pelosi and the various rumours of insider deals not to mention the DUI and the very strange break-in by that guy).
He also committed some actual Federal gun crimes, and potentially state/DC ones as well.
" There's plenty of rumours that he allegedly was cutting Dad in on the deals, but since Hunter's a champion screw-up that is not necessarily credible evidence."
More than rumors. The email from the laptop includes a reference to part of the money from one deal going to "the big guy" in a context that appears to refer to Joe, and one of the partners to the deal has confirmed that it was Joe.
I believe, however, that Joe was out of office at that point — and the deal didn't go through so he never got the money. It is clear from the laptop emails that his claim to have no connection to Hunter's deals when VP was a lie, but it isn't in general illegal for politicians to lie, and meeting with people who were paying his son isn't illegal.
The trouble with Hunter is how much is him just blabbing whatever crosses his drug-addled mind at the time, how much is him trying to sound impressive to the guys he's scamming ("Big Guy is totally in on this, trust me!") and how much we can legitimately believe happened.
Hunter was totally coasting on his father's political connections, and Joe does seem to have protected, indulged and indeed cosseted him, but whether Hunter actually *could* swing meetings with Joe or Top Officials for the guys offering him big cushy jobs on the board is another matter. My own view is that Hunter *might* have wanted to pay Dad back for all the bailing-out Joe has done for him, and that he was trying to earmark some of the money he might be getting for that purpose, but it doesn't necessarily link up with Joe knowing it was a bribe and accepting it as a bribe. I think Joe Biden is a long-term career politician who has done backroom deals and the rest of it, but I don't get a sense of him being particularly corrupt in that I would be surprised to discover he did take kickbacks and bribes this blatantly, whereas there are other politicians I could well believe it of them.
“*If* it can be demonstrated that he was entangling his father and/or the Obama administration in corruption” wow. Unstated assumption that anyone currently in power would have even a scintilla of interest in doing so. You can’t find what you can’t look at. The FBI is obviously looking away, hard. Thought experiment: same fact pattern, different people. Say, a family whose name starts with T. What then? Would corruption be found?
Has anyone devoted anywhere near as much effort to Ivanka and Jared's shady deals as they have to Hunter's? Seems like there would be just as much to work with, and no one is prosecuting any of them.
The proposal was that *democrats* initiate the prosecution as a costly therefore credible signal of being serious about evenhanded application of the law
But who would believe that, given that I think the likely outcome would be that Hunter might be jailed for hookers and blow and dickpics and the rest of it, but not really for anything that can be proven to have solely political application only?
I mean, yeah, he's an embarrassment, but he's more of a family embarrassment to Joe than an embarrassment to the party as such, and if he does get away with it then it's down to being well-off and connected, which would equally apply to Republican scions behaving badly.
This is not to say that Hunter *shouldn't* do jail time if he's broken any laws (which with the hookers and blow and dick pics is very damn likely), but it's more "Charlie Sheen level of carry-on". I agree the problem is the laptop cover-up, if it is a cover-up, and that this shouldn't be dismissed as simply a conspiracy theory or false flag operation, but while it might be more credible as signalling seriousness about evenhanded application of the law, I think it's understandable why they'd want to brush this under the carpet.
But legal consequences to people who are in power is pretty unique to democracies. In whatever sense people think that the left had power in 2020, Trump has power now.
The left did not have power in 2020 in any sense meaningful for this discussion, and prosecution of Biden in 2020 would have been worrying for the same reason that prosecution of Trump would be worrying today.
In addition to what Humphrey Appleby said: Legal consequences once you leave office is what's happening, not while you're still in power. And that is indeed common. Look at Hu Jintao or any of the former Russian leaders or the noble supporters of the previous rulers in Saudi Arabia.
This entire area is so fraught that the founders considered giving the elected officials full immunity form prosecution for life. It didn't get a majority and I don't think that's a good policy. It leads to things like the British property developer who bought a seat in Parliament so he could flout construction rules. But my point is that this is a perilous area and it's a long known one. You are setting the precedents now that will apply going forward. And plenty of republics have fallen to issues with partisan judicial abuses.
The deeply problematic precedent was set when it was so hard to prosecute him early in his term. He's only being prosecuted after he leaves office because of the entrenched corruption that shielded him while in office.
There was a clear bar and procedure for impeaching Trump and the Democrats simply failed to meet that bar. If you want to make some change so it's easier to impeach and prosecute presidents then that's a defensible position. But keep in mind the Republicans will use it against the Democrats when they regain power.
If you want to see what this looks like on the other side: Most of the Mueller investigation was enabled by precedents and standards the Republicans invented to go after Clinton in the 1990s. Political convenience has a way of setting precedents that neither side ultimately likes.
How does Trump have power now? If the answer is ‘he is wealthy’ then there are a lot of Russian oligarchs and jailed Chinese billionaires who would like a word. If the answer is ‘he is a prominent opposition politician…’you see the problem?
He has more control of social media and the general discourse about politics than any other individual, except maybe Elon Musk. He's certainly far more powerful at getting his viewpoint out there and being discussed than anyone who uses words like "Latinx" or "microaggression".
Donald Trump has no control of social media (except his own Twitter-clone, if that's a thing; haven't kept track). He has a great deal of *attention* from social media, which gives him some degree of influence in some parts of US society, but he can't get someone else banned from Twitter (there are a few places where he could get someone fired, I'll admit, but there aren't very many of them).
I think comparing Donald Trump to the hundred-headed hydra and saying "well, Donald Trump's bigger than any of the individual heads", while true, is not very illuminating.
none of this is *official, governmental* power. Are you seriously arguing that only liberal democracies jail people with this kind of soft influence? How does your theory handle Gandhi or Mandela? Note that I am not making any comment on whether prosecution of DJT is warranted or not, and am certainly not saying he is like either Gandhi or Mandela. I am simply pointing out that the precedent of prosecuting a prominent opposition politician is worrying, and that legal trouble for opposition politicians is very much not something that happens `only in liberal democracies.'
I would argue he has power now, because there is a non-trivial number of people in the country who support him deeply.
`Legal consequences for opposition politicians who have a non-trivial base of support' are certainly not particular to liberal democracies, plenty of autocracies to that too. Indeed a smart autocrat would *only* bother to jail opposition politicians who had a non-trivial base of support - people who nobody supports anyway can be safely ignored.
Trump does have control of the federal judiciary, businesses, popular culture, the news media, and social media.
Whoa, that seems pretty far out into tinfoil hat territory. How does he exercise that control? If what you mean to say is "a shocking number of my fellow citizens like and support the man, and the size of that number ends up giving him substantial influence" -- well, welcome to the challenge of living in a republic. But your beef is with those fellow voters, you can't blame Trump himself for their existence. He didn't call them forth from the Earth by eldritch spells, they already existed and their values and interests already existed -- Trump just gave them a focal point.
Those assertions are clearly completely false with regards to all but the first and even the first is questionable
Yes. We’re so far from western ideals like equality under the law (evenhanded application of the power to punish if you like) that many of the very very smart people here can’t see it, much less understand why it’s a problem.
Given the laws we've got now, we'd be in real trouble if they started being applied evenly, or even widely. It's bad enough that they're applied to "troublesome people".
I believe that a couple of decades ago there was an estimate that the average person committed 3 felonies per day.
I don't know whether it is justified or wise, but it doesn't "pattern-match" to Putin's tactics (false equivalence). That would be if the Democrats sought to ensure that they faced no serious opposition in any future elections and set up Kamala Harris as de facto dictator for life.
Eliminating Trump might actually be doing the Republicans a favor, actually.
"set up Kamala Harris as de facto dictator for life"
Oh golly, I very nearly want a President Kamala now. If there weren't all the problems with Ukraine and energy supply and China and Covid and climate change and the economy and the rest of it, which I don't see being solved quickly and I don't even want to guess at what 2024 would bring, I'd be delighted to see that happen, just to see how poorly it would go.
I don't think she'd start the Fourth World War but it might be the distaff version of the Gerald Ford presidency, e.g. nothing really happens but everyone is vaguely unhappy anyway.
This last year what’s most important have gotten better to a degree that I haven’t seen in *decades*:
Wages are up thanks to D.C.’s money from the sky inducing general inflation
Rents are down in San Francisco thanks to the Tech worker exodus and the increase in remote work due to Covid
Unfortunately crime is up, but that’s well worth the lower rents
I like now *far* better than last year and the year before.
All previous years for *decades* when wages went up rents went up even *faster*, this is much better
yeah but your viewpoint is imo very much specific to the blue collar san francisco experience and not representative of the country at large. Only ~2% of the country lives in metro-SF.
Yes it is tactically a mistake. But I think the committee in question was boxed in- politically impossible not to do anything
If Ron DeSantis ends up becoming president, they will regret this
You all may enjoy my interview of Bethany McLean: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/bethany-mclean
She was the first reporter to write critically about Enron's financial obfuscation (six months later, the company was bankrupt). She is the author of some of the best books about finance ever (especially loved her books about Enron and the housing crisis).
We discussed the astounding similarities between Enron and FTX: The rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars run by supposed geniuses, insider dealing and romantic entanglements between the heads of sister-companies, a politically generous CEO well connected in Washington, the use of a company’s own stock as its collateral, a short-lived attempt to get bought out by a competitor thought to be inferior, and the fraudulent abuse of mark-to-market accounting.
And we talked about much more:
- How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),
- What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,
- Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,
- And why history keeps repeating itself.
Can you list
- people from the present and from history whom you consider visionaries and frauds?
- people you consider visionaries, but not frauds?
- cases when history repeated itself?
In the cases of Enron and FTX, how do you distinguish fraud from complexity and rules-lawyering? For example, I can find thousands of websites saying that Enron used "fraudulent accounting", but if I try to dig into the details, the worst I can find is that they used mark-to-market accounting, which was very subjective and yet perfectly legal. "Fraud" hypothesizes a bright-line distinction between optimism and lies. How did you draw this line?
This is a really good question.
Rasputin comes to mind as an interesting subject. I haven’t been able to settle on anyone else.
For some perspective on the fraudulent accounting, the big issue IIRC (haven't read up on this in a while) is that while they were marking to market, which is still required in many cases, the issue was that the market price was set by Enron and not by a competitive market. This sounds in theory like what a market maker would do, but I believe there was never any prospective of sales to third parties, so the market price was never tested.
The other big issue is that Enron's auditors were not able to hold them to account, mostly because of their large consulting business. Enron paid Arthur Andersen for consulting advice which was much more profitable than audit work (Audits are generally fixed fee, while consulting is per hour, so audits are to get you in the door to make money off the consulting). I believe Enron was relying on accounting advice on marking to market from Arthur Andersen as well, so they had an interest to keep the game going.
I might have some of these details wrong, but that's the broad strokes
Thank you for your amazing content as always!
Thanks man I really appreciate it!
Merry Christmas to you too
I’ll be at the Quillette social on Jan 7th. Tix still available. Some ev psych and rationalist people already coming
https://events.humanitix.com/quillette-social
Tell Claire to come back
show up and tell her yourself!
If you're responding via email clients, this reply has arrived as a top level comment and is disconnected from whoever you meant to respond to.
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You can delete posts on substack.
done. thanks
> I would not have guessed that existed.
“That” referring to what?
Ack! Somehow I replied to the wrong post - which was meant to be a polite exit from a thread.
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking - are you saying that psychic phenomena are real, but are subtle and strange enough that most people who think of themselves as smart wrongly think that they don't exist? Or are you saying that people who think of themselves as smart can create models of reality that are strange enough that they believe in psychic phenomena, even though they don't exist?
If it's the first, I'd say that anything so "subtle and strange" that it's undetectable by all of modern science might as well not exist for any practical purpose. If it's the second, I'd say that being very smart doesn't mean that you've pruned all unnecessary details from your model of the world - your mind never needs to update on psychic powers unless psychic powers are a major part of your life, and they usually aren't. If you tried to use remote viewing to find oil wells or spy on foreign countries, you'd probably update on it very quickly.
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