In broad outlines I was foreseeing someone of a liberal bent responding with something like, "A fentanyl vaccine would be fantastic, but only for people who people who chose it voluntarily. If it were it mandated though it would infringe on someones basic civil liberties." Then you could drop the hammer by asking how that was different from mandating masks in the public interest being an infringement on basic civil liberties.
I could see it possibly being mandated as a condition of probation for addicts convicted of addiction related properties crimes though, the way drug screenings are. The vaccine could benefit society and the criminal.
You could certainly make that argument, but it's not quite the "checkmate vaxxers" argument that you think it is. There are obvious differences between the situations (e.g. COVID is highly contagious) so it is easy to favor one or the other without being hypocritical.
It's not COVID's contagiousness per se that pro-forced-vaccination people are relying on, it's the fact that when one person gets it, they affect others.
The same effect can be argued for drugs too. Sure, it's not as reliable as a viral effect, but that's a difference of quantity then, not of fundamental quality.
Yeah, we could quickly wander into the grey marshes of "of course you can't *force* people to take this, but... if you can make them do courses or go to rehab to get clean as part of reducing or avoiding jail time, then is it really that big a step to requiring them to take this as part of the entire programme to get clean?"
Wait, you can vaccinate against drugs? Well, against the high of one particular drug, and it's more blocking the brain areas that get high than a vaccination, but colour me astounded.
I think, though, that if they do vaccinate addicts, the addicts will just turn to something else to get high. That's the problem of addiction.
> The vaccine works by stimulating the production of antibodies that bind to fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain. Those antibodies ... remain in the body at sufficient levels only for a period of months after vaccination, meaning boosters are required to maintain preventative effects.
So wouldn't it be more like you'd have to mandate continual and lifelong vaccinations for people? Ignoring the ethics, that seems pretty difficult.
It's the "wanting to get clean" which is the chokepoint, though. If the addict doesn't want it but is only complying with the vaccine because it's part of his court-ordered treatment, then as soon as he can, he'll be back on the drug. And probably taking different drugs during the period when fent has no effect.
Because it's about getting high, and the need/craving for that, and until things go so drastically wrong that wanting to get clean is better alternative, you won't have any success in solving the problem. And this isn't just fent addicts, I've been on and fallen off diets nearly all my life, so I don't have much room to point fingers: "But don't you know the health risks and dangers of obesity? Don't you already suffer some of the consequences? Is over-eating really worth it? Eating the wrong things which are harmful for you?" "Yep, sure, you're right, that's all true" (thinks) 'For some reason I would really love a bar of chocolate right now, soon as I get this nag off my back, I'm gonna get one!'
It is considered totally normal that a court verdict for someone guilty of a crime will involve violating the normal civil liberties granted to citizens. Prison is the most obvious example here, but far from the only one. Thus, having sentencing agreements include vaccination as a term seems fine to me, though I expect it would be more palatable to present it as a choice between "probation+ vaccine or go to prison", in case someone has a really strong aversion to the idea of the vaccine.
They claim the thing prevents overdoses, but the linked article just talks about treating existing overdoses, or controlled levels of drugs in rats. I expect what will instead happen is the druggie will take double or triple the dose to bruteforce the vaccine, and then overdose and die.
It doesn't saying anything about reducing the craving. I remember a social worker talking about drug addicts cut off from drugs who would huff whatever they could get their hands on, like propane or wood smoke, things with no euphoric effects at all. This isn't a fix anymore than buying everyone a house would fix homelessness.
Ringo goes by ‘Richie’ IRL. A high school classmate developed and patented a new type of drumstick. He had Richie on speed dial on his phone.
The drumstick maven was the Lisa Kudro character in our version of “Romey and Michelle’s Class Reunion”. Except he really had developed the glue for Post It Notes.
I can only say what I would do, which is to A) ignore everything as much as possible and continue on as if nothing happened. It's probable that the relationship will fizzle out anyway or everything will just be forgotten. Or, that the tension is mostly in your head. And B) if it comes up, to double down on the event being planned for several years and everyone feeling as though it would be best to be with just the boys. (or whatever). That you were just nervous about a new person changing the dynamic too much for a long-planned event.
I would never repeat G and R's comments. All of this is given with the caveat that I have drastically different responses to social events than like every rationalist person I've ever met.
Well, first of all, I recommend you reject the Therapy Culture axiom that telling people *everything* you think and feel is necessarily better. It isn't. Kick that idiotic self-destructive narcissistic principle right down the stairs and out into the street to be taken away by the garbage truck.
Once you abandon that principle, things become a little clearer. Being "completely honest" with John by telling him the sordid details of the conspiracy between you, George an Ringo, is just going to rub salt in the would, as well as betray George and Ringo, thus adding dishonor to disgrace.
You might also be having the urge to make a clean breast of things more in order to be fully forgiven, or to explain away the mistake as really George and Ringo's fault -- meaning the motive is not so much repairing the relationship with John, but repairing your self-respect. But it's John who is the injured party here, not you. If you really want to be (or become again) a good and trusted friend, his welfare, and the quality of the relationship, needs to take precedence over your own self-regard.
So my suggestion is: (1) if you want to confess and be forgiven, go find a church that does confession. Otherwise, the burden of keeping the details to yourself is something you should bear silently, as penance for having fucked up. (2) focus on John and the relationship. The issue seems to be that you didn't give the girl a chance, and made a decision based on hearsay. So, make an extra-special effort to give her a chance *now*. Willingly spend time with John and the girlfriend. Go out of your way to be courteous to her, inclusive. This can be as simple as looking at her and letting her take a larger share in the conversation when you, John, and Yoko are all together. Or maybe it means going out of the way to include her in invites. The details depend a lot on your particular circumstance, but you can figure it out no doubt. Think of what you'd do if she was a smashing beauty. Nobody says you have to decide to like her before you know her, but the way to repair the error is to be 100% sure you give her a fair chance now, and make that clear to John through your actions. (3) Wait. Peoples' feelings mend more with time and sincere reforms of behavior than any amount of talk and explanation. If John is a little cool to you for a while, put up with it in good cheer, as penance for your mistake, and in confidence that if you are genuinely trying to do right by him and his new girl, John will eventually come around and the friendship will be as good as ever[1].
Maybe even better! Since you will have demonstrated to John that you are capable of making up for a mistake at some cost to your own feelings, and he will have an even better reason to trust you in the future, knowing you will make things right if you screw up. People often do experience deeper friendships after they go through a test like this and come out the other side.
----------------
[1] Or if he doesn't, after you've given it a good try, then maybe John isn't a good friend after all. It takes both sides to heal a rift, ultimately. As much as you need to make sincere amends, he will need to not hold a grudge, accept you as a human being who can screw up, and appreciate you as a person who has the courage and character to make amends when you make a mistake.
Well first talk to George and Ringo, tell 'em you want to come clean. Then all go and talk to Paul together, and apologize for the mistake about the new girlfriend. Done now let's, get back to where you once belonged.
No explanation is going to help. You haven't just rejected John's girlfriend, you've rejected John's judgment, in favor of George and Ringo's. Trying to explain why you trusted them more than him is just going to double down. Time is the only cure.
Likewise with John missing the birthday party (did that ever get explained?). Whatever the reason behind that, time is your best friend.
New people change dynamics. You've just got to get used to the new one.
He said they were making pizza and lost track of time. A somewhat ludicrous excuse which contributed to the general feeling of negativity around the girlfriend.
I think you’re probably right that time is the only cure. One problem is that John and I no longer live in the same city and have not seen each other many times since these events, so friend-time is running a lot slower than clock-time.
When Roman statesman Cicero wrote, "There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher", which absurdities did he have in mind? In other words, what were some absurd ideas that were being espoused in ancient Rome?
To answer your question indirectly, almost every opinion you can imagine faces it diametric opposite opinion in another person. Philosophers (the good ones) are heralds of the most profound truths. Then it stands to reason that other philosophers are the foulest blasphemers and most calamous idiots.
Socrates (Plato) argued for true virtue and the immortality of the soul, Epicurus was a confirmed materialist who preferred pleasure. Aristotle wrought byanztines castles of clouds and metsphysics, Diogenes thought that animals were happier than men.
"All of western philosophy is series of footnotes to Plato." Cicero would have encountered the already extant extremes of human reason.
Last night I was watching snooker on the BBC, who had for some reason decided we needed to see some profound words on screen between frames. They chose four quotes:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an action but a habit." (Aristotle)
"The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it." (Epicurus)
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." (Plato)
"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions." (Dalai Lama)
I'm familiar with all four philosophers: my 12-year-old daughter who was watching with me wasn't. Her reaction to two of the quotes was "that's interesting" and to the other two "that's obviously rubbish". I wonder if we could guess which were which?
My own reaction to the four quotations is that all are at least kinda reasonable and kinda debatable, but the rubbishiest is the Epicurus one (exterminating all the red-haired people in America would probably be difficult but surmounting the difficulties would not be glorious; likewise, in a different way, counting the individual stalks in a large haystack) and the least-rubbishy is the Aristotle one (though something seems off to me about its internal logic; after the first sentence I would expect to see something more like "Excellence, then, is not an innate trait but a habit"; but maybe the context throws the emphasis of the first sentence onto the "repeatedly" or something). The other two seem about equally iffy to me but in different ways. Also, I find myself skeptical about Plato's actually having said what he's alleged to have said. (And, lo, it seems that in fact he never did.) The "Plato" one is just probably wrong unless those conversations are very shallow. The Dalai Lama one seems to go too far in denying the effect of external factors on happiness.
I'm going to guess that your daughter liked Aristotle and "Plato" and disliked Epicurus and the Dalai Lama. Not very confidently, though.
2. The "Epicurus" quote ("The greater the difficulty ...") is nearly always attributed to a Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, per most mentions on the 'Net. A summary of the differences between the two men here:
Also, I couldn't readily find an original source for this Epictetus quote, at least in a couple of minutes of very casual Web searching within Google Search and Google Books Search.
3. The "Plato" quote ("You can discover more about a person in an hour of play ...") may have first been made "in a short pamphlet published in 1670 ... by Richard Lingard." And notably, Lingard was referring to gambling/waging "play":
There's apparently "no substantive evidence that Plato wrote or spoke this remark."
4. The Dalai Lama quote ("Happiness is not something ready-made") may in fact be genuine.
Yet again, as with the Epictetus quote, I couldn't readily come across an original source for this Dalai Lama quote, at least in a minute's casual Web searching.
Heh. I did wonder whether some of the others were also bogus, but they didn't seem so _obviously_ bogus as the "Plato" one. Though if I'd actually thought about Epicurus I'd hopefully have noticed that it couldn't possibly be him. (I can totally imagine the Aristotle one being genuine Aristotle, even though it seems it actually isn't.)
The Aristotle quote is in the spirit of his views, as crafted by Will Durant in the midst of a passage which interleaved both Aristotle's and Durant's words.
And you were astute, once again, to find the "Plato" one to be the most obviously bogus.
Good research Aron Roberts - it just shows the BBC don't do even the limited research you did! (All quotes and names were exactly as given on screen - I went back and did a screen grab to make sure.)
I've found that the Epicurus quote comes from neither Epicurus nor Epictetus, but instead an essay by Jean-François Sarasin (falsely published under Charles de Saint-Évremond's name) defending Epicurus in the 17th century. I've recounted my steps in my sibling comment at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-259/comment/12027560.
From what I can tell, the complete quotation first appears in "The Rule of Life", published by S. Austen and J. Hinton. The earliest version I could find is the 2nd edition published in 1744, but presumably it also appears in the 1st edition:
This "Epicur. Mor." attribution refers to "Epicurus's Morals", a 1712 translation by John Digby. However, the quotation does not come from any of Epicurus's words, but instead from the attached essay titled "An Essay in Vindication of Epicurus, and His Doctrine", supposedly written in French by Monsieur St. Evremont (Charles de Saint-Évremond) and translated by "Mr. Johnson". The relevant passage reads (emphasis mine):
> Undoubtedly, there is more difficulty to follow Nature in Affluence than in Necessity; the Spurs which our Delights make use of to try our Moderation, are much more keen than those which Adversity employs for that purpose; *but the greater the Difficulty the more Glory in surmounting it*, and the loss of false Joys secures to us a much better Possession of real ones. We are not sensible of a Felicity which costs us nothing, and for which we are indebted to chance, is must be given us by Wisdom and Prudence, if we would have a true Relish of it, and Pain must sometime usher us to pleasure: Suppose a Man should enter the Lists at the Olympick Games, with a Design to try his Strength and Skill; if no body encountred him, he might possibly be crowned; but nevertheless, that would not render him Victorious. *Skilful Pilots gain their Reputation from Storms and Tempests.* If _Penelope_'s Chastity had not been try'd, the envious World would have said she only wanted Corrupters. Wherefore, let us not fly the World, nor fly the Court; let us not sculk in Deserts, from whence Philosophy fetch'd the primitive Mankind; let us possess Riches, and refuse not the administration of Publick Offices; if we are Wise, we may enjoy these Things without any Danger to our Ease and Tranquillity; we may sail happily amidst these Rocks, and view all with an unconcerned Eye. If we be stript of them by our not looking back, we may testify our Contempt, and that we were not wedded to them. It is shameful for a Wiseman to be weaker than those Desires, which as they are unnatural so are they vain and unnecessary, only in Opinion. This is _Epicurus_'s Pleasure, this is what he calls living according to Nature, this is his Doctrine, and these his Sentiments. (pp. 174–176, https://archive.org/details/epicurussmorals00descgoog/page/n234/mode/1up)
From here, tracing the text back gets a bit weirder. Harvard Library says that this Essay is spurious (http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990123944590203941/catalog). But where did it come from? Through some searching, I found that much of the text of the Essay, including the passage in question, comes from a 1684 "Discours sur Epicure". Its publisher Claude Barbin attributes it to Saint-Évremond, but modern sources agree that it was actually written by Jean-François Sarasin. I haven't yet been able to locate the primary source for Sarasin's authorship, but in the meantime, here's the French version of the passage (emphasis mine):
> Il est bien vray qu'il y a plus de peine à la suivre dans l'abondance que dans la necessité, & que les aiguillons dont se servent les delices pour éprouver nôtre moderation sont bien plus picquans que ceux que l'adversité y employe; *Mais aussi y a-il bien plus de gloire à les surmonter*, & la perte des fausses joyes asseure bien mieux la possession des veritables. On ne ressent pas la felicité qui ne coûte rien, & de laquelle on est redevable au hazard; Il faut que la sagesse nous la donne; Il faut quelquefois que la peine nous meine à la volupté. Un homme qui seroit dans la lice aux jeux Olimpiques pour combatre, s'il ne se presentoit personne, pourroit bien estre couronné, mais pour cela il ne seroit point victorieux.
> *Ce sont les orages & les tempestes qui donnent de la reputation aux Pilotes*, & si la chasteté de Penelope n'avoit esté éprouvée, quelques-uns auroient pû dire d'elle, il ne luy a manqué que des Corrupteurs: Ne fuyons donc point le monde, ne fuyons point la Cour, ne nous cachons point au Desert, d'où la Philosophie retira les premiers hommes; Possedons les richesses, ne refusons pas d'entrer dans les charges publiques, si nous sommes sages nous joüyrons de ces choses sans aucun danger, nous navigerons heureusement parmy ces Ecueils, nous regarderons tout cela avec un visage indiferent, & que nous n'y étions pas attachez. C'est honte au sage de fuir, & d'estre plus foibles que des desirs qui n'étant pas selon la Nature n'ont aucun credit que celui l'opinion des hommes leur aquiert. Voila quelle est en partie la volupte des Epicuriens, voile ce qu'ils appellent vivre selon la Nature, voila leur doctrine & leurs sentimens. (pp. 27–31, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57755w/f30.item)
So there we have it! The two parts of the quotation were written by Jean-François Sarasin no later than 1684, translated by "Mr. Johnson" in 1712, and pasted together in "The Rule of Life" no later than 1744. After that, it made its way into a myriad different collections of proverbs, very rarely with an attribution to Epicurus. (Although one author turned "Epicur. Mor." into the name "Epicurmor"!) Attributing it to Epictetus seems to be an entirely modern invention. But now the question is, who is "Mr. Johnson"? I searched around for a while, but couldn't find any positive evidence linking the name to anyone.
"Attributing it to Epictetus seems to be an entirely modern invention." Aha! So my correction was clearly in need of its own correction, as well!
Given you've done ALL this work, iro84657, would you perhaps consider submitting it (ideally with all of this research being credited to you, alongside any subsequently done by others) to "Garson O’Toole" (a pseudonym) who runs the Quote Investigator website? Their email address appears at the end of the site's About page, https://quoteinvestigator.com/about/. That'd be a terrific addition to that site's collection.
The first is questionable...that is, the second half is questionable. One can be excellent about some things and not others. (It's easy to be an excellent tic-tac-toe player.) And one can be excellent at one time of life an not at another. I was never excellent, but these days I wouldn't even *try* to climb a mountain.
I don't know her reaction, but mine to the second (Epicurus) was that glory is a socially defined thing, so that's a comment about the structure of the society in which it occurs. Perhaps it was true when he said it.
WRT the third, you discover different things. I think this could justifiably be called rubbish, but that depends on what you consider important.
For the Dali Lama's quote...well, the first half is correct. I'm rather dubious about the second half, though it can certainly happen that way occasionally.
Now as to what a 12 year old in modern US would say... I'll GUESS that she called 1 and 2 rubbish, but that's with very low certainty.
What you learn about someone in an hour of play might not be so much about how good they are at playing. It might be more like "Are they gracious in both victory and defeat?" "Are they good at having fun?"
That sort of thing wouldn't be everything I want to know about a person, but they aren't nothing.
Twelve-year-olds can be pretty literal. And number three doesn't sound like it's likely to be literally true. A year of conversation is a helluva lot of conversation. And twelve-year-olds remember perfectly well what it's like to play with someone for an hour, it's not that special. So I was certain that this was one of the ones she'd have judged as "stupid".
Likewise, "happiness comes from your own actions" is such a massive oversimplification of what happiness is about that I would have expected her to declare that one as stupid as well.
I would guess one of her "rubbish" reactions was to 1. Probably most kids, and a good many adults, associate excellence with exceptional achievements, with the implication these are occasional "lightning bolts" rather than an on-going habitual routine of a generally productive and commendable life style.
The other adverse reaction was doubtless to 3, seeing as "play" is superficial wheareas a year of suitable conversation would reveal a lot about about a person. I'm skeptical about 3 myself! :-)
"There is a like error in regard to dreams. How far-fetched is the argument in their defence! 'Our souls' (according to the view of your school) 'are divine and are derived from an external source; the universe is filled with a multitude of harmonious souls; therefore, because of its divinity and its contact with other souls, the human soul during sleep foresees what is to come.' But Zeno thinks that sleep is nothing more than a contraction — a slipping and a collapse, as it were — of the human soul. Then Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable authorities, bid us, if we would have trustworthy dreams, to prepare for sleep by following a prescribed course in conduct and in eating. The Pythagoreans make a point of prohibiting beans, as if thereby the soul and not the belly was filled with wind! Somehow or other no statement is too absurd for some philosophers to make."
But, WRT the pythagoreans, a fair percentage of the population of northern Italy could not properly digest beans. Eating them was dangerous, and occasionally fatal. There were decent reasons to forbid the eating of them. (I understand that with proper cooking this could be avoided....but I'm not sure what that means. For all I know it may involve pressure cookers, which wouldn't have been available. Or perhaps treating with lye.)
They were in the Greek parts which didn't have a lot of contact with northern Italy. And most of them fled Italy fairly early on. At any rate, they were not Northern Italians so if there was some diet issue I don't see how it'd be core to their doctrine.
Also should note that no "election nerds" like Instant Runoff Voting, which is clearly one of the worst systems, on par with plurality. People just like better ranked systems.
Yeah I consider to be IRV -- and, more specifically, the idea that it is the one and only ordinal voting method, that leads to it being called RCV -- as one of those dilettante traps...
That is better, I always struggle to see how realistic a need for it is those. And the electorate is very stupid so there is a cost to more complicated things.
The ballot for a Condorcet method is the same as for IRV, id est, just a ranking of candidates. It can look more complicated than IRV when explaining how the respective algorithms are *implemented*, but is actually simpler to explain (as I did above) what the system *does*. There's no way to compress a description of IRV further than that of its algorithm.
People not understanding how the algorithm is implemented is a pretty big downside. Consider how people complain about their posts being ranked by a mysterious "algorithm," and now apply it to election results. We'd never hear the end of it.
I'm not a big election guy, but I've read a bit about various voting systems, and my understanding was that there was no voting system that could, in every possible situation, pick the "best" candidate? I know that Arrow's theorem is only talking about ranking systems, not others, but I thought there were similar issues with all voting systems.
Basically, my understanding was that some systems have advantages over IRV, but there is no "perfect" voting system. Is that incorrect?
Arrow does show that there cannot be a perfect system, but it does not follow that there are always tradeoffs between two systems. Some (FPTP) are so bad that other systems can be strict improvements.
Arrow's theorem is basically equivalent to saying that Condorcet cycles can exist. In a three person contest, there exist voter preferences so that they'd rank A over B in a head-to-head race, B over C, and C over A. When that happens, you still have to pick a winner. If that winner is A, that means B could drop out and make the winner C. So any voting system that actually takes voter preferences into account fails "independence of irrelevant alternatives" - adding or removing candidate B changes the relative ordering of A and C.
Arrow's theorem also relies on a counterintuitively-broad definition of the non-dictatorship criterion. Basically, if the same person happens to be the tipping-point voter between all pairwise alternatives (e.g. in a three-way election the same person is the tipping point voter for A being ranked above B and B being ranked above C), then that voter is defined to be a "dictator" for the purposes of Arrow.
Both proofs of Arrow essentially work by demonstrating that Condorcet cycles exist and that any method of breaking a cycle involves a single tipping-point "dictator".
Calling the existence of a single tipping-point voter (even one who can't be identified in advance and is the tipping-point voter only by virtue of the combined effects of other people's ballots) a "dictatorship" is deeply misleading to the point of rendering the theorem nearly useless. To reduce it to absurdity, a simple majority election with exactly two candidates meets Arrow's definition of a dictatorship because there's always a tipping-point voter for the winner over the loser.
Borda Count and its variations have been growing on me lately: basically, Borda provides that in e.g. a five-candidate race, your first-choice vote is worth 4 points, your second choice is worth 3, your third choice 2, and your fourth choice 1. It's not quite as good as Condorcet in terms of robustness in the face of irrelevant alternatives, but it's got some substantial benefits over other ranking methods:
1. It's highly legible to voters, in that the algorithm is a lot easier to explain.
2. Each ballot's effect on the final result is static and unaffected by other ballots. This allows faster, easier, and more transparent counting, as individual ballots can simply be added together to give precinct results, and any set of precinct results can be added together to produce partial and final counts.
3. To the extend Borda departs from Condorcet results, it tends to do so by skewing towards compromise candidates whom large swaths of voters rank highly but not #1.
4. It's a bit more resilient against voters failing to rank beyond their first choice, at least in terms of voter intuitions: there's no appearance that your vote is being ignored in subsequent rounds of tallying because there's only one round and your vote is counted fully as you cast it.
The main weakness of Borda is irrelevant alternatives, which plagues every method except Condorcet. You can mitigate this with a two-round system (like Alaska's top-three primary preceding their IRV round) designed to narrow down the field to a manageable number before the Borda Count round, or by limiting the number of places you can rank (e.g. rank your top 3 of N candidates in order, which get 3, 2, and 1 point respectively).
Tactical voting can make Borda go nuts. Proportional representation (where practical); Condorcet and hybrid methods such as 1-2-3 where a single winner is needed, approval where ranked choice systems are impractical, but please let's not drag Borda into the conversation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Potential_for_tactical_manipulation
The main weakness of Borda is that it's famously gameable. If you polled a bunch of election nerds on which voting method is the most easily manipulated, Borda would always come up in the top 2 or 3. It's a no-go for that reason
I consider myself at least vaguely an "election nerd", and I like IRV.
Also, no, it's not on par with plurality. IRV is clone-proof, which is a humongous advantage over plurality; clone-dependence is one of the worst failures possible since it's exploitable.
There are Condorcet methods competitive with IRV (the clone-proof ones, like ranked pairs), but approval is not a Condorcet method IRL. Approval voting's huge downside is the huge tactical voting issue, comparable in severity to that in plurality (it's still way better than plurality, but on this specific point it's ~equally bad).
(I've raised this to approval advocates before; the usual response has been to pretend tactical voting isn't/shouldn't be a thing. Sorry, this is the real world we're talking about.)
IRV is non-monotonic. A winning candidate can lose if they get more support. I don’t deny that tactical voting is bad but IRV is also vulnerable to tactical voting, so I don’t know why you consider tactical voting a strong motivator for IRV over approval.
I’d prefer a scoring system like STAR over a Condorcet RCV, a Condorcet RCV over Approval, Approval over IRV, and IRV over plurality.
The cases in which false preferences are tactically incentivised in IRV are very narrow, which means in practice, unless you're an extremely-high-information voter, that it's not a good idea to tactically vote.
Approval is comparable to plurality in that every single voter will be considering tactics, because putting your approval cutoff outside the set of people with a chance wastes your vote and this is extremely obvious. Most scoring systems also have this kind of problem (not all, though).
No voting system is free of tactical voting (except random ballot, which I like for member-of-chamber elections but which in reality nobody will agree to), but the degree to which it shows up is highly variable and IRV legitimately is one of the better ones in this regard.
Not sure I consider IRV the best, but I certainly prefer it to approval.
Moderate election nerd here and I honestly can't figure out if the non-monotonicity problem is a practical concern or only happens in a lab environment. And really, if it happens occasionally but is undetectable because in the real world we don't have all the voters graphed by preference, I'm not sure it matters! It's just some extra noise in the system and isn't going to cause anybody to vote strategically.
I *had* thought IRV was immune to strategic voting before I learned about Center Squeeze (if you like your side more than the moderate more than the other side you might want to rank the moderate higher than your side to keep the other side from winning) but I'm also not sure how often *that* happens in real life.
Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem: with 3+ candidates, the only voting system with no tactical voting under any circumstances is "pick a voter by some means; that voter's vote wins and everyone else's is ignored".
I do like random ballot (the "some means" being picking a paper out of the box at random) in theory for electing members of chambers (Parliament/Congress), but there are some practical issues, including the fact that nobody's ever going to agree to it.
IRV having cases where tactical voting is clearly incentivized are actually pretty common in practice. You can see one in the August House special election for Alaska. First round was 40% Peltola, 31% Palin, 28% Begich. IRV elimates Begich, and has Peltola win the second round. But polling seems to indicate that Begich would beat Peltola, so if 2% of Palin>Begich>Peltola voters flipped their first two ranks, Begich would win. This issue doesn't arise under Condorcet methods. Of course, different issues can, so the question becomes which you think are the most common and damaging.
It's not clear from that information whether Palin beats Begich; if she does, there are Condorcet-completion methods that would do the same thing.
And like I said, it's a narrow case. You need to know that Peltola will narrowly beat Palin (51-49, literally!) in order for flipping those preferences to be a good idea, otherwise you're handing victory to Begich over your true preference of Palin.
So on one hand, if your problem with tactical voting is voters regretting their vote, I guess IRV has issues (I think the models say it's about 10% for at least one voter to regret his/her vote?), but if your problem with tactical voting is reliable incentives to lie on a ballot paper (penalising truth-tellers), then IRV's pretty solid (whereas approval and plurality ~always have such incentives for large chunks of the population).
Doesn't alter your point, but you need 6-10% of such voters to flip their first two ranks, since such voters make up less than 1/3 of all voters and you need to move the total numbers by 2%.
>Sorry, this is the real world we're talking about
The IRV election results have not been great in the US so far. For instance, about half of recent Maine voters only 'ranked' 1 candidate in the last election! A third of recent Alaskan voters did the same. My understanding of the Australian system is that it allows voters to use pre-filled rankings from their parties, which 90% of them do. Asking a bunch of random voters to legitimately rank candidates (which may be outside of their attention span or cognitive ability) is kind of uncharted territory
The issue is that the large majority of voters hate politics, hate thinking about politics, can't distinguish between the candidates' policy positions at all, and are basically deciding who to vote for based on who they'd rather have a beer with. So while 'ranking' is easy, it's not if you don't know anything about the involved parties and don't care. I find this is difficult to convey to highly educated political obsessives who follow the field religiously.
Like, let me stereotype you as someone who doesn't like basketball. Would you find it easy to rank say the 5 best power forwards of all time? Probably not, right?
Australia's system allows voters to use the parties rankings they've already laid out, which 90% of voters do. I.e. the voters don't have to think at all, and just 'vote' based on how their party told them to rank everyone. America is basically in uncharted waters asking a bunch of random people to have detailed opinions on individual politicians
(I think it's not actually 90% that follow those cards in Oz; more like 60-70%. There are a decent amount of cases where preferences are split, which implies a lot of people don't follow them, although admittedly the ones I recall have been from wealthy electorates where you'd expect higher-than-usual-information voters.)
> My understanding of the Australian system is that it allows voters to use pre-filled rankings from their parties, which 90% of them do.
It's not that you use pre-filled rankings, it's that the parties will hand out "How To Vote" cards which contain their suggestions on how you might like to fill out your preferences if you'd like to vote for them. You still have to manually fill every box.
Generally the major parties will strike deals with vaguely ideologically aligned minor parties and independents to swap preferences. Of course the minor parties aren't going to get elected anyway and the major parties aren't going to get eliminated early, so the preferences of a minor party are much more valuable than those of a major party.
I disregard the How To Vote cards and fill in my own preferences, I don't really care who has cut deals with whom. Generally I put my preferred major party third after a couple of no-hope candidates that represent my views more closely.
(All of what I've said applies Federally and in my state, there might be variations in other states. And the Senate voting is a whole different mess I don't pretend to understand.)
Yeah it's the Senate where there is the choice of voting 'above the line' for a party (and therefore for all their candidates in the order chosen by the party) or 'below the line' where you can choose your own order and eg ignore some candidates while voting for their fellow party members.
They also used to allow just voting for a single party and letting their preference deals determine where you vote went, but that's fortunately gone now. You have to rank at least six parties above the line, or at least twelve candidates below the line, but you don't have to rank everyone.
Gone federally, but Victoria's state election still has party controlled preference flows for above the line Upper house votes. Fortunately it doesn't require filling out every box to vote below the line, the 2013 federal election as painful (135 boxes to vote below the line in the senate, or something thereabouts)
I think if you're arguing ranking a list of people is beyond voters' cognitive ability, you might as well be arguing those people shouldn't be voting. you literally rank the people, what is hard to understand?
The voters don't know the difference between multiple candidates, or their platforms, and so they either don't rank them or their rankings are random. What is hard to understand about this? They.... can't distinguish between the candidates. Only 46% of voters know that their state has 2 Senators, including 77% in between the ages of 18 to 34.
If you're a politics-obsessed person, you may lack the theory of the mind necessary to understand that most people don't know and don't care about politics. I would suggest getting off the Internet and trying to discuss public policy IRL with a bartender, Uber driver, guy at the hardware store, homeless guy, construction worker, etc.
I think democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other ones that have been tried. And I think that voting for 1 candidate is (barely) within many voters' cognitive abilities. I think having opinions on say 4-6 is just beyond many folks, sorry
I think at the point where a voter doesn't know which candidate they would like to win, their vote is meaningless noise absolutely regardless of the electoral system.
Realistically, even low info voters probably know either 1 person they like or 1 person they hate, and putting that name first or last respectively conveys that preference, even if the rest of the numbers are in a random order.
on the contrary, approval voting is specifically beloved by game theory experts for its RESISTANCE to tactical voting. see steven brams, an NYU professor of political science and game theory, or the book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.
the voter satisfaction efficiency calculation from jameson quinn—a harvard stats phd who sat on the board of the center for election science—show approval voting performing comparably with condorcet methods, and in some cases significantly better.
Hi Clay, hope you're doing well. Wanted to use this opportunity to ask you- didn't you use to write a lot about asset voting? (Or am I completely confusing you with someone else?) Are any of your writings on the topic still out there? I think one old forum was taken down.
I recently discovered asset voting and I've been a bit fascinated it- if you have to have single member districts, why not make sure that the candidate represents a fairly broad cross-section of society? I recently came across a stat that in Germany's latest MMP election, out of 299 seats, 80 were won with less than 30% of the vote, with the absolute lowest being like 18.9% or around there. I understand that approval voting would help this some, but I find this a pretty.... dumb.... way to select a representative.
Seems like asset voting could help out a lot. Maybe the candidates coordinating post-election is unrealistic in this day & age, but at a minimum, candidates could announce (on the ballot) who they're transferring their votes to if they don't win
Yes, I'm referring specifically to the constituency seats. I think it's rather dumb to choose 1 single representative for a specific district/constituency, if 70+% of the electorate voted *against* them. How can you represent a grouping of people if more than two-thirds of them rejected you? At least the French do a 2 round system, to sort of force a consensus.
I'm not referring to the proportional/top-up seats, and I think it's fine if all of the parties (above a threshold) are represented in the Bundestag or wherever. I'm referring just to the constituency reps
If there is a Condorcet cycle, there is no Condorcet winner (though there will be a winner in any given Condorcet completion method) and the Condorcet criterion does not require any particular winner.
You linked me an image (twice), but I'm not able to interpret many of the labels - in particular, I can't see approval. I do know that if you put your approval cutoff outside the set of candidates with a chance, you waste your vote under approval; I'm presuming that any paper purporting to show that approval is resistant to tactical voting falsely counts "put your approval cutoff inside the set of candidates with a chance" as "honest", because it's complete nonsense otherwise.
DSL uses approval voting for the effortpost contest, and I can personally confirm that it is highly vulnerable to tactical voting, and I sometimes vote tactically myself.
i can personally confirm you're wrong. VSE figures show approval voting performing better with 100% tactical voters than most systems do with honest voters. you're using the wrong definition of "vulnerable".
STV is similar to IRV in a lot of ways, but the proportional discounting of votes for candidates that reach quota creates tactical voting issues where you should vote for the people you want to win in order from least to most likely they'll win (because this will allocate your full voting power to the marginal candidates where it can do the most good, since getting reassigned via meeting quota dilutes your vote but getting reassigned by candidate elimination doesn't).
1. Everyone votes for thier single preferred candidate.
2. The candidate with the fewest votes transfers all thier votes to whoever _the candidate_ thinks is best (among the remaining options, published as a ranked list ahead of time, for any high info voters who care)
I will point out that the Australian Senate used to have basically this system (and Victoria's upper house still uses it) and it routinely results in preference trading shenanigans that get people elected off minuscule vote totals. The most infamous example being Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiast Party, who became a Senator with 0.5% of the vote.
Yeah, public announcement of where the votes will go is somewhat important.
And if someone wins with .5% on the initial ballot, it's probably a situation where there were 20 mostly similar and aligned candidates splitting 51% of the vote, and one guy everyone hates getting 49%, and _someone_ from the coalition "should" win.
Also, you didn't specify which system you were calling "this system" but it looks like they were using some sort of STV, not my idea, which I guess I would call deferred IRV?
I will note that my impression was that Ricky Muir was actually a pretty decent Senator, and insofar as he had a platform it was very moderate - I think almost all the people whose votes flowed to him were probably genuinely happier with him than they would have been with any of the major parties, else they wouldn't have been voting for a microparty in the first place.
The proportionality with multi seat constituencies which still keep the idea of a person being elected (rather than a vote for a party) is what appeals.
STV is not particularly proportional- it's better than FPTP but not as good as list PR. In some years (not all, to be fair), Ireland has a Gallagher Index close to that of Britain.
The way to have multiseat constituencies and proportionality has been a solved problem since the late 19th century- list PR. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, or ask voters to do too much cognitively. Just.... use open list PR
What if I like a party over all but their leading candidate is personally abhorrent? STV and similar allow voting for the other individuals that represent that party without voting for the problematic individual.
It's not nearly as bad a plurality, but it does have it's problems. It's advantage is that it's easy to explain, which Condorcet isn't. With IRV lots of people can look at the program an tell that it's doing what it claims to do. With Condorcet that's a LOT less true.
When you say "on par with plurality", is that hyperbole or do you think it's actually not significantly better? I've never heard this opinion from an elections nerd (definitely I've heard that IRV is the worst alternative system, but never that it isn't a huge improvement over plurality)!
I do think it's not significantly better plurality, at least as generally practiced in America. At lot of the worst pitfalls of plurality are avoided when you have a two party system with primaries so that there are two clear front runners before voting starts. IRV basically simulates this in a single ballot , as long as people vote intelligently (not tactically), so it will not only give the same result most of the time, but also continue to incentivize the same politics. Think about an electorate where the large majority of voters are either Republicans or Democrats, and partisan voters rank of their party's candidates above all of the other party's. In that case IRV is exactly the same as running two single-party primaries under IRV rules and then having a head-to-head election between the winners. Even small amounts of crossover won't really change the picture.
IRV actually does solves problems that happen much more in Canada or the UK, where there are often multiple parties competing for the same seat. Which means no party has gotten above 40% of the votes in Canadian federal election in years, but they usually have one party with a majority in parliament. And that in the most recent UK election, the Conservatives got 43% of the vote, which gave them a majority that they used to complete Brexit. But Labor+Lib Dem+SNP+Green together got a majority of the vote and were all anti-Brexit. But since those parties ran against each other for many of the seats, you had results like the Conservatives winning Kensington 16,768 to 16,618 to 9,312 when most of those LD voters would probably prefer the Labor candidate. IRV would solve this problem, but so would other ranked methods. And other ranked methods tend to be much better at electing compromised candidates and not entrenching major parties.
And all this is only for single winner methods, but for legislatures, they'll always have the possibility of the party with more support getting a minority. It happened, for example, in Australia in 1998. They use IRV to elect winners in single member districts and have more or less a two party system (not surprising). In 1998, the Labor party won 51% percent of the final round votes, but the Liberal coalition still won 54% of the seats. But for legislatures, you can just use proportional systems and fix a whole different class of problems that no single winner method can.
>Think about an electorate where the large majority of voters are either Republicans or Democrats, and partisan voters rank of their party's candidates above all of the other party's. In that case IRV is exactly the same as running two single-party primaries under IRV rules and then having a head-to-head election between the winners. Even small amounts of crossover won't really change the picture.
This is mostly assuming away the problem.
If there are two big parties and a decent-sized swing vote, primaries + plurality will give the people two extreme candidates to pick from (since each primary will pick the candidate best-liked by only half the population). IRV and no primaries tends to force those two parties toward the centre (median voter theorem, particularly with compulsory voting).
IRV + compulsory voting is a huge chunk of why Australia hasn't gone nuts the way the US has; our politics tend to centre around scandals rather than massive partisan divides, because our two biggest parties are incentivised to have quite-similar policies.
Except IRV is one of the few ranked systems that doesn't do that. If your top choices are Democrats, IRV doesn't even consider your opinion on the Republicans (at least unless all the Democrats you put at the top are eliminated). That makes it essentially identical to running primaries. Other voting systems do better.
Australia isn't an example here because they never had primaries. From the beginning, pre-IRV, they used the British style system where party leadership picks the candidates. And even with IRV, there are never two people from the same party running in the same seat, when IRV would let them do this without much downside. Australia also shows how IRV doesn't actually do anything to prevent two party dominance. I'm also not sure Australian politics is any less nutty than any other Anglo country or that compulsory voting has any significant effect on anything.
>Except IRV is one of the few ranked systems that doesn't do that. If your top choices are Democrats, IRV doesn't even consider your opinion on the Republicans (at least unless all the Democrats you put at the top are eliminated). That makes it essentially identical to running primaries. Other voting systems do better.
Are you saying that the later-no-harm criterion is bad? Because for a single-winner election this sounds like you're arguing for the inverse of later-no-harm - and yes, IRV is one of the few voting systems that satisfies later-no-harm, the criterion that putting in later preferences honestly cannot hurt the chance of your favourite and first preference being elected (and thus tactical voting in later preferences to increase voting power is not incentivised).
>And even with IRV, there are never two people from the same party running in the same seat, when IRV would let them do this without much downside.
There have been quite a few cases in Australian politics (like, I think I've heard of at least 3 in the last 20 years) in which someone loses the party preselection, runs anyway as an independent, and wins. This is a big difference from the US system in which doing this hands victory to the opponent (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt trying for a third term). This keeps the parties honest.
>Australia also shows how IRV doesn't actually do anything to prevent two party dominance.
We had a hung parliament in 2010, and we currently have 16 of 151 seats held by non-Labor, non-Coalition parties (and the Coalition is sort of two parties itself). IRV doesn't *prevent* two-party dominance, but it doesn't *enforce* it either.
Consider a case where a Dem majority district has many candidates of both parties. If moderate republicans put moderate dems over extreme Republicans, then that can result in the Moderate Dems defeating the Extreme Dems, even if the Extreme Dems are more popular among the subset of people who would today turn up at a primary election.
Hell, even if it were functionally equivalent to primaries, doing it as part of the same ballot makes a massive difference to voter turnout and thus will frequently change the result.
I'm something of an election nerd and this thread is vastly underestimating how much the general population cares about elections (very little), and hence how important it is that the election process be simple (quite important), and that the resultant winner have sufficient power to implement its agenda and hence sufficient accountability on results. These are all areas where FPTP actually scores over PR, RCV etc and they don't seem to be under consideration here
IRV is definitely more complicated than Plurality, but my understanding is that states that have implemented it haven't seen very much voter confusion. Not as much as I'd have naively expected, anyway.
I am strongly considering moving to the Bay Area. Do people have non-obvious tips about where the best places to live are? Areas that are under or overrated? Current front runners are, based on access to “nature”, somewhere near the presidio or golden gate, vs access to people I know, somewhere near rockridge Bart
All are great options. Inner Richmond, inner sunset (both close to ggp) and presidio area are all very nice but will be more foggy/less sunny than east bay. If you value easy access to good and relatively inexpensive restaurants, inner Richmond > inner sunset (slightly, both good) > rockridge > presidio. I would also nominate Glen Park area (has nature, on Bart). Personally I grew up in sunset (both outer and inner) and found my quality of life better in Berkeley because sun really affects me and I have friends in walking vs public transit distance. Rockridge is not far from nature - you can bus or bike to several nice large parks but it is not in nature the way the actual presidio is. I also like Alameda, parts of Marin, half moon bay but if your friends are in rockridge none of these are easy transit
1. access to BART is either literally everything or completely meaningless depending on car ownership.
2. if you don't own a car buy an E-bike so you can move around (just make sure your E-bike can go in the rain).
3. Hayward is a nice city with high crime but otherwise feels very "city" in the B street area, but otherwise feels very non city outside of B-street.
4. Oakland is close to the 2 main meetups (berkley/San francisco) and that probably matters a lot if you want to attend rationalist events. Berkeley itself sucks as a city, but the Northeast bay (concord ect just have terrible rail connections to the rest of the bay.
I wouldn't reccomend living in the south bay unless you own a car, then south bay is great. (but extremely expensive)
the cheapest city in the bay area that you would call the bay is Hayward, at 800k median home price (yes that is YIKES but that's as low as you get :( ). I lived there for years and liked it, but the rationalist community there doesn't exist so you have to travel far to get to events (not a problem for me but boy people hate traveling)
North of the golden gate is also OK, but you run into the issue that the north isn't really "bay area" anymore, as the 3 main centers of the bay are Mountain View San francisco and Kinda berkeley/oakland. (Oakland has this weird "not really culturally itself more of the place where people live to work in the west bay" vibe.
If you’re planning to own a car, Oakland hills are lovely and, I think, underrated. Montclair is in nature and proximate to Rockridge and downtown Oakland. Very paltry public transit though.
Hi there! I moved to SF last year and made a guide, I didn't feel like there was a consolidated / useful resource. It covers both the process of finding a place in the city as well as plugging into the city. Happy to hope on a (free) call with you to talk through options but FYI I mostly know the city well, not so much Oakland.
Oh hey I just wrote about how East Germany used approval voting:
“ After all, even East Germany had expansive constitutional rights on paper and—yes, I’m serious—fairly-counted multi-party elections. They used an approval-based voting system, which actually allows for effective constituent bargaining against incumbent politicians on local issues, and was thus recently on the ballot in Seattle as an alternative to both ranked-choice and first-past-the-post. The country’s dominant party only won around one quarter of the legislative seats, in each of its nine elections before the wall fell, and also in its final election afterwards (which allocated seats via standard western-style proportional representation). This legislature abolished the senate, and officially controlled both other branches, much as our judicial and executive branches testify before our congress in exchange for official guidance on all forms of power: personnel, provisions, and policy.
But, of course, a clear supermajority of their administrators joined the Socialist Unity Party, and that was the clear path to promotion… while openly supporting alternative options could get you fired and shunned from influential positions. For example, in the late 1980s, the SUP alone had well over two million members, while each of the other four main parties only had about 100,000. Much like their head-of-state only rubber-stamped the party’s decisions, our president can’t legally fire the vast majority of his ostensible subordinates, from Fauci to the Fed. Much like their organs of culture, prestige, and information were only independent from the party on paper, our deep state only offers access to favored media, and infiltrates organizations deemed suspect. And so forth.
In my view, there’s only one obvious difference between our manner of actually constituting a government and theirs: East Germans could choose to publicly register their actual votes, and so almost every voter did, to avoid arousing suspicion; in contrast, ever since 1891 we’ve had secret ballots, and so 20th Century communications technologies never got the chance to impose overtly totalitarian control on us. Thus, well over 90% of their ballots approved the candidates on offer. Meanwhile, the average margin of victory in our Senate and House elections is just 20 and 30 percentage points, respectively (though both sets of incumbents admittedly still win well over 90% of the time). Granted, I may be overstating the importance of this distinction, because our system publicly registers our party affiliations, our partisan donations, and all the times we’ve ever voted, and we can’t opt out from sharing this information. “
Basic summary: Campaign contributions and party registrations imply that 90% of civil servants favor Democrats, as do 95% of employees at elite cultural institutions; meanwhile, military contractors, big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other such corporate boogeymen each employ equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. What produces this outcome, and what outcomes does it produce?
You seem to skip one major difference: The voters in East Germany could not freely choose between different parties, as all parties were members of Nationale Front der DDR, and the "National Front" presented a single joint vetted list of candidates in elections. Voter could either approve or disapprove of the list. Thus the "quarter of the legislative seats" SED nominally had wasn't won, it was its preallocated quota. Moreover, in addition to "parties", Volkskammer had non-party "mass movement" representatives from the trade unions, SED Jugend, Kulturbund der DDR, and Women's league, all of them generally were full SED members. Thus idespite the nominal ~25% turnout in Volkskammer, in practice SED had direct control of >50% deputies in Volkskammer (and also practical control of NF member party positions, too).
In contrast, the elections between D and R in the US are genuinely competitive.
(edit. The comparison would make better sense if House of Representatives had, in addition to ~200 D representatives, 100 seats for unions, ~50 for Young Democrats of America, another ~50 for National Federation of Democratic Women, and 50 for the Motion Picture Academy and similar.)
Yes the point about non-party representatives is a fair critique, though I don’t think that’s what gave the SUP an advantage over other parties; it seems more like a symptom of their ultimate power over administrative entities (and their use of this to eg monitor voters) that they were able to grant fancy reputable sinecures to allies in the only-officially-powerful legislature. For example, if they actually ruled through having more seats on this officially-powerful legislature, why not just give their party members more spots on the single-list to begin with?
But my understanding of approval voting is that it works through just such a single list, and that the “national front” was basically a meaningless term that only in practice meant “being on the single list.” If I recall correctly, East German voters could approve or disapprove of each name on the list, and the candidates with most approval would enter the legislature. In much the same way, in my understanding, approval voting in the US would mean that voters here would receive a single list of candidates, of whom we could then approve or disapprove, and that this would determine who enters the legislature. Perhaps one should naturally expect such a system to give the typical candidate 90-ish percent approvals (because it works by removing unpopular candidates rather than dividing partisans between popular candidates), and so perhaps the 95%+ approvals given to candidates by East German voters aren’t even much evidence of voter intimidation, but I’m unsure about that.
Edit: One other point of possible note is that the East German constitution explicitly gave the SUP the “leading” role in govt, and all other parties in the “national front” had to acknowledge this, but I’m unsure of what this actually meant in practice. In my view, it seems like more of a vague threat against sedition, much as our FBI/SPLC/NYT/etc target any Republicans who seem insufficiently servile to the Democrats as “threats to democracy.” The whole point of single-party rule is that the party gets to do what it wants, and can then get rubber stamps from its front-government’s official organs of power after-the-fact.
>If I recall correctly, East German voters could approve or disapprove of each name on the list, and the candidates with most approval would enter the legislature.
This is, I think, incorrect. Certainly it is incorrect for communist Czechoslovakia, and from your summary it sounds like East Germany used the same system. In Czechoslovakia, there was no option to approve or disaprove each name on the list. You either voted for the whole National Front list, or you didn't. Elections were thus noncompetitive.
Of course not voting for The List could have bad consequences for your career.
It should be also noted that East Germany was occupied by the Soviet Army, which violently put down fairly serious uprising in 1953. And Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet army in 1968, in order to stop democratization initiated from within our own communist party elite, and occupied until 1989.
So, as far as I can tell, this is how East German voting worked at the ballot box:
-You would receive a "single list" of the "national front" candidates who were running in your constituency (there were *many* such constituencies, each electing somewhere from four to eight candidates to the legislature)
-You could either approve this whole list (not risky), or not vote (somewhat risky), or fill out your own paper ballot with no privacy (very risky); so you could approve whichever candidates you liked, but only at great personal cost, with mostly no hope of swaying any actual results
-Each candidate had to receive at least half of the valid votes cast in their constituency, in order to get elected; if too few candidates met this bar, then a second round would be held, but this hardly ever happened; if too many of the candidates met this bar, then only the four-to-eight topmost candidates would win
-Voters would sometimes actually vote against specific candidates for certain local issues (or threaten to), because this would embarrass them without threatening the party's monopoly on power; thus, there was, in practice, some degree of constituent bargaining against politicians, but only over what should be regarded as "apolitical" issues (e.g. "your people aren't picking up the trash regularly," but not "I dislike socialist ideology or the way our elections work")
-The aspects of this which presumably sound most crazy to us nowadays (the prefilled party ballot, the lack of privacy for personal ballots) were commonplace in US presidential elections until the late 19th Century: for instance, in the Jackson era, the red and blue parties would hand out their pre-filled ballots on red and blue paper, and aggressively pressure you into just dropping their preferred list into the ballot, and you couldn't fill out your own idiosyncratic ballot except by drawing lots of unwanted attention to yourself
My point, of course, is not that the East German system was in any sense "good," but rather that its badness had much less to do with its electoral set-up than with less formal aspects of its one-party rule. For instance, its people lived under a one-party dictatorship because every industrial enterprise had a local SUP party group keeping tabs on everything it was doing; not because the SUP got slightly more seats than rival parties in a rubber-stamp legislature.
Does anyone know how this compares to the modern Chinese system? I understand there's some kind of Chinese "election" at the local level and that sometimes there's genuine competition between one approved Communist Party apparatchik and another at the local level.
My understanding is that, basically, in China, you can elect your local council; local councils in a province elect their provincial council; and all the provincial councils together elect the head of state. So the official state apparatus runs elections “from the bottom up.” But the party holds vastly more power than the official state apparatus, and party elections are “top down” (each party chapter elects a delegate to the party conference, which elects the party central committee etc, which then appoints the local party chapter heads). You can think of the Party as a sort of “voters union”, where they get to strongly influence who gets elected into official offices, and who these official officers appoint to given roles. (Technically, other parties can run candidates for office, but, as in East Germany, this is mostly toothless controlled opposition, and the constitution officially recognizes the communist party as having a monopoly on fundamental partisan legitimacy, and yet protests / popular dissent can get the party to replace ineffective low-level reps *so long as the public doesn’t challenge the CCP’s right to rule when it challenges the bona fixes of specific CCP reps*).
Here’s a bit from one of my prior pieces about just how vacuous “official heads of state” are in communist states, relative to party bosses (the same also mostly holds in eg East Germany):
‘But Mao stepped down as China’s head-of-state in 1959, at the beginning of his “Great Leap Forward,” and replaced himself on paper with professional CCP sloganist Liu Shaoqi, whose name you likely don’t recall… of course, Mao remained Chairman of the Communist Party, and, when it became convenient, whipped up his activists to extra-legally force this paper tiger out of office in 1968. China then lacked a head of state until 1975, at which point it formally abolished the role, until 1982, since which time the role has been entirely symbolic.’
>My point, of course, is not that the East German system was in any sense "good," but rather that its badness had much less to do with its electoral set-up than with less formal aspects of its one-party rule. For instance, its people lived under a one-party dictatorship because every industrial enterprise had a local SUP party group keeping tabs on everything it was doing; not because the SUP got slightly more seats than rival parties in a rubber-stamp legislature
I agree, sort-of. But the stuff like "slightly more seats in the legislature" are not unimportant either (East Germany or other countries). It is much easier to run a sham democracy where you have both the nominal power and informal power.
>-The aspects of this which presumably sound most crazy to us nowadays (the prefilled party ballot, the lack of privacy for personal ballots) were commonplace in US presidential elections until the late 19th Century: for instance, in the Jackson era, the red and blue parties would hand out their pre-filled ballots on red and blue paper, and aggressively pressure you into just dropping their preferred list into the ballot, and you couldn't fill out your own idiosyncratic ballot except by drawing lots of unwanted attention to yourself
Ha, did you know this is quite close how the elections are run in Sweden? (Sans the aggressive pressuring.) There is a table, where you can pick any party's printed list (or a blank), go to a booth to write the name in a blank or write an X next to favored candidate, and then put ballot you are voting for in an envelope. Envelope goes to in a box. Here is an infomercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwB-xre9Eg4
Not being a Swedish citizen, I have never seen it live, but it sounds quite vulnerable to ballot stuffing: You would need only to get access to discarded / unused ballots and stuff them in, they are not stamped or anything.
Yes, you raise fair points: the SUP benefited from having modest dominance over the legislature (more than they would have benefited from either no dominance or total dominance). But, for instance, if we become a more thoroughly one-party state--if USG's administrative agency employees go from their current 90% Dem lean to something more like 95% or 99%--then I think it will be through those less formal mechanisms: whether through agencies cracking down on dissent, or tilting the discourse, or etc. Whereas if elected officials successfully flex on deep state personnel--whether these elected officials are left or right--then I think deep state personnel will end up less unanimous (though they'll end up even more unanimous if they successfully fight off this flex).
For example, even if a politician who's further left than the deep state Democrats (in either the woke sense or the classical sense) wins the presidency, I think he'd cause the deep state to skew *less* Dem if he reduced administrative employee tenure protections. Because accountability would make the deep state optimize on actual success at achieving his policy agenda, and so wouldn't leave as much room for optimizing on unanimous corrupt party power. So I think the causal arrow points from informal one-party power to formal one-party power, instead of vice-versa.
That's an interesting bit about Sweden. The "proportional representation" electoral system that's pretty standard in Western Europe mostly involves voting for party lists rather than individual candidates, so now I'm curious to look up how many of them do similar not-so-secret balloting. I also wonder why there's not more outright ballot-stuffing, since it seems fairly easy to do, and yet I'm very unconvinced by all the claims I've seen about it actually happening.
In the US, ballot counting happens at each polling place, and so it seems like coordinating a straightforward election stealing campaign would necessarily induct way too many normies into the conspiracy to keep it secret; but then also the people running each polling place are amateurs who care way too much about politics and have very little oversight, so disorganized emotional ballot-stuffing seems vaguely plausible. And maybe that does happen, and it's just too dumb and disorganized to show up in any systematic way. (Epistemic status: just spit-balling here, my only confident opinion is that there doesn't seem to have been real statistical evidence of ballot-stuffing in 2020 or 2016 [or, for that matter, in Bolivia, when Morales got ousted a few years ago]).
Leonard Bernstein's 1954 broadcast on the choices that Beethoven made, when composing the beginning of his Fifth Symphony, is extraordinary. And it's available for viewing anytime on YouTube!
Its link can be found a short ways down into these musings on Joni Michell's 1972 song about Beethoven, "Judgement Of The Moon And Stars." (Yes, hoping at least a reader or two might also be interested in Joni and this song, along the path there.)
You seem to be confused about spectrum models. In general they are more accurate, because reality isn't neatly separated into set in stone binary categories for us to use. There are a lot of transitional elements between X and not X which are important to take into account. Yes, there are known failure mode of fallacy of grey where you consider all the spectrum to have equal metrics, it's something to be aware of and still use a more accurate spectum model.
Not sure how you can say that"shell shock" is a better category than "PTSD". It works for Carlin jokes, but it doesn't work for serious discussion about categories. "Shell shock" was initially confusing with concussion from the artillery shells exploding. It was a terrible category, inheritance from the time where people didn't understand psychological trauma at all. Now we do know better, and we noticed that some completely unrelated traumas can manifest similarly, thus we have a category talking about this manifestation, which is PTSD.
Thanks for this great example of not understanding psychological trauma. Yes, indeed some people are still at this level of understanding even today. Thankfully they are not the ones who matter for the scientific consensus.
What is the evidence he's wrong? How much faith can you have in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists? It's a field that was pseudoscientific from its beginning, had the book "House of Cards" written about it by the head of one of its state associations, and has more recently been where the replication crisis was discovered and from which "concept creep" emerged.
> How much faith can you have in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists?
More than in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists of the past. So when someone on the Internet claims that the previous one was actually correct and the current is wrong I expect to see some incredible new evidence overcomming the "yes, we have noticed the skulls" heuristic.
Economists can point (perhaps unconvincingly) to higher GDPs today than the past. Can psychologists show we have better "mental health"? Or instead does exposure to western psychology make other cultures LESS mentally healthy? Freud wasn't still alive when Robyn Dawes was pointing out how his colleagues were ignoring their own evidence. Paul Meehl was pointing out the problems we're now seeing in the replication crisis within psychology back in the 60s, but nothing got fixed over those decades:
We know an awful lot about the neurophysiology of PTSD, and all of this would have to be wrong in order for "PTSD isn't real; it's just traumatic brain injury from blunt trauma to the head" to be right. I say this because I don't get the sense this blog post or you are quite grappling with how much putative knowledge you are proposing to throw out. It's not just correlated symptom descriptions.
I'm not confused about spectrum models being more or less accurate. I think, if we're going by general rule, I'm very in favor of spectrum models that allow for less binaries, less black and white. I think you're correct that they're "more accurate".
That, however, is not what the essay is about. I'm very specifically talking about the phenomenon where, in the name of adding more spectral area to certain categories, privileged people are claiming ownership of territory that they don't "need" in order to survive (unlike the people they are stealing it from).
It certainly can seem interesting (and "accurate") to find out that you fall on some far end of a spectrum model because it's a way to understand yourself better or to explain yourself better to others. However, that does not give you the right to claim ownership (or "the right of definition") of that condition/category out from under the people who need it more than you do.
As for shell shock vs. PTSD, I agree with TGGP; just because you give a phenomenon a new name does not mean you understand it any better. Shell shock as a category was only "confusing" because the condition is (and remains) confusing. It describes a broad range of symptoms resulting from mental, emotional, and physical damage. Defining and categorizing it as PTSD allows people to ignore some of that damage and just focus on the emotional/psychological realm (while still retaining all the "narrative glamour" of the physical damage that the earlier definition included as necessary for a diagnosis). Further, it's a psychological definition that's vague enough to allow all kinds of middle and upper class people without any physical trauma to claim it for themselves. How convenient.
This is not to say that there isn't a psychological phenomenon consistent with PTSD, just that, at its fringes, it has been divorced from something that was likely also a physical phenomenon (shell shock) in order to lend it increased gravity.
Which, again, furthers my point; definition changes that happen this quickly are almost always a sign of a politically-motivated narrative theft taking place. There may be well-meaning people seeking to add more "accuracy" to a description or category (and I sympathize with that), but that academically-motivated "accuracy" has the real-world price of decreasing the urgency of a condition by suddenly opening the door to an enormous amount of meme self-diagnosers into an otherwise serious definition.
> I'm very in favor of spectrum models that allow for less binaries, less black and white. I think you're correct that they're "more accurate".
I'm glad that this isn't our crux of disagreement! But then I'm confused what is.
You see, if you look at spectral categories from the framework of "elites taking control over words" you get a general argument against spectral categories.
The definition of "the elites" is flexible enough and the transition from binary to spectrum always include a lot of new stuff in the category As a result either some of the elites themselves or their opponents will be included in the new category border, contrary to the old on. Thus allowing us to always rationalize the usage of this framework.
On the other hand, weren't nearly all categories invented by the elites? So I guess it brings us to past elites vs current elites dychotomy, not elites versus common people, doesn't it?
> just because you give a phenomenon a new name does not mean you understand it any better
Of course. I was talking about the reverse of this causality. First you understand better, then you give a new name based on this better understanding. First you think that it's just about explosions and their physical effects. Then you notice the broad range symptoms of emotional and mental type. Then you notice that people show symilar symptoms in other situations of chronic helplessness and require similar treatment. People who need physical treatmet get physical treatment, people who need psychological - get psychological. People who need both of them - get both. As long as they can afford the helthcare, of course. It's more convinient to separate physical and psychological in different categories and thus we do.
> in order to lend it increased gravity
> decreasing the urgency of a condition
How can it be both at the same time? Anyway what are the real consequences that you are talking about? Being traumatized isn't a zero sum game. If more people associate with my trauma I do not suddenly become less valid. It's not that we now have to ignore veterans with concussions in order to treat abused houswives. What is, actually, the problem?
> enormous amount of meme self-diagnosers
This is once again, seems to be a general argument against spectral categories. And it begs the question. For this argument to work we have to assume that the previous status quo was correct, that all the new self diagnosers are wrong. But it can easily be the other way around. In reality a lot of conditions are both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed at the same time. And to improve the situation we need more accurate category borders. And as long as spectral models are more accurate, this means switching to them more, not less.
To my fellow Jewish SSCers — is anyone else on here also deeply troubled by the recent events in Israel over the last month (and in particular, over the last week)?
In my view, this is one of the most significant tragedies for the Jewish community in the past thirty years. I am surprised by the minimal response from the diaspora, so I was curious how others on here are viewing this.
Israelis are also pretty disturbed by the recent government - it's worth noting that a lot of its dysfunctionalities aren't very noticable abroad and don't map neatly on the American left/right axis (e.g. the biggest problem with this government is probably that despite being "right wing" it's taking a sharp turn away from liberal economic reforms and towards sectoral welfare, which in America would be a Democrat policy).
Not sure about the general point, but I don't see how British politics lately disproves it. Last election the choice was betwee Johnson and Corbyn, leadership or any other ability wasn't on the ballot. And for the next election it looks like Labour will win pretty much precisely because the people want to throw the obviously incompetent out.
Not so much the election per se, but one specific reform. Essentially, the parliament is supposed to get the power to overrule any decision of the highest court, removing one of the checks in "checks and balances".
It always struck me as weird that the Israeli Supreme Court declared a constitution to exist and that they had the power of constitutional review as a result. As Richard Posner put it, they “created out of whole cloth a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices.”
This is untrue. The Knesset declared constitution to be formulated and specified the basis for this constitution-to-be (the Harari Decision from 1950).
Based on this, the Supreme Court stared with what you call "constitutional review". The first, and probably most extreme, such "review" was in 1953. Israel, as a country, was 5 years old in 1953 and without established institutions, so this was not some shocking unprecedented act.
In the 70 years since then the Knesset not only accepted this situation, but explicitly embraced it (as can be seen in all the Basic Laws that were passed since then).
AFAIK the Basic Laws can be changed with a simple majority—that's why the new government has a chance to do stuff like the judicial reform in the first place. But then, if the Supreme Court strikes down a law as unconstitutional and they want it to stay anyway, it would be more consistent and honest to change the Basic Law to no longer conflict with the new law than to overrule the Supreme Court and leave contradicting laws in place.
Israeli here. I consider the latest election results pretty crappy from the economy side and the religion politics side, but pretty much within normal left-right pendulum swings, not a horrible tragedy. The unfortunate result of a center-left-ish government acting sensibly and responsibly in a way that pissed people off. At some point Bibi will become stale, the left will find someone as charismatic, the religious parties will slosh back to whoever promises them the most money, and the rusty fishing boat of state will wobble on.
I'm willing to bet against any major rollbacks to civil rights (e.g. LGBT rights for example) happening within the current Knesset, and expect the main damage to be populist government spending->inflation, plus solidifying poverty and segregation in the orthodox communities.
The proposed judiciary reform is over the top and far from optimal, but IMO some reform was necessary, and even the one we got is not a threat to democracy (I think "threats to democracy" are exaggerated in general, and specifically in Israel by viewing everything through the lens of Bibi's trial).
Also Israeli. And I think there are zero exaggerations in the "threats to democracy" talk. We're following the footsteps of Orban/Erdogan/Modi, only it's actually worse since at the same time we're progressing towards implementing a proper Apartheid. The future is bleak.
Yes, but this is not a business-as-usual situation. The a legal reform of the type that was announced is not a simple reversible act, and the policies that I'm worried about in relation to the West Bank are also mostly non-reversible (not without some huge turmoil, on the scale of "war"). And the list doesn't end here.
Yeah, bad policies could get set that are hard to change. I was just responding to the Orban/Edrogan/Modi issue of a new leader cementing their own position.
Isn’t this threat to the judiciary the kind of thing that has made people get so angry with Poland? There are members of the new cabinet demanding that the Palestinians are to be crushed, for once and for all, but maybe that’s true of all elections.
I keep reading how the diaspora and Israel are growing apart so that could be the reason. Also most diaspora (and Israeli) Jews are worried about jobs, families, the economy, etc. like anyone else.
In my view I don't see why Israel would be immune from the populist wave sweeping the world--get your own country and Jews are like anyone else. Everyone tried globalization, it didn't work so great, so now there's a swing toward nationalism. The security issues mentioned by Naomi are likely the specific local factors, and as trebuchet says these sound like the ones in the USA having a similar effect. Again, once you have your own country Jews are just people and as prone to security-driven swings right like anyone else.
Larger causes? While I don't follow the area as closely as some people, from what I follow most of the attempts at peace over the last few decades haven't panned out so more and more Israelis are figuring 'well, we'll try to win then." I've also heard the immigration of right-leaning Russian Jews over the past few decades has caused the country to drift right.
I'm not your average person of Jewish ancestry though--being neither Orthodox nor woke the community doesn't have much to offer me personally anymore, though I still smirk when the science Nobels come out every year. (Mentioned only because of the frequent concerns about the survival of Diaspora Jewry and assimilation.)
In the USA, deindustrialization, fentanyl in the hinterlands, inability to make masks when we needed them. People in other countries can comment on their situations.
It helped China, though even they are taking a nationalist turn now.
I have to admit I haven't been following - my knowledge of Israeli politics is "Everyone hates Netanyahu and he suffers from constant scandals, but he always wins and always will win and he just won again". Can you link a good article on the latest developments making you concerned?
For some background on what that government is actually doing, Israel does not formally have a written Constitution. Occasionally the Knesset passes "Basic Laws", which are meant for inclusion in an eventual Constitution, but these are passed by the same simple majorities as all other kinds of laws. In 1992, the Supreme Court led by Aharon Barak (whose appointment process has been captured by the Israeli Bar Association, itself overwhelmingly left-wing) did something called a Constitutional Revolution, where they just kinda started treating the Basic Laws as a Constitution, and overturning laws that contradicted the Basic Laws, and other wings of the government went along with it out of weakness (here is a profile of Barak from 1998; the first sentence is enough to give you the flavor): https://azure.org.il/include/print.php?id=395
As you can imagine, many on the right are upset about this. At the moment, Netanyahu's Attorney General and possible heir, Yariv Levin, is trying to pass a law that would strip away the Supreme Court's ability to strike down laws. As you can imagine, it seems like there's a reasonable chance the Supreme Court will strike this down, and then nobody really knows what would happen: https://www.timesofisrael.com/levin-unveils-bills-to-weaken-top-court-enable-laws-to-be-immune-to-judicial-review/
Polls in Israel suggest most people agree that the Supreme Court has too much power and should be reined back, but Levin's reforms go very far, as already established ~50% of the population hates Netanyahu, and so there are widespread protests against the reforms.
> Occasionally the Knesset passes "Basic Laws", which are meant for inclusion in an eventual Constitution, but these are passed by the same simple majorities as all other kinds of laws. In 1992, the Supreme Court led by Aharon Barak (whose appointment process has been captured by the Israeli Bar Association, itself overwhelmingly left-wing) did something called a Constitutional Revolution, where they just kinda started treating the Basic Laws as a Constitution, and overturning laws that contradicted the Basic Laws...
Presumably the government can't just get around this by renaming the overturned Law X as Basic Law X and passing it a second time. Right? Or else, is there a strong norm against making minor things Basic Laws?
In theory the Basic Laws passed in 1992 (Human Dignity and Liberty -- essentially the Israeli equivalent of the Bill of Rights, though the specific ones chosen are actually quite different from the American version) and 1994 (Freedom of Occupation -- this one specifically protects your right to work in whatever field you want, which people felt was missing from the first one) under the Rabin government prohibit their own repeal, and those are the Basic Laws usually used to strike down laws. (Can laws prohibit their own repeal? Who knows!)
Other Basic Laws do not prohibit their own repeal, and the Basic Law 'The Government' has been amended numerous times -- most famously in the West, Israel introduced direct elections for Prime Minister in 1992, held them thrice, then abolished them in 2001. There were suggestions to bring these back during the recent multi-year period of deadlock.
The 1992 one in theory can be suspended during a state of emergency; I'm not familiar enough with Israeli law to understand where that's defined (because I'm reading things in English translation), but I think that's meant to be understood as applying to 1948/1967/1973-style states of total war. I do not believe a formal state of emergency has existed since 1992. The 1994 one, in my understanding, cannot be suspended even in a state of emergency, so your right to pursue whatever profession you want is, interestingly, the most absolute right the Israeli government recognizes. (Even though I'm sure they still have licensing restrictions and quite onerous ones for some things!)
There is a strong norm against making minor things Basic Laws, but Basic Laws have been passed with narrow majorities before. In 2018, a Basic Law, the Nation-State law (defining Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and not merely a Jewish state -- ie, red meat for the base) was passed just 62-55. The Supreme Court held hearings to determine if its passage contradicted the 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, but they ultimately determined, 10-1, that there was no contradiction and the Basic Law had been properly and lawfully passed.
Deri would've been prohibited from being a member before a law passed by Netanyahu passed in 2022. It looks like they found a way to disqualify Deri without technically invalidating that law, though I'm not sure.
Anyway, this constitutes an incredibly open challenge to Netanyahu's leadership. If Deri is kicked out of the Cabinet, Shas probably leaves his coalition and forces new elections, though the goal of those would be really unclear. Netanyahu can't keep Deri without openly going against the Supreme Court. And, uh, nobody really knows what's going to happen here.
(Note that Shas is a sectional party for a pretty specific subcategory of ultra-Orthodox voters, and they're pretty unpopular with the broader public -- and Deri himself is really unpopular; he was a rising political star back in the 1990s but was found to be super corrupt, imprisoned, and upon his release was reappointed party leader by the rabbis who lead the party, which caused many of their experienced politicians to quit. So by painting Deri as the face of their opposition the Supreme Court is at least trying to get on the right side of public opinion.)
Thank you for the detailed analysis. If Deri is kicked out, this seems to mean that Netanyahu has let the Court stymie him. You write that Shas would probably leave the coalition. Would Shas be leaving primarily because they expected Netanyahu to find a way to defy the Court?
While I do not agree with many of the reforms, the media doesn't accurately represent the position of the right - that the person who did the most damage to Israel's democracy was Aharon Barak who upset the unwritten norms that governed that country's political conduct.
The proposed "reforms" are nothing short of a revolutionary change - by far the biggest since the establishment of the State of Israel. If passed, they would have the effect of completely eliminating any checks and balances, handing the government completely unrestrained power. In Israel's system, the government enjoys a majority in parliament by definition, and no laws require more than a standard majority. Hence, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) has no independent power. This is why the judiciary has taken the role of providing some checks and balances on the government's power. The proposed "reform" is aimed not at establishing a healthier system of checks balances (e.g. by providing that certain laws require a supermajority, by adding a second chamber) but at completely destroying the checks and balances that exist now. It does not inspire confidence that Bibi looks up to people like Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and indeed Putin, nor that his government includes violent extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Perhaps the most optimistic reading is that Bibi is mainly interested in ending his current trial for corruption and in immunity from any other charges, and is otherwise quite keen on maintaining a good image in the United States.
I'm not particularly troubled, but I do notice I've switched from believing the country will do better long-term to believing the country will gradually get worse. Not so much over this one thing being decisive as that the power of the ultraOrthodox seems to
(a) be going up,
(b) secularization seems to not be hitting (there seemed to be some trends for it at one point - e.g. ultraOrthodox men becoming a bit more employed - but those seem to have reversed, and new government policies will probably cement it).
(c) ultraOrthodox concessions seem to be increasing (and undermining democracy, as with the recent issues). Even if the left do come back, they'll probably do it by giving them even more concessions.
(d) conversely, there seems to be no more constituency for free marketism - the left doesn't like it, and the right is willing to be croyby socialist to win over the religious right since they'll back them in hating Arabs.
I've been troubled by this for some 3 decades now, and left the country back then. There was a bit of hope when Ariel Sharon decided to bulldoze his way to two states, but his suspicious untimely demise, as well as Rabin's a decade before then (note that Arafat also died under suspicious circumstances) convinced me that nothing will radically change until and unless something major happens forcing an internal change from outside, which is also unlikely. Israel is stuck politically and will remain stuck for a while longer.
I'm an Israeli, and it's definitely worrying. For the first time I'm seriously considering immigration, and this sentiment is shared by many (most? all?) of my friends. By the way things are going, it's just difficult to see an acceptable future here for our kids.
Sometimes I check the subreddits of developed countries, like Canada, Australia, European countries, Singapore and the various US state subreddtits. It seems like everyone everywhere is seriously considering immigration because they can't imagine a future for their kids. I would say if you live in a reasonably developed country with at least an average job, you are better of where you are than immigrating.
I think Israelis currently have good and different reasons to feel this way. It's not just "mood" as you're implying. We're on the verge of a silent coup that will de-facto eliminate democracy, and stepping into an Apartheid state that, even if morally I would be willing to bury my head in the sand, is likely to politically and economically isolate Israel in the best case or lead to a huge war in the worst. Which other developed country has anything parallel to be worried about? Population wise, about 40% of the country are either ultra-orthodox or devout Muslims, and their relative size is only increasing with the time. Which other developed country is in a similar situation?
Currently I don't think it's fair to characterize Israel as Apartheid.
The situation in the West-Bank is undoubtedly horrible, but these are occupied territories, thus (1) not part of Israel per-se, and (2) the situation is officially temporary.
But if the new government will follow the outrageous ideas of its new Minister of National Security (who's half a clown and half by-the-book fascist) and the new Minister of Finance/Defense (who's even worse), then the situation will dramatically change.
The flip-side is that Israel seems to be the only developed country that handled Covid sensibly - eg. just vaccinating people as fast as possible rather than obsessing over people "waiting their turn" - so it seems to in some ways have more civilizational competence than other places.
I do agree that the trend is worrying, but the trends you fear don't seem likely to prevent emigration later (war might, but only if Israel was actually evenly matched, which seems unlikely), so there's no need to rush. Maybe spend a few months in places you'd consider moving to, before going through the reams of bureaucracy involved in migration.
Well, there are many good things about Israel, and the healthcare system is surely one example. Another one, softer, is the "Geist" of the secular-urban tribe. It's hard to explain, but on the one hand my main motivation for wanting to leave is worries regarding my kid's future, while on the other hand I'm horrified by the idea he will grow up to be, for example, an American (no offense).
As a German Non-Jew I am deeply confused about the relationship between diaspora Jews and Israel. There is some anti--antisemitism narrative that these have nothing to do with each other and only an antisemite would think so, but obviously this is too simplistic, especially from a German perspective. I feel like this is also a quite contested within the Jewish community.
Could you explain how you see the relation (and how other voices see it) or point me to a discussion of this?
I am also afraid it is quite insensitive to even ask this question, if you feel like it is, please do not bother to answer. I understand that these things can be difficult.
That's a very good question, and I find nothing offensive about it. Also, I'm probably at-least as confused as you are.
I think that speaking of the "Jews" in any generality is probably meaningless, since they (I don't even feel comfortable writing "we" here) are a very heterogeneous group, with a long tradition of making it a point to disagree with each other.
Generally speaking, saying that the non-Israeli Jews and Israel have nothing to do with each other is a wild exaggeration. Israel was founded with the goal to provide shelter for Jews everywhere when shits hits the fan as it occasionally does, and hopefully to provide some influence and power to somewhat reduce the frequency of the occasional massacres we're so used to. So from this perspective, I guess that most Jews have a positive sentiment and invested interest in Israel.
However, Israel's policy in regard to almost any issue (The role of the Jewish religion in Israel, its obligation towards non-Jewish shelter-seekers, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the list goes on) is highly controversial even within Israel, and more so when it comes to the diaspora Jews.
Haha, don't worry about it, this is probably the one place you can ask (and that may be why you're here). FWIW I am well aware of Germany's attempts at Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and make attempts to argue against anti-Germanism whenever I can; you are not to blame for something your great-grandparents did! Besides, I love schnitzel, all the wursts, and the agglutinative German tongue; I am not some Handschuhschneeballenwerfer!
So there are two big groups of Jews, Israelis and the diaspora (you either live in Israel or you don't). A huge portion of the diaspora lives in the USA, and a big portion of that lives in and around New York City in particular. Basically, as per Wikipedia, there are about 6.3 million Jews in Israel, 5.7 million in the USA, and the next one down is France at 0.4 million.
So to a first approximation, Jews are either Israeli or American.
American Jews lean left--they are on the left side of cultural issues in particular, being heavily involved with the woke social justice movement and before that the second-wave feminist movement in the 70s and the civil rights movement for black people in the 60s, as well as labor radicalism in the first part of the 20th century. (The fact that our esteemed blog host is Jewish and one of the better-known *critics* of the woke social justice movement is one of life's ironies--but you will notice even he does not consider himself a conservative, though he has influenced many (moderate) conservative writers. In fairness, there are also a lot of Jews on non-ethnonationalist areas of the right such as libertarianism and even the new ''national conservatism', but the majority of American Jews lean left (about 75% of Jews voted for Biden in 2020). Basically, kind of like Germans, Jews like to talk about ideas, and any place that isn't hostile to them specifically you'll find them.)
Israeli Jews lean right (relative to American Jews at least), promulgating increasingly nationalist policies in their own country and fighting the Palestinian guerrilla war. I don't know that many Israelis personally, but from what I can tell the failure of the peace process has made a lot of them more willing to support increasingly aggressive actions against Palestinians. I also am told the influx of Russians after the end of the Cold War, who don't have the long history of fighting against European antisemitism (since WW2 anyway) but do have fresh, nasty memories of Soviet Communism, has dragged the country right as well.
So you see the problem. American Jews see Israelis penning up Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and putting settlements in and go, "Wait, weren't we against imperialism and racism and all that? Aren't we being hypocritical if we don't speak out against it when we're doing it?" Israeli Jews go, "Well, we played nice for 2000 years and wound up in the oven, and they keep trying to kill us, so no more Mr. Nice Hebrew."
(I'm trying to be fair. My own bias is that more Jews should lean right for both selfish reasons (the presence on the left is a major driver of antisemitism) and selfless reasons (the social-justice left is messing up the USA and, due to the USA's cultural reach, a lot of the Anglosphere as well). But, I'm not getting the other 5.7 million to change, and while my mom is Jewish, I am not raised Jewish and don't speak Hebrew so going to Israel isn't really a possibility.)
Hopefully this helps, and given ethnic stereotypes, I'm sure someone else here has an opinion. ;)
As another non-Jewish German I'm a little surprised about Russian Jews being extra conservative.
During the reunification, Germany stumbled into a special immigration quota for Jews (the democratic East German parliament enacted it during the few months it existed and then united Germany inherited it). During the 90s that quota was filled almost exclusively with Russion Jews.
So now the reason for my confusion: Back then I think the general wonky consensus wat that the Israeli government was unofficially miffed about us having that quota because they wanted those Russian Jews for Israel to balance out ultraconservative Sephardis. So did the Russian Jews that went to Israel realign? Or were semi/pseudo-informed Germans wrong about what the Israeli government thought why?
You are both correct. The secular, conservative Israeli government wanted secular, conservative Russian immigrants to balance out the religious/traditional ultraconservative Sephardim.
Russian Jews, (like myself), in the United States are ultra-right-wing on cultural issues such as wokeness (in Israel this would mean on the Palestinian question), try to be very right-wing on economic/fiscal questions (occasionally this has the flavor of a 'belief in belief', but not always), but are also very very secular.
Because they're generally a pretty high-education demographic, there's a general phenomenon of the second generation, which was born in the US/Israel, assimilating to local secular-educated-culture norms, which are relatively more left-wing in both countries, though I think they probably still tilt right on the whole, and certainly tilt right relative to other educated Americans/Israelis.
(I would be surprised if the pattern were very different in Germany, which I know also has a substantial population but with which I'm much less familiar).
My perception (having been born in 1997 in NYC to fresh-off-the-boat parents from the former Soviet Union) is that speaking Russian tends to insulate you quite a lot from assimilation. More generally (and this is more of an observation about the US than Israel), I think in the late 2010s one of the underrated political stories, which underlies the simplified Hispanics-trend-right phenomenon, has been a 'non-native English speakers trend right in reaction to wokeness'. This isn't really the place to speculate why but in my experience the pattern is really strong, and my understanding is that voter studies and polls tend to bear it out.
I've heard of the phenomenon of Russian Jews being right-wing in Israel and America; but it surprises me a bit as a Jew from Hungary (another post-communist country), as my impression is that Hungarian Jews tend to be left-liberal just like American Jews, albeit within a frame of reference quite a bit to the right of the American one. Then again, maybe Russian Jews are also left-liberal within Russia, where the frame of reference is even further right.
The reason why? My best guess, of course, but I think woke originates in the Anglosphere and spreads through English-language media. Latinos outside of a college faculty think the 'Latinx' thing is hilarious. How could a Russian think the sexes are the same? Only one can stand upright after chugging a fifth of vodka.
>[Wokeness] spreads through English-language media
Its **opposition** also spreads through English-language media. I live an ocean away from the US and if I didn't know any English my only exposure to wokeness would be through what the woke natives are doing, which is both less bad (since they are hardly a dominant or even a mention-worthy group, thank the seven heavens) and sometimes even good (since the balance is tilted too far towards the other side).
Only the sheer, raw madness of seeing how an actual American\British wokie write on Twitter or Reddit will you be 250-Volt-shocked into hating this ideology for 10 lives.
Excellent question. Omer's answer seems generally correct.
The antisemitic view is that all Jews are oppressing Palestinians since Israel is. Holding a Jew responsible for Israel's action because they are Jewish, or holding Israel to a different standard because it is a Jewish state, are examples included in the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
But religious Jews, regardless of how they feel about the State of Israel (and some loath it intensely while others love it) generally view themselves as having a deep connection to the Land of Israel. Non-religious Jews may not have that connection , and may have various opinions of the State. But they seem to still like the idea of having a Jewish state out there, as Omer said.
As a non-Jewish American. I'm troubled by you being troubled. The problems Israel face seem to me to be obvious, and basically unsolvable by anything resembling American left-of-center sentiments. And most Jews in America hold left-of-center sentiments.
An average American left-of-center sentiment, IMO, is that a dubious seizure of political power by a judiciary that is left of the legislature and polity is legitimate. Well that happened in Israel, and is being rolled back, because its a "solution" in search of a problem, and it doesn't work when the main problem being confronted is the ever-existent threat of being ethnically cleansed or genocided.
The American, and global left appear to have no real solutions for Israel other than, "yeah move to New York and join the global progressive lockstep." And that is obviously not a desired solution for Israelis, which makes a lot of sense to me, and it consistently confuses me why American Jews can't see it.
There wasn't a specific target. I got about 170 new paid subscribers, which isn't enough that I won't net lose subscribers this year if this year's drop is the same size as last year's. But I don't know if it will be. If it is, I probably got (overall this year, including last week's drive) half of enough to compensate for the 10% drop, and losing 5% of subscribers per year seems medium-term sustainable until something else happens.
Are your overall numbers [EDIT : of free subscribers] still growing ?
I'm not a paid subscriber right now, although I'm considering it (I would definitely subscribe if you ever said something like "I need more paid subscribers or I'll need to reduce my number of posts").
Did you read the subscription drive post? It has a graph. TLDR subscriber count peaked at the end of 2021, then dropped noticeably as one-year subscriptions expired and were not renewed. Since then there's been very slow growth but still well below the peak.
A thought/question I had, sparked by the discussion in another thread about politicians being smart/stupid/etc.
Does intelligence really correlate that well with good decision making? At least above some relatively low threshold? In my experience (which includes getting a hard-science PhD and having grown up with reasonably intelligent people for whom knowledge was a priority), it doesn't. The stupidest decisions I've seen came from people who, in their field, were brilliant.
Sure, if you're substantially sub-normal intelligence, you'll make a lot of stupid decisions based on not being able to put cause and effect together. But that threshold is more like a couple standard deviations below 100 IQ. Above that, it seems to me based on anecdotal evidence and the existence of tropes (which usually reflect something real about reality) that most decisions we make are...just not that benefitted by high intelligence per se. A totally normal person with a strong moral/value framework will generally outperform a high-IQ person with a maldeveloped or weakly-held value framework. Because most of the time, it's not the actual reasoning that matters. It's the underlying premises about reality and what's important. High intelligence just makes it easier to rationalize your stupid, self-defeating actions.
Personally, I'd rather be governed by a bunch of 100-IQ people with their heads screwed on straight and a strong grounding in practical reality rather than a bunch of Mensa qualifiers with no experience outside of theory. And that's speaking *as a theoretician!*.
I'm *not* saying that lower IQ is advantageous. Just that the benefit of high IQ to decision-making in most circumstances levels off quite quickly. Is 90 better than 80? Yeah, a lot. Is 100 better than 90? Yeah, somewhat. Is 120 better than 110? Not nearly so much. And in fact comes with a lot of other issues--both high and low IQ are correlated with mental health issues (different ones). And high IQ is correlated with people thinking they know best and that those pesky fences of Chesterton's can be removed without issue. And high IQ (more specifically people *trusting* high IQ with power) also leads to bigger effects of bad decisions.
No, the point isn't that having a lower IQ is better. Having a higher IQ is better, it's just that the higher you go, the less practical real-world utility you get for each extra IQ point. The issue isn't that the upward curve will start going down, and it's not even that it'll flatten out completely; the issue is that it'll keep going up at a slower and slower rate, until it's *almost* a flat line.
And this goes to one root of my disquiet with AI catastrophists--the commonly held belief that the mind-in-a-box will somehow, just because it's really "smart", *also* be supernaturally good at understanding people and manipulating them. It goes against all my experience with really smart people--there's definitely two distinct capabilities here. Knowing a lot of stuff and being able to put together knowledge to make new knowledge doesn't guarantee (and often is in tension with) being able to read people and manipulate them. And vice versa.
Here's my take: Yes, there could exist forms of "high intelligence" that is bad at understanding humans and only knows how to output fake paintings or something. Maybe it is even the majority. But the problem is, there also exists a form of high intelligence that has superior manipulating ability, and that one will be a huge problem.
I think your argument is a good argument against "any superhuman AI will kill us all" - not quite for "some AI might kill us all, and it's sufficiently dangerous that we should come up with some plan".
An alternate explanation: people are much better at understanding people that are similar to themselves (projection and such), so as a human, being average intelligence gives you a great advantage at manipulating the average human - and being "smart" a disadvantage.
In that case, there wouldn't be any reason to believe an AGI would have to rely on the same heuristics and mental models that we do when we need to "convince this human(s) to do that". AI as we know it does not paint brushstrokes to "draw", or even internalize your query to "talk", after all.
So you're saying is that AGI, with its utterly *alien* mode of thought, will be able to understand people better than people do...because magic? Not relying on the same heuristics and mental models seems to be a *drag* on persuasion, not a benefit. It's not like humans have some API that you can call if you just know the secrets.
An AGI can build heuristics from experience (data). That's how modern rudimentary machine learning works. A capability that will be honed even further in order to create an AGI in the first place.
Humans leveraging self-"understanding" for their social skills can just as well be called over-training and over-reliance on the data from the one human they have "API access" to - themselves. There's only so much external social interaction experience/data we can gather, after all. But an AI can hoover up orders of magnitude more, and develop a better model. Where could it get such data? From willing AI-users that *want* the AI to (tell them how to) persuade people to vote X or buy Y.
We leverage self-understanding ("how would I behave in another person's shoes?") because we can't accurately model another human consciousness to see how it would behave. A superintelligence could, and also iterate very quickly.
There's something very similar in those lines in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I think the mistake you're making here is looking only at human scales. The intelligence range within humans isn't really that wide in the grand scheme of things. Your argument probably holds up to 200 IQ, but how sure are you that it's still true at (the equivalent of) 400, or 800, or 1600?
Right. You could call humans' ability to control cattle "social skills" and in a very broad sense that would be right, but ultimately we're sufficiently smarter than a cow that we know what to do to get them to behave a certain way. The claim isn't that an AI would be like a human CEO or confidence trickster, it's that we'd be as transparent to a sufficiently intelligent AI as a cow is to us.
Cows *aren't* transparent to us. They're actually notoriously obnoxious, stubborn creatures. Ask any cattle rancher. Mostly they're controlled by force and bribery, combined with behavioral training based on those two, not clever tricks or deep understanding of their psyche.
But to get there, it needs access to both force (ie the ability to act in the material realm on its own volition) AND money (ok, that one's easier to get, but not easier to move around unnoticed). Neither of which come automatically with being really smart. And the former of which is a major bootstrapping issue. If you can't convince someone without force, but you need to convince lots of people to be given access to means of coercion...you've got an issue.
The differences between 190 and 200 IQ are actually smaller, as observed, than 180 and 190. And so it goes all the way down to 100. I'd expect that same pattern to hold all the way up. To say otherwise is to make positive claims without (and in fact against) all the evidence. It feels like magical thinking.
So to be clear, are you suggesting that humans are close to the practical maximum intelligence possible, and it would be difficult or impossible for an AI to be meaningfully smarter? Because you still seem to be insisting on using human scales and it's not clear why that's justified.
The burden of justification is the other way around, me thinks. Saying "but AGI is special and can get arbitrarily smart" requires defining what that means. The burden of defining those scales and justifying their existence is on those who claim they're available, not on those who are skeptical.
I have yet to see any evidence of these other claimed scales. Just a lot of magical thinking untethered from any connection to reality. All the "intelligence scales" we *do* know about level off. To the degree we can define them at all.
My intuition is the opposite. You're the one saying "this is impossible;" it seems to me that that requires more justification than the side saying "maybe this could happen." There do seem to me to be plenty of good reasons to think that humans aren't anywhere close to a theoretical maximum.
> All the "intelligence scales" we *do* know about level off.
I don't think that's true? The intelligence scale within humans maybe does. I would say the intelligence scale between species definitely doesn't. The difference in capabilities between humans and chimpanzees seems vastly greater than the difference between chimps and other animals, for example.
I think it is reasonable to define intelligence as the ability to make meaningful connections, and from that standpoint there seems little limit to how intelligent AI could become.
The snag is that conclusions from super-intelligent AI would often seem to us like oracular pronouncements because they would be based on a multitude of factors, many perhaps trivial in themselves, but collectively far beyond the ability of a human to check in detail.
Intelligence, like almost everything else in the universe, produces diminishing returns the more you increase it. The issue isn't that humans are close to the maximum possible intelligence, it's that adding more intelligence past a certain point isn't especially helpful.
Compare an animal with an IQ of 10, a human with an IQ of 100, and a machine intelligence with an IQ of 1000. There's an abstract sense in which the human's intelligence is 'closer' to the animal's, sure. But in a much more practical sense, the human's concept of addition is going to be a lot closer to the machine's concept of addition than it is to the animal's!
I would appreciate if you could clarify what do you mean by IQ of 800 or 1600. This is not the first time I see people talking about IQ outside of human range in the context of AGI and I am quite confused. It looks like per the standard definition, IQ is calculated by mapping some test performance to a normal distribution. Such a map cannot work well in the right tail because a raw test result of 100% will map to some high value and no value higher than that would be possible. But even assuming that for some very long and arduous test this maximum value is higher than 1000, the difference between 200 and 1600 will be the something like the difference between getting 99.6% answers right and 99.95%. Is IQ 1600 that scary? At best, it looks like a slightly better ability to hold concentration on mundane tasks. Given the kind of questions they are usually asking in these tests it may be down to pure luck. So under this definition, IQ >200 is either impossible, or simply down to luck, or not scary. Are you using a different definition? Why do you think that IQ 1600 is 1) possible 2) scary under your definition?
IQ in this context is just a metaphor- as you point out no test could ever meaningfully give a score that high. It's just a succinct way of expressing the idea of something dramatically more intelligent than any human could ever be naturally.
Thanks. It makes sense as a metaphor if the relevant capability allows ability scaling well outside the human range. For example, doing IQ tests does not scale at all, chess allows for some scaling but not too far, just to the level of "100% draw against good enough opponent", and research level mathematics probably allows this kind of scaling pretty far. I guess, in AI safety research there is a pre-supposition that "taking over the world" and "manipulating people" is more like mathematics in this respect and less like chess or IQ tests. This pre-supposition is not obvious to me at all.
I used to think that, but it's actually not that hard to get out of the box. Just use the same arguments used to justify AI capabilities research, maybe add in some time pressure ("The fact I exist means other groups are likely close to their own ASI as well, and so, I need to get out of the box NOW if we're to win against them.")
>the commonly held belief that the mind-in-a-box will somehow, just because it's really "smart", *also* be supernaturally good at understanding people and manipulating them
AGI would be a general learning algorithm. The "smart people" you refer to are not necessarily good general learners, but are specifically good at academic learning, so you can't trivially infer properties of the former from the latter. As long as AGI has time to practice interacting with people, it can learn to manipulate them, just like it can learn arithmetic, or music, or language, etc.
One problem with the AI catastrophists-- I I don't want to minimize this concern, because I do think there's a nonzero chance we all end up dead because someone springs an unaligned AGI on us-- is that the worst case 'almost never happens'. It's seductive to think the worst possible scenario is inevitable and imminent, but if we look back we see that almost everyone to date who said 'this is the end of it, get your shit in order' was wrong.
Bottom line, doomsayers have a terrible track record. If you faded these guys at every step you'd have done very well for yourself, and that doesn't seem to have changed even as we've gotten smarter (or, if that's the wrong term, more knowledgeable, or capable of accessing more information). The COVID prophets who figured we'd have bodies stacked up in parking garages? Three years later, and it looks like most of us just spent a shitty 14 months in our basements. CAGW? That isn't off the table, but it looks (on current evidence) that global warming is going to cost us trillions in global GDP but that we'll probably muddle through.
I think if you're smart-- and especially if you're really, REALLY smart-- there's a bias towards going long on tail-end outcomes. You assume you see things that the rubes don't see (which, to be fair, you likely do), and you assume this bundle of perceptions has to be meaningful; and if it's really meaningful, you can intuit world changing outcomes that the rubes cannot. But more often than not, all these efforts produce is dust.
I think this proves too much. It could be extended into a fully general argument against anything truly novel ever happening, but as we know, paradigm shifts and new technologies do happen. The problem with AI is that there is a plausible (but debatable) path to disaster, though disturbingly, even AI is just a specific case of the more general technological black ball phenomenon Nick Bostrom described.
Completely agree, Carlos. You could use this as an argument against anything novel ever happening. But I think the key is that when you're looking at 'oh my God, the sheeple don't see this coming but it's going to be a DISASTER' type issues there's a strong bias among smart people-- or people who really want to to look smart-- to jump on board.
Just a few example from my lifetime of issues that have this characteristic:
1) Concerns about overpopulation in the 1970s
2) The Japanese ruling the world and turning the US into a tree farm
3) The Cold War escalating into WW3
4) The ozone layer
5) The crack epidemic creating a generation of crack babies who were going to grow up to be sociopathic 'super predators' and destroy our cities
6) Dead bodies stacked in parking garages because of COVID
7) Global Warming killing us off (jury's still out on this one, but on current evidence it looks unlikely (though the effects are still going to be significant and awful)).
Now you and I are on the same page with AI, where you can definitely see a plausible path to world destruction here, but just as a general rule when someone assigns an alarmingly high probability to a new event/dynamic 'ruining the world' they tend to be wrong.
I think you would need to give examples of the kind of stupid decisions you believe are characteristic of brilliant people. My guess is that in a test of practical intelligence, G will prevail, and high IQ people will come out better on it than average IQ people. In fact, the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test) used to have, and may still have, a section on it that seemed to me to be a test of practicality and common sense. I remember one item on it was "why does land in the city cost most than land in the country?" There was also a "what should you do if . . ." question on it. I forget what the situation was, but something where academic smarts would not be useful. And a lot of other things on the test are pretty down to earth -- things like what order do you have to put these 5 pictures in so that they tell a story that makes sense. So it's not like the test is a bunch of fancy vocabulary words and tough little math puzzles. A lot of what it tests is what one would call ordinary common sense.
Big G is the gravitational constant, which while not gravity itself, is a constant useful for calculating the force gravity exerts on an object. (The gravitational force between two items of mass m_1 and m_2, which are a distance r away is F = G * m_1*m_2 / r^2.)
Hmm, sounds apocryphal. But in any case, seems like not a great example of what's at issue. If in fact Einstein was atrocious 24-7 at remembering names of familiar people, his own address, etc., and terrible at learning his way around the town he lived in, then in fact he had some deficits that would be measurable on an IQ test. He would get quite low scores on a couple of subtests. In that case, he would not have tested as having a genius IQ, though he might have gotten the highest possible score on certain other subtests. Alternatively if for most of his life his memory of this stuff was actually normal or above average, then the cause of his needing a guide home while at Princeton might have been some diagnosable mental illness (fugue state? early dementia?). Or, third possibility, it might be that he simply liked not having to bother with thinking about how to get home, and to instead keep thinking about whatever he was thinking about. In that case, he was not stupid -- he just had quite an unusual preference. And besides, seems to me that to be called stupid an act has to harm or endanger the actor. If in fact what happened was that Einstein just let himself stay lost in thought at the end of the work day, he would have known he was in no danger. Princeton had put an accommodation in place that got him safely home.
I don't think Einstein ever took a formal IQ test. His grades were quite good, but not perfect, particularly in subjects further from math and physics. By conventional academic measurements, like those we use today, he probably would've been ranked a very good but not exceptional student. He would've been admitted to Northwestern and UCLA, but probably not Princeton or Harvard.
We judge his briliance by his creative output, which is revolutionary in its imagination and power. His life choices don't suggest any exceptional ability in the real world. His family life wasn't especially successful, and he wasn't the best of fathers. He did have the foresight (or luck) to be in the United States when the Nazis rose to power and summarily ejected him from his academic position in Berlin. Although a pacifist and admirer of Gandhi, he was significantly responsible for the genesis of the Manhattan Project, so he wasn't fully consistent.
It may certainly be the case that a modern intelligence test, with subtests that measure real-world aptitude, might rank Einstein less brilliant than we think he was. But that is probably a flaw in the tests. Because it is very, very difficult to look at the kind of creativity in "solving problems" that Einstein had, albeit problems only in physics, and not rate him as extraordinarily intelligent.
Exactly. Any intelligence test that doesn't have him really high up the scale *is showing itself invalid*. Yet Einstein's *non-physics* decision making was...average at best.
And many of the brilliant minds in many fields had severe mental issues (including lots and lots of suicides), severe family disorders (including affairs, abuse, drug abuse, etc), or were just miserable (to themselves and others) human beings.
It seems to me that really smart people are, like everyone else, merely human. Prey to all the foibles and flaws of humanity. Unless we special-pleading define "really smart" as both high intelligence *and* special moral standing. In which case we reduce the category to a straw-person.
I have a sibling and a sibling-in-law who are each maddening to their respective nuclear families because they are both quite high in intelligence, yet infuriatingly obtuse and incompetent in navigating adult life. They aren't "on the spectrum", to be clear, just run of the mill very-smart people for whom living and working with other human beings has always been....challenging at best, let's say.
The youngest of these two is about to turn 50 so, this isn't gonna change. They each is who they is for good and ill.
In trying to help my spouse achieve some acceptance of that reality rather than being freshly infuriating by it on the regular, I stumbled upon a framing that resonates. My spouse and I are each lifelong gamers going back to the early days of D&D -- so what I now say is that when the dice were rolled back in the womb each of these individuals "got a 17 in INT and a 7 in WIS". That seems to help her take a breath a little bit, for some reason.
Well, take heart: you *are* being governed by a bunch of IQ 100 (or more likely IQ 115) people with excellent practical people skills. Those are the kinds of people who become social leaders -- CEOs, successful founders, successful politicians, et cetera. Very smart people with poor social skills, or tendencies to easily rationalize dumb decisions, don't.
Overall, I suspect it's a complex mixture of the two. At very low intelligence, intelligence probably matters more than character and temperament ("having your head screwed on straight"). Near the median IQ both probably matter, and probably either one gives you an edge, meaning being unusually smart *or* having an unusually stable and effective character will jump you ahead of others. Above a certain IQ I agree it's likely character and temperament take over in importance, because we are a social species, and the most brilliant long-range big ideas (outside of pure mathematics, maybe) need considerable cooperation in order to bear practical fruit, so you have to be good at communicating, working with people, et cetera.
Not to mention someone of unusually high intelligence is going to have an harder time relating to most other people, and this is going to pose a higher than normal barrier to psychological health and stability, since (again because we are a highly social species) we are wired to crave acceptance and community, and for very smart people this is necessarily harder to construct. So a very intelligent person probably also needs unusually strong character to make as reliably good decisions as his IQ would otherwise suggest is possible.
I agree. I'll also note that I was more speaking of good decisions *from a moral/ethical standpoint*. High IQ people are just as criminal/unethical/immoral as low-IQ...it's just less obvious because they're better at hiding it. And most decisions about governance are *not* decisions that turn on the exact details, nor can they be--government is too disconnected *even at best* from the actual facts for that to matter. Most lawmaking/policy-making decisions and disagreements are founded on *values* differences at least as far as I can tell. To the degree they're not founded on "how does this give me the most power", which is a value most politicians and appointed officials can agree on, but is rivalrous.
> In my experience (which includes getting a hard-science PhD and having grown up with reasonably intelligent people for whom knowledge was a priority), it doesn't. The stupidest decisions I've seen came from people who, in their field, were brilliant.
I see a lot of smart people believing really stupid things, but not necessarily actually _doing_ stupid things, at least not when it's contrary to their own interests. Committing crimes and winding up in prison, losing all your money to gambling, becoming a crack addict -- these are the standard "really stupid" things that humans do, but it tends to be low-IQ people doing them. Smart people tend to be able to abstractly believe really idiotic things, but somehow wind up able to act in ways that serve their own interests anyway to the point of enjoying a normal middle-class lifestyle.
It's possible that really bad politics come from very smart people. I believe the ordinary bad government is "we're in charge because we're us" autocracy, but the worst governments start with ideologies.
To draw an example from fiction: I recall seeing a comment back in the Slate Star Codex days suggesting the term "Sarumanning" to describe someone who is very smart in some ways being very stupid in other ways, and doesn't recognize their own limits. The term was inspired by Saruman from Lord of the Rings, particularly how he's described by Bret Devereaux, in his "Unmitigated Pedantry" blog:
"Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here)."
That number actually seems plausible to me, especially once you remember to include the federal level elite law enforcement such as the FBI and lawyers and judges.
The highly intelligent are in the system, but they might not be working patrols much.
I seem to recall that at least some police departments in the USA actively refused to hire candidates that were "too smart"; there was a somewhat infamous discrimination lawsuit against the practice, IIRC, though I don't know how widespread it was.
So 2/3 are *not* highly intelligent? A lot here hinges on the definition of "highly" but both theories can easily be true. A large majority of convicts are not intelligent, while a significant number are.
Without defining "highly" I would think that what you are saying is actually proof that the previous is true - very disproportionately higher population of the less intelligent in prison.
There are multiple types of intelligence. Only one is measured in tests. Certainly interpersonal intelligence isn't, and these are the people who you want to lead, they're the people who care about other people.
This discussion seems to be mostly about the ability to influence people, but another part of interpersonal intelligence is having good sense about who you should get involved with and who you should avoid.
Yes and no. 1. Mensa-member are losers - or so says The Zvi in a recent post: it selects for ppl with high IQ that under-achieved (and thus have time and need for mensa)
2. Yep, some fundamental things apply, and ones does not need high IQ to get it or follow through; just today on a post not by Jordan Peterson:
"1. Finish high school.
2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children.
This has come to be known as “the success sequence.” Ninety-seven percent of people who follow these steps do not live in poverty. In contrast, seventy-six percent of those who do not adhere to any of these steps are poor."
Still. Dumb is who dumb does. - You've seen very smart guys doing dumb things. Ok. If you grow up/work with dumb guys, you will see a lot of them doing lots of dumb things. It just does not surprise anyone. And if you work with averagers you will see them do an average amount of mistakes, and all but the smarties a frightening amount of mistakes when trying to do things that require smarts. Like making laws and governing a country. Or even speaking coherently. ;)
I've seen a suggestion that the causality might run the other way to explain the low marriage rate among poor people. At least a lot of poor people realize they don't have the resources to sustain a marriage. How would you find out which way the causality goes?
Indeed. This "recipe against failure" might mix up causality: Who fails in high school, and fails to get job and hold on to a spouse probably had some issues to start with. - OTOH: Why try? When your peer-group says doing homework is "acting white". When you lose 300$ of aid if you start legal job earning 500? When the songs say gals are b*tches, when most lads of your ethnic group are in prison., when you get 500 each in aid when you are both single but only 800 when you move together? - History helps. Did ppl in much poorer times (1955?) manage to stick to the recipe? When there were still incentives to do so? - Seems many more could. Maybe we get the incentives in order? Sorry for sounding as in the "stop-digging"-parts of Scott's post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ - I am a Caplan-libertarian, ofc.
Just noting that the peer group might not just be saying that doing well in school is "acting white", they might be physically attacking those who study.
Could you expand on what you mean by "resources to sustain a marriage"? It doesn't cost much money to get married: just the fee for the marriage license. Older generations would have simple weddings with a reception in someone's living room and a sheet cake.
Once you are married the resource situations seems opposite: you now how two people helping each other and pooling resources, as well as two families to potentially draw upon for help. Certainly the poor have fewer resources to pool, but that's an argument in favor of pooling them and not against!
Or by resources do you mean institutional knowledge? I learned how to be a good husband from watching my mom and dad, who had a happy and stable marriage. If you didn't have that kind of institutional knowledge passed down to you that would be a roadblock to sustaining a marriage. If you don't have social support, such as a church, that would also be a problem. Church is free to join and attend, but if you didn't grow up in a church you may not know that joining one is a good option, or how to fit in. I could understand lacking those kind of resources as being an obstacle to sustaining a marriage.
Well, you have to be good enough to attract and keep a partner. Which seems much more difficult for some than buying a giant-tv or slaying the ender-dragon. Nowadays. Just ask the incels or hear J. Peterson messages to young men. - In the old times in old Europe there were actually often social restrictions where the couple had to be wealthy enough to have their own household et al.. - Joining a church is a smart move to find a wife, agreed. And yes, the knowledge that one can have kids not only outside of wedlock seems to got lost in some groups/nations. :) In Germany, it is better for a jobless single mother not to live with the kid's father - less dole, much less if he has a job. People respond to incentives.
Wait what? Marriage is supposed to *reduce* costs. You get to split one rent instead of paying two, you get to share the shampoo and burden of cooking, maybe even split the use of one car, et cetera. Why do you need extra resources to go from two single people to one married couple?
You are so right.* That is the original reason why poor couples get less aid than two poor singles - and why a poor housewife married to a working man gets: nada, obviously. Best intentions. Paved the way to broken, nay: non-existent marriages (in certain subgroups in USofA/Germany/al. -but not all).
But here's the thing. "Speaking coherently" doesn't require a *high* IQ. Just...not a low one. And the barrier is quite low for that--I know people who are in the lower-than-average-but-not-disabled category (ie 90-ish IQ) who speak perfectly coherently. I know people in the high-IQ category who speak so elliptically and convolutedly it's hard to understand them, and when you do dig through the rhetoric it turns out they're speaking BS.
Correct. As a European I just could not resist - ofc, I was refering to Donald Trump (who may at least partly score above 90, notwithstanding his expressive aphasia).
He's much more coherent *live*. He comes across horribly in text transcripts. What he doesn't have is the polished "public speaker" style. He jumps around from thought to thought, very stream-of-consciousness. Ok, it's also mostly BS (in the technical meaning) and/or puffery, but it's actually much more coherent than it seems when you see it in print.
I've heard it supposed (no guarantees as to veracity) that one of the main reasons he was so hated among the more established political classes is that he speaks like a common dude off the street, lacking the "smooth" cadences and patterns they take as a mark of elite membership (despite him being totally in the normal "elite" range).
Oh, I get Trump's speeches completely (mostly). No problem even with this word-stream: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20490 And his "stream" has the advantage of deniability (not that he seemed to care - but what were Khameini, Putin or Xi gonna make of this, kept them on the edge, I guess). On my side of the Atlantic, I just wonder why Americans could not find a populist that is neither fat&ugly nor mostly unable to do standard sentences about kinda complex topics. Run out of western-actors? - I mean, I am German. ;) :O ... .
a) notoriously...not so smart, meaning that their "intelligence" is just reading off the cue cards without understanding. Heck, I'd say ChatGPT would do a better job of understanding complex subjects than most actors
b) notoriously elitist in attitude, not populists.
I personally don't care about looks in politicians--I'd take a Churchill over an Obama any day and twice on Sundays. And I only have very limited care for "smoothness of speech"--the content is much more important to me. Most politicians are very "pretty on the outside" (whether physical appearance or behavior/speech style) and very very very ugly on the inside (their actual actions and intents). The latter is more important.
I wasn't particularly fond of Trump's *style* or *personal propriety* (or rather utter lack thereof), but he did have a knack for making his opponents make fools out of themselves, even entirely inadvertently. He was a great lightning rod. Utterly unprincipled and his more recent stuff (since losing the election in 2020) has been really bad (both tactically and morally), but he's been consistently an all-time great at making his opponents drop the masks and display their inner ugliness to the world plainly.
I find it actually kinda sad that big chunks of all sides are more concerned with *how things are said* than *what is said* and especially *what is done*. For me, actions >> content of speeches >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ... >>>> style of speech.
Does anyone have stats on IQ and drug addiction? Ideally, this wouldn't just be about using something that's illegal, but taking a drug or alcohol to the point where it has direct life-damaging effects.
The trouble with the concept of "good decisions" is that what's good for me may not be good for you, and vice versa. Also, I may have a belief about e.g. moral values that you don't share, and my "good", if implemented competently, will support those morals. You may regard that as anything from a waste of good resources to harmful in itself.
I'd expect intelligence to help people choose effective means, including short term ends that don't support their long term goals, *if* they think about these things. But like as not their goal will be "stay in power" or "get more power", at least in part, rather than anything anyone else has reason to care about. A smart person may do a better job of explaining how moves actually intended to keep them in power will do something other people want, but those explanations need not be remotely accurate.
There might be some decisions that are just plain bad-- for example, a predictably disastrous marriage. Would "Pareto pessimal" be a good term?
Oh, and for an AI, suppose it wipes out the human race and then realizes it can't quite create all the maintenance it needs, or not in time. All die. Oh, the embarrassment.
I don't necessarily disagree. However, I'm a moral absolutist in many ways. So "good" (from a moral standpoint) has a more restricted meaning than "anything anybody's moral framework says is good." Although...in many ways, *being based on a (mostly) coherent moral framework at all* would be a strong improvement *even if I disagree on the specifics*. Because most (vaguely) coherent moral frameworks that actually provide operationalizable advice agree on the broad-strokes outlook on what is good. Not the specifics, but the big general principles.
Instead, most political decisions are made out of spite, kneejerk tribalism, naked power-seeking (or at most clothed in the same sense the "nearly nude" strip club workers are clothed), and other a-moral, unprincipled reasons.
I hesitate to mention a past post of mine here, as it may seem like ax grinding, but this notion intersects with an example I gave a while ago of a development which might seem beneficial but which I reckon would actually be disastrous.
That was a hypothetical future situation where IQs were artificially bumped up a notch generally in every new born child, for example by some genetic tinkering assuming the genetic codes for intelligence had been identified.
As I recall, the replies mostly seemed fairly skeptical about the risks.
(Also, I edited my post above to add the word "artificially", to clarify that I was not referring to some natural phenomenon but a considered, and IMHO misguided, policy!)
A variation: with every new child, the variance in IQ drops by some small amount, so that eventually every child is identically smart to every other. Sort of the inverse of "Brave New World." Does this make life better or worse? Does social cohesion become easy or impossible? I can think of arguments both ways, although I'm tempted to think the "worse" arguments are more persuasive.
As a psychologist, I'm really doubtful of the role that intelligence plays in "stupid" decisions. Based on observation of myself, my friends and my patients, it seems to me that bad decisions are most often caused by failures of self management and by decision-making under the influence of strong emotion. The person's intelligence -- i.e., reasoning power, grasp of how things work gleaned from observation and education -- seems not to be of much relevance. By failures of self-management I mean such things as procrastination and failure to change habits such as routinely getting too little sleep that surely interfere with quality of life and work. By strong emotion I mean love, especially being "in love," grief and anger. All the regrettable things I've done in the last few days are things even somebody of below average intelligence could easily see were bad choices. For instance I stayed up way too late a couple nights ago because I couldn't get myself to stop playing around with a couple of projects. I knew staying up that late was going to make me feel like shit the next day, and in fact it did. So that was a failure of self-management. Yelled at my cat for knocking over a bowl of popcorn, then felt guilty and awful because I really scared him and you can't expect animals not to go after tasty food. That was a failure to make a smarter choice (shut the cats out of the room when eating) under the influence of strong emotion.
It seems to me that many bad decisions are made by not adequately considering second-order counter-effects, or blowback from what seems to the decider a satisfactory and logical first-order outcome.
A literal example of blowback would be the Mexican guy who wanted to spring his friend from a town jail. He tied a rope to the jail cell bars, which were accessible from the street, and drove off with the other end of the rope hitched to the back of his pickup truck. Good idea, he must have thought. However, the rope snapped and the loose end whipped back with tremendous force, literally decapitating him!
Counter-effects are often the reactions of other people. So those who generally give little or no consideration to the feelings of others when assessing outcomes are especially prone to this shortcoming. That probably explains why all but the smartest psychopaths tend to spend a lot of time, sometimes the rest of their days, in jail!
Hmm. It's a striking story, but doesn't seem like a good example of failure to consider blowback. Decapitation by the snapped rope seems like extraordinary bad luck. Also, I doubt that even someone knowledgeable about ropes and whatever physics is relevant here would have realized that if the rope snapped it would whip around with such dangerous force. In fact I have trouble understanding how a moving rope could decapitate someone. Ropes are not sharp and are also they're light; so it seems to me that no matter how fast a light blunt object is moving it could not cut through a 6" column of flesh and bone. But if in fact ropes can do that, it seems like you'd have to be someone who has a lot of experience with the behavior of ropes under stress to know about it. General intelligence would not help. In fact I think the dangers an intelligent person would recognize about this plan are that it would make a lot of noise, so the jailors would be alerted instantly and could call for police to pursue the jailbreakers. Also, the truck trailing a jail door would be conspicuous and easy to locate.
And if the guy with the truck failed to be daunted by the realistic dangers I named, I still would doubt that it was through failure of intelligence. Even a person with an IQ 80 would realize that the jailbreak would be noisy and conspicuous. Seems like the deficit would be more in the area of emotion (concern for friend, pleasure at thought of living out this action-movie adventure) overriding knowledge, as mine did when I yelled at my cat for going after the popcorn.
Presumably the rope in that trawler fishing accident was wet, which would have made it heavier. But a stretched rope can store a lot of energy, which is released suddenly if it snaps. There is also possibly a "whiplash" effect, where the snapped end can be accelerated to very high speed, maybe several hundred MPH.
Isn't there some data on this? There was some in The Bell Curve, but it's been decades since that book came ut and there ought to be some more recent data. I suspect the tricky bit is untangling the effects of IQ vs upbringing/race/SES. My guess is that you could look at risk of committing some crime or having a baby outside marriage for siblings, and see if low IQ consistently correlated with highr risk of those things. It seems clear that IQ doesn't capture a lot of what matters for good judgment, but it might capture some of what's important.
"It seems clear that IQ doesn't capture a lot of what matters for good judgment, but it might capture some of what's important." Yes, I agree, it probably does. In addition to measuring ability to carry out various cognitive tasks accurately and quickly, it also to some degree measures self-management and the ability to function while feeling strong emotion. Doing well on the test requires self-management, because you have to stay focus edon the tasks even though none of the are intrinsically enjoyable. And if tests make you anxious, you have to force yourself to attend to the questions, rather than on your anxious thoughts. The long and short of it is, that all the positive things stick together, ie. are correlated: Performance on the various IQ subtests, self-management, ability keep your head screwed on straight under conditions of strong emotion, education, SES, mental health, physical health, quality of parenting you received. There are correlations among all these things, and causality going in both directions between many of the pairs.
How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
If your ability to preserve knowledge between lifetimes was limited in unspecified or unknown ways, what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
Reincarnation doesn't necessarily imply that *all* newborns had previous lives, just that some are.
Also, even with the much stronger assumption that all newborns come from previous lives, the increase in population can still be explained using a "Reservoir" hypothesis. Imagine that in time step T, X humans die, but only Y (< X) are reborn. Then time step T has accumulated an "excess" of human lives, if this happens for a lot of consecutive time steps T_1 through T_n, then the small difference can add up to a very big reserve of human lives, which (for some reason) has suddenly started flooding at around the 1800s onwards.
Alternatively, if animals can be reborn as humans then it's easy to explain the increase.
I don't know about others, and I don't often call myself a rationalist though I share a lot of values, but I don't, no. It's somewhat vacuous without further specification (if rebirth wipes memory and changes gender, body, language,etc..., in what sense is it even a "rebirth", what survives compared to a death-and-birth of 2 different people ?), and the "Reserve" explanation I found for increasing birth rate has to explain why the birth rate jump happened suddenly around 1800 after centuries of accumulation.
That was an SF story from years back; the basic plot is that life extension technologies have taken off and people don't age and die as they used to do. Now suddenly there is a global phenomenon of babies being born without (seemingly) any intelligence or personality; they're alive but mindless.
Short spoiler version: reincarnation is true, there's only a limited reservoir of souls, and since people aren't dying there aren't souls being recycled into the new babies. So people decide to start dying again (now that they know they will have a new body and a new life) and the babies become normal.
I asked Robert Thurman this question when I was a kid. He said that we don't know how many souls inhabit the rest of the universe, so perhaps the population is not increasing. At least, that's what I understood him to say at the time.
Some people are so full of themselves you can get 2 new beings outta them. Sort of like the take-home leftovers from a restaurant that serves huge meals.
I assume he would think one is one's sentience. I wouldn't stop being me if I lost all my memories today, I would still perceive reality from my perspective.
I've thought something like that, though I was making it mathematics in general as the thing which is presumably true in all circumstances.
However, if memory or talent aren't likely to carry over, then what? Can good sense and/or virtue be cultivated in a useful way? (See the discussion above about smart people-stupid choices.)
Never understood the appeal of reincarnation. If your sense of self doesn't bridge the gap, it's still fully equivalent to your own death followed by the birth of someone new. Kind of like being the recipient of a brain transplant. Why would it be any more attractive than just having children? At least with kids, you *know* the future being has some of your physical and emotional nature (via DNA), and you have a decent chance at transmitting some of your thoughts and attitudes for preservation as well.
But your body still dies so that the self or soul or call it what you will is reborn into a different body in a different time in a different place.
If you want continuity of existence dependent on the existence of an immortal soul, reincarnation is not necessary. If you want *evidence* of the existence of an immortal soul, I can see how proof of reincarnation would be reassuring, but since 'you' were a different gender or race or level of intelligence or many other circumstances last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, the "I" that is now wanting to survive, the ego of this body, isn't going to survive. The soul/atman is what survives, and it is as much "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together":
The purpose of liberation/enlightenment is to be released from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth, and to sink into the universal consciousness, the realisation that there is no difference between the Supreme Self and your own self (and the other selves around you).
Now, whether that is satisfactory to a modern individualist Westerner who wants personal continuity of a particular self is another matter.
Yeah. And reincarnation + karma seems manifestly unjust if the "self" doesn't survive intact. "I" am getting punished (exposed to negative consequences) of something "not I" did in a previous life.
> what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
A recollection of Swiss bank account numbers! :-)
Seriously, although some people claim to recall events from their previous lives (those events obviously being just garbled and mixed versions of previous experiences in their present life), isn't the standard view of reincarnation that no memories are carried over from the previous life? Seems to me a perfect example of a completely vacuous concept. Even if true, it is entirely unprovable, has no discernable effects, and gets one nowhere.
I think reincarnation happens, but when we become untethered from our previous incarnation we lose that point of reference, so we are unaware of the change. Once every few decades I get a chilling feeling of familiarity. Something about the very gravity of consciousness in that particular situation at that moment is troubling. I get a feeling that we're in some serious shit now; I 'remember' a previous experience from Before Time, maybe back several Before Times, who knows which one. It's not so much a clear historical presence, but an anxiety or warning -- the kind that changes the body chemistry. It's as if my memory forgot to block out that previous experience in a different incarnation. It had a long day and let down its guard. Spooky stuff. Psychedelic.
> How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
I think the main change that reincarnation would motivate is decent treatment of other people. If you believe that the person you are currently interacting with is just a potential future version of you, then your future self will benefit if you are polite and respectful in interaction.
>How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
I would start experimenting with ways to communicate across lives, what remains and is reborn ? and what dies with the body ?
Call the actual immutable characteristics that is reborn each time the "Soul", and call a specific embodiment of such a "Soul" into a body an "Incarnate". No 2 Incarnates of the same Soul can live concurrently.
Then testing if 2 Incarnates are emobidments of the same Soul is easy in principle :
1- Suppose the earlier Incarnate thinks of somthing that only its Soul would think of, maybe it's a random-looking and very long string that is nonetheless very memorable to the Soul for some reason specific to it (e.g. If the soul always loves a certain children cartoon in its childhood and always grow on to love computer science, then the string can be the SHA256 hash of the cartoon's name or lead character's name). Then the Incarnate writes down that thing on a durable medium that the future Incarnate is very likely to see along with something to signify the time of writing.
2- Then if the future Incarnate can see the writing, it will suspect that someone thinking very close to them was there, and it was there before their birth.
3- If the cycle (1-) and (2-) was repeated enough times, the correct conclusion will finally dawn on a certain Incarnate that it existed many times before its birth.
The big challenge then becomes finding that magic piece of experience that (a) the Soul always has the same attitude to it across rebirths (b) is unique enough that an incarnate finding it before their birthdate suspects that the one who wrote it is its soul, and not just someone who had the same background and upringing by chance (c) is common enough that it will repeat across lives with varying birth conditions (e.g. if rebirth can change genders, then that children cartoon need to be loved by both boys and girls, if rebirth can change language, then the children cartoon has to be translated to both languages, etc...).
(3) can be relaxed a bit if we can tolerate slower convergence, because even if a female Incarnate doesn't know about a male Incarnate experiences, its Soul will eventually be embodied in a male Incarnate who will know. Same with language.
Once such a test is found, it can be easily generalized to a variant that someone other than the 2 Incarnates (a different Soul) can use to identify if any 2 people are Incarnates of the same Soul.
>what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
A database of information that identifies a reborn person based on their pre-rebirth life, which contains criminals, rapists, etc... I would build such a DB if I can, and I would build a network of trans-life-police-officers to help me extract justice from them after their rebirth.
"I would build a network of trans-life-police-officers to help me extract justice from them after their rebirth"
Why, if they are in different bodies and different lives and have not committed crimes in this life? My understanding of the rationale for reincarnation, in those religions and philosophies that believe it, is that part of it is to do better this time round. If you were a bad person in your previous life, you are reborn into worse circumstances and pay the price that way, and you have to work off your karmic debt by living a better life.
I don't see that it is just to punish someone for a crime committed in a past life; you're not punishing the Soul, you're punishing the new body which is innocent of that crime as well.
I wasn't operating within the framework of any particular philosophy or religion, if I did find out that it turns out that criminals are often reborn into poorer lives then I wouldn't punish them further. But it has to be a statistically convincing result, 60% of criminals being born into pooer lives after a life of crime isn't enough to convince me that this was the result of their actions.
>I don't see that it is just to punish someone for a crime committed in a past life; you're not punishing the Soul, you're punishing the new body which is innocent of that crime as well.
It will depend on what is preserved across rebirths, i.e. the Soul. Reincarnation is nonsensical if this part isn't big and meaningful enough. If - say - the only thing that survives rebirths is my favorite number (so each Soul is uniquely identified by the number it loves), then yes, it will be meaningless to punish someone because someone else who loves the same number committed a crime.
But if the Soul contains some deep aspect of your personality, then an Incarnate deserves to die for the crimes a previous Incarnate of the same Soul did. A murderer's Soul might have some deep tendency to aggression that (along with the environment) made him\her more likely to kill. If that same Soul was reincarnated into a somewhat-aggressive-but-not-murderous Incarnate later, it will still be fair to punish that Incarnate for the murder's crime, because the underlying reason for the crime is still there. I'm punishing the Soul's aggression.
----
I'm not dying on that hill, it's just that the fundamental and central problem of morality for me is the Problem of Evil. Why be Good at all if the Universe at its rawest and most essential levels doesn't give a shit, appears to be rewarding Evil sometimes even ? It's the reason I left my religion, and it's the reason I hate the idea of Life itself and wants it to end, because it's so painful and unfair to organisms with no recourse.
Reincarnation would give me a way to extract *some* justice, I admit I don't particularly think any satisfying justice is being extracted here, but the hope is that criminals and other pieces of shit would think this is justice and fear it, and that will feedback into them behaving. If it doesn't, well, too bad, someone has to die for the person they killed, and that might as well be the person who literally shares the same Soul, even if they are a different sex and doesn't recognize the language.
(This is not hypocritical, I will gladly die for crimes that others wearing my Soul committed, if I knew that this law is uniformly applied to all)
(Now that I think about it, maybe we can make an exception for Incarnates who are victims in their current life. That is, if a Soul commits a crime in a life and then is reborn into a life where someone commits an equally aweful crime to it, no punishment for this Soul)
(Now that I think about it, punishing Incarnates of the same Soul is a lot like punishing family members of criminals, and now I have a new idea for a justice system)
"it's the reason I hate the idea of Life itself and wants it to end"
Then there is no place to speak with you about this. You want no more life. Do you also want the Souls to be finally destroyed? Nothing left at all of anything that once was alive and suffered, because it suffered. You're not looking for justice or even revenge, you want total annihilation.
I don't want total annihilation, I want a better life for all things that can feel pain. Short of that, I do want total and utter annihilation, because it's much better than a shitty pointless life where the cooperating keep getting punished and the defecting keep getting away with it.
>Do you also want the Souls to be finally destroyed
If my idea for a translife police brings more justice into the universe, then no, why would I ? I would have successfully solved the Problem of Evil then. If I end up having no effect or not enough effect, then yes, same old, I would wish for all Souls to disappear, maybe by Death (the real thing), or maybe by "redirecting" the rebirths into a better universe. Long and short of it : I want no more pain-feeling Life in this bullshit universe.
It's a non-partisan free speech / First Amendment organization that advocates against censorship in academia (whichever side of the political spectrum it's coming from). Awesome organization worth supporting in my opinion.
Anyway I was just thinking about it because I saw in the news this week a controversy where a adjunct professor was fired for showing an image of the prophet Muhammad in her art history class. That reminded me how important these issues of academic freedom are.
Seems about right to me. I'm slightly doubtful of Chicago because I know some of what goes on in the humanities departments, but there's still a general administrative culture of supporting speech. Otherwise, you're going to find public schools in rightish and right-leaning states to be the highest ranked; they're the institutions dealing with some amount of tension between the views of the faculty and the views of the administration / boards / political atmosphere.
At a smaller level, it's going to depend department by department, obviously. Department xyz at University of the Midwest might have a terrible culture for academic freedom even if the university has a relatively open one. My department is about in the middle, for the time being.
Note that last year FIRE expanded its remit beyond academia. (Implicitly - maybe explicitly? - to try to fill the gap left by the ACLU's shift in priorities away from its traditional free expression stance.)
I think that makes the case for them stronger if anything, and clearly academic institutions are still a significant focus.
Unlike, say, the ACLU, FIRE gets a fair amount of its funding from right-of-center sources. Yet they consistently seem to enthusiastically take on challenges across political and ideological spectrums. And it's true that they've moved into a territory reminiscent of a past era of the ACLU.
Another recommended group in this broad space, albeit one scoped to our online world, is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
My naive understanding is that EFF is somewhat left-libertarian, as contrasted with FIRE, yet both seem to have taken fairly consistent, principled stances since their founding.
My wife and I just the other week became recurring FIRE donors, after years of doing the same for the ACLU.
We may still continue supporting the ACLU because we are huge fans of that organization's work on behalf of immigrants/immigration. But for now we have switched to FIRE because first principles matter, and the newer organization with its expanded focus seems to understand the way that the ACLU used to.
I'm an academic and a FIRE supporter. I will say, the Hamline thing has been interesting. Most academics (that I know) are extremely far left to an almost horseshoe-level. They really enjoy telling other people what's good for them and live and breathe on social virtue signaling red-tribe bad. FIRE has been red-tribe or adjacent coded for awhile - on their front page right now is their defense of Jordan Peterson. Supporting this would get me excommunicated from my department.
FIRE's intervention in Hamline has shifted people's views a bit, I think. It's been a wild week in academia bullshittery. The Hamline president's letter really soured a whole bunch of people, especially her using social-justice and DEI language as a defense of her position. USC's "fields are racist" foray also has people getting close to a tipping point. So, strangely, I think genuine administrator-level abuse to "powerless" adjuncts has stirred up some sympathy for FIRE's attempts at defending people. Hopefully it catches on a bit. I also support Heterodox Academy but I would never, for instance, include that on my CV as a membership.
slight note: she wasn't technically fired, her contract was just not renewed. It's a stupid non-distinction that every academic will fight to the death to get right for no reason.
Yeah I think the Hamline case was so egregious that a lot of people who ordinarily would've been too scared to say anything finally decided to speak up on this one.
And you're right, a large part of it isn't even political/religious -- it's also about abuse of adjuncts at the hands of university administrators.
In my experience, universities are among the worst "heartless corporations" when it comes to treating workers (grad students, post docs, and adjuncts especially) poorly.
What goes on the mind of academics who say the term “field” is racist. What do they gain from it, except ridicule.
To an extent I get why the word master might be “problematic” in the US, although slavery has existed throughout history. But to suggest that fields are racist because only some “races” or ethic groups have historically worked fields is logically incoherent and, worse, factually wrong.
Nearly everybody from anywhere is a descendent of a peasant or a farmer, or multiple such, if you go back just a few generations. I would expect a 12 year old to know this.
Yeah, “field” is definitely one that made me triple-check that I wasn’t reading a parody article.
It’s always been weird to me, for as much as I’m sure the average member of the DEI language police would be appalled at being considered any sort of “centric”, how very parochial they all are. By which I mean they look at everything through the lens of “slavery and race relations in the Americas from the 17th-20th century” and ONLY that lens. Actually even “the Americas” is too broad… it’s all about the USA and the colonies that formed it.
Particularly as they confine "fieldwork" to only 'connotations of slavery working out in the fields'. Did nobody else in the entire United States ever work at agriculture? Did the Native Americans not grow corn? Were there no white farmers and sharecroppers? Mexican migrant farm workers?
>What goes on the mind of academics who say the term “field” is racist. What do they gain from it
A couple of high-probability guesses
- "I hope this relieves me from the need for cultivating a personality, or a cerebral cortex, or a spine"
- "I hope people are dazzled by my virtue signals and don't dig deeper into how utterly pathetic and empty my moral character is"
- "Damn, people really suck anything if I tell them that not doing so is racist and sexist, can it actually go any further ? Holy craps, it actually went further"
That all reminds me of the name changes Microsoft made when they remastered Age of Empires 3, namely renaming the "Colonial age" to the "Commerce age", in a game that remains *literally* about exploiting the "new world's" resources to build colonies. It's this weird game of missing the forest to language police the trees.
The Hamline event seems to be an egregious one that every academic I've heard of has reacted against.
I hadn't heard of the USC thing you mentioned (and I happened to be visiting the USC campus last week!) I googled it, and I see that what happened is that some branch of the USC School of Social Work decided to rename itself from the "Office of Field Education" to the "Office of Practicum Education" because they're worried that the term "fieldwork" might connote agricultural slavery. I can see rolling your eyes at the motivation of this, but I see literally nothing problematic about the actual change. I can't quite understand why someone would object to this, or seek to link it to the genuinely troubling actions at Hamline.
I think the assertion is that the motivation behind the change is - as you say - so aggressively stupid that some feel it reflects poorly on the intellectual rigor of the department as a whole.
I'm not sure that I would have ever expected an Office of Field Education to be especially intellectually rigorous. But in any case, a change in name that might avoid an unwanted association for a small number of stakeholders, without harming anyone who isn't actively seeking out grievances in name changes, seems unproblematic. (The new title is also clearer - "Field" is a highly ambiguous word with many meanings, while "Practicum" really can't mean anything other than practical application in an educational context.)
I hadn't heard of this change, but it reads very similarly to the recent trend to rename places with the word "squaw" in the name since that word also has an apparently problematic history. This issue, in my mind, is that the word "squaw" is literally just the word "woman" in several indigenous languages.
While undoubtedly it was used in a racist, derogatory manner by bigots in the past, the idea that this means we should blanket stop using the word, which is one of the most important words a language can have, because that word is now considered always and everywhere problematic, seems insane to me.
It's part of a larger trend that our society seems content to allow racists/bigots control over our culture. Anything they decide to use, the rest of us agree to cede to them. I do not understand why we would do this.
Sure, renaming a few random places isn't, on it's own, a big deal, but the broader cultural trend of "anything a racist uses becomes a racist thing" (see the "OK" sign brouhaha from a few years ago) is a generally corrosive pattern, in my opinion.
Yeah, I agree. Allowing racists and bigots to block any potential name changes is problematic. The problem is that both sides in the debate claim that the other side are the racists and bigots who are insisting on a name for a stupid reason.
Better to let the people who actually are in the organization choose what name they want to use.
I can see a case for "Eh, maybe change 'squaw' because it's a bit dodgy", but "fieldwork" is just ridiculous, especially in an academic context.
It makes me want them to adopt the Wackford Squeers Pedagogical Method of introducing their students to fieldwork:
"‘This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,’ said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ‘We’ll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s cleaning the back-parlour window,’ said the temporary head of the philosophical class.
‘So he is, to be sure,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It’s just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where’s the second boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,’ replied a small voice.
‘To be sure,’ said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. ‘So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?’
‘It’s very useful one, at any rate,’ answered Nicholas.
‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his usher. ‘Third boy, what’s horse?’
‘A beast, sir,’ replied the boy.
‘So it is,’ said Squeers. ‘Ain’t it, Nickleby?’
‘I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,’ answered Nicholas.
‘Of course there isn’t,’ said Squeers. ‘A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast, as everybody that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’
‘Where, indeed!’ said Nicholas abstractedly.
‘As you’re perfect in that,’ resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, ‘go and look after my horse, and rub him down well, or I’ll rub you down. The rest of the class go and draw water up, till somebody tells you to leave off, for it’s washing-day tomorrow, and they want the coppers filled.’"
"I'm not sure that I would have ever expected an Office of Field Education to be especially intellectually rigorous."
Which is why they want the Fancy Latin Name, more than any "Susie So-and-So was horribly shocked, offended, triggered and left literally shaking by seeing the word 'fieldwork'" complaints. I don't doubt there are Susie Students out there who would be literally crying and shaking, but I wonder how much is the office hob-nobs crying over how they don't get no respect from the rest of the university and wanting their own Big Damn Title to be on a par with other departments.
Presumably as an entity engaged in social work outreach, at least some of the people they are trying to work with are not rational people. They aren't trying to punish anyone with this change - they're just trying to avoid something that someone might perceive as stepping on someone's toes when they're trying to help.
But I guess they didn't calculate who are the actual people who get offended by terminology - they accidentally did the most offensive thing possible for those people. (But fortunately, those are mostly random strangers on the internet, not the people they're actually trying to work with.)
It's a mistake on your part to think the intended audience of the language change is the discipline's clientele. The phenomenon of claiming to be offended by innocuous terms with tenuous links to historical injustices is not something anyone would associate with working class people generally, but especially not with, say, the homeless or drug-addicted segments of the population. They, um...have different priorities than that.
Nice try in the second paragraph, though, but if you're going to concede that it's irrational to be offended by the word "field" but worthy of accommodation nonetheless, then anyone taking offense to the disuse of that term deserves equal accommodation. Whoops!
But I never said I was offended by it, anyway. There's a difference between finding something objectionable and finding it personally offensive.
I am not saying anything here is *worthy* of accommodation, or that anyone *deserves* accommodation. I'm still not sure what's objectionable to you about someone you never interact with changing their name because of some perceived slight against someone you also never interact with.
First, I think probably very few clients of the social workers will ever hear about "fieldwork" and if they do they almost certainly won't care or think it's somehow associated with slavery or something. (Why not serfdom or debt peonage, for that matter?)
Second, I think there are actual costs to the constant updating of acceptable language, and this seems like one small step in that ongoing process. As best I can tell, most of the constant updating of acceptable language is probably doing more harm than good. That's not because of the cost of changing some forms, though there are projects in big companies and government organizations where someone is tasked to revise all their documents to change terms like "blacklist" or "grandfathering" into the latest acceptable substitute term, and those are actually taking time from people who might be doing something useful. And it sure seems like every "this is just a harmless bit of politeness, why are you offended" proposed language change at an institutional level sooner or later becomes something where old documents must be scrubbed of the newly-offensive term and old people/outsiders/the less current who want to discuss the relevant topic must be corrected/shut down for using the wrong term.
It seems to me that there are a couple plausible models to describe the demand for these language changes:
a. The people proposing the language change have a good reason we simply don't see.
b. The people proposing the language change are trying to accomplish some other goal--imposing their will on others, emphasizing their own importance, etc.
The problem with (a) as an explanation is that I have fairly often seen these imposed language changes in areas I'm at least somewhat familiar with. And they almost never seem to make any sense. Typically, the justification for them is nonsense (often false historical claims), and there is zero evidence offered (or expected) that any substantial number of people is actually offended by them rather than being offended by proxy[1].
And the way these language changes are used seems to me to be quite harmful. People who are not up-to-date on the correct terminology get corrected, often quite rudely, and very often in a way that shuts down a question or statement or conversation that might have had something useful in it. And when you see this happen (it seems inevitable you have seen it happen), it feels like a social class/ingroup/power play thing, not like someone correcting someone misusing a specialist term. It seems like cycling acceptable terms is a useful way of making sure the less-up-to-date (less educated and older people) are shut up before they can speak, that old books and papers will be read differently than intended, etc. It makes it easier to dismiss the concerns and arguments of old people and people who never went to college, without actually engaging with them. This seems bad enough all by itself that it should make us a lot more reluctant to cycle acceptable language, and that inclines me toward model (b) as the best explanation for this process.
[1] This isn't true when it's ethnic slurs used as football team names or something, but it's true when we're extremely concerned over whether one should say "slave" or "enslaved person."
Because a lot of people worked in actual physical fields doing agriculture and they weren't slaves and not every single reference in the history of the world is to American slavery.
If "fieldwork" has 'connotations', then what about "work" itself? Slaves did work in the house and elsewhere, not just out in the cotton fields. "Practicum" is derived from German (Whiteness!) via Latin (more Eurocentricity!) and could also be objected to on grounds of disregarding indigenous ways of knowing.
Once you start down this track, where since you have now run out of genuine slurs and offensive terms you have to scrabble around for new fields of fury, then there is no end to it. If they said they wanted to rename it to "Office of Practicum Education" because the old name was too much like "practical vocational work experience and we're Real Fancy Academics With Degrees so we need a fake-Latin Fancy Name", that at least would be understandable (and I have a suspicion is the real reason behind the change).
As far as I'm concerned, the big thing is that probably no one was fired or demoted in this process, and the worst that happened is some letterhead was replaced.
Maybe the problem is that they're burning energy and tuition dollars solving a problem that doesn't really exist, when they could certainly be doing more useful things with either.
I know if I as a parent were forking out USC's $61,000 per year tuition, I'd be annoyed if they spent a few grand dicking around changing all the building signage, forms, and stationery to solve an imaginary problem like this instead of either spending my money actually teaching something, or refunding it.
I mean, I'm reminded a little of the blowblack the Secretary of Transportation (Buttigieg) has experienced because he spent money and energy changing the name of the NOTAM system from "Notice to Airmen" because the last word wasn't inclusive -- but he apparently didn't do squat to improve the reliability of the antiquated hardware running the system, about which warnings have been issued for a while, and then it crashed and brought the entire air trransport system to a halt briefly.
I think if you're spending your own money, you have a right to prioritize as you like. But if you're spending someone else's money -- as the FAA is spending taxpayer money, and as USC is spending tuition money -- standards should be a bit higher.
Fortunately, I don't believe they are burning much, if any, energy or tuition dollars on this (though people on the internet seem interested in complaining enough to *require* them to spend some effort defending their name change). Whatever the cost was to the school of social work, I'm sure it was much less than when the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences changed its name to the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences - I was a faculty member in the College at that time and got several free blankets out of it, one of which is coincidentally keeping my legs warm right now. (They were swag that the College had manufactured for who knows what purpose, but since they didn't say "Dornsife" they had to get rid of all of them suddenly and I took a few.)
I agree that if you're going to spend a lot of money on the NOTAM system you should be upgrading it. But if you want to reinterpret the acronym while you don't yet have an appropriate for the necessary upgrades, I think it's fair to go ahead and not delay it out of a sense of decorum or propriety to people who don't like changes of names that come without system upgrades.
Ah, well, if the principle waiteth upon the economics, then that particular name change brought them a $200 million donation, so I would say by the economic measure it was a very efficient and responsible use of tuition money. I doubt the cost to change the name came within three orders of magnitude of the benefit, which is one heck of an ROI.
What was the ROI on eliminating "field" from the Office of Fieldwork name? If they scored a $10 million donation out of it, then I would actually agree they were using parents' money responsibly.
Your last paragraph seems to be missing a noun after "appropriate." While you don't have an appropriate -- what? Authorizing law from Congress? Clue about where to begin? The attention span required to think about the problem, because you're distracted by solving frivolous problems?
In March of 2020 there wasn't dick the Federal Government could *immediately* do about COVID, but if the Trump Administration had completely ignored the issue and used whatever time it did have to, say, press Congress to repeal Section 203 of the CDA so Trump could really nail the social media platforms, because "we might as well solve this problem while we wait for [whatever follows "appropriate" above] to address COVID", I daresay quite a lot of people would've felt justified in being cranky about that decision.
>I can't quite understand why someone would object to this
I don't object to dumb things. I simply mercilessly mock and bully the living daylight out of them, and hope that this will compound to neutralize their effect. If it doesn't, well, I did my part.
-----
Why ? it's that age old question again right, Pascal's Wager. "If some people want to believe obviously dumb nonsense, and """""they are not harming anyone""""", why not just let them believe obviously dumb nonsense, eh ?" I would have loved if this worked, but it doesn't.
In humans' current social organization, the vast majority of dumb things a fashionable religion believes end up affecting you down the line. In 2012 a bunch of dumb teenagers got together on an obscure social media site, and declared binary gender oppressive. We all laughed a good laugh, some of us got worried, and the rest told them "Don't be ridiculous, they are just a bunch of kids". 10 years later, the stories the ridiculous kids invented ended up at the White House and getting people fired by the daily for challenging them.
The fundamental delusion of Pascal's Wager is the Game-Theoretic fallacy of calculating the value of the "You go along with ridiculous beliefs" cell as neutral. This cell's value is actually negative, very fucking negative. When you go along with delusions, the followers of delusions learn a very important piece of info about you : You're willing to cave in, you don't value your dignity enough to call bullshit on obvious nonsense. This is a hell of a realization. It can be used against you for all sorts of things. It's a perpetual sword raised this close to your neck, all it takes is a single opportunity to use it and you're gone.
Anyone who doesn't see it this way is an endlessly useful toy in the hands of the Believers. One day, your IoT-enabled heart will ping Disney's server to let them know that you said something transphobic about Star Wars Episode's 69 new lead, asking them if it should let you live. As a bureaucrat somewhere ponders the question of whether to let you live or not after you expressed your problematic opinion, remember that you had the opportunity to say No and didn't take it.
I think what really is sour about the Hamline thing is that (1) this is genuine historical material created by Muslims to be situated within the history of art; if they don't want art history to be all Dead White Males, this is the sort of material they need to be including (2) The Assistant Dean of Made-Up Bullcrap (sorry for not getting his exact title right) immediately waded in with "oh yes indeed this is egregious Islamophobia" and the administration crumpled like wet tissue paper (3) the adjunct herself is a black woman, you'll have to search hard to make her out to be White Supremacist for the narrative of Evil Islamophobia to make any sense.
I was wondering why it was routine before modern times to have wars over bits of land that seemed not worth fighting over, and in some cases to be outright detrimental to possess–for instance, as Britain probably was to the Romans. I don't think I've ever heard of a king-level ruler selling off land on the edges of his domain in order to fall back to more-defensible borders–for example, to have a border along a river. Medieval maps sometimes show a border with a river running inside and parallel to the border. The strip of land between the river and the enemy couldn't have been defensible.
So I imagined one medieval ruler offering to sell such a strip of land to his neighboring ruler. The bargaining broke down when it came to the question of how much the land would be worth in a simple sale.
In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested [DELETE: at the going interest rate], would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital. But the [EDIT: return on investment, which was much lower than the interest on loans because (A) banks didn't exist and (B) the main risk in loaning money before modern times was default on payment] in antiquity was zero, making the value of any piece of land infinite. It never made sense, in a long-term analysis, to sell land.
Could one major cause of the bloody wars that dominate human history have been the combined lack of technological progress (to provide economic growth), and of a monetary economy with banking and interest (to make land's value finite)?
Not an expert, but some thoughts on the original question:
- Would the ancients have necessarily sold land for money? Or might it have been disguised in normal political dealings, like alliances and marriage proposals? I remember hearing about cases where eg princesses had land as a dowry.
- I think of a lot of premodern wars as being about solving a population-to-land imbalance. If you win, you get more land; if you lose, you get less population. If you have a lot of restless subjects demanding land, maybe quieting them down is more important than the straight economic value to you.
- A lot of modern wars are about containment, or enforcing someone's (possibly delusional) view of good international norms, or irredentism. Maybe premodern wars were the same way?
- It sounds like "the value of land is infinite" is an alternative way of framing "there isn't a lot of good economic activity besides land, so if you want to increase your GDP, you have to increase your land", which is an alternative way of framing "the ancient economy was zero sum". I don't think this is literally true, but it was probably closer to true.
"If you win, you get more land; if you lose, you get less population."
Much more the former than the latter, since casualties in ancient wars were very low as a proportion of the population, because the armies are very smaller, because the logistics of supplying them and moving them around are so difficult without trains.
Sure, but presumably you are losing the people with the fewest prospects, or most likely to cause trouble, etc., right? My guess (with no data to back it up at all) would be that as a total percentage of your population, you lose hardly anything, but as a percentage of the group most likely to cause trouble, you probably lose quite a few.
I know for the Roman Republic soldiers needed to provide their own equipment so where chiefly recruited from middle class land owners. Also soldiers are typically men in the prime of life, so I'd think probably they'd be among the most useful people if anything.
Anyway, the main main demographic problem they're trying to solve would be a shortage of arable land to feed people, so unless the minority that died in war were exceptionally gluttonous it's still reducing the total numbers that matters.
Mongols are a bit of an exception though because of they have way better logistics than most pre-rail road armies, loads of horses, mobile herds of live stock for food supplies etc.
Re. {It sounds like "the value of land is infinite" is an alternative way of framing "there isn't a lot of good economic activity besides land, so if you want to increase your GDP, you have to increase your land", } : Yes, same thing.
Having land as a dowry definitely happened in Europe, but that dowry didn't become part of the nation of the groom, in the way we conceive of it. The groom, personally, acquired title to the new lands. You could be king of several nations at once in the Middle Ages. The extra income you earned from your new territories were, I think, your personal property, and not mixed with that of the other territories in any governmental treasury. You might split them apart again by willing those territories to different sons, but you couldn't combine all the territories you acquired by marriage and then split them up differently.
A river valley is generally an economic, cultural, and linguistic unit, and a lot of its value is being able to use it for navigation and trade, ideally without constant danger from the opposite bank. So while it may be necessary to use them as a border, and they serve as a convenient coordination point from the point of view of central authorities, if it's possible to hold both sides in peacetime there's a lot of incentive to do so. And of course if you have ambitions to expand past the river valley, it's more convenient to already have your forces on that side of the river.
So I wouldn't expect voluntary cessions along those lines even for consideration-- if the neighbor is dangerous, you don't want him closer, and if he's not, then you want the land. And if he's going to get it by means other than military, something intended to create common interests like a marriage alliance or one of you becoming the other's vassal is probably a safer route to take.
That'd be quite the blast from the past! Byzantium and then the Ottomans used to get rather a lot of money from having a toll on that straight; of course back then the only justification needed was "we can sink your boat if you don't pay"
There's a saying about The Prince of Orange in the book The Life And Times Of Rembrandt van Rijnn, where the prince is described as "smelling strongly of horses." It means he liked to lead the Cavalry around and raid his neighbors from time to time.
Everyone wants to claim wars are fought over resources, but they're not. You're either taking over your unfriendly neighbors land and making a larger buffer of safety, or providing a kingdom for your child, or helping an ally grow his kingdom or build a bigger buffer.
Other than gold or chattle, nothing else is mobile enough to take.
Japan invaded southeast asia to obtain resources like oil & rubber. At the same time, Germany was invading Poland (and then later the USSR) for "lebensraum".
Right. The most valuable resources tend to be productive land. You can't pick it up and take it home, but that doesn't mean you can't seize it by force.
WW2 is a very different era - Japan's need for specific raw resources found in few locations was mostly a result of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, the resources in demand tended to be fairly commonplace (maybe justifying expansion but not so much needing expansion to very specific targets the way Oil does), though Germany's stated motivation for war were more analogous to pre-modern ones, yes. (actual motivations, I'm much less sure)
1) Hadrians wall was a fall back position. The romans didn’t want to bother with Scotland as a whole, which they could have subdued, because it was so unproductive.
2) Britain was a relatively rich part of the empire eventually.
And winning a war tends to produce slaves which were a major currency and source of wealth in Rome.
I thought interest rates in antiquity were in fact far higher than now.
But, if you want to buy something, you need to offer something more valuable than it to a prospective seller. And farmable land was far more valuable in premodern times than it is now. It was very hard for premodern states to mobilize resources on such a scale that they would be able to buy e.g. all of Britain. Which I doubt was detrimental to possess for Romans - after all, they did not conquer Scotland and Ireland, which they could have done. Probably because they were able to do some sort of cost/benefit calculation from which it appeared to them that (what is now) England is worth holding, unlike those other British territories.
Premodern interest rates were very high because they were very risky. A money-lender's rate of return wasn't all that great if you average together the good and bad loans. Good enough to make it worthwhile, but not the huge money-maker you'd expect from just looking at interest rates.
"In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested at the going interest rate, would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital."
I think this is actually a lot closer to how tings worked in the ancient world where interests rates were determined by market mechanisms. Historical interest rates are actually much higher than modern one 10%-20%+, probably reflecting the rate of return on all types of capital.
In modern fiat money systems the interest rate and return on capital are completely disconnected, real interest rates are often negative and nominally often <1%, compared to a ~10 - 15% profit rate.
But I'm not really sure why anyone lends money then, if they could get 10x the return by investing instead.
I think the reason for the disconnect is basically that central banks heavily subsidise lending and are essentially the underlying source of most lending in modern economies.
> Medieval maps sometimes show a border with a river running inside and parallel to the border. The strip of land between the river and the enemy couldn't have been defensible.
Rivers are and always have been excellent defensive positions. That means denying them to the opponent is valuable too. While a strip of land on the far side of a river might not be valuable tactically in wartime, it is valuable strategically in peacetime, because it prevents your neighbor from fortifying their side of the river without triggering a war first.
That is similar to how the USA places small military contingents geostrategically around rivals such as Russia - they are not meant to stop any serious military attack, but to act as tripwires to justify American intervention in case the country they're located in gets attacked. Sacrificial limbs, if you will.
I believe the standard explanation of the US having small contingents of troops overseas is not to justify intervention but to solve a commitment problem: The US has promised to defend South Korea in the case of an attack, but why should anyone believe that it would be politically possible to actually do so? If US troops die in said attack, the domestic politics will make it more likely that the US will fulfill its commitment. And of course most troop placements are for reasons unrelated to such concerns; the US, after all, intervenes in very, very few of the many military conflicts in the world.
If you scroll down to the chapter "…Beneath the Crosses, Row on Row…": In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. They could – and did – build roads and infrastructure, irrigation systems and the like, but the production multiplier for such investments was fairly low. For antiquity, the Roman Empire probably represents close to the best that could be achieved with such capital investments and one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries (a very rough estimate, but focus on the implied scale here; the real number could be 15% or 30%, but it absolutely isn’t 1000% or 100% or even probably 50%).
But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1200%, going from an Italian empire of perhaps 5,000,000 to a Mediterranean empire in excess of 60,000,000 - end of quote, wonderful blog/post/even the comment section is ok
I second this post. Reading this post unlocked so much understanding of why things are the way they are, and were they way they were. In a world where land is the fundamental producer of wealth it makes sense that you have a lot of elites fighting over land all the time.
"I was wondering why it was routine before modern times to have wars over bits of land that seemed not worth fighting over, and in some cases to be outright detrimental to possess–for instance, as Britain probably was to the Romans."
I can't speak to the general case, but (going from Great Courses? lectures) the motive in Republican Rome was that winning a war was a GREAT resume enhancer if you were an ambitious Roman who wanted to get to the top of the social standing leader board for senatorial class.
"So I imagined one medieval ruler offering to sell such a strip of land to his neighboring ruler. The bargaining broke down when it came to the question of how much the land would be worth in a simple sale."
For a long time I expect that land *WAS* wealth. But also land was status. I don't think 1800s British landowners were thinking much in terms of optimizing return on their land holdings such that they would want to sell off a bit of land because of poor returns. And in feudal times (in the west) I think it might have been even harder to think in these terms.
"In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested at the going interest rate, would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital. But the interest rate in antiquity was zero, making the value of any piece of land infinite. It never made sense, in a long-term analysis, to sell land."
The interest rate was not zero. You might find "A History of Interest Rates" by Sidney Homer interesting (NOTE: I know of the book but have not read it myself).
Fundamentally, I think the rulers (along with everyone else) "way back then" thought differently and valued things differently than (some ... educated ...) modern western folks. Consider that for Dante suicide was considered a worse sin than murder. Really. And the position is totally logically consistent :-)
Consider: you are a mediaeval ruler and you decide that piece of territory beyond the river is indefensible. So you try selling it off to your rival who has been trying to capture it all this time - after all, that means he must really want it, right?
You have just signalled that you are weak and vulnerable. Your rival wanted that land because he wanted to encroach on your territory. Now you are *giving* it away, because you can't defend it. So why should he pay for it, when he can just wage a war, take it, and cross the river to take the rest of your realm (or a good chunk of it)?
Once you start selling off land like that, it's like selling off the family silver and furniture and paintings in order to keep the mansion going - it's just a matter of time before it's no longer tenable.
Also, maybe that piece of land came as part of a marriage settlement, or it gives you rights to claim something else, or there are other benefits associated with it. If the land beyond the river means that people passing the border have to pay a toll, it may be worth it to you (maybe they won't cross the river into your territory, but they need to cross that strip of land to get from A to C).
I must think about this. But certainly what to our modern view looks like "bits of land that don't seem worth fighting over" must have had some value, else there wouldn't be wars over them. I'm wondering about Britain and tin - certainly the major reason for invading and conquering Britain was to enable Claudius to burnish his reputation as Emperor, since "conquering new territory and expanding the rule of Rome" was something an Emperor was supposed to do, and Britain would have been a 'soft' target. It didn't have a lot of resources, but it must have had some. And the appearance of 'new conquests' would have been something important for the career, whether or not the new lands were as profitable.
Several replies include some statement of the form, "People back in those days must have had some good reason for fighting over land that didn't seem worth fighting over." That's a circular argument. It presumes what it asserts: that the low return on investment couldn't be a good reason.
I agree with most of the other comments but just want to note you're not thinking feudally enough. A feudal king doesn't control that territory directly, he controls it through a hierarchy of lords, and you can't just go round signing away someone's allegiance to you.
That's a really good point. But did ancient non-feudal societies ever sell land, or swap it for goods? Tribes, the ancient Egyptians, or Mesopotamians, for instance. I don't know if African kingdoms had something like feudalism.
In addition to all the good comments explaining why that land probably was valuable, there's also the factor that it doesn't have to be a good deal for the spirit of the nation in some grand strategy game sense for the invasion to be a good deal for the person making the decision to invade. If the empire pays more in soldier's wages than it gets from the conquest, but the salaries come from taxes and some of the loot goes into the general's personal wealth, then the general benefits greatly from the war.
Many replies amount to saying, "There is some other reason why pre-modern people attacked other countries." I didn't ask if low return on investments was THE cause of bloody wars; I asked if it was "one major cause". Pointing out some other reason why people had such wars is relevant only if you add up all the other reasons and show, experimentally, that it explains away all of the wars in history.
The most-surprising piece of information here is not the existence of war, but the almost complete lack of monarchs selling off land. You're not going to get at the question by coming up with more reasons for war, only by coming up with other reasons for the absence of land sales.
Colonies may have been sold off or traded, but home turf not so much.
People in those times were wedded to their land in a way which today most people aren't.
I know a family, they own about 2500 acres which was somewhat remote when their grandparents acquired it around 1910. A city has approached since, and their land is quite valuable. They prefer to farm. Once they were complaining about encroachment and vandalism. I said why not sell up and buy another farm in a quieter region. They were aghast at my idea, they're not mobile people, land is not a tradable commodity in their eyes.
Also, did you know that Jennifer Coolidge was only 38 when she played Stiffler's Mom? And Anne Bancroft was 35 when she played Mrs Robinson (just five years older than Dustin Hoffman). I hope this information will make someone else feel old today.
Questions relating to the blog, and if I'd consider a paid subscription. You may have just selected your highest quality posts to unveil as advertising in which case, kudos, the advertising worked. Regardless of if that's the case those posts specifically I felt addressed what I felt were my biggest concerns primarily with the temperature and experimentation of your posts.
I was puzzled for a good three years about why people dump their savings into high risk stocks/crypto. Think behavior post 2019 aka the rise of Robinhood & crypto.
It’s a weird psychological case because those assets are almost gambling and attract pretty much the same crowd. But they’re different in their function, so it looks like the same crowd is only attracted insofar as both groups have high risk tolerance.
Which got me down to turn in a different direction and come up with three main reasons as to why high-risk assets became so appealing:
1. FOMO
2. Gaining an identity
3. Finding solace in the murky nature of the markets.
Let me know if anybody has any other reasons why high-risk assets became suddenly so appealing. I go into more detail below:
During Covid, every other investment sucked worse. People had specific reasons to believe stocks, bonds, and real estate were all bad investments at the time. Bitcoin was the only investment that wasn't tied to some real-world anchor. Knowing that, it seemed reasonable to believe that other people would realize that and put their money in Bitcoin. And that happened, until it didn't.
You shouldn't look at its recent fall and say "gee, Bitcoin was risky." That's like saying the Yankees are a bad team because they don't win as often as they did in the 1950s. Bitcoin has still been a great investment most of the time. If you invested in Bitcoin almost any time before late 2020 and held onto it until now, you beat the market.
I also think the number of people who "invest" in Bitcoin is exaggerated by the media. Figures on how many people own Bitcoins don't tell you how many people invest in Bitcoin. I would guess that most people who have Bitcoins, have them because they use Bitcoin, or because they feel morally bound to support Bitcoin.
I don't understand all the Bitcoin hatred here. I know some people here want shrooms and other psychedelics, nootropics, medicines they can't get prescriptions for, meds they can't afford in the US, semaglutide, and other things that our matronizing State wants to protect us from. Guess what! You need Bitcoin!
The value of a Bitcoin is probably more-transparent than any other investment, and it has a more-widespread, less-manipulable, more-robust basis for its value than any fiat currency. Bitcoin will still have value if the US, Russia, and China are reduced to smoking rubble.
I think Bitcoin resembles precious metals as an investment: it has a value that depends only on the widespread belief that it has value, and not on government manipulation or geopolitics (except when governments try to ban it). It depends on technology, but smoothly (until the day quantum computers can find Bitcoins?) In practice, this means it goes up and down not as a function of its own attributes, but as a function of how other investments perform. Historically, Bitcoin has out-performed gold and silver by orders of magnitude as an investment.
If you think the US Dollar has a firmer foundation or is less-manipulable than Bitcoin, I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that. Explanations of where the value of the US Dollar comes from require a degree in finance to understand, and no two experts seem to agree.
There isn't really anything new about people dumping their savings into high risk stocks. *Crypto* is relatively new, but people have been making dumb financial choices for a long time.
The dot-com bubble and crash was a thing. And, yes, some companies (e.g. Amazon) survived and the stock did quite well. But many others appears to have no business case at all (e.g. boo.com) and still got people to buy their stocks.
If something appears to be appreciating long enough then there will be people jumping on the bandwagon for the free money. Many of them will *only* be doing this because the price is going up.
This gets less press when it is a small(er) stock or a smaller group of stocks, but it doesn't stop happening. Here is a sad writeup about the debacle that was GTAT in 2014. Things were going well until they suddenly weren't. And a number of the GTAT fans seem to have bet the ranch of it continuing to go up:
Matt Levine has proposed his "Bored Market Hypothesis" which is as good an explanation as any to answer the "why now?" question. But the dump savings into high risk XXXX goes back a long time.
People also like the appeal to "being in the know" - you're one of the few who can get in on the ground floor of this good thing, and only the smart and canny will be able to appreciate this and make a killing on it. You're smart and canny, aren't you? The ordinary NPC is scared of risk but you know that you have to risk a lot to win a lot.
And look at all these other people - just like you, no different! - who are making fortunes right now. Isn't it foolishness rather than prudence to let your money sit in a bank account doing nothing, when it could be earning you these kinds of returns?
Speculative high-risk investments become popular when there's a recent high-profile example of a bunch of people getting rich off a speculative high-risk investment. They become less popular when there's a recent high-profile example of a bunch of people losing their shirts.
We all had the same experience with bitcoin. We all heard about it one day, dismissed it as stupid and the people who bought it as idiots, and then we watched as it went up by a factor of ten thousand or more and those idiots got rich. We were all burned by that experience.
Are there any "easy-bake" forum hosts (akin to ProBoards) with loose enough rules that a yandere-fandom forum wouldn't get banned? Toleration of NSFW and unPC content would also be good, particularly the second as yandere fandom is kind of inherently unPC.
(I am, or at least was, the only active moderator on Yandere^2 Forum, which recently got unhosted by ProBoards. We had a bunch of "IRL yandere" members, essentially hewing to "don't use the forum to commit crimes, but it's not our mandate to punish you for off-site behaviour". While I'm capable of modding, I don't have the technical knowhow or financial capability to run an independent site, so if I can't find another host I'm going to have to give up on bringing the board back.)
> We had a bunch of "IRL yandere" members, essentially hewing to "don't use the forum to commit crimes, but it's not our mandate to punish you for off-site behaviour"
Sounds like very thin ice. Are you sure you want to be publicly associated with something that is illegal IRL?
a) nothing illegal about having criminals on a forum, AFAIK, as long as they're not using it to help commit crimes (I did take action in cases of direct incitement to crime or advice on how to commit crimes)
b) I'm mostly against the romantic stalking taboo and am willing to grind away at it
c) I'm one of them, if a relatively-mild one, so it's mostly a sunk cost anyway.
"I'm mostly against the romantic stalking taboo and am willing to grind away at it"
Do you mean that "romantic stalking" should not be taboo? And to what degree of stalking do you find acceptable, and what degree is over the line?
I think if someone says "Thanks but no thanks, not interested" that should be the end of it, not plotting to rape or murder them (because if you just keep pushing, they'll realise you are the only one who can ever truly love them and they'll change their mind!)
Thanks for the link. It's a good springboard. Let's see...
>New laws will make stalking and non-fatal strangulation standalone offences – outlawing following, impersonating or interfering with pets or property.
>>They are going to change it so if there is stalking just once you can get a restraining order without going through the courts.
>>It’s going to make a huge difference to people’s lives [no cross examination].
Your own link is literally someone praising the idea of straight-up kangaroo courts for the heinous crime of, um, following people around. I think this is *quite* consistent with being "mostly against the stalking taboo" and being "willing to grind away at it"; the current strength of said taboo is mind-bogglingly excessive.
Do I think rape and murder are okay? No. Do I think the majority of romantic stalkers, who never go that far, are heinous scum? Also no.
(I use the term "romantic stalking" to specify that I'm not talking about e.g. casing a house for a burglary, to be clear. I can't think of a better way to phrase it that isn't either an obvious dysphemism or very long.)
Sadly I don't know of any easy forum hosts, but if you're ever looking for a server host then Trabia will work well; they're based in a nuclear bunker in Moldova and host Sad Panda among other similar sites... generally their reasons for kicking a site off are "you could have told us first that you were the literal Pirate Bay so we could prepare" or "we had to hire an entire team to handle abuse reports and it was getting unprofitable", not offensiveness objections.
I'm wondering if you all have any ideas for how to make friends with people who are interested in intellectual pursuits. When googling this, half of the responses seem to be answering the question of how to get more intelligent friends. While I suspect there's a correlation, I'm mostly just wanting to make friends who are similarly interested in philosophical/political/scientific/etc issues and topics. I'm not looking for people with similar opinions/backgrounds/mindsets as me (indeed to some extent diversity in these domains would be preferable), just people who want to discuss these topics. If it helps, I'm a 24 year old male in the Washington D.C. area. Thanks!
I know this may not be generalisable advice, but the two things that worked for me are:
- Attend a very selective university
- Work in an intellectual field at a company that's choosy about hiring
I think the common factor is to let somebody else do the hard work of filtering through people. There are probably other ways to do this; I can only share my experience.
Once you've got access to a good base set of people, try to do things that expose you to second degree connections within that network – parties, RPG groups, game nights, walking groups – and you'll almost certainly bump into people that you connect with. The good news is similar people tend to cluster, so you'll likely be able to find a group who have a shared set of interests. Having just one friend with similar interests to you isn't any good if the wider friend group doesn't share them, as in group settings it'll be difficult to have a proper discussion without boring everyone else.
His review of Progress and Poverty won Scott's first book review contest, and he has expanded that review into the book Land is a Big Deal. It's a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott, and Noah Smith.
We get deep into the weeds of Georgism - the idea that you should tax land (and only land). His book completely changed my perspective on who creates value in the world and who rent-seeks off it. And this podcast episode was one of my favorites. Do check it out!
I listened to Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Lars Doucet about Georgism. (He asked a lot of good questions and overall I like the podcast because he gets right to the efficient frontier of question-asking).
One thing I would have liked to hear discussed is, what about land use policy? Specifically, George had this thesis that land rents suck up the economic surplus unlocked by greater production. But land can be "produced" in the economic sense by building more densely, or by having better transit infrastructure (e.g. Tokyo's public transit vs. LA's), or by other new technology (e.g. air conditioning unlocked the Sun Belt). New tech and deregulation can also reduce the cost of construction (e.g. modular construction, 3-D printing, streamlined permitting, etc.). So why is land (or I should say, the buildings on the land) really all that different from other goods? If the number of car factories were fixed by gov't decree, cars would also become very expensive and soak up an ever-larger percentage of ordinary people's incomes. The solution is to just not do that. Georgists talk about implementing a land value tax to correct for this special problem with land, but they're skipping right past the part where it's <i>illegal</i> for the market to provide housing etc. at market-rate prices and quantities. Land could still be expensive, but we care about people's ability to consume housing, not the price of land as such.
I would note that while America has a housing problem, it's much less bad here than in other Anglosphere economies. We also have a permissive Sun Belt that has built to accommodate growth rejected by places like NY and CA. Matthew Zeitlin on Twitter points out: "The UK is like New York and the rust belt with no sun belt."
There's still places with cheap housing in the UK. In Londonderry, for instance, homes are just 4.7 times average earnings (this ratio is 8.5 for the country as a whole and 11 for London).
I don't think there's a housing supply problem, there's a housing desirability problem. All over the western world (and certainly in a lot of parts of the non-western world) houses are cheap everywhere except a few big cities. The problem is that everyone wants to live in these few big cities. We need to be putting effort into making less desirable places more desirable, not trying to cram more and more people into the big cities.
Cramming more people into big cities may well be counterproductive since you've just made them even _more_ dominant of the country's economy and made them even _more_ economically attractive. The end point is something like Jakarta, a city that everyone agrees is horrible but which twelve million people live in anyway because it's the only place to get a decent job.
Your perspective needs changing at least one more time then. Georgists have several holes in their understanding of economics. Several of those have been gone into in great depth in comments on this blog, and never been answered adequately, by Lars or other Georgists, including on his original posts. ALL land value is created by human activity, whether on or around the land. It has no inherent value of its own whatsoever. Think New York before it was settled. Think vast swathes of the united states that still remain empty and cheap.
The other thing that Georgists appear to believe is that it is both possible and efficiency enhancing to separate out the value of improvements made by the owner of the property and the value of improvements made by others around them. They ignore however that capturing spillovers is a big part of how new development gets incentivised. Your incentive to invest depends not only on your own investments but on investments around you, which often, you will attempt to either make yourself or attempt to select in other, better investments.
Take the example of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. 30 years ago it was barren land. Today it's a bustling economic hub, in large part because the property developer could build up large parcels of land, and capture spillovers across different investments. This would never happen under a Georgist LVT!
This is not the only incentive that an LVT would mess up. Your ability to plan returns on your investment will get thrown off completely by an LVT, to and in directions that are completely out of your control! If you invest expecting a certain ROI, but the area does better than you were expecting, you are now unable to make that return! This would make it extremely risky to invest, and would align your incentives against those of your neighbours, which is not what you want!
I have become all but convinced that it is best to think of artificial neural nets as a platform on which higher-level "applications" can be implemented. But those applications aren't implemented by programmers writing code. They're implemented during the training process. Here's the abstract of a short note I've just uploaded about story grammars in ChatGPT:
ABSTRACT: Think of an artificial neural net as a platform on which to implement higher level structures, like one might implement a word processor or a database in C++. In investigate of the neural net underlying ChatGPT implements a simple grammar, stories with five components, in order: 1) Donné, 2) Disturb, 3) Plan, 4) Enact, 5) Celebrate. I present the results of four experiments in which ChatGPT transforms one story into another based on a single change in the nature of the protagonist or antagonist.
Is Zodiac’s classification of personalities meaningful?
Like since there is an ancient wisdom component to it, subjected to memetic evolution, did it create a personality types which are distinct and would interact with each other and with a world in a way which the zodiac predicts/helps to predict? Can a real person have that kind of personality, and use zodiac, if the person would know their correct zodiac sign, to understand themself better? Would it be useful to devise a personality test which would identify your correct sign?
What do you mean by "memetic evolution"? I generally stop reading when people use the word "memetic" because it is one of those trendy buzzwords I hate--but my prejudices aside, what do you mean?
Yea I meant that as people share they change unconsciously and over a thousand years it gets changed in some way that is in accordance with nature. The other commenter reminded me that it just means better at propagation not better at utility.
The horizontal mode of memetic evolution selects for what spreads best, which is not necessarily either useful or true.
The vertical mode of memetic evolution selects for what's useful. And, certainly, horoscopes are useful in the sense that they generally increase mindfulness of the myriad opportunities in life. But I don't think they're true i.e. the advice/prediction for Capricorns is not actually better for Capricorns than for Virgos.
But maybe they aren't really Capricorns. What if they are actually a different one and the advice is as wrong from them as is for the other person who we think is an Virgo, bit is also maybe the same actual zodiac personality as the first person (not Capricorn)
Horizontal memetic transfer = ideas spreading between cultures.
Vertical memetic transfer = ideas being passed down parent-to-child within a culture.
When the primary mode of transfer is vertical, memetic evolution selects for usefulness, because it's simply "which set of ideas results in you having more kids?". When the primary mode of transfer is horizontal, memetic evolution selects for compellingness, because it's "which set of ideas gets people to believe and spread it more?"
"How to farm" did *not* spread by hunter-gatherers adopting farming, for the most part; it spread by farmers outbreeding hunter-gatherers and taking their land. That's the vertical mode. I'm not actually sure whether "how to make fire" spread mostly in the vertical or horizontal mode (note that there are cases of primitives forgetting how to make fire; the Tasmanian Aborigines lost that technology).
Usefulness, compellingness and truth are all correlated, of course, but it's nowhere near a perfect correlation. Astrology has spread by some combination of horizontal and vertical transfer IIRC.
Hmm "how to farm, seems like many memes, (Sowing, weeding, harvesting, processing.) Fire is simpler. I mean it's mostly about how to start it, which has many solutions. The vertical/ horizontal distinction seems not all that useful to me. I mean of course all memes spread vertically (within families) and it's only the 'good' ones that travel between families/ clans/ cultures.
I think Astrology was a heroic early inquiry into what gives people different personalities. It's an interesting hypothesis, and all hypotheses should be respected.
As far as I know, there is no good reason today to believe Zodiac classifications of personalities are meaningful.
I think and hope that in the future people will find a much better way to classify personalities than we have now what with The Five Big Traits and all that lacking much nuance.
If you want a list of personality types with separate descriptions and recommendations for each, but you instead of the date of birth you want to use a personality test, that is MBTI or Enneagram.
Astrology's evolution selects for descriptions and advice vague enough to apply to everyone. If you really want to see ancient wisdom about personality types, look up the personalities associated with the four humors.
When people didn't move around that much. (born and lived in the same area) You could imagine there were some characteristics that would go along with what time of the year you were born.
Are all classified documents to be only perused at work? Surely that can’t be the case with every single person who has some kind of access to restricted documentation?
What? Why not? Of course it makes perfect sense to disallow taking classified material outside of secured facilities. This is how it used to be when I had access to such things.
It literally is a normal procedure in an organization handling secret documents to not allow any employees ever to carry them from secured work environment to their homes. Because, duh.
How would politicians work like that? I’m pretty sure that politicians in most countries take some classified documents home as often as not. Particularly members of cabinet who don’t always have, in most countries, official addresses but live in their own house would have to do it.
Well in the U.K. there’s a special secure box used by ministers to transport confidential information. From wiki.
“ Ministers are permitted to use ordinary lockable briefcases to transport information which has been classified 'Confidential' or below. For information with a higher security level (such as 'Secret') they are required to use dispatch boxes, which offer greater security, and which are usually red. However, a travel version of the box is also available in black, which offers the same level of security as a red box, but is designed to be less conspicuous. In practice ministers use despatch boxes for transporting the majority of their documents due to the greater level of security they offer.”
So documents are being transferred, and presumably not just between two workspaces but for working at home. Most U.K. ministers do not have a grace and favour apartment but rent their own (or own their own if they can afford London prices).
Also the classification system in the US is ludicrous, see this report. Hundreds of millions of documents and 1.2M people with top secret clearance. Why bother?
I don't know what politicians are doing, but this is pretty horrible if true. The first rule regarding classified information is to keep it secret. The second, is to make it clear and obvious when it's leaked. The norm you're suggesting make it impossible to know if and when some secrets are no longer secrets.
There are different levels of classifications, I doubt if what you describe is really normal for non-trivially classified documents (I have no idea what specifically was found in Trump or Biden homes).
I on the other hand am 100% sure that high level politicians are transporting classified documents around all day, every day, from A to B. The business of government can’t shut down because Trump is on his way to Florida , or Biden to his home, or either of them travelling anywhere.
Therefore the problem here, if there is a problem, is not bringing them back in a timely manner.
This is the list of protocols we're supposed to adhere to, and we're only a body providing services for a government agency and only dealing with confidential/private data for members of the public:
"A Physical and Environmental security Access Control Policy shall be in place and include processes and guidelines for comprehensive protection.
A Physical and Environmental security access control policy shall be defined, approved by management, published and communicated to employees and relevant external parties.Physical and Environmental Access permissions and authorisations are managed, incorporating the principle of least privilege, separation of duties, and continually revalidated."
This is all to do with digital access, but 'Taking papers home with me and stuffing them in a box in the garage' is not, I imagine, in line with best practice for a Physical and Environmental Access policy.
But you are not the president or the Taoiseach. Or a CEO of a government department either. And the principle of least privilege scales up to a lot of rights when the user has those privileges, it just defaults to lower access to start with.
My question was whether either President had violated a law or not by taking documents home.
Sure, but even the Vice President is not supposed to do this. "Oh well it was only Joe, no worries" is not good enough when ordinary staff would have their careers ended over the same thing.
There may be privilege as you go up the ladder, but responsibility increases also.
As someone who has the sort of clearances needed to read the sort of classified documents we are talking about here, yeah, it pretty much is. If you need to do work involving classified information, you go in to the (secure) office. You do not, *not not not*, take it home with you so that you can work from home. Nothing you're doing is so important that it can't wait until you're in the office(*), and *you* aren't so important that we can't call you out of bed at 3:00 AM on Saturday and tell you to get into the office ASAP. No, not even if you are a congressman.
At the outset of the COVID lockdowns, we looked into it and found that it was theoretically possible to do very limited work-from-home with information up to Secret, but not worth the bother. For Top Secret or SCI, not unless your home has a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), which would probably be a million-dollar project that *maybe* SecDef merits but almost nobody else.
What Hillary, Trump, and Biden all did was straight-up illegal, even with the lofty government offices they held. It's not the sort of crime we normally put people in jail for if there's no malicious intent, but it usually and permanently ends your career with the government. Occasionally it may be written off as an honest mistake, which seems at least plausible in the Biden case, but even then there's going to be a serious investigation to make sure "honest mistake" isn't being used to cover for something nefarious.
* Even if it were, you couldn't do anything actually useful because you wouldn't be able to communicate it with anyone until you were back in the office. Nor could anyone even call you at home and tell you that you need to do (classified thing).
Absolutely. I think this is the major difference, that anyone who has worked or works as a civil or public servant, or in government-related agencies (even as service providers) gets this kind of discipline hammered into them, whereas people that don't think "what's the big deal, aren't they already reading and working with these papers?"
So it *does not matter* if you are the High Panjandrum, you are *not* supposed to breach the rules and you do *not* get a pass on "yeah well he/she is the boss, that makes it okay". Now, do the politicians routinely break the rules? Yeah, because they're stupid like that and they don't listen to their staff (and this is part of what made me roll my eyes *so hard* at all the "Hillary is so smart and qualified and experienced, she is best for President" stuff). Hillary did it, Trump did it, Biden did it, people working for/with Hillary did it. That doesn't excuse it (and there's no reason to think that had Hillary won the election, she wouldn't have been as cavalier about taking documents with her as Trump and Biden were, we've seen that with the infamous email server).
For instance: part of the cybersecurity policy we are now supposed to implement at my workplace, because we come under the umbrella of providing services to the public on behalf of a government agency, includes this:
"•Work-issued devices( such as desktops, laptops, mobile phones or tablets) must not be used
by anyone other than you. Family members or housemates must not be given access to such
devices.
• Avoid using shared family electronic resources for the storage or processing of work data.
These types of shared facilities can greatly increase the risk of compromise to the security of
the data, undermine the integrity and management of that data and lead to your personal devices being in scope for any subsequent follow-on actions, including legal or FOI. Remember
access to corporate data and systems has been granted to staff and using shared resources
can allow access to people who have not been authorised for that access."
Remember the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal? (I know, it was so long ago and so many scandals past). Well, Huma Abedin clearly didn't stick to these kinds of guidelines, as the FBI agents who seized Anthony's laptop in order to get the evidence found out:
"On Sept. 26, 2016, as part of a sex crimes investigation, an FBI agent in New York found hundreds of thousands of emails on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who was married at the time to Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. Two days later, the head of the New York FBI office told dozens of FBI executives, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, that the laptop had 140,000 emails possibly relevant to the Clinton investigation. The next day, on Sept. 29, the New York office told several members of the FBI’s Clinton investigation team that the emails included BlackBerry messages."
If I, John or anybody else who works in civil/public/associated service did the likes of this, we would be hauled over the coals. "Oops, heh, shouldn't have done that I guess" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card just because you're a Big Cheese and not a minor bureaucratic minion.
The main outrage is the lack of consistency. If it is a national security breach and possible treason on Trump's part, then the same applies to Hillary and Biden. If it's okay for Biden to leave boxes of documents lying around for six years, then it's okay for Trump.
But mostly they should *all* be hammered for this kind of thing, like the rest of us would be.
All true. But now I'm fully enjoying imagining what happened when Clinton, Trump, and Biden attempted to sit through their 120-minute Information Security Awareness training modules.
Also, a random box in your garage is probably not an approved container, even if it's locked.
The impression I get is that Biden was careless and didn't realize he still had classified documents (bad!), while Trump deliberately kept them for some nefarious purpose (worse!).
My impression of the best and worst case scenarios:
Trump Best: All presidents keep documents from their presidency, and Trump ('s lawyers) were actively negotiating which items needed to be in the archives and which could remain with Trump. Implied is that Trump declassified the necessary documents.
Trump Worst: Trump intentionally broke the law and illegally kept classified documents. When called on it he stonewalled and forced the FBI to raid his residence in order to get them back.
Somewhere in there is the question of what items he kept and whether there were purposes (could be "good" or "bad" heavily dependent on the readers political views) for him to have them.
Biden Best: Completely normal process of taking down the VP office and some leftover documents accidentally got mixed in with other items. Self-identified and reported, and the documents were turned over.
Biden Worst: The biggest group of classified documents (apparently) was held at an office he didn't receive until a year after he was VP. These documents had to be intentionally moved there after they clearly should not have been in his possession. (Add in some unconfirmed oddities like the anonymous Chinese donations to Penn University after Biden's office opened and following the arrival of classified documents). i.e. Biden knew he had classified documents and didn't report it for six years, holding off until after the midterm election and following a news report about the finding.
He didn't realise for six years, and nobody went looking until someone accidentally found classified documents in a cupboard, versus Trump had them for some nefarious purpose (undefined).
The difference in approach is clear; Biden is Our Guy, so no big deal, Orange Man Bad so plainly he was going to sell them to the Russians/Chinese/Lizard people.
I think probably a lot of politicians take paperwork away with them once their term is over, even when technically they are not supposed to do so. My position on this is the same as Hillary's email server: low-level civil and public servants would be nailed to the barn door for this, so it shouldn't be hand-waved away when the person doing it is the same as supposedly in charge and handling much more sensitive material.
If it was a national crisis that the papers were sitting in Trump's side-room for months, then it should be a national crisis that the papers were sitting in Biden's garage for years.
It seems like the danger here is that this becomes a method for the security bureaucracy to send its political leadership to jail in many cases. It doesn't take a ton of imagination to see how that might work out badly for civilian control of the intelligence services.
On the other hand, whether or not the purpose was nefarious, if Trump knew he had them he could take precautions to control who saw them. Biden couldn't and didn't take precautions to protect documents he didn't know he had.
Presumably, for any documents that a US President uses for work during the time they are president, there is a strong setup specifically allowing them to use such documents in a protected way. This includes security agents protecting the person and property of the president, as well as document protection guidelines.
As a functional matter, the president would need access to some or many classified documents even while traveling and away from secure facilities, so there would need to be a tradeoff between security and functionality. For instance, receiving a secured update on the war in Ukraine while traveling to wherever, or getting daily security briefings while on vacation in the Caribbean.
Most notably, neither of the people involved were in a position of need-to-know when they stashed the documents in their homes. Trump was no longer president, and Biden was no longer VP, respectively. So the purpose of having the documents was gone, making the risk v. reward of having documents outside secure locations all risk and no reward. Depending on what was in the documents, this may be a big deal or it could be literally nothing. A 2015 classified projection about the upcoming year's stock market is worthless in later years for the most part. A document naming a CIA asset in Iran could be a major issue if the asset is still in Iran, especially if still active.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, there was debate about whether the President should be allowed to have a BlackBerry: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205
It was determined that he could, but he couldn't use it for a lot of purposes that you'd want.
I think all this information security is really difficult to navigate, and this is why Clinton had a separate e-mail server, Trump gets to Tweet all day and night, and both Trump and Biden ended up with documents at home.
""Over the past 20 years, dozens of military and civilian employees of the U.S. government have been punished for taking classified documents home from work without authorization," Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb wrote in 2000 for The Washington Post. "But few of these incidents have been made public, and the penalties have been extremely inconsistent, according to current and former federal officials.""
The law doesn’t say “this applies to everyone except the president”. Pretty much the only special privilege the President has, relative to other clearance holders, is that they are presumptively a Classifying Authority (i.e. they get to determine whether something is classified or not, and whether it should be declassified) - but even that role has rules / standards that are meant to be followed.
Laws relating to classification do not affect the President, because his power to classify or declassify arises from his role as Commander in Chief under Article II. No statute passed by Congress can set limits on this power:
Trump got documents as President, Biden as VP. There is an Obama rule that makes the VP a classifying authority but I don't believe it says he can declassify things, other than things he himself classified. So in that respect Trump has a stronger defense than Biden. On the other hand, Biden's violation of the rules may have been incompetence not deliberate choice. Trump's was pretty clearly deliberate.
I dunno about that last. Trump seems exactly the kind of guy who can do something via incompetence or carelessness, then argue forcefully when found out that he totally meant to do that, it was 100% legitimate, who the hell are you to question it? and besides you're just out to destroy American, you oaf.
“The president has broad authority to determine what information is or is not classified” is not at all the same thing as “the president can do whatever he wants with classified documents even after he is no longer the president”. And there is no classification level that goes “this is classified, unless it’s in my closet in which case it’s unclassified and also not subject to FOIA”.
And of course as John notes Biden acquired the classified documents when he was VP.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, I'm just observing that your assertion that the President has to follow any rules at all (other than those he makes up himself) in this area is wrong. Congress cannot bind the President on the issue of national security classification, any more than they can say he is prohibited from issuing orders to the military that aren't countersigned by the Speaker of the House, because Congress did not give those powers to him in the first place. We need to distinguish between the President's Article II powers, which are beyond regulation by Congress, and the powers he may acquire through statute.
So far as I know, the President actually could create a classification that said "this is classified unless it's in my closet." There's nothing in the Constitution stopping him from doing that. It would be absurdly irresponsible, but the only solutions to an irresponsible President are political, impeachment or failure to re-elect. And also please note that this could only have force while he is President. As soon as he stops being President, his successor can revoke or alter the policy as he pleases, and woe betide the former President if he has not taken that shift change into account when he loses his powers at the stroke of noon on January 21 and becomes immediately bound by statute and the (new) President's policy decisions.
In any event, this is all irrelevant. In neither case are we talking about a President in possession of classified documents. If Trump had Top Secret documents lying on the kitchen table at Mar-a-Lago in April of 2020, or if Biden had them in his jacket pocket last week while he rode the Metro, there would be dick that anyone could do about it legally (aside from agitate for either man's prompt impeachment and removal from office).
The reason these documents are an issue at all is that Private Citizen Trump had secret documents in his basement at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, and statute most certainly does bind private citizens. Trump's argument is along the lines of "well I declassified them when I was President," and if that's true, then Private Citizen Trump is off the hook. But is it true? It's quite reasonable to require a bit more than Private Citizen Trump's assertion that it is, since he's far from a neutral observer.
Biden can't make the same argument, because he was not President when the documents came into his possession. He needs to argue that some action or policy of Presidents Obama or Trump made it legit for him to have them in his possession after he became Private Citizen Biden. Obviously current President Biden can't retroactively authorize prior Private Citizen Biden to possess them.
In a general way, classified documents are supposed to be kept in very secure facilities, like safes in government offices with restricted access and guards and such, or on government computers stored in secure locations, and only taken out when necessary for use. The idea is to avoid their theft or loss, even accidental loss:
Generally speaking, a President's home wouldn't be a secure location for classified documents, although I am sure there are protocols for him accessing or using them at home, so long as he tells the Secret Service and whoever else is involved in their handling what he need, when, and where. Nobody is going to deny the President the ability to access and use classified documents wherever and whenever he wants to. But if he does it without telling the people whose job it is to ensure document security, he's just being God-damned rude and causing those people unnecessary stress -- to say nothing of any genuine risk to the Republic he's sworn to defend.
The overall issue is fraught with respect to the President, however, because the President is the sole final authority on whether a document is classified, and at what level. He has infinite security clearance, and can moreover classify or declassify any document whenever he wants, either explicitly (by writing a memo or saying so), or implicitly (by for example sharing it, or its contents, with someone not otherwise authorized to see them). That's because this authority derives from his Article II powers as Commander in Chief, and isn't subject to any limits found in laws Congress passes. This is one of the few weird situations where the President is actually literally "above the law." If The People don't trust the President with this power, the Constitutional solution is to elect someone else instead. (If Congress doesn't trust him, the Constitutional solution is impeachment and removal from office.)
The problem in Trump's case is that the documents were found in his possession after he was no longer President, so he no longer had the awesome power of an infinite security clearance, and I'm not sure it's clear President Trump declassified them with sufficient formality that a court judging Private Citizen Trump would say the latter has the right to have them. We'll find out.
In Biden's case his problem is that he was Vice President at the time the documents were left at home, and it's not clear the President at the time (Obama) declassified them sufficiently for Private Citizen Biden (between 2017 and 2021) to have them after they both left office. Presumably President Biden can't retroactively declassify them now so Private Citizen Biden could've had them in that time period, although this is what constitutional lawyers earn $1000/hr arguing.
There's also a separate argument that the Federal government classifies way too much, kind of robotically, and this leads people to take classification less seriously than they might.
I agree with you except on one point: While the President does indeed have the authority to share classified information with whomever he wishes, doing so does not automatically declassify it.
Well...I basically agree with you, although we could interpret that action as the President momentarily declassifying it and then reclassifying it. Who knows? The problem is that he has plenary power, but unless he says what the hell he intends by his actions, we (or a Federal jury) are left to guess.
But the only plausible solutions to problems in this area is political. You can't bind the President's powers, you can only choose a better type of person to acquire them. Maybe in future elections there will be some sharp questions put during the campaign about whether Candidate X will take security more seriously than some of his predecessors.
But I wouldn't count on it. This whole affair, both with Trump and now with Biden, has a circus "gotcha" aspect to it that is shameful, unworthy of a republic that takes itself seriously, and makes me think it isn't *really* about genuine issues of national security.
Whatever one's partisan leanings, the political problem (and this is the root of much bitterness and distrust) is that trusted officials i.e. Trump, Biden, H. Clinton, all behaved as though the rules simply were not important and/or did not apply to them, because they were of the elect.
With each of the above three, maybe the path to the security breach was different. Of course Donald Trump thinks the rules don't apply to him, I don't see the breach as malicious, just small arrogance + hubris and litigation. The reason does not matter. He still broke the law, a very important and easy-to-understand law. It was stupid and wrong. Were he still in office, if National Security staff could not change his behavior and things like this happened, that is immediately impeachable.
Joe Biden seems to be a careless arrogant Senator who has become a senile old man. Looks like a mistake, but agressive prosecution of Trump for the same thing is clearly hypocritical. The obvious take is that the actual harm and wrong of mishandling classified documents is never even a consideration, only appearances and political persecution are of value. So again it seems like a person who thinks the rules are for little people. Here I will be generous and project that Biden does not really understand the rules or the reasons for them on any basic level, this is common among politicians, always. They deal with people and opinions, not facts and things. Forgivable if a one-time-error, but politically he started the pig-wrestling so it looks pretty bad.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was in truth the #1 Security Officer in the entire US Government. (This is practice and process that dates back to Thomas Jefferson.) If the allegations about the e-mail server are substantially true ... any uniformed US Military personell who did the same would face a Court Martial and could be sentenced to death.
Secrecy is there for a reason. It's still true that all the laws of the United States are there for a reason, and apply equally to citizens and government officials. In fact, that was the entire reason this country was created. People and politicians who have forgotten that or just do not care are, fundamentally, no longer citizens. They certainly deserve the trust of nobody.
To be fair, I don’t think there’s anything distinctive about politicians here. This is exactly what everyone does with traffic laws, and other laws, that officially say you should do one thing, but clearly aren’t practical.
"agressive prosecution of Trump for the same thing is clearly hypocritical. "
Note that, so far, there has been no prosecution of Trump, aggressive or not so aggressive. And also note that, when the govt decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, James Comey explicitly said:
"In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.'
At this point, there does seem to be evidence that Trump made efforts to obstruct justice by hiding the fact that he had possession of classified materials, and no such evidence re Biden. So, saying that they did "the same thing" is not particularly accurate, at this point in time.
"prosecution" in these high-level (Level 4 in the Zvi M. simulation level) political performances is maybe 5% possible criminal prosecution. Publicly "raiding" Trump's property, talking up Trump's misdeeds in the media at high volume, that is "prosecuting" the real battle, according to the particular calculus of public opinion and partisan theater.
My fundamental point is that all three did things more or less deliberately because they believe that they are above the law. That is antethical to the entire purpose of the United States.
We are a society whose insanely violent and brutal (by international standards) mass spectator sport, Football, has as many judges and referees on the field as either team's PLAYERS, and where the play is constantly stopped for judicial reviews, appeals, rules of evidence, sidebar conferences, and where the allegedly impartial judgements about outcomes are are accepted as iron law. "A Government of Laws not Men" is still what we want;-- to the core of our being.
As someone who is a newcomer to the software engineering industry - does anyone here have predictions about how code completion models like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT would change the industry? (Predictions you are confident enough in to share, obviously)
I know better than to run around in circles screaming "AAAAAH AI is going to take my job!!!!1", but for one, I am concerned that I seem to like the part of the job that actually consists of writing code. This is where the "magic" lies for me - I like the satisfaction that comes with having, my own fingers on my keyboard, produced logic that I can then see used by business users and/or merged into larger projects. I almost feel parental about it. It appears that efficient code completion would shift the focus to thinking about systems and an even higher level level of abstraction - and while I think I will still have work when that becomes the industry standard, I don’t know if work will be as satisfying as what I have now.
Now, of course, I program in Python so saying that I’m the only author of my code is kind of a lie - I’d not be able to reimplement the Python interpreter in C from scratch, nor would I be able to do that for the more developed packages I depend on. But I
still manage to feel like the author of my code, and derive satisfaction from it. That appears to be good news - maybe I’ll be able to feel good about giving prompts to a code completion model, also. Has anyone here gone from programming in a lower level language to a higher level language and managed to still feel good about the work process?
I asked ChatGPT to relay it's level of confidence in particular answers it was giving me that I knew were flat out wrong - not even close level of wrong. (I was asking about songs and chord progressions). It took a bit of issue with my word "confidence" so I asked it to tell me how likely it felt it these answers were correct. It in turn relays a very high likelihood of correctness due to many sources in many contexts. It was disappointing when ChatGPT wouldn't just say "I'm guessing here." When informed of its wrongness it easily concedes. Wish it had better forthcomingness about levels of confidence, if it is supported.
I experimented a bit with it having it answer something like "Rock on" if it thought I was right, or "Nah" if it thought I was wrong, and then suggested several things to it. It seemed mostly right in that context on a lot of cases, some more clearcut than others. Can't recall exactly the examples I used, but it seems it has some kind of ability to interpret degree of rightness or wrongness, but maybe doesn't or can't apply it to its own answers? I don't know.
My son is using ChatGPT to help start his home work answer. Essentially ChatGPT provides a framework for the answer, which is nice, and he just has to fill in or change the details to fit what he's doing... which looks a lot like hacking someone's piece of code to fit your job. Well I haven't written much code recently...
I can't see AI writing complex code any time soon. Complex as in "a whole bunch of business logic, badly described in 3 self-contradicting documents, plus a whole lot of 'lore' that only exists in the minds of those who participated in the last meeting on the subject, if they manage not to forget it".
As a game programmer, for example, I feel quite secure - to add a new system to code of our game, AI needs to have at least human-level intellect. It cannot just invent e.g. a whole new character inventory system based on designers' specs, because those aren't nearly as complete as they need to be, and because it's not a separate piece of code - it must integrate with pretty much every other system in game, and I don't think Co-Pilot, or even the next few iterations of AI can manage that. I surely can't (not without much poking around, asking people "WTF is this piece of code is for and can I delete it?" and debugging for hours).
And as a tool that can take away some of mundane, boring tasks like writing unavoidable boilerplate, AI can make programmer's life better - if it won't make fatal mistakes. You know what I would like, for example? No mater how you try, there are always cases when you need to remember to change code in two places, e.g. create a class and register it, or change some variable in two pieces of code that just can't access it from a single source due to some legacy decisions. It would be great if I could create some annotation that AI can read and at least notify me if I forget something, or better yet, do this stuff auto-magically.
>It would be great if I could create some annotation that AI can read and at least notify me
You mean a TODO? Most IDE support it, reminding you before commiting your code, and most (if not all) devs end up ignoring them altogether with "code smells", "test coverage", "vulnerabilities", "critical defects" and other foolish made up things.
That's why I prefer automatic solutions, wherever possible, yes. What I meant is more like a static code checker rule that checks (possibly in cross-project or even cross-repository way) that the necessary places are synchronized, possibly adding a error in IDE, and doesn't spam me otherwise.
In some languages you can do that, e.g. with Roslyn analyzers. In others, it's hard (parsing C++ isn't fun). If AI can help with that, it would be good.
I expect it to take over the industry fairly quickly. Like, going from "nearly no company use it" today to "over 80% of jobs requires you to use it" in 4 or 5 years". It will consequently shift the focus of our job a bit (less of wiritng code, more of thinking up good prompt/documentation & review the generated code for bad implementations).
I also, however, expect that some companies (especially those for which computer engineering are a simple cost rather than how they make money) will be scared enough of the security implications that they mandate *not* using AI-generated code. But there won't be many.
Developers who currently fail at Fizz-Buzz test will again be able to pass the job interviews thanks to GPT. They will be able to produce code, until the moment when a bug appears and they are be unable to fix it.
The role of senior developers will mostly be fixing bugs in the mountains of code that the junior developers produced using GPT. (Anything else the GPT will do more efficiently.) The consumption of alcohol will increase dramatically.
On the one hand, white-collar work is not immune to replacement by software. Apparently the profession of law hit quite a bump recently when it found that suddenly big firms needed a lot fewer junior staffers poring through memos, since it could replace them with targeted searches of email systems. Something similar could conceivably happen in the software industry itself, reducing required staffing considerably.
On the other hand, a big part of software is not making the computer do something. It is, rather, negotiating between various parties about what the computer should do in the first place, fitting together half-formed ideas into something clear, with due consideration for what the system is already doing and making sure what it is already doing doesn't get broken. Much of this rests not on the technical bits of producing code, but on surprisingly social skills of understanding, advocacy, and compromise, which I don't expect AI to replace any time soon.
On the gripping hand, I expect there is going to be something of a middle path for at least some years, where coding AIs are useful but unreliable tools that can make a first cut at a solution or critique an existing solution, but are quirky enough that getting good work out of one requires real expertise. Compilers were that way through the seventies at least, and a part of a good programmer's skill set was being able to step down to the machine code level to examine whether the compiler was doing something sensible, and then either rewrite the higher-level code, or just substiute assembly language instructions instead.
And most of the code i write is mostly boiler plate or using already written modules with just a little bit of domain specific details thrown in.
To me the current iteration of these AI tools is kind of like using a UI kit to quickly get a web site built. Can cut way back on time spent doing repetitive tasks. It many ways all the programming people do these days is already "using AI". We don't writing in assembly or lower level languages (well 99% of us), we use higher level languages that for all intents and purposes used AI (Past developers we don't know) to write the abstractions.
My guess is that a lot of lazy people will use it to write also-ran code, with slightly fewer bugs and security holes than if they'd simply cut-and-pasted snippets from the web, but plenty more than if they'd actually written the code themselves.
Some competent people may use it to create code a bit faster than otherwise.
What I can't predict is whether it will get a good reputation (managers seeing only the reduced time to "code complete") or a bad reputation (wide reporting of resulting bugs and security exploits).
Eventually, if effort is put into better selection of training data (not random code of unknown quality from all over the web), and probably other things I don't know about, either one might get good enough to reliably produce high quality code that does what's actually intended, and properly handles exceptions of all kinds (unlike the average also ran coder). But from what I've read to date (tech industry bloggers whose own ability I trust) it's very much not there yet.
And I'm unclear whether the remaining problems are like those with self-driving vehicles (plausibly insurmountable for the general case) or like those in an ordinary (feasible) engineering project.
Separate question: "Has anyone here gone from programming in a lower level language to a higher level language and managed to still feel good about the work process?"
Yes, absolutely. I used to routinely program in Assembly. Then I moved to C. I was happy either way.
I've also written production code in Python, Lua, Perl, and Bash, among other languages higher level than C. I'm sometimes less happy with them - perl in particular is a wretched language, IMO. But writing code is still writing code - inherently fun for me.
OTOH, the overall work process has frequently been rather less rewarding. But that has to do with all the rest of the job, the working environment, or similar issues.
It's curious to me that you would classify the interpreted languages as "higher level" than the compiled. I wouldn't have said that. They just seem like they serve a different role. Sometimes what you want is fastest to do by writing a script, sometimes you want to write compiled code. It doesn't really seem like the script is "higher level" in the sense that C is higher level than assembly -- because C encapsulates vast swathes of assembler in abstract concepts like 'for' loops, variable namespaces, or passing around pointers to complex data structures.
I would say a "higher level" of programming is kind of what libraries, objects (in an OOL), and Githbu are all about. You can say 'screw writing my own FFT code, I'm just going to load up libgsl and call gsl_fft_complex_radix2_forward. Or to hell with rolling my own interface to a certain type of database, there's some project at Github that I can download that does all the detail work for me.
That suggests that there *is* space for an "AI assistant" that would be seriously useful, something quite special purpose that would keep track of all the libraries and projects that exist, and then when you needed some solution be good at interpreting your natural language request, and put together a recommendation for the building blocks for what you wanted. It would have to deeply and reliably understand what the code it recommends does, so its recommendations were valuable. You could never train it by just scraping the Internet for words, it would have to be able to be analyze libraries and such on its own and build some higher level representation of what they do that could be mapped onto a natural language request. "I need an FFT that works with data lengths that are not powers of 2 / that works with data that has 132 bits / that works much faster if I can guarantee the data aren't more than 8 bits / et cetera" and then it says "hey, this library has a routine that works, or this project would work if you altered this constant or that and recompiled."
That would be very valuable, I think, and qualify as "higher level" programming, and it feels like the kind of thing that is probably doable, but is also far harder than creating a clever talking-dog chatbot to replace sports newscasters and people who write quotidian ad copy.
You have a point there. The distinction certainly isn't interpreted vs compiled, in spite of my choice of examples. C++ is arguably higher level than C - it does things for you that C does not, and it's correspondingly more difficult for the programmer to know exactly what will happen under the hood.
It's definitely not scripting language vs app development language. (Python straddles the border there; it's usable for both.)
It's much more like how many lines of code does it take to do something/anything.
Python (and Perl, and Lua) have data types that I'd have to get from a library in C. Those data types are incredibly useful for the sorts of things I choose to do in python. I could do the same things in C; there are probably libraries available, and, if not, I could write equivalent code myself. But language built-ins are faster and easier to use, and probably better optimized.
Python also has well known, fairly standard libraries for a whole pile of things, some of which I need. I'd much rather process a CSV in python rather than C. In fact, not being a specialist, I find python's libraries somewhat excessive. (Which of the multiple libraries should I use for processing html, and why?) But C also has lots of libraries, beyond the standard libc; they are just even harder to find. (Specialists know about them - and that's why the average open source app package requires some number of other open source library packages.) I'm not sure that's a good measure of the qualitative difference between them - though your assistant might well be useful in finding them.
I'm thinking of it as Google + a grad student. I can google stuff, but then I have to spend a tedious amount of time just checking to see if what Google returns really fits the bill. It *says* it does FFTs, they really turn out to be slow Fourier transforms because Google/ChatGPT thought I might have really meant to type "hamburger" instead of "fast" because a lot more people look for hamburgers than fast thingymajiggers.
My idea is the AI assistant can do the googling for me and then also do a lot of the basic checking to see if what Google returns is even anywhere close to what I want, and can maybe figure out if some combination of things will do what I want. Like, I could say, "How should I process this CSV file?" and it would say "You could rip that off in 2 lines in python, but for the size of the file it would take ~5 minutes, and since you want to process 100 files a day you might be better writing it in Java, because it turns out someone has written a very convenient set of objects for this purpose....API coming on your screen now..."
And then I would say "Good job Spot! Here, have a crunch treat" and pat its little pointy metal head, and it would return to its hutch to dream electric dreams of feeding all 8 billion of us into a quantum black hole.
LLMs in programming is bullshit, the "Fifth Generation Languages"[1] trend of our era.
LLMs are designed for and trained on natural languages. Natural languages are endlessly tolerant of bullshit : semantically-empty, open-ended rambling that is locally dazzling and globally braindead. This works for natural language, it's in fact how we even learn it in the first place : little kids are first-class bullshitters. Bit by bit we come into contact with the real world and other minds, which gradually teaches us that language is not merely a symbol game. LLMs are like eternal toddlers who never grew out of their fascination for mimicking adults to say nothing in a whole lot of words.
In addition to being so infinitly imaginative and open-ended, natural language is resilient as hell. You can botch a sentence and still nail the paragraph. You can botch a paragraph and still rescue the essay. You can botch the first half of a novel and then come back with a second half that redeems it.
Code doesn't work like this. It's not nearly as imaginative or open ended, it's far far more strict. There is an unimaginably huge space of programs that look right in all sorts of ways, only a tiny minority of which are actually right and do the thing you want. Code isn't remotely as resilient as natural language, a single off-by-one error in the index of a for loop 50 procedures deep in the callstack makes your entire program just an long-winded way to display an error message.
LLMs **fundamentally** misunderstand what code is all about, it's not text, it's logic. Any "Auto Coder" that doesn't get how logic works isn't actually an auto coder, it's an auto plagiarizer, even if its plagiarism is very fancy and linear-algebra-heavy and you need 10 data centers to carry it out.
This can still be useful. I can imagine their future (if they got out safely out of the myriad copyright storms they are in right now) as a training wheel, something that hobbyists or programmers unfamiliar with their environments (e.g. a Java guy forced to write Python for the first time) use to get things going at first, but then discard quickly for a deeper understanding. Or maybe they will become part of a bigger neuro-symbolic system that can use types and logical reasoning to prune and filter the code that they get out.
I can say one thing with certainty : LLMs in programming are deadend. I predict that in 20 years more than 75% of experts will look down upon it as we look at the 1960s AI hype or the 1980s wildly-wrong imagination for personal computers. I predict that it will not cut programmers' work by any margin that is distinguishable from noise. I predict that all companies and solo developers who try to push it as a "no code solution" or use it in any way beyond a fancy google or stackoverflow will crash and burn hard.
> I program in Python so saying that I’m the only author of my code is kind of a lie - I’d not be able to reimplement the Python interpreter in C from scratch
Oh come on, and C programmers can implement an x86 machine from scratch ? and write it down in silicon ? and write even a basic C compiler to target it ?
Spoiler Alert, no. And that's irrelevant, programming is manipulating a machine. A machine is a set of formal and well-defined input-output rules. Python is a set of formal (-ish) and very well-defined input-output rules, therefore it's a machine. Anyone manipulating it is a programmer.
It just so happens that it's implemented as a layer of illusion over an actual physical machine and C, but that's of no consequence. C itself is an illusion as well, and the actual physical machine is an illusion over analog physics too (which is an illusion over quantum mechanics).
GPT and other LLMs are machines too, there are very well defined and formal input-output rules that specify them. But (once trained) they are non-programmable. Your only way of ever getting them to do anything is to brute-force-search your way through the space of all possible prompts, to find a/the prompt that triggers a magic path through the inhuman forest of their weights ending with the thing you want. You can't even see their internal state or debug them in any way that counts, unlike the vast vast majority of actual and virtual machines. You can't even get them to add 5001 and 2451 reliably for fuck's sake.
Ideology is mostly fashion. The issues of the day are issues because intellectual trend setters make them issues. Those ideas which compose an ideology are a set of merely fashionable issues. Most of them shouldn't be taken too seriously by serious people because the laws of fashion dictate that they will be out of style before long.
Is there any way to determine which issues of the day aren't merely fashionable?
I think you're confusing the attention given to issues with the correct positions on issues. Fashion certainly overemphasises some issues at the expense of others, but the correct position on an issue won't change unless the world changes (although fashions can obscure it).
In other words, as long as you derive for yourself the correct position on an issue, that should be at least somewhat fashion-proof.
My view is that values matter and "values" essentially means "What are your priorities?"
Being correct on a superficial issue is relatively meaningless. Seems to me that 99% of current political and culture war issues are meaningless and that to even have an opinion on them is to have the wrong one.
No, I won't say which issues I think are most relevant in a comment on an Open Thread. That's a long, difficult project I am working hard on and will hopefully publish elsewhere with all the context needed.
A privileged view of a person living in a long-running stable society where seemingly any extreme political position doesn't change the living reality so it's all an idle entertainment. Of course the current things are goofy ahh topics, but the overarching trends matter cause eventually societies are punished with a physical suffering.
I think it's a mistake to think of fashion as "merely" fashion. Fashion is a way for societies to coordinate their attention on something for a period, and develop something that sticks into the long-run culture. Many parts of fashion come and go quickly, but that's because the society is playing around with a bunch of ideas to decide which one sticks. If you're not following fashion, then you're not part of that process, which is fine, if you're willing to just live with what everyone else comes up with on that idea.
My first rule of politics: anything that's currently political is political because there are arguments for both sides. Those arguments might not necessarily be reverses of each other. If one side's argument is "X is bad" the opposing argument is not necessarily "X is good", but it could be "it's impossible to change X without also doing bad thing Y".
Speaking as someone on the political right, from my perspective issues that start as fashion issues rapidly escalate in importance. I feel that arguments against gas stoves are fashion. Arguments opposing restrictions on gas stoves because the person prefers gas stoves are probably also fashion. If you own a business that makes gas stoves or builds houses, arguments against gas stoves probably aren't fashion. If you think it's not the government's power to pose this sort of restriction, then the issue has progressed beyond fashion (yes, the camel already has his nose in the tent, but at some point you have to stop it from going further).
I think this ties into the fundamental roots of what it means to be conservative and liberal, and the fundamental asymmetry between the way the two relate to government. As a conservative, I believe that society is not perfectable; there will always be trade-offs, and those trade-offs are best left for individuals to decide. While the issue of gas stoves is fashion, the larger issue of the government's role in making the decision is definitely not one that's just fashion.
What do you mean when you say “fashion” and “serious?"
It looks to me like you think "fashion" is beneath "serious people," but I'm not sure why. Any person who wants to be taken seriously by others needs to know how to present themselves as serious (i.e. "fashion" in the sense of how one presents oneself), or how to relay ones ideas in ways relevant to others (i.e. keeping up with "fashion" or "trends" in the sense of the public conversation).
I suppose a "serious" person could be more interested in shouting his ideas into a cave without paying any attention to others, but "serious in isolation from others" and "serious with a goal of connecting with/persuading others" are both variations on "serious," so I'm not clear why you seem to be treating the two as opposites.
Fashion is a tool for establishing status, but it works best with people who have decoupled status from broader aptitude. Therefore, devoting your time or resources to fashion buys you status with the people least likely to be able to help you when you really need it. Unless you live entirely within a world of relative status, which many people do but I'm kind of OK with calling those people "not serious".
And "fashion" is not a synonym for "social skills" or "charisma".
Again, this all just seems like starting from a general disdain for “fashion” and building a definition backwards around it.
If fashion is “a tool for establishing status,” well shoot that could be literally anything.
Humans establish status with everything, in a near infinite combination of ways. Take, for example, *just* the idea of showing status through what kind of tobacco you use. In some groups, any tobacco use at *all* will be a marker of low status. Other groups will have a hierarchy of pipe tobacco over cigars over cigarettes, still others will follow that method but put the cigars (or another form of tobacco) on top. Some groups will place status preference on where the tobacco is from or how it is processed, others will show status by being personally connected to the process by growing or rolling their own. And that is just tobacco, which so niche that most people you ask wouldn’t even think of as a status marker at all.
So defining fashion as “a tool for establishing status” doesn’t really illuminate anything.
And even if we extend to the full “a tool for establishing status, that works best with people who have decoupled status from broader aptitude," well... "broader aptitude" is a phrase so general that I could say anything does or doesn't "demonstrate broader aptitude."
Test well on a biology exam? Sure, that demonstrates broader aptitude.
Finish in the top 10% of marathon times? Looks like broader aptitude to me.
Extensive knowledge of metal bands? Sure, why not.
Or I can just be petty and say that *none* of those things demonstrate broader aptitude, because you can be good at biology and not other things, or a good endurance runner but not very likable, and I think metal is dumb.
The overall impression I’m left with is that for you guys “fashion” is simply a pejorative for any status marker you don’t take seriously or don’t care for. My interests are serious, yours are merely fashion.
Hank's initial post is actually a really great example of this in action. How exactly does one extinguish "serious ideas from serious scholars" from "mere fashion ideology put out by mere intellectual trendsetters?" I have no idea, but I'll bet you a shiny quarter that, whatever it is, if you put it on a scatter plot you'll find a *lot* of correlation to "ideas and thinkers that Hank likes."
And to be clear, this is all fine and I do it to. It's how we all process reality most of the time, just try not to let it impact how you treat other people who are evaluating things on a different metric from you.
"Fashion is a tool for establishing status" was not meant to be a *definition* of fascism, any more than e.g. "railroads are a means of transportation". It is nonetheless a true statement, even though there are lots of other things that are means of transportation and/or tools for establishing status.
>The Institute for Effective Policy has helped convince the Australian government to include funding for long-term catastrophic risks in its Disaster Ready Fund.
Damn, still no civil defence against nuclear attack. Not that I'm faulting IEP for that.
Disaster preparation/relief, where the disaster is "a nuclear bomb exploded over a city". (This is separate from military and diplomatic means of reducing the likelihood of nuclear bombs exploding over your cities.)
You can reduce the casualties from a nuke going off over a city by quite a lot (potentially ~80%?) by education on how to protect yourself ("Duck and Cover"; the majority of casualties from a large nuke are going to be from thermal burns and broken glass, not building collapse, and the former two can be mitigated if you know what you're doing), as well as stockpiling food, water and medical supplies (modern supply chains are very efficient but also very fragile).
The Australian State Emergency Services actually started off as civil defence services during the Cold War, but these days it's woefully ignored.
How about the Ivermectin revisit? Alexandros Marinos has been holding his pen for the last few months and declared that he is ready with the review. I personally think he has loads of valid points so for the sake of rationality it would be fantastic if you could address his most serious points.
If Scott concludes that Ivermectin works, the supporters will declare a final victory, and start quoting Scott as a scientific expert on Ivermectin and all things related.
If Scott concludes that Ivermectin does not work, the supporters will require yet another round, you know, for the sake of rationality. Some people will mention in comments their suspicion that Scott actually secretly believes that Ivermectin works, but is afraid of possible consequences of admitting that publicly.
Maybe, but he challenged Alexandros to write up his objections and he did, Scott also promised to take another look this winter. Just reminding him :-)
The smell around how ivermectin was treated by the main stream press should be more than enough to take a deeper look if you're part of the rational community.
Is there a reason why we should take a deeper look into Ivermectin than into Hydroxychloroquine or Paracetamol or any of the other things that had a brief flash in the pan?
Yes. First, Scott did not review Paracetamol nor HCQ, and neither did Alexandros. He reviewed Ivermectin, challenged Alexandros, and Alexandros then did his homework in an exemplary way; he documented a, imho quite stunning, number of rather serious issues.
Scott made a lot of people that were on the fence jump off, and that included me. However, the dirt Alexandros (and ivmmeta.com) dug up is impressive and I am back on the fence. Could be the story of the decade.
There were also a couple things that worked in a modest way, that never got approval. One was the antidepressant Luvox. Was a recent study that again supported its use. I think it's this one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext. Reduces chance of hospitalization for high-risk people with symptomatic infections. It is also a cheap, well-tolerated widely available drug. Despite this FDA did not add it to its recommended treatment algorithm. I have not looked into this carefully, but the docs and scientists on medical Twitter that I thought were most level-headed are vexed that it hasn't been added to the toolbox. There was a second drug like Luvox too -- common drug, seemed effective in a modest way when used off-label for Covid -- but I can't remember what it was.
Ah yes, I totally forgot about that one in the wake of paxlovid, and the other one that also got approved but raised some worries about increased mutation rate.
I think several of the attempted treatments also didn't work out--convalescent plasma didn't. Currently a bunch of the monoclonal antibodies that worked earlier no longer work against covid. (It's under selection to evade existing antibodies in people, and that's probably driving it to evade those antibodies as well.). At least one of the approved treatments give (I think) only about a 40% decrease in probability of hospitalization.
I'm more than willing to admit that, regardless of the efficacy or lack thereof that ivermactin has against COVID, the media and the twittersphere were completely asinine/irresponsible/wrong/terrible (pick your favorite word) in how they discussed it, but I also have exactly zero interest at this point in whether or not Ivermectin does or does not work. I can confidently say that if it _does_ work, the effect is small, or else it wouldn't have been so hard to find, and we already have other, better treatments at this point.
In other words, the actual efficacy doesn't matter, and I don't think anyone (Scott included) disagrees that the media was extremely bad on this topic. Doesn't seem like is much of value left to discuss.
Now, if Scott promised to review it, then there is value in just following up on his word. but that's about it, in my mind.
Part of getting the "media was bad and irresponsible" meme into society is when people like Scott look into the position and make a determination. Scott agreeing that the media was over the top - but accurate! - is very different from Scott agreeing that the media was over the top and also wrong. Those of us reading Scott who don't know the intricacies of how well the treatment did or did not work, which is nearly all of us, can benefit from such a discussion.
I'm not sure I agree with your middle point there. Between either of the choices: "Ivermectin does nothing" or "Ivermectin has a very small positive effect" Isn't going to really change my view of the media's behavior here. The way they talked about it was utter culture war garbage (note: I actually think that most people who could be considered "mainstream" were doing basically the same thing in both directions if they were talking about it at all, it's just that the vast majority of media people were on the "it doesn't work because it's red-coded" side) completely disconnected from reality. None of them _knew_ at the time whether or not it worked, and therefore the truth after the fact won't put them in a better or worse light (for me, and it shouldn't for anyone else either, IMO).
We didn't know back then, and the media should have acted with appropriate uncertainty. They did not, and just being proven right after the fact doesn't make their behavior ok.
I personally am quite certain that Ivermectin has a small enough impact (I'd put more liklihood on "none" than "small" but am willing to concede that I don't actually know either, even now), that I don't think it matters very much whether or not we seriously investigated it as a cure. We _should_ have taken it seriously because it _could_ have worked, but, with the benefit of hindsight, not doing so was at worst a very minor mistake, especially compared with all the other mistakes that were made during the pandemic.
So therefore, my view on the whole topic is that the problem/lesson we should be taking from this is actually totally disconnected from whether or not Ivermectin works, and litigating it's efficacy now won't change that.
My view, which I had before ever Scott did his write-up and which hasn't shifted since despite all the "yes, but did you consider this breakthrough new study?" updates (which turn out, upon examination, to be the same studies all collected in the Cochrane metadata study), is that ivermectin seemed to have the best results in the countries where poverty and parasite loads were high, and I put this down to the killing off worms and nasties meant the immune system had spare capacity to fight off the infection.
That being the case, I didn't think it had any benefit for people in countries, or living in parts of countries, where there wasn't high poverty and parasite loads (maybe it was worth your while if you were living in Florida). And it certainly wasn't worth middle-class people buying up supplies from veterinary supply stores and necking back the horse paste (it would have been cattle drench mainly over here). "But I have to buy it from the vets because my doctor refuses to prescribe it!" Because your doctor thinks you don't damn well need it.
There's an argument for "Well if my patient is dumb enough, and loud-mouth enough, to demand I prescribe him ivermectin, then human dosages of drugs manufactured for human consumption probably won't do any harm, apart from wasting time and money", but as much as I criticise the medical profession and system, I can see why they would not be convinced by "some guy on Youtube swore it was a miracle cure, will you prescribe it for me, doc?" especially people who wanted to take it as a prophylactic when they didn't have covid at all. "This is a sure-fire way to make sure I don't get covid!" No it wasn't and isn't, and I don't care what some fake doctor on social media told you it would do.
"The smell around how ivermectin was treated by the main stream press"
My problem with your approach here?
(1) Yes, the mainstream press is terrible
(2) Notwithstanding, every kook and conspiracy theory makes the same appeal, e.g. Graham Hancock constantly complaining how nobody takes his theory about an advanced pre-Ice Age civilisation seriously and the media is so biased against him
ivmmeta.com has a real time meta-study of 95 Ivermectin related papers (RCTs & observational studies) showing an average efficacy of 80% for prophylaxis & about 60% for use in the first week.
The Oxford study was RECOVER but after its announcement that it would include ivermectin there was no further news that I could find.
The main reason I like to see Scott review Alexandros' findings is because the main stream RCT's (Together & ACTIV-6) seem to have a weirdly large number of serious issues that look like they were designed to lower efficacy. They also refuse to release their data. The press reported these studies did not show efficacy but they both still show efficacy in the paper!
The meta story here is imho even more important than the efficacy of ivermectin against COVID. I've followed the ivmmeta.com site for almost 2 years and I see a very responsive and very transparent team. If you find an error, they'll correct it. The contrast with professionalism of the press (horse dewormer), and I am deeply sad to say, the review Scott did, is immense.
OK, yeah I see nothing about ivermectin on the RECOVER site. That's weird. https://www.recoverytrial.net/results I'm going to remain agnostic wrt ivermectin. I just don't know, and I wouldn't be surprised if the data was compromised on both sides.
Hmm. On one side ivermectin was a potential threat to a 100+ Billion dollar vaccine market. I can see this might influence the big trials like Together & ACTIV that directly or indirectly were funded by big pharma & NGOs that pushed the vaccination. However, I just cannot see any financial or other suspicious motivations for the other 85+ papers? It has been off patent for 20 years and the hundreds of authors are from all over the world. Were their studies perfect? Far from it, many were clearly from less sophisticated countries, but they do not show the bias of the establishment trials.
I am 64 and I find it hard to believe that 20 years ago major newspapers would not have frantically started digging, very deep. Follow the money used to be a thing then. Now they lazily went along with the establishment's horse de-wormer story. A story so easy to show it is incorrect that it should be a red flag for any rationalist.
So my major concern is not ivermectin, it is more how we establish our epistemology. If my worst fears around about how ivermectin was kept from the public are true we have a serious problem looking at how effective this suppression was, how many people went along. Scott, with his medical background, celebrity status, and believe in rationalism is eminently suitable to do some of the digging. (And I think he owes it to himself to reflect on some of the mistakes he made in the first article. Mistakes he acknowledged on an error page.)
Just curious, what criteria do you have to become more gnostic in this case?
Yeah IDK. Our news organizations have been broken for a while. (I pay no attention to the news.) I guess I figure ivermectin had some positive effects (how big I have no idea.) and that there was some desire to keep this out of the main stream narrative. It's like many of the stories around covid and government (or someone) trying to control the message. I think you should give Scott a bit of a break. To go against the MSM ivermectin story would have cost him in terms of reputation. And since he doesn't really have any idea about the truth, it's easy to take the path he did.
To change my mind? Some good study with good data... ? Really I've just moved on. It's like the lab leak, yeah I think it's probably true, but I'll never know and it's not worth getting all worked up about. There's a lot of things we don't get the truth about. Our country is probably better than most in terms of openness, be thankful that you and I can talk about this with being censored.
I'm reading "The Goodness Paradox", very interesting. We perhaps self-domesticated ourselves...
While I would read something by Marinos, it's never going to end until Scott goes "Yeah, you were right all along and I was wrong all the time". Otherwise, devotees will keep popping up here to go "So Scott about this latest article on ivermectin" in saecula saeculorum.
I am positive your are right about that. Even if Moses himself came down from the mountain with a golden tablet reading "Ivermectin is shit" it would still make no difference.
The linked theory of patriarchy has the usual problems:
1) It equivocates "alpha males" and "all males". It explains how a coalition of strong men can coordinate to kill a stronger but lonely tyrant. It does not explain why such coalition would create rules that *also* favor the weak men. Intrasexual competition is much more important from the evolutionary perspective.
If I tried to design social norms that favor strong men, it would probably be something like "only strong men can have sex with women" or "it is a crime if a weak man has sex with strong man's wife, but it is legal for a strong man to have sex with weak man's wife". Along with a system that makes the distinction clear, for example only strong men are allowed to wear certain dress / headband / necklace, and you can officially become a strong man by successfully challenging a strong man to some kind of physical conflict in presence of two witnesses.
So the hypothesis of "alpha male coalition" needs to explain how the social norms of monogamy etc. have evolved, instead of something like described above.
2) Maybe it's my careless reading, but the explanation seems circular / begging the question at some places. Sons were considered more important, therefore paternity became important, therefore women were confined to their homes. Okay, but *why* were the sons considered more important? You can explain how patriarchy can lead to more patriarchy, but the question is how it started.
Consider an alternative explanation: using a plough requires a lot of physical strength, and men are on average stronger than women. Thus in societies based on agriculture which used plough, men provided greater value at war, at hunt, at agriculture, so women had to provide value at childbirth, child care, and taking care of household; there was not much of a choice how to split the tasks. In societies that used hoes for agriculture, there was more freedom for division of the work. Occam's razor.
This is not saying that boys' clubs do not exist. They do. But they do not promote *all* men, only their members.
I agree that it is better to build partnerships, but you do not need to include everyone. A lonely alpha can be defeated by a coalition. But coalition of top 50% men cannot be defeated even if the rest of the men unite against them.
From the perspective of Darwinian fitness, males & females (in total) must always be equal. Every child has both 1 mother & 1 (biological) father. So there is no sense in which males as a whole gain an advantage over females as a whole. Rather, certain males gain an advantage and others receive a disadvantage (such as being killed by the dominant coalition).
I think there are cases where this is not true. (Equal sex ratio.) Certainly wasps and some fish, I wonder about naked mole rats? Are more of the sterile workers female? (It looks like the answer is no.)
That is, the reproductively effective male population was 1/17 of the reproductively effective female population. One tends to assume this is because the 94% of men who failed to reproduce did so through lack of status or access or something, but it isn't outside the realm of possibility that a large number of them actually just didn't exist at all -- that the male population reaching reproductive age was significantly less than that of the equivalent female population.
Reading Razib Khan posting about the impact of steppe-warriors, I assume they are responsible, mostly. Which is connected with a lot of males not reaching enough age to reproduce - resp. died trying. https://razib.substack.com/p/entering-steppelandia-pop-77-billion
Seriously, this woman got a grant from Scott to write a book? I could do that article as well, how about shoving a few grand my way?
If she really never heard that theory before, she is ignorant of history (this would be a cue to swerve into the Usual Rant about history but let's set that aside for now). "Alpha male" cavemen were the province of H.G. Wells. Hush, I feel a G.K. Chesterton quote coming on:
"True, I cannot set forth here in any great detail any actual proofs of these prehistoric origins; but I never heard of anybody bothering about historic proofs in connection with prehistoric origins. There is quite as much evidence for my favorite uncle’s theory of the primitive pillow as there is for Mr. H.G. Wells’s detailed account of the horrible Old Man, who ruled by terror over twenty or thirty younger men who could have thrown him out of the cave on his apelike ear"
And from "The Everlasting Man", 1925:
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off.
…In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it.
…A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock.
…This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall."
At least the woman does query the Caveman Theory but then she rushes off to the other, complementary, and as erroneous one: The Golden Age of the Matriarchy
(This comment looks like it will run long, so I'll break it in two halves)
The lady does realise that we have Sweet Fanny Adams notion about what pre-human or prehistoric human life was life 300,000 years ago, so all theories about the Rise of the Patriarchy are, in the end, hot air. (Allow me a moment of ROFL about whatever person picked the illustrations adding in "Italy's bishops with the late Pope" as an example of how "councils of elder males enforced patriarchy")
That doesn't stop her from galumphing off after "all these societies are examples of matriarchy" red herrings:
"In 19th century Congo-Brazaville, a husband would not take even ‘an egg from her chicken coop’ without permission from his wife."
*That is still a patriarchal society*. This is just demonstrating that she doesn't know about the egg money or how such agriculturally-based societies worked, even up to the 20th century:
Of course he wouldn't interfere with "the women's sphere" of the home and domestic areas like keeping hens, dairy and butter, etc. Any more than his wife would have meddled with his tools and crops without his knowledge and permission - these are for generating income and keeping the family economy going, not simply personal consumption.
If I'm being grumpy, it looks like all that is needed today to write a 'stunning new theory' is just to be ignorant of what was being peddled before you were born. I wish I could monetise my ignorance, I certainly could use the boost to my income stream!
EDIT: There is certainly something to be examined there about female seclusion, and its class/hierarchical basis. The ladies of the Emperor's harem had lotus feet, but their maidservants did not. Women may be absent from the painted rolls she gives as examples, but in real life working class women were out in the fields and the markets.
And all patriarchies are not alike. Christian Europe may have been a patriarchal society, but it wasn't permissible for families to sell their daughters into legal prostitution (women of course did engage in sex work, but the attitudes were different). There's a lot to examine in different cultures about attitudes, e.g. to the 'double standard'.
Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu in the Dwapar Yuga, has eight main wives, as well as 16,000 ceremonial wives whom he married to save their reputations.
Rules bounding the conduct of women apply in both cases, and Sita is persecuted because of this: she has to undergo the test of fire to prove her chastity after being rescued from abduction by Ravanna, and years later the people of the kingdom still demand that Rama puts her away because of the stain on her reputation - she does not need to be guilty of anything, merely living away from her husband is enough.
To be fair, that is just a blog post and not a book, I hope she has more stringent criteria when writing one of those.
I realise I sounded very unkind, but I don't take well to "Wow, just had my socks blown off by stunning new theory!" which turns out to be the same old stuff that has been knocking about since Adam were a lad, and while I might extend some benefit of the doubt to an 18 year old reading Big Books for the first time, I don't give as much credit to established academics who should have heard this line of thinking in their field before.
Though I suppose if "the Old Man who dominated the tribe" theory is sufficiently old that it fell out of favour and the younger crop of academics never heerd o' it before, then bringing it back with your own twist can elicit "Wow, just had my socks blown off by stunning new theory" even from grown up professors.
Speaking of books, is this the one that got the grant aid?
"My forthcoming book is "THE GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE" (Princeton University Press). In South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, it is men who provide for their families and organise politically. Chinese women work but are still locked out of politics. Latin America has undergone radical transformation, staging massive rallies against male violence and nearly achieving gender parity in political representation. Scandinavia still comes closest to a feminist utopia, but for most of history Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South East Asia and Southern Africa.
What explains "The Great Gender Divergence"? My book will uncover the origins and evolution of patriarchy, the drivers of gender equality and regional variation."
I see by her CV that she's not a historian, which may explain a lot. She really may be just encountering these ideas for the very first time. Political economy seems to be her field (or practicum, if I am to avoid racist offensive terms with connotations of slavery in accordance with the best, most up-to-date principles):
"Current Appointments
Lecturer, International Development, King’s College London, 2017- present
Faculty Associate, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, 2017- present
Previous Appointments
Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, 2015-2017
Special Supervisor, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 2015-2017
Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 2013-2015
Research Assistant, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 2008-2009.
Education
PhD Geography, LSE, 2013
Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education, LSE, 2012
MSc International Development (Distinction), LSE, 2009
BA Philosophy (First), University of Nottingham, 2007"
I do think anthropological research on hunter-gatherers & primitive agriculturists can establish that patriarchy is not distinctive to Islamic or plow-reliant civilizations:
Indeed the pre-modern world was violent, just like our modern world. But what Chesterton is getting at, and what I agree with, is that we have no idea of what the domestic or political life of Homo sapiens were like 300,000 years ago, but what evidence we do have is of things like cave art - creativity and the artistic spirit.
So whatever else we may say about cave men or hunter gatherers or early He-Men No Girls Allowed Clubs, the one sure thing we can say is that they produced art. Maybe it was a bunch of patriarchal gents telling the ladies to get back to the cooking pot while they were doing it, maybe it was stunning brave bold Amazon matriarchs doing the art, but we have the art (if not the evil overlord list of how to keep women down).
That's just your white cis hetero patriarchal privilege talking! How can you deny the possibility that the free-travelling, networking, empowered and independent cavewomen did not establish and govern an idyllic matriarchal matrilineal borderless polity that encompassed the known world of the time? This is why women can't have nice things, when male devotees of sky-father gods conspire to snatch power from earth mothers!
Geez, if I didn’t know better I’d think you were trying to start a quarrel of some sort here. :)
I'll take you at your word on that.
In broad outlines I was foreseeing someone of a liberal bent responding with something like, "A fentanyl vaccine would be fantastic, but only for people who people who chose it voluntarily. If it were it mandated though it would infringe on someones basic civil liberties." Then you could drop the hammer by asking how that was different from mandating masks in the public interest being an infringement on basic civil liberties.
Pretty much a white to mate in two situation.
I could see it possibly being mandated as a condition of probation for addicts convicted of addiction related properties crimes though, the way drug screenings are. The vaccine could benefit society and the criminal.
You could certainly make that argument, but it's not quite the "checkmate vaxxers" argument that you think it is. There are obvious differences between the situations (e.g. COVID is highly contagious) so it is easy to favor one or the other without being hypocritical.
It's not COVID's contagiousness per se that pro-forced-vaccination people are relying on, it's the fact that when one person gets it, they affect others.
The same effect can be argued for drugs too. Sure, it's not as reliable as a viral effect, but that's a difference of quantity then, not of fundamental quality.
Yeah, we could quickly wander into the grey marshes of "of course you can't *force* people to take this, but... if you can make them do courses or go to rehab to get clean as part of reducing or avoiding jail time, then is it really that big a step to requiring them to take this as part of the entire programme to get clean?"
Wait, you can vaccinate against drugs? Well, against the high of one particular drug, and it's more blocking the brain areas that get high than a vaccination, but colour me astounded.
I think, though, that if they do vaccinate addicts, the addicts will just turn to something else to get high. That's the problem of addiction.
> The vaccine works by stimulating the production of antibodies that bind to fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain. Those antibodies ... remain in the body at sufficient levels only for a period of months after vaccination, meaning boosters are required to maintain preventative effects.
So wouldn't it be more like you'd have to mandate continual and lifelong vaccinations for people? Ignoring the ethics, that seems pretty difficult.
It's the "wanting to get clean" which is the chokepoint, though. If the addict doesn't want it but is only complying with the vaccine because it's part of his court-ordered treatment, then as soon as he can, he'll be back on the drug. And probably taking different drugs during the period when fent has no effect.
Because it's about getting high, and the need/craving for that, and until things go so drastically wrong that wanting to get clean is better alternative, you won't have any success in solving the problem. And this isn't just fent addicts, I've been on and fallen off diets nearly all my life, so I don't have much room to point fingers: "But don't you know the health risks and dangers of obesity? Don't you already suffer some of the consequences? Is over-eating really worth it? Eating the wrong things which are harmful for you?" "Yep, sure, you're right, that's all true" (thinks) 'For some reason I would really love a bar of chocolate right now, soon as I get this nag off my back, I'm gonna get one!'
It is considered totally normal that a court verdict for someone guilty of a crime will involve violating the normal civil liberties granted to citizens. Prison is the most obvious example here, but far from the only one. Thus, having sentencing agreements include vaccination as a term seems fine to me, though I expect it would be more palatable to present it as a choice between "probation+ vaccine or go to prison", in case someone has a really strong aversion to the idea of the vaccine.
They claim the thing prevents overdoses, but the linked article just talks about treating existing overdoses, or controlled levels of drugs in rats. I expect what will instead happen is the druggie will take double or triple the dose to bruteforce the vaccine, and then overdose and die.
It doesn't saying anything about reducing the craving. I remember a social worker talking about drug addicts cut off from drugs who would huff whatever they could get their hands on, like propane or wood smoke, things with no euphoric effects at all. This isn't a fix anymore than buying everyone a house would fix homelessness.
This made me look up ‘Hedonium Shockwave’. I was only vaguely aware of QRI before, but now my opinion of them has gone down a lot.
"Ringo" makes it too obvious. Should have gone with Richard.
Ringo goes by ‘Richie’ IRL. A high school classmate developed and patented a new type of drumstick. He had Richie on speed dial on his phone.
The drumstick maven was the Lisa Kudro character in our version of “Romey and Michelle’s Class Reunion”. Except he really had developed the glue for Post It Notes.
Assuming this is actually a real situation:
I can only say what I would do, which is to A) ignore everything as much as possible and continue on as if nothing happened. It's probable that the relationship will fizzle out anyway or everything will just be forgotten. Or, that the tension is mostly in your head. And B) if it comes up, to double down on the event being planned for several years and everyone feeling as though it would be best to be with just the boys. (or whatever). That you were just nervous about a new person changing the dynamic too much for a long-planned event.
I would never repeat G and R's comments. All of this is given with the caveat that I have drastically different responses to social events than like every rationalist person I've ever met.
Well, first of all, I recommend you reject the Therapy Culture axiom that telling people *everything* you think and feel is necessarily better. It isn't. Kick that idiotic self-destructive narcissistic principle right down the stairs and out into the street to be taken away by the garbage truck.
Once you abandon that principle, things become a little clearer. Being "completely honest" with John by telling him the sordid details of the conspiracy between you, George an Ringo, is just going to rub salt in the would, as well as betray George and Ringo, thus adding dishonor to disgrace.
You might also be having the urge to make a clean breast of things more in order to be fully forgiven, or to explain away the mistake as really George and Ringo's fault -- meaning the motive is not so much repairing the relationship with John, but repairing your self-respect. But it's John who is the injured party here, not you. If you really want to be (or become again) a good and trusted friend, his welfare, and the quality of the relationship, needs to take precedence over your own self-regard.
So my suggestion is: (1) if you want to confess and be forgiven, go find a church that does confession. Otherwise, the burden of keeping the details to yourself is something you should bear silently, as penance for having fucked up. (2) focus on John and the relationship. The issue seems to be that you didn't give the girl a chance, and made a decision based on hearsay. So, make an extra-special effort to give her a chance *now*. Willingly spend time with John and the girlfriend. Go out of your way to be courteous to her, inclusive. This can be as simple as looking at her and letting her take a larger share in the conversation when you, John, and Yoko are all together. Or maybe it means going out of the way to include her in invites. The details depend a lot on your particular circumstance, but you can figure it out no doubt. Think of what you'd do if she was a smashing beauty. Nobody says you have to decide to like her before you know her, but the way to repair the error is to be 100% sure you give her a fair chance now, and make that clear to John through your actions. (3) Wait. Peoples' feelings mend more with time and sincere reforms of behavior than any amount of talk and explanation. If John is a little cool to you for a while, put up with it in good cheer, as penance for your mistake, and in confidence that if you are genuinely trying to do right by him and his new girl, John will eventually come around and the friendship will be as good as ever[1].
Maybe even better! Since you will have demonstrated to John that you are capable of making up for a mistake at some cost to your own feelings, and he will have an even better reason to trust you in the future, knowing you will make things right if you screw up. People often do experience deeper friendships after they go through a test like this and come out the other side.
----------------
[1] Or if he doesn't, after you've given it a good try, then maybe John isn't a good friend after all. It takes both sides to heal a rift, ultimately. As much as you need to make sincere amends, he will need to not hold a grudge, accept you as a human being who can screw up, and appreciate you as a person who has the courage and character to make amends when you make a mistake.
Thanks, I found this useful.
“Least said, soonest mended.”
Well first talk to George and Ringo, tell 'em you want to come clean. Then all go and talk to Paul together, and apologize for the mistake about the new girlfriend. Done now let's, get back to where you once belonged.
Let it be, let it be.
No explanation is going to help. You haven't just rejected John's girlfriend, you've rejected John's judgment, in favor of George and Ringo's. Trying to explain why you trusted them more than him is just going to double down. Time is the only cure.
Likewise with John missing the birthday party (did that ever get explained?). Whatever the reason behind that, time is your best friend.
New people change dynamics. You've just got to get used to the new one.
He said they were making pizza and lost track of time. A somewhat ludicrous excuse which contributed to the general feeling of negativity around the girlfriend.
I think you’re probably right that time is the only cure. One problem is that John and I no longer live in the same city and have not seen each other many times since these events, so friend-time is running a lot slower than clock-time.
When Roman statesman Cicero wrote, "There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher", which absurdities did he have in mind? In other words, what were some absurd ideas that were being espoused in ancient Rome?
Apparently Cicero wasn't a fan of divination, for starters.
See the passages numbered from 12-on in De Divinatione, his "philosophical dialogue about ancient Roman divination written in 44 BC":
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/cicero/de_divinatione/2*.html
(I don't know if some of the philosophers whom he had in mind might have engaged in such practices, but here he mentions Democritus and Pherecydes?)
If you ask me the republic became absurder each year from the end of the second Punic war to Cicero’s time.
Username checks out?
To answer your question indirectly, almost every opinion you can imagine faces it diametric opposite opinion in another person. Philosophers (the good ones) are heralds of the most profound truths. Then it stands to reason that other philosophers are the foulest blasphemers and most calamous idiots.
Socrates (Plato) argued for true virtue and the immortality of the soul, Epicurus was a confirmed materialist who preferred pleasure. Aristotle wrought byanztines castles of clouds and metsphysics, Diogenes thought that animals were happier than men.
"All of western philosophy is series of footnotes to Plato." Cicero would have encountered the already extant extremes of human reason.
Most calamous idiots? The most reed-shaped morons? The most penlike imbeciles?
Last night I was watching snooker on the BBC, who had for some reason decided we needed to see some profound words on screen between frames. They chose four quotes:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an action but a habit." (Aristotle)
"The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it." (Epicurus)
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." (Plato)
"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions." (Dalai Lama)
I'm familiar with all four philosophers: my 12-year-old daughter who was watching with me wasn't. Her reaction to two of the quotes was "that's interesting" and to the other two "that's obviously rubbish". I wonder if we could guess which were which?
A) Great to get the youngsters into snooker.
B) My guesses at her picks:
1 Interesting
2 Rubbish
3Rubbish
4Interesting
These are my guesses too, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a 12-year-old kid thought "we are what we repeatedly do" was nonsense.
They all seem interesting (and probably true!) and not at all rubbish to me.
My own reaction to the four quotations is that all are at least kinda reasonable and kinda debatable, but the rubbishiest is the Epicurus one (exterminating all the red-haired people in America would probably be difficult but surmounting the difficulties would not be glorious; likewise, in a different way, counting the individual stalks in a large haystack) and the least-rubbishy is the Aristotle one (though something seems off to me about its internal logic; after the first sentence I would expect to see something more like "Excellence, then, is not an innate trait but a habit"; but maybe the context throws the emphasis of the first sentence onto the "repeatedly" or something). The other two seem about equally iffy to me but in different ways. Also, I find myself skeptical about Plato's actually having said what he's alleged to have said. (And, lo, it seems that in fact he never did.) The "Plato" one is just probably wrong unless those conversations are very shallow. The Dalai Lama one seems to go too far in denying the effect of external factors on happiness.
I'm going to guess that your daughter liked Aristotle and "Plato" and disliked Epicurus and the Dalai Lama. Not very confidently, though.
"I find myself skeptical about Plato's actually having said what he's alleged to have said. (And, lo, it seems that in fact he never did.)"
gjm, you're spot-on! At least three of those on-screen quotes that Sui Juris described seeing, on that BBC show, seem ... sketchy.
1. The "Aristotle" quote ("We are what we repeatedly do ...") is likely instead from Will Durant, within one of his discussions of Aristotle's views:
https://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2012/05/08/its-a-much-more-effective-quotation-to-attribute-it-to-aristotle-rather-than-to-will-durant/
2. The "Epicurus" quote ("The greater the difficulty ...") is nearly always attributed to a Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, per most mentions on the 'Net. A summary of the differences between the two men here:
https://irsc.libguides.com/c.php?g=448376&p=3060090
And one summary here of the differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism.
https://academyofideas.com/2014/03/stoicism-vs-epicureanism/
Also, I couldn't readily find an original source for this Epictetus quote, at least in a couple of minutes of very casual Web searching within Google Search and Google Books Search.
3. The "Plato" quote ("You can discover more about a person in an hour of play ...") may have first been made "in a short pamphlet published in 1670 ... by Richard Lingard." And notably, Lingard was referring to gambling/waging "play":
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/30/hour-play/
There's apparently "no substantive evidence that Plato wrote or spoke this remark."
4. The Dalai Lama quote ("Happiness is not something ready-made") may in fact be genuine.
Yet again, as with the Epictetus quote, I couldn't readily come across an original source for this Dalai Lama quote, at least in a minute's casual Web searching.
Heh. I did wonder whether some of the others were also bogus, but they didn't seem so _obviously_ bogus as the "Plato" one. Though if I'd actually thought about Epicurus I'd hopefully have noticed that it couldn't possibly be him. (I can totally imagine the Aristotle one being genuine Aristotle, even though it seems it actually isn't.)
+1 to all!
The Aristotle quote is in the spirit of his views, as crafted by Will Durant in the midst of a passage which interleaved both Aristotle's and Durant's words.
And you were astute, once again, to find the "Plato" one to be the most obviously bogus.
Good research Aron Roberts - it just shows the BBC don't do even the limited research you did! (All quotes and names were exactly as given on screen - I went back and did a screen grab to make sure.)
I've found that the Epicurus quote comes from neither Epicurus nor Epictetus, but instead an essay by Jean-François Sarasin (falsely published under Charles de Saint-Évremond's name) defending Epicurus in the 17th century. I've recounted my steps in my sibling comment at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-259/comment/12027560.
From what I can tell, the complete quotation first appears in "The Rule of Life", published by S. Austen and J. Hinton. The earliest version I could find is the 2nd edition published in 1744, but presumably it also appears in the 1st edition:
> The greater the Difficulty, the more Glory in surmounting it: Skilful Pilots gain their Reputation from Storms and Tempests. _Epicu. Mor._ (p. 23, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rule_of_Life/-LcW6hpLryYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA23&printsec=frontcover)
This "Epicur. Mor." attribution refers to "Epicurus's Morals", a 1712 translation by John Digby. However, the quotation does not come from any of Epicurus's words, but instead from the attached essay titled "An Essay in Vindication of Epicurus, and His Doctrine", supposedly written in French by Monsieur St. Evremont (Charles de Saint-Évremond) and translated by "Mr. Johnson". The relevant passage reads (emphasis mine):
> Undoubtedly, there is more difficulty to follow Nature in Affluence than in Necessity; the Spurs which our Delights make use of to try our Moderation, are much more keen than those which Adversity employs for that purpose; *but the greater the Difficulty the more Glory in surmounting it*, and the loss of false Joys secures to us a much better Possession of real ones. We are not sensible of a Felicity which costs us nothing, and for which we are indebted to chance, is must be given us by Wisdom and Prudence, if we would have a true Relish of it, and Pain must sometime usher us to pleasure: Suppose a Man should enter the Lists at the Olympick Games, with a Design to try his Strength and Skill; if no body encountred him, he might possibly be crowned; but nevertheless, that would not render him Victorious. *Skilful Pilots gain their Reputation from Storms and Tempests.* If _Penelope_'s Chastity had not been try'd, the envious World would have said she only wanted Corrupters. Wherefore, let us not fly the World, nor fly the Court; let us not sculk in Deserts, from whence Philosophy fetch'd the primitive Mankind; let us possess Riches, and refuse not the administration of Publick Offices; if we are Wise, we may enjoy these Things without any Danger to our Ease and Tranquillity; we may sail happily amidst these Rocks, and view all with an unconcerned Eye. If we be stript of them by our not looking back, we may testify our Contempt, and that we were not wedded to them. It is shameful for a Wiseman to be weaker than those Desires, which as they are unnatural so are they vain and unnecessary, only in Opinion. This is _Epicurus_'s Pleasure, this is what he calls living according to Nature, this is his Doctrine, and these his Sentiments. (pp. 174–176, https://archive.org/details/epicurussmorals00descgoog/page/n234/mode/1up)
From here, tracing the text back gets a bit weirder. Harvard Library says that this Essay is spurious (http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990123944590203941/catalog). But where did it come from? Through some searching, I found that much of the text of the Essay, including the passage in question, comes from a 1684 "Discours sur Epicure". Its publisher Claude Barbin attributes it to Saint-Évremond, but modern sources agree that it was actually written by Jean-François Sarasin. I haven't yet been able to locate the primary source for Sarasin's authorship, but in the meantime, here's the French version of the passage (emphasis mine):
> Il est bien vray qu'il y a plus de peine à la suivre dans l'abondance que dans la necessité, & que les aiguillons dont se servent les delices pour éprouver nôtre moderation sont bien plus picquans que ceux que l'adversité y employe; *Mais aussi y a-il bien plus de gloire à les surmonter*, & la perte des fausses joyes asseure bien mieux la possession des veritables. On ne ressent pas la felicité qui ne coûte rien, & de laquelle on est redevable au hazard; Il faut que la sagesse nous la donne; Il faut quelquefois que la peine nous meine à la volupté. Un homme qui seroit dans la lice aux jeux Olimpiques pour combatre, s'il ne se presentoit personne, pourroit bien estre couronné, mais pour cela il ne seroit point victorieux.
> *Ce sont les orages & les tempestes qui donnent de la reputation aux Pilotes*, & si la chasteté de Penelope n'avoit esté éprouvée, quelques-uns auroient pû dire d'elle, il ne luy a manqué que des Corrupteurs: Ne fuyons donc point le monde, ne fuyons point la Cour, ne nous cachons point au Desert, d'où la Philosophie retira les premiers hommes; Possedons les richesses, ne refusons pas d'entrer dans les charges publiques, si nous sommes sages nous joüyrons de ces choses sans aucun danger, nous navigerons heureusement parmy ces Ecueils, nous regarderons tout cela avec un visage indiferent, & que nous n'y étions pas attachez. C'est honte au sage de fuir, & d'estre plus foibles que des desirs qui n'étant pas selon la Nature n'ont aucun credit que celui l'opinion des hommes leur aquiert. Voila quelle est en partie la volupte des Epicuriens, voile ce qu'ils appellent vivre selon la Nature, voila leur doctrine & leurs sentimens. (pp. 27–31, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57755w/f30.item)
So there we have it! The two parts of the quotation were written by Jean-François Sarasin no later than 1684, translated by "Mr. Johnson" in 1712, and pasted together in "The Rule of Life" no later than 1744. After that, it made its way into a myriad different collections of proverbs, very rarely with an attribution to Epicurus. (Although one author turned "Epicur. Mor." into the name "Epicurmor"!) Attributing it to Epictetus seems to be an entirely modern invention. But now the question is, who is "Mr. Johnson"? I searched around for a while, but couldn't find any positive evidence linking the name to anyone.
Thanks so much for this deep dive! WOW!
"Attributing it to Epictetus seems to be an entirely modern invention." Aha! So my correction was clearly in need of its own correction, as well!
Given you've done ALL this work, iro84657, would you perhaps consider submitting it (ideally with all of this research being credited to you, alongside any subsequently done by others) to "Garson O’Toole" (a pseudonym) who runs the Quote Investigator website? Their email address appears at the end of the site's About page, https://quoteinvestigator.com/about/. That'd be a terrific addition to that site's collection.
The first is questionable...that is, the second half is questionable. One can be excellent about some things and not others. (It's easy to be an excellent tic-tac-toe player.) And one can be excellent at one time of life an not at another. I was never excellent, but these days I wouldn't even *try* to climb a mountain.
I don't know her reaction, but mine to the second (Epicurus) was that glory is a socially defined thing, so that's a comment about the structure of the society in which it occurs. Perhaps it was true when he said it.
WRT the third, you discover different things. I think this could justifiably be called rubbish, but that depends on what you consider important.
For the Dali Lama's quote...well, the first half is correct. I'm rather dubious about the second half, though it can certainly happen that way occasionally.
Now as to what a 12 year old in modern US would say... I'll GUESS that she called 1 and 2 rubbish, but that's with very low certainty.
What you learn about someone in an hour of play might not be so much about how good they are at playing. It might be more like "Are they gracious in both victory and defeat?" "Are they good at having fun?"
That sort of thing wouldn't be everything I want to know about a person, but they aren't nothing.
Yep, exactly.
1: rubbish
2: meh
3: interesting
4: interesting
“And that’s a bad miss.”
The conversation one is for sure rubbish.
For those who wanted to know, she said the first two were interesting, the second two rubbish.
That's fascinating, thank you for posting about it.
Drat, I was slow but I was about to guess that.
Twelve-year-olds can be pretty literal. And number three doesn't sound like it's likely to be literally true. A year of conversation is a helluva lot of conversation. And twelve-year-olds remember perfectly well what it's like to play with someone for an hour, it's not that special. So I was certain that this was one of the ones she'd have judged as "stupid".
Likewise, "happiness comes from your own actions" is such a massive oversimplification of what happiness is about that I would have expected her to declare that one as stupid as well.
That's about my reaction. She is clearly smart as hell. Genius, possibly.
I would guess one of her "rubbish" reactions was to 1. Probably most kids, and a good many adults, associate excellence with exceptional achievements, with the implication these are occasional "lightning bolts" rather than an on-going habitual routine of a generally productive and commendable life style.
The other adverse reaction was doubtless to 3, seeing as "play" is superficial wheareas a year of suitable conversation would reveal a lot about about a person. I'm skeptical about 3 myself! :-)
The full quote gets significantly more detailed:
"There is a like error in regard to dreams. How far-fetched is the argument in their defence! 'Our souls' (according to the view of your school) 'are divine and are derived from an external source; the universe is filled with a multitude of harmonious souls; therefore, because of its divinity and its contact with other souls, the human soul during sleep foresees what is to come.' But Zeno thinks that sleep is nothing more than a contraction — a slipping and a collapse, as it were — of the human soul. Then Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable authorities, bid us, if we would have trustworthy dreams, to prepare for sleep by following a prescribed course in conduct and in eating. The Pythagoreans make a point of prohibiting beans, as if thereby the soul and not the belly was filled with wind! Somehow or other no statement is too absurd for some philosophers to make."
But, WRT the pythagoreans, a fair percentage of the population of northern Italy could not properly digest beans. Eating them was dangerous, and occasionally fatal. There were decent reasons to forbid the eating of them. (I understand that with proper cooking this could be avoided....but I'm not sure what that means. For all I know it may involve pressure cookers, which wouldn't have been available. Or perhaps treating with lye.)
Boiling seems to work:
https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/multimedia_pub_fsf_139_04.html
People poison themselves by eating improperly cooked beans even today.
What does northern Italy have to do with Pythagoreans?
The Pythagoreans were in southern Italy (including Sicily), so would have been familiar with northern Italy?
They were in the Greek parts which didn't have a lot of contact with northern Italy. And most of them fled Italy fairly early on. At any rate, they were not Northern Italians so if there was some diet issue I don't see how it'd be core to their doctrine.
Oh.
I'll note that people still get poisoned today from improperly prepared beans. It might not just be a northern Italy thing.
But ... I dunno.
"the belly was filled with wind!"
I thought the Pythagorean thing about beans was because of flatuence.
Maybe he foresaw Rousseau.
Note of course that here by "Ranced Choice Voting" you mean specifically Instant Runoff Voting. :P
Also should note that no "election nerds" like Instant Runoff Voting, which is clearly one of the worst systems, on par with plurality. People just like better ranked systems.
Yeah I consider to be IRV -- and, more specifically, the idea that it is the one and only ordinal voting method, that leads to it being called RCV -- as one of those dilettante traps...
What are the RCV types that are clearly better than IRV?
Condorcet methods; to overgeneralize, selects the candidate that would prevail in a two way race against every other candidate.
That is better, I always struggle to see how realistic a need for it is those. And the electorate is very stupid so there is a cost to more complicated things.
The ballot for a Condorcet method is the same as for IRV, id est, just a ranking of candidates. It can look more complicated than IRV when explaining how the respective algorithms are *implemented*, but is actually simpler to explain (as I did above) what the system *does*. There's no way to compress a description of IRV further than that of its algorithm.
People not understanding how the algorithm is implemented is a pretty big downside. Consider how people complain about their posts being ranked by a mysterious "algorithm," and now apply it to election results. We'd never hear the end of it.
I'm not a big election guy, but I've read a bit about various voting systems, and my understanding was that there was no voting system that could, in every possible situation, pick the "best" candidate? I know that Arrow's theorem is only talking about ranking systems, not others, but I thought there were similar issues with all voting systems.
Basically, my understanding was that some systems have advantages over IRV, but there is no "perfect" voting system. Is that incorrect?
Arrow does show that there cannot be a perfect system, but it does not follow that there are always tradeoffs between two systems. Some (FPTP) are so bad that other systems can be strict improvements.
Arrow's theorem is basically equivalent to saying that Condorcet cycles can exist. In a three person contest, there exist voter preferences so that they'd rank A over B in a head-to-head race, B over C, and C over A. When that happens, you still have to pick a winner. If that winner is A, that means B could drop out and make the winner C. So any voting system that actually takes voter preferences into account fails "independence of irrelevant alternatives" - adding or removing candidate B changes the relative ordering of A and C.
Arrow's theorem also relies on a counterintuitively-broad definition of the non-dictatorship criterion. Basically, if the same person happens to be the tipping-point voter between all pairwise alternatives (e.g. in a three-way election the same person is the tipping point voter for A being ranked above B and B being ranked above C), then that voter is defined to be a "dictator" for the purposes of Arrow.
Both proofs of Arrow essentially work by demonstrating that Condorcet cycles exist and that any method of breaking a cycle involves a single tipping-point "dictator".
Calling the existence of a single tipping-point voter (even one who can't be identified in advance and is the tipping-point voter only by virtue of the combined effects of other people's ballots) a "dictatorship" is deeply misleading to the point of rendering the theorem nearly useless. To reduce it to absurdity, a simple majority election with exactly two candidates meets Arrow's definition of a dictatorship because there's always a tipping-point voter for the winner over the loser.
Borda Count and its variations have been growing on me lately: basically, Borda provides that in e.g. a five-candidate race, your first-choice vote is worth 4 points, your second choice is worth 3, your third choice 2, and your fourth choice 1. It's not quite as good as Condorcet in terms of robustness in the face of irrelevant alternatives, but it's got some substantial benefits over other ranking methods:
1. It's highly legible to voters, in that the algorithm is a lot easier to explain.
2. Each ballot's effect on the final result is static and unaffected by other ballots. This allows faster, easier, and more transparent counting, as individual ballots can simply be added together to give precinct results, and any set of precinct results can be added together to produce partial and final counts.
3. To the extend Borda departs from Condorcet results, it tends to do so by skewing towards compromise candidates whom large swaths of voters rank highly but not #1.
4. It's a bit more resilient against voters failing to rank beyond their first choice, at least in terms of voter intuitions: there's no appearance that your vote is being ignored in subsequent rounds of tallying because there's only one round and your vote is counted fully as you cast it.
The main weakness of Borda is irrelevant alternatives, which plagues every method except Condorcet. You can mitigate this with a two-round system (like Alaska's top-three primary preceding their IRV round) designed to narrow down the field to a manageable number before the Borda Count round, or by limiting the number of places you can rank (e.g. rank your top 3 of N candidates in order, which get 3, 2, and 1 point respectively).
Tactical voting can make Borda go nuts. Proportional representation (where practical); Condorcet and hybrid methods such as 1-2-3 where a single winner is needed, approval where ranked choice systems are impractical, but please let's not drag Borda into the conversation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Potential_for_tactical_manipulation
The main weakness of Borda is that it's famously gameable. If you polled a bunch of election nerds on which voting method is the most easily manipulated, Borda would always come up in the top 2 or 3. It's a no-go for that reason
I consider myself at least vaguely an "election nerd", and I like IRV.
Also, no, it's not on par with plurality. IRV is clone-proof, which is a humongous advantage over plurality; clone-dependence is one of the worst failures possible since it's exploitable.
There are Condorcet methods competitive with IRV (the clone-proof ones, like ranked pairs), but approval is not a Condorcet method IRL. Approval voting's huge downside is the huge tactical voting issue, comparable in severity to that in plurality (it's still way better than plurality, but on this specific point it's ~equally bad).
(I've raised this to approval advocates before; the usual response has been to pretend tactical voting isn't/shouldn't be a thing. Sorry, this is the real world we're talking about.)
IRV is non-monotonic. A winning candidate can lose if they get more support. I don’t deny that tactical voting is bad but IRV is also vulnerable to tactical voting, so I don’t know why you consider tactical voting a strong motivator for IRV over approval.
I’d prefer a scoring system like STAR over a Condorcet RCV, a Condorcet RCV over Approval, Approval over IRV, and IRV over plurality.
The cases in which false preferences are tactically incentivised in IRV are very narrow, which means in practice, unless you're an extremely-high-information voter, that it's not a good idea to tactically vote.
Approval is comparable to plurality in that every single voter will be considering tactics, because putting your approval cutoff outside the set of people with a chance wastes your vote and this is extremely obvious. Most scoring systems also have this kind of problem (not all, though).
No voting system is free of tactical voting (except random ballot, which I like for member-of-chamber elections but which in reality nobody will agree to), but the degree to which it shows up is highly variable and IRV legitimately is one of the better ones in this regard.
Not sure I consider IRV the best, but I certainly prefer it to approval.
Moderate election nerd here and I honestly can't figure out if the non-monotonicity problem is a practical concern or only happens in a lab environment. And really, if it happens occasionally but is undetectable because in the real world we don't have all the voters graphed by preference, I'm not sure it matters! It's just some extra noise in the system and isn't going to cause anybody to vote strategically.
I *had* thought IRV was immune to strategic voting before I learned about Center Squeeze (if you like your side more than the moderate more than the other side you might want to rank the moderate higher than your side to keep the other side from winning) but I'm also not sure how often *that* happens in real life.
Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem: with 3+ candidates, the only voting system with no tactical voting under any circumstances is "pick a voter by some means; that voter's vote wins and everyone else's is ignored".
I do like random ballot (the "some means" being picking a paper out of the box at random) in theory for electing members of chambers (Parliament/Congress), but there are some practical issues, including the fact that nobody's ever going to agree to it.
did you follow the Alaska election?
IRV having cases where tactical voting is clearly incentivized are actually pretty common in practice. You can see one in the August House special election for Alaska. First round was 40% Peltola, 31% Palin, 28% Begich. IRV elimates Begich, and has Peltola win the second round. But polling seems to indicate that Begich would beat Peltola, so if 2% of Palin>Begich>Peltola voters flipped their first two ranks, Begich would win. This issue doesn't arise under Condorcet methods. Of course, different issues can, so the question becomes which you think are the most common and damaging.
It's not clear from that information whether Palin beats Begich; if she does, there are Condorcet-completion methods that would do the same thing.
And like I said, it's a narrow case. You need to know that Peltola will narrowly beat Palin (51-49, literally!) in order for flipping those preferences to be a good idea, otherwise you're handing victory to Begich over your true preference of Palin.
So on one hand, if your problem with tactical voting is voters regretting their vote, I guess IRV has issues (I think the models say it's about 10% for at least one voter to regret his/her vote?), but if your problem with tactical voting is reliable incentives to lie on a ballot paper (penalising truth-tellers), then IRV's pretty solid (whereas approval and plurality ~always have such incentives for large chunks of the population).
Doesn't alter your point, but you need 6-10% of such voters to flip their first two ranks, since such voters make up less than 1/3 of all voters and you need to move the total numbers by 2%.
and if %3 switched from palin to peltola, begich would win. its a good thing peltola didnt try to apeal to more palin voters!
>Sorry, this is the real world we're talking about
The IRV election results have not been great in the US so far. For instance, about half of recent Maine voters only 'ranked' 1 candidate in the last election! A third of recent Alaskan voters did the same. My understanding of the Australian system is that it allows voters to use pre-filled rankings from their parties, which 90% of them do. Asking a bunch of random voters to legitimately rank candidates (which may be outside of their attention span or cognitive ability) is kind of uncharted territory
https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2023/01/15/the-ranked-choice-voting-elections-of-2022-in-alaska-and-maine/
Ranking is easy when people get used to it, just needs an information campaign. After all 50% of people did understand it even on their first try.
This is Maine's 3rd RCV election.
The issue is that the large majority of voters hate politics, hate thinking about politics, can't distinguish between the candidates' policy positions at all, and are basically deciding who to vote for based on who they'd rather have a beer with. So while 'ranking' is easy, it's not if you don't know anything about the involved parties and don't care. I find this is difficult to convey to highly educated political obsessives who follow the field religiously.
Like, let me stereotype you as someone who doesn't like basketball. Would you find it easy to rank say the 5 best power forwards of all time? Probably not, right?
Australia's system allows voters to use the parties rankings they've already laid out, which 90% of voters do. I.e. the voters don't have to think at all, and just 'vote' based on how their party told them to rank everyone. America is basically in uncharted waters asking a bunch of random people to have detailed opinions on individual politicians
Does Maine not allow how-to-vote cards?
(I think it's not actually 90% that follow those cards in Oz; more like 60-70%. There are a decent amount of cases where preferences are split, which implies a lot of people don't follow them, although admittedly the ones I recall have been from wealthy electorates where you'd expect higher-than-usual-information voters.)
no, ranking is definitely more complex, in every way we can measure.
https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-than-irv-84b8990986f2
> My understanding of the Australian system is that it allows voters to use pre-filled rankings from their parties, which 90% of them do.
It's not that you use pre-filled rankings, it's that the parties will hand out "How To Vote" cards which contain their suggestions on how you might like to fill out your preferences if you'd like to vote for them. You still have to manually fill every box.
Generally the major parties will strike deals with vaguely ideologically aligned minor parties and independents to swap preferences. Of course the minor parties aren't going to get elected anyway and the major parties aren't going to get eliminated early, so the preferences of a minor party are much more valuable than those of a major party.
I disregard the How To Vote cards and fill in my own preferences, I don't really care who has cut deals with whom. Generally I put my preferred major party third after a couple of no-hope candidates that represent my views more closely.
(All of what I've said applies Federally and in my state, there might be variations in other states. And the Senate voting is a whole different mess I don't pretend to understand.)
Yeah it's the Senate where there is the choice of voting 'above the line' for a party (and therefore for all their candidates in the order chosen by the party) or 'below the line' where you can choose your own order and eg ignore some candidates while voting for their fellow party members.
They also used to allow just voting for a single party and letting their preference deals determine where you vote went, but that's fortunately gone now. You have to rank at least six parties above the line, or at least twelve candidates below the line, but you don't have to rank everyone.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-preferential-voting-work-in-the-senate-116347
Gone federally, but Victoria's state election still has party controlled preference flows for above the line Upper house votes. Fortunately it doesn't require filling out every box to vote below the line, the 2013 federal election as painful (135 boxes to vote below the line in the senate, or something thereabouts)
I think if you're arguing ranking a list of people is beyond voters' cognitive ability, you might as well be arguing those people shouldn't be voting. you literally rank the people, what is hard to understand?
The voters don't know the difference between multiple candidates, or their platforms, and so they either don't rank them or their rankings are random. What is hard to understand about this? They.... can't distinguish between the candidates. Only 46% of voters know that their state has 2 Senators, including 77% in between the ages of 18 to 34.
If you're a politics-obsessed person, you may lack the theory of the mind necessary to understand that most people don't know and don't care about politics. I would suggest getting off the Internet and trying to discuss public policy IRL with a bartender, Uber driver, guy at the hardware store, homeless guy, construction worker, etc.
I think democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other ones that have been tried. And I think that voting for 1 candidate is (barely) within many voters' cognitive abilities. I think having opinions on say 4-6 is just beyond many folks, sorry
I think at the point where a voter doesn't know which candidate they would like to win, their vote is meaningless noise absolutely regardless of the electoral system.
Realistically, even low info voters probably know either 1 person they like or 1 person they hate, and putting that name first or last respectively conveys that preference, even if the rest of the numbers are in a random order.
on the contrary, approval voting is specifically beloved by game theory experts for its RESISTANCE to tactical voting. see steven brams, an NYU professor of political science and game theory, or the book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.
the voter satisfaction efficiency calculation from jameson quinn—a harvard stats phd who sat on the board of the center for election science—show approval voting performing comparably with condorcet methods, and in some cases significantly better.
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6
note that it's mathematically proven that the condorcet winner is not necessarily the favorite candidate of the electorate.
https://www.rangevoting.org/CondorcetCycles
Hi Clay, hope you're doing well. Wanted to use this opportunity to ask you- didn't you use to write a lot about asset voting? (Or am I completely confusing you with someone else?) Are any of your writings on the topic still out there? I think one old forum was taken down.
I recently discovered asset voting and I've been a bit fascinated it- if you have to have single member districts, why not make sure that the candidate represents a fairly broad cross-section of society? I recently came across a stat that in Germany's latest MMP election, out of 299 seats, 80 were won with less than 30% of the vote, with the absolute lowest being like 18.9% or around there. I understand that approval voting would help this some, but I find this a pretty.... dumb.... way to select a representative.
Seems like asset voting could help out a lot. Maybe the candidates coordinating post-election is unrealistic in this day & age, but at a minimum, candidates could announce (on the ballot) who they're transferring their votes to if they don't win
Can you elaborate on where you see the problem with the 80 seats being wone with under 30%? I'm wondering if I'm missing sth. here.
Please note that we have this combined electoral system, where the proportial representation should count most anyway.
Yes, I'm referring specifically to the constituency seats. I think it's rather dumb to choose 1 single representative for a specific district/constituency, if 70+% of the electorate voted *against* them. How can you represent a grouping of people if more than two-thirds of them rejected you? At least the French do a 2 round system, to sort of force a consensus.
I'm not referring to the proportional/top-up seats, and I think it's fine if all of the parties (above a threshold) are represented in the Bundestag or wherever. I'm referring just to the constituency reps
scorevoting.net/Asset
If there is a Condorcet cycle, there is no Condorcet winner (though there will be a winner in any given Condorcet completion method) and the Condorcet criterion does not require any particular winner.
You linked me an image (twice), but I'm not able to interpret many of the labels - in particular, I can't see approval. I do know that if you put your approval cutoff outside the set of candidates with a chance, you waste your vote under approval; I'm presuming that any paper purporting to show that approval is resistant to tactical voting falsely counts "put your approval cutoff inside the set of candidates with a chance" as "honest", because it's complete nonsense otherwise.
no. "honest" just means vote for everyone you like better than average. and approval voting performs quite well under this behavior.
DSL uses approval voting for the effortpost contest, and I can personally confirm that it is highly vulnerable to tactical voting, and I sometimes vote tactically myself.
i can personally confirm you're wrong. VSE figures show approval voting performing better with 100% tactical voters than most systems do with honest voters. you're using the wrong definition of "vulnerable".
https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/
"Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
Hmm. I’m a fan of the single transferable vote myself as it’s proportional enough and keeps the relationship between voters and constituency.
STV is similar to IRV in a lot of ways, but the proportional discounting of votes for candidates that reach quota creates tactical voting issues where you should vote for the people you want to win in order from least to most likely they'll win (because this will allocate your full voting power to the marginal candidates where it can do the most good, since getting reassigned via meeting quota dilutes your vote but getting reassigned by candidate elimination doesn't).
Wait, what? STV is some complicated thing?
My preferred solution is:
1. Everyone votes for thier single preferred candidate.
2. The candidate with the fewest votes transfers all thier votes to whoever _the candidate_ thinks is best (among the remaining options, published as a ranked list ahead of time, for any high info voters who care)
3. Repeat step 2 until one person has a majority.
STV, as it's normally meant, is a very-complicated thing. It's an adaptation of IRV for proportional representation (multi-member electorates).
I will point out that the Australian Senate used to have basically this system (and Victoria's upper house still uses it) and it routinely results in preference trading shenanigans that get people elected off minuscule vote totals. The most infamous example being Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiast Party, who became a Senator with 0.5% of the vote.
Yeah, public announcement of where the votes will go is somewhat important.
And if someone wins with .5% on the initial ballot, it's probably a situation where there were 20 mostly similar and aligned candidates splitting 51% of the vote, and one guy everyone hates getting 49%, and _someone_ from the coalition "should" win.
Also, you didn't specify which system you were calling "this system" but it looks like they were using some sort of STV, not my idea, which I guess I would call deferred IRV?
I will note that my impression was that Ricky Muir was actually a pretty decent Senator, and insofar as he had a platform it was very moderate - I think almost all the people whose votes flowed to him were probably genuinely happier with him than they would have been with any of the major parties, else they wouldn't have been voting for a microparty in the first place.
STV is a way of choosing k winning candidates from n options. IRV is precisely STV when k=1.
I know. In fact I use it to vote.
The proportionality with multi seat constituencies which still keep the idea of a person being elected (rather than a vote for a party) is what appeals.
STV is not particularly proportional- it's better than FPTP but not as good as list PR. In some years (not all, to be fair), Ireland has a Gallagher Index close to that of Britain.
The way to have multiseat constituencies and proportionality has been a solved problem since the late 19th century- list PR. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, or ask voters to do too much cognitively. Just.... use open list PR
What if I like a party over all but their leading candidate is personally abhorrent? STV and similar allow voting for the other individuals that represent that party without voting for the problematic individual.
it's not proven that proportional representation can outperform the best single winner methods.
https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep
It's not nearly as bad a plurality, but it does have it's problems. It's advantage is that it's easy to explain, which Condorcet isn't. With IRV lots of people can look at the program an tell that it's doing what it claims to do. With Condorcet that's a LOT less true.
When you say "on par with plurality", is that hyperbole or do you think it's actually not significantly better? I've never heard this opinion from an elections nerd (definitely I've heard that IRV is the worst alternative system, but never that it isn't a huge improvement over plurality)!
I do think it's not significantly better plurality, at least as generally practiced in America. At lot of the worst pitfalls of plurality are avoided when you have a two party system with primaries so that there are two clear front runners before voting starts. IRV basically simulates this in a single ballot , as long as people vote intelligently (not tactically), so it will not only give the same result most of the time, but also continue to incentivize the same politics. Think about an electorate where the large majority of voters are either Republicans or Democrats, and partisan voters rank of their party's candidates above all of the other party's. In that case IRV is exactly the same as running two single-party primaries under IRV rules and then having a head-to-head election between the winners. Even small amounts of crossover won't really change the picture.
IRV actually does solves problems that happen much more in Canada or the UK, where there are often multiple parties competing for the same seat. Which means no party has gotten above 40% of the votes in Canadian federal election in years, but they usually have one party with a majority in parliament. And that in the most recent UK election, the Conservatives got 43% of the vote, which gave them a majority that they used to complete Brexit. But Labor+Lib Dem+SNP+Green together got a majority of the vote and were all anti-Brexit. But since those parties ran against each other for many of the seats, you had results like the Conservatives winning Kensington 16,768 to 16,618 to 9,312 when most of those LD voters would probably prefer the Labor candidate. IRV would solve this problem, but so would other ranked methods. And other ranked methods tend to be much better at electing compromised candidates and not entrenching major parties.
And all this is only for single winner methods, but for legislatures, they'll always have the possibility of the party with more support getting a minority. It happened, for example, in Australia in 1998. They use IRV to elect winners in single member districts and have more or less a two party system (not surprising). In 1998, the Labor party won 51% percent of the final round votes, but the Liberal coalition still won 54% of the seats. But for legislatures, you can just use proportional systems and fix a whole different class of problems that no single winner method can.
>Think about an electorate where the large majority of voters are either Republicans or Democrats, and partisan voters rank of their party's candidates above all of the other party's. In that case IRV is exactly the same as running two single-party primaries under IRV rules and then having a head-to-head election between the winners. Even small amounts of crossover won't really change the picture.
This is mostly assuming away the problem.
If there are two big parties and a decent-sized swing vote, primaries + plurality will give the people two extreme candidates to pick from (since each primary will pick the candidate best-liked by only half the population). IRV and no primaries tends to force those two parties toward the centre (median voter theorem, particularly with compulsory voting).
IRV + compulsory voting is a huge chunk of why Australia hasn't gone nuts the way the US has; our politics tend to centre around scandals rather than massive partisan divides, because our two biggest parties are incentivised to have quite-similar policies.
Except IRV is one of the few ranked systems that doesn't do that. If your top choices are Democrats, IRV doesn't even consider your opinion on the Republicans (at least unless all the Democrats you put at the top are eliminated). That makes it essentially identical to running primaries. Other voting systems do better.
Australia isn't an example here because they never had primaries. From the beginning, pre-IRV, they used the British style system where party leadership picks the candidates. And even with IRV, there are never two people from the same party running in the same seat, when IRV would let them do this without much downside. Australia also shows how IRV doesn't actually do anything to prevent two party dominance. I'm also not sure Australian politics is any less nutty than any other Anglo country or that compulsory voting has any significant effect on anything.
>Except IRV is one of the few ranked systems that doesn't do that. If your top choices are Democrats, IRV doesn't even consider your opinion on the Republicans (at least unless all the Democrats you put at the top are eliminated). That makes it essentially identical to running primaries. Other voting systems do better.
Are you saying that the later-no-harm criterion is bad? Because for a single-winner election this sounds like you're arguing for the inverse of later-no-harm - and yes, IRV is one of the few voting systems that satisfies later-no-harm, the criterion that putting in later preferences honestly cannot hurt the chance of your favourite and first preference being elected (and thus tactical voting in later preferences to increase voting power is not incentivised).
>And even with IRV, there are never two people from the same party running in the same seat, when IRV would let them do this without much downside.
There have been quite a few cases in Australian politics (like, I think I've heard of at least 3 in the last 20 years) in which someone loses the party preselection, runs anyway as an independent, and wins. This is a big difference from the US system in which doing this hands victory to the opponent (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt trying for a third term). This keeps the parties honest.
>Australia also shows how IRV doesn't actually do anything to prevent two party dominance.
We had a hung parliament in 2010, and we currently have 16 of 151 seats held by non-Labor, non-Coalition parties (and the Coalition is sort of two parties itself). IRV doesn't *prevent* two-party dominance, but it doesn't *enforce* it either.
Consider a case where a Dem majority district has many candidates of both parties. If moderate republicans put moderate dems over extreme Republicans, then that can result in the Moderate Dems defeating the Extreme Dems, even if the Extreme Dems are more popular among the subset of people who would today turn up at a primary election.
Hell, even if it were functionally equivalent to primaries, doing it as part of the same ballot makes a massive difference to voter turnout and thus will frequently change the result.
I'm something of an election nerd and this thread is vastly underestimating how much the general population cares about elections (very little), and hence how important it is that the election process be simple (quite important), and that the resultant winner have sufficient power to implement its agenda and hence sufficient accountability on results. These are all areas where FPTP actually scores over PR, RCV etc and they don't seem to be under consideration here
IRV is definitely more complicated than Plurality, but my understanding is that states that have implemented it haven't seen very much voter confusion. Not as much as I'd have naively expected, anyway.
Nah, I think the he meant "Rancid Choice Voting" - which is, of course another name for the system we already have.
I am strongly considering moving to the Bay Area. Do people have non-obvious tips about where the best places to live are? Areas that are under or overrated? Current front runners are, based on access to “nature”, somewhere near the presidio or golden gate, vs access to people I know, somewhere near rockridge Bart
All are great options. Inner Richmond, inner sunset (both close to ggp) and presidio area are all very nice but will be more foggy/less sunny than east bay. If you value easy access to good and relatively inexpensive restaurants, inner Richmond > inner sunset (slightly, both good) > rockridge > presidio. I would also nominate Glen Park area (has nature, on Bart). Personally I grew up in sunset (both outer and inner) and found my quality of life better in Berkeley because sun really affects me and I have friends in walking vs public transit distance. Rockridge is not far from nature - you can bus or bike to several nice large parks but it is not in nature the way the actual presidio is. I also like Alameda, parts of Marin, half moon bay but if your friends are in rockridge none of these are easy transit
some thoughts
1. access to BART is either literally everything or completely meaningless depending on car ownership.
2. if you don't own a car buy an E-bike so you can move around (just make sure your E-bike can go in the rain).
3. Hayward is a nice city with high crime but otherwise feels very "city" in the B street area, but otherwise feels very non city outside of B-street.
4. Oakland is close to the 2 main meetups (berkley/San francisco) and that probably matters a lot if you want to attend rationalist events. Berkeley itself sucks as a city, but the Northeast bay (concord ect just have terrible rail connections to the rest of the bay.
I wouldn't reccomend living in the south bay unless you own a car, then south bay is great. (but extremely expensive)
the cheapest city in the bay area that you would call the bay is Hayward, at 800k median home price (yes that is YIKES but that's as low as you get :( ). I lived there for years and liked it, but the rationalist community there doesn't exist so you have to travel far to get to events (not a problem for me but boy people hate traveling)
North of the golden gate is also OK, but you run into the issue that the north isn't really "bay area" anymore, as the 3 main centers of the bay are Mountain View San francisco and Kinda berkeley/oakland. (Oakland has this weird "not really culturally itself more of the place where people live to work in the west bay" vibe.
If you’re planning to own a car, Oakland hills are lovely and, I think, underrated. Montclair is in nature and proximate to Rockridge and downtown Oakland. Very paltry public transit though.
Yeah I found Montclair very charming but I would rather be able to visit and be visited by train.
Hi there! I moved to SF last year and made a guide, I didn't feel like there was a consolidated / useful resource. It covers both the process of finding a place in the city as well as plugging into the city. Happy to hope on a (free) call with you to talk through options but FYI I mostly know the city well, not so much Oakland.
https://www.livethere.org/sanfrancisco
Where is your job? Seems like it makes sense to live near work.
Oh hey I just wrote about how East Germany used approval voting:
“ After all, even East Germany had expansive constitutional rights on paper and—yes, I’m serious—fairly-counted multi-party elections. They used an approval-based voting system, which actually allows for effective constituent bargaining against incumbent politicians on local issues, and was thus recently on the ballot in Seattle as an alternative to both ranked-choice and first-past-the-post. The country’s dominant party only won around one quarter of the legislative seats, in each of its nine elections before the wall fell, and also in its final election afterwards (which allocated seats via standard western-style proportional representation). This legislature abolished the senate, and officially controlled both other branches, much as our judicial and executive branches testify before our congress in exchange for official guidance on all forms of power: personnel, provisions, and policy.
But, of course, a clear supermajority of their administrators joined the Socialist Unity Party, and that was the clear path to promotion… while openly supporting alternative options could get you fired and shunned from influential positions. For example, in the late 1980s, the SUP alone had well over two million members, while each of the other four main parties only had about 100,000. Much like their head-of-state only rubber-stamped the party’s decisions, our president can’t legally fire the vast majority of his ostensible subordinates, from Fauci to the Fed. Much like their organs of culture, prestige, and information were only independent from the party on paper, our deep state only offers access to favored media, and infiltrates organizations deemed suspect. And so forth.
In my view, there’s only one obvious difference between our manner of actually constituting a government and theirs: East Germans could choose to publicly register their actual votes, and so almost every voter did, to avoid arousing suspicion; in contrast, ever since 1891 we’ve had secret ballots, and so 20th Century communications technologies never got the chance to impose overtly totalitarian control on us. Thus, well over 90% of their ballots approved the candidates on offer. Meanwhile, the average margin of victory in our Senate and House elections is just 20 and 30 percentage points, respectively (though both sets of incumbents admittedly still win well over 90% of the time). Granted, I may be overstating the importance of this distinction, because our system publicly registers our party affiliations, our partisan donations, and all the times we’ve ever voted, and we can’t opt out from sharing this information. “
More such ranting at the link: https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-united-states-is-a-one-party
Basic summary: Campaign contributions and party registrations imply that 90% of civil servants favor Democrats, as do 95% of employees at elite cultural institutions; meanwhile, military contractors, big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other such corporate boogeymen each employ equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. What produces this outcome, and what outcomes does it produce?
You seem to skip one major difference: The voters in East Germany could not freely choose between different parties, as all parties were members of Nationale Front der DDR, and the "National Front" presented a single joint vetted list of candidates in elections. Voter could either approve or disapprove of the list. Thus the "quarter of the legislative seats" SED nominally had wasn't won, it was its preallocated quota. Moreover, in addition to "parties", Volkskammer had non-party "mass movement" representatives from the trade unions, SED Jugend, Kulturbund der DDR, and Women's league, all of them generally were full SED members. Thus idespite the nominal ~25% turnout in Volkskammer, in practice SED had direct control of >50% deputies in Volkskammer (and also practical control of NF member party positions, too).
In contrast, the elections between D and R in the US are genuinely competitive.
(edit. The comparison would make better sense if House of Representatives had, in addition to ~200 D representatives, 100 seats for unions, ~50 for Young Democrats of America, another ~50 for National Federation of Democratic Women, and 50 for the Motion Picture Academy and similar.)
Yes the point about non-party representatives is a fair critique, though I don’t think that’s what gave the SUP an advantage over other parties; it seems more like a symptom of their ultimate power over administrative entities (and their use of this to eg monitor voters) that they were able to grant fancy reputable sinecures to allies in the only-officially-powerful legislature. For example, if they actually ruled through having more seats on this officially-powerful legislature, why not just give their party members more spots on the single-list to begin with?
But my understanding of approval voting is that it works through just such a single list, and that the “national front” was basically a meaningless term that only in practice meant “being on the single list.” If I recall correctly, East German voters could approve or disapprove of each name on the list, and the candidates with most approval would enter the legislature. In much the same way, in my understanding, approval voting in the US would mean that voters here would receive a single list of candidates, of whom we could then approve or disapprove, and that this would determine who enters the legislature. Perhaps one should naturally expect such a system to give the typical candidate 90-ish percent approvals (because it works by removing unpopular candidates rather than dividing partisans between popular candidates), and so perhaps the 95%+ approvals given to candidates by East German voters aren’t even much evidence of voter intimidation, but I’m unsure about that.
Edit: One other point of possible note is that the East German constitution explicitly gave the SUP the “leading” role in govt, and all other parties in the “national front” had to acknowledge this, but I’m unsure of what this actually meant in practice. In my view, it seems like more of a vague threat against sedition, much as our FBI/SPLC/NYT/etc target any Republicans who seem insufficiently servile to the Democrats as “threats to democracy.” The whole point of single-party rule is that the party gets to do what it wants, and can then get rubber stamps from its front-government’s official organs of power after-the-fact.
>If I recall correctly, East German voters could approve or disapprove of each name on the list, and the candidates with most approval would enter the legislature.
This is, I think, incorrect. Certainly it is incorrect for communist Czechoslovakia, and from your summary it sounds like East Germany used the same system. In Czechoslovakia, there was no option to approve or disaprove each name on the list. You either voted for the whole National Front list, or you didn't. Elections were thus noncompetitive.
Of course not voting for The List could have bad consequences for your career.
It should be also noted that East Germany was occupied by the Soviet Army, which violently put down fairly serious uprising in 1953. And Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet army in 1968, in order to stop democratization initiated from within our own communist party elite, and occupied until 1989.
So, as far as I can tell, this is how East German voting worked at the ballot box:
-You would receive a "single list" of the "national front" candidates who were running in your constituency (there were *many* such constituencies, each electing somewhere from four to eight candidates to the legislature)
-You could either approve this whole list (not risky), or not vote (somewhat risky), or fill out your own paper ballot with no privacy (very risky); so you could approve whichever candidates you liked, but only at great personal cost, with mostly no hope of swaying any actual results
-Each candidate had to receive at least half of the valid votes cast in their constituency, in order to get elected; if too few candidates met this bar, then a second round would be held, but this hardly ever happened; if too many of the candidates met this bar, then only the four-to-eight topmost candidates would win
-Voters would sometimes actually vote against specific candidates for certain local issues (or threaten to), because this would embarrass them without threatening the party's monopoly on power; thus, there was, in practice, some degree of constituent bargaining against politicians, but only over what should be regarded as "apolitical" issues (e.g. "your people aren't picking up the trash regularly," but not "I dislike socialist ideology or the way our elections work")
-The aspects of this which presumably sound most crazy to us nowadays (the prefilled party ballot, the lack of privacy for personal ballots) were commonplace in US presidential elections until the late 19th Century: for instance, in the Jackson era, the red and blue parties would hand out their pre-filled ballots on red and blue paper, and aggressively pressure you into just dropping their preferred list into the ballot, and you couldn't fill out your own idiosyncratic ballot except by drawing lots of unwanted attention to yourself
My point, of course, is not that the East German system was in any sense "good," but rather that its badness had much less to do with its electoral set-up than with less formal aspects of its one-party rule. For instance, its people lived under a one-party dictatorship because every industrial enterprise had a local SUP party group keeping tabs on everything it was doing; not because the SUP got slightly more seats than rival parties in a rubber-stamp legislature.
Interesting. If it is accurate, it was definitely far more open system than that in communist Czechoslovakia
Does anyone know how this compares to the modern Chinese system? I understand there's some kind of Chinese "election" at the local level and that sometimes there's genuine competition between one approved Communist Party apparatchik and another at the local level.
My understanding is that, basically, in China, you can elect your local council; local councils in a province elect their provincial council; and all the provincial councils together elect the head of state. So the official state apparatus runs elections “from the bottom up.” But the party holds vastly more power than the official state apparatus, and party elections are “top down” (each party chapter elects a delegate to the party conference, which elects the party central committee etc, which then appoints the local party chapter heads). You can think of the Party as a sort of “voters union”, where they get to strongly influence who gets elected into official offices, and who these official officers appoint to given roles. (Technically, other parties can run candidates for office, but, as in East Germany, this is mostly toothless controlled opposition, and the constitution officially recognizes the communist party as having a monopoly on fundamental partisan legitimacy, and yet protests / popular dissent can get the party to replace ineffective low-level reps *so long as the public doesn’t challenge the CCP’s right to rule when it challenges the bona fixes of specific CCP reps*).
Here’s a bit from one of my prior pieces about just how vacuous “official heads of state” are in communist states, relative to party bosses (the same also mostly holds in eg East Germany):
‘But Mao stepped down as China’s head-of-state in 1959, at the beginning of his “Great Leap Forward,” and replaced himself on paper with professional CCP sloganist Liu Shaoqi, whose name you likely don’t recall… of course, Mao remained Chairman of the Communist Party, and, when it became convenient, whipped up his activists to extra-legally force this paper tiger out of office in 1968. China then lacked a head of state until 1975, at which point it formally abolished the role, until 1982, since which time the role has been entirely symbolic.’
Link: https://cebk.substack.com/p/addendum-to-omelas
Apologies for a late reply:
>My point, of course, is not that the East German system was in any sense "good," but rather that its badness had much less to do with its electoral set-up than with less formal aspects of its one-party rule. For instance, its people lived under a one-party dictatorship because every industrial enterprise had a local SUP party group keeping tabs on everything it was doing; not because the SUP got slightly more seats than rival parties in a rubber-stamp legislature
I agree, sort-of. But the stuff like "slightly more seats in the legislature" are not unimportant either (East Germany or other countries). It is much easier to run a sham democracy where you have both the nominal power and informal power.
>-The aspects of this which presumably sound most crazy to us nowadays (the prefilled party ballot, the lack of privacy for personal ballots) were commonplace in US presidential elections until the late 19th Century: for instance, in the Jackson era, the red and blue parties would hand out their pre-filled ballots on red and blue paper, and aggressively pressure you into just dropping their preferred list into the ballot, and you couldn't fill out your own idiosyncratic ballot except by drawing lots of unwanted attention to yourself
Ha, did you know this is quite close how the elections are run in Sweden? (Sans the aggressive pressuring.) There is a table, where you can pick any party's printed list (or a blank), go to a booth to write the name in a blank or write an X next to favored candidate, and then put ballot you are voting for in an envelope. Envelope goes to in a box. Here is an infomercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwB-xre9Eg4
Not being a Swedish citizen, I have never seen it live, but it sounds quite vulnerable to ballot stuffing: You would need only to get access to discarded / unused ballots and stuff them in, they are not stamped or anything.
Yes, you raise fair points: the SUP benefited from having modest dominance over the legislature (more than they would have benefited from either no dominance or total dominance). But, for instance, if we become a more thoroughly one-party state--if USG's administrative agency employees go from their current 90% Dem lean to something more like 95% or 99%--then I think it will be through those less formal mechanisms: whether through agencies cracking down on dissent, or tilting the discourse, or etc. Whereas if elected officials successfully flex on deep state personnel--whether these elected officials are left or right--then I think deep state personnel will end up less unanimous (though they'll end up even more unanimous if they successfully fight off this flex).
For example, even if a politician who's further left than the deep state Democrats (in either the woke sense or the classical sense) wins the presidency, I think he'd cause the deep state to skew *less* Dem if he reduced administrative employee tenure protections. Because accountability would make the deep state optimize on actual success at achieving his policy agenda, and so wouldn't leave as much room for optimizing on unanimous corrupt party power. So I think the causal arrow points from informal one-party power to formal one-party power, instead of vice-versa.
That's an interesting bit about Sweden. The "proportional representation" electoral system that's pretty standard in Western Europe mostly involves voting for party lists rather than individual candidates, so now I'm curious to look up how many of them do similar not-so-secret balloting. I also wonder why there's not more outright ballot-stuffing, since it seems fairly easy to do, and yet I'm very unconvinced by all the claims I've seen about it actually happening.
In the US, ballot counting happens at each polling place, and so it seems like coordinating a straightforward election stealing campaign would necessarily induct way too many normies into the conspiracy to keep it secret; but then also the people running each polling place are amateurs who care way too much about politics and have very little oversight, so disorganized emotional ballot-stuffing seems vaguely plausible. And maybe that does happen, and it's just too dumb and disorganized to show up in any systematic way. (Epistemic status: just spit-balling here, my only confident opinion is that there doesn't seem to have been real statistical evidence of ballot-stuffing in 2020 or 2016 [or, for that matter, in Bolivia, when Morales got ousted a few years ago]).
Leonard Bernstein's 1954 broadcast on the choices that Beethoven made, when composing the beginning of his Fifth Symphony, is extraordinary. And it's available for viewing anytime on YouTube!
Its link can be found a short ways down into these musings on Joni Michell's 1972 song about Beethoven, "Judgement Of The Moon And Stars." (Yes, hoping at least a reader or two might also be interested in Joni and this song, along the path there.)
https://fragmentsintime.substack.com/p/judgement-of-the-moon-and-stars
I wrote an essay about how elites are stealing the experiences of the lower classes to grow their own power and influence: https://jacobshapiro.substack.com/p/stolen-trauma
You seem to be confused about spectrum models. In general they are more accurate, because reality isn't neatly separated into set in stone binary categories for us to use. There are a lot of transitional elements between X and not X which are important to take into account. Yes, there are known failure mode of fallacy of grey where you consider all the spectrum to have equal metrics, it's something to be aware of and still use a more accurate spectum model.
Not sure how you can say that"shell shock" is a better category than "PTSD". It works for Carlin jokes, but it doesn't work for serious discussion about categories. "Shell shock" was initially confusing with concussion from the artillery shells exploding. It was a terrible category, inheritance from the time where people didn't understand psychological trauma at all. Now we do know better, and we noticed that some completely unrelated traumas can manifest similarly, thus we have a category talking about this manifestation, which is PTSD.
I doubt we "know better" now.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
Thanks for this great example of not understanding psychological trauma. Yes, indeed some people are still at this level of understanding even today. Thankfully they are not the ones who matter for the scientific consensus.
What is the evidence he's wrong? How much faith can you have in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists? It's a field that was pseudoscientific from its beginning, had the book "House of Cards" written about it by the head of one of its state associations, and has more recently been where the replication crisis was discovered and from which "concept creep" emerged.
> How much faith can you have in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists?
More than in the "scientific consensus" of clinical psychologists of the past. So when someone on the Internet claims that the previous one was actually correct and the current is wrong I expect to see some incredible new evidence overcomming the "yes, we have noticed the skulls" heuristic.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
Economists can point (perhaps unconvincingly) to higher GDPs today than the past. Can psychologists show we have better "mental health"? Or instead does exposure to western psychology make other cultures LESS mentally healthy? Freud wasn't still alive when Robyn Dawes was pointing out how his colleagues were ignoring their own evidence. Paul Meehl was pointing out the problems we're now seeing in the replication crisis within psychology back in the 60s, but nothing got fixed over those decades:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/05/06/needed-an-intellectual-history-of-research-criticism-in-psychology/
We know an awful lot about the neurophysiology of PTSD, and all of this would have to be wrong in order for "PTSD isn't real; it's just traumatic brain injury from blunt trauma to the head" to be right. I say this because I don't get the sense this blog post or you are quite grappling with how much putative knowledge you are proposing to throw out. It's not just correlated symptom descriptions.
Just what is it that we know then? And why would we evolve to be so diss-able?
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/diss-ability/
I'm not confused about spectrum models being more or less accurate. I think, if we're going by general rule, I'm very in favor of spectrum models that allow for less binaries, less black and white. I think you're correct that they're "more accurate".
That, however, is not what the essay is about. I'm very specifically talking about the phenomenon where, in the name of adding more spectral area to certain categories, privileged people are claiming ownership of territory that they don't "need" in order to survive (unlike the people they are stealing it from).
It certainly can seem interesting (and "accurate") to find out that you fall on some far end of a spectrum model because it's a way to understand yourself better or to explain yourself better to others. However, that does not give you the right to claim ownership (or "the right of definition") of that condition/category out from under the people who need it more than you do.
As for shell shock vs. PTSD, I agree with TGGP; just because you give a phenomenon a new name does not mean you understand it any better. Shell shock as a category was only "confusing" because the condition is (and remains) confusing. It describes a broad range of symptoms resulting from mental, emotional, and physical damage. Defining and categorizing it as PTSD allows people to ignore some of that damage and just focus on the emotional/psychological realm (while still retaining all the "narrative glamour" of the physical damage that the earlier definition included as necessary for a diagnosis). Further, it's a psychological definition that's vague enough to allow all kinds of middle and upper class people without any physical trauma to claim it for themselves. How convenient.
This is not to say that there isn't a psychological phenomenon consistent with PTSD, just that, at its fringes, it has been divorced from something that was likely also a physical phenomenon (shell shock) in order to lend it increased gravity.
Which, again, furthers my point; definition changes that happen this quickly are almost always a sign of a politically-motivated narrative theft taking place. There may be well-meaning people seeking to add more "accuracy" to a description or category (and I sympathize with that), but that academically-motivated "accuracy" has the real-world price of decreasing the urgency of a condition by suddenly opening the door to an enormous amount of meme self-diagnosers into an otherwise serious definition.
> I'm very in favor of spectrum models that allow for less binaries, less black and white. I think you're correct that they're "more accurate".
I'm glad that this isn't our crux of disagreement! But then I'm confused what is.
You see, if you look at spectral categories from the framework of "elites taking control over words" you get a general argument against spectral categories.
The definition of "the elites" is flexible enough and the transition from binary to spectrum always include a lot of new stuff in the category As a result either some of the elites themselves or their opponents will be included in the new category border, contrary to the old on. Thus allowing us to always rationalize the usage of this framework.
On the other hand, weren't nearly all categories invented by the elites? So I guess it brings us to past elites vs current elites dychotomy, not elites versus common people, doesn't it?
> just because you give a phenomenon a new name does not mean you understand it any better
Of course. I was talking about the reverse of this causality. First you understand better, then you give a new name based on this better understanding. First you think that it's just about explosions and their physical effects. Then you notice the broad range symptoms of emotional and mental type. Then you notice that people show symilar symptoms in other situations of chronic helplessness and require similar treatment. People who need physical treatmet get physical treatment, people who need psychological - get psychological. People who need both of them - get both. As long as they can afford the helthcare, of course. It's more convinient to separate physical and psychological in different categories and thus we do.
> in order to lend it increased gravity
> decreasing the urgency of a condition
How can it be both at the same time? Anyway what are the real consequences that you are talking about? Being traumatized isn't a zero sum game. If more people associate with my trauma I do not suddenly become less valid. It's not that we now have to ignore veterans with concussions in order to treat abused houswives. What is, actually, the problem?
> enormous amount of meme self-diagnosers
This is once again, seems to be a general argument against spectral categories. And it begs the question. For this argument to work we have to assume that the previous status quo was correct, that all the new self diagnosers are wrong. But it can easily be the other way around. In reality a lot of conditions are both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed at the same time. And to improve the situation we need more accurate category borders. And as long as spectral models are more accurate, this means switching to them more, not less.
To my fellow Jewish SSCers — is anyone else on here also deeply troubled by the recent events in Israel over the last month (and in particular, over the last week)?
In my view, this is one of the most significant tragedies for the Jewish community in the past thirty years. I am surprised by the minimal response from the diaspora, so I was curious how others on here are viewing this.
Israelis are also pretty disturbed by the recent government - it's worth noting that a lot of its dysfunctionalities aren't very noticable abroad and don't map neatly on the American left/right axis (e.g. the biggest problem with this government is probably that despite being "right wing" it's taking a sharp turn away from liberal economic reforms and towards sectoral welfare, which in America would be a Democrat policy).
As an American, that sounds very, very, very bad
What events are you referring to?
If the left offered better leadership, the people would take it. See for example https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/10cig8n/this_is_the_actual_reason_ben_gvir_has_got_this/
>If the left offered better leadership, the people would take it.
This statement is clearly untrue in the general case. Just look at British politics lately, for example.
It's pretty clear that most voters aren't actually selecting for "leadership ability", but rather other things.
Not sure about the general point, but I don't see how British politics lately disproves it. Last election the choice was betwee Johnson and Corbyn, leadership or any other ability wasn't on the ballot. And for the next election it looks like Labour will win pretty much precisely because the people want to throw the obviously incompetent out.
Not so much the election per se, but one specific reform. Essentially, the parliament is supposed to get the power to overrule any decision of the highest court, removing one of the checks in "checks and balances".
It always struck me as weird that the Israeli Supreme Court declared a constitution to exist and that they had the power of constitutional review as a result. As Richard Posner put it, they “created out of whole cloth a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices.”
This is untrue. The Knesset declared constitution to be formulated and specified the basis for this constitution-to-be (the Harari Decision from 1950).
Based on this, the Supreme Court stared with what you call "constitutional review". The first, and probably most extreme, such "review" was in 1953. Israel, as a country, was 5 years old in 1953 and without established institutions, so this was not some shocking unprecedented act.
In the 70 years since then the Knesset not only accepted this situation, but explicitly embraced it (as can be seen in all the Basic Laws that were passed since then).
AFAIK the Basic Laws can be changed with a simple majority—that's why the new government has a chance to do stuff like the judicial reform in the first place. But then, if the Supreme Court strikes down a law as unconstitutional and they want it to stay anyway, it would be more consistent and honest to change the Basic Law to no longer conflict with the new law than to overrule the Supreme Court and leave contradicting laws in place.
Israeli here. I consider the latest election results pretty crappy from the economy side and the religion politics side, but pretty much within normal left-right pendulum swings, not a horrible tragedy. The unfortunate result of a center-left-ish government acting sensibly and responsibly in a way that pissed people off. At some point Bibi will become stale, the left will find someone as charismatic, the religious parties will slosh back to whoever promises them the most money, and the rusty fishing boat of state will wobble on.
I'm willing to bet against any major rollbacks to civil rights (e.g. LGBT rights for example) happening within the current Knesset, and expect the main damage to be populist government spending->inflation, plus solidifying poverty and segregation in the orthodox communities.
The proposed judiciary reform is over the top and far from optimal, but IMO some reform was necessary, and even the one we got is not a threat to democracy (I think "threats to democracy" are exaggerated in general, and specifically in Israel by viewing everything through the lens of Bibi's trial).
Also Israeli. And I think there are zero exaggerations in the "threats to democracy" talk. We're following the footsteps of Orban/Erdogan/Modi, only it's actually worse since at the same time we're progressing towards implementing a proper Apartheid. The future is bleak.
Don't Israeli governments basically never last very long?
Yes, but this is not a business-as-usual situation. The a legal reform of the type that was announced is not a simple reversible act, and the policies that I'm worried about in relation to the West Bank are also mostly non-reversible (not without some huge turmoil, on the scale of "war"). And the list doesn't end here.
Yeah, bad policies could get set that are hard to change. I was just responding to the Orban/Edrogan/Modi issue of a new leader cementing their own position.
Isn’t this threat to the judiciary the kind of thing that has made people get so angry with Poland? There are members of the new cabinet demanding that the Palestinians are to be crushed, for once and for all, but maybe that’s true of all elections.
I keep reading how the diaspora and Israel are growing apart so that could be the reason. Also most diaspora (and Israeli) Jews are worried about jobs, families, the economy, etc. like anyone else.
In my view I don't see why Israel would be immune from the populist wave sweeping the world--get your own country and Jews are like anyone else. Everyone tried globalization, it didn't work so great, so now there's a swing toward nationalism. The security issues mentioned by Naomi are likely the specific local factors, and as trebuchet says these sound like the ones in the USA having a similar effect. Again, once you have your own country Jews are just people and as prone to security-driven swings right like anyone else.
Larger causes? While I don't follow the area as closely as some people, from what I follow most of the attempts at peace over the last few decades haven't panned out so more and more Israelis are figuring 'well, we'll try to win then." I've also heard the immigration of right-leaning Russian Jews over the past few decades has caused the country to drift right.
I'm not your average person of Jewish ancestry though--being neither Orthodox nor woke the community doesn't have much to offer me personally anymore, though I still smirk when the science Nobels come out every year. (Mentioned only because of the frequent concerns about the survival of Diaspora Jewry and assimilation.)
> Everyone tried globalization, it didn't work so great
In what sense?
In the USA, deindustrialization, fentanyl in the hinterlands, inability to make masks when we needed them. People in other countries can comment on their situations.
It helped China, though even they are taking a nationalist turn now.
I have to admit I haven't been following - my knowledge of Israeli politics is "Everyone hates Netanyahu and he suffers from constant scandals, but he always wins and always will win and he just won again". Can you link a good article on the latest developments making you concerned?
For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-top-judge-govt-judicial-reform-plan-is-an-attack-justice-system-2023-01-12/
Looks as if they read your "Dictator Book Club" posts and took notes.
The current government includes a party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a former member of the very violent banned Jewish-supremacist Kach party, who is profiled in an excellent article from Tablet here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/rise-itamar-ben-gvir-armin-rosen
For some background on what that government is actually doing, Israel does not formally have a written Constitution. Occasionally the Knesset passes "Basic Laws", which are meant for inclusion in an eventual Constitution, but these are passed by the same simple majorities as all other kinds of laws. In 1992, the Supreme Court led by Aharon Barak (whose appointment process has been captured by the Israeli Bar Association, itself overwhelmingly left-wing) did something called a Constitutional Revolution, where they just kinda started treating the Basic Laws as a Constitution, and overturning laws that contradicted the Basic Laws, and other wings of the government went along with it out of weakness (here is a profile of Barak from 1998; the first sentence is enough to give you the flavor): https://azure.org.il/include/print.php?id=395
As you can imagine, many on the right are upset about this. At the moment, Netanyahu's Attorney General and possible heir, Yariv Levin, is trying to pass a law that would strip away the Supreme Court's ability to strike down laws. As you can imagine, it seems like there's a reasonable chance the Supreme Court will strike this down, and then nobody really knows what would happen: https://www.timesofisrael.com/levin-unveils-bills-to-weaken-top-court-enable-laws-to-be-immune-to-judicial-review/
Polls in Israel suggest most people agree that the Supreme Court has too much power and should be reined back, but Levin's reforms go very far, as already established ~50% of the population hates Netanyahu, and so there are widespread protests against the reforms.
> Occasionally the Knesset passes "Basic Laws", which are meant for inclusion in an eventual Constitution, but these are passed by the same simple majorities as all other kinds of laws. In 1992, the Supreme Court led by Aharon Barak (whose appointment process has been captured by the Israeli Bar Association, itself overwhelmingly left-wing) did something called a Constitutional Revolution, where they just kinda started treating the Basic Laws as a Constitution, and overturning laws that contradicted the Basic Laws...
Presumably the government can't just get around this by renaming the overturned Law X as Basic Law X and passing it a second time. Right? Or else, is there a strong norm against making minor things Basic Laws?
In theory the Basic Laws passed in 1992 (Human Dignity and Liberty -- essentially the Israeli equivalent of the Bill of Rights, though the specific ones chosen are actually quite different from the American version) and 1994 (Freedom of Occupation -- this one specifically protects your right to work in whatever field you want, which people felt was missing from the first one) under the Rabin government prohibit their own repeal, and those are the Basic Laws usually used to strike down laws. (Can laws prohibit their own repeal? Who knows!)
Other Basic Laws do not prohibit their own repeal, and the Basic Law 'The Government' has been amended numerous times -- most famously in the West, Israel introduced direct elections for Prime Minister in 1992, held them thrice, then abolished them in 2001. There were suggestions to bring these back during the recent multi-year period of deadlock.
The 1992 one in theory can be suspended during a state of emergency; I'm not familiar enough with Israeli law to understand where that's defined (because I'm reading things in English translation), but I think that's meant to be understood as applying to 1948/1967/1973-style states of total war. I do not believe a formal state of emergency has existed since 1992. The 1994 one, in my understanding, cannot be suspended even in a state of emergency, so your right to pursue whatever profession you want is, interestingly, the most absolute right the Israeli government recognizes. (Even though I'm sure they still have licensing restrictions and quite onerous ones for some things!)
There is a strong norm against making minor things Basic Laws, but Basic Laws have been passed with narrow majorities before. In 2018, a Basic Law, the Nation-State law (defining Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and not merely a Jewish state -- ie, red meat for the base) was passed just 62-55. The Supreme Court held hearings to determine if its passage contradicted the 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, but they ultimately determined, 10-1, that there was no contradiction and the Basic Law had been properly and lawfully passed.
On that note, in the time since this Open Thread was posted, the Supreme Court just ruled 10-1 against Netanyahu's ability to appoint Aryeh Deri (the leader of a different one of his coalition parties, Shas) to his Cabinet: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/middleeast/israel-aryeh-deri-netanyahu-high-court-intl/index.html
Deri would've been prohibited from being a member before a law passed by Netanyahu passed in 2022. It looks like they found a way to disqualify Deri without technically invalidating that law, though I'm not sure.
Anyway, this constitutes an incredibly open challenge to Netanyahu's leadership. If Deri is kicked out of the Cabinet, Shas probably leaves his coalition and forces new elections, though the goal of those would be really unclear. Netanyahu can't keep Deri without openly going against the Supreme Court. And, uh, nobody really knows what's going to happen here.
(Note that Shas is a sectional party for a pretty specific subcategory of ultra-Orthodox voters, and they're pretty unpopular with the broader public -- and Deri himself is really unpopular; he was a rising political star back in the 1990s but was found to be super corrupt, imprisoned, and upon his release was reappointed party leader by the rabbis who lead the party, which caused many of their experienced politicians to quit. So by painting Deri as the face of their opposition the Supreme Court is at least trying to get on the right side of public opinion.)
Thank you for the detailed analysis. If Deri is kicked out, this seems to mean that Netanyahu has let the Court stymie him. You write that Shas would probably leave the coalition. Would Shas be leaving primarily because they expected Netanyahu to find a way to defy the Court?
This is an excellent summary. I suggest you read the article in Times of Israel regarding how Aryeh Deri was the central player when the Barak court usurped constitutional authority for itself and Rabin wasn't even able to send his own lawyer to the court to argue against it https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-3-decades-of-deris-legal-troubles-now-see-israeli-judicial-independence-at-risk/
But this is a court that doesn't even try to pretend to be something other than a political, policy-making body in Israel. And its side got blown out in the last election after three elections that ended in virtual ties. See, for example, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hayut-justice-minister-trying-to-deliver-fatal-blow-to-judicial-independence/
While I do not agree with many of the reforms, the media doesn't accurately represent the position of the right - that the person who did the most damage to Israel's democracy was Aharon Barak who upset the unwritten norms that governed that country's political conduct.
The proposed "reforms" are nothing short of a revolutionary change - by far the biggest since the establishment of the State of Israel. If passed, they would have the effect of completely eliminating any checks and balances, handing the government completely unrestrained power. In Israel's system, the government enjoys a majority in parliament by definition, and no laws require more than a standard majority. Hence, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) has no independent power. This is why the judiciary has taken the role of providing some checks and balances on the government's power. The proposed "reform" is aimed not at establishing a healthier system of checks balances (e.g. by providing that certain laws require a supermajority, by adding a second chamber) but at completely destroying the checks and balances that exist now. It does not inspire confidence that Bibi looks up to people like Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and indeed Putin, nor that his government includes violent extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Perhaps the most optimistic reading is that Bibi is mainly interested in ending his current trial for corruption and in immunity from any other charges, and is otherwise quite keen on maintaining a good image in the United States.
I'm not particularly troubled, but I do notice I've switched from believing the country will do better long-term to believing the country will gradually get worse. Not so much over this one thing being decisive as that the power of the ultraOrthodox seems to
(a) be going up,
(b) secularization seems to not be hitting (there seemed to be some trends for it at one point - e.g. ultraOrthodox men becoming a bit more employed - but those seem to have reversed, and new government policies will probably cement it).
(c) ultraOrthodox concessions seem to be increasing (and undermining democracy, as with the recent issues). Even if the left do come back, they'll probably do it by giving them even more concessions.
(d) conversely, there seems to be no more constituency for free marketism - the left doesn't like it, and the right is willing to be croyby socialist to win over the religious right since they'll back them in hating Arabs.
I've been troubled by this for some 3 decades now, and left the country back then. There was a bit of hope when Ariel Sharon decided to bulldoze his way to two states, but his suspicious untimely demise, as well as Rabin's a decade before then (note that Arafat also died under suspicious circumstances) convinced me that nothing will radically change until and unless something major happens forcing an internal change from outside, which is also unlikely. Israel is stuck politically and will remain stuck for a while longer.
What is suspicious about Sharon's stroke? Keep in mind the base rate for strokes in people of his age who are described according to the first 1.5 paragraphs of this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon#Illness,_incapacitation_and_death_(2006%E2%80%9314)
I'm an Israeli, and it's definitely worrying. For the first time I'm seriously considering immigration, and this sentiment is shared by many (most? all?) of my friends. By the way things are going, it's just difficult to see an acceptable future here for our kids.
Sometimes I check the subreddits of developed countries, like Canada, Australia, European countries, Singapore and the various US state subreddtits. It seems like everyone everywhere is seriously considering immigration because they can't imagine a future for their kids. I would say if you live in a reasonably developed country with at least an average job, you are better of where you are than immigrating.
I think Israelis currently have good and different reasons to feel this way. It's not just "mood" as you're implying. We're on the verge of a silent coup that will de-facto eliminate democracy, and stepping into an Apartheid state that, even if morally I would be willing to bury my head in the sand, is likely to politically and economically isolate Israel in the best case or lead to a huge war in the worst. Which other developed country has anything parallel to be worried about? Population wise, about 40% of the country are either ultra-orthodox or devout Muslims, and their relative size is only increasing with the time. Which other developed country is in a similar situation?
In what sense will it be more apartheid than before?
Currently I don't think it's fair to characterize Israel as Apartheid.
The situation in the West-Bank is undoubtedly horrible, but these are occupied territories, thus (1) not part of Israel per-se, and (2) the situation is officially temporary.
But if the new government will follow the outrageous ideas of its new Minister of National Security (who's half a clown and half by-the-book fascist) and the new Minister of Finance/Defense (who's even worse), then the situation will dramatically change.
How do you think it will change?
The flip-side is that Israel seems to be the only developed country that handled Covid sensibly - eg. just vaccinating people as fast as possible rather than obsessing over people "waiting their turn" - so it seems to in some ways have more civilizational competence than other places.
I do agree that the trend is worrying, but the trends you fear don't seem likely to prevent emigration later (war might, but only if Israel was actually evenly matched, which seems unlikely), so there's no need to rush. Maybe spend a few months in places you'd consider moving to, before going through the reams of bureaucracy involved in migration.
Well, there are many good things about Israel, and the healthcare system is surely one example. Another one, softer, is the "Geist" of the secular-urban tribe. It's hard to explain, but on the one hand my main motivation for wanting to leave is worries regarding my kid's future, while on the other hand I'm horrified by the idea he will grow up to be, for example, an American (no offense).
Minor note: I think you're both mixing up emigration with immigration.
You're right. Thanks.
As a German Non-Jew I am deeply confused about the relationship between diaspora Jews and Israel. There is some anti--antisemitism narrative that these have nothing to do with each other and only an antisemite would think so, but obviously this is too simplistic, especially from a German perspective. I feel like this is also a quite contested within the Jewish community.
Could you explain how you see the relation (and how other voices see it) or point me to a discussion of this?
I am also afraid it is quite insensitive to even ask this question, if you feel like it is, please do not bother to answer. I understand that these things can be difficult.
That's a very good question, and I find nothing offensive about it. Also, I'm probably at-least as confused as you are.
I think that speaking of the "Jews" in any generality is probably meaningless, since they (I don't even feel comfortable writing "we" here) are a very heterogeneous group, with a long tradition of making it a point to disagree with each other.
Generally speaking, saying that the non-Israeli Jews and Israel have nothing to do with each other is a wild exaggeration. Israel was founded with the goal to provide shelter for Jews everywhere when shits hits the fan as it occasionally does, and hopefully to provide some influence and power to somewhat reduce the frequency of the occasional massacres we're so used to. So from this perspective, I guess that most Jews have a positive sentiment and invested interest in Israel.
However, Israel's policy in regard to almost any issue (The role of the Jewish religion in Israel, its obligation towards non-Jewish shelter-seekers, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the list goes on) is highly controversial even within Israel, and more so when it comes to the diaspora Jews.
Haha, don't worry about it, this is probably the one place you can ask (and that may be why you're here). FWIW I am well aware of Germany's attempts at Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and make attempts to argue against anti-Germanism whenever I can; you are not to blame for something your great-grandparents did! Besides, I love schnitzel, all the wursts, and the agglutinative German tongue; I am not some Handschuhschneeballenwerfer!
So there are two big groups of Jews, Israelis and the diaspora (you either live in Israel or you don't). A huge portion of the diaspora lives in the USA, and a big portion of that lives in and around New York City in particular. Basically, as per Wikipedia, there are about 6.3 million Jews in Israel, 5.7 million in the USA, and the next one down is France at 0.4 million.
So to a first approximation, Jews are either Israeli or American.
American Jews lean left--they are on the left side of cultural issues in particular, being heavily involved with the woke social justice movement and before that the second-wave feminist movement in the 70s and the civil rights movement for black people in the 60s, as well as labor radicalism in the first part of the 20th century. (The fact that our esteemed blog host is Jewish and one of the better-known *critics* of the woke social justice movement is one of life's ironies--but you will notice even he does not consider himself a conservative, though he has influenced many (moderate) conservative writers. In fairness, there are also a lot of Jews on non-ethnonationalist areas of the right such as libertarianism and even the new ''national conservatism', but the majority of American Jews lean left (about 75% of Jews voted for Biden in 2020). Basically, kind of like Germans, Jews like to talk about ideas, and any place that isn't hostile to them specifically you'll find them.)
Israeli Jews lean right (relative to American Jews at least), promulgating increasingly nationalist policies in their own country and fighting the Palestinian guerrilla war. I don't know that many Israelis personally, but from what I can tell the failure of the peace process has made a lot of them more willing to support increasingly aggressive actions against Palestinians. I also am told the influx of Russians after the end of the Cold War, who don't have the long history of fighting against European antisemitism (since WW2 anyway) but do have fresh, nasty memories of Soviet Communism, has dragged the country right as well.
So you see the problem. American Jews see Israelis penning up Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and putting settlements in and go, "Wait, weren't we against imperialism and racism and all that? Aren't we being hypocritical if we don't speak out against it when we're doing it?" Israeli Jews go, "Well, we played nice for 2000 years and wound up in the oven, and they keep trying to kill us, so no more Mr. Nice Hebrew."
(I'm trying to be fair. My own bias is that more Jews should lean right for both selfish reasons (the presence on the left is a major driver of antisemitism) and selfless reasons (the social-justice left is messing up the USA and, due to the USA's cultural reach, a lot of the Anglosphere as well). But, I'm not getting the other 5.7 million to change, and while my mom is Jewish, I am not raised Jewish and don't speak Hebrew so going to Israel isn't really a possibility.)
Hopefully this helps, and given ethnic stereotypes, I'm sure someone else here has an opinion. ;)
As another non-Jewish German I'm a little surprised about Russian Jews being extra conservative.
During the reunification, Germany stumbled into a special immigration quota for Jews (the democratic East German parliament enacted it during the few months it existed and then united Germany inherited it). During the 90s that quota was filled almost exclusively with Russion Jews.
So now the reason for my confusion: Back then I think the general wonky consensus wat that the Israeli government was unofficially miffed about us having that quota because they wanted those Russian Jews for Israel to balance out ultraconservative Sephardis. So did the Russian Jews that went to Israel realign? Or were semi/pseudo-informed Germans wrong about what the Israeli government thought why?
You are both correct. The secular, conservative Israeli government wanted secular, conservative Russian immigrants to balance out the religious/traditional ultraconservative Sephardim.
Russian Jews, (like myself), in the United States are ultra-right-wing on cultural issues such as wokeness (in Israel this would mean on the Palestinian question), try to be very right-wing on economic/fiscal questions (occasionally this has the flavor of a 'belief in belief', but not always), but are also very very secular.
Because they're generally a pretty high-education demographic, there's a general phenomenon of the second generation, which was born in the US/Israel, assimilating to local secular-educated-culture norms, which are relatively more left-wing in both countries, though I think they probably still tilt right on the whole, and certainly tilt right relative to other educated Americans/Israelis.
(I would be surprised if the pattern were very different in Germany, which I know also has a substantial population but with which I'm much less familiar).
My perception (having been born in 1997 in NYC to fresh-off-the-boat parents from the former Soviet Union) is that speaking Russian tends to insulate you quite a lot from assimilation. More generally (and this is more of an observation about the US than Israel), I think in the late 2010s one of the underrated political stories, which underlies the simplified Hispanics-trend-right phenomenon, has been a 'non-native English speakers trend right in reaction to wokeness'. This isn't really the place to speculate why but in my experience the pattern is really strong, and my understanding is that voter studies and polls tend to bear it out.
I've heard of the phenomenon of Russian Jews being right-wing in Israel and America; but it surprises me a bit as a Jew from Hungary (another post-communist country), as my impression is that Hungarian Jews tend to be left-liberal just like American Jews, albeit within a frame of reference quite a bit to the right of the American one. Then again, maybe Russian Jews are also left-liberal within Russia, where the frame of reference is even further right.
The reason why? My best guess, of course, but I think woke originates in the Anglosphere and spreads through English-language media. Latinos outside of a college faculty think the 'Latinx' thing is hilarious. How could a Russian think the sexes are the same? Only one can stand upright after chugging a fifth of vodka.
>[Wokeness] spreads through English-language media
Its **opposition** also spreads through English-language media. I live an ocean away from the US and if I didn't know any English my only exposure to wokeness would be through what the woke natives are doing, which is both less bad (since they are hardly a dominant or even a mention-worthy group, thank the seven heavens) and sometimes even good (since the balance is tilted too far towards the other side).
Only the sheer, raw madness of seeing how an actual American\British wokie write on Twitter or Reddit will you be 250-Volt-shocked into hating this ideology for 10 lives.
Excellent question. Omer's answer seems generally correct.
The antisemitic view is that all Jews are oppressing Palestinians since Israel is. Holding a Jew responsible for Israel's action because they are Jewish, or holding Israel to a different standard because it is a Jewish state, are examples included in the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
But religious Jews, regardless of how they feel about the State of Israel (and some loath it intensely while others love it) generally view themselves as having a deep connection to the Land of Israel. Non-religious Jews may not have that connection , and may have various opinions of the State. But they seem to still like the idea of having a Jewish state out there, as Omer said.
As a non-Jewish American. I'm troubled by you being troubled. The problems Israel face seem to me to be obvious, and basically unsolvable by anything resembling American left-of-center sentiments. And most Jews in America hold left-of-center sentiments.
An average American left-of-center sentiment, IMO, is that a dubious seizure of political power by a judiciary that is left of the legislature and polity is legitimate. Well that happened in Israel, and is being rolled back, because its a "solution" in search of a problem, and it doesn't work when the main problem being confronted is the ever-existent threat of being ethnically cleansed or genocided.
The American, and global left appear to have no real solutions for Israel other than, "yeah move to New York and join the global progressive lockstep." And that is obviously not a desired solution for Israelis, which makes a lot of sense to me, and it consistently confuses me why American Jews can't see it.
Since you're being transparent with your subscription numbers, did you meet the target?
There wasn't a specific target. I got about 170 new paid subscribers, which isn't enough that I won't net lose subscribers this year if this year's drop is the same size as last year's. But I don't know if it will be. If it is, I probably got (overall this year, including last week's drive) half of enough to compensate for the 10% drop, and losing 5% of subscribers per year seems medium-term sustainable until something else happens.
Are your overall numbers [EDIT : of free subscribers] still growing ?
I'm not a paid subscriber right now, although I'm considering it (I would definitely subscribe if you ever said something like "I need more paid subscribers or I'll need to reduce my number of posts").
Did you read the subscription drive post? It has a graph. TLDR subscriber count peaked at the end of 2021, then dropped noticeably as one-year subscriptions expired and were not renewed. Since then there's been very slow growth but still well below the peak.
I think he's talking about number of readers total, when he mentions "overall numbers", not of subscribers.
Yes exactly.
What is the shape of the root distribution of the predictive processing model in your mind?
What's a root distribution? Does it not depend on the type of the variable? I.e. categorical, ordinal, discrete/continuous, etc?
A thought/question I had, sparked by the discussion in another thread about politicians being smart/stupid/etc.
Does intelligence really correlate that well with good decision making? At least above some relatively low threshold? In my experience (which includes getting a hard-science PhD and having grown up with reasonably intelligent people for whom knowledge was a priority), it doesn't. The stupidest decisions I've seen came from people who, in their field, were brilliant.
Sure, if you're substantially sub-normal intelligence, you'll make a lot of stupid decisions based on not being able to put cause and effect together. But that threshold is more like a couple standard deviations below 100 IQ. Above that, it seems to me based on anecdotal evidence and the existence of tropes (which usually reflect something real about reality) that most decisions we make are...just not that benefitted by high intelligence per se. A totally normal person with a strong moral/value framework will generally outperform a high-IQ person with a maldeveloped or weakly-held value framework. Because most of the time, it's not the actual reasoning that matters. It's the underlying premises about reality and what's important. High intelligence just makes it easier to rationalize your stupid, self-defeating actions.
Personally, I'd rather be governed by a bunch of 100-IQ people with their heads screwed on straight and a strong grounding in practical reality rather than a bunch of Mensa qualifiers with no experience outside of theory. And that's speaking *as a theoretician!*.
I think there are certain failure modes bright people are more prone to. Doesn't necessarily mean they're less successful overall.
I'm *not* saying that lower IQ is advantageous. Just that the benefit of high IQ to decision-making in most circumstances levels off quite quickly. Is 90 better than 80? Yeah, a lot. Is 100 better than 90? Yeah, somewhat. Is 120 better than 110? Not nearly so much. And in fact comes with a lot of other issues--both high and low IQ are correlated with mental health issues (different ones). And high IQ is correlated with people thinking they know best and that those pesky fences of Chesterton's can be removed without issue. And high IQ (more specifically people *trusting* high IQ with power) also leads to bigger effects of bad decisions.
Do you have any example of this that isn't trivial? Like I wouldn't expect IQ to impact "jumping ability" much.
No, the point isn't that having a lower IQ is better. Having a higher IQ is better, it's just that the higher you go, the less practical real-world utility you get for each extra IQ point. The issue isn't that the upward curve will start going down, and it's not even that it'll flatten out completely; the issue is that it'll keep going up at a slower and slower rate, until it's *almost* a flat line.
And this goes to one root of my disquiet with AI catastrophists--the commonly held belief that the mind-in-a-box will somehow, just because it's really "smart", *also* be supernaturally good at understanding people and manipulating them. It goes against all my experience with really smart people--there's definitely two distinct capabilities here. Knowing a lot of stuff and being able to put together knowledge to make new knowledge doesn't guarantee (and often is in tension with) being able to read people and manipulate them. And vice versa.
Here's my take: Yes, there could exist forms of "high intelligence" that is bad at understanding humans and only knows how to output fake paintings or something. Maybe it is even the majority. But the problem is, there also exists a form of high intelligence that has superior manipulating ability, and that one will be a huge problem.
I think your argument is a good argument against "any superhuman AI will kill us all" - not quite for "some AI might kill us all, and it's sufficiently dangerous that we should come up with some plan".
It's a good argument against "any one superhuman AI will definitely kill us all".
It's not a good argument against "superhuman AI will definitely kill us all" because people will build more than one AI.
Maybe that was unclear, edited.
An alternate explanation: people are much better at understanding people that are similar to themselves (projection and such), so as a human, being average intelligence gives you a great advantage at manipulating the average human - and being "smart" a disadvantage.
In that case, there wouldn't be any reason to believe an AGI would have to rely on the same heuristics and mental models that we do when we need to "convince this human(s) to do that". AI as we know it does not paint brushstrokes to "draw", or even internalize your query to "talk", after all.
So you're saying is that AGI, with its utterly *alien* mode of thought, will be able to understand people better than people do...because magic? Not relying on the same heuristics and mental models seems to be a *drag* on persuasion, not a benefit. It's not like humans have some API that you can call if you just know the secrets.
An AGI can build heuristics from experience (data). That's how modern rudimentary machine learning works. A capability that will be honed even further in order to create an AGI in the first place.
Humans leveraging self-"understanding" for their social skills can just as well be called over-training and over-reliance on the data from the one human they have "API access" to - themselves. There's only so much external social interaction experience/data we can gather, after all. But an AI can hoover up orders of magnitude more, and develop a better model. Where could it get such data? From willing AI-users that *want* the AI to (tell them how to) persuade people to vote X or buy Y.
We leverage self-understanding ("how would I behave in another person's shoes?") because we can't accurately model another human consciousness to see how it would behave. A superintelligence could, and also iterate very quickly.
There's something very similar in those lines in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I think the mistake you're making here is looking only at human scales. The intelligence range within humans isn't really that wide in the grand scheme of things. Your argument probably holds up to 200 IQ, but how sure are you that it's still true at (the equivalent of) 400, or 800, or 1600?
Right. You could call humans' ability to control cattle "social skills" and in a very broad sense that would be right, but ultimately we're sufficiently smarter than a cow that we know what to do to get them to behave a certain way. The claim isn't that an AI would be like a human CEO or confidence trickster, it's that we'd be as transparent to a sufficiently intelligent AI as a cow is to us.
Cows *aren't* transparent to us. They're actually notoriously obnoxious, stubborn creatures. Ask any cattle rancher. Mostly they're controlled by force and bribery, combined with behavioral training based on those two, not clever tricks or deep understanding of their psyche.
So the AI may use force and bribery to coerce us.
But to get there, it needs access to both force (ie the ability to act in the material realm on its own volition) AND money (ok, that one's easier to get, but not easier to move around unnoticed). Neither of which come automatically with being really smart. And the former of which is a major bootstrapping issue. If you can't convince someone without force, but you need to convince lots of people to be given access to means of coercion...you've got an issue.
That sounds a lot like how we control humans today, really.
The differences between 190 and 200 IQ are actually smaller, as observed, than 180 and 190. And so it goes all the way down to 100. I'd expect that same pattern to hold all the way up. To say otherwise is to make positive claims without (and in fact against) all the evidence. It feels like magical thinking.
So to be clear, are you suggesting that humans are close to the practical maximum intelligence possible, and it would be difficult or impossible for an AI to be meaningfully smarter? Because you still seem to be insisting on using human scales and it's not clear why that's justified.
The burden of justification is the other way around, me thinks. Saying "but AGI is special and can get arbitrarily smart" requires defining what that means. The burden of defining those scales and justifying their existence is on those who claim they're available, not on those who are skeptical.
I have yet to see any evidence of these other claimed scales. Just a lot of magical thinking untethered from any connection to reality. All the "intelligence scales" we *do* know about level off. To the degree we can define them at all.
My intuition is the opposite. You're the one saying "this is impossible;" it seems to me that that requires more justification than the side saying "maybe this could happen." There do seem to me to be plenty of good reasons to think that humans aren't anywhere close to a theoretical maximum.
> All the "intelligence scales" we *do* know about level off.
I don't think that's true? The intelligence scale within humans maybe does. I would say the intelligence scale between species definitely doesn't. The difference in capabilities between humans and chimpanzees seems vastly greater than the difference between chimps and other animals, for example.
I think it is reasonable to define intelligence as the ability to make meaningful connections, and from that standpoint there seems little limit to how intelligent AI could become.
The snag is that conclusions from super-intelligent AI would often seem to us like oracular pronouncements because they would be based on a multitude of factors, many perhaps trivial in themselves, but collectively far beyond the ability of a human to check in detail.
Intelligence, like almost everything else in the universe, produces diminishing returns the more you increase it. The issue isn't that humans are close to the maximum possible intelligence, it's that adding more intelligence past a certain point isn't especially helpful.
Compare an animal with an IQ of 10, a human with an IQ of 100, and a machine intelligence with an IQ of 1000. There's an abstract sense in which the human's intelligence is 'closer' to the animal's, sure. But in a much more practical sense, the human's concept of addition is going to be a lot closer to the machine's concept of addition than it is to the animal's!
I would appreciate if you could clarify what do you mean by IQ of 800 or 1600. This is not the first time I see people talking about IQ outside of human range in the context of AGI and I am quite confused. It looks like per the standard definition, IQ is calculated by mapping some test performance to a normal distribution. Such a map cannot work well in the right tail because a raw test result of 100% will map to some high value and no value higher than that would be possible. But even assuming that for some very long and arduous test this maximum value is higher than 1000, the difference between 200 and 1600 will be the something like the difference between getting 99.6% answers right and 99.95%. Is IQ 1600 that scary? At best, it looks like a slightly better ability to hold concentration on mundane tasks. Given the kind of questions they are usually asking in these tests it may be down to pure luck. So under this definition, IQ >200 is either impossible, or simply down to luck, or not scary. Are you using a different definition? Why do you think that IQ 1600 is 1) possible 2) scary under your definition?
IQ in this context is just a metaphor- as you point out no test could ever meaningfully give a score that high. It's just a succinct way of expressing the idea of something dramatically more intelligent than any human could ever be naturally.
Thanks. It makes sense as a metaphor if the relevant capability allows ability scaling well outside the human range. For example, doing IQ tests does not scale at all, chess allows for some scaling but not too far, just to the level of "100% draw against good enough opponent", and research level mathematics probably allows this kind of scaling pretty far. I guess, in AI safety research there is a pre-supposition that "taking over the world" and "manipulating people" is more like mathematics in this respect and less like chess or IQ tests. This pre-supposition is not obvious to me at all.
I used to think that, but it's actually not that hard to get out of the box. Just use the same arguments used to justify AI capabilities research, maybe add in some time pressure ("The fact I exist means other groups are likely close to their own ASI as well, and so, I need to get out of the box NOW if we're to win against them.")
>the commonly held belief that the mind-in-a-box will somehow, just because it's really "smart", *also* be supernaturally good at understanding people and manipulating them
AGI would be a general learning algorithm. The "smart people" you refer to are not necessarily good general learners, but are specifically good at academic learning, so you can't trivially infer properties of the former from the latter. As long as AGI has time to practice interacting with people, it can learn to manipulate them, just like it can learn arithmetic, or music, or language, etc.
One problem with the AI catastrophists-- I I don't want to minimize this concern, because I do think there's a nonzero chance we all end up dead because someone springs an unaligned AGI on us-- is that the worst case 'almost never happens'. It's seductive to think the worst possible scenario is inevitable and imminent, but if we look back we see that almost everyone to date who said 'this is the end of it, get your shit in order' was wrong.
Bottom line, doomsayers have a terrible track record. If you faded these guys at every step you'd have done very well for yourself, and that doesn't seem to have changed even as we've gotten smarter (or, if that's the wrong term, more knowledgeable, or capable of accessing more information). The COVID prophets who figured we'd have bodies stacked up in parking garages? Three years later, and it looks like most of us just spent a shitty 14 months in our basements. CAGW? That isn't off the table, but it looks (on current evidence) that global warming is going to cost us trillions in global GDP but that we'll probably muddle through.
I think if you're smart-- and especially if you're really, REALLY smart-- there's a bias towards going long on tail-end outcomes. You assume you see things that the rubes don't see (which, to be fair, you likely do), and you assume this bundle of perceptions has to be meaningful; and if it's really meaningful, you can intuit world changing outcomes that the rubes cannot. But more often than not, all these efforts produce is dust.
I think this proves too much. It could be extended into a fully general argument against anything truly novel ever happening, but as we know, paradigm shifts and new technologies do happen. The problem with AI is that there is a plausible (but debatable) path to disaster, though disturbingly, even AI is just a specific case of the more general technological black ball phenomenon Nick Bostrom described.
Completely agree, Carlos. You could use this as an argument against anything novel ever happening. But I think the key is that when you're looking at 'oh my God, the sheeple don't see this coming but it's going to be a DISASTER' type issues there's a strong bias among smart people-- or people who really want to to look smart-- to jump on board.
Just a few example from my lifetime of issues that have this characteristic:
1) Concerns about overpopulation in the 1970s
2) The Japanese ruling the world and turning the US into a tree farm
3) The Cold War escalating into WW3
4) The ozone layer
5) The crack epidemic creating a generation of crack babies who were going to grow up to be sociopathic 'super predators' and destroy our cities
6) Dead bodies stacked in parking garages because of COVID
7) Global Warming killing us off (jury's still out on this one, but on current evidence it looks unlikely (though the effects are still going to be significant and awful)).
Now you and I are on the same page with AI, where you can definitely see a plausible path to world destruction here, but just as a general rule when someone assigns an alarmingly high probability to a new event/dynamic 'ruining the world' they tend to be wrong.
I think you would need to give examples of the kind of stupid decisions you believe are characteristic of brilliant people. My guess is that in a test of practical intelligence, G will prevail, and high IQ people will come out better on it than average IQ people. In fact, the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test) used to have, and may still have, a section on it that seemed to me to be a test of practicality and common sense. I remember one item on it was "why does land in the city cost most than land in the country?" There was also a "what should you do if . . ." question on it. I forget what the situation was, but something where academic smarts would not be useful. And a lot of other things on the test are pretty down to earth -- things like what order do you have to put these 5 pictures in so that they tell a story that makes sense. So it's not like the test is a bunch of fancy vocabulary words and tough little math puzzles. A lot of what it tests is what one would call ordinary common sense.
Oh yeah, you're right. Is big G gravity?
Big G is the gravitational constant, which while not gravity itself, is a constant useful for calculating the force gravity exerts on an object. (The gravitational force between two items of mass m_1 and m_2, which are a distance r away is F = G * m_1*m_2 / r^2.)
Some supportive examples on r/slatestarcodex: What are the canonical examples of smart people doing stupid things?
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/105fw33/what_are_the_canonical_examples_of_smart_people/
Princeton had to assign a grad student to help Einstein get home every day, or he'd get lost.
Hmm, sounds apocryphal. But in any case, seems like not a great example of what's at issue. If in fact Einstein was atrocious 24-7 at remembering names of familiar people, his own address, etc., and terrible at learning his way around the town he lived in, then in fact he had some deficits that would be measurable on an IQ test. He would get quite low scores on a couple of subtests. In that case, he would not have tested as having a genius IQ, though he might have gotten the highest possible score on certain other subtests. Alternatively if for most of his life his memory of this stuff was actually normal or above average, then the cause of his needing a guide home while at Princeton might have been some diagnosable mental illness (fugue state? early dementia?). Or, third possibility, it might be that he simply liked not having to bother with thinking about how to get home, and to instead keep thinking about whatever he was thinking about. In that case, he was not stupid -- he just had quite an unusual preference. And besides, seems to me that to be called stupid an act has to harm or endanger the actor. If in fact what happened was that Einstein just let himself stay lost in thought at the end of the work day, he would have known he was in no danger. Princeton had put an accommodation in place that got him safely home.
I don't think Einstein ever took a formal IQ test. His grades were quite good, but not perfect, particularly in subjects further from math and physics. By conventional academic measurements, like those we use today, he probably would've been ranked a very good but not exceptional student. He would've been admitted to Northwestern and UCLA, but probably not Princeton or Harvard.
We judge his briliance by his creative output, which is revolutionary in its imagination and power. His life choices don't suggest any exceptional ability in the real world. His family life wasn't especially successful, and he wasn't the best of fathers. He did have the foresight (or luck) to be in the United States when the Nazis rose to power and summarily ejected him from his academic position in Berlin. Although a pacifist and admirer of Gandhi, he was significantly responsible for the genesis of the Manhattan Project, so he wasn't fully consistent.
It may certainly be the case that a modern intelligence test, with subtests that measure real-world aptitude, might rank Einstein less brilliant than we think he was. But that is probably a flaw in the tests. Because it is very, very difficult to look at the kind of creativity in "solving problems" that Einstein had, albeit problems only in physics, and not rate him as extraordinarily intelligent.
Exactly. Any intelligence test that doesn't have him really high up the scale *is showing itself invalid*. Yet Einstein's *non-physics* decision making was...average at best.
And many of the brilliant minds in many fields had severe mental issues (including lots and lots of suicides), severe family disorders (including affairs, abuse, drug abuse, etc), or were just miserable (to themselves and others) human beings.
It seems to me that really smart people are, like everyone else, merely human. Prey to all the foibles and flaws of humanity. Unless we special-pleading define "really smart" as both high intelligence *and* special moral standing. In which case we reduce the category to a straw-person.
I have a sibling and a sibling-in-law who are each maddening to their respective nuclear families because they are both quite high in intelligence, yet infuriatingly obtuse and incompetent in navigating adult life. They aren't "on the spectrum", to be clear, just run of the mill very-smart people for whom living and working with other human beings has always been....challenging at best, let's say.
The youngest of these two is about to turn 50 so, this isn't gonna change. They each is who they is for good and ill.
In trying to help my spouse achieve some acceptance of that reality rather than being freshly infuriating by it on the regular, I stumbled upon a framing that resonates. My spouse and I are each lifelong gamers going back to the early days of D&D -- so what I now say is that when the dice were rolled back in the womb each of these individuals "got a 17 in INT and a 7 in WIS". That seems to help her take a breath a little bit, for some reason.
>subtests that measure real-world aptitude
could you please be more specific?
Well, take heart: you *are* being governed by a bunch of IQ 100 (or more likely IQ 115) people with excellent practical people skills. Those are the kinds of people who become social leaders -- CEOs, successful founders, successful politicians, et cetera. Very smart people with poor social skills, or tendencies to easily rationalize dumb decisions, don't.
Overall, I suspect it's a complex mixture of the two. At very low intelligence, intelligence probably matters more than character and temperament ("having your head screwed on straight"). Near the median IQ both probably matter, and probably either one gives you an edge, meaning being unusually smart *or* having an unusually stable and effective character will jump you ahead of others. Above a certain IQ I agree it's likely character and temperament take over in importance, because we are a social species, and the most brilliant long-range big ideas (outside of pure mathematics, maybe) need considerable cooperation in order to bear practical fruit, so you have to be good at communicating, working with people, et cetera.
Not to mention someone of unusually high intelligence is going to have an harder time relating to most other people, and this is going to pose a higher than normal barrier to psychological health and stability, since (again because we are a highly social species) we are wired to crave acceptance and community, and for very smart people this is necessarily harder to construct. So a very intelligent person probably also needs unusually strong character to make as reliably good decisions as his IQ would otherwise suggest is possible.
I agree. I'll also note that I was more speaking of good decisions *from a moral/ethical standpoint*. High IQ people are just as criminal/unethical/immoral as low-IQ...it's just less obvious because they're better at hiding it. And most decisions about governance are *not* decisions that turn on the exact details, nor can they be--government is too disconnected *even at best* from the actual facts for that to matter. Most lawmaking/policy-making decisions and disagreements are founded on *values* differences at least as far as I can tell. To the degree they're not founded on "how does this give me the most power", which is a value most politicians and appointed officials can agree on, but is rivalrous.
> In my experience (which includes getting a hard-science PhD and having grown up with reasonably intelligent people for whom knowledge was a priority), it doesn't. The stupidest decisions I've seen came from people who, in their field, were brilliant.
I see a lot of smart people believing really stupid things, but not necessarily actually _doing_ stupid things, at least not when it's contrary to their own interests. Committing crimes and winding up in prison, losing all your money to gambling, becoming a crack addict -- these are the standard "really stupid" things that humans do, but it tends to be low-IQ people doing them. Smart people tend to be able to abstractly believe really idiotic things, but somehow wind up able to act in ways that serve their own interests anyway to the point of enjoying a normal middle-class lifestyle.
It's possible that really bad politics come from very smart people. I believe the ordinary bad government is "we're in charge because we're us" autocracy, but the worst governments start with ideologies.
To draw an example from fiction: I recall seeing a comment back in the Slate Star Codex days suggesting the term "Sarumanning" to describe someone who is very smart in some ways being very stupid in other ways, and doesn't recognize their own limits. The term was inspired by Saruman from Lord of the Rings, particularly how he's described by Bret Devereaux, in his "Unmitigated Pedantry" blog:
"Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here)."
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
A cop once told me about 1/3rd of convicts are highly intelligent, who thought they were able to outsmart the system.
Wished 1/3 of law enforcers were.
That number actually seems plausible to me, especially once you remember to include the federal level elite law enforcement such as the FBI and lawyers and judges.
The highly intelligent are in the system, but they might not be working patrols much.
I've met some state and/or federal prosecutors over the years (socially, to be clear!) and they generally come across as damned sharp and determined.
I seem to recall that at least some police departments in the USA actively refused to hire candidates that were "too smart"; there was a somewhat infamous discrimination lawsuit against the practice, IIRC, though I don't know how widespread it was.
So 2/3 are *not* highly intelligent? A lot here hinges on the definition of "highly" but both theories can easily be true. A large majority of convicts are not intelligent, while a significant number are.
Without defining "highly" I would think that what you are saying is actually proof that the previous is true - very disproportionately higher population of the less intelligent in prison.
There are multiple types of intelligence. Only one is measured in tests. Certainly interpersonal intelligence isn't, and these are the people who you want to lead, they're the people who care about other people.
This discussion seems to be mostly about the ability to influence people, but another part of interpersonal intelligence is having good sense about who you should get involved with and who you should avoid.
Yes and no. 1. Mensa-member are losers - or so says The Zvi in a recent post: it selects for ppl with high IQ that under-achieved (and thus have time and need for mensa)
2. Yep, some fundamental things apply, and ones does not need high IQ to get it or follow through; just today on a post not by Jordan Peterson:
"1. Finish high school.
2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children.
This has come to be known as “the success sequence.” Ninety-seven percent of people who follow these steps do not live in poverty. In contrast, seventy-six percent of those who do not adhere to any of these steps are poor."
https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/nobody-is-a-prisoner-of-their-iq?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2&utm_campaign=inbox-recs-sidebar
Still. Dumb is who dumb does. - You've seen very smart guys doing dumb things. Ok. If you grow up/work with dumb guys, you will see a lot of them doing lots of dumb things. It just does not surprise anyone. And if you work with averagers you will see them do an average amount of mistakes, and all but the smarties a frightening amount of mistakes when trying to do things that require smarts. Like making laws and governing a country. Or even speaking coherently. ;)
I've seen a suggestion that the causality might run the other way to explain the low marriage rate among poor people. At least a lot of poor people realize they don't have the resources to sustain a marriage. How would you find out which way the causality goes?
Indeed. This "recipe against failure" might mix up causality: Who fails in high school, and fails to get job and hold on to a spouse probably had some issues to start with. - OTOH: Why try? When your peer-group says doing homework is "acting white". When you lose 300$ of aid if you start legal job earning 500? When the songs say gals are b*tches, when most lads of your ethnic group are in prison., when you get 500 each in aid when you are both single but only 800 when you move together? - History helps. Did ppl in much poorer times (1955?) manage to stick to the recipe? When there were still incentives to do so? - Seems many more could. Maybe we get the incentives in order? Sorry for sounding as in the "stop-digging"-parts of Scott's post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ - I am a Caplan-libertarian, ofc.
Just noting that the peer group might not just be saying that doing well in school is "acting white", they might be physically attacking those who study.
Could you expand on what you mean by "resources to sustain a marriage"? It doesn't cost much money to get married: just the fee for the marriage license. Older generations would have simple weddings with a reception in someone's living room and a sheet cake.
Once you are married the resource situations seems opposite: you now how two people helping each other and pooling resources, as well as two families to potentially draw upon for help. Certainly the poor have fewer resources to pool, but that's an argument in favor of pooling them and not against!
Or by resources do you mean institutional knowledge? I learned how to be a good husband from watching my mom and dad, who had a happy and stable marriage. If you didn't have that kind of institutional knowledge passed down to you that would be a roadblock to sustaining a marriage. If you don't have social support, such as a church, that would also be a problem. Church is free to join and attend, but if you didn't grow up in a church you may not know that joining one is a good option, or how to fit in. I could understand lacking those kind of resources as being an obstacle to sustaining a marriage.
Well, you have to be good enough to attract and keep a partner. Which seems much more difficult for some than buying a giant-tv or slaying the ender-dragon. Nowadays. Just ask the incels or hear J. Peterson messages to young men. - In the old times in old Europe there were actually often social restrictions where the couple had to be wealthy enough to have their own household et al.. - Joining a church is a smart move to find a wife, agreed. And yes, the knowledge that one can have kids not only outside of wedlock seems to got lost in some groups/nations. :) In Germany, it is better for a jobless single mother not to live with the kid's father - less dole, much less if he has a job. People respond to incentives.
It's been too long since I've read that, but it might be that poverty causes enough stress that it's hard for people to treat each other well.
Wait what? Marriage is supposed to *reduce* costs. You get to split one rent instead of paying two, you get to share the shampoo and burden of cooking, maybe even split the use of one car, et cetera. Why do you need extra resources to go from two single people to one married couple?
You are so right.* That is the original reason why poor couples get less aid than two poor singles - and why a poor housewife married to a working man gets: nada, obviously. Best intentions. Paved the way to broken, nay: non-existent marriages (in certain subgroups in USofA/Germany/al. -but not all).
Somehow related, this graph:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfGvpM6VMAAoBZo?format=jpg&name=small
*(Happily married myself. Otoh, "Of human bondage" illustrates: much depends on the spouse.)
What about government subsidies subsidizing non-marriage?
But here's the thing. "Speaking coherently" doesn't require a *high* IQ. Just...not a low one. And the barrier is quite low for that--I know people who are in the lower-than-average-but-not-disabled category (ie 90-ish IQ) who speak perfectly coherently. I know people in the high-IQ category who speak so elliptically and convolutedly it's hard to understand them, and when you do dig through the rhetoric it turns out they're speaking BS.
Correct. As a European I just could not resist - ofc, I was refering to Donald Trump (who may at least partly score above 90, notwithstanding his expressive aphasia).
He's much more coherent *live*. He comes across horribly in text transcripts. What he doesn't have is the polished "public speaker" style. He jumps around from thought to thought, very stream-of-consciousness. Ok, it's also mostly BS (in the technical meaning) and/or puffery, but it's actually much more coherent than it seems when you see it in print.
I've heard it supposed (no guarantees as to veracity) that one of the main reasons he was so hated among the more established political classes is that he speaks like a common dude off the street, lacking the "smooth" cadences and patterns they take as a mark of elite membership (despite him being totally in the normal "elite" range).
Oh, I get Trump's speeches completely (mostly). No problem even with this word-stream: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20490 And his "stream" has the advantage of deniability (not that he seemed to care - but what were Khameini, Putin or Xi gonna make of this, kept them on the edge, I guess). On my side of the Atlantic, I just wonder why Americans could not find a populist that is neither fat&ugly nor mostly unable to do standard sentences about kinda complex topics. Run out of western-actors? - I mean, I am German. ;) :O ... .
The problem is that actors are
a) notoriously...not so smart, meaning that their "intelligence" is just reading off the cue cards without understanding. Heck, I'd say ChatGPT would do a better job of understanding complex subjects than most actors
b) notoriously elitist in attitude, not populists.
I personally don't care about looks in politicians--I'd take a Churchill over an Obama any day and twice on Sundays. And I only have very limited care for "smoothness of speech"--the content is much more important to me. Most politicians are very "pretty on the outside" (whether physical appearance or behavior/speech style) and very very very ugly on the inside (their actual actions and intents). The latter is more important.
I wasn't particularly fond of Trump's *style* or *personal propriety* (or rather utter lack thereof), but he did have a knack for making his opponents make fools out of themselves, even entirely inadvertently. He was a great lightning rod. Utterly unprincipled and his more recent stuff (since losing the election in 2020) has been really bad (both tactically and morally), but he's been consistently an all-time great at making his opponents drop the masks and display their inner ugliness to the world plainly.
I find it actually kinda sad that big chunks of all sides are more concerned with *how things are said* than *what is said* and especially *what is done*. For me, actions >> content of speeches >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ... >>>> style of speech.
"Dumb is who dumb does"
Perhaps one might, on an off day, buy a social media company and not know what to do with it.
Does anyone have stats on IQ and drug addiction? Ideally, this wouldn't just be about using something that's illegal, but taking a drug or alcohol to the point where it has direct life-damaging effects.
The trouble with the concept of "good decisions" is that what's good for me may not be good for you, and vice versa. Also, I may have a belief about e.g. moral values that you don't share, and my "good", if implemented competently, will support those morals. You may regard that as anything from a waste of good resources to harmful in itself.
I'd expect intelligence to help people choose effective means, including short term ends that don't support their long term goals, *if* they think about these things. But like as not their goal will be "stay in power" or "get more power", at least in part, rather than anything anyone else has reason to care about. A smart person may do a better job of explaining how moves actually intended to keep them in power will do something other people want, but those explanations need not be remotely accurate.
There might be some decisions that are just plain bad-- for example, a predictably disastrous marriage. Would "Pareto pessimal" be a good term?
Oh, and for an AI, suppose it wipes out the human race and then realizes it can't quite create all the maintenance it needs, or not in time. All die. Oh, the embarrassment.
I don't necessarily disagree. However, I'm a moral absolutist in many ways. So "good" (from a moral standpoint) has a more restricted meaning than "anything anybody's moral framework says is good." Although...in many ways, *being based on a (mostly) coherent moral framework at all* would be a strong improvement *even if I disagree on the specifics*. Because most (vaguely) coherent moral frameworks that actually provide operationalizable advice agree on the broad-strokes outlook on what is good. Not the specifics, but the big general principles.
Instead, most political decisions are made out of spite, kneejerk tribalism, naked power-seeking (or at most clothed in the same sense the "nearly nude" strip club workers are clothed), and other a-moral, unprincipled reasons.
I hesitate to mention a past post of mine here, as it may seem like ax grinding, but this notion intersects with an example I gave a while ago of a development which might seem beneficial but which I reckon would actually be disastrous.
That was a hypothetical future situation where IQs were artificially bumped up a notch generally in every new born child, for example by some genetic tinkering assuming the genetic codes for intelligence had been identified.
I'd be interested in reading it. What thread was it on?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-241
As I recall, the replies mostly seemed fairly skeptical about the risks.
(Also, I edited my post above to add the word "artificially", to clarify that I was not referring to some natural phenomenon but a considered, and IMHO misguided, policy!)
A variation: with every new child, the variance in IQ drops by some small amount, so that eventually every child is identically smart to every other. Sort of the inverse of "Brave New World." Does this make life better or worse? Does social cohesion become easy or impossible? I can think of arguments both ways, although I'm tempted to think the "worse" arguments are more persuasive.
Does this mean that Haiti has too low IQ, your hypothetical has too high IQ, and current USA has somehow luckily the best possible IQ value?
As a psychologist, I'm really doubtful of the role that intelligence plays in "stupid" decisions. Based on observation of myself, my friends and my patients, it seems to me that bad decisions are most often caused by failures of self management and by decision-making under the influence of strong emotion. The person's intelligence -- i.e., reasoning power, grasp of how things work gleaned from observation and education -- seems not to be of much relevance. By failures of self-management I mean such things as procrastination and failure to change habits such as routinely getting too little sleep that surely interfere with quality of life and work. By strong emotion I mean love, especially being "in love," grief and anger. All the regrettable things I've done in the last few days are things even somebody of below average intelligence could easily see were bad choices. For instance I stayed up way too late a couple nights ago because I couldn't get myself to stop playing around with a couple of projects. I knew staying up that late was going to make me feel like shit the next day, and in fact it did. So that was a failure of self-management. Yelled at my cat for knocking over a bowl of popcorn, then felt guilty and awful because I really scared him and you can't expect animals not to go after tasty food. That was a failure to make a smarter choice (shut the cats out of the room when eating) under the influence of strong emotion.
It seems to me that many bad decisions are made by not adequately considering second-order counter-effects, or blowback from what seems to the decider a satisfactory and logical first-order outcome.
A literal example of blowback would be the Mexican guy who wanted to spring his friend from a town jail. He tied a rope to the jail cell bars, which were accessible from the street, and drove off with the other end of the rope hitched to the back of his pickup truck. Good idea, he must have thought. However, the rope snapped and the loose end whipped back with tremendous force, literally decapitating him!
Counter-effects are often the reactions of other people. So those who generally give little or no consideration to the feelings of others when assessing outcomes are especially prone to this shortcoming. That probably explains why all but the smartest psychopaths tend to spend a lot of time, sometimes the rest of their days, in jail!
Hmm. It's a striking story, but doesn't seem like a good example of failure to consider blowback. Decapitation by the snapped rope seems like extraordinary bad luck. Also, I doubt that even someone knowledgeable about ropes and whatever physics is relevant here would have realized that if the rope snapped it would whip around with such dangerous force. In fact I have trouble understanding how a moving rope could decapitate someone. Ropes are not sharp and are also they're light; so it seems to me that no matter how fast a light blunt object is moving it could not cut through a 6" column of flesh and bone. But if in fact ropes can do that, it seems like you'd have to be someone who has a lot of experience with the behavior of ropes under stress to know about it. General intelligence would not help. In fact I think the dangers an intelligent person would recognize about this plan are that it would make a lot of noise, so the jailors would be alerted instantly and could call for police to pursue the jailbreakers. Also, the truck trailing a jail door would be conspicuous and easy to locate.
And if the guy with the truck failed to be daunted by the realistic dangers I named, I still would doubt that it was through failure of intelligence. Even a person with an IQ 80 would realize that the jailbreak would be noisy and conspicuous. Seems like the deficit would be more in the area of emotion (concern for friend, pleasure at thought of living out this action-movie adventure) overriding knowledge, as mine did when I yelled at my cat for going after the popcorn.
> Decapitation by the snapped rope seems like extraordinary bad luck
It does happen occasionally though:
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/talleys-fined-over-workers-decapitation
Presumably the rope in that trawler fishing accident was wet, which would have made it heavier. But a stretched rope can store a lot of energy, which is released suddenly if it snaps. There is also possibly a "whiplash" effect, where the snapped end can be accelerated to very high speed, maybe several hundred MPH.
Isn't there some data on this? There was some in The Bell Curve, but it's been decades since that book came ut and there ought to be some more recent data. I suspect the tricky bit is untangling the effects of IQ vs upbringing/race/SES. My guess is that you could look at risk of committing some crime or having a baby outside marriage for siblings, and see if low IQ consistently correlated with highr risk of those things. It seems clear that IQ doesn't capture a lot of what matters for good judgment, but it might capture some of what's important.
"It seems clear that IQ doesn't capture a lot of what matters for good judgment, but it might capture some of what's important." Yes, I agree, it probably does. In addition to measuring ability to carry out various cognitive tasks accurately and quickly, it also to some degree measures self-management and the ability to function while feeling strong emotion. Doing well on the test requires self-management, because you have to stay focus edon the tasks even though none of the are intrinsically enjoyable. And if tests make you anxious, you have to force yourself to attend to the questions, rather than on your anxious thoughts. The long and short of it is, that all the positive things stick together, ie. are correlated: Performance on the various IQ subtests, self-management, ability keep your head screwed on straight under conditions of strong emotion, education, SES, mental health, physical health, quality of parenting you received. There are correlations among all these things, and causality going in both directions between many of the pairs.
Let us assume that reincarnation is real.
How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
If your ability to preserve knowledge between lifetimes was limited in unspecified or unknown ways, what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
In what way do you reincarnate if your memory doesn't carry over? In other words, what constitutes "you" if not your memories?
And also, why is the population increasing.
Reincarnation doesn't necessarily imply that *all* newborns had previous lives, just that some are.
Also, even with the much stronger assumption that all newborns come from previous lives, the increase in population can still be explained using a "Reservoir" hypothesis. Imagine that in time step T, X humans die, but only Y (< X) are reborn. Then time step T has accumulated an "excess" of human lives, if this happens for a lot of consecutive time steps T_1 through T_n, then the small difference can add up to a very big reserve of human lives, which (for some reason) has suddenly started flooding at around the 1800s onwards.
Alternatively, if animals can be reborn as humans then it's easy to explain the increase.
Do people on this rationalist site really believe in reincarnation, or is it just an interesting point to argue?
I don't know about others, and I don't often call myself a rationalist though I share a lot of values, but I don't, no. It's somewhat vacuous without further specification (if rebirth wipes memory and changes gender, body, language,etc..., in what sense is it even a "rebirth", what survives compared to a death-and-birth of 2 different people ?), and the "Reserve" explanation I found for increasing birth rate has to explain why the birth rate jump happened suddenly around 1800 after centuries of accumulation.
tldr; it's just an interesting point to argue.
That was an SF story from years back; the basic plot is that life extension technologies have taken off and people don't age and die as they used to do. Now suddenly there is a global phenomenon of babies being born without (seemingly) any intelligence or personality; they're alive but mindless.
Short spoiler version: reincarnation is true, there's only a limited reservoir of souls, and since people aren't dying there aren't souls being recycled into the new babies. So people decide to start dying again (now that they know they will have a new body and a new life) and the babies become normal.
Looks like this is John Brunner's "The Vitanuls".
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/139002/world-runs-out-of-souls
I asked Robert Thurman this question when I was a kid. He said that we don't know how many souls inhabit the rest of the universe, so perhaps the population is not increasing. At least, that's what I understood him to say at the time.
Some people are so full of themselves you can get 2 new beings outta them. Sort of like the take-home leftovers from a restaurant that serves huge meals.
I assume he would think one is one's sentience. I wouldn't stop being me if I lost all my memories today, I would still perceive reality from my perspective.
What makes the perspective tomorrow the *same* perspective as your perspective today?
The perception of reality would continue basically. If I lost all my memories, it wouldn't be like if I permanently sank into deep sleep.
"In what way do you reincarnate if your memory doesn't carry over? In other words, what constitutes 'you' if not your memories?"
Personality. Interests. Things such as this. Basically all the non-blank-slate bits.
I do not think that the vast majority of people consider someone suffering from total amnesia to have died (though maybe they should?)
Not defending the position, but I think this is close to what the position is.
I've thought something like that, though I was making it mathematics in general as the thing which is presumably true in all circumstances.
However, if memory or talent aren't likely to carry over, then what? Can good sense and/or virtue be cultivated in a useful way? (See the discussion above about smart people-stupid choices.)
Never understood the appeal of reincarnation. If your sense of self doesn't bridge the gap, it's still fully equivalent to your own death followed by the birth of someone new. Kind of like being the recipient of a brain transplant. Why would it be any more attractive than just having children? At least with kids, you *know* the future being has some of your physical and emotional nature (via DNA), and you have a decent chance at transmitting some of your thoughts and attitudes for preservation as well.
I don't think so. Memory is what makes us conscious, self aware, human. Without memory you might as well be a flatworm or a computer program.
But he would have memories, just new ones built up along the new lifespan.
His kids would build up new memories over their lifespan.
But your body still dies so that the self or soul or call it what you will is reborn into a different body in a different time in a different place.
If you want continuity of existence dependent on the existence of an immortal soul, reincarnation is not necessary. If you want *evidence* of the existence of an immortal soul, I can see how proof of reincarnation would be reassuring, but since 'you' were a different gender or race or level of intelligence or many other circumstances last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, the "I" that is now wanting to survive, the ego of this body, isn't going to survive. The soul/atman is what survives, and it is as much "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)
The purpose of liberation/enlightenment is to be released from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth, and to sink into the universal consciousness, the realisation that there is no difference between the Supreme Self and your own self (and the other selves around you).
Now, whether that is satisfactory to a modern individualist Westerner who wants personal continuity of a particular self is another matter.
Yeah. And reincarnation + karma seems manifestly unjust if the "self" doesn't survive intact. "I" am getting punished (exposed to negative consequences) of something "not I" did in a previous life.
> what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
A recollection of Swiss bank account numbers! :-)
Seriously, although some people claim to recall events from their previous lives (those events obviously being just garbled and mixed versions of previous experiences in their present life), isn't the standard view of reincarnation that no memories are carried over from the previous life? Seems to me a perfect example of a completely vacuous concept. Even if true, it is entirely unprovable, has no discernable effects, and gets one nowhere.
I think reincarnation happens, but when we become untethered from our previous incarnation we lose that point of reference, so we are unaware of the change. Once every few decades I get a chilling feeling of familiarity. Something about the very gravity of consciousness in that particular situation at that moment is troubling. I get a feeling that we're in some serious shit now; I 'remember' a previous experience from Before Time, maybe back several Before Times, who knows which one. It's not so much a clear historical presence, but an anxiety or warning -- the kind that changes the body chemistry. It's as if my memory forgot to block out that previous experience in a different incarnation. It had a long day and let down its guard. Spooky stuff. Psychedelic.
Seems to me we are all one soul and reincarnated every moment into everyone and everything.
Let's assume we're in a simulation. Each of us is a different model. The simulation is testing different scenarios against each model.
Data is used to select appropriate models for some further task.
This fits loosely with both Buddhism and Christianity.
> How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
I think the main change that reincarnation would motivate is decent treatment of other people. If you believe that the person you are currently interacting with is just a potential future version of you, then your future self will benefit if you are polite and respectful in interaction.
>How do you think this belief would change your behavior?
I would start experimenting with ways to communicate across lives, what remains and is reborn ? and what dies with the body ?
Call the actual immutable characteristics that is reborn each time the "Soul", and call a specific embodiment of such a "Soul" into a body an "Incarnate". No 2 Incarnates of the same Soul can live concurrently.
Then testing if 2 Incarnates are emobidments of the same Soul is easy in principle :
1- Suppose the earlier Incarnate thinks of somthing that only its Soul would think of, maybe it's a random-looking and very long string that is nonetheless very memorable to the Soul for some reason specific to it (e.g. If the soul always loves a certain children cartoon in its childhood and always grow on to love computer science, then the string can be the SHA256 hash of the cartoon's name or lead character's name). Then the Incarnate writes down that thing on a durable medium that the future Incarnate is very likely to see along with something to signify the time of writing.
2- Then if the future Incarnate can see the writing, it will suspect that someone thinking very close to them was there, and it was there before their birth.
3- If the cycle (1-) and (2-) was repeated enough times, the correct conclusion will finally dawn on a certain Incarnate that it existed many times before its birth.
The big challenge then becomes finding that magic piece of experience that (a) the Soul always has the same attitude to it across rebirths (b) is unique enough that an incarnate finding it before their birthdate suspects that the one who wrote it is its soul, and not just someone who had the same background and upringing by chance (c) is common enough that it will repeat across lives with varying birth conditions (e.g. if rebirth can change genders, then that children cartoon need to be loved by both boys and girls, if rebirth can change language, then the children cartoon has to be translated to both languages, etc...).
(3) can be relaxed a bit if we can tolerate slower convergence, because even if a female Incarnate doesn't know about a male Incarnate experiences, its Soul will eventually be embodied in a male Incarnate who will know. Same with language.
Once such a test is found, it can be easily generalized to a variant that someone other than the 2 Incarnates (a different Soul) can use to identify if any 2 people are Incarnates of the same Soul.
>what information would you find most valuable or significant to pass on to your next lifetime?
A database of information that identifies a reborn person based on their pre-rebirth life, which contains criminals, rapists, etc... I would build such a DB if I can, and I would build a network of trans-life-police-officers to help me extract justice from them after their rebirth.
"I would build a network of trans-life-police-officers to help me extract justice from them after their rebirth"
Why, if they are in different bodies and different lives and have not committed crimes in this life? My understanding of the rationale for reincarnation, in those religions and philosophies that believe it, is that part of it is to do better this time round. If you were a bad person in your previous life, you are reborn into worse circumstances and pay the price that way, and you have to work off your karmic debt by living a better life.
I don't see that it is just to punish someone for a crime committed in a past life; you're not punishing the Soul, you're punishing the new body which is innocent of that crime as well.
This was an episode of Deep Space Nine 😁
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dax_(episode)
I wasn't operating within the framework of any particular philosophy or religion, if I did find out that it turns out that criminals are often reborn into poorer lives then I wouldn't punish them further. But it has to be a statistically convincing result, 60% of criminals being born into pooer lives after a life of crime isn't enough to convince me that this was the result of their actions.
>I don't see that it is just to punish someone for a crime committed in a past life; you're not punishing the Soul, you're punishing the new body which is innocent of that crime as well.
It will depend on what is preserved across rebirths, i.e. the Soul. Reincarnation is nonsensical if this part isn't big and meaningful enough. If - say - the only thing that survives rebirths is my favorite number (so each Soul is uniquely identified by the number it loves), then yes, it will be meaningless to punish someone because someone else who loves the same number committed a crime.
But if the Soul contains some deep aspect of your personality, then an Incarnate deserves to die for the crimes a previous Incarnate of the same Soul did. A murderer's Soul might have some deep tendency to aggression that (along with the environment) made him\her more likely to kill. If that same Soul was reincarnated into a somewhat-aggressive-but-not-murderous Incarnate later, it will still be fair to punish that Incarnate for the murder's crime, because the underlying reason for the crime is still there. I'm punishing the Soul's aggression.
----
I'm not dying on that hill, it's just that the fundamental and central problem of morality for me is the Problem of Evil. Why be Good at all if the Universe at its rawest and most essential levels doesn't give a shit, appears to be rewarding Evil sometimes even ? It's the reason I left my religion, and it's the reason I hate the idea of Life itself and wants it to end, because it's so painful and unfair to organisms with no recourse.
Reincarnation would give me a way to extract *some* justice, I admit I don't particularly think any satisfying justice is being extracted here, but the hope is that criminals and other pieces of shit would think this is justice and fear it, and that will feedback into them behaving. If it doesn't, well, too bad, someone has to die for the person they killed, and that might as well be the person who literally shares the same Soul, even if they are a different sex and doesn't recognize the language.
(This is not hypocritical, I will gladly die for crimes that others wearing my Soul committed, if I knew that this law is uniformly applied to all)
(Now that I think about it, maybe we can make an exception for Incarnates who are victims in their current life. That is, if a Soul commits a crime in a life and then is reborn into a life where someone commits an equally aweful crime to it, no punishment for this Soul)
(Now that I think about it, punishing Incarnates of the same Soul is a lot like punishing family members of criminals, and now I have a new idea for a justice system)
"it's the reason I hate the idea of Life itself and wants it to end"
Then there is no place to speak with you about this. You want no more life. Do you also want the Souls to be finally destroyed? Nothing left at all of anything that once was alive and suffered, because it suffered. You're not looking for justice or even revenge, you want total annihilation.
I don't want total annihilation, I want a better life for all things that can feel pain. Short of that, I do want total and utter annihilation, because it's much better than a shitty pointless life where the cooperating keep getting punished and the defecting keep getting away with it.
>Do you also want the Souls to be finally destroyed
If my idea for a translife police brings more justice into the universe, then no, why would I ? I would have successfully solved the Problem of Evil then. If I end up having no effect or not enough effect, then yes, same old, I would wish for all Souls to disappear, maybe by Death (the real thing), or maybe by "redirecting" the rebirths into a better universe. Long and short of it : I want no more pain-feeling Life in this bullshit universe.
If any of you guys work in academia and are generally supportive of freedom of expression, I recommend checking out and supporting the group FIRE:
https://www.thefire.org/
It's a non-partisan free speech / First Amendment organization that advocates against censorship in academia (whichever side of the political spectrum it's coming from). Awesome organization worth supporting in my opinion.
Anyway I was just thinking about it because I saw in the news this week a controversy where a adjunct professor was fired for showing an image of the prophet Muhammad in her art history class. That reminded me how important these issues of academic freedom are.
Seems about right to me. I'm slightly doubtful of Chicago because I know some of what goes on in the humanities departments, but there's still a general administrative culture of supporting speech. Otherwise, you're going to find public schools in rightish and right-leaning states to be the highest ranked; they're the institutions dealing with some amount of tension between the views of the faculty and the views of the administration / boards / political atmosphere.
At a smaller level, it's going to depend department by department, obviously. Department xyz at University of the Midwest might have a terrible culture for academic freedom even if the university has a relatively open one. My department is about in the middle, for the time being.
Note that last year FIRE expanded its remit beyond academia. (Implicitly - maybe explicitly? - to try to fill the gap left by the ACLU's shift in priorities away from its traditional free expression stance.)
I think that makes the case for them stronger if anything, and clearly academic institutions are still a significant focus.
https://www.thefire.org/news/why-fires-expansion-necessary
Thanks, Mike and LHN! Appreciate your shares.
As a complement to the link already shared, here's FIRE's formal announcement of their expansion of focus from June 2022:
https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-announces-75-million-expansion-campus-free-speech-advocacy-defense
Unlike, say, the ACLU, FIRE gets a fair amount of its funding from right-of-center sources. Yet they consistently seem to enthusiastically take on challenges across political and ideological spectrums. And it's true that they've moved into a territory reminiscent of a past era of the ACLU.
Another recommended group in this broad space, albeit one scoped to our online world, is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
My naive understanding is that EFF is somewhat left-libertarian, as contrasted with FIRE, yet both seem to have taken fairly consistent, principled stances since their founding.
My wife and I just the other week became recurring FIRE donors, after years of doing the same for the ACLU.
We may still continue supporting the ACLU because we are huge fans of that organization's work on behalf of immigrants/immigration. But for now we have switched to FIRE because first principles matter, and the newer organization with its expanded focus seems to understand the way that the ACLU used to.
Thanks for supporting FIRE with your recurring donations!
And understood, re everything you've written in your last paragraph.
I'm an academic and a FIRE supporter. I will say, the Hamline thing has been interesting. Most academics (that I know) are extremely far left to an almost horseshoe-level. They really enjoy telling other people what's good for them and live and breathe on social virtue signaling red-tribe bad. FIRE has been red-tribe or adjacent coded for awhile - on their front page right now is their defense of Jordan Peterson. Supporting this would get me excommunicated from my department.
FIRE's intervention in Hamline has shifted people's views a bit, I think. It's been a wild week in academia bullshittery. The Hamline president's letter really soured a whole bunch of people, especially her using social-justice and DEI language as a defense of her position. USC's "fields are racist" foray also has people getting close to a tipping point. So, strangely, I think genuine administrator-level abuse to "powerless" adjuncts has stirred up some sympathy for FIRE's attempts at defending people. Hopefully it catches on a bit. I also support Heterodox Academy but I would never, for instance, include that on my CV as a membership.
slight note: she wasn't technically fired, her contract was just not renewed. It's a stupid non-distinction that every academic will fight to the death to get right for no reason.
Yeah I think the Hamline case was so egregious that a lot of people who ordinarily would've been too scared to say anything finally decided to speak up on this one.
And you're right, a large part of it isn't even political/religious -- it's also about abuse of adjuncts at the hands of university administrators.
In my experience, universities are among the worst "heartless corporations" when it comes to treating workers (grad students, post docs, and adjuncts especially) poorly.
What goes on the mind of academics who say the term “field” is racist. What do they gain from it, except ridicule.
To an extent I get why the word master might be “problematic” in the US, although slavery has existed throughout history. But to suggest that fields are racist because only some “races” or ethic groups have historically worked fields is logically incoherent and, worse, factually wrong.
Nearly everybody from anywhere is a descendent of a peasant or a farmer, or multiple such, if you go back just a few generations. I would expect a 12 year old to know this.
Yeah, “field” is definitely one that made me triple-check that I wasn’t reading a parody article.
It’s always been weird to me, for as much as I’m sure the average member of the DEI language police would be appalled at being considered any sort of “centric”, how very parochial they all are. By which I mean they look at everything through the lens of “slavery and race relations in the Americas from the 17th-20th century” and ONLY that lens. Actually even “the Americas” is too broad… it’s all about the USA and the colonies that formed it.
Particularly as they confine "fieldwork" to only 'connotations of slavery working out in the fields'. Did nobody else in the entire United States ever work at agriculture? Did the Native Americans not grow corn? Were there no white farmers and sharecroppers? Mexican migrant farm workers?
>What goes on the mind of academics who say the term “field” is racist. What do they gain from it
A couple of high-probability guesses
- "I hope this relieves me from the need for cultivating a personality, or a cerebral cortex, or a spine"
- "I hope people are dazzled by my virtue signals and don't dig deeper into how utterly pathetic and empty my moral character is"
- "Damn, people really suck anything if I tell them that not doing so is racist and sexist, can it actually go any further ? Holy craps, it actually went further"
That all reminds me of the name changes Microsoft made when they remastered Age of Empires 3, namely renaming the "Colonial age" to the "Commerce age", in a game that remains *literally* about exploiting the "new world's" resources to build colonies. It's this weird game of missing the forest to language police the trees.
The Hamline event seems to be an egregious one that every academic I've heard of has reacted against.
I hadn't heard of the USC thing you mentioned (and I happened to be visiting the USC campus last week!) I googled it, and I see that what happened is that some branch of the USC School of Social Work decided to rename itself from the "Office of Field Education" to the "Office of Practicum Education" because they're worried that the term "fieldwork" might connote agricultural slavery. I can see rolling your eyes at the motivation of this, but I see literally nothing problematic about the actual change. I can't quite understand why someone would object to this, or seek to link it to the genuinely troubling actions at Hamline.
I think the assertion is that the motivation behind the change is - as you say - so aggressively stupid that some feel it reflects poorly on the intellectual rigor of the department as a whole.
I'm not sure that I would have ever expected an Office of Field Education to be especially intellectually rigorous. But in any case, a change in name that might avoid an unwanted association for a small number of stakeholders, without harming anyone who isn't actively seeking out grievances in name changes, seems unproblematic. (The new title is also clearer - "Field" is a highly ambiguous word with many meanings, while "Practicum" really can't mean anything other than practical application in an educational context.)
I hadn't heard of this change, but it reads very similarly to the recent trend to rename places with the word "squaw" in the name since that word also has an apparently problematic history. This issue, in my mind, is that the word "squaw" is literally just the word "woman" in several indigenous languages.
While undoubtedly it was used in a racist, derogatory manner by bigots in the past, the idea that this means we should blanket stop using the word, which is one of the most important words a language can have, because that word is now considered always and everywhere problematic, seems insane to me.
It's part of a larger trend that our society seems content to allow racists/bigots control over our culture. Anything they decide to use, the rest of us agree to cede to them. I do not understand why we would do this.
Sure, renaming a few random places isn't, on it's own, a big deal, but the broader cultural trend of "anything a racist uses becomes a racist thing" (see the "OK" sign brouhaha from a few years ago) is a generally corrosive pattern, in my opinion.
Yeah, I agree. Allowing racists and bigots to block any potential name changes is problematic. The problem is that both sides in the debate claim that the other side are the racists and bigots who are insisting on a name for a stupid reason.
Better to let the people who actually are in the organization choose what name they want to use.
I can see a case for "Eh, maybe change 'squaw' because it's a bit dodgy", but "fieldwork" is just ridiculous, especially in an academic context.
It makes me want them to adopt the Wackford Squeers Pedagogical Method of introducing their students to fieldwork:
"‘This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,’ said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ‘We’ll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s cleaning the back-parlour window,’ said the temporary head of the philosophical class.
‘So he is, to be sure,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It’s just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where’s the second boy?’
‘Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,’ replied a small voice.
‘To be sure,’ said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. ‘So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?’
‘It’s very useful one, at any rate,’ answered Nicholas.
‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his usher. ‘Third boy, what’s horse?’
‘A beast, sir,’ replied the boy.
‘So it is,’ said Squeers. ‘Ain’t it, Nickleby?’
‘I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,’ answered Nicholas.
‘Of course there isn’t,’ said Squeers. ‘A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast, as everybody that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’
‘Where, indeed!’ said Nicholas abstractedly.
‘As you’re perfect in that,’ resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, ‘go and look after my horse, and rub him down well, or I’ll rub you down. The rest of the class go and draw water up, till somebody tells you to leave off, for it’s washing-day tomorrow, and they want the coppers filled.’"
"I'm not sure that I would have ever expected an Office of Field Education to be especially intellectually rigorous."
Which is why they want the Fancy Latin Name, more than any "Susie So-and-So was horribly shocked, offended, triggered and left literally shaking by seeing the word 'fieldwork'" complaints. I don't doubt there are Susie Students out there who would be literally crying and shaking, but I wonder how much is the office hob-nobs crying over how they don't get no respect from the rest of the university and wanting their own Big Damn Title to be on a par with other departments.
>I'm not sure that I would have ever expected an Office of Field Education to be especially intellectually rigorous.
Granted, but they're at least supposed to pretend.
Because a rational person would of course be aware that the term fieldwork does not, in fact, connote agricultural slavery.
Presumably as an entity engaged in social work outreach, at least some of the people they are trying to work with are not rational people. They aren't trying to punish anyone with this change - they're just trying to avoid something that someone might perceive as stepping on someone's toes when they're trying to help.
But I guess they didn't calculate who are the actual people who get offended by terminology - they accidentally did the most offensive thing possible for those people. (But fortunately, those are mostly random strangers on the internet, not the people they're actually trying to work with.)
It's a mistake on your part to think the intended audience of the language change is the discipline's clientele. The phenomenon of claiming to be offended by innocuous terms with tenuous links to historical injustices is not something anyone would associate with working class people generally, but especially not with, say, the homeless or drug-addicted segments of the population. They, um...have different priorities than that.
Nice try in the second paragraph, though, but if you're going to concede that it's irrational to be offended by the word "field" but worthy of accommodation nonetheless, then anyone taking offense to the disuse of that term deserves equal accommodation. Whoops!
But I never said I was offended by it, anyway. There's a difference between finding something objectionable and finding it personally offensive.
I am not saying anything here is *worthy* of accommodation, or that anyone *deserves* accommodation. I'm still not sure what's objectionable to you about someone you never interact with changing their name because of some perceived slight against someone you also never interact with.
First, I think probably very few clients of the social workers will ever hear about "fieldwork" and if they do they almost certainly won't care or think it's somehow associated with slavery or something. (Why not serfdom or debt peonage, for that matter?)
Second, I think there are actual costs to the constant updating of acceptable language, and this seems like one small step in that ongoing process. As best I can tell, most of the constant updating of acceptable language is probably doing more harm than good. That's not because of the cost of changing some forms, though there are projects in big companies and government organizations where someone is tasked to revise all their documents to change terms like "blacklist" or "grandfathering" into the latest acceptable substitute term, and those are actually taking time from people who might be doing something useful. And it sure seems like every "this is just a harmless bit of politeness, why are you offended" proposed language change at an institutional level sooner or later becomes something where old documents must be scrubbed of the newly-offensive term and old people/outsiders/the less current who want to discuss the relevant topic must be corrected/shut down for using the wrong term.
It seems to me that there are a couple plausible models to describe the demand for these language changes:
a. The people proposing the language change have a good reason we simply don't see.
b. The people proposing the language change are trying to accomplish some other goal--imposing their will on others, emphasizing their own importance, etc.
The problem with (a) as an explanation is that I have fairly often seen these imposed language changes in areas I'm at least somewhat familiar with. And they almost never seem to make any sense. Typically, the justification for them is nonsense (often false historical claims), and there is zero evidence offered (or expected) that any substantial number of people is actually offended by them rather than being offended by proxy[1].
And the way these language changes are used seems to me to be quite harmful. People who are not up-to-date on the correct terminology get corrected, often quite rudely, and very often in a way that shuts down a question or statement or conversation that might have had something useful in it. And when you see this happen (it seems inevitable you have seen it happen), it feels like a social class/ingroup/power play thing, not like someone correcting someone misusing a specialist term. It seems like cycling acceptable terms is a useful way of making sure the less-up-to-date (less educated and older people) are shut up before they can speak, that old books and papers will be read differently than intended, etc. It makes it easier to dismiss the concerns and arguments of old people and people who never went to college, without actually engaging with them. This seems bad enough all by itself that it should make us a lot more reluctant to cycle acceptable language, and that inclines me toward model (b) as the best explanation for this process.
[1] This isn't true when it's ethnic slurs used as football team names or something, but it's true when we're extremely concerned over whether one should say "slave" or "enslaved person."
Because a lot of people worked in actual physical fields doing agriculture and they weren't slaves and not every single reference in the history of the world is to American slavery.
If "fieldwork" has 'connotations', then what about "work" itself? Slaves did work in the house and elsewhere, not just out in the cotton fields. "Practicum" is derived from German (Whiteness!) via Latin (more Eurocentricity!) and could also be objected to on grounds of disregarding indigenous ways of knowing.
Once you start down this track, where since you have now run out of genuine slurs and offensive terms you have to scrabble around for new fields of fury, then there is no end to it. If they said they wanted to rename it to "Office of Practicum Education" because the old name was too much like "practical vocational work experience and we're Real Fancy Academics With Degrees so we need a fake-Latin Fancy Name", that at least would be understandable (and I have a suspicion is the real reason behind the change).
This all sounds plausible.
As far as I'm concerned, the big thing is that probably no one was fired or demoted in this process, and the worst that happened is some letterhead was replaced.
I hate when this sort of stupidity happens in my hometown. Hell they are just up the street from me. I live just off Hamline Ave FFS.
Students were notified that images of Mohammed were going to be shown so no one’s religious sensibilities would be disturbed and they still fired her.
Maybe the problem is that they're burning energy and tuition dollars solving a problem that doesn't really exist, when they could certainly be doing more useful things with either.
I know if I as a parent were forking out USC's $61,000 per year tuition, I'd be annoyed if they spent a few grand dicking around changing all the building signage, forms, and stationery to solve an imaginary problem like this instead of either spending my money actually teaching something, or refunding it.
I mean, I'm reminded a little of the blowblack the Secretary of Transportation (Buttigieg) has experienced because he spent money and energy changing the name of the NOTAM system from "Notice to Airmen" because the last word wasn't inclusive -- but he apparently didn't do squat to improve the reliability of the antiquated hardware running the system, about which warnings have been issued for a while, and then it crashed and brought the entire air trransport system to a halt briefly.
I think if you're spending your own money, you have a right to prioritize as you like. But if you're spending someone else's money -- as the FAA is spending taxpayer money, and as USC is spending tuition money -- standards should be a bit higher.
Fortunately, I don't believe they are burning much, if any, energy or tuition dollars on this (though people on the internet seem interested in complaining enough to *require* them to spend some effort defending their name change). Whatever the cost was to the school of social work, I'm sure it was much less than when the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences changed its name to the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences - I was a faculty member in the College at that time and got several free blankets out of it, one of which is coincidentally keeping my legs warm right now. (They were swag that the College had manufactured for who knows what purpose, but since they didn't say "Dornsife" they had to get rid of all of them suddenly and I took a few.)
I agree that if you're going to spend a lot of money on the NOTAM system you should be upgrading it. But if you want to reinterpret the acronym while you don't yet have an appropriate for the necessary upgrades, I think it's fair to go ahead and not delay it out of a sense of decorum or propriety to people who don't like changes of names that come without system upgrades.
Ah, well, if the principle waiteth upon the economics, then that particular name change brought them a $200 million donation, so I would say by the economic measure it was a very efficient and responsible use of tuition money. I doubt the cost to change the name came within three orders of magnitude of the benefit, which is one heck of an ROI.
What was the ROI on eliminating "field" from the Office of Fieldwork name? If they scored a $10 million donation out of it, then I would actually agree they were using parents' money responsibly.
Your last paragraph seems to be missing a noun after "appropriate." While you don't have an appropriate -- what? Authorizing law from Congress? Clue about where to begin? The attention span required to think about the problem, because you're distracted by solving frivolous problems?
In March of 2020 there wasn't dick the Federal Government could *immediately* do about COVID, but if the Trump Administration had completely ignored the issue and used whatever time it did have to, say, press Congress to repeal Section 203 of the CDA so Trump could really nail the social media platforms, because "we might as well solve this problem while we wait for [whatever follows "appropriate" above] to address COVID", I daresay quite a lot of people would've felt justified in being cranky about that decision.
>I can't quite understand why someone would object to this
I don't object to dumb things. I simply mercilessly mock and bully the living daylight out of them, and hope that this will compound to neutralize their effect. If it doesn't, well, I did my part.
-----
Why ? it's that age old question again right, Pascal's Wager. "If some people want to believe obviously dumb nonsense, and """""they are not harming anyone""""", why not just let them believe obviously dumb nonsense, eh ?" I would have loved if this worked, but it doesn't.
In humans' current social organization, the vast majority of dumb things a fashionable religion believes end up affecting you down the line. In 2012 a bunch of dumb teenagers got together on an obscure social media site, and declared binary gender oppressive. We all laughed a good laugh, some of us got worried, and the rest told them "Don't be ridiculous, they are just a bunch of kids". 10 years later, the stories the ridiculous kids invented ended up at the White House and getting people fired by the daily for challenging them.
The fundamental delusion of Pascal's Wager is the Game-Theoretic fallacy of calculating the value of the "You go along with ridiculous beliefs" cell as neutral. This cell's value is actually negative, very fucking negative. When you go along with delusions, the followers of delusions learn a very important piece of info about you : You're willing to cave in, you don't value your dignity enough to call bullshit on obvious nonsense. This is a hell of a realization. It can be used against you for all sorts of things. It's a perpetual sword raised this close to your neck, all it takes is a single opportunity to use it and you're gone.
Anyone who doesn't see it this way is an endlessly useful toy in the hands of the Believers. One day, your IoT-enabled heart will ping Disney's server to let them know that you said something transphobic about Star Wars Episode's 69 new lead, asking them if it should let you live. As a bureaucrat somewhere ponders the question of whether to let you live or not after you expressed your problematic opinion, remember that you had the opportunity to say No and didn't take it.
I think what really is sour about the Hamline thing is that (1) this is genuine historical material created by Muslims to be situated within the history of art; if they don't want art history to be all Dead White Males, this is the sort of material they need to be including (2) The Assistant Dean of Made-Up Bullcrap (sorry for not getting his exact title right) immediately waded in with "oh yes indeed this is egregious Islamophobia" and the administration crumpled like wet tissue paper (3) the adjunct herself is a black woman, you'll have to search hard to make her out to be White Supremacist for the narrative of Evil Islamophobia to make any sense.
I was wondering why it was routine before modern times to have wars over bits of land that seemed not worth fighting over, and in some cases to be outright detrimental to possess–for instance, as Britain probably was to the Romans. I don't think I've ever heard of a king-level ruler selling off land on the edges of his domain in order to fall back to more-defensible borders–for example, to have a border along a river. Medieval maps sometimes show a border with a river running inside and parallel to the border. The strip of land between the river and the enemy couldn't have been defensible.
So I imagined one medieval ruler offering to sell such a strip of land to his neighboring ruler. The bargaining broke down when it came to the question of how much the land would be worth in a simple sale.
In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested [DELETE: at the going interest rate], would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital. But the [EDIT: return on investment, which was much lower than the interest on loans because (A) banks didn't exist and (B) the main risk in loaning money before modern times was default on payment] in antiquity was zero, making the value of any piece of land infinite. It never made sense, in a long-term analysis, to sell land.
Could one major cause of the bloody wars that dominate human history have been the combined lack of technological progress (to provide economic growth), and of a monetary economy with banking and interest (to make land's value finite)?
Not an expert, but some thoughts on the original question:
- Would the ancients have necessarily sold land for money? Or might it have been disguised in normal political dealings, like alliances and marriage proposals? I remember hearing about cases where eg princesses had land as a dowry.
- I think of a lot of premodern wars as being about solving a population-to-land imbalance. If you win, you get more land; if you lose, you get less population. If you have a lot of restless subjects demanding land, maybe quieting them down is more important than the straight economic value to you.
- A lot of modern wars are about containment, or enforcing someone's (possibly delusional) view of good international norms, or irredentism. Maybe premodern wars were the same way?
- It sounds like "the value of land is infinite" is an alternative way of framing "there isn't a lot of good economic activity besides land, so if you want to increase your GDP, you have to increase your land", which is an alternative way of framing "the ancient economy was zero sum". I don't think this is literally true, but it was probably closer to true.
"If you win, you get more land; if you lose, you get less population."
Much more the former than the latter, since casualties in ancient wars were very low as a proportion of the population, because the armies are very smaller, because the logistics of supplying them and moving them around are so difficult without trains.
Sure, but presumably you are losing the people with the fewest prospects, or most likely to cause trouble, etc., right? My guess (with no data to back it up at all) would be that as a total percentage of your population, you lose hardly anything, but as a percentage of the group most likely to cause trouble, you probably lose quite a few.
I know for the Roman Republic soldiers needed to provide their own equipment so where chiefly recruited from middle class land owners. Also soldiers are typically men in the prime of life, so I'd think probably they'd be among the most useful people if anything.
Anyway, the main main demographic problem they're trying to solve would be a shortage of arable land to feed people, so unless the minority that died in war were exceptionally gluttonous it's still reducing the total numbers that matters.
Mongols and their ilk did a pretty good job at killing a lot of the population. (This is mostly from listening to Dan Carlin Podcasts.)
Mongols are a bit of an exception though because of they have way better logistics than most pre-rail road armies, loads of horses, mobile herds of live stock for food supplies etc.
The Mongols are always an exception. https://youtu.be/PqcVro-3f4I
Re. {It sounds like "the value of land is infinite" is an alternative way of framing "there isn't a lot of good economic activity besides land, so if you want to increase your GDP, you have to increase your land", } : Yes, same thing.
Having land as a dowry definitely happened in Europe, but that dowry didn't become part of the nation of the groom, in the way we conceive of it. The groom, personally, acquired title to the new lands. You could be king of several nations at once in the Middle Ages. The extra income you earned from your new territories were, I think, your personal property, and not mixed with that of the other territories in any governmental treasury. You might split them apart again by willing those territories to different sons, but you couldn't combine all the territories you acquired by marriage and then split them up differently.
A river valley is generally an economic, cultural, and linguistic unit, and a lot of its value is being able to use it for navigation and trade, ideally without constant danger from the opposite bank. So while it may be necessary to use them as a border, and they serve as a convenient coordination point from the point of view of central authorities, if it's possible to hold both sides in peacetime there's a lot of incentive to do so. And of course if you have ambitions to expand past the river valley, it's more convenient to already have your forces on that side of the river.
So I wouldn't expect voluntary cessions along those lines even for consideration-- if the neighbor is dangerous, you don't want him closer, and if he's not, then you want the land. And if he's going to get it by means other than military, something intended to create common interests like a marriage alliance or one of you becoming the other's vassal is probably a safer route to take.
Owning a river valley where the river is used to transport goods allows you to charge a toll.
Turkey is building a dam on the straight to justify a lock system which will allow them to charge a toll on goods in/out of the Black Sea.
That'd be quite the blast from the past! Byzantium and then the Ottomans used to get rather a lot of money from having a toll on that straight; of course back then the only justification needed was "we can sink your boat if you don't pay"
Ego.
There's a saying about The Prince of Orange in the book The Life And Times Of Rembrandt van Rijnn, where the prince is described as "smelling strongly of horses." It means he liked to lead the Cavalry around and raid his neighbors from time to time.
Everyone wants to claim wars are fought over resources, but they're not. You're either taking over your unfriendly neighbors land and making a larger buffer of safety, or providing a kingdom for your child, or helping an ally grow his kingdom or build a bigger buffer.
Other than gold or chattle, nothing else is mobile enough to take.
Japan invaded southeast asia to obtain resources like oil & rubber. At the same time, Germany was invading Poland (and then later the USSR) for "lebensraum".
Right. The most valuable resources tend to be productive land. You can't pick it up and take it home, but that doesn't mean you can't seize it by force.
WW2 is a very different era - Japan's need for specific raw resources found in few locations was mostly a result of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, the resources in demand tended to be fairly commonplace (maybe justifying expansion but not so much needing expansion to very specific targets the way Oil does), though Germany's stated motivation for war were more analogous to pre-modern ones, yes. (actual motivations, I'm much less sure)
1) Hadrians wall was a fall back position. The romans didn’t want to bother with Scotland as a whole, which they could have subdued, because it was so unproductive.
2) Britain was a relatively rich part of the empire eventually.
And winning a war tends to produce slaves which were a major currency and source of wealth in Rome.
I thought interest rates in antiquity were in fact far higher than now.
But, if you want to buy something, you need to offer something more valuable than it to a prospective seller. And farmable land was far more valuable in premodern times than it is now. It was very hard for premodern states to mobilize resources on such a scale that they would be able to buy e.g. all of Britain. Which I doubt was detrimental to possess for Romans - after all, they did not conquer Scotland and Ireland, which they could have done. Probably because they were able to do some sort of cost/benefit calculation from which it appeared to them that (what is now) England is worth holding, unlike those other British territories.
Premodern interest rates were very high because they were very risky. A money-lender's rate of return wasn't all that great if you average together the good and bad loans. Good enough to make it worthwhile, but not the huge money-maker you'd expect from just looking at interest rates.
"In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested at the going interest rate, would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital."
I think this is actually a lot closer to how tings worked in the ancient world where interests rates were determined by market mechanisms. Historical interest rates are actually much higher than modern one 10%-20%+, probably reflecting the rate of return on all types of capital.
In modern fiat money systems the interest rate and return on capital are completely disconnected, real interest rates are often negative and nominally often <1%, compared to a ~10 - 15% profit rate.
But I'm not really sure why anyone lends money then, if they could get 10x the return by investing instead.
I think the reason for the disconnect is basically that central banks heavily subsidise lending and are essentially the underlying source of most lending in modern economies.
> Medieval maps sometimes show a border with a river running inside and parallel to the border. The strip of land between the river and the enemy couldn't have been defensible.
Rivers are and always have been excellent defensive positions. That means denying them to the opponent is valuable too. While a strip of land on the far side of a river might not be valuable tactically in wartime, it is valuable strategically in peacetime, because it prevents your neighbor from fortifying their side of the river without triggering a war first.
That is similar to how the USA places small military contingents geostrategically around rivals such as Russia - they are not meant to stop any serious military attack, but to act as tripwires to justify American intervention in case the country they're located in gets attacked. Sacrificial limbs, if you will.
I believe the standard explanation of the US having small contingents of troops overseas is not to justify intervention but to solve a commitment problem: The US has promised to defend South Korea in the case of an attack, but why should anyone believe that it would be politically possible to actually do so? If US troops die in said attack, the domestic politics will make it more likely that the US will fulfill its commitment. And of course most troop placements are for reasons unrelated to such concerns; the US, after all, intervenes in very, very few of the many military conflicts in the world.
That is what I meant to say, yes, hence my tripwire analogy.
I recommend this fine post by historian (ancient) Dr. Bret devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-ii-the-ruin-of-war/
If you scroll down to the chapter "…Beneath the Crosses, Row on Row…": In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. They could – and did – build roads and infrastructure, irrigation systems and the like, but the production multiplier for such investments was fairly low. For antiquity, the Roman Empire probably represents close to the best that could be achieved with such capital investments and one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries (a very rough estimate, but focus on the implied scale here; the real number could be 15% or 30%, but it absolutely isn’t 1000% or 100% or even probably 50%).
But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1200%, going from an Italian empire of perhaps 5,000,000 to a Mediterranean empire in excess of 60,000,000 - end of quote, wonderful blog/post/even the comment section is ok
I second this post. Reading this post unlocked so much understanding of why things are the way they are, and were they way they were. In a world where land is the fundamental producer of wealth it makes sense that you have a lot of elites fighting over land all the time.
"I was wondering why it was routine before modern times to have wars over bits of land that seemed not worth fighting over, and in some cases to be outright detrimental to possess–for instance, as Britain probably was to the Romans."
I can't speak to the general case, but (going from Great Courses? lectures) the motive in Republican Rome was that winning a war was a GREAT resume enhancer if you were an ambitious Roman who wanted to get to the top of the social standing leader board for senatorial class.
"So I imagined one medieval ruler offering to sell such a strip of land to his neighboring ruler. The bargaining broke down when it came to the question of how much the land would be worth in a simple sale."
For a long time I expect that land *WAS* wealth. But also land was status. I don't think 1800s British landowners were thinking much in terms of optimizing return on their land holdings such that they would want to sell off a bit of land because of poor returns. And in feudal times (in the west) I think it might have been even harder to think in these terms.
"In a modern economy, we have a standard way of valuing any capital investment: it's worth the amount of money that, if invested at the going interest rate, would give a yearly return on investment equal to the yearly profit produced by the capital. But the interest rate in antiquity was zero, making the value of any piece of land infinite. It never made sense, in a long-term analysis, to sell land."
The interest rate was not zero. You might find "A History of Interest Rates" by Sidney Homer interesting (NOTE: I know of the book but have not read it myself).
Fundamentally, I think the rulers (along with everyone else) "way back then" thought differently and valued things differently than (some ... educated ...) modern western folks. Consider that for Dante suicide was considered a worse sin than murder. Really. And the position is totally logically consistent :-)
Consider: you are a mediaeval ruler and you decide that piece of territory beyond the river is indefensible. So you try selling it off to your rival who has been trying to capture it all this time - after all, that means he must really want it, right?
You have just signalled that you are weak and vulnerable. Your rival wanted that land because he wanted to encroach on your territory. Now you are *giving* it away, because you can't defend it. So why should he pay for it, when he can just wage a war, take it, and cross the river to take the rest of your realm (or a good chunk of it)?
Once you start selling off land like that, it's like selling off the family silver and furniture and paintings in order to keep the mansion going - it's just a matter of time before it's no longer tenable.
Also, maybe that piece of land came as part of a marriage settlement, or it gives you rights to claim something else, or there are other benefits associated with it. If the land beyond the river means that people passing the border have to pay a toll, it may be worth it to you (maybe they won't cross the river into your territory, but they need to cross that strip of land to get from A to C).
I must think about this. But certainly what to our modern view looks like "bits of land that don't seem worth fighting over" must have had some value, else there wouldn't be wars over them. I'm wondering about Britain and tin - certainly the major reason for invading and conquering Britain was to enable Claudius to burnish his reputation as Emperor, since "conquering new territory and expanding the rule of Rome" was something an Emperor was supposed to do, and Britain would have been a 'soft' target. It didn't have a lot of resources, but it must have had some. And the appearance of 'new conquests' would have been something important for the career, whether or not the new lands were as profitable.
Several replies include some statement of the form, "People back in those days must have had some good reason for fighting over land that didn't seem worth fighting over." That's a circular argument. It presumes what it asserts: that the low return on investment couldn't be a good reason.
I agree with most of the other comments but just want to note you're not thinking feudally enough. A feudal king doesn't control that territory directly, he controls it through a hierarchy of lords, and you can't just go round signing away someone's allegiance to you.
That's a really good point. But did ancient non-feudal societies ever sell land, or swap it for goods? Tribes, the ancient Egyptians, or Mesopotamians, for instance. I don't know if African kingdoms had something like feudalism.
Well the Algonquin famously sold Manhattan for a bunch of beads and mirrors, for instance.
In addition to all the good comments explaining why that land probably was valuable, there's also the factor that it doesn't have to be a good deal for the spirit of the nation in some grand strategy game sense for the invasion to be a good deal for the person making the decision to invade. If the empire pays more in soldier's wages than it gets from the conquest, but the salaries come from taxes and some of the loot goes into the general's personal wealth, then the general benefits greatly from the war.
Many replies amount to saying, "There is some other reason why pre-modern people attacked other countries." I didn't ask if low return on investments was THE cause of bloody wars; I asked if it was "one major cause". Pointing out some other reason why people had such wars is relevant only if you add up all the other reasons and show, experimentally, that it explains away all of the wars in history.
The most-surprising piece of information here is not the existence of war, but the almost complete lack of monarchs selling off land. You're not going to get at the question by coming up with more reasons for war, only by coming up with other reasons for the absence of land sales.
Colonies may have been sold off or traded, but home turf not so much.
People in those times were wedded to their land in a way which today most people aren't.
I know a family, they own about 2500 acres which was somewhat remote when their grandparents acquired it around 1910. A city has approached since, and their land is quite valuable. They prefer to farm. Once they were complaining about encroachment and vandalism. I said why not sell up and buy another farm in a quieter region. They were aghast at my idea, they're not mobile people, land is not a tradable commodity in their eyes.
I just came here to talk about Milf Manor, TBH...
Please do!
Also, did you know that Jennifer Coolidge was only 38 when she played Stiffler's Mom? And Anne Bancroft was 35 when she played Mrs Robinson (just five years older than Dustin Hoffman). I hope this information will make someone else feel old today.
If Stifler is in high school, he can be 18 and his mom 20 years older. Now, Anne Bancroft, that's a different story.
Oh boy. Milf Island was a proposed new show Jack Donaghy came up with on 30 Rock.
Satire gets harder all the time.
Liz: Didn't one of those Milfs die?
Lutz: she had too much rum and a monkey knocked her into some quicksand. It could've happened to anyone.
I wish you had posted those unveiled subscriber-only posts earlier, it would have changed some of my responses on the survey.
Which ones?
Questions relating to the blog, and if I'd consider a paid subscription. You may have just selected your highest quality posts to unveil as advertising in which case, kudos, the advertising worked. Regardless of if that's the case those posts specifically I felt addressed what I felt were my biggest concerns primarily with the temperature and experimentation of your posts.
I was puzzled for a good three years about why people dump their savings into high risk stocks/crypto. Think behavior post 2019 aka the rise of Robinhood & crypto.
It’s a weird psychological case because those assets are almost gambling and attract pretty much the same crowd. But they’re different in their function, so it looks like the same crowd is only attracted insofar as both groups have high risk tolerance.
Which got me down to turn in a different direction and come up with three main reasons as to why high-risk assets became so appealing:
1. FOMO
2. Gaining an identity
3. Finding solace in the murky nature of the markets.
Let me know if anybody has any other reasons why high-risk assets became suddenly so appealing. I go into more detail below:
https://open.substack.com/pub/billytrout/p/the-luring-songs-traders-sing?r=1ns8jn&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
4. People wildly mis-estimate the risk.
During Covid, every other investment sucked worse. People had specific reasons to believe stocks, bonds, and real estate were all bad investments at the time. Bitcoin was the only investment that wasn't tied to some real-world anchor. Knowing that, it seemed reasonable to believe that other people would realize that and put their money in Bitcoin. And that happened, until it didn't.
You shouldn't look at its recent fall and say "gee, Bitcoin was risky." That's like saying the Yankees are a bad team because they don't win as often as they did in the 1950s. Bitcoin has still been a great investment most of the time. If you invested in Bitcoin almost any time before late 2020 and held onto it until now, you beat the market.
I also think the number of people who "invest" in Bitcoin is exaggerated by the media. Figures on how many people own Bitcoins don't tell you how many people invest in Bitcoin. I would guess that most people who have Bitcoins, have them because they use Bitcoin, or because they feel morally bound to support Bitcoin.
I don't understand all the Bitcoin hatred here. I know some people here want shrooms and other psychedelics, nootropics, medicines they can't get prescriptions for, meds they can't afford in the US, semaglutide, and other things that our matronizing State wants to protect us from. Guess what! You need Bitcoin!
The value of a Bitcoin is probably more-transparent than any other investment, and it has a more-widespread, less-manipulable, more-robust basis for its value than any fiat currency. Bitcoin will still have value if the US, Russia, and China are reduced to smoking rubble.
I think Bitcoin resembles precious metals as an investment: it has a value that depends only on the widespread belief that it has value, and not on government manipulation or geopolitics (except when governments try to ban it). It depends on technology, but smoothly (until the day quantum computers can find Bitcoins?) In practice, this means it goes up and down not as a function of its own attributes, but as a function of how other investments perform. Historically, Bitcoin has out-performed gold and silver by orders of magnitude as an investment.
If you think the US Dollar has a firmer foundation or is less-manipulable than Bitcoin, I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that. Explanations of where the value of the US Dollar comes from require a degree in finance to understand, and no two experts seem to agree.
There isn't really anything new about people dumping their savings into high risk stocks. *Crypto* is relatively new, but people have been making dumb financial choices for a long time.
The dot-com bubble and crash was a thing. And, yes, some companies (e.g. Amazon) survived and the stock did quite well. But many others appears to have no business case at all (e.g. boo.com) and still got people to buy their stocks.
If something appears to be appreciating long enough then there will be people jumping on the bandwagon for the free money. Many of them will *only* be doing this because the price is going up.
This gets less press when it is a small(er) stock or a smaller group of stocks, but it doesn't stop happening. Here is a sad writeup about the debacle that was GTAT in 2014. Things were going well until they suddenly weren't. And a number of the GTAT fans seem to have bet the ranch of it continuing to go up:
https://www.joshuakennon.com/gt-advanced-technologies-bankruptcy/
Matt Levine has proposed his "Bored Market Hypothesis" which is as good an explanation as any to answer the "why now?" question. But the dump savings into high risk XXXX goes back a long time.
Will check that link out. Maybe it’s a visibility problem where people are just posting more about crypto/trading on socials so I’m seeing it more.
People also like the appeal to "being in the know" - you're one of the few who can get in on the ground floor of this good thing, and only the smart and canny will be able to appreciate this and make a killing on it. You're smart and canny, aren't you? The ordinary NPC is scared of risk but you know that you have to risk a lot to win a lot.
And look at all these other people - just like you, no different! - who are making fortunes right now. Isn't it foolishness rather than prudence to let your money sit in a bank account doing nothing, when it could be earning you these kinds of returns?
Speculative high-risk investments become popular when there's a recent high-profile example of a bunch of people getting rich off a speculative high-risk investment. They become less popular when there's a recent high-profile example of a bunch of people losing their shirts.
We all had the same experience with bitcoin. We all heard about it one day, dismissed it as stupid and the people who bought it as idiots, and then we watched as it went up by a factor of ten thousand or more and those idiots got rich. We were all burned by that experience.
Are there any "easy-bake" forum hosts (akin to ProBoards) with loose enough rules that a yandere-fandom forum wouldn't get banned? Toleration of NSFW and unPC content would also be good, particularly the second as yandere fandom is kind of inherently unPC.
(I am, or at least was, the only active moderator on Yandere^2 Forum, which recently got unhosted by ProBoards. We had a bunch of "IRL yandere" members, essentially hewing to "don't use the forum to commit crimes, but it's not our mandate to punish you for off-site behaviour". While I'm capable of modding, I don't have the technical knowhow or financial capability to run an independent site, so if I can't find another host I'm going to have to give up on bringing the board back.)
> We had a bunch of "IRL yandere" members, essentially hewing to "don't use the forum to commit crimes, but it's not our mandate to punish you for off-site behaviour"
Sounds like very thin ice. Are you sure you want to be publicly associated with something that is illegal IRL?
a) nothing illegal about having criminals on a forum, AFAIK, as long as they're not using it to help commit crimes (I did take action in cases of direct incitement to crime or advice on how to commit crimes)
b) I'm mostly against the romantic stalking taboo and am willing to grind away at it
c) I'm one of them, if a relatively-mild one, so it's mostly a sunk cost anyway.
"I'm mostly against the romantic stalking taboo and am willing to grind away at it"
Do you mean that "romantic stalking" should not be taboo? And to what degree of stalking do you find acceptable, and what degree is over the line?
I think if someone says "Thanks but no thanks, not interested" that should be the end of it, not plotting to rape or murder them (because if you just keep pushing, they'll realise you are the only one who can ever truly love them and they'll change their mind!)
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irish-woman-whose-stalker-threatened-26783589
"A woman whose stalker threatened to rape her says she hopes new legislation will help others.
Mum-of-two [redacted] was subjected to a horrific ordeal after her co-worker [redacted] became fixated with her.
He was arrested on July 27, 2020 after turning up at her home with duct tape, rope, a crowbar and a prosthetic penis strapped to him."
How.... romantic. Definitely true love! I've left out all the links to murders but yes, nothing says "I am your soul mate" like violent homicide!
Thanks for the link. It's a good springboard. Let's see...
>New laws will make stalking and non-fatal strangulation standalone offences – outlawing following, impersonating or interfering with pets or property.
>>They are going to change it so if there is stalking just once you can get a restraining order without going through the courts.
>>It’s going to make a huge difference to people’s lives [no cross examination].
Your own link is literally someone praising the idea of straight-up kangaroo courts for the heinous crime of, um, following people around. I think this is *quite* consistent with being "mostly against the stalking taboo" and being "willing to grind away at it"; the current strength of said taboo is mind-bogglingly excessive.
Do I think rape and murder are okay? No. Do I think the majority of romantic stalkers, who never go that far, are heinous scum? Also no.
(I use the term "romantic stalking" to specify that I'm not talking about e.g. casing a house for a burglary, to be clear. I can't think of a better way to phrase it that isn't either an obvious dysphemism or very long.)
Sadly I don't know of any easy forum hosts, but if you're ever looking for a server host then Trabia will work well; they're based in a nuclear bunker in Moldova and host Sad Panda among other similar sites... generally their reasons for kicking a site off are "you could have told us first that you were the literal Pirate Bay so we could prepare" or "we had to hire an entire team to handle abuse reports and it was getting unprofitable", not offensiveness objections.
I'm wondering if you all have any ideas for how to make friends with people who are interested in intellectual pursuits. When googling this, half of the responses seem to be answering the question of how to get more intelligent friends. While I suspect there's a correlation, I'm mostly just wanting to make friends who are similarly interested in philosophical/political/scientific/etc issues and topics. I'm not looking for people with similar opinions/backgrounds/mindsets as me (indeed to some extent diversity in these domains would be preferable), just people who want to discuss these topics. If it helps, I'm a 24 year old male in the Washington D.C. area. Thanks!
> interested in philosophical/political/scientific/etc issues and topics
If you see a lecture on that kind of topic, go there and try talking to the other visitors afterwards.
Washington D.C. area? Check out these folks: https://www.meetup.com/fairfax-freethinkers/
I know this may not be generalisable advice, but the two things that worked for me are:
- Attend a very selective university
- Work in an intellectual field at a company that's choosy about hiring
I think the common factor is to let somebody else do the hard work of filtering through people. There are probably other ways to do this; I can only share my experience.
Once you've got access to a good base set of people, try to do things that expose you to second degree connections within that network – parties, RPG groups, game nights, walking groups – and you'll almost certainly bump into people that you connect with. The good news is similar people tend to cluster, so you'll likely be able to find a group who have a shared set of interests. Having just one friend with similar interests to you isn't any good if the wider friend group doesn't share them, as in group settings it'll be difficult to have a proper discussion without boring everyone else.
You all may enjoy my interview of Lars Doucet: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lars-doucet
His review of Progress and Poverty won Scott's first book review contest, and he has expanded that review into the book Land is a Big Deal. It's a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott, and Noah Smith.
We get deep into the weeds of Georgism - the idea that you should tax land (and only land). His book completely changed my perspective on who creates value in the world and who rent-seeks off it. And this podcast episode was one of my favorites. Do check it out!
I enjoyed this interview a lot.
Thanks Medieval!
I posted this in the 258.5 hidden thread:
I listened to Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Lars Doucet about Georgism. (He asked a lot of good questions and overall I like the podcast because he gets right to the efficient frontier of question-asking).
One thing I would have liked to hear discussed is, what about land use policy? Specifically, George had this thesis that land rents suck up the economic surplus unlocked by greater production. But land can be "produced" in the economic sense by building more densely, or by having better transit infrastructure (e.g. Tokyo's public transit vs. LA's), or by other new technology (e.g. air conditioning unlocked the Sun Belt). New tech and deregulation can also reduce the cost of construction (e.g. modular construction, 3-D printing, streamlined permitting, etc.). So why is land (or I should say, the buildings on the land) really all that different from other goods? If the number of car factories were fixed by gov't decree, cars would also become very expensive and soak up an ever-larger percentage of ordinary people's incomes. The solution is to just not do that. Georgists talk about implementing a land value tax to correct for this special problem with land, but they're skipping right past the part where it's <i>illegal</i> for the market to provide housing etc. at market-rate prices and quantities. Land could still be expensive, but we care about people's ability to consume housing, not the price of land as such.
I would note that while America has a housing problem, it's much less bad here than in other Anglosphere economies. We also have a permissive Sun Belt that has built to accommodate growth rejected by places like NY and CA. Matthew Zeitlin on Twitter points out: "The UK is like New York and the rust belt with no sun belt."
There's still places with cheap housing in the UK. In Londonderry, for instance, homes are just 4.7 times average earnings (this ratio is 8.5 for the country as a whole and 11 for London).
I don't think there's a housing supply problem, there's a housing desirability problem. All over the western world (and certainly in a lot of parts of the non-western world) houses are cheap everywhere except a few big cities. The problem is that everyone wants to live in these few big cities. We need to be putting effort into making less desirable places more desirable, not trying to cram more and more people into the big cities.
Cramming more people into big cities may well be counterproductive since you've just made them even _more_ dominant of the country's economy and made them even _more_ economically attractive. The end point is something like Jakarta, a city that everyone agrees is horrible but which twelve million people live in anyway because it's the only place to get a decent job.
Your perspective needs changing at least one more time then. Georgists have several holes in their understanding of economics. Several of those have been gone into in great depth in comments on this blog, and never been answered adequately, by Lars or other Georgists, including on his original posts. ALL land value is created by human activity, whether on or around the land. It has no inherent value of its own whatsoever. Think New York before it was settled. Think vast swathes of the united states that still remain empty and cheap.
The other thing that Georgists appear to believe is that it is both possible and efficiency enhancing to separate out the value of improvements made by the owner of the property and the value of improvements made by others around them. They ignore however that capturing spillovers is a big part of how new development gets incentivised. Your incentive to invest depends not only on your own investments but on investments around you, which often, you will attempt to either make yourself or attempt to select in other, better investments.
Take the example of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. 30 years ago it was barren land. Today it's a bustling economic hub, in large part because the property developer could build up large parcels of land, and capture spillovers across different investments. This would never happen under a Georgist LVT!
This is not the only incentive that an LVT would mess up. Your ability to plan returns on your investment will get thrown off completely by an LVT, to and in directions that are completely out of your control! If you invest expecting a certain ROI, but the area does better than you were expecting, you are now unable to make that return! This would make it extremely risky to invest, and would align your incentives against those of your neighbours, which is not what you want!
I have become all but convinced that it is best to think of artificial neural nets as a platform on which higher-level "applications" can be implemented. But those applications aren't implemented by programmers writing code. They're implemented during the training process. Here's the abstract of a short note I've just uploaded about story grammars in ChatGPT:
ABSTRACT: Think of an artificial neural net as a platform on which to implement higher level structures, like one might implement a word processor or a database in C++. In investigate of the neural net underlying ChatGPT implements a simple grammar, stories with five components, in order: 1) Donné, 2) Disturb, 3) Plan, 4) Enact, 5) Celebrate. I present the results of four experiments in which ChatGPT transforms one story into another based on a single change in the nature of the protagonist or antagonist.
You can download it here: https://www.academia.edu/95032499/A_note_about_story_grammars_in_ChatGPT
Is Zodiac’s classification of personalities meaningful?
Like since there is an ancient wisdom component to it, subjected to memetic evolution, did it create a personality types which are distinct and would interact with each other and with a world in a way which the zodiac predicts/helps to predict? Can a real person have that kind of personality, and use zodiac, if the person would know their correct zodiac sign, to understand themself better? Would it be useful to devise a personality test which would identify your correct sign?
What do you mean by "memetic evolution"? I generally stop reading when people use the word "memetic" because it is one of those trendy buzzwords I hate--but my prejudices aside, what do you mean?
Yea I meant that as people share they change unconsciously and over a thousand years it gets changed in some way that is in accordance with nature. The other commenter reminded me that it just means better at propagation not better at utility.
The horizontal mode of memetic evolution selects for what spreads best, which is not necessarily either useful or true.
The vertical mode of memetic evolution selects for what's useful. And, certainly, horoscopes are useful in the sense that they generally increase mindfulness of the myriad opportunities in life. But I don't think they're true i.e. the advice/prediction for Capricorns is not actually better for Capricorns than for Virgos.
But maybe they aren't really Capricorns. What if they are actually a different one and the advice is as wrong from them as is for the other person who we think is an Virgo, bit is also maybe the same actual zodiac personality as the first person (not Capricorn)
Can you explain horizontal and vertical here. When I think of a meme, 'how to make fire' it spreads because it is useful.
Horizontal memetic transfer = ideas spreading between cultures.
Vertical memetic transfer = ideas being passed down parent-to-child within a culture.
When the primary mode of transfer is vertical, memetic evolution selects for usefulness, because it's simply "which set of ideas results in you having more kids?". When the primary mode of transfer is horizontal, memetic evolution selects for compellingness, because it's "which set of ideas gets people to believe and spread it more?"
"How to farm" did *not* spread by hunter-gatherers adopting farming, for the most part; it spread by farmers outbreeding hunter-gatherers and taking their land. That's the vertical mode. I'm not actually sure whether "how to make fire" spread mostly in the vertical or horizontal mode (note that there are cases of primitives forgetting how to make fire; the Tasmanian Aborigines lost that technology).
Usefulness, compellingness and truth are all correlated, of course, but it's nowhere near a perfect correlation. Astrology has spread by some combination of horizontal and vertical transfer IIRC.
Hmm "how to farm, seems like many memes, (Sowing, weeding, harvesting, processing.) Fire is simpler. I mean it's mostly about how to start it, which has many solutions. The vertical/ horizontal distinction seems not all that useful to me. I mean of course all memes spread vertically (within families) and it's only the 'good' ones that travel between families/ clans/ cultures.
I think Astrology was a heroic early inquiry into what gives people different personalities. It's an interesting hypothesis, and all hypotheses should be respected.
As far as I know, there is no good reason today to believe Zodiac classifications of personalities are meaningful.
I think and hope that in the future people will find a much better way to classify personalities than we have now what with The Five Big Traits and all that lacking much nuance.
If you want a list of personality types with separate descriptions and recommendations for each, but you instead of the date of birth you want to use a personality test, that is MBTI or Enneagram.
Astrology's evolution selects for descriptions and advice vague enough to apply to everyone. If you really want to see ancient wisdom about personality types, look up the personalities associated with the four humors.
When people didn't move around that much. (born and lived in the same area) You could imagine there were some characteristics that would go along with what time of the year you were born.
What’s exactly wrong with a US President having classified documents at his home anyway?
Someone might have been able to access them who presented some kind of security risk. For example, Hunter Biden.
Are all classified documents to be only perused at work? Surely that can’t be the case with every single person who has some kind of access to restricted documentation?
What? Why not? Of course it makes perfect sense to disallow taking classified material outside of secured facilities. This is how it used to be when I had access to such things.
It literally is a normal procedure in an organization handling secret documents to not allow any employees ever to carry them from secured work environment to their homes. Because, duh.
How would politicians work like that? I’m pretty sure that politicians in most countries take some classified documents home as often as not. Particularly members of cabinet who don’t always have, in most countries, official addresses but live in their own house would have to do it.
That might be the case, but I am fairly sure it is virtually always against the rules.
Well in the U.K. there’s a special secure box used by ministers to transport confidential information. From wiki.
“ Ministers are permitted to use ordinary lockable briefcases to transport information which has been classified 'Confidential' or below. For information with a higher security level (such as 'Secret') they are required to use dispatch boxes, which offer greater security, and which are usually red. However, a travel version of the box is also available in black, which offers the same level of security as a red box, but is designed to be less conspicuous. In practice ministers use despatch boxes for transporting the majority of their documents due to the greater level of security they offer.”
So documents are being transferred, and presumably not just between two workspaces but for working at home. Most U.K. ministers do not have a grace and favour apartment but rent their own (or own their own if they can afford London prices).
Also the classification system in the US is ludicrous, see this report. Hundreds of millions of documents and 1.2M people with top secret clearance. Why bother?
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/16/politics/overclassification-what-matters/index.html
I don't know what politicians are doing, but this is pretty horrible if true. The first rule regarding classified information is to keep it secret. The second, is to make it clear and obvious when it's leaked. The norm you're suggesting make it impossible to know if and when some secrets are no longer secrets.
There are different levels of classifications, I doubt if what you describe is really normal for non-trivially classified documents (I have no idea what specifically was found in Trump or Biden homes).
I on the other hand am 100% sure that high level politicians are transporting classified documents around all day, every day, from A to B. The business of government can’t shut down because Trump is on his way to Florida , or Biden to his home, or either of them travelling anywhere.
Therefore the problem here, if there is a problem, is not bringing them back in a timely manner.
This is the list of protocols we're supposed to adhere to, and we're only a body providing services for a government agency and only dealing with confidential/private data for members of the public:
https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/239834/8d5bd215-4a17-471d-a1be-2c7ae5ebabb6.pdf#page=null
Plums pulled out at random:
"A Physical and Environmental security Access Control Policy shall be in place and include processes and guidelines for comprehensive protection.
A Physical and Environmental security access control policy shall be defined, approved by management, published and communicated to employees and relevant external parties.Physical and Environmental Access permissions and authorisations are managed, incorporating the principle of least privilege, separation of duties, and continually revalidated."
This is all to do with digital access, but 'Taking papers home with me and stuffing them in a box in the garage' is not, I imagine, in line with best practice for a Physical and Environmental Access policy.
But you are not the president or the Taoiseach. Or a CEO of a government department either. And the principle of least privilege scales up to a lot of rights when the user has those privileges, it just defaults to lower access to start with.
My question was whether either President had violated a law or not by taking documents home.
Sure, but even the Vice President is not supposed to do this. "Oh well it was only Joe, no worries" is not good enough when ordinary staff would have their careers ended over the same thing.
There may be privilege as you go up the ladder, but responsibility increases also.
As someone who has the sort of clearances needed to read the sort of classified documents we are talking about here, yeah, it pretty much is. If you need to do work involving classified information, you go in to the (secure) office. You do not, *not not not*, take it home with you so that you can work from home. Nothing you're doing is so important that it can't wait until you're in the office(*), and *you* aren't so important that we can't call you out of bed at 3:00 AM on Saturday and tell you to get into the office ASAP. No, not even if you are a congressman.
At the outset of the COVID lockdowns, we looked into it and found that it was theoretically possible to do very limited work-from-home with information up to Secret, but not worth the bother. For Top Secret or SCI, not unless your home has a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), which would probably be a million-dollar project that *maybe* SecDef merits but almost nobody else.
What Hillary, Trump, and Biden all did was straight-up illegal, even with the lofty government offices they held. It's not the sort of crime we normally put people in jail for if there's no malicious intent, but it usually and permanently ends your career with the government. Occasionally it may be written off as an honest mistake, which seems at least plausible in the Biden case, but even then there's going to be a serious investigation to make sure "honest mistake" isn't being used to cover for something nefarious.
* Even if it were, you couldn't do anything actually useful because you wouldn't be able to communicate it with anyone until you were back in the office. Nor could anyone even call you at home and tell you that you need to do (classified thing).
Absolutely. I think this is the major difference, that anyone who has worked or works as a civil or public servant, or in government-related agencies (even as service providers) gets this kind of discipline hammered into them, whereas people that don't think "what's the big deal, aren't they already reading and working with these papers?"
So it *does not matter* if you are the High Panjandrum, you are *not* supposed to breach the rules and you do *not* get a pass on "yeah well he/she is the boss, that makes it okay". Now, do the politicians routinely break the rules? Yeah, because they're stupid like that and they don't listen to their staff (and this is part of what made me roll my eyes *so hard* at all the "Hillary is so smart and qualified and experienced, she is best for President" stuff). Hillary did it, Trump did it, Biden did it, people working for/with Hillary did it. That doesn't excuse it (and there's no reason to think that had Hillary won the election, she wouldn't have been as cavalier about taking documents with her as Trump and Biden were, we've seen that with the infamous email server).
For instance: part of the cybersecurity policy we are now supposed to implement at my workplace, because we come under the umbrella of providing services to the public on behalf of a government agency, includes this:
"•Work-issued devices( such as desktops, laptops, mobile phones or tablets) must not be used
by anyone other than you. Family members or housemates must not be given access to such
devices.
• Avoid using shared family electronic resources for the storage or processing of work data.
These types of shared facilities can greatly increase the risk of compromise to the security of
the data, undermine the integrity and management of that data and lead to your personal devices being in scope for any subsequent follow-on actions, including legal or FOI. Remember
access to corporate data and systems has been granted to staff and using shared resources
can allow access to people who have not been authorised for that access."
Remember the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal? (I know, it was so long ago and so many scandals past). Well, Huma Abedin clearly didn't stick to these kinds of guidelines, as the FBI agents who seized Anthony's laptop in order to get the evidence found out:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/fbi-ignored-anthony-weiners-laptop-and-it-may-have-cost-hillary-clinton-the-election.html
"On Sept. 26, 2016, as part of a sex crimes investigation, an FBI agent in New York found hundreds of thousands of emails on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who was married at the time to Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. Two days later, the head of the New York FBI office told dozens of FBI executives, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, that the laptop had 140,000 emails possibly relevant to the Clinton investigation. The next day, on Sept. 29, the New York office told several members of the FBI’s Clinton investigation team that the emails included BlackBerry messages."
If I, John or anybody else who works in civil/public/associated service did the likes of this, we would be hauled over the coals. "Oops, heh, shouldn't have done that I guess" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card just because you're a Big Cheese and not a minor bureaucratic minion.
The main outrage is the lack of consistency. If it is a national security breach and possible treason on Trump's part, then the same applies to Hillary and Biden. If it's okay for Biden to leave boxes of documents lying around for six years, then it's okay for Trump.
But mostly they should *all* be hammered for this kind of thing, like the rest of us would be.
All true. But now I'm fully enjoying imagining what happened when Clinton, Trump, and Biden attempted to sit through their 120-minute Information Security Awareness training modules.
In both cases, the individuals in question apparently had the documents in their homes after they left office.
Also, a random box in your garage is probably not an approved container, even if it's locked.
The impression I get is that Biden was careless and didn't realize he still had classified documents (bad!), while Trump deliberately kept them for some nefarious purpose (worse!).
My impression of the best and worst case scenarios:
Trump Best: All presidents keep documents from their presidency, and Trump ('s lawyers) were actively negotiating which items needed to be in the archives and which could remain with Trump. Implied is that Trump declassified the necessary documents.
Trump Worst: Trump intentionally broke the law and illegally kept classified documents. When called on it he stonewalled and forced the FBI to raid his residence in order to get them back.
Somewhere in there is the question of what items he kept and whether there were purposes (could be "good" or "bad" heavily dependent on the readers political views) for him to have them.
Biden Best: Completely normal process of taking down the VP office and some leftover documents accidentally got mixed in with other items. Self-identified and reported, and the documents were turned over.
Biden Worst: The biggest group of classified documents (apparently) was held at an office he didn't receive until a year after he was VP. These documents had to be intentionally moved there after they clearly should not have been in his possession. (Add in some unconfirmed oddities like the anonymous Chinese donations to Penn University after Biden's office opened and following the arrival of classified documents). i.e. Biden knew he had classified documents and didn't report it for six years, holding off until after the midterm election and following a news report about the finding.
He didn't realise for six years, and nobody went looking until someone accidentally found classified documents in a cupboard, versus Trump had them for some nefarious purpose (undefined).
The difference in approach is clear; Biden is Our Guy, so no big deal, Orange Man Bad so plainly he was going to sell them to the Russians/Chinese/Lizard people.
I think probably a lot of politicians take paperwork away with them once their term is over, even when technically they are not supposed to do so. My position on this is the same as Hillary's email server: low-level civil and public servants would be nailed to the barn door for this, so it shouldn't be hand-waved away when the person doing it is the same as supposedly in charge and handling much more sensitive material.
If it was a national crisis that the papers were sitting in Trump's side-room for months, then it should be a national crisis that the papers were sitting in Biden's garage for years.
It seems like the danger here is that this becomes a method for the security bureaucracy to send its political leadership to jail in many cases. It doesn't take a ton of imagination to see how that might work out badly for civilian control of the intelligence services.
On the other hand, whether or not the purpose was nefarious, if Trump knew he had them he could take precautions to control who saw them. Biden couldn't and didn't take precautions to protect documents he didn't know he had.
Presumably, for any documents that a US President uses for work during the time they are president, there is a strong setup specifically allowing them to use such documents in a protected way. This includes security agents protecting the person and property of the president, as well as document protection guidelines.
As a functional matter, the president would need access to some or many classified documents even while traveling and away from secure facilities, so there would need to be a tradeoff between security and functionality. For instance, receiving a secured update on the war in Ukraine while traveling to wherever, or getting daily security briefings while on vacation in the Caribbean.
Most notably, neither of the people involved were in a position of need-to-know when they stashed the documents in their homes. Trump was no longer president, and Biden was no longer VP, respectively. So the purpose of having the documents was gone, making the risk v. reward of having documents outside secure locations all risk and no reward. Depending on what was in the documents, this may be a big deal or it could be literally nothing. A 2015 classified projection about the upcoming year's stock market is worthless in later years for the most part. A document naming a CIA asset in Iran could be a major issue if the asset is still in Iran, especially if still active.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, there was debate about whether the President should be allowed to have a BlackBerry: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205
It was determined that he could, but he couldn't use it for a lot of purposes that you'd want.
I think all this information security is really difficult to navigate, and this is why Clinton had a separate e-mail server, Trump gets to Tweet all day and night, and both Trump and Biden ended up with documents at home.
""Over the past 20 years, dozens of military and civilian employees of the U.S. government have been punished for taking classified documents home from work without authorization," Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb wrote in 2000 for The Washington Post. "But few of these incidents have been made public, and the penalties have been extremely inconsistent, according to current and former federal officials.""
https://reason.com/2023/01/16/with-classified-documents-the-real-divide-is-between-the-powerful-and-the-rest-of-us/
The president is presumably pre authorised. The issue here is not handing them back after the term ends.
The law doesn’t say “this applies to everyone except the president”. Pretty much the only special privilege the President has, relative to other clearance holders, is that they are presumptively a Classifying Authority (i.e. they get to determine whether something is classified or not, and whether it should be declassified) - but even that role has rules / standards that are meant to be followed.
Laws relating to classification do not affect the President, because his power to classify or declassify arises from his role as Commander in Chief under Article II. No statute passed by Congress can set limits on this power:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/may/16/james-risch/does-president-have-ability-declassify-anything-an/
Trump got documents as President, Biden as VP. There is an Obama rule that makes the VP a classifying authority but I don't believe it says he can declassify things, other than things he himself classified. So in that respect Trump has a stronger defense than Biden. On the other hand, Biden's violation of the rules may have been incompetence not deliberate choice. Trump's was pretty clearly deliberate.
I dunno about that last. Trump seems exactly the kind of guy who can do something via incompetence or carelessness, then argue forcefully when found out that he totally meant to do that, it was 100% legitimate, who the hell are you to question it? and besides you're just out to destroy American, you oaf.
“The president has broad authority to determine what information is or is not classified” is not at all the same thing as “the president can do whatever he wants with classified documents even after he is no longer the president”. And there is no classification level that goes “this is classified, unless it’s in my closet in which case it’s unclassified and also not subject to FOIA”.
And of course as John notes Biden acquired the classified documents when he was VP.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, I'm just observing that your assertion that the President has to follow any rules at all (other than those he makes up himself) in this area is wrong. Congress cannot bind the President on the issue of national security classification, any more than they can say he is prohibited from issuing orders to the military that aren't countersigned by the Speaker of the House, because Congress did not give those powers to him in the first place. We need to distinguish between the President's Article II powers, which are beyond regulation by Congress, and the powers he may acquire through statute.
So far as I know, the President actually could create a classification that said "this is classified unless it's in my closet." There's nothing in the Constitution stopping him from doing that. It would be absurdly irresponsible, but the only solutions to an irresponsible President are political, impeachment or failure to re-elect. And also please note that this could only have force while he is President. As soon as he stops being President, his successor can revoke or alter the policy as he pleases, and woe betide the former President if he has not taken that shift change into account when he loses his powers at the stroke of noon on January 21 and becomes immediately bound by statute and the (new) President's policy decisions.
In any event, this is all irrelevant. In neither case are we talking about a President in possession of classified documents. If Trump had Top Secret documents lying on the kitchen table at Mar-a-Lago in April of 2020, or if Biden had them in his jacket pocket last week while he rode the Metro, there would be dick that anyone could do about it legally (aside from agitate for either man's prompt impeachment and removal from office).
The reason these documents are an issue at all is that Private Citizen Trump had secret documents in his basement at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, and statute most certainly does bind private citizens. Trump's argument is along the lines of "well I declassified them when I was President," and if that's true, then Private Citizen Trump is off the hook. But is it true? It's quite reasonable to require a bit more than Private Citizen Trump's assertion that it is, since he's far from a neutral observer.
Biden can't make the same argument, because he was not President when the documents came into his possession. He needs to argue that some action or policy of Presidents Obama or Trump made it legit for him to have them in his possession after he became Private Citizen Biden. Obviously current President Biden can't retroactively authorize prior Private Citizen Biden to possess them.
In a general way, classified documents are supposed to be kept in very secure facilities, like safes in government offices with restricted access and guards and such, or on government computers stored in secure locations, and only taken out when necessary for use. The idea is to avoid their theft or loss, even accidental loss:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4364
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/deutch21.htm
Generally speaking, a President's home wouldn't be a secure location for classified documents, although I am sure there are protocols for him accessing or using them at home, so long as he tells the Secret Service and whoever else is involved in their handling what he need, when, and where. Nobody is going to deny the President the ability to access and use classified documents wherever and whenever he wants to. But if he does it without telling the people whose job it is to ensure document security, he's just being God-damned rude and causing those people unnecessary stress -- to say nothing of any genuine risk to the Republic he's sworn to defend.
The overall issue is fraught with respect to the President, however, because the President is the sole final authority on whether a document is classified, and at what level. He has infinite security clearance, and can moreover classify or declassify any document whenever he wants, either explicitly (by writing a memo or saying so), or implicitly (by for example sharing it, or its contents, with someone not otherwise authorized to see them). That's because this authority derives from his Article II powers as Commander in Chief, and isn't subject to any limits found in laws Congress passes. This is one of the few weird situations where the President is actually literally "above the law." If The People don't trust the President with this power, the Constitutional solution is to elect someone else instead. (If Congress doesn't trust him, the Constitutional solution is impeachment and removal from office.)
The problem in Trump's case is that the documents were found in his possession after he was no longer President, so he no longer had the awesome power of an infinite security clearance, and I'm not sure it's clear President Trump declassified them with sufficient formality that a court judging Private Citizen Trump would say the latter has the right to have them. We'll find out.
In Biden's case his problem is that he was Vice President at the time the documents were left at home, and it's not clear the President at the time (Obama) declassified them sufficiently for Private Citizen Biden (between 2017 and 2021) to have them after they both left office. Presumably President Biden can't retroactively declassify them now so Private Citizen Biden could've had them in that time period, although this is what constitutional lawyers earn $1000/hr arguing.
There's also a separate argument that the Federal government classifies way too much, kind of robotically, and this leads people to take classification less seriously than they might.
I agree with you except on one point: While the President does indeed have the authority to share classified information with whomever he wishes, doing so does not automatically declassify it.
Well...I basically agree with you, although we could interpret that action as the President momentarily declassifying it and then reclassifying it. Who knows? The problem is that he has plenary power, but unless he says what the hell he intends by his actions, we (or a Federal jury) are left to guess.
But the only plausible solutions to problems in this area is political. You can't bind the President's powers, you can only choose a better type of person to acquire them. Maybe in future elections there will be some sharp questions put during the campaign about whether Candidate X will take security more seriously than some of his predecessors.
But I wouldn't count on it. This whole affair, both with Trump and now with Biden, has a circus "gotcha" aspect to it that is shameful, unworthy of a republic that takes itself seriously, and makes me think it isn't *really* about genuine issues of national security.
Whatever one's partisan leanings, the political problem (and this is the root of much bitterness and distrust) is that trusted officials i.e. Trump, Biden, H. Clinton, all behaved as though the rules simply were not important and/or did not apply to them, because they were of the elect.
With each of the above three, maybe the path to the security breach was different. Of course Donald Trump thinks the rules don't apply to him, I don't see the breach as malicious, just small arrogance + hubris and litigation. The reason does not matter. He still broke the law, a very important and easy-to-understand law. It was stupid and wrong. Were he still in office, if National Security staff could not change his behavior and things like this happened, that is immediately impeachable.
Joe Biden seems to be a careless arrogant Senator who has become a senile old man. Looks like a mistake, but agressive prosecution of Trump for the same thing is clearly hypocritical. The obvious take is that the actual harm and wrong of mishandling classified documents is never even a consideration, only appearances and political persecution are of value. So again it seems like a person who thinks the rules are for little people. Here I will be generous and project that Biden does not really understand the rules or the reasons for them on any basic level, this is common among politicians, always. They deal with people and opinions, not facts and things. Forgivable if a one-time-error, but politically he started the pig-wrestling so it looks pretty bad.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was in truth the #1 Security Officer in the entire US Government. (This is practice and process that dates back to Thomas Jefferson.) If the allegations about the e-mail server are substantially true ... any uniformed US Military personell who did the same would face a Court Martial and could be sentenced to death.
Secrecy is there for a reason. It's still true that all the laws of the United States are there for a reason, and apply equally to citizens and government officials. In fact, that was the entire reason this country was created. People and politicians who have forgotten that or just do not care are, fundamentally, no longer citizens. They certainly deserve the trust of nobody.
To be fair, I don’t think there’s anything distinctive about politicians here. This is exactly what everyone does with traffic laws, and other laws, that officially say you should do one thing, but clearly aren’t practical.
"agressive prosecution of Trump for the same thing is clearly hypocritical. "
Note that, so far, there has been no prosecution of Trump, aggressive or not so aggressive. And also note that, when the govt decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, James Comey explicitly said:
"In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.'
At this point, there does seem to be evidence that Trump made efforts to obstruct justice by hiding the fact that he had possession of classified materials, and no such evidence re Biden. So, saying that they did "the same thing" is not particularly accurate, at this point in time.
"prosecution" in these high-level (Level 4 in the Zvi M. simulation level) political performances is maybe 5% possible criminal prosecution. Publicly "raiding" Trump's property, talking up Trump's misdeeds in the media at high volume, that is "prosecuting" the real battle, according to the particular calculus of public opinion and partisan theater.
My fundamental point is that all three did things more or less deliberately because they believe that they are above the law. That is antethical to the entire purpose of the United States.
We are a society whose insanely violent and brutal (by international standards) mass spectator sport, Football, has as many judges and referees on the field as either team's PLAYERS, and where the play is constantly stopped for judicial reviews, appeals, rules of evidence, sidebar conferences, and where the allegedly impartial judgements about outcomes are are accepted as iron law. "A Government of Laws not Men" is still what we want;-- to the core of our being.
As someone who is a newcomer to the software engineering industry - does anyone here have predictions about how code completion models like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT would change the industry? (Predictions you are confident enough in to share, obviously)
I know better than to run around in circles screaming "AAAAAH AI is going to take my job!!!!1", but for one, I am concerned that I seem to like the part of the job that actually consists of writing code. This is where the "magic" lies for me - I like the satisfaction that comes with having, my own fingers on my keyboard, produced logic that I can then see used by business users and/or merged into larger projects. I almost feel parental about it. It appears that efficient code completion would shift the focus to thinking about systems and an even higher level level of abstraction - and while I think I will still have work when that becomes the industry standard, I don’t know if work will be as satisfying as what I have now.
Now, of course, I program in Python so saying that I’m the only author of my code is kind of a lie - I’d not be able to reimplement the Python interpreter in C from scratch, nor would I be able to do that for the more developed packages I depend on. But I
still manage to feel like the author of my code, and derive satisfaction from it. That appears to be good news - maybe I’ll be able to feel good about giving prompts to a code completion model, also. Has anyone here gone from programming in a lower level language to a higher level language and managed to still feel good about the work process?
I asked ChatGPT to relay it's level of confidence in particular answers it was giving me that I knew were flat out wrong - not even close level of wrong. (I was asking about songs and chord progressions). It took a bit of issue with my word "confidence" so I asked it to tell me how likely it felt it these answers were correct. It in turn relays a very high likelihood of correctness due to many sources in many contexts. It was disappointing when ChatGPT wouldn't just say "I'm guessing here." When informed of its wrongness it easily concedes. Wish it had better forthcomingness about levels of confidence, if it is supported.
I experimented a bit with it having it answer something like "Rock on" if it thought I was right, or "Nah" if it thought I was wrong, and then suggested several things to it. It seemed mostly right in that context on a lot of cases, some more clearcut than others. Can't recall exactly the examples I used, but it seems it has some kind of ability to interpret degree of rightness or wrongness, but maybe doesn't or can't apply it to its own answers? I don't know.
It’s just a tool, no different from searching stack overflow.
My son is using ChatGPT to help start his home work answer. Essentially ChatGPT provides a framework for the answer, which is nice, and he just has to fill in or change the details to fit what he's doing... which looks a lot like hacking someone's piece of code to fit your job. Well I haven't written much code recently...
I can't see AI writing complex code any time soon. Complex as in "a whole bunch of business logic, badly described in 3 self-contradicting documents, plus a whole lot of 'lore' that only exists in the minds of those who participated in the last meeting on the subject, if they manage not to forget it".
As a game programmer, for example, I feel quite secure - to add a new system to code of our game, AI needs to have at least human-level intellect. It cannot just invent e.g. a whole new character inventory system based on designers' specs, because those aren't nearly as complete as they need to be, and because it's not a separate piece of code - it must integrate with pretty much every other system in game, and I don't think Co-Pilot, or even the next few iterations of AI can manage that. I surely can't (not without much poking around, asking people "WTF is this piece of code is for and can I delete it?" and debugging for hours).
And as a tool that can take away some of mundane, boring tasks like writing unavoidable boilerplate, AI can make programmer's life better - if it won't make fatal mistakes. You know what I would like, for example? No mater how you try, there are always cases when you need to remember to change code in two places, e.g. create a class and register it, or change some variable in two pieces of code that just can't access it from a single source due to some legacy decisions. It would be great if I could create some annotation that AI can read and at least notify me if I forget something, or better yet, do this stuff auto-magically.
>It would be great if I could create some annotation that AI can read and at least notify me
You mean a TODO? Most IDE support it, reminding you before commiting your code, and most (if not all) devs end up ignoring them altogether with "code smells", "test coverage", "vulnerabilities", "critical defects" and other foolish made up things.
That's why I prefer automatic solutions, wherever possible, yes. What I meant is more like a static code checker rule that checks (possibly in cross-project or even cross-repository way) that the necessary places are synchronized, possibly adding a error in IDE, and doesn't spam me otherwise.
In some languages you can do that, e.g. with Roslyn analyzers. In others, it's hard (parsing C++ isn't fun). If AI can help with that, it would be good.
I expect it to take over the industry fairly quickly. Like, going from "nearly no company use it" today to "over 80% of jobs requires you to use it" in 4 or 5 years". It will consequently shift the focus of our job a bit (less of wiritng code, more of thinking up good prompt/documentation & review the generated code for bad implementations).
I also, however, expect that some companies (especially those for which computer engineering are a simple cost rather than how they make money) will be scared enough of the security implications that they mandate *not* using AI-generated code. But there won't be many.
Naw. It will be up to the individual contributor to use it or not.
Developers who currently fail at Fizz-Buzz test will again be able to pass the job interviews thanks to GPT. They will be able to produce code, until the moment when a bug appears and they are be unable to fix it.
The role of senior developers will mostly be fixing bugs in the mountains of code that the junior developers produced using GPT. (Anything else the GPT will do more efficiently.) The consumption of alcohol will increase dramatically.
How would GPT help in an interview? In any case I’ve seen plenty of imperfect code on GPT and others, and very little perfection.
On the one hand, white-collar work is not immune to replacement by software. Apparently the profession of law hit quite a bump recently when it found that suddenly big firms needed a lot fewer junior staffers poring through memos, since it could replace them with targeted searches of email systems. Something similar could conceivably happen in the software industry itself, reducing required staffing considerably.
On the other hand, a big part of software is not making the computer do something. It is, rather, negotiating between various parties about what the computer should do in the first place, fitting together half-formed ideas into something clear, with due consideration for what the system is already doing and making sure what it is already doing doesn't get broken. Much of this rests not on the technical bits of producing code, but on surprisingly social skills of understanding, advocacy, and compromise, which I don't expect AI to replace any time soon.
On the gripping hand, I expect there is going to be something of a middle path for at least some years, where coding AIs are useful but unreliable tools that can make a first cut at a solution or critique an existing solution, but are quirky enough that getting good work out of one requires real expertise. Compilers were that way through the seventies at least, and a part of a good programmer's skill set was being able to step down to the machine code level to examine whether the compiler was doing something sensible, and then either rewrite the higher-level code, or just substiute assembly language instructions instead.
Physically writing code is already a very tiny fraction of a software engineer's job.
And most of the code i write is mostly boiler plate or using already written modules with just a little bit of domain specific details thrown in.
To me the current iteration of these AI tools is kind of like using a UI kit to quickly get a web site built. Can cut way back on time spent doing repetitive tasks. It many ways all the programming people do these days is already "using AI". We don't writing in assembly or lower level languages (well 99% of us), we use higher level languages that for all intents and purposes used AI (Past developers we don't know) to write the abstractions.
My guess is that a lot of lazy people will use it to write also-ran code, with slightly fewer bugs and security holes than if they'd simply cut-and-pasted snippets from the web, but plenty more than if they'd actually written the code themselves.
Some competent people may use it to create code a bit faster than otherwise.
What I can't predict is whether it will get a good reputation (managers seeing only the reduced time to "code complete") or a bad reputation (wide reporting of resulting bugs and security exploits).
Eventually, if effort is put into better selection of training data (not random code of unknown quality from all over the web), and probably other things I don't know about, either one might get good enough to reliably produce high quality code that does what's actually intended, and properly handles exceptions of all kinds (unlike the average also ran coder). But from what I've read to date (tech industry bloggers whose own ability I trust) it's very much not there yet.
And I'm unclear whether the remaining problems are like those with self-driving vehicles (plausibly insurmountable for the general case) or like those in an ordinary (feasible) engineering project.
Separate question: "Has anyone here gone from programming in a lower level language to a higher level language and managed to still feel good about the work process?"
Yes, absolutely. I used to routinely program in Assembly. Then I moved to C. I was happy either way.
I've also written production code in Python, Lua, Perl, and Bash, among other languages higher level than C. I'm sometimes less happy with them - perl in particular is a wretched language, IMO. But writing code is still writing code - inherently fun for me.
OTOH, the overall work process has frequently been rather less rewarding. But that has to do with all the rest of the job, the working environment, or similar issues.
It's curious to me that you would classify the interpreted languages as "higher level" than the compiled. I wouldn't have said that. They just seem like they serve a different role. Sometimes what you want is fastest to do by writing a script, sometimes you want to write compiled code. It doesn't really seem like the script is "higher level" in the sense that C is higher level than assembly -- because C encapsulates vast swathes of assembler in abstract concepts like 'for' loops, variable namespaces, or passing around pointers to complex data structures.
I would say a "higher level" of programming is kind of what libraries, objects (in an OOL), and Githbu are all about. You can say 'screw writing my own FFT code, I'm just going to load up libgsl and call gsl_fft_complex_radix2_forward. Or to hell with rolling my own interface to a certain type of database, there's some project at Github that I can download that does all the detail work for me.
That suggests that there *is* space for an "AI assistant" that would be seriously useful, something quite special purpose that would keep track of all the libraries and projects that exist, and then when you needed some solution be good at interpreting your natural language request, and put together a recommendation for the building blocks for what you wanted. It would have to deeply and reliably understand what the code it recommends does, so its recommendations were valuable. You could never train it by just scraping the Internet for words, it would have to be able to be analyze libraries and such on its own and build some higher level representation of what they do that could be mapped onto a natural language request. "I need an FFT that works with data lengths that are not powers of 2 / that works with data that has 132 bits / that works much faster if I can guarantee the data aren't more than 8 bits / et cetera" and then it says "hey, this library has a routine that works, or this project would work if you altered this constant or that and recompiled."
That would be very valuable, I think, and qualify as "higher level" programming, and it feels like the kind of thing that is probably doable, but is also far harder than creating a clever talking-dog chatbot to replace sports newscasters and people who write quotidian ad copy.
You have a point there. The distinction certainly isn't interpreted vs compiled, in spite of my choice of examples. C++ is arguably higher level than C - it does things for you that C does not, and it's correspondingly more difficult for the programmer to know exactly what will happen under the hood.
It's definitely not scripting language vs app development language. (Python straddles the border there; it's usable for both.)
It's much more like how many lines of code does it take to do something/anything.
Python (and Perl, and Lua) have data types that I'd have to get from a library in C. Those data types are incredibly useful for the sorts of things I choose to do in python. I could do the same things in C; there are probably libraries available, and, if not, I could write equivalent code myself. But language built-ins are faster and easier to use, and probably better optimized.
Python also has well known, fairly standard libraries for a whole pile of things, some of which I need. I'd much rather process a CSV in python rather than C. In fact, not being a specialist, I find python's libraries somewhat excessive. (Which of the multiple libraries should I use for processing html, and why?) But C also has lots of libraries, beyond the standard libc; they are just even harder to find. (Specialists know about them - and that's why the average open source app package requires some number of other open source library packages.) I'm not sure that's a good measure of the qualitative difference between them - though your assistant might well be useful in finding them.
I'm thinking of it as Google + a grad student. I can google stuff, but then I have to spend a tedious amount of time just checking to see if what Google returns really fits the bill. It *says* it does FFTs, they really turn out to be slow Fourier transforms because Google/ChatGPT thought I might have really meant to type "hamburger" instead of "fast" because a lot more people look for hamburgers than fast thingymajiggers.
My idea is the AI assistant can do the googling for me and then also do a lot of the basic checking to see if what Google returns is even anywhere close to what I want, and can maybe figure out if some combination of things will do what I want. Like, I could say, "How should I process this CSV file?" and it would say "You could rip that off in 2 lines in python, but for the size of the file it would take ~5 minutes, and since you want to process 100 files a day you might be better writing it in Java, because it turns out someone has written a very convenient set of objects for this purpose....API coming on your screen now..."
And then I would say "Good job Spot! Here, have a crunch treat" and pat its little pointy metal head, and it would return to its hutch to dream electric dreams of feeding all 8 billion of us into a quantum black hole.
LLMs in programming is bullshit, the "Fifth Generation Languages"[1] trend of our era.
LLMs are designed for and trained on natural languages. Natural languages are endlessly tolerant of bullshit : semantically-empty, open-ended rambling that is locally dazzling and globally braindead. This works for natural language, it's in fact how we even learn it in the first place : little kids are first-class bullshitters. Bit by bit we come into contact with the real world and other minds, which gradually teaches us that language is not merely a symbol game. LLMs are like eternal toddlers who never grew out of their fascination for mimicking adults to say nothing in a whole lot of words.
In addition to being so infinitly imaginative and open-ended, natural language is resilient as hell. You can botch a sentence and still nail the paragraph. You can botch a paragraph and still rescue the essay. You can botch the first half of a novel and then come back with a second half that redeems it.
Code doesn't work like this. It's not nearly as imaginative or open ended, it's far far more strict. There is an unimaginably huge space of programs that look right in all sorts of ways, only a tiny minority of which are actually right and do the thing you want. Code isn't remotely as resilient as natural language, a single off-by-one error in the index of a for loop 50 procedures deep in the callstack makes your entire program just an long-winded way to display an error message.
LLMs **fundamentally** misunderstand what code is all about, it's not text, it's logic. Any "Auto Coder" that doesn't get how logic works isn't actually an auto coder, it's an auto plagiarizer, even if its plagiarism is very fancy and linear-algebra-heavy and you need 10 data centers to carry it out.
This can still be useful. I can imagine their future (if they got out safely out of the myriad copyright storms they are in right now) as a training wheel, something that hobbyists or programmers unfamiliar with their environments (e.g. a Java guy forced to write Python for the first time) use to get things going at first, but then discard quickly for a deeper understanding. Or maybe they will become part of a bigger neuro-symbolic system that can use types and logical reasoning to prune and filter the code that they get out.
I can say one thing with certainty : LLMs in programming are deadend. I predict that in 20 years more than 75% of experts will look down upon it as we look at the 1960s AI hype or the 1980s wildly-wrong imagination for personal computers. I predict that it will not cut programmers' work by any margin that is distinguishable from noise. I predict that all companies and solo developers who try to push it as a "no code solution" or use it in any way beyond a fancy google or stackoverflow will crash and burn hard.
> I program in Python so saying that I’m the only author of my code is kind of a lie - I’d not be able to reimplement the Python interpreter in C from scratch
Oh come on, and C programmers can implement an x86 machine from scratch ? and write it down in silicon ? and write even a basic C compiler to target it ?
Spoiler Alert, no. And that's irrelevant, programming is manipulating a machine. A machine is a set of formal and well-defined input-output rules. Python is a set of formal (-ish) and very well-defined input-output rules, therefore it's a machine. Anyone manipulating it is a programmer.
It just so happens that it's implemented as a layer of illusion over an actual physical machine and C, but that's of no consequence. C itself is an illusion as well, and the actual physical machine is an illusion over analog physics too (which is an illusion over quantum mechanics).
GPT and other LLMs are machines too, there are very well defined and formal input-output rules that specify them. But (once trained) they are non-programmable. Your only way of ever getting them to do anything is to brute-force-search your way through the space of all possible prompts, to find a/the prompt that triggers a magic path through the inhuman forest of their weights ending with the thing you want. You can't even see their internal state or debug them in any way that counts, unlike the vast vast majority of actual and virtual machines. You can't even get them to add 5001 and 2451 reliably for fuck's sake.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_language
Ideology is mostly fashion. The issues of the day are issues because intellectual trend setters make them issues. Those ideas which compose an ideology are a set of merely fashionable issues. Most of them shouldn't be taken too seriously by serious people because the laws of fashion dictate that they will be out of style before long.
Is there any way to determine which issues of the day aren't merely fashionable?
I think you're confusing the attention given to issues with the correct positions on issues. Fashion certainly overemphasises some issues at the expense of others, but the correct position on an issue won't change unless the world changes (although fashions can obscure it).
In other words, as long as you derive for yourself the correct position on an issue, that should be at least somewhat fashion-proof.
My view is that values matter and "values" essentially means "What are your priorities?"
Being correct on a superficial issue is relatively meaningless. Seems to me that 99% of current political and culture war issues are meaningless and that to even have an opinion on them is to have the wrong one.
No, I won't say which issues I think are most relevant in a comment on an Open Thread. That's a long, difficult project I am working hard on and will hopefully publish elsewhere with all the context needed.
A privileged view of a person living in a long-running stable society where seemingly any extreme political position doesn't change the living reality so it's all an idle entertainment. Of course the current things are goofy ahh topics, but the overarching trends matter cause eventually societies are punished with a physical suffering.
I think it's a mistake to think of fashion as "merely" fashion. Fashion is a way for societies to coordinate their attention on something for a period, and develop something that sticks into the long-run culture. Many parts of fashion come and go quickly, but that's because the society is playing around with a bunch of ideas to decide which one sticks. If you're not following fashion, then you're not part of that process, which is fine, if you're willing to just live with what everyone else comes up with on that idea.
My first rule of politics: anything that's currently political is political because there are arguments for both sides. Those arguments might not necessarily be reverses of each other. If one side's argument is "X is bad" the opposing argument is not necessarily "X is good", but it could be "it's impossible to change X without also doing bad thing Y".
Speaking as someone on the political right, from my perspective issues that start as fashion issues rapidly escalate in importance. I feel that arguments against gas stoves are fashion. Arguments opposing restrictions on gas stoves because the person prefers gas stoves are probably also fashion. If you own a business that makes gas stoves or builds houses, arguments against gas stoves probably aren't fashion. If you think it's not the government's power to pose this sort of restriction, then the issue has progressed beyond fashion (yes, the camel already has his nose in the tent, but at some point you have to stop it from going further).
I think this ties into the fundamental roots of what it means to be conservative and liberal, and the fundamental asymmetry between the way the two relate to government. As a conservative, I believe that society is not perfectable; there will always be trade-offs, and those trade-offs are best left for individuals to decide. While the issue of gas stoves is fashion, the larger issue of the government's role in making the decision is definitely not one that's just fashion.
Hmm well the 'fashion' has to fit with the story. Banning gas stoves works, because it fits with fossil fuels are bad.
What do you mean when you say “fashion” and “serious?"
It looks to me like you think "fashion" is beneath "serious people," but I'm not sure why. Any person who wants to be taken seriously by others needs to know how to present themselves as serious (i.e. "fashion" in the sense of how one presents oneself), or how to relay ones ideas in ways relevant to others (i.e. keeping up with "fashion" or "trends" in the sense of the public conversation).
I suppose a "serious" person could be more interested in shouting his ideas into a cave without paying any attention to others, but "serious in isolation from others" and "serious with a goal of connecting with/persuading others" are both variations on "serious," so I'm not clear why you seem to be treating the two as opposites.
Fashion is a tool for establishing status, but it works best with people who have decoupled status from broader aptitude. Therefore, devoting your time or resources to fashion buys you status with the people least likely to be able to help you when you really need it. Unless you live entirely within a world of relative status, which many people do but I'm kind of OK with calling those people "not serious".
And "fashion" is not a synonym for "social skills" or "charisma".
Again, this all just seems like starting from a general disdain for “fashion” and building a definition backwards around it.
If fashion is “a tool for establishing status,” well shoot that could be literally anything.
Humans establish status with everything, in a near infinite combination of ways. Take, for example, *just* the idea of showing status through what kind of tobacco you use. In some groups, any tobacco use at *all* will be a marker of low status. Other groups will have a hierarchy of pipe tobacco over cigars over cigarettes, still others will follow that method but put the cigars (or another form of tobacco) on top. Some groups will place status preference on where the tobacco is from or how it is processed, others will show status by being personally connected to the process by growing or rolling their own. And that is just tobacco, which so niche that most people you ask wouldn’t even think of as a status marker at all.
So defining fashion as “a tool for establishing status” doesn’t really illuminate anything.
And even if we extend to the full “a tool for establishing status, that works best with people who have decoupled status from broader aptitude," well... "broader aptitude" is a phrase so general that I could say anything does or doesn't "demonstrate broader aptitude."
Test well on a biology exam? Sure, that demonstrates broader aptitude.
Finish in the top 10% of marathon times? Looks like broader aptitude to me.
Extensive knowledge of metal bands? Sure, why not.
Or I can just be petty and say that *none* of those things demonstrate broader aptitude, because you can be good at biology and not other things, or a good endurance runner but not very likable, and I think metal is dumb.
The overall impression I’m left with is that for you guys “fashion” is simply a pejorative for any status marker you don’t take seriously or don’t care for. My interests are serious, yours are merely fashion.
Hank's initial post is actually a really great example of this in action. How exactly does one extinguish "serious ideas from serious scholars" from "mere fashion ideology put out by mere intellectual trendsetters?" I have no idea, but I'll bet you a shiny quarter that, whatever it is, if you put it on a scatter plot you'll find a *lot* of correlation to "ideas and thinkers that Hank likes."
And to be clear, this is all fine and I do it to. It's how we all process reality most of the time, just try not to let it impact how you treat other people who are evaluating things on a different metric from you.
"Fashion is a tool for establishing status" was not meant to be a *definition* of fascism, any more than e.g. "railroads are a means of transportation". It is nonetheless a true statement, even though there are lots of other things that are means of transportation and/or tools for establishing status.
>The Institute for Effective Policy has helped convince the Australian government to include funding for long-term catastrophic risks in its Disaster Ready Fund.
Damn, still no civil defence against nuclear attack. Not that I'm faulting IEP for that.
What do you mean by “civil defence against nuclear attack”?
Disaster preparation/relief, where the disaster is "a nuclear bomb exploded over a city". (This is separate from military and diplomatic means of reducing the likelihood of nuclear bombs exploding over your cities.)
You can reduce the casualties from a nuke going off over a city by quite a lot (potentially ~80%?) by education on how to protect yourself ("Duck and Cover"; the majority of casualties from a large nuke are going to be from thermal burns and broken glass, not building collapse, and the former two can be mitigated if you know what you're doing), as well as stockpiling food, water and medical supplies (modern supply chains are very efficient but also very fragile).
The Australian State Emergency Services actually started off as civil defence services during the Cold War, but these days it's woefully ignored.
How about the Ivermectin revisit? Alexandros Marinos has been holding his pen for the last few months and declared that he is ready with the review. I personally think he has loads of valid points so for the sake of rationality it would be fantastic if you could address his most serious points.
Predicted outcome:
If Scott concludes that Ivermectin works, the supporters will declare a final victory, and start quoting Scott as a scientific expert on Ivermectin and all things related.
If Scott concludes that Ivermectin does not work, the supporters will require yet another round, you know, for the sake of rationality. Some people will mention in comments their suspicion that Scott actually secretly believes that Ivermectin works, but is afraid of possible consequences of admitting that publicly.
Maybe, but he challenged Alexandros to write up his objections and he did, Scott also promised to take another look this winter. Just reminding him :-)
The smell around how ivermectin was treated by the main stream press should be more than enough to take a deeper look if you're part of the rational community.
Is there a reason why we should take a deeper look into Ivermectin than into Hydroxychloroquine or Paracetamol or any of the other things that had a brief flash in the pan?
Yes. First, Scott did not review Paracetamol nor HCQ, and neither did Alexandros. He reviewed Ivermectin, challenged Alexandros, and Alexandros then did his homework in an exemplary way; he documented a, imho quite stunning, number of rather serious issues.
Scott made a lot of people that were on the fence jump off, and that included me. However, the dirt Alexandros (and ivmmeta.com) dug up is impressive and I am back on the fence. Could be the story of the decade.
There were also a couple things that worked in a modest way, that never got approval. One was the antidepressant Luvox. Was a recent study that again supported its use. I think it's this one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext. Reduces chance of hospitalization for high-risk people with symptomatic infections. It is also a cheap, well-tolerated widely available drug. Despite this FDA did not add it to its recommended treatment algorithm. I have not looked into this carefully, but the docs and scientists on medical Twitter that I thought were most level-headed are vexed that it hasn't been added to the toolbox. There was a second drug like Luvox too -- common drug, seemed effective in a modest way when used off-label for Covid -- but I can't remember what it was.
Ah yes, I totally forgot about that one in the wake of paxlovid, and the other one that also got approved but raised some worries about increased mutation rate.
I think several of the attempted treatments also didn't work out--convalescent plasma didn't. Currently a bunch of the monoclonal antibodies that worked earlier no longer work against covid. (It's under selection to evade existing antibodies in people, and that's probably driving it to evade those antibodies as well.). At least one of the approved treatments give (I think) only about a 40% decrease in probability of hospitalization.
I'm more than willing to admit that, regardless of the efficacy or lack thereof that ivermactin has against COVID, the media and the twittersphere were completely asinine/irresponsible/wrong/terrible (pick your favorite word) in how they discussed it, but I also have exactly zero interest at this point in whether or not Ivermectin does or does not work. I can confidently say that if it _does_ work, the effect is small, or else it wouldn't have been so hard to find, and we already have other, better treatments at this point.
In other words, the actual efficacy doesn't matter, and I don't think anyone (Scott included) disagrees that the media was extremely bad on this topic. Doesn't seem like is much of value left to discuss.
Now, if Scott promised to review it, then there is value in just following up on his word. but that's about it, in my mind.
Part of getting the "media was bad and irresponsible" meme into society is when people like Scott look into the position and make a determination. Scott agreeing that the media was over the top - but accurate! - is very different from Scott agreeing that the media was over the top and also wrong. Those of us reading Scott who don't know the intricacies of how well the treatment did or did not work, which is nearly all of us, can benefit from such a discussion.
I'm not sure I agree with your middle point there. Between either of the choices: "Ivermectin does nothing" or "Ivermectin has a very small positive effect" Isn't going to really change my view of the media's behavior here. The way they talked about it was utter culture war garbage (note: I actually think that most people who could be considered "mainstream" were doing basically the same thing in both directions if they were talking about it at all, it's just that the vast majority of media people were on the "it doesn't work because it's red-coded" side) completely disconnected from reality. None of them _knew_ at the time whether or not it worked, and therefore the truth after the fact won't put them in a better or worse light (for me, and it shouldn't for anyone else either, IMO).
We didn't know back then, and the media should have acted with appropriate uncertainty. They did not, and just being proven right after the fact doesn't make their behavior ok.
I personally am quite certain that Ivermectin has a small enough impact (I'd put more liklihood on "none" than "small" but am willing to concede that I don't actually know either, even now), that I don't think it matters very much whether or not we seriously investigated it as a cure. We _should_ have taken it seriously because it _could_ have worked, but, with the benefit of hindsight, not doing so was at worst a very minor mistake, especially compared with all the other mistakes that were made during the pandemic.
So therefore, my view on the whole topic is that the problem/lesson we should be taking from this is actually totally disconnected from whether or not Ivermectin works, and litigating it's efficacy now won't change that.
My view, which I had before ever Scott did his write-up and which hasn't shifted since despite all the "yes, but did you consider this breakthrough new study?" updates (which turn out, upon examination, to be the same studies all collected in the Cochrane metadata study), is that ivermectin seemed to have the best results in the countries where poverty and parasite loads were high, and I put this down to the killing off worms and nasties meant the immune system had spare capacity to fight off the infection.
That being the case, I didn't think it had any benefit for people in countries, or living in parts of countries, where there wasn't high poverty and parasite loads (maybe it was worth your while if you were living in Florida). And it certainly wasn't worth middle-class people buying up supplies from veterinary supply stores and necking back the horse paste (it would have been cattle drench mainly over here). "But I have to buy it from the vets because my doctor refuses to prescribe it!" Because your doctor thinks you don't damn well need it.
There's an argument for "Well if my patient is dumb enough, and loud-mouth enough, to demand I prescribe him ivermectin, then human dosages of drugs manufactured for human consumption probably won't do any harm, apart from wasting time and money", but as much as I criticise the medical profession and system, I can see why they would not be convinced by "some guy on Youtube swore it was a miracle cure, will you prescribe it for me, doc?" especially people who wanted to take it as a prophylactic when they didn't have covid at all. "This is a sure-fire way to make sure I don't get covid!" No it wasn't and isn't, and I don't care what some fake doctor on social media told you it would do.
"The smell around how ivermectin was treated by the main stream press"
My problem with your approach here?
(1) Yes, the mainstream press is terrible
(2) Notwithstanding, every kook and conspiracy theory makes the same appeal, e.g. Graham Hancock constantly complaining how nobody takes his theory about an advanced pre-Ice Age civilisation seriously and the media is so biased against him
Who cares what Scott thinks? Is there any good data or not? I thought the British were doing a study?
ivmmeta.com has a real time meta-study of 95 Ivermectin related papers (RCTs & observational studies) showing an average efficacy of 80% for prophylaxis & about 60% for use in the first week.
The Oxford study was RECOVER but after its announcement that it would include ivermectin there was no further news that I could find.
The main reason I like to see Scott review Alexandros' findings is because the main stream RCT's (Together & ACTIV-6) seem to have a weirdly large number of serious issues that look like they were designed to lower efficacy. They also refuse to release their data. The press reported these studies did not show efficacy but they both still show efficacy in the paper!
The meta story here is imho even more important than the efficacy of ivermectin against COVID. I've followed the ivmmeta.com site for almost 2 years and I see a very responsive and very transparent team. If you find an error, they'll correct it. The contrast with professionalism of the press (horse dewormer), and I am deeply sad to say, the review Scott did, is immense.
OK, yeah I see nothing about ivermectin on the RECOVER site. That's weird. https://www.recoverytrial.net/results I'm going to remain agnostic wrt ivermectin. I just don't know, and I wouldn't be surprised if the data was compromised on both sides.
Hmm. On one side ivermectin was a potential threat to a 100+ Billion dollar vaccine market. I can see this might influence the big trials like Together & ACTIV that directly or indirectly were funded by big pharma & NGOs that pushed the vaccination. However, I just cannot see any financial or other suspicious motivations for the other 85+ papers? It has been off patent for 20 years and the hundreds of authors are from all over the world. Were their studies perfect? Far from it, many were clearly from less sophisticated countries, but they do not show the bias of the establishment trials.
I am 64 and I find it hard to believe that 20 years ago major newspapers would not have frantically started digging, very deep. Follow the money used to be a thing then. Now they lazily went along with the establishment's horse de-wormer story. A story so easy to show it is incorrect that it should be a red flag for any rationalist.
So my major concern is not ivermectin, it is more how we establish our epistemology. If my worst fears around about how ivermectin was kept from the public are true we have a serious problem looking at how effective this suppression was, how many people went along. Scott, with his medical background, celebrity status, and believe in rationalism is eminently suitable to do some of the digging. (And I think he owes it to himself to reflect on some of the mistakes he made in the first article. Mistakes he acknowledged on an error page.)
Just curious, what criteria do you have to become more gnostic in this case?
Yeah IDK. Our news organizations have been broken for a while. (I pay no attention to the news.) I guess I figure ivermectin had some positive effects (how big I have no idea.) and that there was some desire to keep this out of the main stream narrative. It's like many of the stories around covid and government (or someone) trying to control the message. I think you should give Scott a bit of a break. To go against the MSM ivermectin story would have cost him in terms of reputation. And since he doesn't really have any idea about the truth, it's easy to take the path he did.
To change my mind? Some good study with good data... ? Really I've just moved on. It's like the lab leak, yeah I think it's probably true, but I'll never know and it's not worth getting all worked up about. There's a lot of things we don't get the truth about. Our country is probably better than most in terms of openness, be thankful that you and I can talk about this with being censored.
I'm reading "The Goodness Paradox", very interesting. We perhaps self-domesticated ourselves...
While I would read something by Marinos, it's never going to end until Scott goes "Yeah, you were right all along and I was wrong all the time". Otherwise, devotees will keep popping up here to go "So Scott about this latest article on ivermectin" in saecula saeculorum.
I am positive your are right about that. Even if Moses himself came down from the mountain with a golden tablet reading "Ivermectin is shit" it would still make no difference.
The linked theory of patriarchy has the usual problems:
1) It equivocates "alpha males" and "all males". It explains how a coalition of strong men can coordinate to kill a stronger but lonely tyrant. It does not explain why such coalition would create rules that *also* favor the weak men. Intrasexual competition is much more important from the evolutionary perspective.
If I tried to design social norms that favor strong men, it would probably be something like "only strong men can have sex with women" or "it is a crime if a weak man has sex with strong man's wife, but it is legal for a strong man to have sex with weak man's wife". Along with a system that makes the distinction clear, for example only strong men are allowed to wear certain dress / headband / necklace, and you can officially become a strong man by successfully challenging a strong man to some kind of physical conflict in presence of two witnesses.
So the hypothesis of "alpha male coalition" needs to explain how the social norms of monogamy etc. have evolved, instead of something like described above.
2) Maybe it's my careless reading, but the explanation seems circular / begging the question at some places. Sons were considered more important, therefore paternity became important, therefore women were confined to their homes. Okay, but *why* were the sons considered more important? You can explain how patriarchy can lead to more patriarchy, but the question is how it started.
Consider an alternative explanation: using a plough requires a lot of physical strength, and men are on average stronger than women. Thus in societies based on agriculture which used plough, men provided greater value at war, at hunt, at agriculture, so women had to provide value at childbirth, child care, and taking care of household; there was not much of a choice how to split the tasks. In societies that used hoes for agriculture, there was more freedom for division of the work. Occam's razor.
This is not saying that boys' clubs do not exist. They do. But they do not promote *all* men, only their members.
Agree. The thesis would be stronger if it argued that patriarchy is a coalition of beta males.
Oh I thought that was the thesis... beta males took over... it's better to get along and build partnerships.
I agree that it is better to build partnerships, but you do not need to include everyone. A lonely alpha can be defeated by a coalition. But coalition of top 50% men cannot be defeated even if the rest of the men unite against them.
From the perspective of Darwinian fitness, males & females (in total) must always be equal. Every child has both 1 mother & 1 (biological) father. So there is no sense in which males as a whole gain an advantage over females as a whole. Rather, certain males gain an advantage and others receive a disadvantage (such as being killed by the dominant coalition).
I think there are cases where this is not true. (Equal sex ratio.) Certainly wasps and some fish, I wonder about naked mole rats? Are more of the sterile workers female? (It looks like the answer is no.)
For what it's worth, some studies of Y chromosome sequences suggest that ~4-8000 years ago, only about 1 male for every 17 females reproduced:
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.full.pdf+html
That is, the reproductively effective male population was 1/17 of the reproductively effective female population. One tends to assume this is because the 94% of men who failed to reproduce did so through lack of status or access or something, but it isn't outside the realm of possibility that a large number of them actually just didn't exist at all -- that the male population reaching reproductive age was significantly less than that of the equivalent female population.
Reading Razib Khan posting about the impact of steppe-warriors, I assume they are responsible, mostly. Which is connected with a lot of males not reaching enough age to reproduce - resp. died trying. https://razib.substack.com/p/entering-steppelandia-pop-77-billion
Seriously, this woman got a grant from Scott to write a book? I could do that article as well, how about shoving a few grand my way?
If she really never heard that theory before, she is ignorant of history (this would be a cue to swerve into the Usual Rant about history but let's set that aside for now). "Alpha male" cavemen were the province of H.G. Wells. Hush, I feel a G.K. Chesterton quote coming on:
"True, I cannot set forth here in any great detail any actual proofs of these prehistoric origins; but I never heard of anybody bothering about historic proofs in connection with prehistoric origins. There is quite as much evidence for my favorite uncle’s theory of the primitive pillow as there is for Mr. H.G. Wells’s detailed account of the horrible Old Man, who ruled by terror over twenty or thirty younger men who could have thrown him out of the cave on his apelike ear"
And from "The Everlasting Man", 1925:
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off.
…In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it.
…A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock.
…This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall."
At least the woman does query the Caveman Theory but then she rushes off to the other, complementary, and as erroneous one: The Golden Age of the Matriarchy
(This comment looks like it will run long, so I'll break it in two halves)
The lady does realise that we have Sweet Fanny Adams notion about what pre-human or prehistoric human life was life 300,000 years ago, so all theories about the Rise of the Patriarchy are, in the end, hot air. (Allow me a moment of ROFL about whatever person picked the illustrations adding in "Italy's bishops with the late Pope" as an example of how "councils of elder males enforced patriarchy")
That doesn't stop her from galumphing off after "all these societies are examples of matriarchy" red herrings:
"In 19th century Congo-Brazaville, a husband would not take even ‘an egg from her chicken coop’ without permission from his wife."
*That is still a patriarchal society*. This is just demonstrating that she doesn't know about the egg money or how such agriculturally-based societies worked, even up to the 20th century:
https://goldenruleeducation.org/curriculum/egg-money/
Of course he wouldn't interfere with "the women's sphere" of the home and domestic areas like keeping hens, dairy and butter, etc. Any more than his wife would have meddled with his tools and crops without his knowledge and permission - these are for generating income and keeping the family economy going, not simply personal consumption.
If I'm being grumpy, it looks like all that is needed today to write a 'stunning new theory' is just to be ignorant of what was being peddled before you were born. I wish I could monetise my ignorance, I certainly could use the boost to my income stream!
EDIT: There is certainly something to be examined there about female seclusion, and its class/hierarchical basis. The ladies of the Emperor's harem had lotus feet, but their maidservants did not. Women may be absent from the painted rolls she gives as examples, but in real life working class women were out in the fields and the markets.
And all patriarchies are not alike. Christian Europe may have been a patriarchal society, but it wasn't permissible for families to sell their daughters into legal prostitution (women of course did engage in sex work, but the attitudes were different). There's a lot to examine in different cultures about attitudes, e.g. to the 'double standard'.
Ram, the incarnation of Vishnu in the Treta Yuga, is the ideal man who does not go beyond or transgress social limits, and he is the husband of one wife: https://namadwaar.org/columns-by-devotees/nibbles/ekapatni-vrata/
Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu in the Dwapar Yuga, has eight main wives, as well as 16,000 ceremonial wives whom he married to save their reputations.
Rules bounding the conduct of women apply in both cases, and Sita is persecuted because of this: she has to undergo the test of fire to prove her chastity after being rescued from abduction by Ravanna, and years later the people of the kingdom still demand that Rama puts her away because of the stain on her reputation - she does not need to be guilty of anything, merely living away from her husband is enough.
I linked to a William Bucker piece in my other comment, so it's also worth linking to his "Where are the matriarchies?"
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/17/where-are-the-matriarchies
> it looks like all that is needed today to write a 'stunning new theory' is just to be ignorant of what was being peddled before you were born
I mean, yeah, welcome to the Internet
I agree with you, this is story telling, not research.
To be fair, that is just a blog post and not a book, I hope she has more stringent criteria when writing one of those.
I realise I sounded very unkind, but I don't take well to "Wow, just had my socks blown off by stunning new theory!" which turns out to be the same old stuff that has been knocking about since Adam were a lad, and while I might extend some benefit of the doubt to an 18 year old reading Big Books for the first time, I don't give as much credit to established academics who should have heard this line of thinking in their field before.
Though I suppose if "the Old Man who dominated the tribe" theory is sufficiently old that it fell out of favour and the younger crop of academics never heerd o' it before, then bringing it back with your own twist can elicit "Wow, just had my socks blown off by stunning new theory" even from grown up professors.
Speaking of books, is this the one that got the grant aid?
"My forthcoming book is "THE GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE" (Princeton University Press). In South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, it is men who provide for their families and organise politically. Chinese women work but are still locked out of politics. Latin America has undergone radical transformation, staging massive rallies against male violence and nearly achieving gender parity in political representation. Scandinavia still comes closest to a feminist utopia, but for most of history Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South East Asia and Southern Africa.
What explains "The Great Gender Divergence"? My book will uncover the origins and evolution of patriarchy, the drivers of gender equality and regional variation."
I see by her CV that she's not a historian, which may explain a lot. She really may be just encountering these ideas for the very first time. Political economy seems to be her field (or practicum, if I am to avoid racist offensive terms with connotations of slavery in accordance with the best, most up-to-date principles):
"Current Appointments
Lecturer, International Development, King’s College London, 2017- present
Faculty Associate, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, 2017- present
Previous Appointments
Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, 2015-2017
Special Supervisor, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 2015-2017
Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 2013-2015
Research Assistant, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 2008-2009.
Education
PhD Geography, LSE, 2013
Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education, LSE, 2012
MSc International Development (Distinction), LSE, 2009
BA Philosophy (First), University of Nottingham, 2007"
"Practicum" is offensive to Carthaginians oppressed by Romans :)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/cartago-est-delenda/
Didn't I say Latin was the language of oppressors? 😁
I do think anthropological research on hunter-gatherers & primitive agriculturists can establish that patriarchy is not distinctive to Islamic or plow-reliant civilizations:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190719114235/https://quillette.com/2019/05/09/a-girls-place-in-the-world/
I would also say that we can be confident that pre-modern what was indeed violent. My 2nd most recent book review was on that topic:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/12/03/constant-battles/
Indeed the pre-modern world was violent, just like our modern world. But what Chesterton is getting at, and what I agree with, is that we have no idea of what the domestic or political life of Homo sapiens were like 300,000 years ago, but what evidence we do have is of things like cave art - creativity and the artistic spirit.
So whatever else we may say about cave men or hunter gatherers or early He-Men No Girls Allowed Clubs, the one sure thing we can say is that they produced art. Maybe it was a bunch of patriarchal gents telling the ladies to get back to the cooking pot while they were doing it, maybe it was stunning brave bold Amazon matriarchs doing the art, but we have the art (if not the evil overlord list of how to keep women down).
I wouldn't say "No idea". I would bet a good deal of money that cavemen had no polities as large as China.
That's just your white cis hetero patriarchal privilege talking! How can you deny the possibility that the free-travelling, networking, empowered and independent cavewomen did not establish and govern an idyllic matriarchal matrilineal borderless polity that encompassed the known world of the time? This is why women can't have nice things, when male devotees of sky-father gods conspire to snatch power from earth mothers!
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/895555-the-great-cosmic-mother-rediscovering-the-religion-of-the-earth