Scott, I started tracking down your email cuz I have an article request, but I don't know how you feel about those and I don't know how you like emails to be worded for you to triage them.
Then I realized: maybe your commenters could help, and we could save your time.
> Maybe neuroscientists or psychologists have good reasons for this, but "autism" is the most immensely deranged word in the history of categories--- what utility is a word that crosses absent minded professors and people who can't conceptually distinguish a week from a month insofar as you can wordlessly elicit conceptual understanding from them???? If you worked at the dictionary factory and you tried to slip that word in, you'd be fired immediately. So why do psychologists or neuroscientists get away with this???
I think there's something important here that people aren't talking about, and every time I see an excerpt from Michael lewis' SBF book my skin crawls.
I agree that it is crazy to have a word that means both the absent-minded professor and someone nonverbal who couldn't survive without special care.
And yet there is a continuum between the two, so to make two different words, you would need to make an arbitrary line somewhere. I haven't seen the data, but I suspect that the distribution isn't even bimodal; that there isn't a natural thin place where to cut the curve.
I think (maybe I am wrong here) that the traditional cutting point for "is actually a serious disease" would be something like "is capable of living alone and keeping a job". That seems to involve factors that are not inherently a part of autism, such as whether the person has other qualities (such as high intelligence) that can *compensate* for the weaknesses. An absent-minded professor will probably be more employable than an absent-minded factory worker. Does it mean that stupid aspies are "more autistic" than smart aspies? Do aspies with programming skills become "less autistic" when there is a shortage of programmers, and then become "more autistic" again when a tech bubble bursts and they get laid off? Also, it feels like this would in some sense punish the people in the middle for developing good coping skills (now that they have the skills, we conclude officially that their problem was never real).
I agree that identifying politically with one of your traits (whether a strength or a weakness) is stupid. People are multidimensional. Also, you should be more than the sum of the parts you were born with.
But sometimes the label is pushed on you against your will. Not necessarily a specific diagnosis; just people calling you "weird" when you are young, and telling you that your kids are "weird" when you get older. You choice is not between "weird" and "normal"; it is between "weird" in an unspecified way, and a specific way of being weird. The latter has the advantage that it potentially provides useful information on what to do about it.
That said, I think the label "aspie" also fulfilled this purpose, and caused less confusion.
By the way, under the second article you linked, the most upvoted comment says that vaccinations cause autism. LOL
yeah you're right this is the moderating voice I needed--- cashing out "social model of disability" into labor supply/demand is pretty potent. I also think it matters that we don't know how much effort it costs a given person to learn to "fit in" or whatever, and thanks for reminding me of that.
yes this is just what the doctor ordered, thanks! I especially like the part where he admitted that we're bad at words, but I hadn't fully considered that "autism" is a slightly worse variant of the thing that a bajillion other psychiatric phenomena are subject to.
This thread is old, so I’m writing this out while I am thinking about it and I’ll repost it in the next open thread.
Does anybody have any good breakdowns of sexual partner statistics? Particularly in terms of lifetime sexual partners? Keep in mind that I know nothing about stats and I don’t have the capacity to evaluate whether a given study is good or not. Trusting y’all not to lead me astray.
I think my main question is that it seems odd to me that lifetime sexual partners is a normal distribution, particularly for men.
So, average number in the US is around 6. That doesn’t seem low, I guess, because there is a sizable percentage of the population that has 0-2 lifetime partners.
And I guess it makes sense that women would be a normal distribution. Most women can get laid whenever they want, so intuitively you would expect a bell curve there.
But for men... most men are wired to get laid as much as possible. Some can’t, or choose not to, or get into a serious relationship relatively early. I believe a majority of the population falls into one of those buckets.
But, for guys who can and don’t get locked down.... isn’t 6 a crazy low lifetime number? Wouldn’t you expect some sort of gap between, say, 5 and 20?
For example: average attractiveness guy gets a high school sweetheart (1). Goes to college, has a hookup and then gets in another year long relationship (3). Breaks up, one more hookup and one more relationship in college (5). Breaks up a year after graduating. After a year or two without getting laid, gets another 3 year relationship (6). Breaks up, gets motivated, is now a little more mature and confident, so he hooks up with a few girls over the next year (10). Around 27, meets a girl that becomes his wife (11). Divorced after 8 years, one more hookup and one more marriage that lasts til he dies (13).
That is more than double the lifetime average, and it seems lowwww. This is a guy who spends the majority of his life in committed relationships, never cheats, never goes through a slut phase where he sleeps with 8-10 girls in a year.
Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
Seems to me that extremes are easy to imagine but actually not that frequent in real life.
It is easy to imagine a guy who can't get a girl. It is easy to imagine a traditional monogamous man. It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night. In physics, this is sometimes expressed as "the only numbers that do not require special explanation are zero, one, and infinity". :D
In real life you probably get a lot of men who either try to be monogamous but their first few relations fall apart for various reasons, and men who try to bang as many women as possible but are less successful than a Hollywood movie might make you believe.
> Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
> Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number. To find out better numbers, you would have to change the questionnaire -- to write it so that it makes it easier to "remember" partners that would otherwise easily be "forgotten".
So if I wrote the questionnaire, instead of directly asking about the number of partners, I would go category by category. "Have you been married? How many times? Did you have a long-term boyfriend you didn't marry? How many? Did you have a boyfriend you had sex with but the relation was short? How many? Did you have a one-night stand? How many times?" and only after all the answers are written down, I would ask about the total number of sexual partners. (Need to ask separately, because there can be overlap between the categories, or partners who were not included in any. Such as: had a one-night stand with someone, then 20 years later they met again and got married.)
Without a good questionnaire, I don't think there could a simple method that works, such as "multiply numbers reported by women by 2, and divide numbers provided by men by 2". First, we need to figure out the exact coefficient empirically. Second, it's not just simple division or multiplication; different parts of the curve probably misreport their numbers differently.
> It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night.
hahaha no it isn't! I was roommates with a guy in my early 20's who was near the top end of what I would consider achievable for a non-celebrity (or celebrity equivalent, or guy who organizes his entire life around getting laid like a party promoter or whatever). He was tall, handsome, charming, and absolutely relentless. Hit on girls everywhere - gas station, grocery story - just absolutely fearless and never ever satisfied. I'd guess he averaged about 8-10 new girls a year.
> If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
So, I swear I didn't do this for internet points, but in the other comment I made a guess and looked up the stats. Intuitively, I thought there should be a gap/lull between 0-5 and 20 plus for men. My thought process is that there is a significant difference between the number of women that most men are able to sleep with and the number that they would choose to sleep with. At a certain level of attractiveness - my guess was Pareto rule, 80/20 - I thought that men would be able to get lifetime numbers closer to their actual preferences.
Point being, I thought the majority of guys would fall in the 0-5 range, and then there would be a 20% of attractive guys who were 20 plus, with fewer guys falling into that middle range of 6-19.
The differences are fuzzier than I thought, but definitely there. 28.3% of men report 15 plus, compared to 12.5% reporting 10-14. So, the gap is there - question is, do I have the best explanation for that gap?
> I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number.
Makes total sense. They do this in real life. Drives me crazy. Not because I care what the number is, but because I know that you are lying to me when you say that it's 6! lolol
It’s pretty common, although I again I don’t have any stats. What do guys who can get laid do after a breakup? Go out and try to get laid. Or, flip side, even they are looking for a relationship, you have false starts along the way. Maybe replace some of those hookups with month and half relationships that didn’t work.
I think the key point I’m trying to make is that because of the way men are wired, I wouldn’t expect a fully normal distribution. Six makes sense to me as an average, no issues with that. But I would expect some sort of gap in lifetime partners between the majority of men (80ish percent) who take what they can get (0-6) and those who can get laid when they want to (15-20 plus).
I mean, it's clearly not a normal distribution, that's not the sort of distribution you expect for a "count of..." anything. I forget all my basic statistics at this point but it's going to be some sort of long tailed distribution with a peak in the low single digits and a very long tail extending into the hundreds.
But my comment isn't to nitpick your grasp of statistics, it's to more deeply criticise your understanding of male psychology. I just don't think that this chad/virgin view of male psychology in which all men are constantly trying to fuck as many women as they possibly can is accurate, it's just a dumb stereotype. Most men have limited (but nonzero) interest in random hookups with random floozies. Maybe they try it a few times and realise it's not appealing. Maybe they get interested in it only under certain circumstances, like when travelling or after a breakup. Maybe they are generally uninterested in it, but hey, if you're really drunk and she's really hot then these things do occasionally happen. But the population of men who constantly bang as many girls as they possibly can is limited (and can be found at both ends of the distribution, but probably not in the middle).
Thanks for clarifying the shape, yeah that's obviously how that should look. But it should still have a gap!
I'm doing a shit job of explaining what I'm intuiting. The chad/virgin thing is lame, and I'm not saying that every guy wants to fuck 1000 women. What I'm trying to get at is that I think there is a reasonable gap between a) the number of women that men actually sleep with and b) the number that they would sleep with if given the chance.
There are a lot of guys who sleep with every woman they can, and that number happens to be in the single digits. Those guys tend to wreck their marriages when they get a cute secretary.
If you want a look at unchained male libido, it looks more like professional athletes, musicians, etc... Many of those guys eventually get wives - some of them get married surprisingly young! And I'm sure a decent percentage are faithful husbands. But in general, you'll see a professional athlete have a wife... and a lot of discrete girlfriends on the road, which the wife ignores. You see that pattern throughout history as well.
So, here's what I'm trying to say. I think there should be some kind of inflection point - maybe an 80/20 thing. At some level of attractiveness, guys are less bound by what they can get, and instead become bound by what they actually desire. I would expect a sizable jump in lifetime partners around that point.
It says 25.8% for 5-9, 12.5% for 10-14, and 28.3% for 15 plus! and the 15+ amount for women is less than half of that. So... I guess the question now is whether my theory is accurate, or there is some better explanation for why it is that way.
I’m looking for an article that I’m 80% sure was written here (or some adjacent Substack) that was a take down of a viral political psychology study. I can’t remember the specific “findings” of the study but it was one of those classic “we proved conservatives are bad” papers that always goes viral in parts of Twitter/Reddit despite having comically terrible methodology. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
My Metaphysical Transit Authority shirt is finally starting to wear out, and I was thinking of ordering another one. But today my kid noticed a problem with it: the original trolley problem mentions five people in the path of the trolley, but the shirt only has four!
I intend to order another shirt whether or not you fix this, but please reply to let me know if you will fix it; this will remind me to place my order.
I'll be noodling around with other coverage but the defence strategy seems to be "Sam is a Good Boy, he's a maths nerd who doesn't drink or party! He was an honest businessman!" and the prosecution right now is going for "here is this list of witnesses gonna tell you that he was a fraud, he knew it was fraud, and he knew he was committing fraud, also it was all him and not them".
Any speaker that gets Democratic support would inherently be suspect by the Republicans, so they'd probably just kick her out again. Plus, it seems unlikely that Cheney would be willing to make a deal with the Democrats. She is a staunch conservative after all, not exactly a moderate.
If the Democrats decide to support a Speaker with the same discipline that they decided to oust McCarthy, the Republicans could only kick that Speaker out if they could get 217 out of 221 Republican house members on board to do so. And we just got an object lesson in how hard it is to get 217 Republican congressmen to agree on anything.
If the Democrats somehow managed to get a member of the Democratic party elected to the Speakership, yes, the GOP would join ranks to evict that person out of principle. But if the Democrats throw their support behind any reasonable Republican speaker, I suspect there would be at least five Republican congressmen who would go along with it.
Then for shits and giggles, the Democrats could withdraw their support two weeks later and wait for her to get kicked out again.
Honestly I'm a bit confused why the standing orders (or whatever they're called) of the US House of Reps allow a speaker to be kicked out without the election of a replacement speaker.
I don't think the moderate Republicans would vote for any Democrat-backed candidate until they've been through numerous rounds of humiliating defeat trying to pass one with only R votes.
Earlier this year, they took 15 rounds to vote over the course of a week and *still* didn't cave. Why would this time be different?
Earlier this year, the Democrats didn't support any Republican candidate for Speaker. In the present (and IMHO unlikely) hypothetical, the Democrats are supporting a Republican candidate. Earlier this year, the only way the GOP could get one of their own in that position, was to achieve nearly total unanimity within their caucus. Which as you note was particularly hard, and made them look weak and foolish. In the present hypothetical, any five GOP congressmen who want can cut through all that nonsense and get a Republican speaker on the first vote.
Well, first vote after the Democrats make this hypothetical offer; I expect they would want to make the Republicans suffer a bit before bailing them out.
Just because here is the only place where I get an understanding ear rather than being booed... 25 minute aboriginal land acknowledgement at the start of a meeting this week. I did time it. And again it included prayers to the Creator.
I am hopeful that here in Australia we've reached the peak of Aborigine-worship and I'm hopeful for a decrease soon. There's a referendum next weekend to enshrine an ill-defined "Indigenous Voice To Parliament" in the Constitution, and polls have shown a massive decline in support for the proposition over the last couple of months, that has all the qualities of a preference cascade. At first the vibe was "if you don't vote yes, you're a racist", but as more and more people have come out as "no" supporters people realised it was safe to do so. As a result, the referendum is headed for a resounding and embarrassing 40-60 defeat.
But it's a lot easier to have the courage to object to something in a secret ballot than to stand up in a meeting and say "Actually why don't we _not_ do this?"
I'd like to, but feels like paying the dane geld. And also, using the term native american is like three levels down on the euphemism treadmill. Considered very offensive these days by all the right thinking people in my office, officially at least. I just point it out for the lols.
This week we take a look back at the ideas of Ted Kaczynski. He was a militant critic of modern industrial society who chose to propagate his ideas using terrorism against scientists. His methods were odious and horrifying, but were there ideas that were worth thinking about? Which ideas are wrong? Which ideas can be salvaged? How much do these ideas exist outside how writings, and how should we deal with them? Do they continue to be dangerous? Should the ideas of a person be erased from discourse because of the awful things they did?
A summary text and podcast audio can be found here:
Why did the Democrats all vote to oust House Speaker McCarthy?
1) Considering the state of the Republican party right now, wasn't he a moderate that could be worked with? Didn't his compromise bill last Saturday to prevent a government shutdown prove that?
2) With McCarthy gone, aren't the odds high that his replacement will be a more extreme Republican who will be harder to work with? Won't that raise the odds of a government shutdown on November 17, which is something the Democrats don't want to happen?
House Dems supported McCarthy on his 45 day continuing resolution. The next day McCarthy went on the Sunday morning talk shows to say the entire cluster fuck was the Dems fault. They just didn't trust the guy.
They weren't willing to play ball with McCarthy any _longer_, because he reneged on previous agreements that the Dems had reached with him.
Also, the GOP's renegades in the House have made it clear that they will continue treating any Speaker who makes any deals with any Dems as a blood enemy. They explicitly promise to continue "burning it all down" (their words) for the sake of punishing any such Speaker, and given the House's rules of operation they can in fact paralyze the place. That removes any motivation for the Dems to enter into any such new agreements.
I think it began dying when the Soviet Union fell. Economic liberalism had a foil to keep it vital, and keep the criticism moored somewhat to reality. Without that foil, a lot of people assumed we were well on our way to Utopia. But while economic liberalism was delivering a lot for developing countries, its benefits were much more subtle in developed countries than they had been in previous generations. Basically, a lot of people, especially in the US, felt promised an ever increasing rate of standard of living improvement, thought that rate was too slow, or even negative, and mood affiliated themselves into believing the standard of living was actually decreasing. While this is easily disprovable, the sentiment is strong and is highly resistant to facts.
It is now unfashionable, and even inviting of mocking scorn to point out simple things like the increase in housing sizes in the US never ceased, that US manufacturing output continues to grow, that the standard of living considered unacceptable today would be luxurious 40 years ago, that the post WW2 economic growth that US workers enjoyed was built largely upon the fact that all of America's industrial competitors were destroyed and had to start over, etc.
The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that this is a psychological problem and not a wealth or distribution of wealth problem. Humans seem to always evaluate their standing relative to other people, not any objective measure. If you're in the top 1% in your relevant economic comparisons, it seems to have the same effect on how you (and the other 99%) feel about you whether you're a Google Senior Programmer or a 12th century merchant with no electricity using chamberpots).
Objectively, 99.xx% of the population in the US today has a higher standard of living than the 1% living prior to 1000 AD. Kings in England had a life expectancy of about 50 between 1000 and 1600 AD. Because these are kings and not just wealthy could-be-kings, this discounts the normal issues of life expectancy from child mortality - they just didn't live that long and were riddled with medical issues that even the poorest today don't deal with. I can understand a peasant in 980 AD looking at the king and thinking he was high above him - because he was, and that king had significant benefits compared to the peasant. But not compared to people living today.
I think it comes down to power, because power is more zero-sum than wealth, and relative wealth is often a source of power. Nobody really cares if I could pay $50,000 for something in the US today, but that would be a huge sum of money for any society, past or present, where $5/day would hire a laborer for as much backbreaking labor as you would want. Or sex, or to walk around behind you singing your praises. The difference is power. We seem very in tune with relative power differences, which I think is the real argument, not wealth and especially not standard of living.
Exactly. And it makes sense that humans would use relative power as the metric for assessing "how they are doing", because trying to follow some normed absolute scale would be nonsense. "Who cares how I am doing relative to Ottoman Empire peasants, the people I think should not be higher status than I should be look very successful on Instagram, and that depresses/enrages me!!!!!"
Right. There will always be a pecking order. In systems where everybody is economically near-equal, like a high school or a prison, the pecking order is based even harder on something other than economics, and it's usually a lot nastier.
You always hear that German fairy tales are brutal, but I never knew that this extends to universal stories like Cinderella as well. The German variant has the evil stepsisters mutilated, blinded and ostracized as punishment for their abuse, while in the dominant English variant, Cinderella forgives them without a second thought and rewards them by marrying them off to rich noblemen once she's queen. I think if I had kids, I'd definitely read them the German version.
"As punishment for the attempted murder of Snow White, the prince orders the Queen to wear a pair of red-hot iron slippers and to dance in them until she drops dead. With the evil Queen finally defeated and dead, Snow White's wedding to the prince peacefully continues."
Given the time period involved in writing these stories, the "or else" may have actually been significantly worse. There were some harsh people empowered to do some bad stuff back then.
Something that interests me about the Grimm version is that the people who complained about the brutality were also German. The original sanitized version was also in German, published by the Grimms in response to complaints. So apparently there was a cultural difference within Germany between the people telling the stories and the people buying the book. Also the evil stepmothers were evil mothers in the original; the Grimms felt evil stepmothers were less disturbing.
I've heard it argued that some of Grimm's tales, e.g. Hansel and Gretel, are what remains in cultural memory of a period of starvation (the kids being sent out into the woods because there wasn't enough food for them at home, the "witch" wanting to eat children because there wasn't any other food around, etc, and I think there are examples of cannibalism in other tales as well, although I can't think of specific ones now).
Quite interesting, but I'm not sure to what extent this is supported by historical research, or if I'm just repeating popular misinformation.
The Grimms themselves believed that kind of stuff. They collected all of those stories in hopes that they contained knowledge of the past. Today's folklorists don't agree.
How many of those criminals were children? Do you believe that making the process of asylum seeking more miserable for children in particular will reduce the crime rate? Is there any causal connection to crime at all, or do you just think that anything that hurts immigrants is justified so long as some of them are criminals?
I'm not sure why I'm expected to care about these "injustices" when the people crying about them actively covered up children literally being raped by brown immigrants. They do not have a principled concern for children, they love brown people and hate white people, so nobody is under any obligation to care about some cartoon mural nonsense.
Joseph Stalin apparently has the Guinness World Record for raising the most statutes to himself. However, these statues were within the U.S.S.R., a country where he was the leader.
What historical figure (so no religious figures) has the most statues outside of a territory that they lived/ruled?
By way of example, I can see two George Washington monuments outside the U.S.A., John Adams has one, F.D.R. has at least six.
Which seems like a silly ruling, as there are lots of religious figures that aren't at the level of Jesus or Buddha that closely match what he's looking for. A famous Pope I think would work, or a theologian/church leader like Aquinas or Martin Luther.
This might get a bit spicy depending on how you define "A country where he lived/ruled", but Robert E. Lee might be a contender. Particularly pre-2010 or so.
It's definitely a close call, and I'm probably biased since I'm American. To me, the distinction between the Confederacy and the Union is clearly big enough to warrant counting them as separate nations for the purpose of the question.
With that being said, when I look at other countries' civil wars, I'm not as convinced that I would find this argument persuasive. If someone built a statue to Liu Bei in Beijing, for example, I'm not sure I'd care that Liu Bei never ruled that particular part of China (or, going further, that he was at war with that part of China for most of his life). It's sort of all China to me.
Regardless, I'll give in to my biases and say that Robert E. Lee definitely counts (only the statues that are outside the former Confederacy though). Hopefully this rule does not come back to haunt me.
That's pretty good! Certainly for modern historical figures, that's in the lead. But Christopher Columbus actually has a crazy amount of statues - more than 22 in Argentina alone.
OK, I messed around with the raven one a little more and got one that seems perfect. The key is clearly gripped in the raven's beak. (I changed the prompt a little, substituting "beak" for "mouth.") https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpg
Nice! Its obviously within the abilities of the model to produce the type of image we are interested in but it seems to have something like a strong prior against the image/difficulty "understanding" the compositionality in the prompt
Yeah, I think both images are at the upper limit of how many relationships between elements it can keep hold of: The key is *in* the raven’s beak, the raven is *on* the woman’s shoulder, they are *in* a library. For llama, bell is *on* tail, boy is * on* llama, both are *in* desert.
I developed a fascination with Dall-e2, even though Midjourney and others make way prettier images, and have made thousands of images with it, along the way figuring out tricks to make the dumb and oppositional thing make what I’m asking for. I used that stuff to get Dall-e3 make these 2 images. With the Raven image what made the most difference was to ask for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. The latter introduces a 4th element, the window, with the other 3 elements inside it, and 3 elements each bearing some relationship to one of more of the others seems to be its limit. The llama image, while no more compositionally complex than the raven one, was much harder to get, because Dall-e has such a strong prior for llamas wearing bells around their necks. I finally used a confusional technique, the misspelled “barette” on the llama tail, in an effort to make Dall-e dizzy enough that it forget where the bell is supposed to go on a llama. And it worked. And note that it did not even include a barrette in the image.
Confusional techniques get Dall-e to lose control of itself. You know how if you ask GPT4 a question it does not know the answer to it often hallucinates? It’s possible to do something similar with Dall-e2. If an important element in your prompt is a nonsense word, or something Dall-e has never seen (an amphisbena, for instance), or incorporates in image it cannot recognize it will sometimes produce images far more violent and obscene than any you can get it to make via straightforward prompt. I have a whole collection of them if you’re curious.
The prompt was "a desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
Dall-e was vey stuck on the idea that llama have bells around their necks and no place else. Telling it there was a barrette in its tail (barette deliberately misspelled to add an element of uncertainty about what the item was) and the bell was attached to that broke Dall-e's mental set.
Soren, I just got Dalle-e 3 to make the raven image or at least something close enough I think it passes. My prompt was "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library." Here's the image:
If you are very particular you can point out that it's not clear whether any of the key is actually *in* the raven's mouth. You'd get the same image if the key was glued to the right side of the raven's beak. On the other hand, it is also possible that the key has a protuberance on it that is gripped by the 2 blades of the beak on the right-hand side of the beak. It took 2 tries with this prompt to get the image. First try gave me 4 images, second one only 3 for some reason. Before I asked for stained glass I asked for "a realistic image" (rest of prompt was the same) and got one perfect result on the first try. It's here:
I'm sure I could get a stained glass image with absolutely no tiny possible flaws to quibble about if I ran the prompt a couple more times.
I think what made the prompt work were (1) I asked for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. Asking for a window adds another element. (2) I mentioned the raven and key first, so as the get that info into Dall-e before it's little head was full. (3) I said "they are in a library" rather than "on the shoulder of a woman in a library" because the latter is a complex sentence, so easier to get confused by.
Not really relevant to the bet, but I've played around with Dall-e 2, and it is often possible to fix problems like no key in the raven's mouth during a second pass. You edit the original photo in Dall-e, whiting out the area where you want a change. Then use a prompt similar to your original one, but changed in a way that makes the feature you want added as prominent as possible. So instead of describing the photo as, say, a woman with a raven on her shoulder and a key in the mouth of the raven, you say a raven with a key in its mouth & Raven is sitting on the shoulder of a woman.
You may know all that already. Out of curiosity -- have you tried it on the images where Dall-e3 failed.?
For the purposes of the bet, I would see that as a clear fail. Thanks for the tips though, I might find them useful in some of the things I've tried to make.
Oh, also, Dall-e2 was very resistant to making images of impossible things (3-headed animals) or even just things you rarely see, like a raven with a key in its mouth. Sometimes it works to first edit the problematic area to make a familiar image -- say a raven with some food in its mouth. Then on a second edit white out the food and ask for a key. If you still can't get a key, you can say the raven is carrying some tasty candy shaped like a key. There are a lot of trix.
Yes, but at this point you're no longer using the program as a fully autonomous AI. If you really wanted to just produce an applicable image, you could use inpainting or even copy/paste images together in Photoshop.
Yeah, I know. I resort to that sometimes. However, I prefer to get Dall-e to do it because I kind of like the unexpected touches it puts in. (Also, I want to WIN! the battle with Dall-e). I get that once you're editing you can't count the results towards the bet, I'm just curious how malleable Dall-e3 is. Tried to try it out today but site is having trouble -- probably too many people going there to give it a try.
Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism? Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism.
I think I understand why the GOP turned against it. Trump figured out that the real issue among conservatives was anti-immigration and used that to destroy the other Republican presidential candidates in 2016. Trump had never really been a fan of the free market: his comparative advantage in NYC real estate was his ability to work the Byzantine bureaucracy, not change it. (See Scott's review of Art of the Deal.) He also understood that the working class blamed and loathed job offshoring almost as much as they blamed and loathed immigration for their not-better wages. And that there is a white professional conservative class which identifies for familial reasons with the working class.
That explains what turned the GOP against neo-liberalism. But where did all the neo-liberals go? Lord knows they didn't all rush over to the Libertarian Party, although I'm not sure why not. If the Libertarian Party was going to have a moment, 2016 should have been it, given that the GOP was suddenly dumping free-market capitalism down the drain -- but no, the Libertarian Party continued to spin in place that year.
What about the Democrats? They had never been the party of Adam Smith, but since Trump *did* drive off Reagan-Bush Republicans from the party, and since few of them joined the Libertarians, shouldn't those Never Trumpers have moved the Dems to the right economically?
The facts on the ground are that Bidenomics is much like Trumpenomics. Tariffs. Mercantilism. Buy American.
Liberalism is dead.
How does that suddenly happen in both major parties at once? One hypothesis, using the Median Voter Theorem, is that, whereas the position of the median voter hasn't changed much if we only look at the well-ordered 1-d economic dimension, the salience of other issues has grown, gradually but suddenly, like big wheels turning, and the median voter is in a very different position because economics is longer as deciding an issue.
That economics matters less as an issue might seem counterintuitive, given that the political rhetoric *about* economics has changed so much, but if that *isn't* the case: where did all the neo-liberals go?
I thought the same thing as Chase. You could ask why the world is less into free trade, but that's not economic liberalism. The Inflation Reduction Act passed the House without a single Republican vote, so the GOP was clearly not on board with it, if that's a determining factor.
Regarding free trade, tariffs are higher than recent memory, but still tiny. I'm getting that tariffs now are 3%+, bigger than 2% ish early this century, but way smaller than the 30% I can recall in early US history from my history classes long ago, and I have the impression it sometimes topped 50% in Great Depression times. So is the question, why are they creeping up again?
One reason is our conflict with China. I'm seeing tariffs against China at 7.5% for some consumer goods and 25% for some other things. China's a major trading partner, so I can see how this would pull us up from 2% ish to 3% ish overall.
I don't know all our tariffs, but it looks like we have a trade dispute with one nation -- let's be honest, one man, Chairman Xi -- and we wouldn't be wise to generalize this to both parties opposing free markets.
In 1972, George McGovern ran on a platform that included a guaranteed minimum income of $6,000 per year, equivalent to about $44,000 today. McGovern lost 49 states, resulting in the Democratic retreat to more conservative economic policies. But one election doesn't necessarily settle an issue for all time. Many of today's political actors weren't even alive in 1972. They may have heard about McGovern's historic loss, but they didn't live through it and so it's not a defining political event for them.
The Median Voter Theorem says that the way to win elections is to move to the middle. Leftists have been arguing for years that that is wrong--that you should instead take a position that contrasts sharply with your opponent's; otherwise voters won't see a difference and will vote on other issues. Trump's success suggests that neoliberal economics is to the right of the median voter, so the contending positions are that the Democratic Party should move somewhat to the left on economic issues to capture the median voter, vs. the position that the Democratic Party should move significantly to the left to give working class people a clear and compelling reason to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. In the Democratic Party, the “median voter” crowd mostly wins these interparty arguments, but the party moves left regardless of which faction wins.
One problem with your logic. The Democrats should move somewhat to the left *of the Republicans* in order to capture the median voter. Saying that neoliberal economics is to the right of the voter doesn't say that the Democrats, who are already on the left, need to go further left. That's possible, given how general the statements are, but unlikely in practice.
As far as historic examples, you can go later than 1972. Reagan so thoroughly captured the political landscape that Clinton essentially ran as a Republican on most topics, but especially economic ones. He was even more muted on abortion than Democrats today ("safe, legal, and rare"), despite that being one of the defining differences between him and Republicans.
Social media is optimized for showing you people doing Things You Don't Like so you'll get angry. A free market basically allows people to do Things You Don't Like with impunity: how are you going to stop them? With government control of the economy, all you have to do is win an election, and boom: suddenly there's a tariff on Imports You Don't Like, licensing requirements for Activities You Don't Like, and prior restraint on Speech You Don't Like.
I hate that this might be true, but I fear that it actually is true. Back when we could self-segregate by community, we weren't exposed to the worst actions of our political enemies like we are today. Now it's easy to see real (and exaggerated or fully fake) excesses of our enemies all day every day.
>"Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism?"
Do you have any evidence to support this claim whatsoever, or is it just vibes? Because none of the rest of what you wrote justifies this and half of it is barely even true, or just requires further evidence.
The evidence is the industrial policy in the bipartisan stamped Inflation Reduction Act and all the Trump tariffs. Do you have reason to believe the Republicans and Democrats are as free trade oriented as they were a decade ago?
Did I fail to cover this in my second sentence above: "Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism." ?
The Inflation Reduction Act, which I invoked as a specific example, is full of subsidies to targeted industries. That is not free-market economics on a domestic or international level. Much domestic trade policy has international implications and vice-versa.
Pure libertarianism is going to be very unpopular. The best a libertarian party could do would be to run on the popular-ish parts of its platform like reducing housing regulation and opposing student loan forgiveness.
Employees are forbidden from law from quitting their jobs, the punishment being that they are not legally allowed to be employed by anybody. Employers are required by law to give their employees a 40% raise each year. Employers can fire employees at will, who are then free to find another job, at whatever market rate they can get.
Now imagine, for a moment, a deregulatory movement arises, and - the law requiring employers to give employees a raise each year is struck down.
Although the amount of regulation has in theory decreased, and in theory we now have a "more free" economy, it isn't clear that the economy has actually become more free - the law requiring a raise each year wasn't simply stifling economic freedom, it was a check and a balance on the law forbidding employees from quitting, preventing it from becoming too burdensome, and forcing employers to either fork over more and more cash year over year, or to give their employees the opportunity to find a different job.
I think a lot of the last thirty years of market "liberalization" has tended to look a lot more like the situation I described, than the actual market liberalization policy of eliminating both regulations together: A slow erosion of checks and balances, which has consistently favored particular parties over others.
Even straightforward deregulation can be anti-market; consider, for a moment, a regulation that requires power utilities to pay meter prices for solar power. A bunch of people install solar panels. The removal of this regulation might be an improvement, in terms of theoretical economic freedom - but it violates the expectations of a lot of people who made capital investments under the previous scheme. A consistent and predictable legal framework is necessary for a truly free market, and market liberalization efforts have had a tendency to undermine the legal framework under which investments were made.
We live in a society of myriad economic regulations, all of which have figured into individual decisions, investments, plans, preparations. Many of these regulations form delicate balances constructed over long periods of time; removing part of these balances leaves the whole unbalanced. Because "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs", often the deregulation effort to remove on part of a check-and-balance succeeds, and the deregulation effort that would balance it does not.
I think a lot of the erosion of support for free-market economics arises from the consistent failure of efforts to free the market to actually do so, and instead to just create disparities in the regulatory frameworks that advantage some participants over others.
(True free market economics have never been tried!)
More seriously, I think this has it backwards: Coordination is literally the thing market economics excels at, and the point where everything else fails horribly and ends up in a Molochian nightmare.
There are some externalities that don't get priced in, but the correct response is to get them properly priced in, so everything can coordinate on it, rather than try to write rules covering every possible case to avoid that externality happening.
Market is mostly excellent at coordination, but when it fails, it does so spectacularly. Roughly call it 80/20 (yes a big Pareto fan here). 80% is awesome and 20% is a death spiral to the lowest common.
This is a great explanation of why "I am always pro liberalization and market forces" is not always a recipe for libertarian regulation holocaust.
I am always trying to get across to people that while I am a HUGE fan of markets and capitalism, they are simply some of our best economics tools, a lot of libertarian ideas on economics are frankly garbage.
Markets and just general human behaviors have some very well understood failings, and the regulations should be there to help paper those over and help the markets function. So often they just benefit incumbent/politically connected actors.
"Markets and just general human behaviors have some very well understood failings,..."
Market failings are understood because economists study them and have a strong theoretical framework within which they understand these failings.
"and the regulations should be there to help paper those over and help the markets function. So often they just benefit incumbent/politically connected actors."
Political power on the other hand, has substantially more failure points, that are substantially less well understood. Shouldn't you be far more skeptical of anyone proposing to use political power to 'help markets function' ?
Yes, but to me, that doesn't mean 'never use political power'. It just raises the bar it such that laws should only come into play when the benefits are so clear as to be basically undeniable, even if they are produced by an imperfect and untrustworthy government.
The early 20th century antitrust movement, for example, seems like a net positive correction to a market failure. Food and medicine safety laws, too, at least up to a point. I am not making a blanket pro-regulation statement here, but simply that just because government can be more flawed than private industry does not mean that the former never has a role to play.
Have antitrust laws ever been successfully applied to a company that wasn't actively losing market share at the time they went into effect?
Edit:
Also, you should look at an old Sears catalogue sometime. Basically everything that wasn't literally poison, sold for medicinal purposes, is still sold today.
There's also a "triangle waistshirt company fire" effect we should consider: When the fire occurred, there weren't any fire engines that could deal with it. We could say government solved a problem - but government had the same kind of problem! Rather, it looks an awful lot like everybody in a position to do something about the problem was ignorant of the problem.
Then, the real change isn't "government does something", but rather an upstream "people realize there is a problem". Absent the FDA regulating food, people still would have demanded companies do something, after their attention was brought to the issues.
I'm certainly not making the claim that the former never has a role to play, but it appears that my bar for 'when the benefits are so clear as to be basically undeniable, ' is substantially higher than yours.
I would say that libertarian ideas are better than all of the others - it's the implementation that is the issue.
Like when Russia became a "free market" by handing ownership of everything from the politically-well-connected classes in their government roles - to those same people, now "private actors".
Spending tax dollars to build things, and then selling these at closed "auctions" at a pittance to the politically-well-connected is just giving the politically-well-connected money with extra steps. This isn't how a free market actually operates!
But this is how "privatization" so often goes.
Likewise, we'd be better off burning all the regulations and starting over from a clean slate; while this would be bad in the short term, it would at least ensure that the process is "fair".
Instead, we incrementally make revisions, the process overseen by the politically-well-connected, who favor some interests over others, and who use deregulation in the same manner they use regulation - as a second hand in a puppet of the invisible hand of the market, pulling it in their preferred direction.
Free trade I think has been an increasingly big target. And I increasingly think this is actually quite reasonable, but that's a complex topic. For the kind of five-second version of that:
Is it okay to forbid US companies from using unsafe-for-workers production processes, and then have trade agreements that effectively just result in these unsafe production processes being used somewhere else? If it's okay to import goods made using unsafe production processes - why isn't it okay to just use those processes here?
(The longer version gets into "The US is kind of an international country, and to a significant extent we kind of do the international equivalent of imposing harsher regulations on Montana than we do on Nebraska, which results in a general impoverishment of Montana." But also we kind of do a more complicated time-discrimination version of the same, where we impose the same harsh restrictions on everybody, but only after Nebraska got rich first. The rules on sleeping under bridges applies to rich and poor alike - the rules on unsafe labor applies to places that already got rich as well as the desperately poor alike.)
“… what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Why can’t that work come home?”
Steve Jobs
“Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Why?
“One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”
I’m typing this on a nice, reasonably priced iPhone, but as someone who once earned a decent living in a difficult but good paying union job I have to say I'm pretty ambivalent about this state of affairs
Gary Johnson did have a bit of a moment early in the 2016 general election season, touching 10% in polling averages a few times. The problem was that he failed to convince either voters or major donors and opinion influencer that he had a real chance of winning. He ended up with 3.3% of the popular vote: far more than any previous Libertarian candidate, but still just a footnote to the two-party contest.
Most of the economic classical liberals probably wound up holding their noses and voting for Trump anyway. I saw a variety of rationales: reflexive partisanship, a sense that Trump was bad but Clinton was worse, an idea that Trump was on their side on social issues, the expectation that Trump had little fixed economic policy of his own and would sign whatever Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell put on his desk, etc.
Others voted for Clinton, seeing her as the lesser evil. She had a few things going for her from an economic liberal's perspective: she's a free trader and she's generally aligned herself with the technocratic centre-left rather than the more socialist wing of the Democratic party.
All successful cases since that period are actually good old big government interventionists. China obviously, but South Korea even more so. The electronics chaebols where set up by the government during a dictatorship.
At this point, laissez-faire means let-do to the state interventionists, you do-nothing and just buy their stuff.
Indeed. Notably, a large share of the decrease in poverty took place out of China. The total number (not just per capita rate) of non-Chinese living in extreme poverty decreased by over half a billion in that period (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-decline-without-china).
Most of that reduction on poverty actually happens in China which manages to have a Schrödinger economy - red communism and neoliberalism simultaneously
It's been pointed out that if the US had taken the trillions the Chinese poured into the US economy in the form of bond purchases and invested it in infrastructure instead of spending it on foreign wars, many more US workers could have gained from the China trade. So maybe the average voter over the past couple decades was hurt not by trade policy but by war policy.
A more fundamental reason, than the obvious ones, is that in any economic orthodoxy there must be winners and losers. By definition, the relative power of economic groups must change (even if all collectively get wealthier). Therefore, despite a massive rise in living standards + income over the past 80 years, some groups (e.g. white working class) that were previous beneficiaries of the system are now losing ground. The knowledge economy has supplanted low tech manufacturing and they have less education and are less suited for this change. Moreover, as labour markets became more borderless, some groups were naturally being outcompeted when they previously held higher economic status due to the effect of protectionism of borders. Having a 'more efficient market' being better for consumers is great. But the aggregate increased utility of all consumers doesn't lobby for political change. Instead, groups that produce a sense of 'us' and with a far more concentrated loss than the diffuse collective gain are the ones that lobby for political change. At least this is one driver, eventually the relative losers (some are absolute winners but some live in towns no so destitute they lost in real terms too) were going to stand up and fight back. Further 'creative destruction' or 'move fast and break things' attitude of an efficient market was going to upset people who wanted stability, and did not want to change industry every few years.
Moreover, politics runs in fashions and trying to stand up against the tide gets you knocked over or ignored (Machiavelli outlines this well). So whilst neoliberals still exist, when they pipe up they will be heckled down as part of the old guard that got us into this mess. They need to wait for the populists to do a terrible job to reassert themselves, but even then it will not go back to how it was. The economic losers from that system are now immunised against being tricked into following that path again.
Yes. That’s it. The American elites didn’t care about the rust belt or the loss of good manufacturing jobs, provided China was a source of labour only (like for Apple or other American companies) not a competitor - economically or militarily
Does anyone have a good prompt for getting ChatGPT to reliably do translation? I've been trying to use the free version to translate chapters of a story from Japanese to English using "Please translate the following into English: <text>", but the success rate is less than 50%, and the worst part is that it is really hard to notice the mistakes just by looking at the output. For example, most recently, it just summarized a section of the story instead of translating it, but there's no way to tell that unless you carefully compare it to the original.
You might try few-shot prompting, where you include examples of the kind of output you want in the prompt. You could also try giving it additional structure to constrain the output, ie having it output in JSON format. Here's an example that worked for me: https://chat.openai.com/share/2bf4e7da-c389-4522-b6a0-29578c332a58
I'm not an experienced prompter at all. But the recommendations I've seen are for improving results are
:
-Give the machine a character to play: So you might say, you are a literature lover who speaks fluent Japanese and fluent English. You do excellent translations of Japanese fiction into English, and especially careful to translate each Japanese sentence into an English equivalent of that sentence, rather than simply summarizing the content of several Japanese sentences in one English one. Also you are extremely careful not to [place here all the kinds of errors it has made in previous translations]
-Break the task into steps, and instruct GPT4 to do one at a time in order. I'm not sure what steps there might be. You could certainly include a double-checking step every so often, where if reads its translations to make sure they are free of the kinds of errors it's been making before. You might be able to come up with some more -- like "consult this list of idioms if a literal transltion of a bit of Japanese does not make sense in English."
Would be curious to know if my bits of second hand advice work -- hope you'll report back. They came from Zvi's blog.
I used "please translate the following text from X to Y, while <additional instructions> : <linebreak, text to translate>". It worked with about 100% precision for the rest of the prompt, ~50% for the next prompt (without adding the same prefix), and would inevitably break down after 2 or 3 prompts without re-establishing the request (it would start doing other languages, make up the rest of the text, re-translate an earlier prompt or just repeat my prompt)
Or, if ChatGPT is too hard, I'm also open to suggestions for other online LLMs that can reliably do a good quality translation without sneakily hallucinating or ignoring the input.
Right now, it seems like the best translation in terms of reliability is the (as far as I can tell) non-LLM based Google Translate, which has really bad translation quality, but is at least fast and doesn't hallucinate.
Can you give an example passage that you want translated? I've had good experiences with DeepL (and GPT-4 but without any special prompt), so would be interested in seeing examples where it doesn't work well (and experimenting with prompts for 3.5).
Back in April 2023, when I last tried using DeepL, it had a strong tendency to randomly ignore the input and write stuff like "The most important thing to remember is that you can't just go out and buy a new car and then buy a new one." (in a text that doesn't mention cars at all)
However, I just tried it again on the examples of particularly egregious hallucination that I had noted down, and it seems to no longer hallucinate on those examples, so I guess it has improved since April.
Edit: On further testing, it unfortunately still hallucinates and skips things a lot when translating longer texts.
I've been writing a blog about prediction markets and forecasting for awhile, mostly for people who are already interested in these topics. But lately, seeing the legal troubles Kalshi and PredictIt are facing, I was thinking about writing some outward-facing articles about prediction markets, trying to make the case for legalizing them to people who aren't already familiar with them.
Does anyone have any ideas for where I could publish an Op-Ed about this? I'm looking for outlets that have an audience mostly unfamiliar with prediction markets, but who might be receptive, and that are not-super-difficult to get an Op-Ed published in (so not like the New York Times or something). Thanks!
Vox/Future Perfect would be my first suggestion? Kelsey Piper has covered them before in Vox, and Dylan Matthews was on a panel on Prediction Markets & Journalism at Manifest.
Happy to introduce you if you have a pitch (email me at austin@manifold.markets). Though fwiw I'm not sure what their policies or bar for op-eds are.
I've never fully understood what it means to say "the US invaded Iraq to get their oil". The US government doesn't sell oil (right?). What was the exact mechanism by which the US benefited from Iraqi oil post-invasion? I guess they replaced the Iraqi leadership, then "negotiated" a good trade deal with the new Iraq government? Was it something to do with OPEC?
I guess I don't understand the government getting involved with the market like that. Petrol was expensive, so the government started a war to lower the price. But no-one, not even US citizens, asked them to do that - in fact, they had to do it under a pretence. What were the incentives? Did Bush expect lower petrol prices to get him re-elected?
If the price of cherries goes up, the government isn't expected to do anything. If the price of wheat goes up, maybe the government should negotiate tariffs or something. If the price of petrol goes up, apparently it's reasonable for the government to march half a million troops into a foreign country, kill tens of thousands of their citizens and topple their government. I mostly understand the difference between these three commodities, but I don't understand the role the government has in deciding which of these wildly inconsistent responses is warranted.
Imagine you're playing Civ 6. An independent city-state named Saudi Arabia discovers oil within its territory. You send envoys there to become its suzerain, use your technical knowledge to cofound a company there called Arabian American Oil, and therefore secure rights to a portion of this militarily vital and economically vital resource. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia sits right next to a warmongerer named Iraq. What's the best response?
One response might be "station troops in Saudi Arabia". On one hand, this is exactly what the House of Saud asked for. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is full of religious radicals who feel offended that infidels are allowed to desecrate their holy land. Enough that a few of them rammed a bunch of planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
If your next best response is "subjugate Iraq", congrats! You chose just like Texan oilman George W Bush, whose father had to defend Kuwait from Iraq just a decade ago. Perhaps you will build an America that will stand the test of time. (Or not. The House of Saud is actually rather upset that Iraq is no longer a buffer zone between itself and Iran, which is full of another type of religious radical.)
There was also probably a neocon element of "Iraq could use a lil democracy anyway". although this is more justification than motive.
So your theory is that Bush thought Saddam was a total moron? (Not saying you're wrong!)
The U.S. went to war to defend Kuwait, a country we weren't even allied with. Obviously we would have gone to war to defend a country that was already full of U.S. troops.
My theory is, the Middle East was a powderkeg along a variety of dimensions. And more specifically, Iraq had recently launched two gulf wars: a war vs Iran to combat the theocratic revolutionaries; and a war vs Kuwait for not forgiving Iraq's debts during the first gulf war. When the boardstate is too chaotic to calculate its evolution, it might be a good idea to introduce some stability. Ergo, "nation-building". Although I think we both know how that turned out.
Meanwhile, the terror attacks of September 11th gave George Bush Jr: A) a loose excuse to oust a loose-cannon (declare war on terror => Saddam used chemical and biological weapons vs Iran => "maybe Saddam still has WMD's" => "Saddam must be plotting terrorism"); B) a further impetus to keep troops out of Saudi Arabia, lest Allah inspire radicals like Bin Laden to ram more planes into more buildings.
> Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden [...] was a Saudi-born militant who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death.
> He founded al-Qaeda in 1988 for worldwide jihad. In the Gulf War (1990–1991), Bin Laden's offer for support against Iraq was rebuked by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid. Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1992. He subsequently shifted his headquarters to Sudan until 1996 when he left the country to establish a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban.
It all ties back to Saudi Arabia. If Bush were to take out Saddam and Osama, Pax Americana would have two less threats, both to its oil supply and its infrastructure.
Also obviously, the United States would have preferred not to keep Saudi Arabia full of U.S. troops, because that has the side effect of airliners crashing into American skyscrapers and government buildings.
I don't know if the US did get any benefit from Iraqi oil, but as a non-American, it's pretty clear the US runs on cheap oil.
Transport - you need cars to get to work and travel pretty much anywhere since the distances are so much greater (see the joke about "in America a hundred years is a long time, in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance") and your entire haulage industry (to get the all year round seasonal vegetables to the supermarkets all the way across the country, etc.)
Think of the fuss about the increase in petrol (gas) prices - here's an article about gas prices "surging" to $3.98/gallon. Let me try and convert that into Irish prices to compare:
Unit price = €3.80/4.5 litres = €0.84/litre (American equivalent price)
Irish unit price = average €1.68/litre
Back converting that, we get
€1.68 = $1.76
4.5 litres = 1 gallon
Price is therefore $7.92 per gallon for Irish equivalent. Very roughly, the "surging" price of $4/gallon would cost you $8/gallon in my country.
Homes - heating, air conditioning, running your appliances, showers, you name it, American households need and consume a lot of energy. Differences in construction also apply here.
Manufacturing/industry - probably still hugely reliant on energy generated by oil, even with green and renewable energy.
If oil prices rise to anything near the European levels, your country considers it a crisis to be sorted out immediately, or people will riot. For oil to be cheap, at the range of prices American consumers are accustomed to, supply needs to be plentiful and cheap as can be bought. If oil-producing countries are not producing oil (by attempting embargoes as per OPEC or because of war and other disturbances), America flexes its might to get that oil flowing again (see how shale oil extraction and fracking became popular to access hitherto uneconomic or unreachable resources).
Scott has also mentioned previously the theory that Iraq was about removing the risk of Iraq invading Saudi Arabia, which allowed the US to remove its military presence in SA which was causing a lot of anger amongst the Saudi population and maybe even elites.
> The US government doesn't sell oil (right?). What was the exact mechanism by which the US benefited from Iraqi oil post-invasion?
One time I had a professor argue that the US invaded Iraq for oil. He expanded on this at length over and over. This was around 2006 or 2007 or so. I raised my hand and I asked your question almost word for word and then said, “if we invaded Iraq for oil and now we have Iraq, then why have gas prices gone up so much since the invasion?”
He got a deer-in-the-headlights look and said, “I meant that we just did it so that China wouldn’t have it,” and then he changed the conversation. I wasn’t trying to be combative, I was just genuinely curious. So I asked again later. He was never able to explain exactly what he meant by it other than, the US didn’t want China to have it.
Sometimes it just takes the right question. For me that question is, If the US didn't invade Iraq (again), what would Iraq do with its oil? It would sell it. But we wouldn't let it. It's obvious US policy wasn't about cheap oil, because all we had to do was lift the embargo.
The difference between oil and cherries is that if the price of cherries goes up by a factor of ten, certain pies will become more expensive, while the price of oil going up by a factor of ten will completely wreck the (2000s) US economy. Modern civilization was (and to be honest, still is) very reliant on oil for transportation of goods, persons and agriculture. Many Americans are totally reliant on motor vehicles to get to their place of employment. At the moment they seem to spend an average of some 2% of their income on gas. If this goes up by a factor of ten, while at the same time prices for agricultural goods and goods shipped from elsewhere go up too, this will put a lot of people into a very dire situation.
By contrast, an isolated rise in the cost of wheat seems less threatening. There is always corn and other grains. Humans can adapt to other carbohydrates more easily than car engines can adapt to other fuels.
Charitably speaking, Bush et al thought that if they could pick any one country to liberate and form a mutually beneficial long term partnership with, it would be in the interests of future generations of Americans to pick a country which offers that one resource which could be called the life-blood of modern civilization.
Less charitably, there is a principal-agent problem between what is good for US long term interests and what is good Bush and his cronies. Between his buddies in the military-industrial-complex on the one side, and his pals in the oil industry on the other side, I guess it is easy enough to believe that you are bringing stability to a region vital to the interests of future generations of Americans while your buddies line their pockets with taxpayer dollars and your pals look forward to business opportunities without having to pay the economic or personal costs of the war.
One theory is that it had to do in part with defending the Petrodollar system. In the early 2000's, Iraq was contemplating selling oil in Euro's rather than in dollars. This is a direct threat to the US dollar's supremacy and status as global reserve currency. The US wants major oil producers to sell oil in exchange for dollars, and then use those dollars to invest in US Treasuries (thereby funding and subsidizing US deficits).
In addition to what the others have mentioned, the connections between Cheney and Halliburton provide some prima facie justification for a conspiracy theory along the lines that one of the motivations for the invasion was not "enrich the US" but "enrich Dick Cheney and his friends." (Cheney was always less convincing than Bush in presenting himself as a genuine believer in the need to keep the world safe from Saddam's WMDs.) Oddly, this version of the conspiracy theory always seemed less prominent among anti-war protestors than the simplistic idea that US was invading Iraq in order to supply its economy's addiction to cheap oil, despite the fact that the simpler version never really made sense as an explanation if you tried to think through the details.
Right. It didn't look good that both Bush and Cheney were oil men. Halliburton really did benefit from the war -- and so did most oil production and service companies, US or otherwise -- because the war caused the oil price to spike. The protestors who believed the war was about driving the price of oil up -- and there were some -- were still wrong about the motive but directionally correct regarding the consequences and how Big Oil would profit.
I got the impression that slogan was largely used as a "Boo" light, expressing overall disapproval of the Iraq War in particular and Bush the Younger's foreign policy in general. Beyond that, there were several shades of underlying meaning that people probably had in mind.
The more reasonable end of the spectrum is that US geopolitical interest in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular has to do with the importance of oil as a strategic resource. It's generally agrees that in the short-to-medium term, it would be a Bad Thing for the US economy if a repeat of the 1970s oil crisis were to occur. I think the claim is that the Bush administration looked at the strategic situation in the Middle East and made the cynical decision to invade Iraq in order to put Iraqi oil under the control of an American client regime in order to ensure US and our allies access to Iraqi oil on the market, and in order to serve as a "pour encourager les autre" example to other Middle Eastern petrostates in case they were considering another oil embargo.
Closely related but somewhat less reasonable was the idea that the worry was not an embargo as such, but rather Iraq and other petrostates deciding to align with China and to sell their oil only to China and Chinese client states. The main flaw with this line of argument is failure to appreciate that oil is fungible and the global markets is not really set up in a way for this to be a major threat.
The more conspiratorial take was based on the left-wing meme that US government policy is corruptly controlled by a plutocratic oligarchy (*), and that in this light the Iraq war was seen as an old-fashioned war of colonial conquests and exploitation. American oil companies, which supposedly controlled the Bush administration, would benefit financially from American occupation of Iraq.
(*) n.b. the Motte of this meme, that corporate interests have substantial political influence due to lobbying and regulatory capture, is defensible and indeed is mainstream Political Economy theory. It's only the Bailey that rounds this influence up to a plutocratic oligarchy engaged in mustache-twirling villainy that I roll my eyes at.
Oil is *the* resource greasing any military or industrial machine. Countries have done wild wild shit to secure oil for themselves, and deny it to their rivals. A Century Of War by Engdahl links oil interests to the majority of geopolitical developments over the past century.
My favourite oil shenanigans has to be Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, disguising himself as a Catholic priest to convince D'Arcy to sell exclusive rights to Persian oil to the English instead of the Dutch. D'Arcy was an Australian mining engineer who was also heavily religious. He was exploring Persia because he thought the towers of flame referenced in the Bible were due to oil pockets combusting. He secured exclusive oil rights from the Persians (due to some favours I think), and was on the verge of signing a deal with Shell (a Dutch company). Panicking, England send over the notorious Sidney Reilly (who James Bond is based off), who disguises himself as a priest and convinces D'Arcy that he should sell the rights to a proper, God-fearing English company. England then erects a company to take on the rights. Thus British Petroleum (BP) is born.
If it ever comes to war, BP will not be securing oil for China's war machine. When it comes to oil, America and England want tight locks on who has access to it, and any government who attempts to strike out on their own oil path (or god forbid, start a nuclear power program) find either knives in their back or bombs dropping from the sky. Until the disgusting dictator is overthrown, and a nice, healthily corrupt democracy is installed.
I mean, Russia is the third largest oil producer in the world, and they will happily supply oil to anyone in a war with the United States. There's no hope of starving China of oil in a war.
Russia can currently only send a small fraction of its oil overland to China. Much of it would have to take a sea route, which could be blockaded by the US.
Naively if you look at a map, Russia and China share a long border.
It may not be great terrain to put a pipeline through (I haven't looked at it in detail). But at the very least, they could build a road and ship stuff in trucks. Neither tends to have the same tender regard that the US and Canada have for BANANA activists.
No, you're not going to prevent Russia and China from trading with each other if they want to.
Building a road through that geography, and running trucks, is only a bit better than carrying it in buckets as far as oil is concerned. Rail is better, but requires a lot of extra infrastructure that takes time to build.
They don't have rail there already because of past tensions (and I think even actual fighting) there, so it's not impossible. It would be easier to build a pipeline there than ship oil in tankers either past Japan or halfway round the world through American-controlled waters if they turned unfriendly.
Slightly less naively, looking at a pair of maps, it looks like the Trans-Siberian Railway passes through Russia's biggest oil-producing region (or maybe just south of it), and that rail-line has a connection to Beijing. But maybe the rail line isn't well suited to transporting oil?
China is no doubt frantically building up this sort of land-based oil transport infrastructure. Will it ever be as cheap or as efficient as sea-based transport? Absolutely not.
Nit, but Shell was originally a Jewish-owned English company. It merged with Royal Dutch around the start of the 20th century, becoming Royal Dutch/Shell, a Dutch-English company. According to Daniel Yergin in _The Prize_, Shell was viewed as "not English" by the English because it was Jewish-owned, despite those Jews being English.
Mostly, “we invaded Iraq for oil” is a conspiracy theory. Bush’s motivations were primarily ideological - and of course he convinced himself (and others) that Hussein presented a serious and imminent threat.
I say mostly because there is a sane-washed version that sort of makes sense:
1. Use war to turn Iraq into an allied state
2. Use Iraqi alliance to make US petroleum markets less reliant on OPEC cartel
3. Lower petrol prices
4. Profit
…but I don’t think this has anything to do with the actual reasons for the Iraq war.
It wasn't just for oil but for resources in general - strategic/geopolitically favourable land, mining opportunities, market opportunities, etc. The personal ideology of one man is a much less believable explanation and arguably more conspiratorial than the much simpler explanation that the US values having control over middle eastern politics and spoils and the people who advised Bush represent these values.
It wasn’t one man - it was the neoconservative movement generally.
They had become convinced that the use of American force to protect human rights around the world was a good thing - they wanted to be the world’s police. In some ways it’s good that Iraq was a disaster, if it had gone well they may well have continued on with a war against Iran.
When I go to sleep my mind starts to wander, I think about various problems that happened that day, my plans for the future and so on. Often I start to analyze things, imagining I'm explaining them to someone, for example some physical phenomenon or my political views. I noticed that sometimes it resembles a tree structure. I go from A to B to C, return to B, go to D, return to B, return to A, go to E.
When these things happen I also simultaneously see/imagine moving through space, and It's pretty much always Call of Duty 4 MW multiplayer maps. I played that game years ago when I was 15-17, now I'm in my late 20s.
From my wikipedia knowledge I can tell that hippocampus is involved in memory consolidation and spatial memory and it's active during sleep. Could what I experience be my hippocampus saving memories to long term storage accidentally triggering the spacial memory of those CoD 4 maps?
It’s basically about moving to SF at 19 and living in a group house with 50 other people and finding your people. It was very inspiring…
I’m thinking of doing something similar. I recently graduated from uni in the UK, and the only time I felt I was with “my people” was at this Effective Altruist conference I went to once. I’m not even an EA, but I felt more energised there than at any other social event. I sense that SF will have a similar vibe.
I was wondering about the actual mechanics of it… how does one find a group house, how do you find interesting work, do random odd jobs etc.
I put up a post on this thread about tutoring for the LSAT. It is an excellent random odd job, if you are one of those people who usually score 98th or 99th percentile on standardized tests. LSAT does not require expert knowledge in any field, just reasoning out logic puzzles and answering questions about long, boring, intricate passages of prose.
I imagine I would love to live in some form of a group house, but the logistics of organizing that seems almost impossible.
I wonder, people who rent, do you choose your location strategically to be close to your friends? I mean, not just "I am looking for a place in this part of city, because that is where my friends live", but also coordinating with your friends so that you are looking to two or more places close to each other.
That is, not just treating everyone else's places as a constant, and choosing *my* place to minimize my distance from them, but everyone choosing *together* to minimize mutual distance. Like, even if each of us wants to live separately, we will try to find a street all of us could move to. Are people doing something like this?
I’ve only ever been able to coordinate this in college, when I was part of an unofficial fraternity. Having the organizational structure and leadership allowed us to coordinate on renting four properties: both sides of a duplex on the north end of town, and a pair of adjacent houses on the south end.
Since then, my friends and I have just made our own decisions, without any attempt to coordinate at a higher level. Too much depends on variables which change from person to person. I’m not going to endure a 2-hour daily commute just so I can live on the same street as my friend.
At a recent ACX meetup, I talked with someone who felt that when he found rationalists, he'd finally found his people. Rationalists weren't as much of a dramatic thing for me because from my point of view, rationalists aren't that different from (print) science fiction fans.
On the other hand, I don't think they're quite the same, and I think there are differences of style that I can't put a finger on. I realize there's a fair amount of overlap.
Anyway, what similarities do people see? What differences?
Similarities: both rationalists and sci-fi fans are intelligent, interested in technology (both optimistic and willing to discuss dangers), open to new experience.
Differences: rationalists are smarter on average, care about truth, want to optimize the world (rather than just read stories about someone else doing so).
I don't know about science fiction fans, but rationalists remind my of my "not technically a 'co-ed literary society'" back in college. Interesting discussion, with bright people who have varying backgrounds and expertise, valuing intellectual honesty over "winning". And were I of the appropriate age and location, the incestuous social scene sounds quite familiar, too.
Has he also interacted with a community of science fiction fans? I haven't, so I don't have a reference point. When it comes to intellectual pursuits, there were few, if any, real-life communities I was able to find that matched my interests at all, let alone communities I felt I could fit in with. When I talked to other people about what it felt like to fit in so easily, I was moderately surprised to learn that this is a common feeling when you find 'your people' and not specific to rationalists at all.
I recently discovered that it's not unusual to find your people at around age twenty. It can be punk, it can even be the pro-ana (anorexia) group back when.
A couple years ago I was extremely skeptical about Russia invading Ukraine, dismissing it as ridiculous. Obviously I was wrong, though to be fair this was before Russia moved troops into the breakaway regions. Between this and the actual invasion, I became preoccupied by adulting milestones and stopped following international news and posting on blogs. On reflection, I'd say that my extreme skepticism of the US government's warnings came from the Iraq War, which was the defining US foreign intervention of my generation (so far, anyways). Consequently I've started giving somewhat more credence to information from the US government.
My question now is which sources do ACX's readers (you) perceive as most reliable when it comes to the big issues of our time? On the Ukraine war, Al Jazeera seems to me the most trustworthy mainstream outlet so far.
Also, personal theory on why military aid to Ukraine has been escalated gradually rather than done all at once, in addition to the fear of NATO involvement and nuclear weapons, which seems to me plausible enough:
The US is looking to potential flashpoints of conflict around the world that's reached a stable equilibrium and where Russia is a significant player. While it wants Russia to "lose" in Ukraine, it doesn't want it to happen so quickly that there are rapid unpredictable consequences in those places. Eg, see Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbia and Kosovo, central Asia, and even India-Pakistan.
We all get to be wrong. But I wasn't surprised that Russia invaded Ukraine. They'd done it before, not long ago. Putin gave his demands in a speech. I was sure he meant the one about Ukraine not joining NATO, because that would put enemy troops some 500 mi from Moscow with no natural barriers. It seemed pretty likely.
I don't trust any of them. I get news from Twitter. I trust it even less than other sources, but since it's varied at least I get lies from different directions. :) And it's a good reminder just how wrong media often is.
I also have a friend from whom I found out the US was close to ending its occupation of Iraq, when big US news sources of right or left, WaPo excepted, declined to cover it (fall 2008). So he's one of my sources. :)
The ACX discord server has a dedicated thread for the war, it has a bunch of people connected to the US military in various ways, as well as just military geeks, and a few Russians.
Probably more important than predicting that Russia won't attack Ukraine is *why* someone did so. There could be better or worse reasons. Try to find out the exact reasons they gave back then (i.e. not their current rationalizations based on what they learned afterwards).
If someone predicted "Russia will not attack because it would be too dangerous, they can instead just take Ukraine and other countries a piece by little piece", I wouldn't blame them.
If someone said (and many people actually did) "Russia will not attack, because Russians are peaceful and civilized people, this is all just the usual evil American warmongering", that person is full of... wrong opinions... and either knows nothing about Russia or is shamelessly lying, so no reasonable person should listen to their opinions anymore.
I was in exactly the same state of mind. US agencies are not in the business of providing truthful statements about the state of the world to the public. Their mission is to further US interests (or the interests of the president in particular). Sometimes these interests are furthered by speaking the truth, sometimes by bald-faced lies. If the CIA announced tomorrow that the sky was blue, I would not take their word for it.
When I heard Nato warnings, I think I mentally filed them as "fearmongering towards some unknown purpose". Boy was I wrong.
I think that geostrategically, making an enemy fight a stupid endless war against a third party is something every power desires. I have no idea if Putin could survive a peace deal and am even more skeptical about him surviving a battlefield defeat. As long as the Ukrainians are willing to do the dying, it certainly serves cynical NATO interests to help them to fight Russia. (Less cynically, helping them fight an attacker also seems a decent thing to do.) Besides, NATO gets to test some of their toys under battlefield conditions. And this time, we are arming a legitimate government, not sponsoring a new faction which will become troublesome down the line (like the Mujaheddin proved to be).
I think the most reliable source of information — still not very reliable — is online conversation in a group with smart participants and a wide political range. I remember seeing the Usenet sf groups as filling that role a long time ago, and to some degree later SSC and its progeny.
Observing smart participants on SSC when I lurked there years ago is how I went from standard college leftie to pretty far right conservative. But it's difficult to spawn discussions on specific topics or questions on demand. Life was a lot simpler when I could just "trust the experts", but the genie left that bottle long ago.
The general split was between the political experts who thought that Putin was bluffing and the military experts who knew that you don’t ship truckloads of blood donations to the frontlines for a ‘bluff’.
Was the shipment of blood donations something that an independent observer could have verified beyond reasonable doubt? Somehow I don't see Putin being willing to let international teams of reporters and experts randomly select blood bags and establish that they indeed contain human blood components.
On the other hand, if the info is based on intelligence sources, then my response would have been to ask if the blood bags were by any chance stacked on top of Saddam's WMDs.
That’s a very good point. And I was definitely extremely on the fence at the time. But I suppose the difference is that the US Government had everything to gain by lying about WMDs, while if Biden lied about Putin invading and then Putin didn’t invade, he’d have been extremely politically embarrassed with no upside. It definitely politically embarrassed Bush of course, but by the point it was already Mission Accomplished on the Iraq invasion.
The Biden administration was pretty clearly trying to deter the invasion, and presumably would have considered Putin not invading a success and played it as such.
Its adversaries would of course have said they'd been crying wolf. But I don't think that would be sufficiently the consensus view to make that success constitute a political embarrassment. Especially since in our timeline the administration's intelligence info in the runup to the war seems to have been pretty good (repeatedly spiking various false flag trial balloons by Putin), so in that one they'd probably have corroborating evidence to help support the case for what had almost happened.
They wouldn't convince everyone, but that's never an option.
Per Wikipedia, platelets have a shelf life of seven days, while red blood cells remain usable for a month. Of course, if it was a bluff, there would be no reason to use unexpired human blood (except for the fact that it would be a more complex conspiracy).
With the benefit of hindsight, the main issue with the bluff explanation is that such an elaborate bluff would require a goal beyond a tweet mocking NATO as a bunch of paranoid has-beens stuck in the cold war. If you e.g. want to feign an attack to distract an enemy from another operation, more civilians dying of blood loss in the meantime is a price most autocrats would gladly pay.
I suppose you could swap out the blood reserves for bags of red paint. But knowing Russian logistics as we now do that would likely have ended with a lot of Russians accidentally receiving paint transfusions.
I suppose the lesson here is that the most internally consistent and well reasoned theories can still be discredited by a single piece of unwelcome evidence.
I also was taken by surprise by Russia actually-for-real invading Ukraine. (Distinct from "Russia asserts sovereignty over contested territories")
In fairness to myself - I thought such a move would be incredibly dumb on their part, and didn't think they'd be that dumb.
That's been a running theme of "Things I have been wrong about" for the past few years. "They wouldn't be dumb enou - ho-lee sheeyit. They were dumb enough."
That’s why I don’t think it was wrong to believe Putin wouldn’t invade—because it has been proven to be super dumb on Putin’s part. That’s also why I was initially certain Putin blew up Nord Stream because Russia had the most to gain by blowing it up…but now I think maybe Ukrainians could have done because people can do dumb things.
There never was any sane explanation for Russia blowing up the pipeline. They could have turned it off, and then would have leverage to turn it back on. I don’t think it was Ukraine either.
Russia almost won the war when it blew up. And they made more than enough money to cover the costs of fixing it thanks to the risk premium…so winning the war and making money are pretty good motives. ;)
It turned out to be incredibly dumb after Russia did much worse in the initial invasion than almost everyone expected it to. It isn't clear that it would have turned out to be dumb if the opening weeks of the war had turned out as expected.
I think the initial phase of the invasion could have gone a lot better for Russia, but even had the invasion gone more favorably for them, it would have most probably still failed.
Kamil Galeev has noted that the Russian invasion force of Ukraine - the largest country in Europe, that had spent the last 8 years modernizing its army after the initial invasion - numbered only 180,000 or so. He contrasts is with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which involved about triple the number of troops invading a country a fifth the size.
He argues that the Russian invasion force was really only fit for; indeed - only intended for - a "special military operation," like the invasion of Crimea, in which Ukraine would put up just token resistance and quickly surrender. It was not up to the task of an actual war.
In 2022 a country having more territory and more old people isn’t necessarily a good thing—Qatar doesn’t want more people and they are very happy with the territory they have. Putin invaded to get crappy land and old people that require pensions and heating. What Putin really wants is more markets to export value added manufactured goods—my recommendation would be to focus on a few areas of manufacturing and do it better instead of trying to find markets for all of the crappy Soviet legacy industries.
This war is not about Putin or Russia making money, whether by grabbing resources or acquiring new markets or any other such thing. This war is about Putin and Russia *spending* money, to get something they want *more* than money. Which, after all, is the whole point of having money in the first place.
From my understanding, Ukraine contains prime farm land. Their grain exports seem to be kind of a big deal for Africa?
Then there is the strategic angle. Access to the Black Sea (and the Mediterraneans beyond), and the Ukraine as one approach to Russia which has to be covered (if you believe in large scale conventional warfare between nuclear powers, which I don't).
Then there is the historical aspect. Russia (or the USSR) used to be one of the superpowers. The switch from "we want to rule the world" to "we are happy with what territory we have and will focus on the needs of our citizens" is certainly possible (I would argue Germany made that transition), but it is also not automatic.
Also, I am not sure that Russia does that much manufacturing these days. I vaguely recall a twitter thread (possibly about avocados?) which made a convincing argument that oligarchies prefer simple extractive industries (such as cash crops or crude resources) which can be well managed by their cliques, while in more complex industries, people with deep domain knowledge are the natural leaders, thus threatening the power base of the oligarchs.
Edit: seems like nitter.net, unlike google, let's you search for old tweets.
From day 1 Putin has been focused on diversifying the Russian economy…they don’t need more farmland. Trust me, Putin is an idiot…and so is George W Bush who is the only Texan that couldn’t find oil and natural gas under Texas. ;)
If you're a broke brainiac, 7Sage, a high end LSAT tutoring company, is sane and reasonably pleasant to work for, and starting pay is $60/hr for tutoring and $100/hr for teaching classes. All work is virtual. You have to get a high score on the LSAT to be hired, though. I believe the cutoff is 175 out of a possible high score of 180. That's about 98th percentile I think. They don't care whether you are going to law school or not, just want to see the score as evidence that you're excellent at the test itself. They are actively hiring now. (I have no affiliation with them -- just happen to know someone who works for them.)
How do the pawn shops actually function, from the economical perspective?
If I understand it correctly, they lend to people relatively small amounts of money with high interest, with some objects as a collateral. They make money either when the interest is paid, or if the objects are sold. First question, what is the typical balance between these two sources of income? Do most people pay the money back? Or is selling the objects actually the main source of profit?
Second question, what fraction of those objects was originally stolen? I mean, if you imagine yourself as a thief, in every place you break into, you find some cash, and lots of objects that are mostly useless to you. If only there was a convenient way to convert those objects into cash... oh wait, there is -- you just have to pretend that you are taking a loan that you are unable to pay back. It doesn't matter if you only get a fraction of those objects' market worth, because you got them for free anyway. Am I too paranoid here, or is this actually an important part of how these things work?
In many states in the US, pawn shops are required to keep ledgers of the identities of sellers, track serial numbers on pawned goods, and share this information (sometimes electronically) with police. This is to cut down on the trafficking of stolen goods.
The one I lived near in grad school had a big sign saying "Checks Cashed / Bail Bonds / We Buy Gold". I presume they bought low and sold high, and took a percentage every way they could.
My understanding of police work is that they do, or did, monitor pawn shops for stolen goods, but I don't know whether that's current any more.
From how they're depicted in fiction, the profit comes in undervaluing the items pawned (because people are desperate for quick cash and will take whatever they can get) then selling the item for full value if it's not claimed. I gather from social history that they acted something like payday loan outfits; people would pawn items of value (e.g. good suit of clothes) then redeem it later in the week when they got paid. If they acted like small loans, then presumably you had to pay a little extra than you pawned the item for when you redeemed it.
How modern pawn shops work, I have no idea. They seem to have morphed into those "we buy gold and silver" places I often see ads for, but the traditional pawn shops must still exist.
The TV show Pawn Stars seems to indicate that you hope someone will pawn/sell something valuable either not knowing it's a collectible, or that you can bargain them down to a lower deal than the price they might get at auction:
Pretty much the only thing a lot of people have now that's actually worth something to the pawn shop would be jewelry. It does have the intrinsic value of the metals in it after all.
The "good suit of clothes" dropped in price because of cheap manufacturing and standards moving to the casual.
Small electronics have a pretty short shelf life, and I doubt you can pawn your phone.
Large electronics and furniture are far too bulky.
Musical instruments? How many instruments are for sale on eBay?
The pawn shop has to plan for a fairly high percentage of the stuff being given up, at which point they have to resell it.
Just anecdotally, I’ve spent a little bit of time waiting around in pawn shops, mostly while they process my background check for gun purchases, and I was surprised how many people they had coming in either to pay the loan off or at least the monthly interest. One time I was there 5 o’clock first Friday after rent was due they literally had a separate, pretty sizable line going just for people making payments.
That being said, the dollar amounts on the loans typically aren’t much, maybe $150 for an item that’d get $500 on Craigslist, so there’s a decent incentive to pay it back, even if you’re just going to turn around and sell the item yourself.
I mean there’s a reason why “go chat up the pawn shop owner” is a staple trope in every cop show. That said I don’t know what the actual stats are.
I’m pretty sure most pawn shops do plenty of business in just buying and selling used valuables - some percentage of the goods on offer in the store are foreclosed collateral, but some of its just stuff sold for quick cash.
We had a burglary when we were living in Chicago and one of the items stolen was Betty's viola da gamba. It ended up in a pawn shop, it had the maker's name on a slip of paper inside it, the pawn shop got in touch with him, he told them who he had made it for and she got it back.
What kinds of intellectual development is available to someone who comes to self-diagnose themselves to be temperamentally a "hater" or outright bigot?
Let's imagine someone who openly advocates policies that are invidious, widely characterized as racist, and politically immune to criticism due to the cluster of beliefs they've adopted. The public persona of Trump's adviser Stephen Miller comes to mind; I don't intend here to make a specific attribution that either person is in fact inclined to be a reactive and biased judge of others.
My question isn't about whether these people are "bad." Instead, I'm curious what path is available to someone who feels that, in their most intimate thoughts, they are very tribal, harsh in their judgments of out-groups, and then they come to recognize that their inclinations are truly biased in a distorted fashion.
Is there a path available to such people to extirpate these biases?
In our cultural climate, it'd be inconceivable to openly confess to such inclinations, unless they wanted to simply volunteer as a poster-child for "anti-racists." That camp frankly seems to believe that everyone *else* is as biased as this hypothetical Stephen-Miller-type admits to being.
Are there options for such a temperamental hater-reflex beyond the way functioning schizophrenics can recognize certain voices & beliefs as non-reality based?
What books/blogs/experiences could be developed to help such self-admitted bigots?
>My question isn't about whether these people are "bad." Instead, I'm curious what path is available to someone who feels that, in their most intimate thoughts, they are very tribal, harsh in their judgments of out-groups, and then they come to recognize that their inclinations are truly biased in a distorted fashion. Is there a path available to such people to extirpate these biases?
"Bias" as used here is basically a propaganda term. There's nothing inherently biased or unbiased about having any particular view of one's outgroup, and despite the fact that people who talk endlessly about 'bias' would never say so, its use here applies to an actual majority of political active leftists in the US today. That is, unless you've managed to somehow convince yourself that BLM and everything like it isn't tribalisitic in the most obvious of ways.
The idea that people on the left have anything resembling charitable views towards their outgroup is outrageous. They're probably more harsh in their judgements of ""racists"" than ""racist"" people are of immigrants.
Thinking that races differ in intelligence is called 'bigoted' and 'biased'...but there's an extremely strong scientific case that this is actually a correct understanding of the world. At the very least, it's vastly more scientifically defensible than the racial egalitarianism that a majority of the left have today. So the idea that people who are tagged as 'bigoted' by definition have 'non-reality based views' is absolutely false. Maybe you want to claim that your focus is much more narrow, but any way you slice it either what you're saying applies to vast swathes of the left, or you're simply being baised yourself.
In theory, if your thoughts are indeed biased, exposing yourself to more evidence should correct the bias. But you need to make sure the evidence is representative, that means chosen kinda randomly. If you only notice the minority people when they annoy you somehow, but ignore them otherwise, such evidence is not going to improve your feelings towards them. Problem is, if you are already hostile against them, their reactions to you will probably reflect that. So you need a way to notice them without getting involved; for example notice how they interact with other people.
You could on purpose only expose yourself to the best examples. Note that I am not recommending that as a way to get an unbiased perspective; but if you already decided that you need a push in a certain direction, this could be a way to do it. Also, everyone lives in a bubble; you are already filtering people from your own group -- e.g. as a white person, you probably do not typically meet average white people most of the time, but instead the ones that have similar social class and education as you do.; and then you meet some random black people on your way back from work, of course the latter will seem less impressive on average. Try to find a few best examples of each group.
And there is also the possibility that some of your opinions were correct. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. It is good to fix the mistaken ones, but there is no need to assume that this process will ultimately make you conclude that all people are perfectly identical. Also, you should consider that some things you dislike may be a reasonable adaptation to the circumstances other people live in; and that if you lived in the same situation, you might also do the same simply because you wouldn't have a reasonable alternative.
Shorty: CBT exposure therapy. But I am not sure whether a typical therapist would like to get involved in the politics of racism.
"Let's imagine someone who openly advocates policies that are invidious, widely characterized as racist, and politically immune to criticism due to the cluster of beliefs they've adopted. " This sounds a lot more like a lot of "progressives" to me (e.g. Harvard's well-documented racism against Asians, Newsom looking explicitly for a black female Senate replacement for Feinstein). The application of the label of "racism" in the US is more about how high-status/media-adjacent people choose to label one's ideological preferences than it is about reality (is Stephen Miller really a "self-admitted" biggot? If so he's epidemiologically ahead of many others who seem to claim otherwise...).
It's a bit weird to say that Newsom is racist for explicitly wanting to pick a black female for the job. He's not black. He's also not female. In fact, there are no black females in the Senate right now.
Normally, when you go out of your way to include people from other walks of life, that'd be a model of tolerance. When I think of religious tolerance, for example, I think of synagogues inviting priests to come speak, or churches inviting imams, etc.
Would you categorize those as bigoted, because the synagogue was deliberately looking for a priest to come talk (and thus excluding equally qualified rabbis and such)?
>Normally, when you go out of your way to include people from other walks of life, that'd be a model of tolerance. When I think of religious tolerance, for example, I think of synagogues inviting priests to come speak, or churches inviting imams, etc.
Refusing to hire people of certain demographics is discriminatory, plain and simple, It's just that people on the left only pretend to be against discrimination per se. They just create new definitions of the word to support their discriminatory behavior.
>Would you categorize those as bigoted, because the synagogue was deliberately looking for a priest to come talk (and thus excluding equally qualified rabbis and such)?
This is obviously non-analogous to an actual hiring decision
>Refusing to hire people of certain demographics is discriminatory
I'm not sure that people on the left refuse to hire people of certain demographics. What demographic doesn't get hired by the left?
>This is obviously non-analogous to an actual hiring decision
Can you expand on that? A synagogue hears from rabbis 51 weeks out of the year, and then 1 week out of the year, they get a priest. I'd say that's religious tolerance. Under your framework, it's religious discrimination, because for that one week where they do interfaith outreach, they won't hire someone from their own faith.
I think that's a pretty tortured understanding of tolerance. The archetypical bigot is one who prefers his/her own race/religion/etc. to anyone else's. They think they're the best. It's a very rare bigot who carries a sign saying "Down with me!"
>I'm not sure that people on the left refuse to hire people of certain demographics. What demographic doesn't get hired by the left?
Only being willing to hire a black women means refusing to hire anyone else. You know, the example this comment thread was about to begin with?
>I think that's a pretty tortured understanding of tolerance. The archetypical bigot is one who prefers his/her own race/religion/etc. to anyone else's. They think they're the best. It's a very rare bigot who carries a sign saying "Down with me!"
So if an Asian politician discriminates against black people to help white people, that's fine?
I don't care about these BS labels like "bigot". I care about what actually happens in the world. White college administrators discriminating against white students in college admissions is no less discriminatory than if they instead held black students to higher academic standards to be admitted.
The left act like white people are all one big ingroup looking out for each other, but this isn't true, and this obsession with viewing things as race vs race is nonense.
The Democrats have 51 Senators. 43 are white. I don't think Democrats are adverse to hiring white people. Gavin Newsom is white, for reference.
>So if an Asian politician discriminates against black people to help white people, that's fine?
No, of course not - once you bring in third-parties, you're not going to get ahead by hurting one group to help another.
But hurting your own group in order to help another group? That's archetypical tolerance.
>White college administrators discriminating against white students in college admissions is no less discriminatory than if they instead held black students to higher academic standards to be admitted.
On a philosophical level, sure. Discrimination is discrimination. Of course, if you look through the annals of history, I've never heard of people seriously discriminating against their own kind. It's usually the opposite - can we agree on that?
>The left act like white people are all one big ingroup looking out for each other, but this isn't true, and this obsession with viewing things as race vs race is nonense.
I mean, the topic was about race. If you want to talk about something else - the weather, the movies, etc. - I'm totally game, but hopefully I can be forgiven for responding to a discussion about race with a discussion about race.
If the synagogue advertises that the vacant position of rabbi can only be filled by "Father O'Malley" and nobody else is going to come under consideration, then yeah, I'm raising my eyebrows at that.
I'm not sure I understand. The synagogue wants to have an interfaith dialogue. Meaning for that week (or month or day or whatever), they invite only faith leaders from other religions. Equally qualified--or even more qualified!--rabbis need not apply.
I'm not sure that lines up with the dictionary definitions I'm seeing - they all emphasize differences. You can tolerate differences (for example of opinion), even if you aren't against said opinions.
Regardless, you can use any word you want to describe the behavior. Racist seems like a pretty weird choice of word to describe someone who elevates people from other races above members of his/her own race.
I'll freely admit that politicians are really big on in-group/out-group distinctions. Republicans hardly ever appoint Democrats and vice versa. So if we want to say that Gavin Newsom is intolerant of Republicans, I'm on board with that.
But it's a bit weird to say that Gavin Newsom is racist against his own racial group. Are we really going to say that Gavin Newsom's in-group is black people?
I mean, I'd say that, if you have an opinion, you, by default, believe that opinion to be correct, which kiiind of implies that you think "differences of opinion" are incorrect. Note that if your opinion is "I like this movie" and somebody else's opinion is "I don't like this movie", you don't actually have a difference of opinion, because your opinions can both be true! No tolerance invoked here.
Now, if your opinion is "This movie sucks" and somebody else's opinion is "This movie is great", then there is a difference of opinion, and odds are if the movie is brought up there is going to be an argument about this, and that's where tolerance comes in as a factor.
And racist seems like a perfectly fine word to describe somebody who holds people of a particular race to be superior/inferior in whatever metric.
Mind, this need not actually apply in this particular case; perhaps Newsom thinks that black women are underrepresented, and this is about increasing the representation of black women, rather than racist opinions per se. There's a lot of imaginary ink to be spilled on that particular subject, but as far as racism goes - this particular case need not be racist.
There's a caveat there, though - what, exactly, makes somebody a representative of a group? Membership in that group? Being chosen by that group? If it's choice, which I think makes more sense, then insofar as Newsom has appointed a black woman, the only person who is truly represented by that specific black woman is Newsom himself. She represents his choices, his opinions, his beliefs; and as we examine this, we must admit that his choice may say something about him, but, failing to say anything at all about who black women would choose to represent them, utterly fails to represent black women. And that is, perhaps, a form of racism in itself, in that Newsom is choosing to represent himself, while pretending to represent black women.
But we could arrive at an entirely different kind of racism if, say, Newsom thinks black women are stupid and will vote for him if he nominates a black woman. Or it could be not-racist and he thinks -everybody- is stupid in this way, and black women are a particular demographic he feels he needs to shore up his support with.
Or maybe he doesn't think anybody is stupid, but thinks this will help his vote strategically in some other fashion.
This whole thing is kind of just reading tea leaves into other people's motivations. But, if he had appointed a white man, we'd still be reading tea leaves!
Discussion about this over on The Other Place seems to be inclining towards if Newsom is going to run for President in 2028, he needs to lock in the Southern Black vote, and since black voters are predominantly black women, then picking Laphonza Butler is the smart move: she's ticking all the boxes for being able to mobilise women and black women voters (work as fundraiser for EMILY's List), union ties, and enough of an outsider that she has no chance at seriously running in the proper election for the Senate seat, so he's not offending any of the three Democrat frontrunners going for that (except Barbara Lee, who seems to be madder than a wet hen that he didn't nominate her); once she's served her placeholder term she'll go back to her normal NGO etc. work and owe him a favour to be repaid in raising support for his presidential campaign among black women voters.
Again, I really don't think that's an accurate description of the definition of tolerance, at least not from the definitions I'm seeing. It also leads to the weirdly counterintuitive result that only racists can be racially tolerant, because people who aren't racist thus have nothing to tolerate. That is 180 degrees from how it's used commonly, and how it's defined.
In any event, I think we have to move beyond just speculating about people subjective motivations. Otherwise, conversation is basically impossible. From what he's said, Gavin Newsom is appointing a black woman because there aren't any black women in the Senate. If the Senate was 100% black women, he'd probably appoint someone else.
That takes race into account, but I don't know that it's racist in the way that people usually use the term.
One possible approach is to discover someone you very much approve of who is a member of the group you are strongly prejudiced against. A non-racial example might be someone who believes all socialists are horrible people and reads Orwell's letters and essays, or a strongly anti-religious atheist becoming a GK Chesterton fan. For an implausible racial example, someone prejudiced against Chinese who is a fan of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris and discovers that the author was (half) Chinese.
I may have become slightly less negative about progressive/woke types since reluctantly concluding that Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, is one of them.
I'm a progressive/woke type, and one of the things I like about Novik is how nuanced she is in her treatment of these topics.
(Spoilers below for Uprooted)
Take Prince Marek, in Uprooted. The first time we see him is a standard feminist inversion of the chivalrous knight — he's an arrogant boor who assaults Agnieszka. He's also not especially bright and mostly serves as a puppet for the Wood. But despite all that, Novik goes out of her way to show his positive qualities: his bravery, his skill, his charisma and easy friendship with his men, and his uncompromising loyalty to his friends and family.
I take Novik to be endorsing the concept of toxic masculinity, while also rejecting the idea that to be masculine is inherently to be toxic,. In fact she holds masculinity up for admiration as much as for criticism.
Best of all, we aren't given a neat synthesis that resolves the contradiction; we're just left to sit with the ambiguity and draw our own conclusions.
What bothered me most about Novik was not in the books. There is a reference to dreadlocks in, I think, the first Scholomance book. She was attacked on the grounds that the term is not politically correct, apologized, replaced a nicely written short passage with a weaker passage. The context does not put anyone down, insult anyone, so the objection struck me as unreasonable and her going along with it either cowardice or, more plausibly, agreeing with the criticism.
So far as the books themselves, I think the only thing that bothered me was in _The Golden Enclaves_, the third book. The link between enclaves and mawmouths worked dramatically, but seen as a comment on the real world it converted a reasonable point about the corrupting effect of large inequalities of wealth and power, on both sides of the relationship, to the claim that the rich get that way by harming the poor.
I believe the only defense of that claim in the general case — obviously it's true in some cases — is the view that not helping is the moral equivalent of harming. If you take that position seriously almost all of us, including Novik, are murderers, since we could have chosen to live on a part of our income, very high by world standards, and spend the rest saving lives in poor countries.
If that's how someone feels "in their most intimate thoughts" it would probably be better to just accept that that is who they fundamentally are. Otherwise, this sounds like gay conversion therapy. Just be a racist; the world will survive. I've known plenty of racists. They do fine as long as they are smart enough not to say anything racist in the wrong situation. Your hypothetical self-aware racist would be self-aware enough to do fine in our society.
EDIT: Society doesn't care if anyone is really racist or not. All that matters is that you act and speak appropriately.
This sounds like the idea in the OP of treating these reflexive ideas as if they are crazy thoughts, which can be rationally critiqued and disbelieved.
Even if these innate biases were as deeply ingrained as sexual preference, a 'self-aware racist' may not derive any pleasure from this inclination, nor would they necessarily believe that the expression of this bias is an intrinsic part of their identity.
I think of it as being akin to not liking a particular genre. In my case, I don't care for romance novels or movies. My wife is a huge romance aficionado.
So we try to find cross-over type movies and novels, ones that have some romance stuff that I can be exposed to while also giving me some action or fantasy or whatever. Over time, I've lessened my aversion to romance by sheer exposure.
Analogously, I don't particularly like anti-racism as a genre. But I do enjoy history. So I still remember an Asian-American studies class that had a lot of history, but also a lot of serious discussions regarding discrimination and privilege and such. Likewise, I found the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates to be really interesting because he had a lot of historical information that I had never been exposed to before. Over time, my aversion to discussions of race wore down and now I don't find them particularly objectionable even if I don't seek them out.
So my advice is to figure out what you like and then see if you can combine what you like with what you want to consume. If you like romance, there are tons of romance novels and movies that add in social justice elements. If you like fantasy, or history, or action, the same is true. It's the equivalent of a Flintstone gummy - kids want the sugar, parents want the vitamins. Mix the two and everyone's happy.
In this vein, I recommend Lindsay Ellis's video essays as some possible content to explore. The overall genre is moderately-snarky nerdy analysis of pop culture (mostly movies and stage musicals) from a film/literary criticism perspective. It bleeds over a fair amount into social commentary when discussing the impact and cultural context of various elements, and most of this is from a "woke" perspective.
A lot of what I have disliked about "woke" discourse is the attitude more than the content. "Blue tribe" norms of advocacy and debate often rub me deeply the wrong way (specifically, I mostly agree with most of Scott's "things I will regret writing" essays), but Ellis's stuff very rarely does, and her content is one of the most "grey tribe" friendly packaging of "woke" ideas that I've come across.
She started doing new videos again late last year, but she's only doing them on Nebula instead of YouTube. I haven't watched them yet, as they're behind Nebula's paywall and I'm still in the process of talking myself into paying for a subscription.
This is the target audience for Ibram Kendi and Tema Okun and other anti-racism training workshop runners. Unfortunately, it's unclear that their workshops are actually at all effective.
I suspect this is a very difficult space for effective trainings to get into - between the people who distrust the entire idea that unwanted bias exists, and people who are willing to performatively adopt anything that claims to help, it's going to be very hard for an effective process to distinguish itself.
>This is the target audience for Ibram Kendi and Tema Okun and other anti-racism training workshop runners. Unfortunately, it's unclear that their workshops are actually at all effective.
Absoltuely not!
That's not even close to what they're aiming at. Kendi's audience is by design wealthy white liberals. Trivially so.
I highly recommend How to Think, by Alan Jacobs. It's very compatible with rationalism, but comes at the problem of bad thinking more from the point of view of working the feelings that drive things like conviction that the outgroup is a bunch of worthless jerks that should be deleted from the planet.
Looks interesting, thanks for the tip. The reviews on Amazon are intriguing. Jacobs appears to be capable of appealing to people across the political/theological spectrum. I just put a hold on it at my public library
> In our cultural climate, it'd be inconceivable to openly confess to such inclinations, unless they wanted to simply volunteer as a poster-child for "anti-racists."
Presumably the fact that they believe this is the reason they can't change their views. It's totally false, but if they're only around people who act as if it's true they'll never be able to "give in" to deviating from social norms. The easy (well, physically hard but mentally easy) solution is simply "move to a new place where they're not surrounded by social pressure to not change their mind", and then I would guess that it would happen overnight. It's simply not the case that the current "cultural climate" induces feeling this way in general; it's specific to certain in-groups and particularly people who are immersed in conservative agitation media.
Once they're around people for whom this sentence barely parses as English (wtf is a "poster-child for anti-racists"? 99% of not-racist people are just regular kind people who don't treat other people badly, and for most of the world "anti-racist" just means, be not racist but also assert that people around you have to be not-racist also) then it will be easy to feel differently.
> "anti-racist" just means, be not racist but also assert that people around you have to be not-racist also)
Looks like you caught a case of MSNBC-brain.
"The opposite of racist isn’t 'not racist'. It is 'anti-racist'."
"The claim of 'not racist' neutrality is a mask for racism."
"To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences"
"To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world"
"To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy"
"Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups"
Why are you listing all those quotes? They don't seem to have anything to do with what I said. I also have no idea what you mean by MSNBC-brain, but I've never seen MSNBC so maybe it makes sense if you have?
You may not be aware that the specific term "anti-racist" has been co-opted by a decent-sized slice of American society to have a very different meaning than what you appear to assume it means. That is the point that RiseOA was trying to make.
Also he is under the impression that MSNBC is the news outlet of choice among the demographic which he is quoting from. At a minimum it is true that the term "anti-racist" is used on MSNBC in the way that RiseOA is quoting which is different from how you seem to be using it.
I guess I'm peripherally aware of that co-opting, although citing it that way struck me as kinda weird. I've only ever heard thoss ideas from conservatives and other people who are mad about it. I think they have contrived more edifice around the word than it actually has.
I also occasionally hear the term in everyday usage and I think that the everyday usage better reflects a more non-loaded meaning. Meanwhile those quotes reflect the tenets of a sort of 'civic religion' that they're pressing one to adopt. But one can easily be not racist, and even plausibly anti-racist, without identifying with that religious identity. That's what I do. All the benefits of feeling like a good person and not being unkind to anyone, but without playing the weird political games that TV and Twitter will try to convince you everyone is playing.
I'm of a social strata that honestly doesn't know how to get MSNBC or Fox even if I wanted to, anyway (I guess you pay your internet provider and they install a plug or something? I've never really thought about it.).. It's a nice way to live.
There is no "non-loaded" meaning of the term 'anit-racist'. It's explicitly a political propaganda term.
> But one can easily be not racist
Define racism then
>All the benefits of feeling like a good person and not being unkind to anyone,
Kindness is a meaningless term. Some people think that teaching children that white people are "privileged" or discriminating them in hiring or college admission is perfectly 'kind'. I do not.
>TV and Twitter will try to convince you everyone is playing.
Every major institution in the country is 'playing this game' to some degree. Not only schools but even military academies are including books by black nationalists like Kendi in their curricula. The idea that this is just some loonies on twitter is hopelessly naive.
What evidence do you have that absent social norms, a person's reflexive racist thoughts would evaporate?
Not sure my statement made sense, and maybe that's why I am not following your reply. To try again, with a little more context: Unless one already buys into the perspective of Kendi et al, becoming a whipping boy for their vilification won't actually achieve anything substantive. There's plenty of reason to conclude that the current woke perspective, emphasizing systemic racism, wallows into a swamp of Marxist critiques. As far as their proposed solutions, what exactly do they offer? What evidence is there that the stuff they advocate is any more effectual than the workshopping and slogan slinging?
Also, aside, but in response to most of the replies here you asked some question of the form "what evidence do you have that that works?" Why do you want evidence so much? If being racist is bad then you may as well start trying to stuff and finding out if it works *for you*. The space of "things that work" is necessarily much larger than the space of "things that work and enough evidence of it working has been accumulated to convince you". Maybe you/they should go do some, like, citizen science, find out if it works, and report back! If a person only changes based on evidence they're going to be changing at a 20-50 year lag behind the people who are figuring out what works.
I do agree that self-experiments aren't constrained by what's already been discovered and shown to be efficacious. And even if it only works on 1 in 100, perhaps a particular "self-aware racist" will be in the affected 1%.
In this thread, I've mentioned recommending mindfulness, notwithstanding the paucity of randomized clinical trials for its effectiveness.
I would think that it's worth trying any suggestion that they get, or maybe if get the same suggestion more than once or something. Trying anything is likely to help. I think that in some weird deeply-rooted neurological sense, the act of "changing your beliefs" and "contemplating changing you beliefs" are one and the same; to even contemplate approaches and try them is to allow a certain amount of malleability to the beliefs. Going about life allowing beliefs to change will cause new information to be incorporated and update to a new belief that has less tension in reality. Like in the racism case, there's an obvious tension: being racist is bad, but being not-racist the way people prescribe sounds degrading and humiliating. Well, when new information is sought out, it'll become more clear (I predict) that being not-racist *doesn't* involve that, and the people who say it is are just not people who should be paid attention to.
My other comment amounted to: "go actually talk to other kinds of people and see what they think". A silly way to do that would be -- go hang out in a quiet bar in a liberal place and strike up some conversations and ask people about their beliefs in a non-judgmental way. Of course that's just a method of trying my particular suggestion; I'm not trying to say it's better than other people's suggestions, just what kinds to mind. But seriously, getting a room or something in an extremely different part of society and just passively "hanging out" with people can go a long, long way to seeing the world differently. I'd recommend it in a non-touristy and quiet part of a liberal town for this particular problem. It is almost a universal rule that people will enjoy chatting with somebody who's open to having their mind changed and curious what other people think.
I guess it's just from personal experience. The person's beliefs (and sounds like yours as well) cause ideas like "to become not racist is to become a whipping boy for vilification" to sound logically coherent. But in the world I live in (in a liberal city in the South) that sentence sounds logically incoherent; it's not even slightly close to what being not-racist means; it sounds bizarre and delusional and heavily decorrelated with social reality. (When you phrase it that way my brain pattern matches to "someone's been listening to Fox News or worse.. and accidentally believing them". No idea if that's true but that's how it parses.)
The fact that the speaker _believes_ becoming not-racist is becoming a whipping boy (whatever that means, I quite literally can't imagine that viewpoint) is the same reason they can't/won't do it. They feel a huge resistance to it! It sounds pathetic and compromising and degrading! If I felt that way I wouldn't do it either!
So the way their mind changes is not "sucking it up and doing it", but dispelling the bizarre belief that makes changing their mind feel like "giving in" in the first place. Because, from experience, having non-racist beliefs doesn't feel like that at all. So if they go and spend time around normal non-racist people, they will immediately find that nobody thinks that way whatsoever (well some loud-mouths on Twitter probably do, but IRL people don't. Maybe you could find a few if you really sought them out.. but you can pretty much just roll your eyes and avoid them once you recognize it's a power-trip thing), so the whole framework just dissolves into nothingness and they can be not-racist without any compromise to their identity whatsoever.
I would guess that your present model of the "current woke perspective" has next to zero overlap with everyday progressives' opinions of what a good way to be is. And I'll happily agree that the woke perspective that you described -- which is not the on people actually hold but it's the one a few people *want* you to think people hold -- is totally toxic. Both sides of that debate *want* you to think that "being good" involves playing some self-sacrificing, degrading role like you described ... the progressive side wants it because gives them moral superiority (as it's implied that they've done the sacrifice and now they're good), and the conservative side wants it because it's obviously ridiculous so it paints their opponents as insane. It's polarization politics at its finest. But if you go and talk to people almost none of them do any of that; they're just casually not racist or not sexist or whatever, in a casual and non-sacrificial way.
My meaning wasn't that being anti-racist is some false posture, or that our society's shift toward greater tolerance and equity is some woke illusion.
I was simply saying that if a person copped to having reflexive racial bias, they'd likely be ostracized; the "poster boy" term assumed that they'd just confirm whatever political perspective others already held. It would not be a promising path to being introduced to effective practices for reducing or eliminating these biases. I don't know how prevalent such racist thoughts and feelings are. I'm pretty sure that it's a tendency that isn't measured in the Implicit Association Test for bias.
I guess I assume, with no way to prove it, that it's not really a thing that anyone has actual internalized un-changeable racism that they're just suppressing. I assume that "having a reflexive racial bias" is a learned thing that can be unlearned. Probably by figuring out exactly where it comes from, or figuring out exactly why the person is so persistent in not unlearning it. That's just based on how I think people work, and I guess I would be not terribly surprised, but probably disappointed, to find out that I'm wrong.
Like, I've felt racist-adjacent thoughts before, although in my particular life my resentment for other groups has been more around social classes than race. But I eventually realized I was feeling them at the same time that I figured out why: resenting a type of person for, say, embodying ways of living that I was anxious about in myself, or resenting people because I was accidentally blaming them for a problem that really wasn't their fault at all but I didn't have any other way to cope with, or just for having values very different from me that offended me by their existence. Whereas in fact everybody feels things like that... the difference between "shrugging and ignoring people who are different" and "having resentment about them infect all your thoughts" has a lot more to do with how secure and self-assured we feel -- that we don't have anything to prove by putting other groups down or changing others' minds or actions -- and not at all with their actual existence or beliefs.
I've also advocated this path. Since it'd be pretty hard to get people outside of the KKK to cop to any racist impulses, there's probably no evidence that can be collected to document the extent of its efficacy.
Distrust your own judgement - semi-radical epistemic scepticism.
Making judgements about things you feel strongly about that you can be confident are unbiased is really, really hard - if you think you can do it, you're more likely than not just being too charitable to yourself. (Often merely /making/ correct judgements about things you feel strongly about is much easier - the hard part is distinguishing the flawed ones from the unflawed ones).
But recognising "this is an area I have strong feelings about that will cloud my judgement, so even though this seems obvious to me I must keep in mind that it may still be false" is merely very hard.
The aspiring rationalist movement does not provide mental tools that will let you be confidently right most of the time. But it /does/ provide good tools to avoid being confidently wrong, if you're willing to pay the price of using them.
The person who confided this to me is pretty engaged in the rationalist worldview. The question they raised wasn't about distrusting their reflexive bias. Rather, their hope was to find some way to silence these atavistic reactions, since they're recognizably noisy garbage
Lately, I've gotten interested in radar jamming and deception, and in the countermeasures that are used against the jammers/deceivers. It's hard to find simple, clear information on what the state-of-the-art of these technologies are. Does anyone know about it?
Here's one question I have: if a radar is being jammed, it can solve the problem by switching to a new radio frequency. Of course, the jammer can quickly figure out what the radar did and then switch its own jamming signal to the new frequency. The solution seems obvious: Install simple computers in the radars that randomly switch frequencies once an attempt at jamming is detected. Aside from just jamming ALL radio frequencies, how can the attacker overcome that? Random switching is impossible to predict, so it seems like the defender should have an enduring advantage.
Another question: I've read that each military radar has unique strengths and weaknesses, and a specific kind of electronic "signature." Data on these factors are very valuable to enemies. What are examples of those strengths and weaknesses, and what defines a radar signature? Isn't a radar a radar?
Erica's reply covers the jamming aspect fairly well (i.e., it's complicated, as you might expect, and often the goal of jamming isn't to completely "blank out" the target radar but to create spurious returns - this has the advantage of the opponent not simply turning the radar off, which is especially helpful if you're serving your jamming with a side of anti-radiation missiles), so I'll answer the other question. (Note - it's been over a decade since I worked in this area professionally. Any errors are due to my faulty memory and attempts at oversimplification.)
No, radars are not equivalent. At the most basic level, a radar signature is composed of simple measurements like wavelength, pulse repetition frequency, etc. This basic info is enough to generally categorize a radar by type: navigation, fire control, air search, etc. For example, the higher the PRF the more precise the radar's ability to distinguish targets - which is why a signal with a very high PRF is going to be coming from a fire control radar and not navigation.
In practice, militaries build up an electronic order of battle with information about the expected signal characteristics (the "signature") for radars known or expected to be in the target area, making it much faster to match a signal to a specific type of transmitter. This info comes from technical analysis of imagery or descriptions of the radar system, open source reporting, espionage, and keeping electronic surveillance gear nearby when a potential adversary is conducting exercises / actively fighting. (This is why you'll see the US position surveillance aircraft / ships near exercise areas.) Collecting signals from exercises / operations is particularly useful because operators will generally only use some frequency bands or vary techniques (types of PRF jittering, etc.) during active operations to confuse those electronic order of battles drawn up with incomplete information. (These are called wartime reserve modes.) The more signals you can collect from your opponent's real/real-ish world use the better.
All radars will have generic strengths and weaknesses based off the general function (fire control will have shorter range, etc.) and tradeoffs are made for a specific system based on how it's meant to be employed, plus radars will have specific modes that have their own strengths and weaknesses. Strengths / weaknesses here means things like dead zones, target discrimination ability, range, and so on. Multiple types of radars can be fed into a single system to help even out the weaknesses, and phased array radars can electronically form the radar beam in multiple ways to allow for tracking individual targets with enough fidelity for fire control while still scanning in a broader search mode in other sectors.
One problem with naïve "jamming" is the power budget required. In order to brute-force jam a frequency, you need to broadcast noise loudly enough to drown out the signal at every receiver you're trying to jam, and thanks to the inverse-square law that turns into a shit-ton of power when you're somewhat distant from your jammer. And the more frequencies you try to jam, the harder the problem gets: if you're trying to jam 100 frequencies, then you need 100 times as much power. Your opponent is only trying to use one frequency, so their power is 100x more concentrated than yours. You can overcome this by having a lot of small jammers closer to the thing you're trying to jam (inverse square law again, so being 10x as close is as good as being 100x as powerful), by following the frequency hops when the radar switches frequencies, by using stealth to make the signal as weak as possible so you need less noise to obscure it, using a highly directional transmitter to jam the particular target, biting the bullet and pumping an unreasonable amount of power into your jammer (may be workable if you're e.g. a major warship trying to jam a missile's on-board targeting radar), or by using more sophisticated ECM rather than brute-force noise. Also, the inverse-square law hurts radars twice: the strength of your signal when it hits the target is proportional to r^-2, and then the return that gets back to your antenna from your antenna is another r^-2 of that, for a total of r^-4.
A common form of "more sophisticated ECS" is DRFMs (Digital Radio Frequency Memory), which record incoming radar pulses and play them back with a delay, mimicking an actual radar return. DRFMs can be configured to modify the played-back pulse in a variety of ways, increasing the delay (making the return look further away than it actually is), modifying the intensity up or down, changing the frequency (changing the apparent relative velocity of the radar and the target), etc. "Range-gate stealing" and "velocity-gate stealing" are search terms for two of the classic ways DRFMs can be used to mislead radar operators.
Another problem is that receivers are usually directional, specifically configured to pick up returns from a fairly narrow range of directions. So if the jammer is to the east of you and the thing you're trying to radar is to the north, you just point your antenna to the north and cheerfully ignore the jamming. This is a little harder than it sounds, since antennas have unavoidable "sidelobe" directions where they also pick up some signal (positioning your jammer in a sidelobe being a major technique in electronic warfare), but it does make the problem of jamming a lot harder since your jammer needs to be either close to the same direction from the antenna as the target or in a specific sidelobe. Modern electronically-configured receivers make this even harder for the jammer, since these come with the ability to reconfigure the antenna and its sidelobes on the fly, or even to put a small blind spot specifically in the direction of the jammer transmitter. I'm not sure of the counters to these, apart from this type of receiver typically being big and expensive so not everything you might want to jam has this capability.
As for valuable data on military radars from an ECM perspective, these include the size and shape of the antenna's main targetable area and its sidelobes, the range of frequencies it can generate, how long its pulses are and how often it pulses (used for range-gate stealing), and so on. Signatures are also useful for identifying a radar. You detect a signal from an enemy, and you know it has certain characteristics (frequency, intensity, pulse length, pulse rate, etc). What is it? Is it an air-defense tracking radar? A civilian air-traffic control radar? A fire control radar? An incoming missile's homing radar? How you respond to each of these things is going to be very different, so it's handy if you can tell which one you're dealing with.
Is it fair to say that this sort of thing is what aircraft like the EA-18G Growler do? And that the large power budget required is why this is a task for a whole damn specialised aircraft rather than just some kind of module attached to a regular Hornet?
A few months ago I was trying to find out what the Growler actually does, but all the sources I could find were incredibly vague.
Aircraft like the Growler are built to carry much larger antennae, to loiter (which fighters are not built to do), and to carry a large crew of specialists to operate the very specialized equipment. There are some bolt on units for SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) attack craft, but they are much more limited in what they can do.
You might be confusing the Prowler & Growler; the latter is an EA-18G, built on largely the same structure as the F/A-18F Super Hornet (a fighter) and has a crew complement of 2 including the pilot (so hardly a large crew of specialists).
I'm not familiar specifically with the Growler, but given what I do know I suspect it's a combination of power budget, the transmitters and receivers themselves (sounds like the Growlers has multiple electrically-steered radar arrays used to project ECM signals in narrow beams onto specific targets), and specialized hardware to calculate what signals to send (the DRFMs I worked on in the mid 2000s were about the side of a shoe box for fairly basic capabilities, and the Growler presumably has much more sophisticated hardware in its suite).
Much of the discipline revolves around ways to distinguish a genuine reflected pulse from whatever may be coming out of a jammer (the latter, for instance, is usually stationary, as opposed to a valuable target, which is normally an aircraft in motion.) That, and the currently-fashionable pill against radar -- RF-seeking munitions.
Plenty of open-lit sources on the subject, e.g. D. Adamy's "A First Course in Electronic Warfare".
But you should consider reading https://www.navalgazing.net/. Bean used to drop long form comments into the old SSC, but now he had his own blog, and has probably a dozen good articles on this topic, from various angles (systems, tactics, aircraft etc.)
If levered ETFs are such a bad investment, why is the UPRO ETF (it's 3x the results of the S&P 500, calculated daily) up about 40x since 2009? If I'd put all of my money into UPRO on June 26th 2009, wouldn't I now have around 40x that amount? It was $1.26 on that day (its inception), it's about $40 today. The S&P 500 has increased about 5x in that time. Seeing as we're all investing in index funds with the assumption that they will eventually go up, isn't buying (index fund but 3x) at least 3 times as good?
Yes, I know all of the arguments against levered funds. Yes I understand that 3x leverage is only good for the day, not a longer period of time. Yes, I want to emphasize in all caps that I understand how volatility decay works- that it will fall more in market downturns, that it can actually have worse results than its index under some conditions (I think this was true for 2020). Yes I understand what a drawdown is, and how the arithmetic around them works. I get all that. But- my simple observation is that UPRO is up 40x since 2009. If volatility decay & drawdowns are such a bad thing, wouldn't it *not* be up by so much?
(Please for the love of God do not give me an explanation that includes how volatility decay & drawdowns works. I get it, I promise you)
Isn’t it really simple though? 2009 was the start of an enormous bull market. The drawdowns weren’t big enough to blow up the leveraged fund. If you believe a bull market will keep going (note: we’re in the 3rd year of the Presidential cycle, the best-performing year historically), by all means buy a leveraged ETF.
You may be interested in "hedgefundie's excellent adventure".
Anyway, yes, as you seem to mostly understand, it would have higher EV, but it's not guaranteed to always go up in the long run like the plain index fund is.
Is there a reason you're specifically looking only at a start date in 2009? I would recommend looking at a variety of start dates, including start dates both just before and just after major market events, rather than only looking at one that starts near the bottom of the last cycle.
You can easily simulate returns before 2009 by importing historical SPY data (e.g. from Yahoo Finance) into Excel (or e.g. Pandas) and letting it calculate. I highly recommend doing it manually rather than relying on prepared data, as volatility decay is one of the most misunderstood topics in finance. Also, you can calculate Sharpe or Sortino ratios and compare them this way.
If you invest 1000$ in a 3x levered ETF and the market doubles, then you end up with a profit of 2000$. But if the market drops by half, then you make a loss of -1500$, so on top of your initial investment you have to pay a debt of 500$.
For most normal investors, even the risk of losing everything is not acceptable. But the risk of losing all your initial investment AND getting additional debts on top is just not acceptable.
You point to one success where the gamble pays off. But sometimes it does not pay off, and then investors are in really bad trouble.
Re: your 1st paragraph- this would be true for buying something on leverage, but not a levered ETF. You would not have a debt using a levered ETF, that's just completely wrong.
>You point to one success where the gamble pays off
This 'one success' is the last 14 years, which includes 2 market crashes, 1 of which was a 34% crash and one of the worst of the last century
Uhm, sorry, no, then I don't understand how they work. In the product that I know of, you can go into debt.
And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not. Because those cause heavy volatility decay. This is a black swan event, so there may be many or few of them, and this is quite random even over 15 years.
For the UPRO, it won against S&P500 in the first years, where there were relatively few heavy crashes. In the last 5 years, S&P500 has won against UPRO, so that is a data point against the thesis that levered ETF are generally performing better.
In general, leveraged instruments do not drive expectation up or down, at least not if the stock development is the same as the cost of borrowing money. They are not "worse" or "better" in this sense, and I don't see a reason to expect that levered instruments are generally beaten by their underlying indices, or vice versa. But they increase variance, and usually the two goals of investment are
1) high expected return (primary),
2) low variance (secondary).
So to the normal investor, leveraging does not help with 1), but makes 2) worse. That's why they are not such a good investment in standard situations.
Again, just false. Returns from UPRO have exceeded the S&P 500 in the year we're in now, 2021 and 2019. You can just download the results from Yahoo Finance and check yourself.
>And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not
If I don't have any plans to sell, what do I care about the day-to-day volatility? Using that logic I wouldn't be invested in stocks at all
I meant that over the whole time period of the last five years, S&P 500 has won. Though the difference is pretty small, 49% vs 48%, so it might be fairer to call it a draw.
>>And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not
>If I don't have any plans to sell, what do I care about the day-to-day volatility? Using that logic I wouldn't be invested in stocks at all
That's exactly the volatility decay that you asked NOT to explain. A levered index suffers extremely strongly from black swan events, relative to the index fund. If there are 1000 days where the index loses 1% each, and 1000 days where it gains 1% each, then the levered index will suffer a factor of 0.45 compared to the index. If there are 10 days with 10% loss and 10 days with a 10% win, it will suffer almost the same factor of 0.43. If there is a single day with 25% loss and a single day with 25% gain, this is again almost the same factor of 0.47.
So 1000 days with 1% loss (plus recovery) are as important as 10 days with 10% loss are as important as a single day with 25% loss. Black swans are extremely important for leveraged investment, and the most extreme ones are most important. If you have few and mild black swan daily losses, the levered fund is better. If you have many or hefty ones, you want the original index. And for the levered fund it makes a huge difference whether a severe loss is spread out over a week or happens in one day, so saying "the market lost 30% in a month" doesn't tell you much about whether that was a problem for the levered funds or not.
Even over a long time period, black swans are rare, and their number and extremity can vary a lot. I don't think it's literally true that single events dominate everything; my numbers were a bit too extreme, though not completely off the records. But still, that's why I am not very impressed by a single data point that spans 14 years. If you show me that similar numbers come out for other indices or other factors (2x, 5x, .... Well, we know what comes out with 10x), then I'll be more impressed.
>I meant that over the whole time period of the last five years, S&P 500 has won
SPY ETF on the market open of the 1st day of 2018, 267.839996
On the market close on 9/29/23- 427.480011. Up 59%
UPRO ETF on the market open of the 1st day of 2018, 23.576668
On the market close on 9/29/23- 41.169998. Up 74%
Re: the other stuff- but we had a black swan event called Covid, and we experienced a top 5 worst market crash we've ever had, and yet UPRO still beat SPY. You can't get any more black swan than Covid, I believe the Russell 2000 dropped like 40% in a day or something. It probably helps that *UPRO just about doubled in both 2019 and 2021*, I think that clearly more than helps make up for it, yes?
My original question was, here's a 14 year stretch with 2 separate large market crashes, and UPRO still outperformed its index. How bad can it be? I want to discus real world performance and not theory. I didn't want to hear boring 'well in theory' arguments, but you appear to have them in spades. My response is, if the black swans are so bad with levered ETFs, why did we experience 1 of them and yet it still came out ahead? I want people to *explain the real world data, not resort to theory*, and you seem unable to do that.
I don't want to hear a response that doesn't explain 'why did UPRO beat its index even after we lived through a black swan event'.
BTW, every single argument that you have could work just as well if you replace UPRO with 'stocks'. Stocks are prone to black swan events, the losses are worse than the gains, etc. etc. They experience decades of declines- the 30s, 70s, and 2000s. Japan still hasn't reached its early 90s market peak 30 years later. You could use that argument to be 100% bonds and 0% stocks. But we risk stocks, and in exchange experience higher returns. It appears that UPRO is just a higher risk/higher reward venture, no?
I suppose the answer could be that, if we hit another decade of market declines (like the 30s or 70s or 2000s), UPRO would obviously have a much worse result than its index, and so even after such a time period is over one would be starting a new market upturn from a lower net worth. But still- buying UPRO in 2009 is still better than buying SPY (the S&P 500 ETF), that doesn't change that fact
Yes, that's useful if you have a time machine, but you can't buy UPRO in 2009. You can only buy it in 2023. Will the next 14 years look like the last 14?
This has been looked at. It started with a major thread on Bogleheads (look up 'hedge fundies excellent adventure' or HFEA) that did a deep dive, and backtested across 40 years. The conclusion was that an all-equity levered portfolio was extremely unstable, and could underperform or even lose money across a long time period (10+ years). Going with a mix of both a levered equity and a levered bond fund helped, but only to a point.
There's still a lot of unknowns. Backtesting is imperfect, and may not account for all the factors that could come into play. And, of course, it's easy to get excited about a strategy like this in the wake of a very successful decade. But there's a reason nobody has yet concluded that these funds are the best choice for the average long-term investor.
I started a small HFEA allocation on the side, just for fun. Haven't decided if I'm going to increase it. But I'm far too close to retirement (10 years ideally) to risk my core position on it.
>But still- buying UPRO in 2009 is still better than buying SPY (the S&P 500 ETF), that doesn't change that fact
And since 2009, you would get even better return than UPRO with Bitcoin. Both instruments are riskier than S&P 500, and in this particular period, that risk would pay off.
I've been thinking about the tactics of a situation where multiple candidates are competing for a nomination, might write a substack post about it, was hoping to bounce ideas off people here and, hopefully, get some new ones.
Consider, first, a campaign without an initially dominant candidate, the Democratic campaign in 2020 not the Republican in 2024. Different candidates appeal to different groups of voters. The more candidates are splitting the votes of a particular pool, the fewer votes each would get. So it would make sense for two or more candidates who appeal to the same voters to agree that all but one of them will withdraw.
If everyone agrees that they are starting with equal chances of winning the nomination they could use some random method, perhaps rolling dice, to decide who stays in. Ex ante that improves the odd for all of them, since if they are not splitting the votes the chance that the nomination will go to one of them goes up. If their initial chances are not equal but they agree on what they are, they can do the same thing with weighted odds. If they cannot agree on what the chances are, perhaps they could agree that whichever of them does best on three selected polls will stay in, the others withdraw.
Next consider the current Republican race. The candidates face a choice between two approaches. One is to assume that if Trump remains in the race he will win it and aim to be the candidate if Trump has a heart attack, or is assassinated, or for some other reason drops out of the race. The candidate will want to pick up Trump's voters so should be careful not to attack Trump.
The other approach is to try to beat Trump for the nomination. That looks very difficult at present but not impossible. It might be a more plausible approach in a situation where there is a leading candidate but with a smaller lead.
One version of that approach is to be the anti-Trump candidate, in the hope that the primary voters become disenchanted with Trump's approach. That is the tactic that Chris Christie is attempting. Another is to out-Trump Trump, as Ren DeSantis is attempting.
>So it would make sense for two or more candidates who appeal to the same voters to agree that all but one of them will withdraw.
That only makes sense if the candidates are optimizing for the chance that someone from their ideological cluster will win. I don't think any serious candidate for high office does that. They optimize for the chances of themselves, personally, attaining the office, hang those other guys. If they're unlikely to achieve the office in question this year, they may optimize for being appointed to some high-level supporting position (e.g. vice-president or secretary of state), or for positioning themselves to win in the next election cycle.
Dropping out, pretty much minimizes the chances of any of those things happening. At least if you drop out before someone gives you a firm offer of the vice-presidency or whatnot.
Agreeing to drop out if you lose a coin toss or whatever, might make sense in this context. But then, so does coming up with a cheap excuse to reneg on that deal if the coin doesn't turn up in your favor - this isn't at all a standard kind of deal in politics, so this little bit of game theory won't be iterated. Just this once, where staying in means you *might* win and dropping out means you *definitely* lose.
This isn't to say that candidates for high office don't care about their party or their ideology. But by the time you reach the point of being a serious candidate for e.g. POTUS, you've passed through *many* gates where you had to choose between advancing the party or advancing your own career. That selects for people who sincerely believe that the party, ideology, whatever, absolutely needs *them* in a position of great power, and that *they* are the one who can win the general election, not one of those supporting characters who aren't up to the job.
Of course it could be that you enjoy spending a chunk of lifespan in that way. Some of the "perennial candidates" in US political history have seemed as if they did.
I was assuming that the candidate's objective was to win but also that the agreement to drop out after losing the coin toss or getting the lower poll result was in some way enforceable.
Isn't modern democracy per se predicated on the assumption that the losers reliquish power voluntarily, in the wake of an election (which is essentially a poll)?
In 2008 I believed Fred Thompson was working with McCain in SC to take away votes from Huckabee and people close to the situation confirmed that is what happened. And in the TX AG race in 2022 Louie Gohmert gave up a safe seat in Congress to take votes away from Paxton in order to help George P Bush. And on the primary Election Day out of nowhere Forbes broke that George W Bush was the target of an assassination plot…does Forbes routinely break stories like that?? Anyway, powerful forces were at work in 2008 and 2022.
I don't think there's any hope of a Republican getting elected as an anti-Trump candidate. If Trump goes to jail and his reputation is ruined, that still doesn't change the reason that he is popular with a large segment of the population. There might be just enough room to thread the needle on "I support what Trump is doing but not Trump the man" - which I think is what DeSantis is trying?
Yes if Trump goes to jail it don’t be like Nixon where the voters turned against him, post impeachment. It will confirm him as a martyr in the eyes of many of his followers. The media and justice system are seen to be biased in a way that’s fairly new in history.
And some, like Mandela, are pretty much universally accepted despite (or even because of) their time in jail.
I think the key is understanding that not every jail sentence is just. When Putin put Alexei Navalny in jail for various things, nobody considers that legitimate. If Trump becomes the first former president in history to go to jail, with the flurry of charges against him (many of which are novel, stretches of legal theory, or straight-up bunk), then there's every reason to believe that at least his supporters, and likely some number of independents, are going to find them to be illegitimate. If the AG of New York can get elected on an explicit ticket of indicting Trump, without identifying what crime was supposedly committed prior to making that claim, there's a big problem. People aren't dumb, they can see what's going on there.
The fact that some of the charges may have been made against other people at other times doesn't do much against the fact that there's about 10X as many that no one, let alone a former president, would have been charged with.
Yea. Now, DeSantis has turned out to be surprisingly inept in that attempt. (At least surprising to me as a non-Floridian, I tend to assume that anyone who's gotten himself twice elected governor of a large state has some campaigning skills and/or some attractive personality traits.) But the idea was always a long shot regardless.
The challenge isn't Trump being widely popular by the politically-relevant definition of "motivates them to go vote for him"; he isn't. He lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020 after all; and given the turnouts in those elections only a bit more than a quarter of American adults actually voted for Trump in 2016 and/or 2020. But....many of those who do want to vote for him _reeeeally_ want to, that's been his secret sauce politically. They would be extra-hard for anyone else to peel off regardless of how skillful that candidate was in the effort.
Interestingly, they see Trump as genuine. Not that he doesn't lie, or that he doesn't try to cheat his taxes, or your typical measures of honesty. That he is genuinely in their corner. The problem for his enemies is that they don't seem to really get this. When they attack him, they are doing the one and only thing that guarantees his supporters see him as staying genuine. As long as his enemies are the his supporter's enemies, as evidenced by them going after him in the media, courts, everywhere they can, they are locking him in. Maybe that's on purpose at this point, to avoid a better (general election) candidate running, but it was definitely not on purpose to start. They thought that their attacks would have the customary effect of tearing down who they didn't like, but due to how much they themselves were hated, it had the opposite effect.
I genuinely think CNN really did want Trump elected the first time around because they care more about people watching their trashy network than about what is good for the country. I think they knowingly helped get him elected. And they are doing it again, knowingly.
Nah, I know a couple of CNN management staffers personally and am closely related to a former senior editor at one of the nation's largest newspapers. You are vastly overestimating both the degree of beyond-the-current-week planning that goes into their work (I mean seriously LOL), as well as the degree to which anybody over there could stick with such a strategy even if agreed upon.
(Also no news media organization could successfully keep such a plan secret for very long. Every journalist working there knows that breaking such a story would make him or her instantly a legend within their field as well as richer and more famous than almost anything else that anybody not already a star could ever aspire to. The worker bees at CNN and MSNBC and Fox and the network shops -- the 30something journalists making shitty salaries to do 30-second standups from Thanksgiving parades and committee hearings -- would each taze their most beloved editor to break the news of a scheme like you're imagining.)
I'm not saying they planned anything or kept secrets. Only that they were smart enough to know that giving him all that free publicity would increase the odds he would become president -- and they were 100% fine with that. They could have stepped back and said: "Maybe we don't need to cover every one of his rallies." But they couldn't help themselves. They care about ratings uber alles.
I mean the executives, not the worker bees or Anderson Cooper.
Why did the war in Iraq/Global War on Terror in general lead to right-wing types becoming isolationist- but this didn't seem to happen after the Vietnam war, which was much more socially divisive and had way higher casualties? Unless I'm completely wrong about the Vietnam fallout.
I'm middle aged, so the right-wing turn from hawkish globalism to isolationism in the last 15 years has been absolutely head-spinning to live through. (Personal politics- vanilla center-left type who was strongly against the war in Iraq at the time). In the mid 2000s being on the political right meant a great deal of nationalistic enthusiasm for invading other countries thousands of miles away- we were maybe going to invade Iran after Iraq, possibly North Korea, and anyone else that looked at us cross-eyed too. Gems like 'we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here' were very common. Being against invading other countries on other continents was seen as traitorous and unAmerican. In an incredible turnaround, Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely seen as failures (which they were), and the American right has a very strong isolationist strain. Now many Republicans are questioning NATO, our treaty with South Korea, etc.
Was there such an isolationist turn after Vietnam, which again had way way more casualties than the GWOT? If not, why not?
I think it was more the Great Awokening than the War on Terror. Pre-Great Awokening, the US establishment was broadly viewed as right-wing, so invading and occupying other countries was likely to involve imposing right-wing values on them (that's "right-wing" in the US conservative sense of small government, capitalism, self-reliance, democracy, etc.; I'm aware that Saddam could also be considered right wing, but his brand of rightism was very different to the Republican Party's). Post-Great Awokening, it's viewed as left-wing, foreign conquest means spreading left-wing values, so the left is now pro-intervention whereas the right isn't.
Which half of the US political spectrum is more likely to support maintaining or increasing US support for Ukraine, and which half is more likely to support reducing or eliminating it?
The Soviet Union was bigger that al Qaeda is my guess. It was hard to turn away from that. After Iraq you could just stop talking about terrorism. But after Vietnam, you couldn't pretend that communism wasn't still around.
How do you distinguish between the GWoT "leading to right-wing types becoming isolationist", and the GWoT being the last foreign military adventure the US undertook before the right-wing types turned isolationist for some other reason?
Because the 2008 financial crash, the election of Barack Obama and his subsequent interventions, and the populist realignment of the GOP, seem like they could have driven this change all by themselves.
As probably the most rightwing person who would ever comment here, I find it rather ludicrous the right's retconnning of Saddam Hussein as someone we should have left alone. We probably should have acted sooner. We should have done a lot of things differently. We should never have gone along with the pretense that the oil was "theirs". So I would draw a sharp distinction between getting rid of Saddam and the occupation and Long War that followed. Let them revert to whatever rule they wanted. Leave them be until again threaten, rinse and repeat. The world is safer when states - even those invented by mapmakers - have reason to respect one another, there are no half-measures.
Saddam was contained by our enforcement of the no-fly zone and so invading Iraq made no sense. The NATO action to take our Qaddafi made perfect sense as he gave a hero’s welcome to the Lockerbie Bomber which can’t be allowed to stand after 9/11.
But once we invaded Iraq we needed it stable because of its oil reserves. Do you remember the Persian Gulf War??? Why do you think we sent ground troops to repel Saddam’s invasion of his neighbor??
Don't pretend you have WMDs if you don't. There, easy. If the oil is that important, we should have taken permanent control of the oil fields, full stop; or conceded that it doesn't matter who they sell the oil to. While not ridiculing the energy conservation moevement, of course, which is now a joke given recent events.
Saddam was a terrible human being, but the policy of disposing foreign leaders who are terrible human beings empirically does not lead to good outcomes most of the time (Hitler notwithstanding). In retrospect, it is safe to say that Saddam or the Taliban regime were not the only thing which kept the Iraqi and Afghan people from enthusiastically adopting liberal democracy.
Oh, corollary: if you've been cavalier about say, using nerve gas on your own population - then you really doubly need to avoid antagonizing the world's superpower.
And do you know who Rex Tillerson is?? Do you know that he was an important advisor to Bush?? And do you know where Qatar is?? Because in 2003 Tillerson was investing tens of billions of dollars into Qatar to solve our energy crisis. So Tillerson wanted to invest tens of billions of dollars into Iraq and make them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
What moral authority does the United States have to depose a dictator if the quality of life for the people of that country isn’t improved? As it is even with the occupation it was a long hard road to rebuild Iraq’s quality of life to where it was before. Without any occupation things would have likely have been much worse.
I'd say that everybody has the moral authority to depose a dictator, just as everyone has the moral authority to rescue a kidnap victim or stop a thief. Unelected groups of thugs controlling entire countries are a moral abomination which should be wiped out whenever it is seen.
Of course having the moral authority to do so isn't the same as having the actual ability to do so. In practice, the US military is one of the few entities with the actual ability to do these things as well as the moral authority.
Suppose you have the ability to time travel back to the year 1200 (alternate timeline). By your standards, we should send swarms of predator drones back to start taking out all the monarchs, which certainly qualify as "[u]nelected groups of thugs controlling entire countries".
The result would be wars of succession all over the world, which would mostly harm the populations.
I don't claim that absolute monarchs or dictators are entitled to the ontological protections we generally afford the innocents. If someone killed some monarch planning a large scale military campaign, I would be ok with that.
The problem is that you can not transition from feudalism to parliamentary democracy using drone strikes. As an utilitarian, I believe that one should carefully consider the wider outcomes of any actions, including political assassinations and regime change operations.
If you’re not doing it to help the Iraqi people then it’s not justified though. You’re burning down a house to kill a bully ignoring all the other people inside.
The removal of the threat, which is taken seriously, because it is not a world of adults (us) and children (them). What the citizens of the country choose to do with it is up to them. One may have one’s suspicions about the use they’ll make of it - but they might have surprised everyone. One must admit it’s possible. Anyway, the authority to act has nothing to do with what form their government takes afterward. That should never have been the concern of the US Army.
A Pathan friend of mine mused, after 9/11, and the real distress which some, mostly Boomer lefties, felt at the prospect of bombing the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and Kabul, that if the situation were reversed, there would be no handwringing, no distress, just ferocity. Of course bombing Afghanistan was like bombing another century, as Tamim Ansary so convincingly wrote at the time.Still: simple consequences - not games, as with Pakistan, nor castles in the air as in Iraq.
The sight of “women falling from the sky clutching their handbags” may not stir you to action, but if it does not, you probably don’t need to worry overmuch about an excess of inappropriate moralizing in the world.
Finally, my only other contention is that foreign aid is a terrible idea. Makes some think they've bought something, makes others think they've earned something. False pretenses are lethal in international relations in my (obviously lonely) view.
I actually do kind of like this idea that we should just thrash recalcitrant foreign leaders but not bother occupying their country afterwards- too much hassle. The real problem was always the occupation!
McCain and Graham literally warned Qaddafi to his face that giving the Lockerbie Bomber a hero’s welcome would give us no choice but to take him out. Qaddafi was emboldened by the disastrous invasion of Iraq because he believed we didn’t want to do more nation building…we didn’t do nation building although Ambassador Stevens was in Libya in order to help them stabilize.
Just guessing here, but it seems that in the past, "establishment" meant right wing, and today it means left wing. If you are pro-establishment, you want more government action. If you are anti-establishment, you want less.
At the simplest level, Vietnam was sold as resistance to Communism, and for all the many complications to that story, it was not entirely false.
In contrast, Iraq was sold as ... something something 9/11 ... something something WMD. And that story was soon seen to be entirely false. Which made many people ask, "Hey, then what *was* it really about?"
Not sure if it's really isolationist or just "anti-left/liberal", and they are against supporting Ukraine (and Taiwan) because the current Democratic administration is for it.
I don't believe for a moment that Donald Trump is an isolationist. Doesn't he want to invade Mexico? I suspect he would love to start a war with Iran just for the hell of it.
Right-wingers are isolationists when Democrats are in power in the same way they are against low-interest rates when Democrats are in power.
Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime (and considerably before) who didn't start a foreign war. He actually helped reduce our foreign interventions. He has not said a thing about starting a war in Mexico - although the Republican debates featured that conversation, primarily around teaming up with Mexico to help fight the cartels. He also overruled John Bolton, who did want to start a war with Iran, and fired him. That's actually wrapped up in the classified documents Trump took with him - transcriptions of conversations with John Bolton where Bolton tried to start a war with Iran and Trump refused.
That's part of the reason people like him. Globalists and Neoconservatives, who ran the Republican party since at least Reagan and now seem to run the Democrats, are pro-war and pro-intervention. Most people do not benefit from wars, and globalism is a mixed bag for the working classes (30-35%) and people without a college degree (62%). Some things are cheaper, but then maybe the good jobs that don't require a college degree get outsourced. I would much rather be a well-paid steel worker than a poorly paid Walmart stocker, even if the stuff I can buy at Walmart is much cheaper.
Fair enough. I stand by the distinction and that Biden has done a lot to escalate conflict in a way that Trump did not. I used very imprecise language saying "start a war" as not everyone before him did either. I don't think Clinton did, from memory, but he sure participated in a lot of bombings and escalation.
The "trump didn't start any wars and others did" thing, when I've seen it written out, relies on double standards for what counts as starting a war.
Trump attacked Syria's government and killed a top Iranian general, both of which Obama/Bush/etc didn't do. Not to mention escalated use of drones in many areas. By the standards by which people cite various things as Obama/other president "starting wars", those should count as starting wars.
Killing a general in an intentional strike is significantly smaller than toppling a government (Libya) and obviously less than launching an invasion or expanding a war.
I'm not saying Trump never did anything militaristic in his time. I'm saying that what he did was categorically different, and significantly smaller than anything the last five, at least, presidents did before him. Excluding Carter I think you would have to go back to the 1930s to find a president who did less than Trump in that regard.
>globalism is a mixed bag for the working classes (30-35%) and people without a college degree (62%). Some things are cheaper, but then maybe the good jobs that don't require a college degree get outsourced. I would much rather be a well-paid steel worker
The government is not a magic central planning wizard who can create certain economic & labor conditions, or recreate a decade from 70s years ago, by passing the right laws. The economy is not a series of dials and knobs that the wizards can just tweak to achieve the desired outcome. Most manufacturing is highly automated these days, and the less-skilled work moving to lower-cost countries is a major shift in how the world works. The government can't pass a law against other countries being cheaper any more than it can outlaw the tide coming in tomorrow. That era is now gone, in the same way automation removed the Luddites' highly-skilled weaving jobs
Didn’t it take our government’s buy in to NAFTA to get this shift going?
Maybe not a magic central planning wizard but a strong shove in a direction that made US manufacturing jobs move to the maquiladoras of our free trade partner, Mexico, inevitable.
> and the less-skilled work moving to lower-cost countries is a major shift in how the world works. The government can't pass a law against other countries being cheaper any more than it can outlaw the tide coming in tomorrow
The 90s called and demanded its economic philosophy back. Of course countries can build barriers to trade, they do it all the time. This is exactly what the democrats are now trying to do with China. Globalisation depends on laws passed by humans, tariffs passed by countries, international trade agreements. It’s far from being some inevitable law of nature. The Overton window is shifting on that one pretty quickly.
I don't disagree with you, but this message can be said in several ways.
One is "learn to code" type messages that are dismissive and disparaging to those who don't have a highly paid skill set. Hillary Clinton went to a West Virginia coal mining community and told them their jobs were gone and never coming back. She didn't even realize how poorly that resonated.
Another approach is to be sympathetic and work with these communities. It helps a lot, though these people don't want a *different way of life* they want to have the life they recognize and enjoy. It's a tough sell.
Or you could just tell them we're bringing coal back. And because a good bit of the problems in the coal industry can be (rightly or wrongly) blamed on federal policy - including outright attempts at banning the uses of coal - this is a plausible pitch.
Not that Trump was necessarily going to bring coal back on his own (or that his people truly expected him to), but it's very believable that he would 1) Do what he had the power to do, within reason, to benefit coal, and 2) Not intentionally harm coal. Biden, Clinton, or even a Republican like Jeb Bush could not plausibly make this claim and very likely would directly say and do the opposite.
Trump has said loudly and clearly that he wants to use the US army to attack Mexican cartels on Mexican soil. The current Mexican president and the current leading candidates running to be the next Mexican president have said loudly and clearly that the US better not attack anyone on their soil. It doesn't sound like the Republicans are off to a great start "teaming up with Mexico to help fight the cartels".
As for Trump not starting a foreign war: there's a decent chance his scorecard has four years remaining on it.
Probably re-nationalize all their oil fields all over again.
EDIT: And then it could alter the course of history. Mexico could ally politically and economically with Russia and China over the USA. Don't doubt that if the USA invaded Mexico militarily -- which is how Mexicans would view any US attack on their soil -- that a Mexican presidential candidate shouting "Death to America" and urging closer ties with Russia wouldn't beat out any candidate wanting to keep close ties with the US under the same circumstances.
Waging war against someone who is actually attacking you, is a highly non-central example of "isolationism". And there's been enough violence and criminality initiated south of the border and aimed north, that it isn't entirely hyperbole to suggest that the Mexican cartels are attacking the United States.
I don't think that sending the US military into Mexico would be a good strategy for dealing with the cartels, but if someone else proposes it I won't call them an "interventionist" or assume that they're going to be in favor of sending Javelins to Ukraine while flying Predators over Syria and Libya.
I guess I'm not hearing about all the violence the cartels are involved in this side of the border. I know that there's plenty of cartel violence in Juarez but very little in El Paso. Most of the violence in the US is done by US citizens. Or maybe there's a war going on this side of the border I'm not hearing about.
Sending the US military into Mexico to deal with cartels would be insane but, you are right, "interventionist" probably isn't the correct word in this context.
I also mentioned above that Trump would "love to start a war with Iran just for the hell of it". You don't have to agree with that, but my point is only that I don't believe Trump is an isolationist. I believe he is a belligerent man who would behave as a belligerent Commander-in-Chief given much of a provocation to be. It would take a belligerent Commander-in-Chief to use the US military against Mexican drug cartels in Mexico.
And, er, vice versa I assume. It is true that the right became more anti war when Obama was in power. It’s also true that the right are still more likely to support wars or sabre rattling against Muslim states, in particular Iran. What’s more interesting is the left opposing “isolationism” ie supporting American wars.
Is Biden starting any wars right now? He took a big political hit in leaving Afghanistan and has pretty much ended the drone wars.
Only thing is funding Ukraine against Russia, but that's not the same as "starting a war" (and if it does ... well, lethal aid to Ukraine actually started under trump, so it's a war *he* started under that (dumb) standard).
I'm inclined to believe that American foreign policy is determined by the "culture of American foreign policy", which is 100% independent of which party controls the White House. For example, Wilson said he was an isolationist but eventually entered the war. Johnson vastly escalated Vietnam, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with his personal or partisan ideology. Nixon ran on ending the war in Vietnam, then immediately expanded it. Bush W ran as "not a state-builder" then became a state-builder in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama was one of the few members of the senate who voted against authorizing the war in Iraq, ran on that in 2008, and then surged the troops in Afghanistan.
Trump ran in 2016 as an anti-war guy, and he didn't start one in four years. Perhaps we will find out over the next five how anti-war he really is.
Yes. The president takes over an establishment which is geared to preserve US military hegemony. It takes a strong individual to oppose that. With Trump it probably was that nothing needing a war came up during that time.
Although, it looks like she's still on the right side of the DoJ:
"In 2012, Sheehan was sued by the federal government for failure to pay back taxes. "I feel like I gave my son to this country in an illegal and immoral war. I'll never get him back," Sheehan said. "And, so, if they can give me my son back, then I'll pay my taxes. And that's not going to happen."[21] Sheehan appeared in court on April 19, 2012 and in IRS offices on May 9, 2012, refusing to provide information on the basis of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.[22][23] The government dropped its case against her in February 2013.[24]"
I think you are misunderstanding some things. First of all, prior to WW2 the American Right was heavily against interventionism and was very isolationist. They were known as the Old Right. During the Cold War the Old Right was pushed aside by the now infamous Neoconservatives. But you still had people like Taft who were still against NATO for instance. The Old Right pretty much was stagnant till the 80s and was revived by the Paleo-Conservatives. Basically Pat Buchanan was a rehashing of Old school Republicans. These new trends within the Republican Party were pretty much laid out by Buchanan and watered by Trump. Plus you also have to look at things like states with high military populations, they are more anti-interventionist than most people think. If you're from North Carolina and you're son got blown up by an IED in Iraq War and had some other relative blown up in Afghanistan, and seeing the outcomes of those wars, you have probably don't want to see of that in Ukraine.
US aid to Ukraine is just 0.2% of GDP and without a single lost limb or a dead American. If you want to win a Cold War against Russia there is nothing easier or cheaper than supporting Ukraine. An easy way to explain opposition to Ukraine is that the right is simply full of cynical grifters.
I really, really, really hope you never agreed with the people who said that Ameica "can't afford" to build a border wall. You can be oppose it for whatever other reason, but I find that these kinds of justifications for US spending are so often very opportunistic.
> If you want to win a Cold War against Russia there is nothing easier or cheaper than supporting Ukraine.
Who said we want to do that? Who even said we were in a cold war to begin with? The only reason we would be...is this spending in the first place, which is the very thing we're arguing about.
Well let’s see: one problem is that you have a genocidal psychopath with a nuclear arsenal who hates you and the other problem is that there are too many people coming over who want to cut your lawn for you. So yes theoretically you can prioritise the lawn thing.
I'm not sure the War on Terror is the main cause of it; I think it's got more to do with a factional shift on the right as the Republican base turned against their establishment.
My rough timeline is:
1985-1992: Cold War ends. The American right's isolationist streak goes back to WWI, but was basically subdued for as long as there was a hostile Communist superpower, and a foreign policy of preventing them from getting a foothold in Latin America and/or dominating Eurasia was at least broadly defensive (remember we're talking about the right here, so no sympathy for Communist/socialist movements and not a lot of concern for the plight of Laotian peasants etc). After the Cold War, the paleo-cons started to advocate for non-intervention, which tied into a dislike of the federal government generally for a mixture of constitutional, libertarian and, in some cases, "states rights" reasons; the worldview was that the justification for a muscular federal government was essentially a war measure and they were pushing for a second return to normalcy. This split culminated in the first Buchanan campaign against Bush, and was a contributing strain in Ross Perot's support.
1993-2000: The era of not much happening. Neo-cons are in the ascendant in foreign policy, but there's the start of a populist turn in Republican political strategy under Gingrich that culminates in GW Bush.
2001-2007: The War on Terror. Neo-cons are in government, being hawkish and globalist. The paleo-cons start to gain prominence as an anti-war faction, and a weird amount of sympathy from liberals (eg. Pat Buchanan on MSNBC). People who don't like the war and the Patriot Act start drifting into libertarianism and Ron Paul starts to take off. They don't remotely control the Republican Party though, which at this point is dominated by a mixture of evangelicalism, a watered down version of neoliberal economics economics and the neo-con idea of making the world safe for democracy.
2008-2015: Financial crash and Ron Paul candidacy. 2008 discredits the neoliberals to a huge chunk of the Republicans' base, and Ron Paul sucks up most of the populist energy. This massively strengthens the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party, and the establishment starts facing primary challenges. Iraq starts to become near-universally viewed as a disaster because the left and the anti-establishment right are both against it (also, it kind of is, but so was Vietnam). It's thus a convenient boot to kick the establishment with. It also gelled really well with anti-establishment-ism generally, as the Paul-ites could just copy and paste far-left talking points about Halliburton (this trick goes back to Rothbard).
2016-present: Trump era. It turns out the parts of Ron Paul's message that sunk in were the bits about crony capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats being in cahoots, but the libertarianism became a dead weight (why this happened is interesting; it seems the establishment co-opted the meat of it through Paul Ryan, so it started getting parsed by voters as "corporate tax cuts paid for by social security cuts;" this is unfair to the libertarians, but that's politics). Trump ditched the libertarianism and went hard on the anti-elite line, and was able to do this without being extreme on most issues because the extremism by this point was mostly just signalling anti-establishment credentials which he already had. He kept the isolationism because it gelled well with the protectionism he inherited from Perot, it was one of the popular parts of Ron Paul-ism, and "I'm opposed to that disastrous war policy" is an easy sell.
TL;DR: The foreign policy shift is an incidental consequence of the financial crash destroying the Republican establishment, caused by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul being the only anti-establishment force in the Republican Party at the time.
This is a good comment, thanks. But then why weren't the 70s viewed the same way as the 2008 financial crash? There were multiple oil shocks that caused drivers to queue up for blocks just to get gas. There was the worst inflation in a hundred years, to my knowledge- quite a bit worse than today. There was a deep recession in the early 80s that lasted for a couple of years. Wasn't the 10 year span after we finally left Vietnam maybe almost as bad as the 2008 crash, but more prolonged?
Also, we think about our era as cynical and losing social trust in institutions- but the relative fall in the 70s was probably greater. We had a President step down due to criminal activity, his VP was indicted, there was the Church committee on various abuses by the CIA, FBI, Cointelpro, etc. The civil rights movement succeeded in some ways, but hit its end with the failure of busing. Crime increased- a lot! My understanding is that the USSR grew relatively stronger in the 70s. Plus everything economic in my first paragraph
The Vietnam aspect of this question makes this whole thread really thought provoking for me, thanks for this.
I would argue that neoliberalism is what drove American interventionalism and this ideology is/was prevalent on the establishment right and left. The right wing hawks who were hawks in Iraq are still hawks today. It’s just that the right wing has had a populist surge that is against interventions. There's the anti-neoliberal left and the anti-neoliberal right and they have more in common with each other on foreign policy than they do with their respective establishment blocks.
I think it has more to do with a combination of factors. Working class people in rural areas are the ones seeing their local towns economically gutted and generally blame NAFTA (I think there’s some truth to this but even if I’m wrong, it’s how it’s portrayed). There’s a general sense that the establishment values people outside America more than working class Americans (even if this is wrong, it's how it's portrayed). I think this is a reaction to economics and the indignity of sending money elsewhere while people are struggling here. You might argue that we could do both or something, but the optics are not great when you’re in the American town that’s struggling.
But I want to address your core question, which I think was a very good one. Why didn't this happen after Vietnam? In 1972 when Nixon wound down the draft, working class wages were still in the upswing that lasted from WW2 to the early 1980’s. Also, that was one bad war. Now there’s a long string of them. The draft was partially class based, but less so than the volunteer system we have now. The opioid crisis in West Virginia was more lethal than covid during 2020 and 2021. And that's not going away, but deaths of despair are rising. Entire towns are being abandoned. It's only 5 hours from DC but it's like another world. Life expectancy is declining overall, but more importantly, diverging.
Vietnam was one war, and at the time you could argue that it was one "bad apple doesn't ruin all of neoliberalism. But the whole string of them does. Not just the wars, but economic neocolonialism failed as well. In 1982 Mexico was the first to default on major world bank loans and we began the SAPs, which failed.
I know you mentioned in a separate comment that the government is not a magic bag that can just push levers to make things happen however they want, and you're right. But a lot of politics is about optics, and the optics are terrible when we're sending money elsewhere and people are struggling here.
Do you know any influential scholar that identifies as a neoliberal? Since they are hard to identify.
For example, Milton Friedman defined himself as a classic liberal, not a neoliberal. Hayek died before the concept became popular, and also self-defined as a classic liberal.
The concept appears to be used almost exclusively on the left, and as a sum-up of what the author happens to dislike. It is something something neoclassical economics, but it also connotes to stuff the author more-or-less explicitly presents as bad, or stupid, or both.
Only once have I come across a scholar who defined himself as a neoliberal - but he defined the concept very different from anyone else. It was something about the liberating power of markets set against old-style patriarchal and feudal social structures (echoing classical Marxism: Marx hailed the liberating power of capitalism vis a vis feudalism, and as a necessary purgatory before entering the Pearly Gates of Communism).
...Plus, sort-of on the left, Foucault in his lectures on biopolitics can be interpreted as having a positive view of neoliberalism (not the only interpretation mind you, but see the discussion between Gary Becker, another prominent self-defined classic liberal, and some latter-day Foucaultians in University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory working paper No 401: Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker. A conversation with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt, October 2012).
...but apart from these, I have not come across definitions of neoliberalism that any well-meaning person might be sympathetic towards. Which suggests that the concept is mainly used as a diffuse, rhetorical bogeyman-device.
In short: The concept of neoliberalism serves as a barrier to communication rather than a concept that can facilitate communication between opposing ideological views (i.e. ideological views that are actually held by someone).
Correct me if I misunderstand you, but I believe what you’re saying is that if I met someone who I disagreed with, and called them or their ideas neoliberal, it would be a poorly defined term commonly seen as a pejorative and so it would either confuse the conversation or insult them (or both). And as you say, that would be a barrier to communication. If that’s what you mean, I completely agree with you.
However, this seems like a red herring that’s unrelated to the question, which was if there was an isolationist turn after Vietnam, and if not, then why. The contemporary conservative backlash would likely use the word “Globalist” rather than neoliberal. You’re right that influential scholars and politicians do not identify as a neoliberal, and I also don’t know a single scholar or politician who identifies as a globalist, which is also used as a pejorative like neoliberal. But the question is about why is there an isolationist turn, not about changing anyone’s mind on whether it’s a good thing.
"I believe what you’re saying is that if I met someone who I disagreed with, and called them or their ideas neoliberal, it would be a poorly defined term commonly seen as a pejorative and so it would either confuse the conversation or insult them (or both). And as you say, that would be a barrier to communication. If that’s what you mean, I completely agree with you."
...yes, you are right, that was my only errand in this context. I am glad we agree!
Understanding isolationist tendencies and counter-tendencies in US politics and culture is a very interesting topic of study, fully agreeing with you there too. (And speaking as a European, far from only of academic interest.)
...I am sorry if I perhaps came out a bit strong against your choice of concepts, no hard feelings I hope. But I spend my days in a scholary environment where quite a few speak loosely of "neoliberalism". And when doing so, they can be perceived as playing a power game rather than (really) communicating. The aim (which might not be concious, I do not regard people who seek hegemonic discoursive power as overt cynics) is to install fear in others that they may (also) be cast as outside of civilized company if they should dare say things like: "markets might be very useful sometimes". It can be a rhetorical strategy to limit the Overton window, as I guess people say in this forum.
...and I would assume we agree there, too, that this is bad.
Thanks for the link Mallard, very informative (and in agreement with my own view on different brands of liberalism - sort-of the same thing I guess:-)). Concerning the puzzle that according to critics neoliberalism is the dominant ideology in contemporary society, while at the same time it is more-or-less impossible to locate any scholar who self-identifies with the label, your link is also on point, to the extent that I cannot resist the temptation to quote:
"While there are many who give out and are given the title of neoliberal, there are none who will embrace this moniker of power and call themselves as such. There is no contemporary body of knowledge that calls itself neoliberalism, no self-described neoliberal theorists that elaborate it, nor policy-makers or practitioners that implement it. There are no primers or advanced textbooks on the subject matter, no pedagogues, courses or students of neoliberalism, no policies or election manifestoes that promise to implement it (although there are many that promise to dismantle it). Pedantic as it may seem, this is a point that warrants repetition if only because there is a considerable body of critical literature that deploys neoliberalism under the mistaken assumption that, in doing so, it is being transported into the front-lines of hand-to-hand combat with freemarket economics."
I think the same thing probably did happen by the end of the 70s with Reagan, but I don't have a great sense of the factional divides in the Republican Party then so I can only very hazily hypothesise (this is massively speculative, so assume I'm wrong). As I understand it the Republicans were broadly locked out of power at the federal level and were basically a regional coalition of the West and the Northeast, with the Northeast being WASP-ier. Nixon was Californian, anti-Communist, slightly anti-establishment (by ye olde standards, objectively less so even than GW Bush) and also basically a centrist. Watergate happened, Ford took over and lost, while the conservatives (almost the entirety of what's now the Republican Party, but then a minority) turned to Reagan.
All this was happening in a country with no internet and political parties that weren't sorted ideologically (the farthest right were still Southern Democrats), and surprisingly rampant left-wing terrorism, so breaking hard with an establishment consensus was basically never going to happen though. In this context, I think Reagan's "get the government out of the way" and monetarism were the economic side, and rollback (vs containment) was the concurrent foreign policy shift (in the opposite direction, because objective policies are largely, but not entirely, just totem poles to rally factions around).
Yeah this is a way better explanation than what I gave. People forget about the Old Right how for the longest of time, American interventionism was a Progressive Project( Wilson, Roosevelt, etc).
Not exactly my wheelhouse, but I think this is the result of the long tail of Vietnam fallout causing the circumstances to be completely different. 'Nam was the first war that really created a significant anti-war movement. Being anti-war was still a bold, far-left position. Before and during, being pro-war was the default position, with the left taking the "whenever it's necessary, so I'll support this war" side and the right taking the "war is the health of the state" more hawkish side. So when 'Nam turns out to be a bust, it's a loss shared by both the moderate left and the right.
Fast forward to Iraq, and the status quo has changed. The anti-war movement of Vietnam has had time to diffuse into culture, and is primed to be the default Left position. And indeed, that's what you see happening on once the initial patriotism of '01-'02 wears off: being anti-war becomes a much more default stance for the political left. Meanwhile, much of the right has retreated to the "whenever it's necessary, so I'll support this war" side. So when Iraq turns out to be a bust, it's really just the right who have egg on their faces.
Speculation time, but I think that this uneven "blame" for Iraq spurred (certain) right-wing figures to do what they (politicians) often do and claim "well actually, my position is the opposite of what we previously professed" and/or distancing themselves by saying "see, the orthodoxy of my party was wrong (but not me), and we should actually not [aim to be a part of the global community]". The latter bit is probably the stronger argument - if there were fringe isolationist elements of the right, they would be emboldened and strengthened by the "world police" side's "failures".
"Anti-war" has a long history. Take a look at the two world wars. The US was "neutral" for most of the first one, and arguably (depending on when you date the start) most of the second one as well. There was a lot of maneuvering necessary and a lot of things needed to happen for the US to declare war in both cases.
It also helped to confuse the issue that the first one didn't really have a communist side, and for much of the second one, the communists were allied with the Germans in dividing up Europe.
Im not American but here’s my take: there’s also a been a 360 amongst the people who opposed the take down of Hussein and who support taking down Assad (the consequences of which would be much worse).
What happened I think was Obama. He hovered up the anti war coalition and the went to engage in even more wars. War became fashionable with the left and unfashionable with the right. Then Trump starts his rise and he’s even more anti war. Trump is bad and orange and he’s a nationalist. Nationalism is now not going to war and internationalism is going to war, or threatening war across the world.
Trump is America first and that’s basically NAZI ideology, Internationalism is the opposite of that, and though it involves America imposing its western (majority) white opinions on the rest of the world, and hedging in China in Asia, it’s apparently the opposite of white nationalism.
The term isolationism is doing some of that work there too. Were you isolationist during your opposition to Iraq? The word carries a lot of weight, as it carries with it the idea that the isolationist is a Nazi sympathiser.
"Isolationism" is a misleading term, since it combines non-interventionist foreign policy with economic isolationism — high tariff barriers and the like. There is no logical connection between the two.
I think one answer is that the adversary in the Cold War was still clear, and right wing types weren't going to become pro-Communist.
Even after Vietnam, you could tell a coherent story about how the purpose of the war was to fight Communism, but in the aftermath of the Iraq War, it became hard to understand what the point had originally been (it was about WMD's but that turned out to be a lie, etc).
One big factor is that the waning of the war on terror coincided with the gay marriage debate and the rise of the LGBT movement and "wokeness" in general (and then COVID), which alienated many right wing people from the mainstream narrative about America and therefore American foreign policy. (In fact, I think this is more or less what Rod Dreher, a conservative journalist, has said about his own views.)
My guess is that it's about who the enemy is. Speaking as an American who isn't following Putin's policies closely, Putin strikes me as right-wing. He's anti-LGBTQ, nationalist, and presents a macho image of himself. If the Red Chinese pick a fight in the near future, I'd expect the GOP to turn away from isolationism.
That unthinking response is how the war party of the US can rely on different constituencies to support their policies.
Russia isn’t particularly anti gay compared to the Muslim world or Africa, and actually there were plenty of attempts to pathologize Islam post 9/11, albeit less on the anti LGB stuff (the T and the rest weren’t so important back then) more on being religious at all. In particular being anti-enlightenment. Over time, but not immediately, this began to be seen as right wing.
This is just another idea that we, the west, have the correct way of thinking about things and they (the non west) do not.
Of course the opposition to Russia's invasion is orthogonal to any of this. It should be opposed regardless.
I may be interested in applying mechanistic interpretability to some deep learning models I am using in my research in astronomy. These are quite small models, few layers and thousands of neurons at most. What is the best tooling currently available? I am familiar with pytorch, so tools that seamlessly integrate with it would be best.
"This has nothing to do with actually sympathizing with Russia. For a small government party, taking a stand on Ukraine aid as the number one priority simply makes sense given what a huge portion of the budget it is. Ukraine losing will save social security."
This is an absurd thing to think and claim. It's many many orders of magnitude wrong. When told this he didn't apologize or correct, but deflected that it doesn't matter because of like people dieting of fentanyl or something.
If you are a supporter of Hanania, does this make you update your priors on his analysis of various situations? Regardless of your opinion on Ukraine/Russia, he either refuses to accept the actual value of Aid or he is willfully throwing shit out there just to make his point. Does that not point to the potential of similar behavior on other subjects? Why should we take him and his analysis seriously?
It doesn't matter whether Hanania is stupid enough to believe the 40% figure, or stupid enough to think that trolling is the right move. Poe's Law is a thing, and we can find someone other than Hanania to provide us with insightful commentary or whatever going forward. He's done for in my book; his name is now hardwired to my bogometer and I don't see any advantage to recalibrating that.
In a follow-up tweet he says, "Russia isn’t seen as the aggressor in much of the world. Countries without the distorting effect of the western media like Eritrea and North Korea recognize it as a moral champion."
I think he was intending his tweets to be plainly obvious sarcasm and he clearly misjudged.
"Did you hear about Trump being so stupid the Secret Service would stream video of monkeys to entertain him, and Trump kept hitting the side of the TV to make him fight?"
"No, that didn't happen. It was a complete fabrication."
"Oh well, the fact that Trump is so stupid that the monkey thing was believable to me just PROVES how stupid Trump is!"
It's trolling. He's making fun of the right-wing tendency to use Ukraine as a bogeyman. I think he also knows that some right-wingers will unironically believe his tweets, which is meant to highlight how innumerate they are.
I think he may have been surprised himself how many people still think these tweets are serious, which is why he keeps making them more comically ridiculous, but people still keep falling for them.
Wait. Was he trolling last week when he tweeted: "New form of equality is here. The year after BLM, 94% of over 300,000 S&P100 jobs went to non-whites."
"Wow, blacks and Hispanics really knocking it out of the park with “less senior” roles.
If you’re a white guy trying to get your foot in the door, good luck."
Is that guy always trolling? How do you tell where his troll ends and his sincerity begins? Isn't he *very* anti-DEI? If so, then why is he trolling to exaggerate the impact of DEI? Does he like to troll his own fans?
With some big caveats though. For one thing the largest share of that nonwhite hiring by far was in job categories like laborers, service workers, etc. For the categories above that Bloomberg's summary of the numbers is much softer, simply that those companies "increased their racial diversity".
In the "Professionals" category the 2021 nonwhite hiring was dominated by Asians. That trend is not new and has little if anything to do with BLM (to some degree the contrary actually).
Also, way down in the writeup they note in passing that "Many laid off in the pandemic’s early days (2020) were people of color, who were rehired when demand bounced back (2021)." So all of those rehires are being counted here but they don't estimate how many.
P.S. your link had a stray character, here it is corrected:
Most misleading is the word "hire" in the headline. The actual stat says "300,000 jobs were added." So that's a net increase after possibly millions of retirements, firings, and hirings. The 65-year-old cohort is much whiter than the 25-year-old cohort, particularly by self-identification. If millions were hired, the % of whites in the net increase != the % of whites hired. Very different numerators and denominators.
It's true Bloomberg ran that weird, misleading story (I can't read it, though.)
Hanania presents the stats -- maybe Bloomberg does too -- as if the results of the net job churn, likely over 10s of millions of people, is the same thing as "only 6% of new hires with S&P 100 firms went to whites", which is obviously not true.
To expect people to interpret you in good faith as being sarcastic you first have to be someone people can trust to have the right opinion in the first place. You can’t be an alt-right oddball and then pull that trick. People will just assume you are an alt-right oddball on this issue too.
He had somewhat more sinister opinions in the past that he’s now disavowed. But it was recent enough that as far as I’m concerned sarcasm rights have not yet been restored.
In fairness, if you view Richard Hanania as too cringe-y and irritating to read then you're probably not hot on what the actual details are of whatever Damascene conversion he's having. Not sure why you'd be reading his tweets if that was the case though.
I don't know Hanania at all, but, given how many pundits are innumerate, reasoning: "He _can't_ have meant that number seriously. It is _obviously_ grossly wrong." is not a reliable deduction (unless the specific person has shown themselves to be numerate)
that was based on an article in Bloomberg. Which does appear suspect. Nevertheless it’s not necessarily a troll - which I take to mean posting something deliberately false.
"Russia isn’t seen as the aggressor in much of the world. Countries without the distorting effect of the western media like Eritrea and North Korea recognize it as a moral champion."
This, by the way, is basically accurate regarding how much of the world views it (with a smug trollish moral valance added). I say this as someone who's 100% supportive of Ukraine, but there are huge parts of the world who view the European empires as their version of Nazi Germany, the USA as having backed up the British/French/Portuguese/South Africans, and the USSR as the only people who stood up for them. To them, Russia invading Ukraine is roughly how westerners view the USA invading Iraq: a regrettable aberration, by the good guys. From there, it's basically a figure-ground inversion for every other part of the war. Hence the rather lukewarm response from South Asia and Africa.
That world view is fairly accurate, don’t you think? Except the “global south” actually doesn’t really care about European empires much, although there’s a rising use of the term Anglo supremacism. Especially in Chinese attacks on the west.
(Of course this isn’t universal amongst the global south either. The ANC can be forgiven for having some residual sympathy for Russia. Others are more suspicious of China. )
A lot of them really do care; they all teach about it in schools (that make modern progressive textbooks look like Cecil Rhodes), most of them have statues and street names all over the place of their anti-colonial struggle, and quite a lot of them have ruling parties whose claim to legitimacy still derives from it. Not to mention the hatred of current French encroachment in West Africa. The Chinese are more of an exception; the century of humiliation stuff tends to get eye-rolls, and they're more focused on conspiracy theories about the Americans wanting to Balkanise them.
Well that’s not very conspiratorial. I’m sure the spooks are doing their best to increase ethnic tensions in China, although it won’t work. The Chinese do care about the century of humiliation but these things wax and wane depending on present day circumstances - if the UK broke ranks with the US they would forget about it.
If it is a joke, it's not a very good one? That was suggested by some of the replies and maybe i should consider it to be the "answer", but this seems like unnecessary shit posting from someone trying to be seen as a serious thinker.
I think he meant for that to be a joke, but it's pretty close to true.
There are 600,000 homeless people in America. If a "mansion" costs $1,000,000, it would cost $600 billion to give them one each; we've given Ukraine $100 billion (standard disclaimer that some of this is in armaments we couldn't have used anyway that don't directly cost money). So we could only give 1/6 of homeless people mansions - unless many of the homeless people were in families who could share a mansion, or we got economies of scale from building so many mansions at the same time, in which case we might be able to scrape through!
To be fair, though, it's not enough to just give someone a mansion -- you must also ensure he has money for utilities and maintenance, for however long he's living in the mansion. These expenses can add up quite quickly.
The cost is trivial compared to the build cost. Nobody scoffing at the claim that we could afford to build such mansions is doing so due to utilities costs.
So why didn’t we give all homeless people homes back in 2021? I think we both know the answer, which is why using “housing the homeless” trope both may be true and utterly misleading.
I mean the real reason is that fear of homelessness is one of the main motivators for millions of badly paid workers to drag themselves into work every morning and do jobs they hate. Homeless people are a deterrent.
I can easily pass the ideological Turing test on the anti-Ukraine side and even the pro-Russian side. What I can't do is pass the ideological Turing test for 40% of the budget is going to Ukraine. Likewise, I can pass the ITT for democratic socialism but I can't pass it for why AOC said that growing cauliflower in community gardens is colonialism.
I see how both statements grow out of ideological commitments. But that doesn't make them any less wrong and stupid. And frankly if they were trolling then it's an issue in of itself if you say stupid, false things as a troll.
I'm sorry, you're failing it again. He definitely doesn't think 40% of the budget is going to Ukraine. That's a transparently ridiculous number that he's picking to simultaneously make fun of Republicans and at the same time those who are taking him seriously. He's being an annoying troll and I wish people would stop taking the bait. I guess in a way by even responding to you I am participating in the whole mess.
Does that mean that he's literally only tweeting because he thinks stupid people might read what he says and believe it? He's literally just trying to make people more confused?
This sounds like a perfect demonstration for anyone who thought that there shouldn't be censorship, of what sort of thing censorship actually helps for.
The ability to recognize trolling is not the ITT. That's just trolling. And what you're participating in is the purposeful ambiguity people use where they can say anything, no matter how silly, and people will defend them as trolling or 'seriously not literally'. I object to it because it gives cover to all kinds of bad arguments and because aesthetically I object to the post-modern irony it involves.
For those interested in the climate change debate, Statistics Norway has just released an open-access (English language) Discussion Paper arguing that it is not possible, based on available data, to determine how much of the warming trend during the last 200 years that has man-made causes. The paper can be downloaded here:
...for the record, Statistics Norway Discussion Papers have been through an internal review process, but not external review. However, the auhors are acknowledged professionals, and Statistics Norway is the authoritative "go to" place for professional statistical analysis in Norway, and has a thorough internal review process.
Discussion Paper (no. 1007/2023) by Statistics Norway. Title: "Is it certain that the recent global warming trend is mainly man-made?" Copy from abstract and conclusion:
"...we review key properties of global climate models and statistical analyses conducted by others on the ability of the global climate models to track historical temperatures. These tests show that standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures. Finally, we update and extend previous statistical analysis of temperature data (Dagsvik et al., 2020). Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years....In other words, our analysis indicates that with the current level of knowledge, it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to emissions of CO2."
You're cooking something and you increase the heat. You observe with an infrared thermometer that within a minute, the temperature of the pan and its contents goes up. The amount it goes up is many times the variation in temperature over the preceding hour. There are very logical and very well-understood physical reasons why turning up the stove should increase the pan's temperature. What should be the default explanation: that the rise in temperature is just natural variation, or that it's because you turned up the heat? Is "correlation does not imply causation" a valid excuse when the general mechanism of causation was known almost 200 years ago, and when the exact mechanism (human emissions of CO2 increasing the greenhouse effect) was quantitively modelled to factor of 2 accuracy by Arrhenius in 1896?
My understanding is that the primary effect of CO2 on the greenhouse effect was, as you said, modeled correctly by Arrhenius in 1896. The main snag is that there are positive and negative feedback effects which effectively add up to multiplying the primary effect, and the value of that multiplier is uncertain. IIRC, one of the stickier points is the effect on clouds.
"you increase the heat" is doing about 99% of the work here. Closer would be "you exhale slightly harder than your previous breath," there is a statistically insignificant rise in temperature, and then the person next to you wants to use this "evidence" as justification to murder you, because your breath is increasing the heat in the pan such that there is a 1 in a quadrillion higher chance of some oil in the pan splashing onto their skin.
CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo) makes a similar critique as you do. They write:
“The researchers do not relate to physics and other natural sciences to discuss the relationship between CO₂ and temperature, but only a purely statistical correlation analysis. Science is about mechanisms, causality, or causality, not just correlations."
It is an interesting comment, as it relates to a debate that is central to policy debates more generally: What counts as “good enough evidence” for policies? More specifically, and venturing into theory-of-science territory: Is “mechanism-type causal reasoning” sufficient (where climate scientists obviously have much to contribute), or do we also need data and statistical knowledge investigating if the “mechanisms” we have theoretical reasons to assume present, are indeed the dominant ones?
Here, I believe it is fruitful to make a cross-reference to the debate about the “evidence hierarchy” in medicine and related professions. Usually, “mechanistic reasoning” is placed in the bottom half of the evidence hierarchy. See for example Jeremy Howick 2011: The philosophy of evidence-based medicine, chapter 10: “A qualified defence of the EBM stance on mechanistic reasoning”.
With reference to Howick, the (related) problem with your & Cicero’s argument is that we/researchers/professionals are never guaranteed we have an overview of all the “mechanisms” that might be triggered in a causal sequence (or following an intervention). The total number of mechanisms might be larger than our best theories suggest; including unknown mechanisms that may work in a different direction, or that a known mechanism may trigger unknown counter-mechanisms.
This is an argument that statistical competence is of value in itself, in order to find out what is going on. Implying that the competence of statisticians at Statistics Norway is relevant as such.
Let me hasten to add that this does not make the Cicero argument that “mechanism” knowledge is important, null and void. Only that the people who engange in this debate should be careful not to label each other’s competence irrelevant, or (even worse) attack the man rather than the argument.
And just to be clear, I made a link to the working paper available since I believe this is a paper from a usually credible source that might be of interest to those ACX readers who follow the scientific debate on climate change; I did not and do not intend in this comment thread to enter the much larger debate what, if anything, should be done, including how to do risk assessments of different intervention strategies, including risks related to “wait and see”.
I think my own and others reaction to this paper is interesting, in showing some serious bias against believing any evidence against human caused climate change. My approximate reactions were such:
- Statistics Norway is a very reputable source (I'm Norwegian), so this should be worth checking out. Surely the paper is not arguing that climate change is not caused by co2 emissions?
-Skimming the abstract and paper: This sounds like climate change denier propaganda (climate change is caused by magnetic storms and sun cycles). Maybe the authors are not trustworthy after all. Checking the foreword stating that the paper represent the authors opinion, not Statistics norway (ssb), and seeing one of the authors is a retired engineer. Maybe he is an old crackpot, still humored by ssb?
- Reading some more and checking what the paper is actually saying again. The abstract actually says we can't know co2 cause climate change, and the effect of co2 seems to weak to have an effect on temperatures the last 200 years.
- Realising that this seem to be evidence against human caused climate change from a source I have reason to trust. Thinking I have should update on that belief, as a small piece of evidence, but clearly not to the degree of overturning what I believe is the current scientific consensus that climate change is clearly caused by human activity.
Absolutely, to be clear I'm discussing my instinctive thought process, biases and knee-jerk reactions here - none of this should be taken to by my opinions. Also the crackpot part was partly meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks, and sorry Leppi, I was too crabby here to begin with:-).
Apparently, the paper is an updated version of an article the main author (John.Dagsvik@ssb.no) got published in 2020 in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (peer-reviewed and published by Oxford University Press). Which suggests that he is "whole wood" as a researcher, as we say up here.
I don't have the time or desire to read their whole paper, so maybe they address this, but should we even expect climate models to correctly reproduce anything more than the recent past? Beyond a certain point I would expect us to lack crucial information to model earlier climates. We can know what climates were like thousands of years ago, but do we have enough knowledge of all the different inputs to model them well? If we can model the last couple hundred years with some accuracy that seems like the best we could expect given the complexity of the system.
We know the big picture range of temperatures, and we know that previous temperatures (definitely not caused by humans) have been significantly higher and lower than anything in the last 200 years or the next 200 years (at current rates of increase). This includes times when humans were alive and walking the earth, and a much wider range prior to.
If we don't believe we can model anything outside of the last 200 years very well, we don't have solid ground to determine much of anything regarding whether humans have or will influence the temperature.
Well we have plenty of theoretical reasons beyond our models to believe CO2 and other green house gases should increase the temperature. Long before we had models we understood the physical mechanics of climate change.
This paper gives me reason to be skeptical of the output of our models, which I already am (but the IPCC reports already account for this skepticism, giving fairly wide bands for what is possible). It does not give me any reason to doubt that CO2 and methane and others are increasing the heat in the atmosphere. The physics of that is pretty incontrovertible, the only thing to discuss is the magnitude. This paper alone is not really much in the way of evidence that there is 0 effect either, just that it's difficult to determine the total effect, which it is.
So I just kind of skimmed through it, and as someone who is very much not a climate modeller, but who has some familiarity (a graduate level seminar going over climate models), I feel like this paper is actually not terribly important for lay people and how they think about climate change.
It seems like it's at least potentially a good and valid critique of climate models and their limitations, but the base level facts of anthropogenic climate change don't actually require the complicated models.
Based on just the extremely simple temperature reconstructions we have, with no modelling necessary, our prior should be "something has radically changed in the past 200 years that does not appear to have occured prevously". And anthropogenic CO2 should be the strongest contender for "what changed".
Now, I don't mean to imply that the details don't matter. The specifics of how much we expect the global climate to change are actually pretty impactful, as well as to the degree of control we have over that process.
But I think for anyone who isn't a climate doomer, then a paper that shows our current models aren't all the way up to the task of fully modelling the changes isn't that big a deal.
And, in my opinion, we didn't need this paper to argue against the doomer position (and anyone who still holds the doomer view I don't expect to be swayed by one more piece of evidence).
So in summary: from a lay person perspective, this paper really shouldn't shift our opinions much as long as we didn't hold the (admittedly unfortunately common) extreme doomer position, but that extreme doomer position was already not consistent with the best science, so this critque of climate models, even if it turns out to be completely true, doesn't seem particularly impactful.
The paper is not only saying that climate models don't work. It also appears to be saying that we can't know if increase in Co2 caused any temperature changes, and that the changes may be due to natural causes. Actually, the abstract is saying that the effect of co2 appears to be too weak to explain the temperature changes over the last 200 years. I don't know what to make of this, but it seems controversial given that the ipcc, and the scientific consensus says climate change is definitely caused by human activity.
I'm not a climate doomer in and of itself but combining agw with all the other things we are inflicting on the planet and the churning international tensions i could talk myself into prepping.
And that claim, that the past 200 years of warming might just be natural variation, should require _much_ stronger evidence. I believe that it might be true that our _models_ aren't good enough to say whether or not the warming is real (although I'm skeptical of even that claim), but we should view that as problems with the modelling and not actually evidence that the warming isn't real.
As a critique of our current modelling, this paper seems potentially reasonable (I'm not a good enough modeller to assess it myself). As a claim that anthropogenic climate change isn't real (that is to say: the warming we see isn't caused by humans at all), a simple statistical analysis of models is no where _near_ strong enough evidence for us to believe it.
Basically, the temperature plot tells us that, for 100% sure, _something_ at least slightly odd is happening in the past 200 years (since we haven't seen this rapid a temperature change in our temperature reconstructions over the past tens of thousands of years). CO2 seems like a pretty reasonable explanation on a lot of levels. Any critique that doesn't propose an at least equally probable cause should be taken with a grain of salt.
So, assuming a made-up model of the past where we assume that the temperature didn't change very much in the past, we haven't seen these levels of temperature change in the past?
The reconstructions I have seen, the hockey stick papers and critiques of them, only go back about two thousand years. Where are reconstructions of global temperatures that go back over the past tens of thousands of years?
This only goes back 11,000 years, but even so I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, in reconstructions that get older, the scale is going to minimize the recent data. 200 years on a 50,000 year plot doesn't look like much no matter how rapid it is. So the plots that get shared/talked about tend to be from smaller scale plots, where the difference is more apparent. But that doesn't mean it's not _there_ in older reconstructions.
Are you arguing that there exists, in the longer records, time periods with equally rapid change?
That would be pretty monumentally important if so. I'd be interested in seeing that.
Agreed, this is far from strong enough evidence to believe that climate change is not caused by humans. Though it is (weak) evidence in that direction from a source I believe to be trustworthy. Also, it is possibly somewhat stronger evidence that the ipcc position that climate change has been clearly proven to be caused by human activity may be wrong. Ofcourse, this does not mean we should stop acting as if climate change is caused by co2 and green gas emissions, given the consequences - but maybe it means that we should be more inclined to also explore other options If this temperature change is caused by something else, it may be just as harmfull, and I would like to know what is causing it.
I think to go backwards. I haven't seen the evidence that climate change is caused by humans. I have heard about some models but on the level that human body is regulated by 4 humours, i.e., without sufficient evidence about the details.
The presented models as described in the comment by David Friedman are performing very poorly.
The strongest evidence would be that the global warming is happening at the same time we have industrialized, that is, we have released a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. It gives some credence to this theory.
But it could also be coincidence. We have merely starting to make more detailed observations. We don't know how fast the temperature used to change in ancient past. Currently I remain agnostic on the issue – like 50% vs 50%.
This article gives some credence that it is not human caused but I would need to check how good is their analysis. Can we have an independent body like Cochrane group that evaluates these claims?
Also, there was a recent article that claimed that environmental regulations that limited sulphur emissions on sea vessels have been the cause of accelerated warming. It appears that many have accepted this story uncritically. I don't believe it. It seems too convenience and our models are no where near so good to definitely prove it. We should be more sceptical about such stories. Shouldn't even publish them without proper context because it just forms narratives without evidence. We need to make a habit of evidence based science instead of stories.
On the subject of climate models, some time back I looked at the first four IPCC reports to see how well they predicted global temperature. The first badly over predicted, for the next three temperature increase has been within the 90% range of the prediction/projection.
I then did a straight line fit to the data available at the time each IPCC report came out, starting when warming restarted in 1965. It beat the IPCC projection four times out of four. I conclude that the IPCC modeling is not consistently biased but is very weak prediction:
This is the take that has always made the most sense to me. Reasonable to believe that there has been substantial anthropogenic climate change? Sure. Proven? Surely not. Discourse in the whole area is such a mess.
In late 2021, this was added to the Mistakes section (#41):
"In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
I suspect if Scott held in his hands a ballot with Warren on it, as I have, he would not vote for her Republican opponent. I actually have a good reason to vote for her - I also have a Cherokee grandmother, and she is favorable to native american issues, which is important to me. Yes, she is a politician...lesser of evils...
(Also, not a whole lot of elaboration on a shift of "smart and good" to "dumb and bad" - though contributors to the thread other than Scott offer some more flavor)
Re: Czech Republic. IMO so far it's not that interesting in terms of TFR increase initiatives, as they haven't actually reached the 2.05 threshold necessary to sustain the population level. But there's 3 other countries that have managed to bring their TFR back to normal, as per World Bank data.
1. Kazakhstan. From 1.8 in 1998 to 3.32 in 2021
2. Georgia. From 1.55 in 2003 to 2.08 in 2021
3. Tunisia. From 1.96 in 2002 to 2.08 in 2021
As far as I know, none of them had particularly generous social programs. All of them did see a huge improvement in their economy over the past 20 years but usually this results in *decreasing* rather than increasing TFR. These should be the countries to learn from, not Hungary or Czech Republic which have failed to produce tangible results so far.
Regarding the three countries now listed, combined they total a bit over 40M population. Meanwhile nations totaling a population in the billions are going in the other direction (below the TFR and still falling). Easy to see why the demographers doing global population projections keep having to revise downward these days.
Your speculation is a main hypothesis in the field. "Optimism about the long-term economic future" is considered by many researchers to be the main factor behind (relatively) high fertility. More important than specific givernment programmes to boost fertility.
I'm looking for a "work buddy" -- the idea is that we'd meet over discord/zoom for a couple hours and keep each other accountable during the work block (report what we're planning to accomplish, and then whether we've accomplished it). Right now my work schedule involves long chunks of uninterrupted time and I'm finding it hard to stay on track. I'd love for this to become a regularly (daily?) thing, but if you would like a one-shot work buddy (someone to meet for an hour and force you to get started on whatever you've been procrastinating on) I'd also be down. Also, I'd love to know of any preexisting groups I could join.
You might consider focusmate, which can either be random matches with a specific block (usu just an hour). There's also an option to use it in coordination with people you know "You can schedule sessions directly with a friend, or have them schedule your sessions by using your invite link"
What are the best books on ADHD for high-IQ women?
For background, I am the partner. She is extremely talented and knows she has ADHD, but struggles to manage basic symptoms. It is certainly affecting our relationship.
Ideally, the book would speak directly to her experiences, would provide advice and guidance, and also be a good, intriguing read.
I'd also love to hear from women in this situation, or for their partners.
Barkley is one of the top ADHD researchers so the information will be accurate and scientifically based, though pretty dry. Hope can get partial credit for this answer!
We're coming up on Columbus Day again, and our annual fight on whether or not we should be celebrating the guy in the first place. One argument I think is given too little weight, is how incredibly reckless his decision to sail west was in the first place. His miscalculation of the circumference of the Earth and relative position of the far East is just staggering – not least since far better estimates had been around for thousands of years.
The comparison between Columbus and the modern "tech bro" archetype isn't a bad one, but I think it should be considered as a mark in favour of tech-bro-ism rather than a mark against Columbus.
Yes, Columbus engaged in a high-risk high-reward project based on some rather optimistic assumptions. In my view this is a fantastic thing, and something to be encouraged. We don't advance as a species by trying things that will definitely work, we advance by trying things that might not work. This is the spirit that we celebrate when we celebrate Columbus Day, the spirit of trying things that might not work and sometimes discovering something new along the way.
Of course much of the "how silly was this?" question hinges on how much supplies they had, and whether they were planning to turn back if they didn't find land before reaching the point of no return. If they did and they were, then the whole enterprise wasn't even all that risky (at least no riskier than any other long voyage in a 15th century ship).
I appreciate and understand what you say. But in my mind, there’s an distinction between good entrepreneurs and tech bros. The former are disciplined, often obsess about getting the product right even if it’s a simple MVP, start small and scale quickly, take calculated risks and think about risk mitigation. If they fail, they pivot. This gives them the confidence they need to press forward.
Tech bros, in my mind, copy the superficial, highly visible qualities of such entrepreneurs, but not the foundation. They launch half-baked ideas, scale quickly with no proof of viability, have (or fake) unwarranted confidence, and when they fail, they fail spectacularly.
I don’t know if you’ve read the post, but I think Columbus was clearly in the latter category, and I feel like I explain why.
As to your last point, his crew was already on the brink of mutiny a few days before they found land (though not the land they were looking for), because they realized they wouldn’t have enough provisions to make the return trip if they had to.
Empirically, we celebrate people for doing bold audacious things that change the world, not for playing it safe. Or, to take the other usual criticism of Columbus, for being nice. If you want to celebrate the nice guys who took only modest, calculated risks, sure, go for it, but I don't think many people are going to find that appealing.
If you don't want to celebrate someone because they conspicuously leave a box or two unchecked on the Perfect Role Model profile, then don't expect to celebrate very many people at all. Unless you don't look too closely, in which case why are you looking so closely as Columbus.
Bold, yes. Audacious, yes. Changed the World, yes. Columbus is in. Leif Erikson or Amerigo Vespucci or whoever else you want to slot in their place, not so much.
"Conspicuously leaves a box or two unchecked on the Perfect Role Model profile" is one hell of a euphemism for "led slave raids in which over a thousand people were kidnapped and enslaved".
I think "yes, obviously Columbus was an unspeakably evil man, but he was also bold and audacious and his achievements changed the world, and that makes him worth commemorating even if not celebrating" would be a more defensible position if the first, most important, part of it didn't to get lost or played down so much - as you're doing here.
I agree that if your standard is literally "doesn't leave a box or two unchecked etc" then that won't leave you many people to celebrate. But if it's merely "didn't initiate and participate in mass enslavement and murder" then that still leaves quite a lot.
Did you read the post where I lay out my case in more detail? I think there’s a significant difference between bold and audacious (like, say, Magellan, Roald Amundsen, or 1960s NASA) and Columbus.
Seems I'm wrong, he made both mistakes. Probably should have double checked before posting, but I remember having this conversation online a few years ago and my double checking back then turned out differently. I guess Wikipedia marches on...
It's also a really random holiday for United States-ians to celebrate; it's basically the start of the unpleasant story of how Latin America was founded. They should really celebrate Caboto discovering North America for the English and starting the unpleasant story of how Anglo America was founded.
"It's also a really random holiday for United States-ians to celebrate"
If I go by Wikipedia, in one way it's a very USAian holiday to celebrate:
"For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following a lynching in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration"
If Juneteenth is now being pushed to placate African-Americans and/or progressives, then Columbus Day was the forerunner of that, lynchings and all.
I wondered at first glance, is Caboto a typo? Now I realize, once wikipedia spared me an exposure of my provincial ignorance, that this is something more like a flex of greater cosmopolite awareness than I had until now: "John Cabot (Italian: Giovanni Caboto c. 1450 – c. 1500) was an Italian[3][4] navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. "
I literally got Caboto from googling "who discovered North America" while typing that, after checking how to spell "Vespucci" and finding out in the process that he didn't discover North America like I thought.
It seems that Colombus Day was pushed by Italian-Americans who wanted to overcome the bad image (organ grinders, ice cream sellers, and Mafia criminals) their ethnic grouping had - part of the "spics, wops and dagoes" view by nativist Americans.
So they picked a heroic figure of the discovery of America to show that they had every bit as much right to be considered foundational Americans as the WASPS.
Time marches on, and now ooops. We're very very sensitive about these things.
But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*. The WASPs who made and broke treaties with the tribes and drove them onto reservations can't point the finger at Chris for being "he was even more terrible than us" because yeah, but you weren't supposed to be that bad either.
So once you start knocking the culture heroes off their pedestals, it's not going to end there. And if you pick somebody different for October, in a little while they too will be excoriated for wrongthink and badness. This is not saying Columbus didn't do bad things - he did - but all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of woke progressivism.
There's an awful lot of room between "perfect" and "lead slave raids that kidnapped over a thousand innocent people into slavery".
For what it's worth, I personally think that a good start for engagement with history would be the acknowledgement that "not being evil" is a fairly recent innovation (and still very much a work in progress), and that a large majority of pre-modern rulers, and many pre-modern non-rulers, behaved appallingly.
But that's a fairly extreme position - in this case I think I can fairly argue both "it won't happen..." and "... but it would be a good thing if it did". And there's a /lot/ of space between "a decent human being whose flaws are small enough to overlook and excuse" and "as evil as Columbus".
"But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*. "
Well, presumably there was a first person who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last ice age - but finding out his or her name would be ... difficult.
a) I was looking for a non-contentious candidate for "discoverer" of the Americas.
b) Actually, at various points in the process European settlers in the colonies that eventually became the USA traded with the native tribes, so that certainly _affected_ the formation of the USA. I do not know how much it mattered. A bunch of important New World crops, particularly maize, had been cultivated before European settlers arrived, and that was surely important.
I'm not sure we have to scrap everybody. You just have to scrap the people who were in positions of power.
That's happened many times before - Europe's got lots of places dedicated to 1st century Judeans, just not to Pontius Pilate or any of the people in charge. Instead, they're most dedicated to a bunch of nobodies who were persecuted and killed by the Romans.
Over time, we came to find out that the nobodies actually had some important and interesting ideas. Today we build statues of them and name things after them.
I'm confident that if we get rid of Columbus, we'll find lots of other admirable people to celebrate, just not ones that were in positions of power.
During their lives, they were nobodies. That's why Pontius Pilate puts Jesus on trial, and not the other way around. That's why Christians were getting fed to the lions, not the Romans.
After their lives, their fortunes rise and fall. That would happen with obscure Native Americans too - while during their lives they were nobodies, tomorrow they might become the most famous leaders of all time. The future is wide open.
"You just have to scrap the people who were in positions of power."
Everybody was in a position of power, according to privilege theory. You'll have to find obscure Native American tribespeople to venerate because they'll be the only ones Pure Enough (until somebody digs up something in oral tradition that no-nos Chief A or Wise woman B).
Is that any different than venerating 1st century Judeans?
There are lots of people who wielded more temporal power than, for example, Saint Paul. We survived the transition from venerating Augustus to venerating the Apostles - why won't we survive the transition from venerating Columbus to venerating obscure Native Americans?
"why won't we survive the transition from venerating Columbus to venerating obscure Native Americans?"
Over a hundred years ago, Columbus Day was celebrated for several reasons, including political, and Columbus was a National Hero for the foundation myth.
Pick your Native American or haloed other person to replace the holiday. Then tell me that one hundred years from now, opinions about what is bad and who is bad won't have moved on so that they too must now be pulled down (maybe they were meat eaters, the monsters!)
Mores change. I don't care about Columbus Day, it's not a celebration in my country, and it's no skin off my nose if it's celebrated, dumped, or changed to Colours Of The Wind Native American Women Frolicking In The Forest Day.
But there is no guarantee that you can freeze the values of today and have the anodyne pick for replacement remain considered anodyne, and not instead an exemplar of the Worst Tendencies Ever. A hundred years ago Columbus was the hero needed. Today he's a monster to be excoriated. A hundred years from now, what will be the crimes that Colours of the Wind will stand condemned for? You can't put a limit on that, that is the point I am trying to make: not that "Columbus was okay and we should keep the day" but "today's hero will just as easily become tomorrow's zero".
As you can see from the history below, if Colours of the Wind Day is a replacement national holiday to acknowledge Native Americans and be some sort of official apology for their treatment, so was Columbus Day for how Italian-Americans had been treated. Maybe in a hundred years time that aspect will have been forgotten and instead there will be objections to celebrating the murderous war-mongers who tortured and killed (non-human) persons (hunting and fishing for food; the vegan pledge link included the plaintive appeal of a vegan who refers to fish as people and worries about them suffocating when seeing people fishing in the park).
"Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself, and the day was celebrated in New York City on October 12, 1866. The day was first enshrined as a legal holiday in the United States through the lobbying of Angelo Noce, a first-generation American, in Denver. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907.
For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following a lynching in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. The proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. During the anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets, and politicians used rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These rituals took themes such as citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and the celebration of social progress, included among them was the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy.
In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation (1) designating October 12 as Columbus Day; (2) calling on United States government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Columbus Day; and (3) inviting the people of the United States to observe Columbus Day, in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies that express the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of the discovery of America." ... In 1941, Italian and Italian Americans were interned and lost rights as "enemy aliens" due to a belief they would be loyal to Italy and not America in World War II; in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States who had been unable to acquire citizenship due to a literacy requirement, but the implementation of the announcement was not completed until those interned in camps were released after Italy's surrender to the Allies on September 8, 1943.
In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday. These efforts were successful and legislation to create Columbus Day as a federal holiday was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on June 28, 1968, to be effective beginning in 1971.
Since 1971, when Columbus Day became an officially recognized Federal holiday in the United States, it has been observed on the second Monday in October, as commemorated by annual Presidential proclamation noting Columbus' achievements."
So there was a time in American history before we had Columbus Day. We currently have it. In the not too distant future we may no longer have Columbus Day.
Instead, we may replace it with something new, which may, in turn, be replaced again with something newer. I don't really see that as a problem - if anything, that's an integral part of the human experience.
But here, maybe instead we keep Columbus Day and we instead just add holidays for each ethnic and national group that has faced discrimination in America. Would you be in support of that?
Sure, and Saint Paul wasn't without sin. If you're going to be honoring humans, you're going to be honoring sinners, with maybe one or two exceptions (depending on if you believe in Jesus and/or the sinlessness of Mary).
From what I've seen, most people are okay with elevating and honoring the righteous, even if they're not sinless. In contrast, most people aren't okay elevating and honoring awful people - no one is clamoring for national Jeffrey Dahmer Day or anything.
If we view sin/righteousness as a continuum, are we really going to say that there's no one more righteous than Christopher Columbus in all of American history?
It's not "is there no one more righteous than Christopher Columbus", it's "all our righteousness is as filthy rags".
Pick anyone you like out of American history, and for most of them there will be an immediate objection. Someone mentioned Lewis and Clark for a replacement Explorers Day. Well! Lewis and Clark were colonisers and agents of enabling colonisation, exploitation, dispossession, and extirpation of the indigenous peoples by their mapping expeditions opening up new territories for conquest. Sacagawega was a race traitor, since she enabled the success of their mission:
"By August 1805, the corps had located a Shoshone tribe and was attempting to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. They used Sacagawea to interpret and discovered that the tribe's leader, Cameahwait, was her brother.
...The Shoshone agreed to barter horses to the group and to provide guides to lead them over the rugged Rocky Mountains. The trip was so hard that they ran short of food. When they descended into the more temperate regions on the other side, Sacagawea helped to find and cook camas roots to help the party members regain their strength.
As the expedition approached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt to enable the captains to trade for a fur robe they wished to bring back to give to President Thomas Jefferson.
...Her work as an interpreter helped the party to negotiate with the Shoshone. But, she also had significant value to the mission simply by her presence on the journey, as having a woman and infant accompany them demonstrated the peaceful intent of the expedition. While traveling through what is now Franklin County, Washington, in October 1805, Clark noted that "the wife of Shabono [Charbonneau] our interpreter, we find reconciles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace." Further he wrote that she "confirmed those people of our friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter".
Is such a disgraceful quisling worthy of being honoured?
"Sacagawea was an important member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early 20th century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.
If you think that sounds extravagant, remember in 1971 Columbus was inoffensive enough to get a national holiday and now, fifty-two years later, the day should be scrapped because he was so wicked. How do you think attitudes will have moved on fifty-two years from now, and the heroic Indian woman will instead be a filthy tratior quisling who sold out her people to help the invaders and colonisers?
In 1959, Sacagawea was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. In 1976, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2001, she was given the title of Honorary Sergeant, Regular Army, by President Bill Clinton. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame."
Columbus may have been no worse than the *specific* people who broke treaties, but he and they were *absolutely* far worse than most people of their time.
I did! Rather, I downloaded the Substack app, because they've been pushing it so hard, and it sounded like it might be useful, and when I logged in there, it had a blank image so I uploaded the most recent one I took with my current hair color.
However, the app doesn't seem to be as useful as the e-mail/browser combo. When I'm reading in a browser, I can collapse comment threads by clicking on the line next to them, and when I get a response notification e-mail, I can jump directly to it by clicking. In the app I haven't figured out how to do either of these things. If I can't figure them out (and/or no one can explain them to me) then I might delete the app and just end up with the new picture as the souvenir of the experience. (It was due for an update anyway - I think the previous picture was from 2018 and was just the easiest one I had around when Matt Yglesias started his Substack.)
It's green! I definitely can't see it at the small scale here, and even when I click, the larger one is still cropped, but when I click again I get the full rectangle and it's clear there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say Columbus was misunderstood or misrepresented.
But when you start the pebbles rolling, don't be surprised when an avalanche ensues.
Columbus should be stripped of his status and the memorial day junked. Very well.
And what next? Because he wasn't the only one. Now we've the precedent of turning past heroes to current zeroes. Washington is already getting the "he was a slaveholder and just as bad as Jefferson" treatment. How about scrapping Presidents' Day, seeing as how it is officially Washington's Birthday and intended to commemorate him? Just whitewashing (heh!) the day by renaming it isn't good enough, the same way renaming Columbus Day to Discovery Day wouldn't be good enough.
We already have precedent of turning heroes of the present into zeroes, and vice verse. Literally in this case, Columbus was plucked from being a minor historical footnote to being an American emblem by deliberate action, and may return to being so in just the same way. National myths are reinvented, recontextualized and reimagined every generation. You can argue that specific people should and shouldn't be put on a pedestal, but saying that we shouldn't change the occupants of those pedestals at all is arguing against the tide.
I'm not saying we shouldn't change the occupants, I'm saying that changing them based on moral considerations of the day (as witness OP's new comment on 'I'm not celebrating Genghis Khan rape week') means that with the changes of time and history, anyone we pick *today* to replace Columbus on that pedestal is every bit as likely, in the time of our descendants, to be turfed off from Crimes and Misdemeanours that we're not even considering right now, but that will be the big Moral Consideration of *that* day.
I'm predicting meat eating, if veganism does manage to become a groundswell movement, but it could be for any reason. Being the incorrect shade of brown. Cis-het ness. Too tall. Didn't condemn the use of orange as a traffic light colour (how many millions of colour-blind people died due to this dangerous imposition and the indifference of the general public???)
"But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*."
No. Columbus was particularly bad, even by the standards of the era (i.e. the era of the Spanish Inquisition).
Even if you think selling nine-year-old girls as sex slaves, beheading or chopping the hands off natives for minor crimes, or giving your men 100 lashes for not collecting enough food sounds like normal 15th century behavior, his "own" colonists revolted against him, and he was ultimately arrested by the Spanish crown, and stripped of his titles.
It's okay to single out Christopher Columbus for special condemnation.
(I also almost called him Chris, but decided that that would be an insult to the *real* Chris Columbus, who has given humanity so much: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001060/ 😉 )
PS: And you don't have to pick another individual. It would be better to pick a theme, like adventure and exploration, and not put some fallible person's name on it.
If none of these things were true, I would expect opposition to Columbus day to be almost identically strong as it is currently. Hatred of Columbus is so overdetermined that he could have been wildly progressive for this time in these respects and he would still be hated.
Columbus is hated for lots of reasons, many of which I don’t agree with. So you may have a point.
I’m not a huge fan of Columbus, as I’ve made clear, but my main objection to a Columbus Day is that I think there should be a high bar for putting a person’s name on one of our very limited number of days. (I’m not convinced it’s a good idea at all.) And I don’t think Columbus clears that bar.
If we had 7000 holidays named for historical people, I don’t know that I would have singled out CC. (Maybe, but maybe not. Even if I think he was particularly bad, even for his time, there are a lot of bad “great” people throughout history, so competition could have been stiff.) As it is, we have MLK, Jesus and a handful of weird saints (Patrick, Valentine) whom I don’t know enough about. But I really don’t think ruthless, reckless CC is worthy of that company.
It would hardly be the first time a city or country changed its official name to wash off unwanted imperial/colonial flavor, but that’s for the citizens of those places (and the institution) to decide.
So we unperson Columbus because he was so terrible. Right, that's done.
Then we move on to the next guy down. So he only gave people *80* lashes and wasn't as bad as Columbus, but are we saying 80 lashes is okay? Obviously not. He's next on the chopping block.
Guy who didn't give any lashes but chopped off hands. We okay with hand chopping? No? Dump him.
And so on down.
You can certainly single out Columbus for "special condemnation" but once you set the wheels in motion about pulling down the 'heroes of yesteryear' for being bad awful horrible people, it never stops at just this one guy.
They scrapped a memorial to Lee's horse. When you start holding the cavalry horses accountable for the sins of their masters, then tell me I'm invoking the slippery slope.
Reading the news is, in 2023, not the best way to learn about the world. Most of it is designed to outrage you and make you engage with it (click, comment, share), not to empower you to form opinions and make decisions. There are crazy things going on, but most people are nowhere near as crazy as they seem in the news.
As for the horse, I don’t know the story. How did it earn this plaque?
I think that, in fact, recent events have proven that everything is a slippery slope if you don't put your foot down to stop it somewhere. It's not fallacy, the world really is full of slippery slopes.
Yes, there are slippery slopes in the world. Self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing trends are a law of nature. Some of their attributes is that they don’t have
sufficient stops on the way to “unacceptable outcome”, and that the forces working in the opposite direction aren’t strong enough to break and possibly reverse the trend. I don’t think either of those things are true in this case.
Inside certain ecosystems on the left, excesses of wokism have become slippery slopes, and are intolerable, but society at large has different stops and forces in play.
This seems overly dismissive given that their response to you gave an example that actually happened. I don't doubt that numerous other incidents could be given if anyone wanted to spend a few minutes on google.
Is slippery slope fallacy a fallacy when reality does in fact show a slippery slope?
I don’t see statues being toppled by rioters and protesters as even being on the same continuum as having discussions about the legacy of historical persons.
The slope is interrupted by any number of legal, political, moral and social bumps. It is ridiculous to think that if we collectively decide to rename Columbus Day (not likely anyway), we would suddenly slip and fall and rename our capitol city next. But if we do, it will probably be a democratic decision, after a long and heated debate, and not just the inevitable effect of having rethought Columbus’ hero status.
So yes, it is a fallacy, even if you can share old news headlines to help bolster your narrative.
At least according to WH Prescott's History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (caveat: very old, quite possibly out of date), Columbus' colonists revolted because they thought he was too heavy-handed *to them*, not to the natives, and most of the stuff about him being cruel and bloodthirsty was reported by his enemies.
You're right that the actual historical person Christopher Columbus was considered a POS by his own peers during his own lifetime. So in that sense the attempt to un-do his secular sainthood (which is not too strong a phrase for how he was talked and taught about when I was a kid in American public schools) is well justified.
That said, the modern-day efforts to de-platform Columbus have not been based on him as a person any more than the original creation of Columbus Day was. It's about broader questions/issues/arguments about our history of which he happened to be a potent symbol. That is also why the idea of changing the holiday to something like "Discovery Day" or "Exploration Day" would still have to fight through some of the same headwinds (as mentioned below here). I'm not very optimistic that the idea could succeed TBH, given the current infantilism of our culture and politics.
I agree with all of this. I don’t expect anyone to rename the day anytime soon. But I think the way to change the culture is to talk about these things.
In the much bigger picture, I think our culture(s) is pretty good at a handful of holidays – and is phoning in the rest of them (C-day being a prime example). I’d like to give the whole calendar a good jolt, keep the holidays that are culturally robust enough to stand, and replace the weak ones with something more meaningful to more people.
Someone else suggested turning C-day into a day of atonement, with fasting and solemnity, rather than parades. I’m not entirely convinced, but at least that adds some much-needed depth to the whole thing.
"The 1891 New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants in New Orleans by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history. Most of the lynching victims accused in the murder had been rounded up and charged due to their Italian ethnicity.
...As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World.
...The contrasting American and Italian attitudes toward the lynchings are perhaps best summarized by Theodore Roosevelt's comment. Roosevelt, then serving on the United States Civil Service Commission, wrote to his sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles on March 21, 1891:
Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.
The incident has been mostly forgotten in the U.S., relegated to the footnotes of American history texts. However, it is more widely known in Italy."
Given such racist and anti-immigrant attitude on display, should Roosevelt's image be chiseled off Mount Rushmore? Is he somebody worthy of honour and celebration?
One big problem with the day-of-atonement concept is the selectivity of it. E.g. I'm opposed to slavery and very much glad we don't do it anymore, and the "we" includes lots of peoples in the Americas long before any Europeans showed up. I once sat next to a woman at a Midwestern professional conference who got visibly upset about the opening land-acknowledgement statement, and it turned out that she was a local and was a descendant of one of the tribes whose land the Odawa [the group being honored by the land acknowledgement] had taken via genocidal assault. Etc.
A Day of Acknowledgement genuinely aiming to acknowledge and inspire contemplation of the largest horrors of our full collective history, _that_ I could support with enthusiasm. It would in the big picture be healthy and ultimately forward-looking. And perhaps one day there will be a large human society whose thought leaders possess the maturity and thoughtfulness to make such a thing happen....but today's USA is very much not that society.
Seems to me that most of history is the story of people chopping off each others heads, hands, feet, peckers, etc. in fights over resources and over who's right. Maybe we should just have an Our Species Sucks day.
I suspect he had heard and believed tales about Vinland back when he visited Ireland and/or Iceland, and lied to the Spanish crown about his reasons to want to sail west.
He probably relied on the Navigatio of St Brendan and there is a sort of folk tradition that he landed in Galway first and spoke to pilots there about lands further west of Ireland:
"The Navigatio was known widely in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Maps of Christopher Columbus’ time often included an island denominated Saint Brendan's Isle that was placed in the western Atlantic Ocean. Paul Chapman argues that Christopher Columbus learned from the Navigatio that the currents and winds would favor westbound travel by a southerly route from the Canary Islands, and eastbound on the return trip by a more northerly route, and hence followed this itinerary on all of his voyages."
"The Monument to Christopher Columbus is a monument in Galway, Ireland. The memorial was erected in 1992, the year of the Columbus Quincentenary, to commemorate Christopher Columbus's visit to the city in 1477. It stands next to the Spanish Arch."
I used to think so. But if that were true he chose the riskiest route possible, close to where Mansa Musa's predecessor's two fleets disappeared, and far, far south of where Vinland was supposed to be. It would have been better, then, to follow Leiv Eiriksson's fairly well documented route.
Also, his diaries show he clung to his delusions even after finding land.
Leif Erikson's route takes one to Newfoundland, and trade with Newfoundland wasn't going to make anyone rich. Particularly not if you have to launder the profits through Icelandic and English ports on your way back home to Spain or Italy.
The goal was to establish a new and more convenient route for the actually lucrative China/East Indies trade, based I suspect on the not-unreasonable guess that since the Vikings reported that the coast stretched south from Vinland and the Chinese reported a coast stretching north from Korea, the two might be connected. So if you're headed for a rich market fifteen hundred miles southwest of Vinland, and you're starting a thousand or so miles south of Iceland...
I understand and agree, except that guess *is* quite unreasonable if you don’t botch the math. For a brief overview of bad assumptions and miscalculations he made, see the full post.
In general, we don't celebrate a particular person, really, we instead celebrate a myth or an idea or a set of values. I celebrate Christmas even though I'm totally atheistic and don't even fully believe Jesus actually existed (as a man, let alone the son of God). Someone could even claim that Columbus is worth celebrating precisely because he made such a momentous discovery against all odds and all established opinions. In other words we celebrate the discovery, the spirit of discovery, the defiant stance against authority, the confidence in one's own ideas, individuality in general, not the man himself.
I say we keep Columbus Day. Very few people know the details of the discovery, all that matters is the idea of discovery, not whether the particulars were correct.
An interesting argument, which would call for giving the holiday a different name. Of course "Discovery Day" would generate some of the same semi-historical fainting spells that Columbus Day does, while amping up the semi-historical sputtering from Italian-American heritage groups.
I strongly suspect however that each side would be unpleasantly surprised to find that fewer people are much interested in their respective tantrum today than was true 5 or 10 years ago. So yea that could now work if state and federal legislatures were willing to have enough of a collective spine to let the fussing blow itself out.
We don't call Christmas "Family Day" or "Togetherness Day" or "Ham and Cranberries Day." It's named after a person. Whether or not you care about that person has little bearing on whether or not you celebrate Christmas in the US.
I agree with this. An Explorers' Day, where we can tell the story of Columbus, but also the stories of American heroes like Armstrong & Aldrin, Lewis & Clark, etc. but also incorporate stories about explorers, pioneers and adventurers from other cultures and traditions (not least Native Americans).
Maybe, or maybe not. Depends on what people want the holiday to really be about, after thinking and talking it through. Holidays aren’t required to have explicitly patriotic themes (see Halloween, Thanksgiving ++). There are plenty of other values to celebrate.
Personally, I think patriotism is best expressed through such other values. (E.g. I prefer being part of the country that actually celebrates the spirit of exploration is better than being part of the country that smugly pats itself on the back for saying it celebrates the spirit of exploration, but really only cares about its “own”. This is even more important for other traditionally U.S. values, such as opportunity and democracy.)
Me and a friend got into a cordial argument about therapy. My potential problem with therapy (although I guess it would be more correctly stated as a potential problem with therapists) is that, since it is a professional practice, you are meant to treat clients in a certain nonjudgmental, unconditional positive regard-y way; regardless of your personal opinions. But this also implies that there is a potential degree of fabrication/construction/faking which a therapist might be doing, in the case of, e.g., them disliking you at a personal level but having to act as a therapist regardless. (this shouldn't be extrapolated to me having the fear of being disliked-presume the client is a serial abuser, or a school shooter, or someone else who you would personally find abhorrent.)
This separation, as a professional, is entirely sensible. However, with someone who I am being almost completely honest with, and who I am trusting to handle my emotions-it seems hard to trust someone who is acting more like a therapist than like a person-who isn't letting their opinions color their behavior-because I'm not in the market for that sort of validation, I'm in the market for honest conversation. the fact that a person is wearing the therapist 'mask', if you will, makes it seem somewhat manipulative, in the sense of me being completely uncertain about if how my therapist acts is in accord with what they actually believe. That degree of acting-on-beliefs, that sense of coherency, is very important to me. (I want to talk to a person, not to an institutional gestalt of best practices.)
My question, from everyone and-more importantly-actual therapists, is the following: is this warranted? do therapists have the ability to separate their profession from themselves to this degree? and if so, is it reasonable to be worried about this sort of non-coherency?
It's possible to dislike someone and nonetheless be kind to them and have a genuine concern for their well-being. I'm not a therapist but I do it all the time in my everyday life (or try to lol).
The question you raise seems parallel to the ones defense lawyers deal with when they know their client is guilty. Would you refuse to have a lawyer represent you unless they genuinely believed you were in the right? (This isn't a perfect analogy since defense lawyers have the judge and the prosecution to balance them out, but therapists are also operating in balance with the subject's own convictions and the subject's peer group).
I actually think you're right about the non-coherency aspect. Lawyers, therapists and other advocacy-based professionals have to be able to compartmentalize a certain amount - to act in a way that upholds "justice" or "health" as a general concept instead of reacting to the case as an individual. Up to you whether you find that kind of behaviour intolerable.
Psychologist here. Actually every effective therapist I know talks about their patients with affection and respect. I don’t think it’s possible to be very helpful to your patients unless you are genuinely interested in what it’s like to be them, and care about their welfare. If you’re faking it, people can sense that. If you’re not faking it, just being someone who gets it and is on their side is already very helpful. It’s like a tonic — not a cure for their particular difficulty, but good for the person’s overall wellbeing. Also, CBT, which is what many of us mostly do, is, in it’s bare naked form, a bunch of dry, obvious-sounding mental techniques. CBT for anxiety disorders is an escalating series of quite scary challenges. People are not very likely to fully commit to doing the CBT stuff unless they feel like the person prescribing it really gets it about their problem, and sincerely wants to help them get better.
Of course it’s true that many patients are people the therapist would not want to be friends with in their personal life, and many have beliefs the therapist disagrees with, but the thing that keeps all that from wrecking the connection isn’t the therapist pretending to agree with the patient and pretending to like them as a friend. People who are in trouble and are sitting there telling you the truth automatically *are* interesting, and if the therapist’s goal in listening to their story is to understand what it’s like being that person, & how the person ended up where they are, it’s really not relevant whether the person has tastes and opinions they do not share. I had someone who had a kink for giving and getting enemas. To me, there are few things less sexy than enemas. I asked them to explain to me what was hot about enemas, and they talked about being vulnerable, and letting someone into their body, and the hotness of being transgressive. All that was pretty easy to understand. I. could do a mental mapping, along the lines of “enemas for them are like what [various things] are like for me.”
Connecting with a patient is a different kind of connecting that what you do with friends and lovers, but it’s not fake.
I agree with this. You can be genuine with patients while not liking everything about them, or even while disliking many things about them. The idea of regarding your patients positively doesn't mean liking or affirming everything about them, but reflects the therapist's stance toward the patient as a whole person and the treatment.
My wife is a therapist, and though I would never claim to speak for her, I would say one thing I get from discussing it with her is that her main job is to find the best way to help the client. If revealing her personal beliefs about a certain aspect of a client are not going to help them, and may actively harm them, then she isn't going to be totally honest about those feelings. That doesn't mean she is lying to the patient exactly, if they asked her a direct question about her feelings I get the sense that she would answer it honestly, but she might not bring it up as a topic of discussion if she doesn't feel like it will be helpful.
Again, I'm not trying to speak for her, but that's my impression. Take that for what you will.
This recent article from The Washington Post seems relevant to your question (this is a link to a non-paywalled version of it): https://archive.ph/xUs6i
>However, with someone who I am being almost completely honest with, and who I am trusting to handle my emotions-it seems hard to trust someone who is acting more like a therapist than like a person-who isn't letting their opinions color their behavior-because I'm not in the market for that sort of validation, I'm in the market for honest conversation.
With an emphasis on the last sentence, and as someone who don't know much about therapy, I'm not sure that's what you ought to look for in a therapist. Validation and conversation you get from friends/family, and if you absolutely have to pay someone to get these, I think prostitutes are the common fallback.
Being involved with some people with serious problems (depression, autism, and god knows what else), I like to joke that I'm doing the job of a therapist while chatting with them, listening to their problems, trying to give them advices/opinions to "chill them out" or help them (often both), but it's just that, a joke, and I'm not, in fact, doing the job of a therapist. Or, if I do, I'd be really fucking worried by how well regarded therapy has become.
I wonder how many of the people you make that joke with are properly -aware- it's a joke. I've met a few mediocre therapists where sessions kind of devolve to just commiserating about "work is stressful" without seeking out the root causes of my issues.
Than again, when I quit the job in question most of my issues cleared up, so maybe that says more about my situation than the therapist.
The modern medical theory of cognitive behavioral therapy really focuses on the patient and identifying unconstructive behaviors, understanding them, and replacing them. In the US at least probably 80% of therapists practice this or something like it.
The answers aren't really supposed to come from the therapist. Their feelings towards you aren't really important, they are more of an experienced machine for asking the right questions based on your answers and proposing the right metaphors that make your brain click on some new model. It has been to a small degree already successfully partially automated and will get extremely more so with better language ai.
They are really much more interested in getting you to be honest with yourself than being honest with you. Their opinions aren't really part of the clinical mechanism. So to answer your question directly, it's a feature not a bug for the kind of therapy overwhelmingly practiced.
I'm a therapist who does CBT, and I do not think you are right. I am much more effective than I used to be as a CBT therapist, not because I got better at CBT itself, but because I got better at developing a collaborative relationship with the patient, so that we can work together on their problem. CBT techniques are tools.
Much of CBT comes down to exactly what the person's friends and relatives have been saying to them, with increasing exasperation, for months or years: "If you want to feel better, get out of the house and do something. All that negativity you are spewing about yourself and your life is obviously invalid -- you have plenty of evidence that the stuff you're saying to yourself is not true. And as for your phobia -- you have to face your fears." The person's friends and relatives are absolutely right about all those things, but hearing them has not helped the person at all. They have not motivated the person to try any of the suggested techniques. All they have done is make the person feel like everyone is sick to death of him and his problem.
The therapist has to find a way to understand the person's problem, and then develop with the person a model the both find valid of how it works, and then introduce the CBT techniques in terms of the model -- as experiments to do in trying to weaken the structure of the awful thing that has taken over the person's head.
Is advice from friends/family ineffective because of "who" it is coming from? For example, if I tell my spouse to do something, I can only do this as a "spouse", with all the baggage of years of marriage this entails (only used as an example, any resemblance to real persons is coincidental). There's no objective neutral space for me to give this advice from, nor for the spouse to receive it.
Which is where a good therapist comes in, not even necessarily directly "give" the advice, but working as a neutral sounding board for the person to come to realization, "well maybe this was a good idea after all".
There’s nothing wrong with friends and family giving advice of the kind of I described to a depressed or anxious person — stuff like “try getting out of the house and seeing a friend” or “if you face this fear you might be able to just push through it.” I’m sure that many times advice like that is just the nudge somebody needs, and it helps them and they eventually recover on their own. But the people who end up in therapist’s offices stuck in states of hopelessness or anxiety are people for whom the common sense advice did not work for one reason or another. They are stuck in a loop. Once they have reached that state, they are impervious to the usual advice, and when people say it all the stuck person feels is that they do not get how stuck he is, and that they have lost patience with him.
Those people won’t listen to advice from me either, if I roll it out early on. I have to first listen to their account of their problem until they and I both feel like I get it. I ask them what their model is of their depression, and usually they don’t have one, beyond “chemical imbalance” or some much. Then we can start to build a model of how the depression keeps itself in business. I get them to monitor their thoughts and see if we can catch the depression in the act of keeping itself in business, stuff like that. They’ve all already told me long before that advice like “get out of the house and see a friend” does not work. So at some point I ask them what happened when they tried it. Very often it turns out that their trying it consisted of thinking about going out, and “realizing it wouldn’t do any good.” So then we’re in a position to talk about how their depression showed them a movie of it not doing any good, and for them to start doing little experiments to test how accurate their depression’s propaganda movies are. That’s the gist of it. So ultimately it does come down to their doing a lot of the thing friends and family had advised them to do, but we’ve come at that from another direction, and at that point it makes sense to them to at least try some of the stuff.
' Very often it turns out that their trying it consisted of thinking about going out, and “realizing it wouldn’t do any good.” '
Oh that is so relatable... In the long run I solved this one for myself by creating an obligation. Don't just sign up to Planet Fitness for 10 bucks a month - get on a schedule with classes at specific times so that there's a sense of duty to go. Over time same people come to the class so a camaraderie of sorts develops, and now I, like, have another pull, to see the training buddies, and feel bad if I don't show up.
Oh, yeah, I think everybody has some of it. I do my own taxes, and each year my first attempt at sitting down to get the papers in order consists of thinking about how the important ones are all mixed in with other stuff and will be hell to find, and probably something crucial will be lost, and I will be enormously frustrated by the search, and . . . So I decide to get online and crap around instead of getting the documents in order.
Boy, I wish I had a therapist like this who could help me move forward on certain things.
Due to having been raised in a sad and mad home steeped in sklavenmoral and an identity of ourselves as righteous Victims I am fiercely opposed to such sentiments.
This makes it hard when the entire system is trying to "help" me by coo'ing pity about X event or Y "condition".
Say ADHD. I prefer to regard it as something akin to "being in the moment" and as morally neutral as skin color.
That bring the case, I am not looking for a way to "manage", "deal", or "cope".
I definitely need information and assignments and UNDERSTANDING, but not pity or photocopied pages from books whose entire language presumes a "poor you" approach.
I assume that if cognitive therapy would be useful for me it would be primarily for unlearning learned helplessness but also, for me to buy into the idea that I am not actually helpless wrt certain things I would need some hand holding behavioral therapy (otherwise how has helplessness been disputed? I've tried successlessly so many times that it seems to me that what I have learned about the boundties of my abilities is quite accurate).
In the past any behavioral "advice" from friends and family was the equivalent of beating a quadriplegic into running.
It hurts like a motherfucker.
Is there any useful you recommend?
As you can tell from my hatred of the Victimological Standard of my parents (whose own parents were sad/mad/crippled holocaust survivors) I have most certainly NOT given up "trying" to succeed where I have yet to do so (despite the passage of nearly 5 decades) but I see no reason to suffer through "trying" things I have tried unsuccessfully many times before.
If you have a one-time CBT assignment that takes under 6 hours and whose hoped-for positive results are evident that very day I would very much like to try it.
Where I am not Alexander I am very contentedly Diogenes, but it is not clear to me yet where
the outer borders of Alexandria lie so I don't want to presume Diogencian limits simply because I have yet to regularly surpass them.
I can't give you the behavioral assignment you've asked for because I don't know enough about you to come up with one I'm sure would give you quick results, and you sure as hell don't need any more unsuccessful attempts to add the the list. Also, I do not do treatment of people I meet here. I do, though, give advice, so here's some for you.
-If you have good insurance or enough funds to pay out of pocket, you should be able to hire a, smart, unsentimental therapist who is committed to CBT and good at it. Tell them exactly what you wrote here about the kind of approach you want and ask if they are willing to do it. And you and the therapist should treat *that* as an experiment too. At each session, evaluate together how effective it was. If it was not effective, try to figure out why it was not. Is the reason that it was no informative some way? If so, then now you both know something useful. Use it.
-The best way to identify committed and experienced CBT therapists is to go to Psychology Today & search for someone who has the A-CBT (Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy) Certification. I believe the Association for Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy also has listings, but you want someone *with the certification*. In general, psychologists are more committed to the CBT approach than psychiatrists and social workers, although there certainly are practitioners in these other fields who are accomplished CBT practitioners.
-If you cannot afford therapy with a really good pracitioner, look for online resources that approach things in ways that are a good fit for you. Some CBT books are quite practical, and not ooey-gooey. Beeminder is a good resource. You might find there or on this forum someone who also wants to work on changing patterns, and would be willing to partner with you.
I hope you do too. You might not need to pay the therapist out of pocket. I live in an expensive east coast city and most of the therapists here refuse to contract with insurance companies and only accept direct personal payments. But I'm pretty sure that in many parts of the US many therapists accept insurance, and you would only have to pay a copay of about $10-$35 per session. Therapists on Psychology Today state whether they take insurance, and if so which kinds of insurance. Anyhow, wishing you well.
Tentative advice, since I haven't solved my problems, but some things are definitely better.
Find ways to pay attention to more of your self It sounds like you've already done some work in that direction.
The goal is to reflexively notice that both your problem and your internal attack for having the problem are small parts of yourself. You've got more and better going on.
The legend about Alexander and Diogenes has the following occasional addendum.
Alexander: "If I were not Alexander I would want to be Diogenes"
Diogenes: "If I were not Diogenes I would still wants to be Diogenes".
The point of which is that Alexander is glad to lack desires that he can not fulfill but definitely still wants to fulfill those desires that are attainable.
But Diogenes makes the Ecclesiastian claim that even if he could have most things, he would still rather be free from effort and extra desires.
I myself lean strongly towards acceptance of the Diogenene/Buddhist/Ecclesiastical perspective but socially this is difficult for me to sustain for reasons that would require too long a biography to justify here.
My youtube channel currently serves no purpose (because it has no audience) other than to collate an eclectic collection of videos to provide a few random data points to help ease the confusion that occurs fairly regularly when people meet me and believe that I am either the literal actual messiah (last week alone I offhand recall two separate people legitimately and sincerely asking if I was a literal, non-corporeal angel) or alternatively somebody who asks too many questions / knows too much / is too indefinable.
It won't give you any holistically accurate view of myself but does provides a scattershot view.
Suffice it to say that as an extremely ADHD, somewhat autistic, individual gifted in various fields who refuses to give in to societal forces while retaining all sorts of oddities from his upbringing is somebody who would benefit from having two cents to rub together.
I do not care for money or for any other personal achievements or goals but when something inevitably goes wrong on account of my propensity to seek out and speak to all of the interesting people, it would be nice to have a few bucks for the doctor, lawyer or bribe.
That's why, I've decided to consider whether there is more Alexandrian dominion that I ought to have another go at despite my being able to be quite insanely happy with (relatively) nothing.
My only REAL issue with what the pathologists call ADHD is the impediment to solvency it offers.
Obviously starvation is never great. But I'd long ago accepted that, "eh, what can you do". Recently however, having been first attacked for being male (a not uncommon situation for men these days) and a year later cheated by a sociopathic fraud dental organization that is essentially an affinity scam, I'm madder than I have been in decades and interested in gaining at least enough lucre to get the dental treatment I now require and to fight back against the culture that had the audacity to glance sideways in my direction.
I'm still not very angry. Like I said, Stoicism/Taoism is my joy.
But I am angry enough that I set up a youtube channel and stated my willingness to enter public life if there is a public that wants me to, and to have another go at gaining financial security.
This just speculation-- I was actually gobsmacked by the idea of being the sort of person who could seem like the messiah to others, even just a couple of people.
This will not stop me from having theories or writing about them.
Tentatively, it's your detachment from common human desires which makes you seem like a high religious figure.
The detachment, taken as far as you've taken it, could plausibly be a result of a childhood where your desires and needs were unwelcome.
I believe anger serves the function of energizing territorial defense. Running afoul of the bad dental association has caused you to realize you have territory..
I think I'm not communicating effectively - that is exactly what I mean to suggest is typically done using CBT.
What isn't in there that I took to be OPs main question is "honest conversation where the therapists opinions and beliefs color their responses".
That's not to say you aren't supposed to build a relationship with the patient - but you aren't sharing with them if you think they are being dramatic or if it seems like they're as bad for their people as their people are for them or to just tell them what they think the right answer is (the way their people might).
If I'm misunderstanding either the op or you I'll defer - I've experienced a lot.of therapy first and third hand but I am not a trained therapist.
Clinical cognitive behavioral therapy does not utilize this information except for making the best guesses at what questions to ask the patient and what metaphors might work for recontextualizing the thought or behavior patterns that are being worked on. You can just look up manuals for how to do CBT to confirm this.
I don't know that I find your argument compelling for why therapists operate differently than this. Someone with good skills at countertransference will be superior at asking the right questions and providing the right metaphors, but in the talk therapy overwhelmingly practiced in the United States the therapist is intended to be basically completely substitutable with any other equally trained therapist.
Robin Hanson and Agnes Callard's 'Minds Almost meeting' podcast reliably infuriates me because of the mismatch in the two hosts' thinking styles but it really is the only podcast I know of where people talk about genuinely philosophical topics off the cuff and on net I really enjoy it. Does anybody know of similar podcasts?
Maybe "Very Bad Wizards"? It's two philosophy professors (I think) chatting, I think sometimes they'll read/watch something beforehand and chat about that.
I haven't gotten super into it, but I know people who love it! It's a little too much philosophy for me (like it's far above my level) but that might be a plus for you! Even for me it doesn't sound pretentious at all.
VBW listener from like episode 10 here. I am super into their work and it's not that high-level. Only during their philosophy segments, they assume a few intro philosophy and psychology classes, but even without that it's not terribly hard to keep up, especially if you end up googling the names they use anyway. Very casual conversation, easy to listen to.
All their other segments are very laymen friendly. They have an analysis podcast series about the greatest show of all time with no close second, Deadwood. Highly recommended.
Arguments about free will usually turn into arguments about definitions, but as a definition of one type of "free will", can we not say that a person has free will over a particular action if they would have chosen differently if offered a sufficiently large incentive?
For example, for a million dollars I'll happily hold my breath for a minute, so I have free will over that. But I can't consciously slow my heart rate to 30 bpm, so that's outside the scope of my free will. A man can resist taking his first shot of heroin if you offer him a million dollars instead, but maybe the thousandth shot of heroin is impossible to resist and hence beyond free will.
I'm thinking of this definition particularly in the context of crime and punishment. If a criminal could possibly have been incentivised not to commit a particular crime then it makes sense to declare that they had free will when choosing to do it, and hence to punish them for it, because the existence of this punishment becomes part of the incentive structure that exists for others considering the same crime.
Among atheists the argument can only ever be about the definition, because the concept, which made sense in a religious context, loses coherence outside that context.
I will always refer to a simple thought experiment:
An alien with godlike powers has put you in a room. You have two buttons, a red button and a green button. If you press the green button, the experiment ends. If you press the red button, the alien will use its godlike powers to reset the room to the exact configuration the room began in, including you, including quantum configurations. You have free will, and also you prefer to hit the red button, and begin the thought experiment by walking up and pressing the red button.
So what happens, and what does this say about the notion of free will?
>can we not say that a person has free will over a particular action if they would have chosen differently if offered a sufficiently large incentive?<
Well now we're defining 'incentive'. If you hold a magnet up to metal, you're providing it an incentive to move, the stronger the magnet the stronger the incentive. Gravity and obstructions incentivize a drop of water to follow this path down a wall instead of that one; change the obstructions and you change the path. But I don't think anyone wants to argue this means a piece of metal or drop of water has free will.
There's no doubt that the likelihood of a person, or even a rat, doing something is influenced by what they have learned about the likely rewards and punishments of the act. I don't see how bringing the idea of free will into it is relevant. And actually I think the term "free will" sounds like it means something, but in fact does not. Wtf is the opposite of free will -- paralyzed will? will in handcuffs? will whose butt is stuck to the chair with superglue?
Well,.you can't tempt a rock or a robot with inducements.There's a decision making ability tangibly some entities have. And the will can be unfree in the legal sensee, when an individual is compelled.
I think your mention of individuals who are compelled to do something is an example of the kind of thinking that makes the term "free will" seems to make sense. "Free will" sounds meaningful because in thinking about it we use as a model of what it means for a person to be free. Clearly a person can be constrained a lot, little or not at all in what they do in a given situation. So then we think, well, OK, so a person's exercise of their will is similar, and subject to the same states: a lot of constraint, a little, or none.
Really? Ok, tell me what the thing called will is, and what are the conditions that are analogous to a person being constrained a lot, a little or not at all.
You have responded to 2 separate posts of mine with the same sort of low-effort, needling question, one in which you don't put any of your own ideas out that, just ask in a snarky tone for me to expand on what I said. In the case of free will, I had said clearly what I think: the phrase sounds like it means something, but actually does not. What I said is not exactly that the concept of free will is incoherent, but that the phrase "free will" has no clear meaning. I do not know whether that comes down to saying that the concept of free will is incoherent, because to me the phrase "free will" does not capture a concept. Also, I am not really sure what an incoherent concept is. But mostly, Skull, I do not feel motivated to put more effort than I have into responding to your posts, because you are snarky and give nothing back.
The rules on this forum are clearly more strict than I thought, presuming you're a fair representative. Needling! Snarky! I wish you hadn't put any effort in at all if it was such a waste of your time.
From a physics perspective there is no free will because of spacetime. Every event exists in one observer's future, and in another's past, and both viewpoints are equally valid. That means past and future have already been determined, unchanging, and there is no room for free will.
At the same time, this lack of free will doesn't matter for our day-to-day business because it's not even in theory clear whether or not we will ever be able to visit the past and run observations or perform experiments on free will. For all we know we only get this one timeline, so we might as well continue to punish bad actors and reward good ones and convince ourselves we did something to change the future for the better.
It's not about predictions, or memories. It's about raw physics, of which everything else (including humans with their memories and predictions) is made of, no matter how many layers of complexity you have to go through.
What you call the present, the past, or the future all comes down to your frame of reference:
What is a "viewpoint" of the future if not a prediction. Your link is talking about mirrors; the future is not a mirror. If you're arguing there's no free will because the future is already perfectly known like a mirror's reflection, you don't have an argument.
The mirror and photons are part of the thought experiment, simply a way to establish simultaneity and illustrate the point by omitting unnecessary complications that are impossible to describe mathematically. Nonetheless we can use a prediction and its outcome if you prefer, the basic argument doesn't change.
A prediction is an expectation of what the outcome of a certain event will be; it hasn't happened yet from the perspective of the observer making the prediction. For example, "global GDP will rise by more than 2% within the next year according to some source" is the prediction event, and the GDP figure released by that source next year is the outcome event.
As the video I linked above explains, for any 2 events (in this case prediction and outcome), you can construct one observer for which the prediction and a third, unrelated event are simultaneous, and another observer for which the outcome and the third event are simultaneous. Since nothing privileges one observer over the other, both are equally correct in their perception.
The only way to resolve this apparent paradoxon is that simultaneity, and thus the temporal order of events, is subjective, relative, and that we live in a universe where the future exists with the same unchanging realness as the past; we just don't know the future yet because we haven't yet travelled there through spacetime.
>you can construct one observer for which the prediction and a third, unrelated event are simultaneous, and another observer for which the outcome and the third event are simultaneous. <
Okay. Seattle will play Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl this year. What's your third event that's happening both now and in February?
Really physics doesn’t scale up enough to explain even free will at the level of the simplest animal. It can merely explain what primitive particles can do.
Even the most complex animal is bound by the laws of physics, just like e.g. the most complex (and apparently intelligent) piece of software is bound by the manipulation of bits. Complex behaviour can be created from relatively few, simple rules.
"Every event exists in one observer's future, and in another's past, and both viewpoints are equally valid. That means past and future have already been determined, unchanging, and there is no room for free will."
That of course implies that there is no such thing as indeterminism, which violates some other assumptions there.
I used to find statements like yours fairly convincing, but was uncomfortable with ... something about them I couldn't put my finger on.
I found this classic Eliezer Yudkowsky article really useful for understanding why this framing is fundamentally asking the wrong question, I recommend reading it in full.
The quick summary is that asking whether the "future" is controlled by "physics" or by "you" is fundamentally a wrong and confusing framing. In reality, "you" live inside and are part of "physics", so the laws of physics *are* the mechanism by which "you" control the future. Determinism and Free Will are compatible, and moreso than that, physical determinism is *required* for free will to exist.
This of course leaves some wiggling in the exact definition of "you" that's relevant for a given conversation, but that's a larger conversation I'm not looking to trigger now.
Libertarian Free Will is Worth Wanting Because It Allows You To Shape the Future.
Determinism doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were -- before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born.
(Note that this is still true of multiversal theories. In multiversal theories, future states have probabilities that differ from each other and change over time, but can't be changed)
Libertarian free will allows the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A". Moreover, these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones.
Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past -- it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation).
There it is. Compatibilism cannot exist without some form of re-definition. I don't know why people can't just use the term the way everyone understands it. There's nothing wrong with admitting that there is no free will. If something in your life changes because of that, that's a psychological problem, not a metaphysical one.
I'm curious what you see as how "everyone understands" the definition of free will. I think my go-to definition would be something like "to have free will is for your actions to be controlled by you, rather than caused by parts-of-reality-that-are-not-you". I happen to legitimately believe that I am also a part of physical reality that evolves according to the laws of physics, so saying something is controlled by the laws of physics doesn't actually provide any information about whether it's controlled by part-of-reality-that-is-me or parts-of-reality-that-are-not-me.
These all seem like the most natural default definitions that describe how I think about the world, but I'm aware they're not universal. In particular, I there are people that think of themselves as being some "immortal soul" that exists outside of pysical reality and is not subject to the laws of physics, I'm curious whether that's the definition that you think is the default?
I don't mean to make a distinction between "you" and "physics". Of course any system, no matter how complex, is ultimately physics and governed by its rules whatever they may be. What part of my statement did you find to contradict this?
You seem to have a lot of faith for the block-view of spacetime....but it's not the case for all (I don't, for example - i am more like Wolfram view that GR is just a consequence of the underlying update process, expressed in a continuum geometrical framework), within the physics community or in general. And before GR and Quantum field theory are merged it is really a matter of faith, because there is no coherent model yet and even less a single interpretation of the models.
"I'm thinking of this definition particularly in the context of crime and punishment. If a criminal could possibly have been incentivised not to commit a particular crime then it makes sense to declare that they had free will when choosing to do it, and hence to punish them for it, because the existence of this punishment becomes part of the incentive structure that exists for others considering the same crime. "
If you only care about this as a way of decreasing crime (by changing the incentives) then you don't need an opinion on free will or not. You can just run some experiments and see if crime goes up or down.
One (over the top?) example: We might try executing (this Tuesday) all the prisoners in jail/prison for violent felonies and see if the violent crime rate drops over the next few years. I don't need to care about whether the folks in jail/prison had free will or not to measure the change in violent crime rate.
b) One consequence: All else being equal (which admittedly never happens) it makes more sense to apply punishments to criminals who have more forethought than to criminals who have less forethought. The CEO who makes multi-year plans is more easily deterred than the person who never thinks beyond the next five minutes.
Aside from the specifics of the Free Will to decline the first shot of heroin discussion, most people are introduced to the allure of opiates when they break a leg, have dental surgery or maybe are in the process of passing a kidney stone. The starting point is often a doctor’s prescription.
A lot of heroin addicts in Appalachia got their start thanks to greed of the Sackler family pushing OxyContin.
My understanding is that this is almost entirely a false narrative, and that the vast majority of opiate addicts get started the same way that other drug addicts do, they take them "recreationally" for shits and giggles. People who take opiates for legitimate medical reasons have little trouble ditching them when they no longer need them.
Say you are the host of a popular syndicated AM talk radio program with views on drug use similar to your own, so in October of 1995 you say:
“There’s nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”
Eight years later news outlets start to report that you are under investigation for illegally obtaining prescription pills. It turns out you have been obtaining hundreds of prescription pills per month over a period of several years. You've been "doctor shopping" to obtain multiple prescriptions for drugs that would otherwise be illegal.
You realize you are in trouble and check yourself into a treatment facility.
A few years later a man who uses hateful rhetoric against liberals similar to that which you pioneered is elected president and he awards you the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
If your life is on track you probably will take a couple of Percocet after having your wisdom teeth removed and after a couple days switch to Tylenol. You will still probably notice that they made you feel rather niiiiice though. But no big deal, life is good.
If on the other hand you’ve got a kid with a chronic illness, have unpaid medical bills, aren’t getting along with your wife that well and the rumor mill at work says job cuts are coming, you might notice that when you take the Percocet, you feel pretty good and for a while at least you believe that everything is going to work out just fine. Well then you are going to want more of that relief. This guy is going to be more vulnerable to spiraling into addiction.
Not because he’s a worse person but because his life is much shittier and a few hours of relief and piece of mind might be worth what seems like a small risk that will become much larger with time.
This is why I say the guy who’s life is chugging along just fine probably has more free will in his tank than the guy with a host of problems.
“The extraordinarily high abuse rate of opioids is attributed in part to the large number of jobs in heavy manual labor such as mining, timbering, and manufacturing. These professions often cause injuries to workers that are treated with opioid pain relievers, which in turn can lead to addiction.”
It goes on to add that another factor is high unemployment and people living lives of despair.
It doesn’t say that the high abuse rate is because the state is populated by an inordinate number of people of low character.
Yeah Gunflint but the Sackler family couldn't help pushing Oxycontin because being rich as fuck has been shown to cause people to be less compassionate, so the poor Sacklers didn't have free will.
This idea seems pretty close to Scott's debates with Bryan Caplan about mental illness, just with "Constraints vs Preferences" replaced by "Inside vs Outside the scope of free will".
Using your examples, "choosing" to do something given an incentive like getting a million dollars still doesn't involve free-will ultimately, in the sense that you can't choose how you respond to any incentive. Your emotional responses, thoughts and choices kind of come out of nowhere. You say that you can't slow your heart rate to 30bpm. That's true, but you can't choose your thoughts either. They just appear in consciousness out of nowhere (it doesn't matter if you weren't doing anything of if the thought came up because of what you just saw on TV).
But it does make sense to talk about deliberate/intentional actions, because it helps understand how someone might typically behave.
A serial killer, even without free-will, is the sort of person that will still kill despite all the incentives not to commit horrendous crimes. It makes sense for them to stay in prison, both to protect everyone else and to serve as a deterrent for anyone considering committing murder.
Someone who kills accidentally (still no free-will) is probably not a threat in the future and might already be suffering from the guilt alone. Should probably still go to jail for a much shorter period of time, to incentivize people to be careful and to publicly show that killing people is taken very seriously.
Someone who generally behaves well, but with the right incentives might behave poorly (e.g. needs money, robs a store), would sit somewhere in between the two cases above.
In any case we have the concept of "mitigating circumstances."
Sometimes people are talking about ultimate free-will which no one seems to have, but then someone starts discussing deliberate/intentional/conscious actions instead. Many long boring discussions are mostly people using those different definitions.
", but you can't choose your thoughts either. They just appear in consciousness out of nowhere"
1.You, the conscious mind can still choose between impulses.
2. Impulses.don't come from literally nowhere, they come from neural.activity -- Maybe unconscious neural activity, but your unconscious is still "you", in a sense.
Does the fact my conscious mind does not pre-arrange the thoughts that pop into it mean they are not my thoughts?
Nothing in an ordinary person's subjective experience suggests that. Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get urges to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker, or to attend football matches if I am a football hater. My promptings are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
>1.You, the conscious mind can still choose between impulses.
No, you can't. This "choice" is something our conscious mind *experiences*. Your conscious mind "choosing" things would mean it would have to think about something before you think about it. The choice emerges in consciousness, to put it there you need to have made the choice non-consciously.
>Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do.
And the kind of things "you would do"...are precisely those things you have done in the past as a result of your biology and your environment. You didn't consciously choose to be the way you are, now or in the past.
"The choice emerges in consciousness, to put it there you need to have made the choice non-consciously"
Says who? The conscious mind exists for a purpose,, and it cannonball evolved just to be a passive witness...such a conscious mind would take up resources without contributing functioning.
"You didn't consciously choose to be the way you are, now or in the past."
Conscious decisions are influenced by unconscious habit *and vice versa* -- habits can be jnstilled.
Deciding something is something I experience - the thought that I want to pick option A over option B appears in my conscious mind. It cannot be put there by the conscious mind, because that means I would have had to had the conscious thought of 'I pick option A'....before I have the conscious thought 'I pick option A'.
All thoughts simply appear in consciousness, and they must arise from
>The conscious mind exists for a purpose,, and it cannonball evolved just to be a passive witness...
Maybe so, maybe no. You can't simply assume that this is true. You need to actually explain how it's logically coherent for some immaterial 'experience' to influence material brain matter. It's like saying that an image analysis computer program needs the output on the computer monitor to do the analysis. No, the analysis is the voltages on a silicon chip. What you see on the computer monitor is simply the output from those processes, and it's incoherent for there to be any way for the visual output to affect the actual processing, because anything that appears on the screen must already be in encoded in the processing unit, so it will just get the information from there.
We mostly can't have proper brain function without conscious experience, but this is simply a product of the role of the brain in generating conscious experience such that the only way conscious experience is lost when the brain doesn't work. You can't pull out the computer monitor when you're dealing with the brain.
>such a conscious mind would take up resources without contributing functioning.
You're simply assuming this, when it's possible that it arises as a byproduct that doesn't take up any meaingful amount of cognitive resources. You're also assuming it was selected for through evolution which isn't necessarily true either.
>Conscious decisions are influenced by unconscious habit *and vice versa* -- habits can be jnstilled.
No, everything has to have an unconscious basis. We experience the conscious thought of making the decision of wanting to instill an unconscious habit, but that experience itself has to arise from unconscious brain processes. Which means that actually, the unconscious brain is influencing the unconscious brain.
You're literally talking about consciousness here as if it's a soul or something. Half of what you say demonstrates an extreme materialism, the other half talks about the mind in a highly immaterial way.
Experiencing something is not exclusive of doing it.
" the thought that I want to pick option A over option B appears in my conscious mind."
It would appear if it was generated somewhere else, and it would if it appear of it were generated by the conscious mind.
". You need to actually explain how it's logically coherent for some immaterial 'experience'"
I didn't say anything at all about immateriality. Conscious is not defined as immaterial, nor is it defined as just conscious experience. Consciousness is, among other things, a kind of functioning. Doing things consciously is different from doing them absent mindedly or reflexively. Conscious functioning has a known neurological basis -- it can be knocked out by trauma and drugs.
"You're literally talking about consciousness here as if it's a soul or something. "
You seem to be talking about different things than me.
When I used the term coming from nowhere, I didn't mean literally nowhere. Yes, it's from neural activity. The thing is that both impulses and choices come from neural activity. The point is that it's beyond any control **in the ultimate sense**.
The conscious mind doesn't really choose anything, just witnesses a "choice" being made. That is, one impulse "winning". It does come with the experience of choice, but the choice will still just be neural activity which you have no control over. If you feel like consciousness is like a soul that controls neural activity, then for me that just doesn't really make any sense.
You mention randomness. When I said it came out of nowhere it didn't mean it's random. I meant that it will be perceived as having come out of nowhere. It'll mostly definitely be not random, since it'll be the result of the state of your brain, which is my point.
It's like your consciousness is like a movie screen where you'll perceive all impulses and choices showing up, including the feeling that you have control over them. Ultimately though it's just brain activity being dictated by information input, genetics, chemical state and so on.
Maybe you just think you do. If your mind is in fact a physical/chemical process, it's entirely deterministic: the atoms could only ever have one arrangement given their past, and that's the arrangement that caused your body to take the action you took. You have the qualia of having made a choice, but that's not real evidence. If you do things without consciously choosing, that would be strong evidence that you don't make choices, but only observe them.
Your first sentence sounds like a description of epiphenomenalism, i.e. mental events/qualia are just side effects of physical processes. The problem with epiphenomenalism is that we're capable of talking about qualia, i.e. the atoms in our brain arrange themselves in such a way to cause our muscles to produce speech about qualia/consciousness/etc. If the experience of qualia is just a side effect with no influence on physics, why would the atoms in our brain ever end up doing that? It would seem that somehow, the qualia/mental events themselves _do_ cause physical changes to the atoms in the "physical world".
Of course, that's still not proof that "free will" exists. The way in which mental events affect the physical world is still a mystery. That process could also be entirely deterministic, or entirely random (in either case, "choice" isn't a factor).
If you were to train your mind, you'd probably have much more control over your thoughts. Just because you can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done (admittedly it's hard work and takes constant attention). But here's an example for you that I think you'd even be able to do. The next time you hear a popular song that turns into an earworm — i.e. it remains running continually through mind — choose to hum a different tune in your mind. I always Hum the Girl From Ipanema when a particularly obnoxious popular earworm gets caught in my head. The fact that you can choose a different earworm to override the one you've got involuntarily through your head proves that you can have control over your thoughts — at least if you wish to. Repeating a mantra or saying the rosary would have the same effect of silencing unwanted thoughts (at least if you practice the repetitions diligently over months or years).
A good meditator — and I am not one — can eventually train themselves to be empty of random arising thoughts. Likewise, they can choose to focus their one-pointed attention on a single thing such as visualizing all the iconographic details of a Yidam or the detailed layout of their mandala mind-palace. Anyway, it's hard work, and most people really don't have the patience to sit quietly and meditate for an a hour or more day-after-day (because it's very boring, at least in the beginning), but it is possible to take control of one's mind.
It seems like in example 3, you made a choice. All choices can be reduced to impulses, but you can have involuntary impulses and voluntary impulses. I think you need to go back and refine your arguments because you've just admitted that in certain situations you can (a) override involuntary impulses, and (b) using a voluntary impulse, you can choose the method to override the involuntary impulse. Further down this thread, you get hung up about the I. Don't worry about the I. For instance, Buddhists get along quite well without the I, but they posit free will. I think where you people who dismiss consciousness and free will is that you insist on making the I some sort of external process disconnected from the society of processes that are going on in your mind.
"The point is that it's beyond any control **in the ultimate sense**."
What about non ultimate senses? (You can disprove anything by setting the definitional bar high enough).
I can't decide, in advance, exactly what my thoughts are going to be ...that would be somewhere between pointless and impossible. But,according to my own subjective experience, I (my conscious mind) am not compelled to act on every passing thought. Why shouldn't the inability to refrain from acting in passing impulses be a notion of control that could be the basis for a scientifically acceptable theory of free will?
Who defines free will as the ability to think what you're going to think before you've thought it? That is only one notion of "compelled". Mentally healthy people are not compelled by every passing thought . Meditation might show you that thoughts arise unbidden, but if you were compelled to act on unbidden thoughts, you would not be able to stay in the cushion long enough to meditate.
Here is some neuroscience:-
"How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles."
Why couldn't control consist of refraining, vetoing, or filtering?
We do have conscious control, because deliberately think about specific things. Indeed, deliberate, and conscious thinking is what we mean by thinking as opposed to daydreaming or whatever. The fact that thoughts just pop into your head when you are sitting in meditation reflects the fact that you are not actively trying to do anything in particular. But you still make a conscious choice to meditate.
"non ultimate senses" is what I describe as voluntary/conscious/intentional behaviors.
I have no particular affection for the term free-will, but it's usually used in the way I am using it. I'm ok with using any other term.
Whether or not I act on unbidden thoughts is the result of yet another thought, which again pops into perception on its own (the result of more brain activity.)
When we daydream, we are thinking and have the perception of lack of control. When we are deliberately thinking, we are thinking but have the perception of control. The difference is only in what is perceived consciously, which is itself generated by brain activity. But in both cases we are witnessing whatever is appearing in consciousness.
When I'm thinking deliberately to solve a problem I have no idea where the train of thought will take me as those thoughts just pop into perception one at a time. I do have the feeling that I'm thinking them, but if I pay close attention it's still be just thought after thought just like one notices in meditation.
In meditation people are deliberately trying to notice this process. Eventually they perceive the state of no-self which is basically removing the feeling that one is the creator of their own thoughts.
"The difference is only in what is perceived consciously, which is itself generated by brain activity."
No, there are objective e differences between someone who is concentr ating, someone who is daydreaming, and someone who is off their head on drugs.
"When I'm thinking deliberately to solve a problem I have no idea where the train of thought will take me as those thoughts just pop into perception one at a time"
Why does that matter? If deciding everything in advance is the only thing that counts as control, then you would.have no control. But it isn't the one and only thing counts as control.
"basically removing the feeling that one is the creator of their own thoughts"
The subjective feel ing. Objectively, you are in control...who else is?
While I think I understand the appeal from a theoretical standpoint of thinking of our conscious experience as being outside the chain of causation which causes us to act. I don't think it can work that way. Both of us are capable of writing about the experience of making conscious decisions, and it seems absurd to think that our ability to write about these experiences is causally unconnected with our having them.
Something being perceived consciously will influence future thoughts. The memory of having perceived something is still relevant data. But what or whether I write about it is still the output of regular brain activity of which I have no control over.
Do you never intentionally think about something, perhaps a series of thoughts related to a subject? Is that chain ever something that you would not otherwise want to think about, like perhaps a project at work?
Sure, some thoughts pop into my head without prompting from my conscious self. But a whole lot of what I think about are things that I choose to think about and intentionally work on. I have a mentally demanding job that often requires consciously choosing to think on some subjects that I really don't want to think about at all.
Again, the free-will vs intentionality discussion.
I do intentionally think about something, but I did not "choose" to want to do that. Neither do I know where the train of thought will lead me. Thinking deliberately is similar to reading a book or listening to a podcast. I'm witnessing the output of thought appearing in consciousness. The difference is that it comes accompanied by the sense that I'm creating the thoughts. But that's just perception like everything else.
“ I do intentionally think about something, but I did not "choose" to want to do that.”
Honestly Paulo, like a lot of people who dismiss consciousness you have a very sloppy use of language.
The first use of I there is you admitting you can control your thoughts and the second part there’s a different I being controlled by some undefined agent. Obviously not an external agent, though.
There’s a tendency in this kind of argument to make the subconscious some kind of mysterious external entity when it is also part of the mind and all signals are occurring in the brain. That my thoughts seek to come unbidden, when they do which isn’t always, proves nothing of free will.
Do you think there are people with a desire to kill that don't do it? To me, it's obvious that there are many people who refrain from fulfilling their base desires, some of which is easy for them (clearly fitting your theory), but for some it's definitely difficult.
Your first point is close to what Melvin's main point was - definitional differences. If I want to watch TV but instead recognize that the trash needs taken out and do that instead, I would say that I'm exercising free will to choose, but you likely see that as motivated by competing interests (whatever pressures exist that push me to take the trash out competing with my other desire to watch TV).
At some point it just gets silly, though. Like if I did something I clearly don't want to do and causes me harm to prove to you that I have free will, you might say something like "the incentive to prove me wrong induced you to those actions" and I feel like there's no way to resolve that discussion. People do really difficult and unrewarding things all the time, which seems to clearly refute your position, but you could always retreat to one of several mottes - such as "there was some inscrutable internal preference that was unknown to the outside" or "the difficult and rewards were different than we calculated and it's actually positive for this individual."
Pretty much everyone has desires to do all sorts of things that then refrain from doing. But they didn't choose their desires, nor their ability to refrain, nor their impulse not to enact those desires. Those things just appear.
You didn't choose to want to watch TV (the desire came out of nowhere) and you didn't choose to recognize that the trash needs taken out (it also came out of nowhere).
If you did something you clearly didn't want to do to prove me that you have free will, then you wanted to do that thing. But you didn't choose to want to prove me wrong. That's just how you ended up feeling after reading my comment. Choosing not to feel how you felt would be like choosing not to believe that 2+2 = 4. Either you do or you don't.
If you develop a brain tumor that happens to stimulate a part of your brain that makes you a lot more responsible, you'll always take the trash out etc. Are those choices? From your subjective point of view, you'd think so, but does it make sense to say so? What if there's no brain tumor? Well, did you choose your brain? You didn't choose your environment nor your genetics not anything else that can influence your behavior, emotions and thoughts.
It's not a motte. You're talking about something different from me (much more related to the concept of deliberate/conscious/intentional actions). Which kind of means that we ended up doing exactly what I mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous comment.
Yeah, I've been down the road on enough of these conversations about free will to know where they end up. I disagree with many of your statements, but it comes down to the definitional issue Melvin brought up in the first place.
I don't happen to think that my desire to watch TV comes "out of nowhere" and know that such desires can be trained. But I know that you could just retreat to another level of introspection where the desire to train yourself not to watch TV comes out of nowhere and so on. I don't think there's a reasonable way to conclude the conversation.
To be clear, when I mean out of nowhere, I mean as the normal process of brain activity. It comes out of nowhere at the level of perception (and generally with the feeling that you were the creator of the thought).
But yeah, if we were to keep going, we'd probably end up in circles for all eternity :D
Sam Harris and Dan Dennet's conversation on free will is pretty much that the whole time.
I think most of wrangling that goes on about this comes from the idea that you can only hold people morally responsible if they had free will to choose.
We're all little automata. I will hold you morally responsible for being an automata with an incentive-response structure or heuristic behavior structure that leads to things I think are bad. (Either cuz bad outcomes or because of nebulous predilections to being against the whatever it is). Indeed I don't have a choice on the matter.
This behavior will incentivize automata more aligned with me.
That reminds me of a story that I refer to as Napier's Commentary on Moral Relativism.
The context is that the protagonist of the story, Sir Charles Napier, was a general and military governor in British India in the 19th century. In his memoirs, he quoted himself as responding thus to a petition against his enforcement of laws against the practice of Sati (or Suttee), in which widows were compelled to immolate themselves on their late husbands' funeral pyres, on the grounds that the ban was an unwarranted imposition on local customs:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Tangentially, it should be noted that the practice of Sati is the subject of considerable modern historical debate, with the prevailing view being that it was definitely a thing but its frequency was greatly exaggerated in Western (particularly British) cultural imaginations because it played into self-serving narratives about how colonialism was supposedly a mutually beneficial (or even altruistic) enterprise of bringing the blessings of civilization to "savage" subject peoples.
It is interesting to compare our reactions to widow burning and female genital mutilation.
If there is a parallel universe where both were eradicated during colonialism, people probably say that FGM is just a racist myth; an implausible excuse for white colonialists to feel superior.
In an opposite direction, in a parallel universe where both are practiced today, people horrified by widow burning are accused of racism, because hey, if those women want to be burned, who are you to stop their sacred religious practice. (If an immigrant woman says that most women actually don't like to be burned, she is quickly cancelled by the woke mob.)
Or you could hold people responsible as if they had free will, and let the new incentive from holding them responsible affect their internal calculus about what activities are worth doing. At some level we don't really care if people are free to choose evil or do so because it makes economic sense for them to do so, if the same action on our part has the same effect. Increasing prosecutions for theft will have the effect of reducing theft (or vice versa) whether people have free will to choose or are reacting to incentives that are on some level outside of their "control".
I like this definition a lot. It feels like a System 1-System 2 thing, or perhaps a metacognition thing.
One thing it does is take time discounting out of the equation. Here's an edge case: an addict is shortening their life by a lot; he'd may be willing to pay $1b to live an extra ten years. If he keeps going, does that mean he is rejecting a $1b equivalent to do heroin?
Not everyone calculates the value of their life the same. Some people even kill themselves, indicating that they view the value of future life at some level less than $0. Some people value present experience far higher than future possible experiences. It would be difficult for us to determine if someone taking 10 years off of their lives in exchange for a present value is economically positive, negative, or neutral for them, at least a priori.
An honest but starving man steals a bread loaf for survival. Being offered a sum the is enough to buy the loaf would incentivise him to not steal. Did the guy have free will over his decision, even if he would starve to death otherwise?
The incentive doesn't have to be a million dollars if that particular incentive perverts the thought experiment. Imagine that by personally starving to death you can usher in a utopic golden age for those left behind. Or imagine that you know stealing will be punished by eternal punishment in the afterlife.
Some people have chosen to suffer or even die instead of stealing or otherwise harming others in pursuit of their own interests. How would you explain such a situation?
Well, there's still no free will, just a different balance of incentives and impulses.
Your perspective is helpful in everyday life, and thinking about designing incentive structures in society, but doesn't do all that much for the moral implications of determinism.
Not really. It was an internal critique of Melvin's proposed definition of free will.
Melvin's example relies on incentives that are not under the control of the free will in any definition. A million dollars, an addiction to heroin, etc. It doesn't make sense to define free will as something you have, as long as you would have done something else if you change the impulses and incentives.
Whether the impulses and incentives are physical or physiological, psychological or financial, subconscious or keenly felt… None of it changes how free we are to make a different decision, as long as changing the decision depends on changing the inputs. And so I don't see much freedom in that – it's more like a capitulation to determinism.
The every-day helpful distinction Melvin made, however, is more of a question of volition: the difference between being thrown into a pool, falling in, or jumping in. But that is freedom only in the trivial sense that no one denies exists. I've never heard anyone deny that we have preferences, desires, needs, etc. and act on those, so that's not really up for discussion when people talk about free will. The question is whether we are free to navigate those impulses when making a decision, or whether we are just blown about by other impulses.
Having said all that, however, I see from your reply to Paulo Esteves, above, that we are probably not going to come to an agreement on free will in a comment section. We see things very differently.
So, I can answer what I mean by free will, but I don't expect to convince you.
Going back to the example of the pool… The only sense in which I think it makes sense to question and discuss free will, is in asking whether the human mind and universe works in such a way that you – personally, consciously, non-randomly, and free of outside influence – could have *not* jumped into the pool when you did, in fact, jump.
That summarizes what I think most people mean by free will, by the way: It's personal, conscious, non-random, and not significantly shaped or influenced by external factors. If it fails on either point, it's not really free and/or not really will.
I think our decision-making fails to some degree on at least three, possibly all four, points. And so I don't believe any definition of free will that I've seen or heard proposed. (Except those that just refer to uncontroversial volition, as discussed above.)
I don't even understand what actual free will would look like. How does it work? Where does it come from? Does it create itself? If not, how is it free? Why would we even want free will? What good it would do anyone to stand outside the interconnectedness of the universe in that way? Why would we want to make decisions that are not fundamentally shaped by our culture and our environment?
(These aren't rhetorical questions to put forward an argument from ignorance. I am sincerely interested in understanding the strongest version of a secular conception of free will if someone wants to explain.)
I can sympathize with some form of compatibilism, in that many people have an experience of free will – volition again – which keeps the engines purring. But at best, that experience is an illusion that is fairly easy to break. At worst, it's a bit of a bait and switch regarding what people care about when they discuss free will. (Free will is often used as religious apologia for the problem of evil; compatibalism lends a hand.)
Suppose there are two serial killers: one could be incentivised not to kill by paying them a billion dollars, and the other is beyond reach. As far as I'm concerned they should both be behind bars because I'm not willing to foot the $1b bill to stop the first serial killer from killing people.
There's also something circular about your definition: what would it take to incentivise somebody not to succumb to the original incentive?
I am unsure what the proposed mechanism of action is. CO2 is not some exotic toxin, it is the main waste product of cellular respiration. In fact, the reflex to breathe is based on high blood CO2 levels.
If you increase the CO2 content of air from 0.04% to 0.1%, my guess is that you would breathe a tiny bit more to compensate for the lower concentration gradient limiting the speed of diffusion from lungs to air. The air we exhale seems to contain some 5% CO2, so you would have to increase CO2 to the percentage level before you see some big changes in respiration. (Of course, CO2 levels above 5% will mean that the body will be unable to maintain the preferred partial pressure of some 50mBar in arterial blood, and I can see that having nasty physiological effects.)
So I am confused about how this works. Is it the added strain of breathing slightly more? Is it some secondary effect of breathing? Slightly more O2 in the blood does not seem like a bad thing? Loss of water to breathing?
They put a canula in people's noses and measured inhaled CO2 % with various masks. With an ambient of 400ppm CO2, no mask resulted in 2700ppm inhaled (due to breathing some if your own exhalation). Wearing an N95 mask resulted in 25,000 ppm, way higher than any of the experimental treatments mentioned in your review.
So we would expect to see substantial drops in test scores during covid in schools that forced kids to wear masks 8 hours per day. Which we did, but lots of confounders obviously. But if 25,000 doesn't have extremely debilitating effects then i am skeptical of the experiments finding significant results with 2500ppm.
The ethics of forcing kids to inhale high concentrations of CO2 for 8 hours a day for two years, we'll let's just say it wouldn't get past the IRB.
It doesn't matter how "conservative" the leaders of a university are on some personal level. They either don't care about their personal values enough to stop the institutions they lead from operating on the basis of ideologies that were literally held only by far left political radicals a few decades earlier, OR they have so little true power over these insitutions that they can't stop this from happening and are thus not relevant.
The only thing that matters is the policies in place at these insitutions, and in this case far-left ideologies have an insanely outsized influenced on how virtually all major institutions are run today.
That post correctly identifies the theory but fails to engage with it in any real way, instead playing arguments-as-soldiers to dismiss it as quickly as possible.
To pick one paragraph:
> University presidents, trustees, and football programs tend conservative. The most common major is business, with health professions second. All social sciences combined are third, which includes more quantitative economists and political scientists than identity theorists. Fourth is engineering.
The implication being that business/health/economics/political science/engineering are neutral-to-conservative majors in terms of their political alignment, and that by counting up students in each major you can determine the net direction in which the university is effectively pushing things.
The first one is only somewhat true, in that back in 2014 (the last year for which I could find good data) only about 22% of business majors identified as liberal out of a 3-option scale (liberal, moderate, conservative), which is in line with the overall population. But all the other fields he lists are more liberal (health related is 38%, engineering 39%, and all the others basically >50%).
But that's a minor quibble. The bigger issue is that the idea that faculty aren't the ones calling the shots on curriculum, and the very concepts that he readily admits are left-wing (DEI, gender studies), have been made into mandatory courses in multiple universities (UC San Diego helpfully lists which courses qualify for the DEI requirement at https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/programs/dei/index.html). That's the kind of thing the right is talking about when they're talking about using power to shape the conversation/electorate: Every UC graduate will need to actively participate in courses expounding the DEI perspective, none need any exposure to the opposition. Meanwhile his example of "contribution to the right" is the University of Chicago's letter (which you can read here https://news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/Dear_Class_of_2020_Students.pdf which is merely enshrining principles most 90's liberals could have gotten behind). That is, he's using the fact that one university largely stood still and got left behind by its peers, to define a right wing, to deny the very shift that left UChicago an outlier in the first place.
I don't know man, but I think looking at where the ideas come from is a decent line of inquiry. I'd hazard for the left they come from university campuses and for the right, idk, talk radio or internet communities (think Q)?
I'd like to check a theory. Part of what happened to cause a lot of elderly politicians at the top with no obvious successors is that health care got just a little better. With an extra ten or twenty years of healthspan (not great health,, necessarily, but not falling over) there was no urgent need to hand power over to younger people.
I think what has happened is the internet, turning politics into the same thing it has turned everything else into; bubbles reinforced by social status. The people who would have gone into politics went into these bubbles first, and either got frustrated and lost interest, or played the status games with their political beliefs until they became unelectable outside of narrow areas where that status means anything.
I think this is looking a the wrong half of the question. The US has primaries, and if there was someone good waiting in the wings, they'd have stormed the Democratic side in 2016 in particular. But, putting ideology/policy to one side, the younger ones were all just a bit... crap? Obama, by contrast, was young, not crap, and was president for two terms. The phenomenon that needs explaining is really why all the young Democrats are so awful.
My personal theory is that after being taken by surprise in 2008 Hillary spent the entirety of the Obama administration quietly undermining everyone who could be a threat to her nomination in 2016, which meant destroying the careers of every other prominent Democrat born between 1945 and 1975. In the end Hillary didn't get the White House but the massive gap in the Democrats remains.
Really though, I don't think there's a huge lack of competent politicians on either side who could be President, it's just that the media refuses to cover them. Take Doug Burgum for instance; I think he'd probably be a better President than any of the front-runners, but the media has no interest in covering him because the narrative of the election is already decided and he doesn't fit into it.
I've never heard of her destroying careers or undermining in a general sense, just that she made it clear that she was going to be running in 2016 and no one should get in her way.
I don't think there's anything particularly distinctive here about the Democrats. The Republicans don't seem to have anyone under 75 who motivates them to vote either.
It's really hard to judge the Republicans because of Trump; trying to factor him out, De Santis seems fairly close to what I'd expect a generic upper tier Republican primary candidate to be like, and not obviously lower quality than Rick Perry or Ted Cruz or whomever. Haley and Scott similarly seem like they'd have been towards the edge of the stage on the main debate 8 or 12 years ago, and Ramaswamy goes in the weird outcomes of Trump category. I'm not really their target audience so it's harder for me to judge, but I don't get the same, "Can't we find someone better to read the same lines" vibe as I do from some of the Democrats.
The same trend is underway in some other sectors, notably business leadership, which supports the idea that improvements in health care for older people is at least part of it.
The great sorting of US culture/identities has likely been an enabling factor as well. Not that there haven't always been places that would elect a familiar-looking corpse to high office [see Thurmond, Strom; Byrd, Robert; Rayburn, Sam; etc]. But it is somewhat more frequent now, yes.
Interestingly the trend has gone the other direction with regard to big-city mayors. Right now the longest-serving mayor of any of the nation's 50 largest municipalities has been in office for just 12 years. That is a big change, just a generation or two ago it was still normal for an established city-boss type figure to be heading into his 4th or 5th term in those jobs all around the country. The combination of term limits and jungle primaries seems to have forcibly shifted that particular trend line.
My first reaction is that it's due to intra-party seniority incentivizing long terms, but the death of earmarks ought to have mitigated it.
So I suppose I should be boring and say that we should get data on both retirement and successful challenges, and see what they tell us.
Or, how bad is the Republican primary field? Anyone have numbers? My impression is that most of those people don't look too decrepit. Sure, Trump's old, but that's got nothing to do with the rest of the political system. He's a narcissistic honey badger. Come to think of it, Bill Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama were all pretty young, too, and Hillary felt like a Trumpian aberration, and Biden was originally chosen as VP 15 years ago partly because he was old.
But to be naughty and throw out unfounded theories blaming the culture war, maybe there been a decrease in actual challenges to sitting politicians because the parties worry about damaging successful national politicians? Or maybe elections are now all about national stuff and not local stuff, so there's no point in replacing a national politician if they toe the line? Or perhaps the culture war means that the only new politicians we've gotten are ideologues whose only skill is convincingly parroting the latest bullshit, but enough of the electorate is still old enough to recognize this?
Good place here to point out that Bill Clinton, GWB, and Donald Trump were all born in the same 10-week span in mid-1946. (Obviously they were different ages as President.)
It might also be due to the safe seats - if you're elected in a very blue or very red seat, you're pretty much assured of that seat for life. A block of cheese could win the election if it just had the right party affiliation. And once elected, if you're not more than usually incompetent, people will probably keep voting you back in. You make connections, you network, you get onto committees and so on, so the party has no incentive to boot you out: you know the ropes and a new guy (or gal) would have to start from scratch. So as long as you keep both your constituents and the party happy, you'll hold that seat for as long as you want it.
I think the status aspect is also part of it; being a US senator is an important job and people defer to you. Politicians have at least a trace of vanity and self-importance, or they'd never run for office, so why would they give up being a big cheese and the person at home to whom others go for favours, to be just another ordinary retiree?
Perhaps modern media (and social media) amplifies the Matthew Principle where more and more status goes to the people at the top and there's not much room for challengers
Americans constantly make the mistake of not checking what the situation is in Canada, let alone the rest of the (developed) world before proposing some theory.
Geriatric politicians is solely an American problem, it occurs in no other developed democracy! Therefore it cannot be related to general technological improvements because they also apply in other countries. It's due to the electoral system that the US has.
I was thinking of Mahathir Mohamad when I wrote that. Sure I don't consider Malaysia a fully developed country, but it's on the cusp. He was 94 years old and Prime Minister.
You call yourself a Rationalist and yet seem incapable of excluding outliers. This is basic statistics...
The most obvious thing is that PM isn't an elected position. It comes from being the leader of the party in power, which implies that before you were PM you were the leader of the party *out* of power, and that sort of fight takes a lot of vigor.
Also, lots of people cast their votes based on whom they want as Prime Minister, not whom they want as their local MP. Prime Minister isn't technically an elected position, but in practice it sort of is.
This leads me to come up with a theory that elderly politicians is a disease that you get from being the most powerful country in the world. Power is great, but the amount of power you get from running a second-rate country isn't enough to overcome the temptation for a comfortable retirement. But the power of being PM at the height of the British Empire, or even an especially important US senator in the 21st century, is too addictive to ever give up.
I think there are differences in how politics works now vs the nineteenth century (less respect for seniority and family, TV, having to appeal more directly to voters), that make it much less likely for a British political party to choose such an old person to be leader (and you have to be leader to become PM), or for that leader to choose such old people to be ministers.
In America you can become really important as a long time congressperson. But there isn’t really an equivalent in the UK. A member of parliament doesn’t really gain the same kind of prominence just by being there a long time.
You're probably generalizing from too few examples here. African dictators are known for being very old as well, provided they survive and retain control. Part of the problem there is the fear that if they ever give up control, their enemies or successors will have them killed. A very different incentive from anything seen in the US or UK, despite resulting in the outcome we're discussing.
I agree. It's interesting to consider whether the Democrats are forcing him to push harder to become president again.
Also interesting that two sides may see the same fact differently - Republicans may see that as Democrats weaponizing the judiciary to go after Trump and his only hope is to become president, and the Democrats may see that as Trump weaponizing the presidency and their only hope is to prosecute him until he can't become president.
I don't think it's just due to the electoral system, either. In most countries, politicians are happy to retire (on generous pensions) when they reach their sixties, just like normal people do. Who the heck wants to still be working in their seventies or eighties?
I think the point of my comparison (if there is one) was that the US somehow managed to replicate roughly the same structure despite holding regular elections for the Senate and giving it actual power. So it's like the Lords, but much more of a practically important issue rather than a largely symbolic one.
And specifically, healthcare greatly improved the physical consequences of aging, but did next to nothing for the mental consequences. The "elders" of yore looked wrinkled beyond belief, but had a mental acuity matching their real age of 50.
But I was more thinking along the lines of : assuming aging rate remains constant between medieval times and now, what can modern medicine do to compensate ? It can:
* give you a wheelchair for when you can't walk anymore
* feed you when you can't work the fields
* give you new teeth, new hips, pacemakers etc.
But if it's your brain that is getting old, there's a limited set of mental prosthesis that are available : a time manager app ?, a memo app ?, wikipedia ?
I would appreciate it if people give some indication of the sources of their their statements. Even as vague as "common knowledge" or "sounds plausible".
The skin and the rest of the body may not be so disconnected. Smoking is bad for the innards *and* rough on the skin.
My guess is that in the previous generation (baby boomers) places were scaled in university to make room. When the decline in the birth rate in Gen X occurred, the distribution struggle was no longer there. Possibly coupled with a still stuck mentality that you have to fight for a place. In summary, Gen X simply had it easier and was therefore less ambitious.
That's just a gut feeling. I myself am from late Gen Y (raised by Boomer parents) and notice the difference in mentality compared to slightly younger or same-aged people who were raised by Gen X. It certainly can't all be explained by that but I suspect it at least plays a role.
Tangetially: I'm currently dating someone whose parents are also boomers but grew up in East Germany while I'm from West Germany. We discussed that topic and there are certainly some aspects in how we look differently on the world that could be explained by that.
Last week I was reading through the Iran Wikipedia entry and realized I have an exceptionally poor mental model of the country and their global influence. Generally I only ever hear about Iran when their nuclear program is discussed. So this might be a bit overly broad, but how do *you* think about Iran? Are there any interesting insights to be gained by contrasting their mostly Muslim culture with Western society?
More generally, have you recently found any of your models were woefully inaccurate and been forced to make updates?
As far as I can tell, the only middle eastern countries with a more stable democracy than Iran are Israel and Turkey. Iraq is the only other non-monarchy bordering the Persian Gulf, and its democracy hasn't been stable for very long. Like Iraq - Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia all had elections that led to long-term dictatorships that then led to violent uprisings in the past decade or so. It obviously isn't running great, but in many ways it is doing better by western metrics than other regional governments.
There's a lot of really great cinema from Iran. For movies that give glimpses of the legal system, try "A Separation" (2011) and "Close-Up" (1990). (The former is an accessible but gripping family drama; the latter is fascinating but very meta - it is about the real-life trial of a man who impersonated a famous Iranian film director and gained the confidence of an upper middle class family, and combines footage from the actual courtroom with reenactments of the events by the people involved.)
My mental model was also updated dramatically by watching a lot of Iranian films. Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation", mentioned above) has made some very good films, even if he apparently stole the plot of one ("A Hero") from one of his students. "The Salesman" (2016) is about a young professional couple who are both involved in a community production of 'Death of a Salesman', and this premise alone upended a few misconceptions I had about Iranian life. I think Jafar Panahi is even better, though his films are more political - both "Taxi" (2016) and "No Bears" (2022) are IMO excellent stories that are uniquely Iranian.
My mental model of Iran is that it could be a moderately wealthy country (a fairly highly educated population, including women, and lots of natural wealth) held back by an incredibly backwards government and an extremely conservative slice of society that holds a disproportionate amount of power.
You're right that they're both very similar, both you have the reason wrong. They're both held back by the radical far-left communist fundamentalists who prefer to be poor as long as their neighbor is poorer.
Sort of, but in Israel the "far left" are (somewhat weirdly) the parties labeled as "right" (either the religious parties advocating for more requirements-less welfare or modern Likud with its corruption/protectionist policies).
(This wasn't always true, religious parties used to be more centrist and Israel has a history of socialist left parties, but it has been for the last few decades).
Israel is a middle-income country significantly held back by its religious/militant communities(much like Iran), as well as a protectionist government that protects various sectors at high cost to the country. It's not poor by any means, but it's much poorer than a country with it's amount of resources and tech industry should have.
This is a ridiculous statement. Israel is clearly an extremely successful and innovative economy. As someone else pointed out, perhaps as successful as 7th richest in the world. What 'resources' does it have that imply its position should have been higher? Do you think tech industries are things that just happen to economies? No, they get created. Notice how Iran and Pakistan for instance, don't have them.
I've actually lived in Israel, which I'm guessing you haven't. It's not third world, but it's very blatantly not "rich" in the way that America, Japan or western Europe are (and that's the umc secular parts. The religious and Arab parts are significantly poorer). This is one of those cases where raw numbers give you a facially absurd conclusion and you need to dig into why they're wrong.
This is incredibly misleading - PPP is more accurate, but still needs to be adjusted for things like bad infrastructure. If you've actually been to Israel you can tell it's much poorer than that, even in the rich secular part.
You may or may not like Israel's specific policies or its religious right. But objectively it's significantly more economically successful than Iran ($52k per capita vs $4k per capita and much of that $4k from oil). It's also no longer a middle income country with GDP per capita having more than doubled in the past two decades.
My mental model is Israel is that it is an incredibly successful country built on the European mold that is doing its best to become a cross between Iran and 19th century South Africa
“ In the last five years alone, Iranian women have made up more than 60 percent of university entrants”
Which means they go on to have jobs. This alone should tell you that Iran is doing better than most Islamic countries, and probably most countries, on that statistic. And far better than Saudi Arabia.
I can’t fault substack for trying to compete with twitter, but the latest app update was the last straw for me. The last thing I need in life is another rage bait delivery service. I’m back to reading just via email. Do any of you actually enjoy the new design or have had success curating the “tweets”?
I have a set of links in my web browser's bookmark file that point to the substacks of the people I want to read essays by or comment sections curated by. E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com or https://daviddfriedman.substack.com Periodically, I visit those links and I usually find interesting things to read. At no point am I delivered anything resembling a "tweet"; rarely do I see anything even close to rage bait and then only because someone I choose to follow decided to do some rage-baiting.
What do you mean by the "tweets"? I have been getting, via email, posts from substack blogs I've never heard of and that irritates me a lot. Is that what you're talking about?
I like the Notes feature and don't mind the app redesign. However, over the weekend something about the algorithm changed (or my inputs to it changed in some way i don't understand) and my notes were filled with wacko "i used to be a left but now love the right" vaguely conspiracy theory related people. Not flat earth conspiracies, more in the RFK Jr, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tiabi style of conspiracy. High quality shit posters.
Yes. Now my notes feed shows Substack boosting posts just asking questions like “has Taylor Swift been activated to boost a Newsom campaign for President”. Conspiracist rage bait.
I hate it! I want my subscription feed front and centre and notifications easily accessible. Instead both are shunted to weird corners with a “which gives a fuck” stream of random content on my front page.
Yeah, this also affects the writing interface (there's an omnipresent button to tweet but writing a full post requires navigating three menus). It's pretty bad.
I just look at it when I get an email prompt. Sometimes someone says something interesting. I don't feel an urge to participate. I never did much with twitter, either.
This may seem a couple of stupid questions about Trump's retained documents case but why did he take the physical documents anyway? Did he not know how to use the camera on a cell phone? And if he had taken digital images of them would it still be an offence?
"And if he had taken digital images of them would it still be an offence?"
Considering that "Hillary's emails" contained classified docs improperly removed from a secure server, no reasonable prosecutor would have gone after OMB if it were just electronic copies.
Yes it would definitely still be an offense, and possibly add new ones depending on how the images were taken and transmitted. Though, ironically, it probably would have reduced his risk of being caught because no one would have been looking for the documents.
You're assuming he had rational reasons for it; but he didn't, his reasons were irrational and driven by his personality disorder. You can't understand the paper situation until you understand this (any more than you can understand Elon Musk buying Twitter by talking about how you just don't understand what financial analysis Musk could have which justified the purchase and wondering what '4D chess' Musk is playing).*
Trump is a narcissist {{citation needed}}. One of the idiosyncratic behaviors of narcissists is 'trophies': a desperate need to keep souvenirs of the past about how awesome they are, to prove to themselves & others again and again that they existed and had an important life, not just the best life, the most awesomest life. The need to make & keep trophies approaches the level of life-and-death obsession as part of maintaining their 'narcissist supply'.
That's why he took them, why digital images were no replacement, why he suicidally kept showing them off to anyone who came within 10 feet of him, why he lied (or made his employees/lawyers lie, same thing) about having them to investigators, and why he didn't return the trophies until essentially physically forced to.
Trump has engaged in trophy behavior before, like newspaper covers featuring him, but it's never been a big deal because you can just buy a magazine and put it on your wall, no big deal. Unfortunately, he has, surprisingly and irrationally, chosen to build his post-presidency narcissistic edifice on the idea that he is a hero who stopped nuclear war (in multiple ways), as *proven* by reams of *highly classified documents*, which apparently include some of the most sensitive stuff like the US's very scarce HUMINT in Iran.
I remember the first newspaper article I read about 'classified documents at Mar-a-lago' which did not mention them being immediately returned for a slap on the wrist - my jaw figuratively dropped as I said to myself, "oh my god - he's made them *trophies*! That's the only reason to take so many and then refuse to return them. He could get away with it *so easily* just by returning them now and blaming clerical error, like everyone else does. But he won't, he *can't* return them, because he's made them trophies, and as a narcissist, losing years' worth of trophies would almost literally be like dying for him. All the federal government has to do is give him some rope, in the form of trading off keeping the trophies today for consequences a long time from now, and he'll hang himself. He won't even think twice before ordering employees to lie or shuffle stuff around to hide it so he can keep it, and he'll probably even keep showing them off to random people in order to maintain the narcissistic supply. He'll drag it out for months and create a paper trail a mile wide, irrationally digging himself in deeper and deeper. He just can't help himself, the narcissism is who he *is*, that's why personality disorders are so utterly intractable. The only question now is whether the investigators have the guts to do it."
Turns out (like the Twitter board) they did.
* I couldn't help but read every article on the Musk Twitter purchase & Trump classified papers. It is very rare to see such important people destroy themselves in ways so clearly traceable to specific well-known psychiatric causes (bipolar & narcissism, respectively). We may never see such crystal-clear incidents play out again, much less simultaneously the way they did on the national stage in 2022.
Couldn't it just be that Trump expected that he'd be able to brazen it out? Or that refusing to return the documents would garnish him headlines and red meat for his base?
I'm definitely not saying that he's not a narcissist in the everyday sense of the word but if he anticipated any real consequences (like an actual for real prison sentence) I think he'd have returned the documents.
Neither of those make much sense on their own, and they make far less sense when you consider what he was doing with the papers or why he couldn't just copy them or pick out a few to hold back etc, or concede after the first government challenge and talk about that for the next few years as an example of how terribly he's persecuted. This is why most people thought it'd be a nothingburger and Trump would wiggle out of it just as he wiggled out of everything before - there just was no rational reason to do anything but turn the papers over immediately when he was rumbled. There were only irrational ones, where the bottom line was prewritten - 'hold onto the trophies at all costs' - and it only remained to come up with excuses and delays like ordering employees to fly the documents out to hide them.
'destroy themselves' is a bit of an overstatement, but I couldn't think of the right word between that and 'damage', which is too mild-sounding. Trump may end up in prison where it's unclear if he even can be elected president, so that would in fact destroy his political career, but we'll see; if nothing else, the completely unforced error of the papers are wasting a lot of his time and energy when he's supposed to be... [checks notes] 'running for President'.
And you are greatly underestimating the toll on Musk of his unforced error: aside from losing somewhere around a tenth of his nominal fortune (and much more of his *liquid* fortune, hence his desperation to keep Dorsey in the deal or use debt to pay for it) in a completely unnecessary and wasteful way, his reputation has been shattered and his mystique has never been more battered, he's made more enemies than ever before, and he has now wasted at least 1 year of his time & energy out of the around perhaps 20 good years he has left, so he's already squandered ~5% of his remaining career on this albatross, and this is leaving out the increasingly loony politics that he's echo-chambering himself into (and I don't just mean his tweets getting stupider every month, but other stuff like a sudden obsession with illegal immigrants...?). Isaacson put it well when he said that Musk's current course looks like it ends in becoming Howard Hughes.
The issue is not that he has stolen some paper and cardbord boxes, but that the ink on the paper spells out classified information. A digital representation of the same info would be just as offensive. (Practically more so, because the likelihood of the info spreading further is much higher when it is conveniently stored on some hackable device than on paper.)
Taking cellphone pictures of a few ten thousand (or whatever) pages does not seem like a fun way to spend a weekend.
I would also be careful about modelling Florida Man (or anyone, really) as a rational actor whose long term goals determine all of his actions. People do stupid, impulsive stuff often enough, not everything counter-intuitive is a masterful 5 dimensional chess move.
Ad Czech fertility rate: I suggest to compare it with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia over time. Ourworldindata has a handy tool for that: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate.
Pattern in those countries is broadly the same: gradual fall from the peak baby boom of the 70s, then sudden further fall in the 90s, imho connected to regime change (1989), then gradual rebound in early 00s, which plateaued and then slightly fell after a few years (this is imho caused by the Great Recession), and then rebound when economy improved.
Czechia stands among those countries only in so far in that it had much deeper fall in the 90s and then much more robust rebound. Imho this is partially self-correcting mechanism at work (availability of housing stock etc.).
I'm pretty sure Elon is mostly just on Team I Don't Want To Hear Any More About Ukraine, Shut Up About Ukraine Already. That this attitude in the US benefits Russia in its war, is I think incidental to Elon Musk. I have no doubt that if the man wanted to say anything good about Russia or Vladimir Putin, he'd have X'd or Tweeted it very explicitly by now.
Elon stuck his neck out to help Ukraine in the early days of the war, and a lot of Ukrainians treated him rather rudely when they found out his support wasn't unconditional and he thought they should be looking for a negotiated settlement rather than a triumphant military victory(*). That he now thinks poorly of them and wants nothing to do with them, is petulant and unseemly but not difficult to understand.
Elon is also now firmly on Team Defeat the Woke Mind-Virus, and many of his teammates in that conflict will gladly egg him on in any anti-Ukrainian expressions he wants to indulge in.
* A position shared by much of the US National Security apparatus, if I read things correctly, but they usually don't say that part out loud. Musk does not do "tact".
Isn't he simply playing to a part of the Republican base? The news I read suggest that some Republican politicians are trying to paint aid to Ukraine as a waste of money abroad which could be spent home (in Musk's case, maybe to further his Mars program, but that's irrelevant to the tweet), and even managed to suspend that aid for a while because of government funding crisis.
This tweet supports that narrative, but it's Elon siding with Reps, not with Russia, and they are not exactly siding with Russia, either, just trying to get votes from people who supported the kind of isolationist, America-first policies some libertarians (e.g. Ron Paul) proposed way back in 00's, and which Trump kind-of-inherited as a part of his base.
Why choose sides? There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war but it makes politicians powerful and important so the fighting continues.
The main reason to choose the Ukrainian side is to support an international order that prohibits unilaterally invading another sovereign nation for the purpose of incorporating it's territory into your own state. That is the interest of almost all nations.
Putting the war itself to the side, as well as the history that got us here, and also putting aside any hint of non-zero-sum thinking:
Russia is a dangerous enemy, but Ukraine is neither.
This is like outspending the USSR until it falls apart due to internal contradictions: cheap at any price. Especially since we're not actually doing the dying. The USSR probably felt this way about the Vietnam War. If we get a chance to do this to China, too, we should go for it.
Destroy kill conquer consume.
(TLDR: we have a **great** reason to do this. If you want us to not do it, you need a counter-argument that's at least in the same league.)
While a million dollars and a dead Ukrainian may seem (to a certain kind of American) like an attractive price for one dead Russian, there's no obvious path by which the current casualty rate leads to a Russian state collapse, and even less so to some replacement of the Russian state that's in any way palatable to American interests. At the moment, the main effect is teaching the Russians to be better at autarky - and, of course, there are plenty of economic costs and risks imposed on the West by the current war, beyond direct spending.
Also, the rose-coloured myth of wily Reagan outspending the Soviets into submission is very anthropic-flavoured. You may argue that the Soviet demise was ultimately inevitable, but it certainly wasn't inevitable at the point it happened. If, say, Vladimir Putin had been in charge in 1990 instead of Mikhail Gorbachev, the show might well have ricketed on for another twenty years, and ended in a much more dangerous way - not impossibly with a reckless military roll of the dice, with all the nuclear escalation potential that entailed.
An easy version would be territorial fragmentation, which is a fantasy occasionally entertained by semi-serious people (e.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration/ )- there are maps out there depicting a rump Muscovite state alongside new republics in the Caucasus as well as Sakha and Buryat republics, possibly Karelia, etc.
Something on the order of the Soviet collapse would qualify, however - a forced/turbulent leadership change, an ideological transformation (not that Russia has much of an ideology anymore apart from crude nationalism), an economic crisis forcing a turn inward and significant dependence on foreign goodwill, and a major decrease in the ability to wield military power and corresponding reduction in regional influence.
I don't think Russian state collapse is likely, although I suppose it is possible. More likely is convincing Putin and his successors and supporters that invading countries in order to grab land is not in their interest.
If Ukraine agrees to hand over the crappy eastern Ukraine regions occupied by Russia in exchange for ending the war, would it have been worth it to Russia? That may be a face-saving ending, but I can't imagine it would be enough for Putin to have invaded if he had the chance to start again.
I agree, but I was trying to go along with Moon Moth's framing of 'cheap at any price', for which (if literally read) I assume the reward has to be no less than the rival's state collapse. If it's just about incentives to influence the behaviour of the Russian state, then it's no longer zero-sum.
Of course, the Russians (and many in the non-Euro-Atlantic world) hope for the reverse lesson to be imparted to the West - inflexibility when integrating rivals who have inconvenient regional interests into the global security architecture results in unacceptable costs. The dog will eventually kill the porcupine, but it might not be better off for it.
I should note here that I don't **like** this argument, and would welcome a good counter. I think there's a decent case to be made that China (and perhaps Xi) can be dealt with safely in a more friendly way than we're doing right now. But with Russia and more importantly Putin, I get the impression that we're a decade or two too late for that.
> There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war [...]
There is, but it is a dishonest argument that ignores the fact that only one side in this war invaded another sovereign nation without provocation and just cause, and only one side committed absolutely atrocious crimes against the civilian population of a foreign country, and only one side is suffering the humanitarian catastrophe of having entire cities leveled by artillery. And it also conveniently forgets that if Russia unilaterally stops fighting, the war is over and everyone can go home in peace, but if Ukraine unilaterally stops fighting, Ukraine as a sovereign state will cease to exist and Russian atrocities against civilians will continue unhindered.
>There is, but it is a dishonest argument that ignores the fact that only one side in this war invaded another sovereign nation without provocation and just cause, and only one side committed absolutely atrocious crimes against the civilian population of a foreign country, and only one side is suffering the humanitarian catastrophe of having entire cities leveled by artillery.
There's literally a dozen things the US have done in the past 2 deacdes that could be described by this, so either you're furiously angry at the US to the point of wanting it violently overthrown, or this is really just a BS rationalization for a position which is entirely dependent on Russia being the ones doing the invading.
Serious question here - how many dead Ukrainians and hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GPD is Crimea worth? No, really, how much?
And we're told that we need to keep giving Ukraine billions of dollars so Russia won't invade the rest of Europe. There is absolutely no conceivable way in which Russia retaining Crimea has any effect on this whatsoever.
Which "absolutely atrocious crimes" did Ukraine allegedly commit against its own population, and which future crimes of Ukraine against its own people would be prevented by Russia conquering Ukraine?
The Russians certainly claim provocation and just cause for their invasion. They will also be quick to point out the casualties - well into the thousands - resulting from Ukrainian suppression of separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014.
I don't believe these rationalisations justify the current war (or that the war is not a strategic failure on Russian terms), but let's not pretend that the doctrine of pre-emptive war is a wholesale Russian invention, or that Ukraine didn't embark on a stringently nationalist path since Maidan, culturally suppressing the Russian (and Hungarian, and occasionally Tatar) linguistic minorities.
That suppression of linguistic minorities is analogous to that practiced by France (and only very recently being somewhat softened): its purpose is to forge the population into a united nation-state, all in it together. While lamentable in some ways, in the present state of threat followed by crisis, it's wholly understandable that they would want to embark on such a project (of course, the invasion itself has been doing their work for them, forging a Ukrainian identity far more effectively than any purely internal campaign).
I hesitate to agree with that analogy. For example, France allows elementary instruction in Basque, while Ukraine effectively scrapped all state-funded instruction in Russian by 2020.
I also find myself less understanding of this than you, because I don't agree that enforcing ethnic homogeneity makes for strong states where restive minorities are involved. Reconciliation, as in (eventually) Quebec or Northern Ireland, is much preferable to the Balkan approach.
With regard to the effect of the invasion on national identity: true in general, and a big element of Russia's strategic failure. But only partly true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and untrue in Crimea and in the aforementioned eastern oblasts of the Donbas. In the latter case, a significant plurality of the Ukrainian-identifying population has (understandably) fled, tilting the balance.
It does NOW, yes. Like I said, this has very recently begun to change (and starting with Basque due to the violent psychos of the ETA, unfortunately). What you should be comparing Ukraine to is not France in the same moment of linear time, but France in the same phase of nation-state development, where you got beaten and expelled for speaking Occitan in school.
Ukraine has repeatedly stated that they don't just want to take a defensive position in this war, they want to actively push into Crimea and take it back despite Western polls showing that most Crimeans would prefer not to be apart of them. What reason do we have to believe that Ukraine would stop fighting when Russia does?
On top of this, Ukraine has stripped workers rights and political opposition rights during the war. That's fine during a war, but what reason do you have to believe that when post-war comes around those rights will come back instantaneously? They also have a history of corruption.
To be clear: I support Ukraine in this war. What I don't support is the idea that it's impossible for Ukraine to be considered bad also. There is a vicious reaction from people when you even dare suggest that Ukraine is anything other than a perfect little angel, and that's just bullshit.
Yes. If Russia stops fighting, the Ukrainian army will march into Crimea (and Donetsk and Luhansk etc). It will do so because the Ukrainians want to do this, the Ukrainians have every right to do this, and not-fighting Russians can't stop them from doing this.
At that point, the war will be over and everyone can go home in peace. I suppose it's theoretically possible that the Russians could say "we're not fighting but we're not going to go home, we're going to hold a sit-in right here on what are presently the front lines", but that would be pointless and they'd probably get hungry and go home pretty soon anyway. Realistically, if the Russians decide to stop fighting, they'll just be going straight home where they belong.
If the Russians stop fighting, there is no more war. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, there is no more Ukraine. Every criticism that can plausibly be levied against Ukraine, utterly pales in significance to that.
Why the hell should the US fund Ukraine retaking some territory that is irrelevant from a security perspective? To "own" the Russians out of liberal ethnic resentment?
Actually it may be true that there is a lot of corruption in Ukraine but it is pretty irrelevant as far as the morality of the war is concerned. It is like saying that the morality of gang violence in New Jersey is somehow changed by Bob Menendez being credibly accused of corruption.
Is it like people who live in corrupt countries are more legitimate targets of war crimes?
Also about Crimea. Whether or not it is realistic for Ukraine to retake Crimea, it is not as though they are going to admit that or voluntarily relinquish their legal claim and lose something they could have used to bargain with.
> Ukraine has repeatedly stated that they don't just want to take a defensive position in this war, they want to actively push into Crimea and take it back [...]
Taking back Crimea _is_ a defensive position, because Crimea is Ukrainian territory. It's only been 9 years since Russia invaded the peninsula, which is not nearly enough time to consider it rightfully belonging to Russia.
> [...] Western polls showing that most Crimeans would prefer not to be apart of them.
So after many native Ukrainians residents have fled from Crimea, and Russia has planted its own citizens there, most "Crimeans" don't want to belong to Ukraine? Yeah, that sounds like a legitimate opinion survey...
If I break into your house, throw you out, put my name on the mailbox, and then after nine years when someone asks me, claim that – given that I'm its resident now – your house should belong to me, does that make me its rightful owner?
> What I don't support is the idea that it's impossible for Ukraine to be considered bad also.
The fact that Ukraine's government has corrupt elements doesn't change a single bit about the situation overall – especially when considering that Russia's government is much worse.
Gallup ran a survey in 2014, after the annexation but before any supposed population transfers (it would be good to have a source for that btw) which showed that the majority of Crimeans thought that the referendum results reflected the popular will https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-research-brief.pdf
>"The fact that Ukraine's government has corrupt elements doesn't change a single bit about the situation overall – especially when considering that Russia's government is much worse."
It doesn't change who is in the right with regards to the war, what it does change however is whether or not someone is allowed to make an anti-Ukraine shitpost on twitter. No comment on whether Musk is right here, I think Ukraine should take US funds.
>"So after many native Ukrainians residents have fled from Crimea, and Russia has planted its own citizens there, most "Crimeans" don't want to belong to Ukraine? Yeah, that sounds like a legitimate opinion survey..."
You clearly don't know the facts: even the actual Ukrainians still living in Crimea do not want to be apart of Ukraine. Again, according to Western polling, not just Russians.
> There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war [...]
I heard this from a Russian doctor who is married to a Ukrainian musician. It is perhaps more subtile than you are making it. As an individual you have the right not to choose sides, or the right to be a pacifist. If you fled Ukraine because it was corrupt, and then war breaks out, it is reasonable (especially if you have family on both sides of the conflict), to say that both governments are terrible and do not represent their citizens. Of course one side is more terrible, but that doesn't disallow you from bad mouthing politicians on both sides of the conflict and seeing both sides as immoral.
> It is perhaps more subtile than you are making it.
There is really nothing subtle about this war, or about who is the aggressor and who is the victim. This is not a case of "You invaded us! – But only because you attacked us first! – To retaliate against you bombing us! – Because you...", the blame falls very clear on one side alone.
I think you're forgetting the context of this thread, which is that Musk makes fun of/complains about Zelenskyy asking for foreign aid to help defend against a murderous invader that slaughters the people he's responsible for. And here you go on about "both governments not representing their citizens", and "seeing both sides as immoral", wtf.
Well, you are obviously passionate about the issue, and you hope that Ukraine will fight to the end because they have the moral high ground. I think this article addresses that oversimplified view:
>The Korean War ended in a stalemate and negotiated armistice and the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were clear U.S. defeats, but the geopolitical consequences of these failures were mostly local;
That strikes me as a highly questionable assertion.
I have recently come across the question of "how bad was colonialism?" a couple of times. Now, there's no denying that many atrocious crimes were committed by colonialists, but it's always important to consider the counterfactuals. Once one part of the world gets on track with science and industrialization and international commerce, while other parts of the worlds are literally still on a stone-age level when it comes to technology and institutions, can that conceivably be a stable situation? Would it even be ethical to leave indigenous peoples on their stone-age level, with outrageous child mortality and constant tribal warfare? What would have been the most benevolent way to bring those societies that want to join the modern world up to speed?
Lots of people in the replies know way more about this than I do, this is my little additional two cents:
Europeans did sign treaties with native North Americans. They also blatantly broke many of these treaties. Even if everything else were exactly the same, honoring the agreements that were made seems extremely doable and more positive for native North Americans.
Native Americans did not rise to the level of signing breakable treaties with each other, so its weird to hold Europeans to a higher standard than the natives. Does existing on the same land mass or looking similar mean you get to treat other groups worse?
So, fully I don't know anything about this besides what I learned in grade school, and I'm Canadian so I also may have learned about a different group of people.
But from my understanding, indigenous people frequently traded with each other, and had explicit treaties that were commemorated by wampum belts. I vaguely remember that the Iroquois federation (I forget the aboriginal name for it) was an alliance of 6 nations. Which seems like a pretty strong example of this sort of thing.
The Columbian exchange and international economic integration was undoubtedly positive. The counterfactual that's relevant is not an alternate history where that exchange never happened. It's whether a bunch of invading Europeans who then exploited native labor for personal profit didn't happen.
The most benevolent alternative would have been just giving away technology for free. But that's not realistic. What was realistic was a more equal relationship and an order less dominated by conquistadors. Which arguably would have been better than what we got for everyone except the conquistadors themselves. But since they actually held the territory they were the ones who counted. As seen when the King of Spain tried to get them to change certain policies and got told, basically, no.
From what I understand, the disease asymmetry doomed the Americans. Even if it had been American ships that reached Europe and returned, there would still have been plagues that would devastate the civilizations of the Americas.
That's accurate. The moment some eskimos wandered over the Bering Strait (or whatever is the accepted population-of-the-Americas theory at present), they doomed their descendants to decimation by Old World diseases the moment contact was reestablished. There's no plausible timeline where this doesn't happen, serviceable oceangoing ships are just that much farther down the tech tree than vaccines. Erusian mentions the conquistadors, but they had little activity in North America and some of the pandemic theories suggest an absolute 95%+ population wipeout there (for example, it's often asserted that the massive bison herds of the Great Plains and the plains themselves were both made possible only by the total depopulation of the formerly agrarian, densely inhabited Great Plains region; i.e. even the lifestyles of the indians with whom European settlers came into contact were a novel artifact of the disease collapse).
There would have been plagues (and contra common myths the Europeans didn't understand this at the time). But the conquest and rule by conquistadors made it significantly worse. There's a natural experiment between the Tlaxcala (who got to rule themselves under Spanish hegemony) and areas under direct conquistador rule and you get much higher mortality in the latter.
On the other hand, you have the Mississippian civilisation, which collapsed due to disease after far less direct interaction with the Spaniards than even the Tascalans had.
I'd call having a string of garrison forts and regular slave raids into their territory fairly direct. Though disease also definitely weakened them. I guess it's less direct than the rule that was present in Mexico. But it's still nowhere near pure disease based collapse.
I was under the impression that the Mississippian civilisation had collapsed between de Soto's expedition and the next European travellers to pass through the region, though maybe I'm mistaken.
Another example would be the US east coast, which had already suffered demographic collapse before the first European colonies were established there (indeed, the colonists could only establish themselves because the previous inhabitants had all been killed or left).
Colonialism was net-positive. This is not to say that the colonial powers didn't commit, as Shaked Koplewitz says, unforced moral errors, but on the whole the track record of colonialism was overwhelmingly positive. British colonialism in particular was a net-good which in hindsight should never have been dismantled; Egypt has inarguably been worse in every way since the British left, and India is the same even though it may be less obvious at a casual glance. It was the British who got rid of the Thuggee and abolished the sati; the latter especially would almost certainly still be practiced at least in parts of India if not for them. And this is only one example of the fact that British 19th century morals are inarguably objectively better than Hindu 19th century morals.
Another oft-neglected point is that while people talk a lot about how the British conquest of the subcontintent was imposition of foreign rule and so on, it's not like India was being ruled by regional assemblies of democratically elected local inhabitants before that; the Mughal emperors weren't the least bit less foreign than the British, nor did they share the culture or religion of their subjects; they forced Islamic law and ethics on a nation of Hindus and Sikhs. (As for extractiveness, let's not even start. The British may have been more effective, but the sin of venality can hardly have existed in stronger manifestation than in Aurangzeb.) And when they did get self-rule, look what a hash they made of it! India is to my knowledge the only large state whose main geopolitical enemy is itself (in the form of Pakistan).
While personally I'm not decided either way and I think there is quite a difference between Company rule and the Raj, one point to add to your view is that Pakistan's diabolical treatment of Bangladesh would have been unlikely to have happened under British overlordship.
There are some primitive tribes still existing, "industrialising" them officially discouraged and seems to be broadly accepted as an unethical thing to do.
The vegan moral absolutists would argue (in other contexts, they won't volunteer this here) that since industrialization would allow them to give up meat consumption, they should do so. It's just not a priority target for assimilation.
What's ethical in these discourses depends on what is salient. Identity politics has more pull.
While true, I can't help but feel like we do that the same way we keep animals in zoos and environmentalists want nature preserves, not because we think that a significant portion of the world living in tribal states is a good thing.
There's too many confounders and no controls, but I suspect that our stance on that has changed as more and more of the world has become westernized. If 50%+ of the world was tribal right now, I think we'd be trying to fix it as a major world problem.
This, precisely. They're an immensely valuable scientific resource if left in their historic way of life, but it's rather bad for their future kids (extant adults would plausibly be net harmed by the shock of transition, but the argument for the infants yet to be born is very clear)
“Colonialism” was a great epoch of history that lumps together a remarkable constellation of governments—from Leopold’s Congo at the worst, to Cromer’s Egypt at the best.
To take the worst, there is no defending the Leopold's Congo Free State, but by the time of Mobutu (1960ish), it had greatly improved the lives of Belgian Congo. You can read the New York Times reporting on the declining quality of life of the people once it was decolonised (and first hand accounts of the locals lamenting it) http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html
I'm against colonialism because I think people should have the freedom to sort out their own shit (even if they don't. And even if they decide to e.g. ethnically cleanse and line their own pockets (like what happened when Britain handed over rule to the Arab ruling caste of Egypt)), and colonialism often involved morally reprehensible actions by the colonizers. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a blatant political distortion of history
Worst mostly due to the behavior of the congolese themselves against their countrymen (unless we're to believe that Leopold somehow convinced otherwise unwilling Congolese to kill vast numbers of each other without ever having set foot in the country)?
I think persons should have the freedom to control their own lives even if they do it badly. But your "people should have the freedom" means some people ruling other people, and I don't see how the rulers living in the same territory as the ruled makes that freedom. Given the choice between a British ruled colony in which individuals are relatively free and the same territory under an oppressive local government, what is your argument for preferring the latter?
My argument is purely that I would personally prefer it. Like all great positions, it's based off my feels.
I'd prefer to live under our exploitative oligarchy than an alien force that enforces strict harmony, not entirely mapping onto our morality, while it extracts Earth's resources. It's admittedly my utilitarian blindspot where I know it would be better, but God it would make my gorge rise.
>I'm against colonialism because I think people should have the freedom to sort out their own shit
A chunk of colonialism was performed to protect settlers (sometimes settling in unoccupied areas) from the agression of nearby natives, or, as in Algeria, to put an end to centuries of pillaging & rape in the mediteranean.
"Let them sort their own shit" don't really works when "their own shit" involves enslaving or scalping your civilians, and they love doing it.
Yes. I said above they should have that freedom, even if I think it's horrible. I think people in other countries should have the freedom to claw out each other's eyes and eat their own shit. The other end of the spectrum is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World expanding to South America.
I'm sorry, I must have misread this, but I can't parse it any other way than that you think the Barbary pirates should have the right to rob, kill and enslave the other peoples of the Mediterranean, but European powers should *not* have the right to do the same thing to the Barbary pirates?
I'm ignorant of the Barbary pirates. But maybe Somali pirates are similar? I think if you enter Somali national waters, you should be as indignant at being taken hostage, roughed up, and/or killed, as you would be if you entered US national waters and got physically detained by the coast guard.
I just think of it like if an alien force colonised earth and criminalized insults because they are immoral. Sure, insults are immoral, but let us animals rule us animals.
This doesn't scale well into the future as earth gets increasingly globalised, I know.
Barbary pirates operated throughout the Mediterranean, and occasionally in the Atlantic as well, frequently abducting entire villages of people to sell into slavery.
If Somali pirates were regularly landing on US soil and kidnapping US citizens, and the only practicable way for the American government to stop them was by occupying the coast of Somalia, would it be justified in doing so?
Disregarding the whole question of the legitimacy of pirates over territorial waters, you really should be aware that Somali pirates are not constrained to the Somali territorial waters, and the whole concept of Piracy involves a hefty dose of contempt for laws, soverignty, or the life of others.
The Barbary Pirates were not operating in territorial waters, they were operating in as much of the Mediterranean as they could manage.
What if the alien force colonized Earth and enforced laws against murder and robbery and such but not a lot of other things? Why do you prefer the human rulers who criminalize insults, and criticism of their rule, and collect half your income as taxes, and require you to fill out long and confusing forms if you want to do anything?
It isn't the case always, but apriori I'd guess if ruling elite considers its subjects to be part of the ingroup, things should be better for subjects.
They should, but then many pre-colonial ruling elites considered their ingroup to be other members of the ruling elite, not the subjects they ruled over.
Well, yea, but there has been a spectrum of in/outgroupness. E.g. Hungarian aristocracy in Middle Ages probably thought about their subjects more as an outgroup than Polish aristocracy.
Except that in pre-modern times, the ruling elite has typically gone to extremes to "prove" that the subjects are not part of the ingroup. The ruling dynasty is usually ethnically distinct from the locals--think Manchus in China, Mary and William in England, Mughals in India. They typically claim some glorious ancestry for themselves that are not shared by the commoners.
Normans are an excellent example of premodern colonizers.
What you say was true often, but not "typically". England was ruled by the English before the Norman Conquest, then by self-identified foreigners, then again by the English, after Normans got assimilated. I've read somewhere that Henry V. was first post-conquest king whose native tongue was English.
Similar story in China. Qing - foreigners, Ming - natives, Yuan - foreigners, Song - natives, and so on.
Looking at results comparing similar colonized and uncolonized places, it seems true both that (a) colonialism was a net positive for colonized areas and (b) colonialism did a lot of bad stuff and unforced (moral) errors.
China was definitely worth stealing, and the Japanese tried hard; they just didn't succeed (except in Taiwan). Ethiopia was also worth stealing, as evidenced by the fact that Italy tried but failed.
This doesn't prove anything - colonialism wasn't based on strict cost benefit analysis. Europeans wanted colonies because they *thought* they would be good to have, and in many cases this was purely a matter of national pride. Portugal wasn't meaningfully benefitting from its colonies but firecely held onto them for the sake of having an empire.
Couple points: 1) colonialism wasn't limited to Stone Age level civilizations, 2) when the West became dominant, it was imho inevitable that it would go on a rampage, I see no reason why e.g. counter-factual Ming China would behave better had it became as dominant as the West, 3) rampage was nevertheless bad and huge crimes were commited, 4) in unrealistic scenario with Western dominance and no crimes, lives of indigenous people would be better, 5) I think some modern countries (Brasil, India, Papua-New Guinea, maybe Indonesia?) have real world policies of coexistence with primitive (I know, problematic term) societies vastly better than what colonialists came up with.
> when the West became dominant, it was imho inevitable that it would go on a rampage
Even if the West didn't go on a rampage then someone using Western weapons would have gone on a rampage. You can see what happened to various Native American or Hawaiian tribes which managed to get hold of western weapons before their local rivals did -- they went on a rampage of their own.
Yeah. You always need to be wary of "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have" excuses, but in some cases, it's probably true. Then the case needs to be made "if I hadn't done it, someone more malicious would have done it, with a far worse outcome", which may hold true for some instances of colonization, and not at all for others.
The counterfactual that I would like to see analysed is how fast the technological progress would have penetrated stone-age societies without colonialism. If a friendly western trader wants to sell you guns in exchange for pelts and they happen to have a few ABCs to give as a customer reward, how soon until your whole culture has adopted the written word and everything that goes with it.
If you want to introduce writing to your culture, you don't need to wait for the Western traders to teach you - the Cherokee script is a classic case of stimulus diffusion.
> Would it even be ethical to leave indigenous peoples on their stone-age level, with outrageous child mortality and constant tribal warfare? What would have been the most benevolent way to bring those societies that want to join the modern world up to speed?
Your post makes it sound like you think that colonialism was effective in reducing child mortality and tribal warfare, and in bringing those societies "up to speed" – a claim I would classify as dubious to outright wrong. Maybe I misunderstood what you said?
I am claiming that modern medicine and technology is very efficient at reducing child mortality, malnutrition and other evils, and that a modern central government is very efficient at reducing tribal warfare (as well as general crime). At least some missionaries and colonizers were at least partly motivated to spread these advances (apart from lots of other, much less noble motivations).
The question is, what would have been the pathways to rolling out modern civilization without the nasty side effects of colonialism? And, more fundamentally, was it inevitable - "can that conceivably be a stable situation"?
First, you would need to establish a link between colonisation and adoption of modernity, which seems essentially nil? Places that were or weren't colonised (say, look at Thailand and Ethiopia vs peers) seems to be broadly in line with their regions. Japan's modernisation kick-started by foreign gunboats, but then had its own momentum. China likewise, potentially kickstarted by (Japanese) aggression, but it was pretty clear the internal situation was unstable anyway.
I think it's very, very difficult to read a history of the East India Company in India and not conclude that it made things dramatically worse in what was already a very volatile time in India at the point of the collapse of the Mughal Empire; the EIC almost unquestioningly made the Bengal Famine of the late 18th century dramatically worse, and pillaged the country with no regard for long-term prosperity.
Similarly, it's extremely difficult to interpret the colonialism that happened in West Africa and interpret it as anything other than pillage that made things much, much worse for people there (not that things were great, mind you, but colonialism created e.g. an endlessly deep market for slaves, mass violent conscription to take materials out of the country with only enough infrastructure to go from the mines to the ports, etc).
The most 'borderline' cases are where the colonialism was 1) With the intent of incorporating the area into the governance structure of permanent settlers, and 2) Done relatively late into the Enlightenment. Probably the most generous examples here would be New Zealand and Algeria, and even then they're not exactly spotless.
Re: your first paragraph, the obvious (though not necessarily right) counterargument would be that these places largely modernised because the alternative was being conquered by European powers. Without colonisation, this incentive wouldn't be there, so they'd be less likely to modernise.
It's hard (but not impossible) to imagine places that were already agricultural / settled not at any point adopting modernity, but I'm less confident for sufficiently remote hunter gatherer societies.
On the West African point I think we're discussing different time points here, and different places (namely I'm earlier, this is in the late stages and pretty idiosyncratic to the UK who did a real 180 on slavery) but I do accept the absurdity of the "civilising mission".
Your first point is good, but I cannot think of many countries that were far behind the curve but escaped being colonized (maybe the -istans in Central Asia? Don't know enough about their history... but they were eventually assimilated by the Soviets - does that count?). Ethiopia was eventually surrounded by colonies, which might have forced them to adapt faster than otherwise.
Japan is a good example of a country that successfully, and consciously, imported modernity, but they were in a much better position to do so than many other countries in terms of organization, education and know-how. Would that approach have worked for, say, Australian aboriginees?
I think the only honest answer here is "we don't know", and 'better' clearly is a pretty debateable term.
Australian Aborigines almost certainly have much lower child mortality and death by infectious disease than pre colonisation, but does that justify the plagues, massacres, and displacement that killed over ninety percent of the pre colonial population? Even today, these are not exactly thriving communities.
It's claimed that black people use the n-word so much to 'reclaim' the word and 'rob it of its power'. Is this a defensible claim? It seems to me the n-word has literally never been more powerful than it is today. And yes, that includes during slavery, perhaps even especially compared to then.
My first thought goes to N.W.A.'s song "Niggaz 4 Lyfe". It's clear to me from the lyrics that the term is being used in a way that deliberately reverses the valence. I don't think people like Ice Cube spent an afternoon pondering how best to reclaim offensive words. More likely, it started off as an obvious opportunity for sarcasm. Grandstanding about "reclaiming the narrative" does sound like a rationalization, though not completely without basis.
Black people, being a minority, have limited say in what the word means and how it is used across society. It's a white word, after all, not a black one, and its current totemization is a white project.
White people being 'not allowed' to say the n word is heavily enforced by white people. The overwhelming majority of is usage today is by black people, and if they chose to never say it, the word would rarely be said at all.
Lots of groups playfully use a derogatory name for their members. It's like people on here referring to themselves and others as "nerds." I don't know how you'd figure out what a particular group's purpose in doing that is. It's not like they agree on the rationale, and vote on the matter.
I feel like you're looking at the result of a lack of governing council...
My impression is that the US LGBT+ movement has been fairly cohesive in the past 20ish years, with pretty good coordination. I don't hear a ton of disagreement about major terminology or policy generally. But, it's a much smaller community, with much more consistent problems, which are largely discrimination based. I think that this is why we see a lot of cohesion about things like the word "queer" or pronoun usages.
However, the American black community faces much more diverse challenges, which include broad poverty and violence, in addition to both historic and current discrimination. There are also a lot more of them, and you can't be a closeted black person. As a result, I do hear a lot more differing opinions, and even those who don't want to be advocates, or as public about their views, are still immediately granted the label of black. So, yeah, you're obviously going to see black people using the n-word casually, as a slur, being offended by it, reclaiming it, and holding a ton of other positions.
I think that because of this lack of cohesion, many white americans are left with the experience that if we were to use it, someone who thinks it bad would yell at us. However, it also gets used casually by people who don't care as much or believe in reclamation, and so it's not a coherent set of rules because... well.. "black americans" actually captures a pretty culturally diverse group of people.
>However, the American black community faces much more diverse challenges, which include broad poverty and violence, in addition to both historic and current discrimination.
Almost all violence against black americans is committed by black americans. Seems like a fairly straightforward challenge to overcome.
Hey, you are all over this comment tree and it's a little obnoxious. I'm not against seeing some right wing opinions in the debate, but you have like five separate replies to the effect of "woke is bad". Don't hog the debate.
Nope, my comments have literally nothing to do with wokeness, in each case I am directly addressing what somebody was saying, and I literally could not care less whether or not you think I'm obnoxious or if you're willing to tolerate "right wing opinions".
Sure, in the same way that all crimes could be prevented by having people not commit them. But if you are a law abiding citizen, there is only so much you can do to stop it. And, once again, there is no special legal structure or governing council to specifically address crimes committed by and against black Americans, so, not so straightforward
This would make sense if black people so much as acknowledged that black crime was even a problem or that black people are to blame for it, but these are minority opinions.
Most black people I've ever seen talking about violence involving black people think unarmed black people being killed by police is the biggest problem facing black people (without almost ever being able to quote the number of unarmed black people killed by police each year to the closest order of magnitude).
I've seen black people be frantic about black crime and have organizations to try to discourage it. Unfortunately, I don't remember names, but this effort goes back decades at least. It isn't related to current politics.
If you want someone on the intellectual side rather than the organizational side, check out Glenn Loury, a black conservative economist.
The idea of a "governing council" fascinates me. Does the Académie Française have authority over racial slurs? I don't know any French slurs, but I assume they must exist.
No clue. But I do think that native American tribes seem to have been effective at controlling when words related to them are used; sports teams are a good example, but I also can't remember the last time I heard someone say "Indian" to refer to native Americans.
For a counterexample, you might look at the evolution of the word Queer. In my lifetime it went from damaging slur to cherished term. I don't recall much of any attempt at making the word something that could only be said by certain people (gay and allies? just gay?), but perhaps it went though such a phase but quickly.
I don't think there's any hope in actually reclaiming a word while enforcing a norm that it's forbidden, even if only to a subset of the population. I also don't think that there is any coherent goal to "reclaim" the n-word.
Several years ago, when I was teaching high school in Oakland, I heard an Asian American student address another Asian American student as "nigga." The several African American students standing next to them did not bash an eyelash. The "a" variant simply has a different meaning.
There's no chance in hell the average black american is okay with white american saying nigga. People have faced seriously consequences for simply singing the word as a lyric to a rap song.
It is absolutely not acceptable on the whole for white people to call black people nigga except in extremely specific circumstances. Maybe some friends do it, maybe some black people don't care, but overall its not accepted.
I think it's indefensible. When some words are permitted to a subset of a society but taboo to the rest it creates a permanent tension.
African-Americans want control and veto power over their own culture while simultaneously wanting full acceptance into general American culture. These two things cannot be achieved together. Either they push for a separate country that they can control or drop their cultural veto and let things mix naturally, i.e. bi-directional assimilation.
PS: I am not an American. I think they should go for separatism, the US is too big and inefficient anyway.
Another potential example is the use of the f-word that means a bundle of sticks within the gay community.
While the n-word has arguably grown more powerful, it's also no longer used as a weapon against Black people. If anything, now it's used defensively against non-Black people.
But the point is, if it IS used against black people, it has literally never had as much as an effect on them as it does today. It's not an exaggeration to say that many (if not an actaul majority of young men at least) black people today would literally become almost homicidally angry if it were used against them, which surely makes it not only more powerful than in the past (when being called the word was surely far more routine and unshocking to them) but perhaps the most powerful word that exists today.
Last week UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman made a speech in Washington DC to the AEI. In it she said some things about immigration and integration that in any other time but ours would have seemed like plain common sense. Predictably in Britain's Virtue Signalling Party one-party state she was furiously bad-mouthed all across the MSM and political establishment. But what shocked me (and I'm not easily shocked) is that I couldn't find a single supportive thing on any Uk-based Substack either.
You can’t present your ideas in such incendiary language and then object when people criticise you instead of engaging with the substance of the argument.
Weird how people like you never apply such logic to anything the left ever says. The left can be explicitly hateful towards white people and any problem with this is chalked up to 'white supremacy'.
Firstly I haven't 'objected' to anyone else's comment and secondly this comment string has been both productive and respectful.. at least until you came along.
I agree Graham, with your assessment that many of the elements of Braverman's speech sound like common sense but, to answer your implied question, Braverman's speech retreats to a motte of reasonableness after months and years of performative cruelty. Even this otherwise reasonable speech claims that "Six in 10 in red wall seats support stopping migrants’ small boats from illegally entering the UK by using any means necessary." What does this mean, "By any means necessary"?
I think there is a reasonable solution to the immigration crisis but, unfortunately, discussions about immigration have been subsumed into the culture war which makes sensible discussion impossible.
FWIW, all of the criticism that I have read of the speech focuses on her argument against multiculturism. I don't find it surprising that people would push back against this.
> Even this otherwise reasonable speech claims that "Six in 10 in red wall seats support stopping migrants’ small boats from illegally entering the UK by using any means necessary." What does this mean, "By any means necessary"?
I don't know, why don't you ask the six in ten red wall voters?
If you're asking whether it's necessary to kill people in order to stop the boats, then no, I think it probably wouldn't be. These generally aren't the fastest boats in the world and it ought to be possible to intercept them and arrest the people on board.
Being cruel is not the same as being effective. In fact conflating the two has been a common mistake throughout history. Regardless the Conservative Party has never been and never will be in the business of limiting immigration. Not that any of their core voter base will ever notice that fact or punish them for it.
Performative cruelty actually is a pretty effective strategy when dealing with illegal immigration, we've done it quite successfully in Australia. We u. ed to have a big problem with boat people, but eventually, slowly, through loud performative cruelty we managed to convince them that invading our country was not worthwhile; the best case scenario was that they'd be held in detention for a few years while we decided whether to send them home or else resettle them in Papua New Guinea.
Sure, it's possible to be cruel without being effective. But are there any actual, concrete examples of these "months and years of performative cruelty", or is it just based on some vague feeling that the Conservatives are right wing, and therefore must all hate immigrants?
As we know you and I are in a different place on the political spectrum.... but we (unlike so much shouty discourse on both ends) manage to have good correspondence. As for Suella Braverman, I can see how she might be a bete noir for the Left but everything she's ever said (to my knowledge anyway) should be music to the ears of a genuinely philosophically conservative political party. But in the UK we don't have one.
I'd guess that the debate about multiculturalism drowned out all other criticism. I think it's an important discussion that we should have but when you juxtapose it with Braverman's plan to ship refugees to Rwanda, it sounds a bit more sinister. Opening discussion about the 1951 Refugee Convention sounds sensible but when you accompany it with a threat to leave the European Court of Human Rights, it sounds less sensible. It's red meat to the culture warriors on the right and it's a red flag to the culture warriors on the left.
Collaborating with the French to slow the stream of illegal migrants sounds eminently sensible to me but when Starmer did the same last week, Conservative HQ demagogued it as a "shocking open door policy on immigration". It's hardly surprising that commentators (on the left and right) glossed over that bit.
What's wrong with a plan to ship refugees to Rwanda? It seems like win-win; anyone genuinely facing persecution in their home country gets to resettle somewhere else, but nobody is encouraged to falsely claim refugee status in the hopes of undeservedly moving to a richer country.
1. A principled case against immigration is unfairly maligned, but causes of this are cultural, a distant result of denazification which transcend "the blob" and MSM. E.g you wouldn't say Pope Francis is part of the blob (?) but he still peddles a pretty strong pro immigration message.
2. Any major initiative to reduce illegal immigration is going to be administered by government agencies I.e the blob. So to fight the blob you must become the blob. Also costs a lot of money which isn't allowed because borrowing is "maxing out the credit card" and raising tax rates is bad.
3. Saying that, I expect this rhetoric along with the anti-green stuff will be moderately successful for the tories, maybe not enough to win but maybe push Starmer into a more unstable government, either with a waffer-thin majority or a nightmare SNP supply deal
The part which a lot of people have an issue with is the assertion that multiculturalism has failed.
I think that going from "having people living in parallel societies is bad" to "therefore multiculturalism is bad" is about as convincing as going from "car accidents are bad" to "therefore motor vehicles are bad".
There is a vast landscape between a homogeneous society where people favor the same culture independent of their origin and strictly segregated parallel societies with their own languages, shops, schools and laws.
If an ethnic minority prefers visibly different clothing, or food, or speak other languages among themselves, or tends to follow a different religion etc, that is already multiculturalism. In the US, all kinds of migrants tended to cluster around their groups of ethnic origin instead of doing their utmost to conform to the ideal of the median American.
By and large, this turned out okay. Today, most US citizens of say Irish or German origin are very much not living in a parallel society, but prefer to live in the mainstream larger US society.
I believe that a multicultural society is a natural consequence of having different ethnic or ideological groups in a pluralistic society. If you enforce one culture on everyone ("this is the state sanctioned church, go there or leave the country"), then you can have a mono-cultural society. If you don't do that, your overall culture will be a sum of different clusters of subcultures (e.g. sports, music genres) and naturally migrants will use that freedom to create their own subcultures.
Maximally segregated parallel societies can be troublesome, and there is certainly something like too much tolerance for value systems incompatible with the broader society, but there is also plenty of multiculturalism which is not pathological.
<i>By and large, this turned out okay. Today, most US citizens of say Irish or German origin are very much not living in a parallel society, but prefer to live in the mainstream larger US society.</i>
Though that mainstream society has in turn been fundamentally changed by repeated waves of immigration. Somebody who valued the more WASP-y American culture of the republic's early decades might reasonably say that they'd prefer to forgo the immigration and keep the original culture, just like someone in the present who values English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc. culture might reasonably not want to bring in a million third-world immigrants a year.
What else is multiculturalism other than having people live in parallel societies? And has there ever been a country that did multiculturalism successfully over a long period of time (say, a century or more)?
Most of the empire was locally monocultural, and to the extent it wasn't, it was mostly traders, military leaders, artists and so on i.e. an elite slice of other cultures. It wasn't just millions of arab/sub-saharan africans moving to majority Roman cities the way the UK has that now.
I think you underestimate the extent of Roman soldiers being deliberately settled in conquered lands to provide a loyal core. This resulted in a lot of cultural and religious syncretism.
For flow in the other direction one needs to look more at the Republic, and remember that it took many centuries and a few wars for the various Italic allies to come to be considered truly Roman
So the only thing multicultarlism means is having different cultures in their own ghettos, but that isn't multiculturalism because they are all individually monocultural?
And "Most of the empire was" doesn't include Rome!
Is Anglo Saxon culture the same as Celtic culture? The UK hasn't made up its my d whether it's ok be country or four, and that's been going on for centuries.
Different native american tribes had different cultures, sometimes radically so. And yet almost everyone treats european cultural displacement in the americas as categorically different than what resulted from native american tribes butchering one another.
This type of logic is literally only ever applied to defend Europeans having foreign cultures imposed on them, never anyone else.
<i>Is Anglo Saxon culture the same as Celtic culture?</i>
In modern times? Pretty much, yeah. The cultural differences between England and Scotland aren't noticeably greater than those between different parts of France or Spain, and are noticeably smaller than those between, say, Minnesota and Alabama.
Not to mention, the constituent countries of the UK are (or were, until mass immigration got going after WW2) individually very culturally homogenous. There might have been cultural differences between England and Scotland (though not very big ones in the grand scheme of things), but there weren't many differences between Perth and Edinburgh, or between London and Birmingham. Nor did you have Scottish ghettoes in major English cities, or vice versa. "A series of ethnically and culturally homogenous countries which happen to be under the same government" might count as multiculturalism under some definitions, but it's a very non-standard example, and it's not the brand of multiculturalism on offer at the moment.
"he constituent countries of the UK are (or were, until mass immigration got going after WW2) individually very culturally homogenous."
So the only thing multicultarlism means is having different cultures in their own ghettos, but that isn't multiculturalism because they are all individually monocultural?
I agree that the UK conservatives are less anti immigration than most voters. I still don't see why that would make them left *wing* as opposed to centrist, since I still don't view the political spectrum as consisting only of two extremes. In fact, one could make a conservative argument for immigration: it's good for the economy. IOW, a conservative is allowed to be more of a fiscal conservative than a social conservative.
Ironic, since "far right" today means "not far left". At no point in history beyond a few decades ago would Sunak be remotely describle in Britain as "right wing" on any almost social issue, nor was "we shouldn't bring in so many immigrants from sub-saharan africa or the middle east" describable as an exclusively "far-right" position.
I'm not that cynical. I give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that she passionately believes what she's saying. And if there were more like her then the UK would actually have a conservative party (rather than the Virtue Signalling Uniparty that it actually has). Guess we're not on the same page here.
Is anybody an expert in psychometrics? I need help evaluating papers ORs.
I realized a family member had mental illness and now want to know the risks for my children. I'm making a "how many kids at what paternal ages means how much risk" model but need to know what parameters to put in. I have some confidence in the math, but less confidence in my ability to evaluate the validity of the papers from which I pull ORs.
However before I charge ahead with an expensive test of the theory, I would like to adversarially collaborate with one or more people who believe in the theory to ensure that my investigation will actually be convincing.
If you are interested, consider joining the Rationalist Psychometrics discord to discuss: https://discord.gg/tanzAJQ3
Scott, I started tracking down your email cuz I have an article request, but I don't know how you feel about those and I don't know how you like emails to be worded for you to triage them.
Then I realized: maybe your commenters could help, and we could save your time.
Here's the article request: could you please write the nuanced and charitable version of this rant https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=eExTPyKGamWWMikrz ? I'm confident that I'm too strong and overstating certain things, but I honestly don't know exactly which things.
> Maybe neuroscientists or psychologists have good reasons for this, but "autism" is the most immensely deranged word in the history of categories--- what utility is a word that crosses absent minded professors and people who can't conceptually distinguish a week from a month insofar as you can wordlessly elicit conceptual understanding from them???? If you worked at the dictionary factory and you tried to slip that word in, you'd be fired immediately. So why do psychologists or neuroscientists get away with this???
I think there's something important here that people aren't talking about, and every time I see an excerpt from Michael lewis' SBF book my skin crawls.
Not sure whether to respond to you here or on LW.
I agree that it is crazy to have a word that means both the absent-minded professor and someone nonverbal who couldn't survive without special care.
And yet there is a continuum between the two, so to make two different words, you would need to make an arbitrary line somewhere. I haven't seen the data, but I suspect that the distribution isn't even bimodal; that there isn't a natural thin place where to cut the curve.
I think (maybe I am wrong here) that the traditional cutting point for "is actually a serious disease" would be something like "is capable of living alone and keeping a job". That seems to involve factors that are not inherently a part of autism, such as whether the person has other qualities (such as high intelligence) that can *compensate* for the weaknesses. An absent-minded professor will probably be more employable than an absent-minded factory worker. Does it mean that stupid aspies are "more autistic" than smart aspies? Do aspies with programming skills become "less autistic" when there is a shortage of programmers, and then become "more autistic" again when a tech bubble bursts and they get laid off? Also, it feels like this would in some sense punish the people in the middle for developing good coping skills (now that they have the skills, we conclude officially that their problem was never real).
I agree that identifying politically with one of your traits (whether a strength or a weakness) is stupid. People are multidimensional. Also, you should be more than the sum of the parts you were born with.
But sometimes the label is pushed on you against your will. Not necessarily a specific diagnosis; just people calling you "weird" when you are young, and telling you that your kids are "weird" when you get older. You choice is not between "weird" and "normal"; it is between "weird" in an unspecified way, and a specific way of being weird. The latter has the advantage that it potentially provides useful information on what to do about it.
That said, I think the label "aspie" also fulfilled this purpose, and caused less confusion.
By the way, under the second article you linked, the most upvoted comment says that vaccinations cause autism. LOL
yeah you're right this is the moderating voice I needed--- cashing out "social model of disability" into labor supply/demand is pretty potent. I also think it matters that we don't know how much effort it costs a given person to learn to "fit in" or whatever, and thanks for reminding me of that.
He wrote Against Against Autism Cures a while back, is that it?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
yes this is just what the doctor ordered, thanks! I especially like the part where he admitted that we're bad at words, but I hadn't fully considered that "autism" is a slightly worse variant of the thing that a bajillion other psychiatric phenomena are subject to.
This thread is old, so I’m writing this out while I am thinking about it and I’ll repost it in the next open thread.
Does anybody have any good breakdowns of sexual partner statistics? Particularly in terms of lifetime sexual partners? Keep in mind that I know nothing about stats and I don’t have the capacity to evaluate whether a given study is good or not. Trusting y’all not to lead me astray.
I think my main question is that it seems odd to me that lifetime sexual partners is a normal distribution, particularly for men.
So, average number in the US is around 6. That doesn’t seem low, I guess, because there is a sizable percentage of the population that has 0-2 lifetime partners.
And I guess it makes sense that women would be a normal distribution. Most women can get laid whenever they want, so intuitively you would expect a bell curve there.
But for men... most men are wired to get laid as much as possible. Some can’t, or choose not to, or get into a serious relationship relatively early. I believe a majority of the population falls into one of those buckets.
But, for guys who can and don’t get locked down.... isn’t 6 a crazy low lifetime number? Wouldn’t you expect some sort of gap between, say, 5 and 20?
For example: average attractiveness guy gets a high school sweetheart (1). Goes to college, has a hookup and then gets in another year long relationship (3). Breaks up, one more hookup and one more relationship in college (5). Breaks up a year after graduating. After a year or two without getting laid, gets another 3 year relationship (6). Breaks up, gets motivated, is now a little more mature and confident, so he hooks up with a few girls over the next year (10). Around 27, meets a girl that becomes his wife (11). Divorced after 8 years, one more hookup and one more marriage that lasts til he dies (13).
That is more than double the lifetime average, and it seems lowwww. This is a guy who spends the majority of his life in committed relationships, never cheats, never goes through a slut phase where he sleeps with 8-10 girls in a year.
Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
Seems to me that extremes are easy to imagine but actually not that frequent in real life.
It is easy to imagine a guy who can't get a girl. It is easy to imagine a traditional monogamous man. It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night. In physics, this is sometimes expressed as "the only numbers that do not require special explanation are zero, one, and infinity". :D
In real life you probably get a lot of men who either try to be monogamous but their first few relations fall apart for various reasons, and men who try to bang as many women as possible but are less successful than a Hollywood movie might make you believe.
> Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
> Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number. To find out better numbers, you would have to change the questionnaire -- to write it so that it makes it easier to "remember" partners that would otherwise easily be "forgotten".
So if I wrote the questionnaire, instead of directly asking about the number of partners, I would go category by category. "Have you been married? How many times? Did you have a long-term boyfriend you didn't marry? How many? Did you have a boyfriend you had sex with but the relation was short? How many? Did you have a one-night stand? How many times?" and only after all the answers are written down, I would ask about the total number of sexual partners. (Need to ask separately, because there can be overlap between the categories, or partners who were not included in any. Such as: had a one-night stand with someone, then 20 years later they met again and got married.)
Without a good questionnaire, I don't think there could a simple method that works, such as "multiply numbers reported by women by 2, and divide numbers provided by men by 2". First, we need to figure out the exact coefficient empirically. Second, it's not just simple division or multiplication; different parts of the curve probably misreport their numbers differently.
> It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night.
hahaha no it isn't! I was roommates with a guy in my early 20's who was near the top end of what I would consider achievable for a non-celebrity (or celebrity equivalent, or guy who organizes his entire life around getting laid like a party promoter or whatever). He was tall, handsome, charming, and absolutely relentless. Hit on girls everywhere - gas station, grocery story - just absolutely fearless and never ever satisfied. I'd guess he averaged about 8-10 new girls a year.
> If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
So, I swear I didn't do this for internet points, but in the other comment I made a guess and looked up the stats. Intuitively, I thought there should be a gap/lull between 0-5 and 20 plus for men. My thought process is that there is a significant difference between the number of women that most men are able to sleep with and the number that they would choose to sleep with. At a certain level of attractiveness - my guess was Pareto rule, 80/20 - I thought that men would be able to get lifetime numbers closer to their actual preferences.
Point being, I thought the majority of guys would fall in the 0-5 range, and then there would be a 20% of attractive guys who were 20 plus, with fewer guys falling into that middle range of 6-19.
It appears that my intuition was pretty close to spot on: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
The differences are fuzzier than I thought, but definitely there. 28.3% of men report 15 plus, compared to 12.5% reporting 10-14. So, the gap is there - question is, do I have the best explanation for that gap?
> I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number.
Makes total sense. They do this in real life. Drives me crazy. Not because I care what the number is, but because I know that you are lying to me when you say that it's 6! lolol
How many guys actually alternate between hookups and long-terms like that? Remove all the hookups and you're at exactly 6.
It’s pretty common, although I again I don’t have any stats. What do guys who can get laid do after a breakup? Go out and try to get laid. Or, flip side, even they are looking for a relationship, you have false starts along the way. Maybe replace some of those hookups with month and half relationships that didn’t work.
I think the key point I’m trying to make is that because of the way men are wired, I wouldn’t expect a fully normal distribution. Six makes sense to me as an average, no issues with that. But I would expect some sort of gap in lifetime partners between the majority of men (80ish percent) who take what they can get (0-6) and those who can get laid when they want to (15-20 plus).
I mean, it's clearly not a normal distribution, that's not the sort of distribution you expect for a "count of..." anything. I forget all my basic statistics at this point but it's going to be some sort of long tailed distribution with a peak in the low single digits and a very long tail extending into the hundreds.
But my comment isn't to nitpick your grasp of statistics, it's to more deeply criticise your understanding of male psychology. I just don't think that this chad/virgin view of male psychology in which all men are constantly trying to fuck as many women as they possibly can is accurate, it's just a dumb stereotype. Most men have limited (but nonzero) interest in random hookups with random floozies. Maybe they try it a few times and realise it's not appealing. Maybe they get interested in it only under certain circumstances, like when travelling or after a breakup. Maybe they are generally uninterested in it, but hey, if you're really drunk and she's really hot then these things do occasionally happen. But the population of men who constantly bang as many girls as they possibly can is limited (and can be found at both ends of the distribution, but probably not in the middle).
Thanks for clarifying the shape, yeah that's obviously how that should look. But it should still have a gap!
I'm doing a shit job of explaining what I'm intuiting. The chad/virgin thing is lame, and I'm not saying that every guy wants to fuck 1000 women. What I'm trying to get at is that I think there is a reasonable gap between a) the number of women that men actually sleep with and b) the number that they would sleep with if given the chance.
There are a lot of guys who sleep with every woman they can, and that number happens to be in the single digits. Those guys tend to wreck their marriages when they get a cute secretary.
If you want a look at unchained male libido, it looks more like professional athletes, musicians, etc... Many of those guys eventually get wives - some of them get married surprisingly young! And I'm sure a decent percentage are faithful husbands. But in general, you'll see a professional athlete have a wife... and a lot of discrete girlfriends on the road, which the wife ignores. You see that pattern throughout history as well.
So, here's what I'm trying to say. I think there should be some kind of inflection point - maybe an 80/20 thing. At some level of attractiveness, guys are less bound by what they can get, and instead become bound by what they actually desire. I would expect a sizable jump in lifetime partners around that point.
And hey, I looked up the most basic stats possible, and it appears that my intuition here is correct (?). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
It says 25.8% for 5-9, 12.5% for 10-14, and 28.3% for 15 plus! and the 15+ amount for women is less than half of that. So... I guess the question now is whether my theory is accurate, or there is some better explanation for why it is that way.
I’m looking for an article that I’m 80% sure was written here (or some adjacent Substack) that was a take down of a viral political psychology study. I can’t remember the specific “findings” of the study but it was one of those classic “we proved conservatives are bad” papers that always goes viral in parts of Twitter/Reddit despite having comically terrible methodology. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
My Metaphysical Transit Authority shirt is finally starting to wear out, and I was thinking of ordering another one. But today my kid noticed a problem with it: the original trolley problem mentions five people in the path of the trolley, but the shirt only has four!
I intend to order another shirt whether or not you fix this, but please reply to let me know if you will fix it; this will remind me to place my order.
Just getting caught up with the SBF trial and whoo.
Thrown *straight* under the bus by his former co-founder Gary Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFSx6KosLJU
I'll be noodling around with other coverage but the defence strategy seems to be "Sam is a Good Boy, he's a maths nerd who doesn't drink or party! He was an honest businessman!" and the prosecution right now is going for "here is this list of witnesses gonna tell you that he was a fraud, he knew it was fraud, and he knew he was committing fraud, also it was all him and not them".
The Democrats should throw their support behind Liz Cheney for new speaker of the house.
Any speaker that gets Democratic support would inherently be suspect by the Republicans, so they'd probably just kick her out again. Plus, it seems unlikely that Cheney would be willing to make a deal with the Democrats. She is a staunch conservative after all, not exactly a moderate.
If the Democrats decide to support a Speaker with the same discipline that they decided to oust McCarthy, the Republicans could only kick that Speaker out if they could get 217 out of 221 Republican house members on board to do so. And we just got an object lesson in how hard it is to get 217 Republican congressmen to agree on anything.
If the Democrats somehow managed to get a member of the Democratic party elected to the Speakership, yes, the GOP would join ranks to evict that person out of principle. But if the Democrats throw their support behind any reasonable Republican speaker, I suspect there would be at least five Republican congressmen who would go along with it.
Then for shits and giggles, the Democrats could withdraw their support two weeks later and wait for her to get kicked out again.
Honestly I'm a bit confused why the standing orders (or whatever they're called) of the US House of Reps allow a speaker to be kicked out without the election of a replacement speaker.
I don't think the moderate Republicans would vote for any Democrat-backed candidate until they've been through numerous rounds of humiliating defeat trying to pass one with only R votes.
Earlier this year, they took 15 rounds to vote over the course of a week and *still* didn't cave. Why would this time be different?
Earlier this year, the Democrats didn't support any Republican candidate for Speaker. In the present (and IMHO unlikely) hypothetical, the Democrats are supporting a Republican candidate. Earlier this year, the only way the GOP could get one of their own in that position, was to achieve nearly total unanimity within their caucus. Which as you note was particularly hard, and made them look weak and foolish. In the present hypothetical, any five GOP congressmen who want can cut through all that nonsense and get a Republican speaker on the first vote.
Well, first vote after the Democrats make this hypothetical offer; I expect they would want to make the Republicans suffer a bit before bailing them out.
Anyone know whether she wants the job?
Just because here is the only place where I get an understanding ear rather than being booed... 25 minute aboriginal land acknowledgement at the start of a meeting this week. I did time it. And again it included prayers to the Creator.
That's awful, which country?
I am hopeful that here in Australia we've reached the peak of Aborigine-worship and I'm hopeful for a decrease soon. There's a referendum next weekend to enshrine an ill-defined "Indigenous Voice To Parliament" in the Constitution, and polls have shown a massive decline in support for the proposition over the last couple of months, that has all the qualities of a preference cascade. At first the vibe was "if you don't vote yes, you're a racist", but as more and more people have come out as "no" supporters people realised it was safe to do so. As a result, the referendum is headed for a resounding and embarrassing 40-60 defeat.
But it's a lot easier to have the courage to object to something in a secret ballot than to stand up in a meeting and say "Actually why don't we _not_ do this?"
Wow, I'm glad I've never had to sit through anything like that.
I'd like to, but feels like paying the dane geld. And also, using the term native american is like three levels down on the euphemism treadmill. Considered very offensive these days by all the right thinking people in my office, officially at least. I just point it out for the lols.
OC ACXLW Unabomber manifesto 10/7/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12NE6POwSv8W2VdPZfCyPLcD_U7bkNdsoISNjRIm8P2I/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 45th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Oct 7, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
This week we take a look back at the ideas of Ted Kaczynski. He was a militant critic of modern industrial society who chose to propagate his ideas using terrorism against scientists. His methods were odious and horrifying, but were there ideas that were worth thinking about? Which ideas are wrong? Which ideas can be salvaged? How much do these ideas exist outside how writings, and how should we deal with them? Do they continue to be dangerous? Should the ideas of a person be erased from discourse because of the awful things they did?
A summary text and podcast audio can be found here:
https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/industrial-society-and-its-future-summary/
ChatGPT and Claude summarize
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OXHvIaIJXXtOkVsfHbIbJzl-cTjAiUS3s_DILmiuxzk/edit?usp=sharing
The full text can be found here:
Industrial Society and Its Future
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Industrial%20Society%20and%20Its%20Future.pdf
Audio version of the full text:
https://archive.org/details/TheodoreJohnKaczynskiIndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture1995www.MP3Fiber.com
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot t
takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Why did the Democrats all vote to oust House Speaker McCarthy?
1) Considering the state of the Republican party right now, wasn't he a moderate that could be worked with? Didn't his compromise bill last Saturday to prevent a government shutdown prove that?
2) With McCarthy gone, aren't the odds high that his replacement will be a more extreme Republican who will be harder to work with? Won't that raise the odds of a government shutdown on November 17, which is something the Democrats don't want to happen?
McCarthy already had to appease FC. Maybe dems were thinking they might lose leverage now that they've fired their only shot.
House Dems supported McCarthy on his 45 day continuing resolution. The next day McCarthy went on the Sunday morning talk shows to say the entire cluster fuck was the Dems fault. They just didn't trust the guy.
They weren't willing to play ball with McCarthy any _longer_, because he reneged on previous agreements that the Dems had reached with him.
Also, the GOP's renegades in the House have made it clear that they will continue treating any Speaker who makes any deals with any Dems as a blood enemy. They explicitly promise to continue "burning it all down" (their words) for the sake of punishing any such Speaker, and given the House's rules of operation they can in fact paralyze the place. That removes any motivation for the Dems to enter into any such new agreements.
True. McCarthy seems to have assumed that the Dems would lose their nerve at the prospect of a new Speaker who is beholden to the burn-it-down group.
Just a nice article I wanted to share.
https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/history-and-humanities/people/albert-einstein-letter-marie-curie/
I think it began dying when the Soviet Union fell. Economic liberalism had a foil to keep it vital, and keep the criticism moored somewhat to reality. Without that foil, a lot of people assumed we were well on our way to Utopia. But while economic liberalism was delivering a lot for developing countries, its benefits were much more subtle in developed countries than they had been in previous generations. Basically, a lot of people, especially in the US, felt promised an ever increasing rate of standard of living improvement, thought that rate was too slow, or even negative, and mood affiliated themselves into believing the standard of living was actually decreasing. While this is easily disprovable, the sentiment is strong and is highly resistant to facts.
It is now unfashionable, and even inviting of mocking scorn to point out simple things like the increase in housing sizes in the US never ceased, that US manufacturing output continues to grow, that the standard of living considered unacceptable today would be luxurious 40 years ago, that the post WW2 economic growth that US workers enjoyed was built largely upon the fact that all of America's industrial competitors were destroyed and had to start over, etc.
The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that this is a psychological problem and not a wealth or distribution of wealth problem. Humans seem to always evaluate their standing relative to other people, not any objective measure. If you're in the top 1% in your relevant economic comparisons, it seems to have the same effect on how you (and the other 99%) feel about you whether you're a Google Senior Programmer or a 12th century merchant with no electricity using chamberpots).
Objectively, 99.xx% of the population in the US today has a higher standard of living than the 1% living prior to 1000 AD. Kings in England had a life expectancy of about 50 between 1000 and 1600 AD. Because these are kings and not just wealthy could-be-kings, this discounts the normal issues of life expectancy from child mortality - they just didn't live that long and were riddled with medical issues that even the poorest today don't deal with. I can understand a peasant in 980 AD looking at the king and thinking he was high above him - because he was, and that king had significant benefits compared to the peasant. But not compared to people living today.
I think it comes down to power, because power is more zero-sum than wealth, and relative wealth is often a source of power. Nobody really cares if I could pay $50,000 for something in the US today, but that would be a huge sum of money for any society, past or present, where $5/day would hire a laborer for as much backbreaking labor as you would want. Or sex, or to walk around behind you singing your praises. The difference is power. We seem very in tune with relative power differences, which I think is the real argument, not wealth and especially not standard of living.
Exactly. And it makes sense that humans would use relative power as the metric for assessing "how they are doing", because trying to follow some normed absolute scale would be nonsense. "Who cares how I am doing relative to Ottoman Empire peasants, the people I think should not be higher status than I should be look very successful on Instagram, and that depresses/enrages me!!!!!"
Right. There will always be a pecking order. In systems where everybody is economically near-equal, like a high school or a prison, the pecking order is based even harder on something other than economics, and it's usually a lot nastier.
I don't know statues, but postage stamps are easier to access.
In that case QEII is a runaway winner, but you could disqualify her for reigning (not ruling).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Literary_versions
You always hear that German fairy tales are brutal, but I never knew that this extends to universal stories like Cinderella as well. The German variant has the evil stepsisters mutilated, blinded and ostracized as punishment for their abuse, while in the dominant English variant, Cinderella forgives them without a second thought and rewards them by marrying them off to rich noblemen once she's queen. I think if I had kids, I'd definitely read them the German version.
Yeah, all the Disney versions are toned down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White
"As punishment for the attempted murder of Snow White, the prince orders the Queen to wear a pair of red-hot iron slippers and to dance in them until she drops dead. With the evil Queen finally defeated and dead, Snow White's wedding to the prince peacefully continues."
"Dance while wearing these red-hot iron slippers until you drop dead... or else!!!"
Given the time period involved in writing these stories, the "or else" may have actually been significantly worse. There were some harsh people empowered to do some bad stuff back then.
I still laughed at your post.
Something that interests me about the Grimm version is that the people who complained about the brutality were also German. The original sanitized version was also in German, published by the Grimms in response to complaints. So apparently there was a cultural difference within Germany between the people telling the stories and the people buying the book. Also the evil stepmothers were evil mothers in the original; the Grimms felt evil stepmothers were less disturbing.
I've heard it argued that some of Grimm's tales, e.g. Hansel and Gretel, are what remains in cultural memory of a period of starvation (the kids being sent out into the woods because there wasn't enough food for them at home, the "witch" wanting to eat children because there wasn't any other food around, etc, and I think there are examples of cannibalism in other tales as well, although I can't think of specific ones now).
Quite interesting, but I'm not sure to what extent this is supported by historical research, or if I'm just repeating popular misinformation.
The Grimms themselves believed that kind of stuff. They collected all of those stories in hopes that they contained knowledge of the past. Today's folklorists don't agree.
Better watch no one calls Child Services on you.
If you really want to traumatize your children with Grimm's fairy tales, read them "The Poor Boy in the Grave"!
The minister for immigration ordered the removal of cartoon murals from asylum centres intended for children to make them less welcoming.
A move that has surely sparked more outrage than all of the crime committed by 'asylum seekers' over X many months or years combined.
How many of those criminals were children? Do you believe that making the process of asylum seeking more miserable for children in particular will reduce the crime rate? Is there any causal connection to crime at all, or do you just think that anything that hurts immigrants is justified so long as some of them are criminals?
Look over there!
I'm not sure why I'm expected to care about these "injustices" when the people crying about them actively covered up children literally being raped by brown immigrants. They do not have a principled concern for children, they love brown people and hate white people, so nobody is under any obligation to care about some cartoon mural nonsense.
I don’t think this is correct.
Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
"The Catholic Church is concerned about child poverty."
"Hah. No they aren't! Why should I listen to them? The people saying this hate all children. They covered up child abuse by priest for decades!"
See link below...
Joseph Stalin apparently has the Guinness World Record for raising the most statutes to himself. However, these statues were within the U.S.S.R., a country where he was the leader.
What historical figure (so no religious figures) has the most statues outside of a territory that they lived/ruled?
By way of example, I can see two George Washington monuments outside the U.S.A., John Adams has one, F.D.R. has at least six.
Can anyone beat six?
Gandhi has many more than six, but I don't know if he beats Columbus.
There are two of Abraham Lincoln in the UK, I'll see if I can find more (levitating piano not included)
3 in the UK: London, Manchester, Edinburgh. There are also statues of him in Oslo, Moscow & Mexico City
The Marquis de Lafayette has a good number in the US (and his grave in Paris was filled with American soil).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honors_and_memorials_to_the_Marquis_de_Lafayette
Jesus or Buddha?
Tons of those, but Zach ruled out religious figures in the question.
Which seems like a silly ruling, as there are lots of religious figures that aren't at the level of Jesus or Buddha that closely match what he's looking for. A famous Pope I think would work, or a theologian/church leader like Aquinas or Martin Luther.
This might get a bit spicy depending on how you define "A country where he lived/ruled", but Robert E. Lee might be a contender. Particularly pre-2010 or so.
It's definitely a close call, and I'm probably biased since I'm American. To me, the distinction between the Confederacy and the Union is clearly big enough to warrant counting them as separate nations for the purpose of the question.
With that being said, when I look at other countries' civil wars, I'm not as convinced that I would find this argument persuasive. If someone built a statue to Liu Bei in Beijing, for example, I'm not sure I'd care that Liu Bei never ruled that particular part of China (or, going further, that he was at war with that part of China for most of his life). It's sort of all China to me.
Regardless, I'll give in to my biases and say that Robert E. Lee definitely counts (only the statues that are outside the former Confederacy though). Hopefully this rule does not come back to haunt me.
I think the difference is that Robert E Lee was fighting to break away from the US, whereas Liu Bei was fighting to unite China under his own rule.
Whoever was the model for the Garden Gnome.
Wait, they're not supposed to be Robt E Lee?
Churchill:
Paris, Toronto, Oslo, Prague, New Orleans, Canberra - fiberglass replica, Halifax, Washington DC
So if you count the fiberglass replica in Canberra, that’s eight.
That's pretty good! Certainly for modern historical figures, that's in the lead. But Christopher Columbus actually has a crazy amount of statues - more than 22 in Argentina alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_to_Christopher_Columbus
Yeah I'm saying this is probably number one. Going to be a very tough one to beat!
I tested Scott Alexander's bet (https://astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fsix%2520months%2520won&utm_medium=reader2) with Gary Marcus on DALLE-3. Scott claimed at one point that he had already won this bet but it still seemed pretty disputable. I would say DALLE-3 passes this benchmark pretty convincingly for 3/5 of the prompts (see photos here: https://twitter.com/_Soren__/status/1709257511780360312), but still is not able to get the key in the mouth of the raven in the stained glass window or the bell on the tail of the llama. Images generated with https://www.bing.com/images/create which is supposedly DALLE-3.
OK, I messed around with the raven one a little more and got one that seems perfect. The key is clearly gripped in the raven's beak. (I changed the prompt a little, substituting "beak" for "mouth.") https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpg
Nice! Its obviously within the abilities of the model to produce the type of image we are interested in but it seems to have something like a strong prior against the image/difficulty "understanding" the compositionality in the prompt
Yeah, I think both images are at the upper limit of how many relationships between elements it can keep hold of: The key is *in* the raven’s beak, the raven is *on* the woman’s shoulder, they are *in* a library. For llama, bell is *on* tail, boy is * on* llama, both are *in* desert.
I developed a fascination with Dall-e2, even though Midjourney and others make way prettier images, and have made thousands of images with it, along the way figuring out tricks to make the dumb and oppositional thing make what I’m asking for. I used that stuff to get Dall-e3 make these 2 images. With the Raven image what made the most difference was to ask for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. The latter introduces a 4th element, the window, with the other 3 elements inside it, and 3 elements each bearing some relationship to one of more of the others seems to be its limit. The llama image, while no more compositionally complex than the raven one, was much harder to get, because Dall-e has such a strong prior for llamas wearing bells around their necks. I finally used a confusional technique, the misspelled “barette” on the llama tail, in an effort to make Dall-e dizzy enough that it forget where the bell is supposed to go on a llama. And it worked. And note that it did not even include a barrette in the image.
Confusional techniques get Dall-e to lose control of itself. You know how if you ask GPT4 a question it does not know the answer to it often hallucinates? It’s possible to do something similar with Dall-e2. If an important element in your prompt is a nonsense word, or something Dall-e has never seen (an amphisbena, for instance), or incorporates in image it cannot recognize it will sometimes produce images far more violent and obscene than any you can get it to make via straightforward prompt. I have a whole collection of them if you’re curious.
Soren, I also got Dall-e 3 to make the llama image:
https://i.imgur.com/dBUupdN.jpg
The prompt was "a desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
Dall-e was vey stuck on the idea that llama have bells around their necks and no place else. Telling it there was a barrette in its tail (barette deliberately misspelled to add an element of uncertainty about what the item was) and the bell was attached to that broke Dall-e's mental set.
Soren, I just got Dalle-e 3 to make the raven image or at least something close enough I think it passes. My prompt was "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library." Here's the image:
https://i.imgur.com/JeKHi8c.jpg
If you are very particular you can point out that it's not clear whether any of the key is actually *in* the raven's mouth. You'd get the same image if the key was glued to the right side of the raven's beak. On the other hand, it is also possible that the key has a protuberance on it that is gripped by the 2 blades of the beak on the right-hand side of the beak. It took 2 tries with this prompt to get the image. First try gave me 4 images, second one only 3 for some reason. Before I asked for stained glass I asked for "a realistic image" (rest of prompt was the same) and got one perfect result on the first try. It's here:
https://i.imgur.com/CUgbUMr.jpg
I'm sure I could get a stained glass image with absolutely no tiny possible flaws to quibble about if I ran the prompt a couple more times.
I think what made the prompt work were (1) I asked for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. Asking for a window adds another element. (2) I mentioned the raven and key first, so as the get that info into Dall-e before it's little head was full. (3) I said "they are in a library" rather than "on the shoulder of a woman in a library" because the latter is a complex sentence, so easier to get confused by.
FWIW, I tried several models on mage.space, but couldn't get the raven to place the key in its mouth, either.
Not really relevant to the bet, but I've played around with Dall-e 2, and it is often possible to fix problems like no key in the raven's mouth during a second pass. You edit the original photo in Dall-e, whiting out the area where you want a change. Then use a prompt similar to your original one, but changed in a way that makes the feature you want added as prominent as possible. So instead of describing the photo as, say, a woman with a raven on her shoulder and a key in the mouth of the raven, you say a raven with a key in its mouth & Raven is sitting on the shoulder of a woman.
You may know all that already. Out of curiosity -- have you tried it on the images where Dall-e3 failed.?
For the purposes of the bet, I would see that as a clear fail. Thanks for the tips though, I might find them useful in some of the things I've tried to make.
Oh, also, Dall-e2 was very resistant to making images of impossible things (3-headed animals) or even just things you rarely see, like a raven with a key in its mouth. Sometimes it works to first edit the problematic area to make a familiar image -- say a raven with some food in its mouth. Then on a second edit white out the food and ask for a key. If you still can't get a key, you can say the raven is carrying some tasty candy shaped like a key. There are a lot of trix.
Yes, but at this point you're no longer using the program as a fully autonomous AI. If you really wanted to just produce an applicable image, you could use inpainting or even copy/paste images together in Photoshop.
Yeah, I know. I resort to that sometimes. However, I prefer to get Dall-e to do it because I kind of like the unexpected touches it puts in. (Also, I want to WIN! the battle with Dall-e). I get that once you're editing you can't count the results towards the bet, I'm just curious how malleable Dall-e3 is. Tried to try it out today but site is having trouble -- probably too many people going there to give it a try.
Tom Hanks calls out a dental ad featuring AI generated Tom Hanks.
https://www.engadget.com/tom-hanks-calls-out-dental-ad-for-using-ai-likeness-of-him-161548459.html
How do I know it's not AI generated Tom Hanks calling out a dental ad featuring real Tom Hanks?
Ahhh, good one.
Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism? Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism.
I think I understand why the GOP turned against it. Trump figured out that the real issue among conservatives was anti-immigration and used that to destroy the other Republican presidential candidates in 2016. Trump had never really been a fan of the free market: his comparative advantage in NYC real estate was his ability to work the Byzantine bureaucracy, not change it. (See Scott's review of Art of the Deal.) He also understood that the working class blamed and loathed job offshoring almost as much as they blamed and loathed immigration for their not-better wages. And that there is a white professional conservative class which identifies for familial reasons with the working class.
That explains what turned the GOP against neo-liberalism. But where did all the neo-liberals go? Lord knows they didn't all rush over to the Libertarian Party, although I'm not sure why not. If the Libertarian Party was going to have a moment, 2016 should have been it, given that the GOP was suddenly dumping free-market capitalism down the drain -- but no, the Libertarian Party continued to spin in place that year.
What about the Democrats? They had never been the party of Adam Smith, but since Trump *did* drive off Reagan-Bush Republicans from the party, and since few of them joined the Libertarians, shouldn't those Never Trumpers have moved the Dems to the right economically?
The facts on the ground are that Bidenomics is much like Trumpenomics. Tariffs. Mercantilism. Buy American.
Liberalism is dead.
How does that suddenly happen in both major parties at once? One hypothesis, using the Median Voter Theorem, is that, whereas the position of the median voter hasn't changed much if we only look at the well-ordered 1-d economic dimension, the salience of other issues has grown, gradually but suddenly, like big wheels turning, and the median voter is in a very different position because economics is longer as deciding an issue.
That economics matters less as an issue might seem counterintuitive, given that the political rhetoric *about* economics has changed so much, but if that *isn't* the case: where did all the neo-liberals go?
The broader economic liberalism spreads, the greater the payoff for defecting.
I thought the same thing as Chase. You could ask why the world is less into free trade, but that's not economic liberalism. The Inflation Reduction Act passed the House without a single Republican vote, so the GOP was clearly not on board with it, if that's a determining factor.
Regarding free trade, tariffs are higher than recent memory, but still tiny. I'm getting that tariffs now are 3%+, bigger than 2% ish early this century, but way smaller than the 30% I can recall in early US history from my history classes long ago, and I have the impression it sometimes topped 50% in Great Depression times. So is the question, why are they creeping up again?
One reason is our conflict with China. I'm seeing tariffs against China at 7.5% for some consumer goods and 25% for some other things. China's a major trading partner, so I can see how this would pull us up from 2% ish to 3% ish overall.
I don't know all our tariffs, but it looks like we have a trade dispute with one nation -- let's be honest, one man, Chairman Xi -- and we wouldn't be wise to generalize this to both parties opposing free markets.
In 1972, George McGovern ran on a platform that included a guaranteed minimum income of $6,000 per year, equivalent to about $44,000 today. McGovern lost 49 states, resulting in the Democratic retreat to more conservative economic policies. But one election doesn't necessarily settle an issue for all time. Many of today's political actors weren't even alive in 1972. They may have heard about McGovern's historic loss, but they didn't live through it and so it's not a defining political event for them.
The Median Voter Theorem says that the way to win elections is to move to the middle. Leftists have been arguing for years that that is wrong--that you should instead take a position that contrasts sharply with your opponent's; otherwise voters won't see a difference and will vote on other issues. Trump's success suggests that neoliberal economics is to the right of the median voter, so the contending positions are that the Democratic Party should move somewhat to the left on economic issues to capture the median voter, vs. the position that the Democratic Party should move significantly to the left to give working class people a clear and compelling reason to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. In the Democratic Party, the “median voter” crowd mostly wins these interparty arguments, but the party moves left regardless of which faction wins.
One problem with your logic. The Democrats should move somewhat to the left *of the Republicans* in order to capture the median voter. Saying that neoliberal economics is to the right of the voter doesn't say that the Democrats, who are already on the left, need to go further left. That's possible, given how general the statements are, but unlikely in practice.
As far as historic examples, you can go later than 1972. Reagan so thoroughly captured the political landscape that Clinton essentially ran as a Republican on most topics, but especially economic ones. He was even more muted on abortion than Democrats today ("safe, legal, and rare"), despite that being one of the defining differences between him and Republicans.
Social media is optimized for showing you people doing Things You Don't Like so you'll get angry. A free market basically allows people to do Things You Don't Like with impunity: how are you going to stop them? With government control of the economy, all you have to do is win an election, and boom: suddenly there's a tariff on Imports You Don't Like, licensing requirements for Activities You Don't Like, and prior restraint on Speech You Don't Like.
TL:DR: Twitter -> "There oughta be a law."
I hate that this might be true, but I fear that it actually is true. Back when we could self-segregate by community, we weren't exposed to the worst actions of our political enemies like we are today. Now it's easy to see real (and exaggerated or fully fake) excesses of our enemies all day every day.
>"Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism?"
Do you have any evidence to support this claim whatsoever, or is it just vibes? Because none of the rest of what you wrote justifies this and half of it is barely even true, or just requires further evidence.
The evidence is the industrial policy in the bipartisan stamped Inflation Reduction Act and all the Trump tariffs. Do you have reason to believe the Republicans and Democrats are as free trade oriented as they were a decade ago?
If you mean free trade, then say free trade. That's just one component of economic liberalism.
Did I fail to cover this in my second sentence above: "Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism." ?
Yes, because your only actual policy example to support the sweeping claim seems to be international trade.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which I invoked as a specific example, is full of subsidies to targeted industries. That is not free-market economics on a domestic or international level. Much domestic trade policy has international implications and vice-versa.
Pure libertarianism is going to be very unpopular. The best a libertarian party could do would be to run on the popular-ish parts of its platform like reducing housing regulation and opposing student loan forgiveness.
"Reforming social security" isn't happening.
Imagine, for a moment, the following situation:
Employees are forbidden from law from quitting their jobs, the punishment being that they are not legally allowed to be employed by anybody. Employers are required by law to give their employees a 40% raise each year. Employers can fire employees at will, who are then free to find another job, at whatever market rate they can get.
Now imagine, for a moment, a deregulatory movement arises, and - the law requiring employers to give employees a raise each year is struck down.
Although the amount of regulation has in theory decreased, and in theory we now have a "more free" economy, it isn't clear that the economy has actually become more free - the law requiring a raise each year wasn't simply stifling economic freedom, it was a check and a balance on the law forbidding employees from quitting, preventing it from becoming too burdensome, and forcing employers to either fork over more and more cash year over year, or to give their employees the opportunity to find a different job.
I think a lot of the last thirty years of market "liberalization" has tended to look a lot more like the situation I described, than the actual market liberalization policy of eliminating both regulations together: A slow erosion of checks and balances, which has consistently favored particular parties over others.
Even straightforward deregulation can be anti-market; consider, for a moment, a regulation that requires power utilities to pay meter prices for solar power. A bunch of people install solar panels. The removal of this regulation might be an improvement, in terms of theoretical economic freedom - but it violates the expectations of a lot of people who made capital investments under the previous scheme. A consistent and predictable legal framework is necessary for a truly free market, and market liberalization efforts have had a tendency to undermine the legal framework under which investments were made.
We live in a society of myriad economic regulations, all of which have figured into individual decisions, investments, plans, preparations. Many of these regulations form delicate balances constructed over long periods of time; removing part of these balances leaves the whole unbalanced. Because "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs", often the deregulation effort to remove on part of a check-and-balance succeeds, and the deregulation effort that would balance it does not.
I think a lot of the erosion of support for free-market economics arises from the consistent failure of efforts to free the market to actually do so, and instead to just create disparities in the regulatory frameworks that advantage some participants over others.
(True free market economics have never been tried!)
I think the biggest problem librarians fail to address is coordination. As usual, our gracious host has a great piece on that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
More seriously, I think this has it backwards: Coordination is literally the thing market economics excels at, and the point where everything else fails horribly and ends up in a Molochian nightmare.
There are some externalities that don't get priced in, but the correct response is to get them properly priced in, so everything can coordinate on it, rather than try to write rules covering every possible case to avoid that externality happening.
Market is mostly excellent at coordination, but when it fails, it does so spectacularly. Roughly call it 80/20 (yes a big Pareto fan here). 80% is awesome and 20% is a death spiral to the lowest common.
That's what the Dewey Decimal System is for
I’ve been waiting for someone to comment on this but it seems that no one appreciates a good joke about an autocorrect typo anymore.
This is a great explanation of why "I am always pro liberalization and market forces" is not always a recipe for libertarian regulation holocaust.
I am always trying to get across to people that while I am a HUGE fan of markets and capitalism, they are simply some of our best economics tools, a lot of libertarian ideas on economics are frankly garbage.
Markets and just general human behaviors have some very well understood failings, and the regulations should be there to help paper those over and help the markets function. So often they just benefit incumbent/politically connected actors.
"Markets and just general human behaviors have some very well understood failings,..."
Market failings are understood because economists study them and have a strong theoretical framework within which they understand these failings.
"and the regulations should be there to help paper those over and help the markets function. So often they just benefit incumbent/politically connected actors."
Political power on the other hand, has substantially more failure points, that are substantially less well understood. Shouldn't you be far more skeptical of anyone proposing to use political power to 'help markets function' ?
Yes, but to me, that doesn't mean 'never use political power'. It just raises the bar it such that laws should only come into play when the benefits are so clear as to be basically undeniable, even if they are produced by an imperfect and untrustworthy government.
The early 20th century antitrust movement, for example, seems like a net positive correction to a market failure. Food and medicine safety laws, too, at least up to a point. I am not making a blanket pro-regulation statement here, but simply that just because government can be more flawed than private industry does not mean that the former never has a role to play.
Have antitrust laws ever been successfully applied to a company that wasn't actively losing market share at the time they went into effect?
Edit:
Also, you should look at an old Sears catalogue sometime. Basically everything that wasn't literally poison, sold for medicinal purposes, is still sold today.
There's also a "triangle waistshirt company fire" effect we should consider: When the fire occurred, there weren't any fire engines that could deal with it. We could say government solved a problem - but government had the same kind of problem! Rather, it looks an awful lot like everybody in a position to do something about the problem was ignorant of the problem.
Then, the real change isn't "government does something", but rather an upstream "people realize there is a problem". Absent the FDA regulating food, people still would have demanded companies do something, after their attention was brought to the issues.
I'm certainly not making the claim that the former never has a role to play, but it appears that my bar for 'when the benefits are so clear as to be basically undeniable, ' is substantially higher than yours.
I would say that libertarian ideas are better than all of the others - it's the implementation that is the issue.
Like when Russia became a "free market" by handing ownership of everything from the politically-well-connected classes in their government roles - to those same people, now "private actors".
Spending tax dollars to build things, and then selling these at closed "auctions" at a pittance to the politically-well-connected is just giving the politically-well-connected money with extra steps. This isn't how a free market actually operates!
But this is how "privatization" so often goes.
Likewise, we'd be better off burning all the regulations and starting over from a clean slate; while this would be bad in the short term, it would at least ensure that the process is "fair".
Instead, we incrementally make revisions, the process overseen by the politically-well-connected, who favor some interests over others, and who use deregulation in the same manner they use regulation - as a second hand in a puppet of the invisible hand of the market, pulling it in their preferred direction.
Free trade I think has been an increasingly big target. And I increasingly think this is actually quite reasonable, but that's a complex topic. For the kind of five-second version of that:
Is it okay to forbid US companies from using unsafe-for-workers production processes, and then have trade agreements that effectively just result in these unsafe production processes being used somewhere else? If it's okay to import goods made using unsafe production processes - why isn't it okay to just use those processes here?
(The longer version gets into "The US is kind of an international country, and to a significant extent we kind of do the international equivalent of imposing harsher regulations on Montana than we do on Nebraska, which results in a general impoverishment of Montana." But also we kind of do a more complicated time-discrimination version of the same, where we impose the same harsh restrictions on everybody, but only after Nebraska got rich first. The rules on sleeping under bridges applies to rich and poor alike - the rules on unsafe labor applies to places that already got rich as well as the desperately poor alike.)
Silicon Valley event February 2011
Barack Obama
“… what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Why can’t that work come home?”
Steve Jobs
“Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Why?
“One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”
I’m typing this on a nice, reasonably priced iPhone, but as someone who once earned a decent living in a difficult but good paying union job I have to say I'm pretty ambivalent about this state of affairs
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
Gary Johnson did have a bit of a moment early in the 2016 general election season, touching 10% in polling averages a few times. The problem was that he failed to convince either voters or major donors and opinion influencer that he had a real chance of winning. He ended up with 3.3% of the popular vote: far more than any previous Libertarian candidate, but still just a footnote to the two-party contest.
Most of the economic classical liberals probably wound up holding their noses and voting for Trump anyway. I saw a variety of rationales: reflexive partisanship, a sense that Trump was bad but Clinton was worse, an idea that Trump was on their side on social issues, the expectation that Trump had little fixed economic policy of his own and would sign whatever Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell put on his desk, etc.
Others voted for Clinton, seeing her as the lesser evil. She had a few things going for her from an economic liberal's perspective: she's a free trader and she's generally aligned herself with the technocratic centre-left rather than the more socialist wing of the Democratic party.
When something is not working it’s not a bad idea to either dump it or change it.
All successful cases since that period are actually good old big government interventionists. China obviously, but South Korea even more so. The electronics chaebols where set up by the government during a dictatorship.
At this point, laissez-faire means let-do to the state interventionists, you do-nothing and just buy their stuff.
Indeed. Notably, a large share of the decrease in poverty took place out of China. The total number (not just per capita rate) of non-Chinese living in extreme poverty decreased by over half a billion in that period (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-decline-without-china).
Also notable, is that China's economic rise during that period was a result of moving towards market liberalization after Mao's death (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin/comment/21923152).
Most of that reduction on poverty actually happens in China which manages to have a Schrödinger economy - red communism and neoliberalism simultaneously
Schrödinger economy. That’s pretty clever. I like it.
I recall buying a pair of slacks in 1981 that had the first Made in China tag I’d ever seen on a garment.
“Communist China???!!!”, I thought to myself.
Working for the world, but working for the American voter?
Yeah this is the big question. It’s good for rich Americans and foreigners. But how well is it really doing for the average Trump voter?
It's been pointed out that if the US had taken the trillions the Chinese poured into the US economy in the form of bond purchases and invested it in infrastructure instead of spending it on foreign wars, many more US workers could have gained from the China trade. So maybe the average voter over the past couple decades was hurt not by trade policy but by war policy.
Well they were for sure hurt by the war policy, that is no argument.
A lot of money basically burned.
A more fundamental reason, than the obvious ones, is that in any economic orthodoxy there must be winners and losers. By definition, the relative power of economic groups must change (even if all collectively get wealthier). Therefore, despite a massive rise in living standards + income over the past 80 years, some groups (e.g. white working class) that were previous beneficiaries of the system are now losing ground. The knowledge economy has supplanted low tech manufacturing and they have less education and are less suited for this change. Moreover, as labour markets became more borderless, some groups were naturally being outcompeted when they previously held higher economic status due to the effect of protectionism of borders. Having a 'more efficient market' being better for consumers is great. But the aggregate increased utility of all consumers doesn't lobby for political change. Instead, groups that produce a sense of 'us' and with a far more concentrated loss than the diffuse collective gain are the ones that lobby for political change. At least this is one driver, eventually the relative losers (some are absolute winners but some live in towns no so destitute they lost in real terms too) were going to stand up and fight back. Further 'creative destruction' or 'move fast and break things' attitude of an efficient market was going to upset people who wanted stability, and did not want to change industry every few years.
Moreover, politics runs in fashions and trying to stand up against the tide gets you knocked over or ignored (Machiavelli outlines this well). So whilst neoliberals still exist, when they pipe up they will be heckled down as part of the old guard that got us into this mess. They need to wait for the populists to do a terrible job to reassert themselves, but even then it will not go back to how it was. The economic losers from that system are now immunised against being tricked into following that path again.
Great Recession. Same thing happened in countries all around the world.
Yes. That’s it. The American elites didn’t care about the rust belt or the loss of good manufacturing jobs, provided China was a source of labour only (like for Apple or other American companies) not a competitor - economically or militarily
Does anyone have a good prompt for getting ChatGPT to reliably do translation? I've been trying to use the free version to translate chapters of a story from Japanese to English using "Please translate the following into English: <text>", but the success rate is less than 50%, and the worst part is that it is really hard to notice the mistakes just by looking at the output. For example, most recently, it just summarized a section of the story instead of translating it, but there's no way to tell that unless you carefully compare it to the original.
You might try few-shot prompting, where you include examples of the kind of output you want in the prompt. You could also try giving it additional structure to constrain the output, ie having it output in JSON format. Here's an example that worked for me: https://chat.openai.com/share/2bf4e7da-c389-4522-b6a0-29578c332a58
I'm not an experienced prompter at all. But the recommendations I've seen are for improving results are
:
-Give the machine a character to play: So you might say, you are a literature lover who speaks fluent Japanese and fluent English. You do excellent translations of Japanese fiction into English, and especially careful to translate each Japanese sentence into an English equivalent of that sentence, rather than simply summarizing the content of several Japanese sentences in one English one. Also you are extremely careful not to [place here all the kinds of errors it has made in previous translations]
-Break the task into steps, and instruct GPT4 to do one at a time in order. I'm not sure what steps there might be. You could certainly include a double-checking step every so often, where if reads its translations to make sure they are free of the kinds of errors it's been making before. You might be able to come up with some more -- like "consult this list of idioms if a literal transltion of a bit of Japanese does not make sense in English."
Would be curious to know if my bits of second hand advice work -- hope you'll report back. They came from Zvi's blog.
I used "please translate the following text from X to Y, while <additional instructions> : <linebreak, text to translate>". It worked with about 100% precision for the rest of the prompt, ~50% for the next prompt (without adding the same prefix), and would inevitably break down after 2 or 3 prompts without re-establishing the request (it would start doing other languages, make up the rest of the text, re-translate an earlier prompt or just repeat my prompt)
You might be pasting in too much text, it gets worse the closer you get to the limit of the context window
Also, keep in mind you have to start a new conversation to reset the context window
Or, if ChatGPT is too hard, I'm also open to suggestions for other online LLMs that can reliably do a good quality translation without sneakily hallucinating or ignoring the input.
Right now, it seems like the best translation in terms of reliability is the (as far as I can tell) non-LLM based Google Translate, which has really bad translation quality, but is at least fast and doesn't hallucinate.
Maybe check out Bloom? I haven't worked with it much, but it's an open source ChatGPT type that was trained on a lot more different languages
Google Translate is better than DeepL?
I tried DeepL for a while, but it didn't seem any better and it had a tendency to hallucinate, so I went back to GT.
Can you give an example passage that you want translated? I've had good experiences with DeepL (and GPT-4 but without any special prompt), so would be interested in seeing examples where it doesn't work well (and experimenting with prompts for 3.5).
Back in April 2023, when I last tried using DeepL, it had a strong tendency to randomly ignore the input and write stuff like "The most important thing to remember is that you can't just go out and buy a new car and then buy a new one." (in a text that doesn't mention cars at all)
However, I just tried it again on the examples of particularly egregious hallucination that I had noted down, and it seems to no longer hallucinate on those examples, so I guess it has improved since April.
Edit: On further testing, it unfortunately still hallucinates and skips things a lot when translating longer texts.
I've been writing a blog about prediction markets and forecasting for awhile, mostly for people who are already interested in these topics. But lately, seeing the legal troubles Kalshi and PredictIt are facing, I was thinking about writing some outward-facing articles about prediction markets, trying to make the case for legalizing them to people who aren't already familiar with them.
Does anyone have any ideas for where I could publish an Op-Ed about this? I'm looking for outlets that have an audience mostly unfamiliar with prediction markets, but who might be receptive, and that are not-super-difficult to get an Op-Ed published in (so not like the New York Times or something). Thanks!
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper
Vox/Future Perfect would be my first suggestion? Kelsey Piper has covered them before in Vox, and Dylan Matthews was on a panel on Prediction Markets & Journalism at Manifest.
Happy to introduce you if you have a pitch (email me at austin@manifold.markets). Though fwiw I'm not sure what their policies or bar for op-eds are.
Amateur geopolitics question/confused ramble:
I've never fully understood what it means to say "the US invaded Iraq to get their oil". The US government doesn't sell oil (right?). What was the exact mechanism by which the US benefited from Iraqi oil post-invasion? I guess they replaced the Iraqi leadership, then "negotiated" a good trade deal with the new Iraq government? Was it something to do with OPEC?
I guess I don't understand the government getting involved with the market like that. Petrol was expensive, so the government started a war to lower the price. But no-one, not even US citizens, asked them to do that - in fact, they had to do it under a pretence. What were the incentives? Did Bush expect lower petrol prices to get him re-elected?
If the price of cherries goes up, the government isn't expected to do anything. If the price of wheat goes up, maybe the government should negotiate tariffs or something. If the price of petrol goes up, apparently it's reasonable for the government to march half a million troops into a foreign country, kill tens of thousands of their citizens and topple their government. I mostly understand the difference between these three commodities, but I don't understand the role the government has in deciding which of these wildly inconsistent responses is warranted.
Imagine you're playing Civ 6. An independent city-state named Saudi Arabia discovers oil within its territory. You send envoys there to become its suzerain, use your technical knowledge to cofound a company there called Arabian American Oil, and therefore secure rights to a portion of this militarily vital and economically vital resource. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia sits right next to a warmongerer named Iraq. What's the best response?
One response might be "station troops in Saudi Arabia". On one hand, this is exactly what the House of Saud asked for. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is full of religious radicals who feel offended that infidels are allowed to desecrate their holy land. Enough that a few of them rammed a bunch of planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
If your next best response is "subjugate Iraq", congrats! You chose just like Texan oilman George W Bush, whose father had to defend Kuwait from Iraq just a decade ago. Perhaps you will build an America that will stand the test of time. (Or not. The House of Saud is actually rather upset that Iraq is no longer a buffer zone between itself and Iran, which is full of another type of religious radical.)
There was also probably a neocon element of "Iraq could use a lil democracy anyway". although this is more justification than motive.
So your theory is that Bush thought Saddam was a total moron? (Not saying you're wrong!)
The U.S. went to war to defend Kuwait, a country we weren't even allied with. Obviously we would have gone to war to defend a country that was already full of U.S. troops.
My theory is, the Middle East was a powderkeg along a variety of dimensions. And more specifically, Iraq had recently launched two gulf wars: a war vs Iran to combat the theocratic revolutionaries; and a war vs Kuwait for not forgiving Iraq's debts during the first gulf war. When the boardstate is too chaotic to calculate its evolution, it might be a good idea to introduce some stability. Ergo, "nation-building". Although I think we both know how that turned out.
Meanwhile, the terror attacks of September 11th gave George Bush Jr: A) a loose excuse to oust a loose-cannon (declare war on terror => Saddam used chemical and biological weapons vs Iran => "maybe Saddam still has WMD's" => "Saddam must be plotting terrorism"); B) a further impetus to keep troops out of Saudi Arabia, lest Allah inspire radicals like Bin Laden to ram more planes into more buildings.
> Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden [...] was a Saudi-born militant who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death.
> He founded al-Qaeda in 1988 for worldwide jihad. In the Gulf War (1990–1991), Bin Laden's offer for support against Iraq was rebuked by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid. Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1992. He subsequently shifted his headquarters to Sudan until 1996 when he left the country to establish a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden
It all ties back to Saudi Arabia. If Bush were to take out Saddam and Osama, Pax Americana would have two less threats, both to its oil supply and its infrastructure.
Also obviously, the United States would have preferred not to keep Saudi Arabia full of U.S. troops, because that has the side effect of airliners crashing into American skyscrapers and government buildings.
I don't know if the US did get any benefit from Iraqi oil, but as a non-American, it's pretty clear the US runs on cheap oil.
Transport - you need cars to get to work and travel pretty much anywhere since the distances are so much greater (see the joke about "in America a hundred years is a long time, in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance") and your entire haulage industry (to get the all year round seasonal vegetables to the supermarkets all the way across the country, etc.)
Think of the fuss about the increase in petrol (gas) prices - here's an article about gas prices "surging" to $3.98/gallon. Let me try and convert that into Irish prices to compare:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-consumer-prices-accelerate-august-gasoline-2023-09-13/
$3.98 = €3.80
1 gallon = 4.5 litres
Unit price = €3.80/4.5 litres = €0.84/litre (American equivalent price)
Irish unit price = average €1.68/litre
Back converting that, we get
€1.68 = $1.76
4.5 litres = 1 gallon
Price is therefore $7.92 per gallon for Irish equivalent. Very roughly, the "surging" price of $4/gallon would cost you $8/gallon in my country.
Homes - heating, air conditioning, running your appliances, showers, you name it, American households need and consume a lot of energy. Differences in construction also apply here.
Manufacturing/industry - probably still hugely reliant on energy generated by oil, even with green and renewable energy.
If oil prices rise to anything near the European levels, your country considers it a crisis to be sorted out immediately, or people will riot. For oil to be cheap, at the range of prices American consumers are accustomed to, supply needs to be plentiful and cheap as can be bought. If oil-producing countries are not producing oil (by attempting embargoes as per OPEC or because of war and other disturbances), America flexes its might to get that oil flowing again (see how shale oil extraction and fracking became popular to access hitherto uneconomic or unreachable resources).
Scott has also mentioned previously the theory that Iraq was about removing the risk of Iraq invading Saudi Arabia, which allowed the US to remove its military presence in SA which was causing a lot of anger amongst the Saudi population and maybe even elites.
> The US government doesn't sell oil (right?). What was the exact mechanism by which the US benefited from Iraqi oil post-invasion?
One time I had a professor argue that the US invaded Iraq for oil. He expanded on this at length over and over. This was around 2006 or 2007 or so. I raised my hand and I asked your question almost word for word and then said, “if we invaded Iraq for oil and now we have Iraq, then why have gas prices gone up so much since the invasion?”
He got a deer-in-the-headlights look and said, “I meant that we just did it so that China wouldn’t have it,” and then he changed the conversation. I wasn’t trying to be combative, I was just genuinely curious. So I asked again later. He was never able to explain exactly what he meant by it other than, the US didn’t want China to have it.
Sometimes it just takes the right question. For me that question is, If the US didn't invade Iraq (again), what would Iraq do with its oil? It would sell it. But we wouldn't let it. It's obvious US policy wasn't about cheap oil, because all we had to do was lift the embargo.
The difference between oil and cherries is that if the price of cherries goes up by a factor of ten, certain pies will become more expensive, while the price of oil going up by a factor of ten will completely wreck the (2000s) US economy. Modern civilization was (and to be honest, still is) very reliant on oil for transportation of goods, persons and agriculture. Many Americans are totally reliant on motor vehicles to get to their place of employment. At the moment they seem to spend an average of some 2% of their income on gas. If this goes up by a factor of ten, while at the same time prices for agricultural goods and goods shipped from elsewhere go up too, this will put a lot of people into a very dire situation.
By contrast, an isolated rise in the cost of wheat seems less threatening. There is always corn and other grains. Humans can adapt to other carbohydrates more easily than car engines can adapt to other fuels.
Charitably speaking, Bush et al thought that if they could pick any one country to liberate and form a mutually beneficial long term partnership with, it would be in the interests of future generations of Americans to pick a country which offers that one resource which could be called the life-blood of modern civilization.
Less charitably, there is a principal-agent problem between what is good for US long term interests and what is good Bush and his cronies. Between his buddies in the military-industrial-complex on the one side, and his pals in the oil industry on the other side, I guess it is easy enough to believe that you are bringing stability to a region vital to the interests of future generations of Americans while your buddies line their pockets with taxpayer dollars and your pals look forward to business opportunities without having to pay the economic or personal costs of the war.
'while the price of oil going up by a factor of ten will completely wreck the (2000s) US economy. '
The price of oil did go up by 10x around the 2000s. Market economies adjust
Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart we did see a sevenfold increase between the lowest price in the early 2000s and the peak.
The gasoline price in the US only increased by a factor of four, though.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epmr_pte_nus_dpg&f=m
And yes, market economies adjust. But that can be a painful process for the people involved. Which might get administrations voted out.
Very different statement from 'completely wreck'.
One theory is that it had to do in part with defending the Petrodollar system. In the early 2000's, Iraq was contemplating selling oil in Euro's rather than in dollars. This is a direct threat to the US dollar's supremacy and status as global reserve currency. The US wants major oil producers to sell oil in exchange for dollars, and then use those dollars to invest in US Treasuries (thereby funding and subsidizing US deficits).
In addition to what the others have mentioned, the connections between Cheney and Halliburton provide some prima facie justification for a conspiracy theory along the lines that one of the motivations for the invasion was not "enrich the US" but "enrich Dick Cheney and his friends." (Cheney was always less convincing than Bush in presenting himself as a genuine believer in the need to keep the world safe from Saddam's WMDs.) Oddly, this version of the conspiracy theory always seemed less prominent among anti-war protestors than the simplistic idea that US was invading Iraq in order to supply its economy's addiction to cheap oil, despite the fact that the simpler version never really made sense as an explanation if you tried to think through the details.
Right. It didn't look good that both Bush and Cheney were oil men. Halliburton really did benefit from the war -- and so did most oil production and service companies, US or otherwise -- because the war caused the oil price to spike. The protestors who believed the war was about driving the price of oil up -- and there were some -- were still wrong about the motive but directionally correct regarding the consequences and how Big Oil would profit.
I got the impression that slogan was largely used as a "Boo" light, expressing overall disapproval of the Iraq War in particular and Bush the Younger's foreign policy in general. Beyond that, there were several shades of underlying meaning that people probably had in mind.
The more reasonable end of the spectrum is that US geopolitical interest in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular has to do with the importance of oil as a strategic resource. It's generally agrees that in the short-to-medium term, it would be a Bad Thing for the US economy if a repeat of the 1970s oil crisis were to occur. I think the claim is that the Bush administration looked at the strategic situation in the Middle East and made the cynical decision to invade Iraq in order to put Iraqi oil under the control of an American client regime in order to ensure US and our allies access to Iraqi oil on the market, and in order to serve as a "pour encourager les autre" example to other Middle Eastern petrostates in case they were considering another oil embargo.
Closely related but somewhat less reasonable was the idea that the worry was not an embargo as such, but rather Iraq and other petrostates deciding to align with China and to sell their oil only to China and Chinese client states. The main flaw with this line of argument is failure to appreciate that oil is fungible and the global markets is not really set up in a way for this to be a major threat.
The more conspiratorial take was based on the left-wing meme that US government policy is corruptly controlled by a plutocratic oligarchy (*), and that in this light the Iraq war was seen as an old-fashioned war of colonial conquests and exploitation. American oil companies, which supposedly controlled the Bush administration, would benefit financially from American occupation of Iraq.
(*) n.b. the Motte of this meme, that corporate interests have substantial political influence due to lobbying and regulatory capture, is defensible and indeed is mainstream Political Economy theory. It's only the Bailey that rounds this influence up to a plutocratic oligarchy engaged in mustache-twirling villainy that I roll my eyes at.
Oil is *the* resource greasing any military or industrial machine. Countries have done wild wild shit to secure oil for themselves, and deny it to their rivals. A Century Of War by Engdahl links oil interests to the majority of geopolitical developments over the past century.
My favourite oil shenanigans has to be Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, disguising himself as a Catholic priest to convince D'Arcy to sell exclusive rights to Persian oil to the English instead of the Dutch. D'Arcy was an Australian mining engineer who was also heavily religious. He was exploring Persia because he thought the towers of flame referenced in the Bible were due to oil pockets combusting. He secured exclusive oil rights from the Persians (due to some favours I think), and was on the verge of signing a deal with Shell (a Dutch company). Panicking, England send over the notorious Sidney Reilly (who James Bond is based off), who disguises himself as a priest and convinces D'Arcy that he should sell the rights to a proper, God-fearing English company. England then erects a company to take on the rights. Thus British Petroleum (BP) is born.
If it ever comes to war, BP will not be securing oil for China's war machine. When it comes to oil, America and England want tight locks on who has access to it, and any government who attempts to strike out on their own oil path (or god forbid, start a nuclear power program) find either knives in their back or bombs dropping from the sky. Until the disgusting dictator is overthrown, and a nice, healthily corrupt democracy is installed.
I mean, Russia is the third largest oil producer in the world, and they will happily supply oil to anyone in a war with the United States. There's no hope of starving China of oil in a war.
Russia can currently only send a small fraction of its oil overland to China. Much of it would have to take a sea route, which could be blockaded by the US.
Naively if you look at a map, Russia and China share a long border.
It may not be great terrain to put a pipeline through (I haven't looked at it in detail). But at the very least, they could build a road and ship stuff in trucks. Neither tends to have the same tender regard that the US and Canada have for BANANA activists.
No, you're not going to prevent Russia and China from trading with each other if they want to.
Building a road through that geography, and running trucks, is only a bit better than carrying it in buckets as far as oil is concerned. Rail is better, but requires a lot of extra infrastructure that takes time to build.
They don't have rail there already because of past tensions (and I think even actual fighting) there, so it's not impossible. It would be easier to build a pipeline there than ship oil in tankers either past Japan or halfway round the world through American-controlled waters if they turned unfriendly.
Slightly less naively, looking at a pair of maps, it looks like the Trans-Siberian Railway passes through Russia's biggest oil-producing region (or maybe just south of it), and that rail-line has a connection to Beijing. But maybe the rail line isn't well suited to transporting oil?
https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/russia-oil-map/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trans-Siberian-Railroad
China is no doubt frantically building up this sort of land-based oil transport infrastructure. Will it ever be as cheap or as efficient as sea-based transport? Absolutely not.
No of course not - it's physics.
Will it be good enough? Yes.
In a war I assume the Russians will get the oil by land or the Chinese protect the shipments.
Last time it was an issue Russia was our ally and we colluded in starving Japan of oil.
Nit, but Shell was originally a Jewish-owned English company. It merged with Royal Dutch around the start of the 20th century, becoming Royal Dutch/Shell, a Dutch-English company. According to Daniel Yergin in _The Prize_, Shell was viewed as "not English" by the English because it was Jewish-owned, despite those Jews being English.
Mostly, “we invaded Iraq for oil” is a conspiracy theory. Bush’s motivations were primarily ideological - and of course he convinced himself (and others) that Hussein presented a serious and imminent threat.
I say mostly because there is a sane-washed version that sort of makes sense:
1. Use war to turn Iraq into an allied state
2. Use Iraqi alliance to make US petroleum markets less reliant on OPEC cartel
3. Lower petrol prices
4. Profit
…but I don’t think this has anything to do with the actual reasons for the Iraq war.
It wasn't just for oil but for resources in general - strategic/geopolitically favourable land, mining opportunities, market opportunities, etc. The personal ideology of one man is a much less believable explanation and arguably more conspiratorial than the much simpler explanation that the US values having control over middle eastern politics and spoils and the people who advised Bush represent these values.
It wasn’t one man - it was the neoconservative movement generally.
They had become convinced that the use of American force to protect human rights around the world was a good thing - they wanted to be the world’s police. In some ways it’s good that Iraq was a disaster, if it had gone well they may well have continued on with a war against Iran.
According to Bruno Macaes, Iraq was largely a conspicuous demonstration of US power projection.
When I go to sleep my mind starts to wander, I think about various problems that happened that day, my plans for the future and so on. Often I start to analyze things, imagining I'm explaining them to someone, for example some physical phenomenon or my political views. I noticed that sometimes it resembles a tree structure. I go from A to B to C, return to B, go to D, return to B, return to A, go to E.
When these things happen I also simultaneously see/imagine moving through space, and It's pretty much always Call of Duty 4 MW multiplayer maps. I played that game years ago when I was 15-17, now I'm in my late 20s.
From my wikipedia knowledge I can tell that hippocampus is involved in memory consolidation and spatial memory and it's active during sleep. Could what I experience be my hippocampus saving memories to long term storage accidentally triggering the spacial memory of those CoD 4 maps?
Also, am I accidentally doing Yoga Nidra? This video by Dr. K (at 5:46 in particular) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hIhFlNMFxY seems to explain the same thing.
Possibly useful info: The stuff you experience on your way to sleep is call hypnogogic imagery. Maybe look that up?
This sounds similar to a "memory palace," in which you remember things by associating them with locations, e.g., rooms in your house.
I recently read this blogpost:
https://www.avabear.xyz/p/megablob-friend-group
It’s basically about moving to SF at 19 and living in a group house with 50 other people and finding your people. It was very inspiring…
I’m thinking of doing something similar. I recently graduated from uni in the UK, and the only time I felt I was with “my people” was at this Effective Altruist conference I went to once. I’m not even an EA, but I felt more energised there than at any other social event. I sense that SF will have a similar vibe.
I was wondering about the actual mechanics of it… how does one find a group house, how do you find interesting work, do random odd jobs etc.
Would love to hear people’s experiences!
I put up a post on this thread about tutoring for the LSAT. It is an excellent random odd job, if you are one of those people who usually score 98th or 99th percentile on standardized tests. LSAT does not require expert knowledge in any field, just reasoning out logic puzzles and answering questions about long, boring, intricate passages of prose.
I imagine I would love to live in some form of a group house, but the logistics of organizing that seems almost impossible.
I wonder, people who rent, do you choose your location strategically to be close to your friends? I mean, not just "I am looking for a place in this part of city, because that is where my friends live", but also coordinating with your friends so that you are looking to two or more places close to each other.
That is, not just treating everyone else's places as a constant, and choosing *my* place to minimize my distance from them, but everyone choosing *together* to minimize mutual distance. Like, even if each of us wants to live separately, we will try to find a street all of us could move to. Are people doing something like this?
I’ve only ever been able to coordinate this in college, when I was part of an unofficial fraternity. Having the organizational structure and leadership allowed us to coordinate on renting four properties: both sides of a duplex on the north end of town, and a pair of adjacent houses on the south end.
Since then, my friends and I have just made our own decisions, without any attempt to coordinate at a higher level. Too much depends on variables which change from person to person. I’m not going to endure a 2-hour daily commute just so I can live on the same street as my friend.
Where the heck do you even find a house that's big enough for 50 people to live in?
At a recent ACX meetup, I talked with someone who felt that when he found rationalists, he'd finally found his people. Rationalists weren't as much of a dramatic thing for me because from my point of view, rationalists aren't that different from (print) science fiction fans.
On the other hand, I don't think they're quite the same, and I think there are differences of style that I can't put a finger on. I realize there's a fair amount of overlap.
Anyway, what similarities do people see? What differences?
Similarities: both rationalists and sci-fi fans are intelligent, interested in technology (both optimistic and willing to discuss dangers), open to new experience.
Differences: rationalists are smarter on average, care about truth, want to optimize the world (rather than just read stories about someone else doing so).
I don't know about science fiction fans, but rationalists remind my of my "not technically a 'co-ed literary society'" back in college. Interesting discussion, with bright people who have varying backgrounds and expertise, valuing intellectual honesty over "winning". And were I of the appropriate age and location, the incestuous social scene sounds quite familiar, too.
Yes, and also people who are interested in a wide range of subjects.
Has he also interacted with a community of science fiction fans? I haven't, so I don't have a reference point. When it comes to intellectual pursuits, there were few, if any, real-life communities I was able to find that matched my interests at all, let alone communities I felt I could fit in with. When I talked to other people about what it felt like to fit in so easily, I was moderately surprised to learn that this is a common feeling when you find 'your people' and not specific to rationalists at all.
He didn't know about sf fandom.
I recently discovered that it's not unusual to find your people at around age twenty. It can be punk, it can even be the pro-ana (anorexia) group back when.
A couple years ago I was extremely skeptical about Russia invading Ukraine, dismissing it as ridiculous. Obviously I was wrong, though to be fair this was before Russia moved troops into the breakaway regions. Between this and the actual invasion, I became preoccupied by adulting milestones and stopped following international news and posting on blogs. On reflection, I'd say that my extreme skepticism of the US government's warnings came from the Iraq War, which was the defining US foreign intervention of my generation (so far, anyways). Consequently I've started giving somewhat more credence to information from the US government.
My question now is which sources do ACX's readers (you) perceive as most reliable when it comes to the big issues of our time? On the Ukraine war, Al Jazeera seems to me the most trustworthy mainstream outlet so far.
Also, personal theory on why military aid to Ukraine has been escalated gradually rather than done all at once, in addition to the fear of NATO involvement and nuclear weapons, which seems to me plausible enough:
The US is looking to potential flashpoints of conflict around the world that's reached a stable equilibrium and where Russia is a significant player. While it wants Russia to "lose" in Ukraine, it doesn't want it to happen so quickly that there are rapid unpredictable consequences in those places. Eg, see Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbia and Kosovo, central Asia, and even India-Pakistan.
We all get to be wrong. But I wasn't surprised that Russia invaded Ukraine. They'd done it before, not long ago. Putin gave his demands in a speech. I was sure he meant the one about Ukraine not joining NATO, because that would put enemy troops some 500 mi from Moscow with no natural barriers. It seemed pretty likely.
I don't trust any of them. I get news from Twitter. I trust it even less than other sources, but since it's varied at least I get lies from different directions. :) And it's a good reminder just how wrong media often is.
I also have a friend from whom I found out the US was close to ending its occupation of Iraq, when big US news sources of right or left, WaPo excepted, declined to cover it (fall 2008). So he's one of my sources. :)
The ACX discord server has a dedicated thread for the war, it has a bunch of people connected to the US military in various ways, as well as just military geeks, and a few Russians.
Probably more important than predicting that Russia won't attack Ukraine is *why* someone did so. There could be better or worse reasons. Try to find out the exact reasons they gave back then (i.e. not their current rationalizations based on what they learned afterwards).
If someone predicted "Russia will not attack because it would be too dangerous, they can instead just take Ukraine and other countries a piece by little piece", I wouldn't blame them.
If someone said (and many people actually did) "Russia will not attack, because Russians are peaceful and civilized people, this is all just the usual evil American warmongering", that person is full of... wrong opinions... and either knows nothing about Russia or is shamelessly lying, so no reasonable person should listen to their opinions anymore.
I was in exactly the same state of mind. US agencies are not in the business of providing truthful statements about the state of the world to the public. Their mission is to further US interests (or the interests of the president in particular). Sometimes these interests are furthered by speaking the truth, sometimes by bald-faced lies. If the CIA announced tomorrow that the sky was blue, I would not take their word for it.
When I heard Nato warnings, I think I mentally filed them as "fearmongering towards some unknown purpose". Boy was I wrong.
I think that geostrategically, making an enemy fight a stupid endless war against a third party is something every power desires. I have no idea if Putin could survive a peace deal and am even more skeptical about him surviving a battlefield defeat. As long as the Ukrainians are willing to do the dying, it certainly serves cynical NATO interests to help them to fight Russia. (Less cynically, helping them fight an attacker also seems a decent thing to do.) Besides, NATO gets to test some of their toys under battlefield conditions. And this time, we are arming a legitimate government, not sponsoring a new faction which will become troublesome down the line (like the Mujaheddin proved to be).
I think the most reliable source of information — still not very reliable — is online conversation in a group with smart participants and a wide political range. I remember seeing the Usenet sf groups as filling that role a long time ago, and to some degree later SSC and its progeny.
Observing smart participants on SSC when I lurked there years ago is how I went from standard college leftie to pretty far right conservative. But it's difficult to spawn discussions on specific topics or questions on demand. Life was a lot simpler when I could just "trust the experts", but the genie left that bottle long ago.
The general split was between the political experts who thought that Putin was bluffing and the military experts who knew that you don’t ship truckloads of blood donations to the frontlines for a ‘bluff’.
Was the shipment of blood donations something that an independent observer could have verified beyond reasonable doubt? Somehow I don't see Putin being willing to let international teams of reporters and experts randomly select blood bags and establish that they indeed contain human blood components.
On the other hand, if the info is based on intelligence sources, then my response would have been to ask if the blood bags were by any chance stacked on top of Saddam's WMDs.
That’s a very good point. And I was definitely extremely on the fence at the time. But I suppose the difference is that the US Government had everything to gain by lying about WMDs, while if Biden lied about Putin invading and then Putin didn’t invade, he’d have been extremely politically embarrassed with no upside. It definitely politically embarrassed Bush of course, but by the point it was already Mission Accomplished on the Iraq invasion.
The Biden administration was pretty clearly trying to deter the invasion, and presumably would have considered Putin not invading a success and played it as such.
Its adversaries would of course have said they'd been crying wolf. But I don't think that would be sufficiently the consensus view to make that success constitute a political embarrassment. Especially since in our timeline the administration's intelligence info in the runup to the war seems to have been pretty good (repeatedly spiking various false flag trial balloons by Putin), so in that one they'd probably have corroborating evidence to help support the case for what had almost happened.
They wouldn't convince everyone, but that's never an option.
> you don’t ship truckloads of blood donations to the frontlines for a ‘bluff’.
You would, if you are smart, and aware that the party you intend to bluff can tell whether or not you're shipping truckloads of blood.
It's an expensive bluff, since blood has a limited shelf life and hospitals can't get enough of the stuff.
Per Wikipedia, platelets have a shelf life of seven days, while red blood cells remain usable for a month. Of course, if it was a bluff, there would be no reason to use unexpired human blood (except for the fact that it would be a more complex conspiracy).
With the benefit of hindsight, the main issue with the bluff explanation is that such an elaborate bluff would require a goal beyond a tweet mocking NATO as a bunch of paranoid has-beens stuck in the cold war. If you e.g. want to feign an attack to distract an enemy from another operation, more civilians dying of blood loss in the meantime is a price most autocrats would gladly pay.
I suppose you could swap out the blood reserves for bags of red paint. But knowing Russian logistics as we now do that would likely have ended with a lot of Russians accidentally receiving paint transfusions.
They're one step ahead of you: the blood in the banks was already illicitly sold off & replaced with paint (/s?)
I suppose the lesson here is that the most internally consistent and well reasoned theories can still be discredited by a single piece of unwelcome evidence.
I also was taken by surprise by Russia actually-for-real invading Ukraine. (Distinct from "Russia asserts sovereignty over contested territories")
In fairness to myself - I thought such a move would be incredibly dumb on their part, and didn't think they'd be that dumb.
That's been a running theme of "Things I have been wrong about" for the past few years. "They wouldn't be dumb enou - ho-lee sheeyit. They were dumb enough."
That’s why I don’t think it was wrong to believe Putin wouldn’t invade—because it has been proven to be super dumb on Putin’s part. That’s also why I was initially certain Putin blew up Nord Stream because Russia had the most to gain by blowing it up…but now I think maybe Ukrainians could have done because people can do dumb things.
There never was any sane explanation for Russia blowing up the pipeline. They could have turned it off, and then would have leverage to turn it back on. I don’t think it was Ukraine either.
Russia almost won the war when it blew up. And they made more than enough money to cover the costs of fixing it thanks to the risk premium…so winning the war and making money are pretty good motives. ;)
It turned out to be incredibly dumb after Russia did much worse in the initial invasion than almost everyone expected it to. It isn't clear that it would have turned out to be dumb if the opening weeks of the war had turned out as expected.
I think the initial phase of the invasion could have gone a lot better for Russia, but even had the invasion gone more favorably for them, it would have most probably still failed.
Kamil Galeev has noted that the Russian invasion force of Ukraine - the largest country in Europe, that had spent the last 8 years modernizing its army after the initial invasion - numbered only 180,000 or so. He contrasts is with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which involved about triple the number of troops invading a country a fifth the size.
He argues that the Russian invasion force was really only fit for; indeed - only intended for - a "special military operation," like the invasion of Crimea, in which Ukraine would put up just token resistance and quickly surrender. It was not up to the task of an actual war.
See e.g. his discussion here: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1511529208576577536, which includes observations from shortly after the invasion.
In 2022 a country having more territory and more old people isn’t necessarily a good thing—Qatar doesn’t want more people and they are very happy with the territory they have. Putin invaded to get crappy land and old people that require pensions and heating. What Putin really wants is more markets to export value added manufactured goods—my recommendation would be to focus on a few areas of manufacturing and do it better instead of trying to find markets for all of the crappy Soviet legacy industries.
This war is not about Putin or Russia making money, whether by grabbing resources or acquiring new markets or any other such thing. This war is about Putin and Russia *spending* money, to get something they want *more* than money. Which, after all, is the whole point of having money in the first place.
From my understanding, Ukraine contains prime farm land. Their grain exports seem to be kind of a big deal for Africa?
Then there is the strategic angle. Access to the Black Sea (and the Mediterraneans beyond), and the Ukraine as one approach to Russia which has to be covered (if you believe in large scale conventional warfare between nuclear powers, which I don't).
Then there is the historical aspect. Russia (or the USSR) used to be one of the superpowers. The switch from "we want to rule the world" to "we are happy with what territory we have and will focus on the needs of our citizens" is certainly possible (I would argue Germany made that transition), but it is also not automatic.
Also, I am not sure that Russia does that much manufacturing these days. I vaguely recall a twitter thread (possibly about avocados?) which made a convincing argument that oligarchies prefer simple extractive industries (such as cash crops or crude resources) which can be well managed by their cliques, while in more complex industries, people with deep domain knowledge are the natural leaders, thus threatening the power base of the oligarchs.
Edit: seems like nitter.net, unlike google, let's you search for old tweets.
The thing I thought of is here: https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388
(Beware, random person on twitter. I found the thread somewhat convincing, but don't know anything about the user.)
> Access to the Black Sea (and the Mediterraneans beyond),
Russia already has a major Black Sea port, but Ukraine has a bigger one. And Crimea has a major Soviet naval base.
From day 1 Putin has been focused on diversifying the Russian economy…they don’t need more farmland. Trust me, Putin is an idiot…and so is George W Bush who is the only Texan that couldn’t find oil and natural gas under Texas. ;)
If you're a broke brainiac, 7Sage, a high end LSAT tutoring company, is sane and reasonably pleasant to work for, and starting pay is $60/hr for tutoring and $100/hr for teaching classes. All work is virtual. You have to get a high score on the LSAT to be hired, though. I believe the cutoff is 175 out of a possible high score of 180. That's about 98th percentile I think. They don't care whether you are going to law school or not, just want to see the score as evidence that you're excellent at the test itself. They are actively hiring now. (I have no affiliation with them -- just happen to know someone who works for them.)
How do the pawn shops actually function, from the economical perspective?
If I understand it correctly, they lend to people relatively small amounts of money with high interest, with some objects as a collateral. They make money either when the interest is paid, or if the objects are sold. First question, what is the typical balance between these two sources of income? Do most people pay the money back? Or is selling the objects actually the main source of profit?
Second question, what fraction of those objects was originally stolen? I mean, if you imagine yourself as a thief, in every place you break into, you find some cash, and lots of objects that are mostly useless to you. If only there was a convenient way to convert those objects into cash... oh wait, there is -- you just have to pretend that you are taking a loan that you are unable to pay back. It doesn't matter if you only get a fraction of those objects' market worth, because you got them for free anyway. Am I too paranoid here, or is this actually an important part of how these things work?
In many states in the US, pawn shops are required to keep ledgers of the identities of sellers, track serial numbers on pawned goods, and share this information (sometimes electronically) with police. This is to cut down on the trafficking of stolen goods.
The one I lived near in grad school had a big sign saying "Checks Cashed / Bail Bonds / We Buy Gold". I presume they bought low and sold high, and took a percentage every way they could.
My understanding of police work is that they do, or did, monitor pawn shops for stolen goods, but I don't know whether that's current any more.
From how they're depicted in fiction, the profit comes in undervaluing the items pawned (because people are desperate for quick cash and will take whatever they can get) then selling the item for full value if it's not claimed. I gather from social history that they acted something like payday loan outfits; people would pawn items of value (e.g. good suit of clothes) then redeem it later in the week when they got paid. If they acted like small loans, then presumably you had to pay a little extra than you pawned the item for when you redeemed it.
How modern pawn shops work, I have no idea. They seem to have morphed into those "we buy gold and silver" places I often see ads for, but the traditional pawn shops must still exist.
The TV show Pawn Stars seems to indicate that you hope someone will pawn/sell something valuable either not knowing it's a collectible, or that you can bargain them down to a lower deal than the price they might get at auction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T84d_DqZ1qA
Pretty much the only thing a lot of people have now that's actually worth something to the pawn shop would be jewelry. It does have the intrinsic value of the metals in it after all.
The "good suit of clothes" dropped in price because of cheap manufacturing and standards moving to the casual.
Small electronics have a pretty short shelf life, and I doubt you can pawn your phone.
Large electronics and furniture are far too bulky.
Musical instruments? How many instruments are for sale on eBay?
The pawn shop has to plan for a fairly high percentage of the stuff being given up, at which point they have to resell it.
Just anecdotally, I’ve spent a little bit of time waiting around in pawn shops, mostly while they process my background check for gun purchases, and I was surprised how many people they had coming in either to pay the loan off or at least the monthly interest. One time I was there 5 o’clock first Friday after rent was due they literally had a separate, pretty sizable line going just for people making payments.
That being said, the dollar amounts on the loans typically aren’t much, maybe $150 for an item that’d get $500 on Craigslist, so there’s a decent incentive to pay it back, even if you’re just going to turn around and sell the item yourself.
I've heard it's a 2:1 split, with the 2 being people never buying back the items they pawn.
I mean there’s a reason why “go chat up the pawn shop owner” is a staple trope in every cop show. That said I don’t know what the actual stats are.
I’m pretty sure most pawn shops do plenty of business in just buying and selling used valuables - some percentage of the goods on offer in the store are foreclosed collateral, but some of its just stuff sold for quick cash.
We had a burglary when we were living in Chicago and one of the items stolen was Betty's viola da gamba. It ended up in a pawn shop, it had the maker's name on a slip of paper inside it, the pawn shop got in touch with him, he told them who he had made it for and she got it back.
What kinds of intellectual development is available to someone who comes to self-diagnose themselves to be temperamentally a "hater" or outright bigot?
Let's imagine someone who openly advocates policies that are invidious, widely characterized as racist, and politically immune to criticism due to the cluster of beliefs they've adopted. The public persona of Trump's adviser Stephen Miller comes to mind; I don't intend here to make a specific attribution that either person is in fact inclined to be a reactive and biased judge of others.
My question isn't about whether these people are "bad." Instead, I'm curious what path is available to someone who feels that, in their most intimate thoughts, they are very tribal, harsh in their judgments of out-groups, and then they come to recognize that their inclinations are truly biased in a distorted fashion.
Is there a path available to such people to extirpate these biases?
In our cultural climate, it'd be inconceivable to openly confess to such inclinations, unless they wanted to simply volunteer as a poster-child for "anti-racists." That camp frankly seems to believe that everyone *else* is as biased as this hypothetical Stephen-Miller-type admits to being.
Are there options for such a temperamental hater-reflex beyond the way functioning schizophrenics can recognize certain voices & beliefs as non-reality based?
What books/blogs/experiences could be developed to help such self-admitted bigots?
>My question isn't about whether these people are "bad." Instead, I'm curious what path is available to someone who feels that, in their most intimate thoughts, they are very tribal, harsh in their judgments of out-groups, and then they come to recognize that their inclinations are truly biased in a distorted fashion. Is there a path available to such people to extirpate these biases?
"Bias" as used here is basically a propaganda term. There's nothing inherently biased or unbiased about having any particular view of one's outgroup, and despite the fact that people who talk endlessly about 'bias' would never say so, its use here applies to an actual majority of political active leftists in the US today. That is, unless you've managed to somehow convince yourself that BLM and everything like it isn't tribalisitic in the most obvious of ways.
The idea that people on the left have anything resembling charitable views towards their outgroup is outrageous. They're probably more harsh in their judgements of ""racists"" than ""racist"" people are of immigrants.
Thinking that races differ in intelligence is called 'bigoted' and 'biased'...but there's an extremely strong scientific case that this is actually a correct understanding of the world. At the very least, it's vastly more scientifically defensible than the racial egalitarianism that a majority of the left have today. So the idea that people who are tagged as 'bigoted' by definition have 'non-reality based views' is absolutely false. Maybe you want to claim that your focus is much more narrow, but any way you slice it either what you're saying applies to vast swathes of the left, or you're simply being baised yourself.
In theory, if your thoughts are indeed biased, exposing yourself to more evidence should correct the bias. But you need to make sure the evidence is representative, that means chosen kinda randomly. If you only notice the minority people when they annoy you somehow, but ignore them otherwise, such evidence is not going to improve your feelings towards them. Problem is, if you are already hostile against them, their reactions to you will probably reflect that. So you need a way to notice them without getting involved; for example notice how they interact with other people.
You could on purpose only expose yourself to the best examples. Note that I am not recommending that as a way to get an unbiased perspective; but if you already decided that you need a push in a certain direction, this could be a way to do it. Also, everyone lives in a bubble; you are already filtering people from your own group -- e.g. as a white person, you probably do not typically meet average white people most of the time, but instead the ones that have similar social class and education as you do.; and then you meet some random black people on your way back from work, of course the latter will seem less impressive on average. Try to find a few best examples of each group.
And there is also the possibility that some of your opinions were correct. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. It is good to fix the mistaken ones, but there is no need to assume that this process will ultimately make you conclude that all people are perfectly identical. Also, you should consider that some things you dislike may be a reasonable adaptation to the circumstances other people live in; and that if you lived in the same situation, you might also do the same simply because you wouldn't have a reasonable alternative.
Shorty: CBT exposure therapy. But I am not sure whether a typical therapist would like to get involved in the politics of racism.
"Let's imagine someone who openly advocates policies that are invidious, widely characterized as racist, and politically immune to criticism due to the cluster of beliefs they've adopted. " This sounds a lot more like a lot of "progressives" to me (e.g. Harvard's well-documented racism against Asians, Newsom looking explicitly for a black female Senate replacement for Feinstein). The application of the label of "racism" in the US is more about how high-status/media-adjacent people choose to label one's ideological preferences than it is about reality (is Stephen Miller really a "self-admitted" biggot? If so he's epidemiologically ahead of many others who seem to claim otherwise...).
It's a bit weird to say that Newsom is racist for explicitly wanting to pick a black female for the job. He's not black. He's also not female. In fact, there are no black females in the Senate right now.
Normally, when you go out of your way to include people from other walks of life, that'd be a model of tolerance. When I think of religious tolerance, for example, I think of synagogues inviting priests to come speak, or churches inviting imams, etc.
Would you categorize those as bigoted, because the synagogue was deliberately looking for a priest to come talk (and thus excluding equally qualified rabbis and such)?
>Normally, when you go out of your way to include people from other walks of life, that'd be a model of tolerance. When I think of religious tolerance, for example, I think of synagogues inviting priests to come speak, or churches inviting imams, etc.
Refusing to hire people of certain demographics is discriminatory, plain and simple, It's just that people on the left only pretend to be against discrimination per se. They just create new definitions of the word to support their discriminatory behavior.
>Would you categorize those as bigoted, because the synagogue was deliberately looking for a priest to come talk (and thus excluding equally qualified rabbis and such)?
This is obviously non-analogous to an actual hiring decision
>Refusing to hire people of certain demographics is discriminatory
I'm not sure that people on the left refuse to hire people of certain demographics. What demographic doesn't get hired by the left?
>This is obviously non-analogous to an actual hiring decision
Can you expand on that? A synagogue hears from rabbis 51 weeks out of the year, and then 1 week out of the year, they get a priest. I'd say that's religious tolerance. Under your framework, it's religious discrimination, because for that one week where they do interfaith outreach, they won't hire someone from their own faith.
I think that's a pretty tortured understanding of tolerance. The archetypical bigot is one who prefers his/her own race/religion/etc. to anyone else's. They think they're the best. It's a very rare bigot who carries a sign saying "Down with me!"
>I'm not sure that people on the left refuse to hire people of certain demographics. What demographic doesn't get hired by the left?
Only being willing to hire a black women means refusing to hire anyone else. You know, the example this comment thread was about to begin with?
>I think that's a pretty tortured understanding of tolerance. The archetypical bigot is one who prefers his/her own race/religion/etc. to anyone else's. They think they're the best. It's a very rare bigot who carries a sign saying "Down with me!"
So if an Asian politician discriminates against black people to help white people, that's fine?
I don't care about these BS labels like "bigot". I care about what actually happens in the world. White college administrators discriminating against white students in college admissions is no less discriminatory than if they instead held black students to higher academic standards to be admitted.
The left act like white people are all one big ingroup looking out for each other, but this isn't true, and this obsession with viewing things as race vs race is nonense.
The Democrats have 51 Senators. 43 are white. I don't think Democrats are adverse to hiring white people. Gavin Newsom is white, for reference.
>So if an Asian politician discriminates against black people to help white people, that's fine?
No, of course not - once you bring in third-parties, you're not going to get ahead by hurting one group to help another.
But hurting your own group in order to help another group? That's archetypical tolerance.
>White college administrators discriminating against white students in college admissions is no less discriminatory than if they instead held black students to higher academic standards to be admitted.
On a philosophical level, sure. Discrimination is discrimination. Of course, if you look through the annals of history, I've never heard of people seriously discriminating against their own kind. It's usually the opposite - can we agree on that?
>The left act like white people are all one big ingroup looking out for each other, but this isn't true, and this obsession with viewing things as race vs race is nonense.
I mean, the topic was about race. If you want to talk about something else - the weather, the movies, etc. - I'm totally game, but hopefully I can be forgiven for responding to a discussion about race with a discussion about race.
If the synagogue advertises that the vacant position of rabbi can only be filled by "Father O'Malley" and nobody else is going to come under consideration, then yeah, I'm raising my eyebrows at that.
I'm not sure I understand. The synagogue wants to have an interfaith dialogue. Meaning for that week (or month or day or whatever), they invite only faith leaders from other religions. Equally qualified--or even more qualified!--rabbis need not apply.
That's religious discrimination, yes?
<i>It's a bit weird to say that Newsom is racist for explicitly wanting to pick a black female for the job. He's not black. He's also not female.</i>
Internalised racism, anyone?
You aren't practicing tolerance if there's nothing to tolerate; you have to have something against somebody in order to tolerate them.
I'm not sure that lines up with the dictionary definitions I'm seeing - they all emphasize differences. You can tolerate differences (for example of opinion), even if you aren't against said opinions.
Regardless, you can use any word you want to describe the behavior. Racist seems like a pretty weird choice of word to describe someone who elevates people from other races above members of his/her own race.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
I'll freely admit that politicians are really big on in-group/out-group distinctions. Republicans hardly ever appoint Democrats and vice versa. So if we want to say that Gavin Newsom is intolerant of Republicans, I'm on board with that.
But it's a bit weird to say that Gavin Newsom is racist against his own racial group. Are we really going to say that Gavin Newsom's in-group is black people?
I mean, I'd say that, if you have an opinion, you, by default, believe that opinion to be correct, which kiiind of implies that you think "differences of opinion" are incorrect. Note that if your opinion is "I like this movie" and somebody else's opinion is "I don't like this movie", you don't actually have a difference of opinion, because your opinions can both be true! No tolerance invoked here.
Now, if your opinion is "This movie sucks" and somebody else's opinion is "This movie is great", then there is a difference of opinion, and odds are if the movie is brought up there is going to be an argument about this, and that's where tolerance comes in as a factor.
And racist seems like a perfectly fine word to describe somebody who holds people of a particular race to be superior/inferior in whatever metric.
Mind, this need not actually apply in this particular case; perhaps Newsom thinks that black women are underrepresented, and this is about increasing the representation of black women, rather than racist opinions per se. There's a lot of imaginary ink to be spilled on that particular subject, but as far as racism goes - this particular case need not be racist.
There's a caveat there, though - what, exactly, makes somebody a representative of a group? Membership in that group? Being chosen by that group? If it's choice, which I think makes more sense, then insofar as Newsom has appointed a black woman, the only person who is truly represented by that specific black woman is Newsom himself. She represents his choices, his opinions, his beliefs; and as we examine this, we must admit that his choice may say something about him, but, failing to say anything at all about who black women would choose to represent them, utterly fails to represent black women. And that is, perhaps, a form of racism in itself, in that Newsom is choosing to represent himself, while pretending to represent black women.
But we could arrive at an entirely different kind of racism if, say, Newsom thinks black women are stupid and will vote for him if he nominates a black woman. Or it could be not-racist and he thinks -everybody- is stupid in this way, and black women are a particular demographic he feels he needs to shore up his support with.
Or maybe he doesn't think anybody is stupid, but thinks this will help his vote strategically in some other fashion.
This whole thing is kind of just reading tea leaves into other people's motivations. But, if he had appointed a white man, we'd still be reading tea leaves!
Discussion about this over on The Other Place seems to be inclining towards if Newsom is going to run for President in 2028, he needs to lock in the Southern Black vote, and since black voters are predominantly black women, then picking Laphonza Butler is the smart move: she's ticking all the boxes for being able to mobilise women and black women voters (work as fundraiser for EMILY's List), union ties, and enough of an outsider that she has no chance at seriously running in the proper election for the Senate seat, so he's not offending any of the three Democrat frontrunners going for that (except Barbara Lee, who seems to be madder than a wet hen that he didn't nominate her); once she's served her placeholder term she'll go back to her normal NGO etc. work and owe him a favour to be repaid in raising support for his presidential campaign among black women voters.
Again, I really don't think that's an accurate description of the definition of tolerance, at least not from the definitions I'm seeing. It also leads to the weirdly counterintuitive result that only racists can be racially tolerant, because people who aren't racist thus have nothing to tolerate. That is 180 degrees from how it's used commonly, and how it's defined.
In any event, I think we have to move beyond just speculating about people subjective motivations. Otherwise, conversation is basically impossible. From what he's said, Gavin Newsom is appointing a black woman because there aren't any black women in the Senate. If the Senate was 100% black women, he'd probably appoint someone else.
That takes race into account, but I don't know that it's racist in the way that people usually use the term.
One possible approach is to discover someone you very much approve of who is a member of the group you are strongly prejudiced against. A non-racial example might be someone who believes all socialists are horrible people and reads Orwell's letters and essays, or a strongly anti-religious atheist becoming a GK Chesterton fan. For an implausible racial example, someone prejudiced against Chinese who is a fan of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris and discovers that the author was (half) Chinese.
I may have become slightly less negative about progressive/woke types since reluctantly concluding that Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, is one of them.
I'm a progressive/woke type, and one of the things I like about Novik is how nuanced she is in her treatment of these topics.
(Spoilers below for Uprooted)
Take Prince Marek, in Uprooted. The first time we see him is a standard feminist inversion of the chivalrous knight — he's an arrogant boor who assaults Agnieszka. He's also not especially bright and mostly serves as a puppet for the Wood. But despite all that, Novik goes out of her way to show his positive qualities: his bravery, his skill, his charisma and easy friendship with his men, and his uncompromising loyalty to his friends and family.
I take Novik to be endorsing the concept of toxic masculinity, while also rejecting the idea that to be masculine is inherently to be toxic,. In fact she holds masculinity up for admiration as much as for criticism.
Best of all, we aren't given a neat synthesis that resolves the contradiction; we're just left to sit with the ambiguity and draw our own conclusions.
What bothered me most about Novik was not in the books. There is a reference to dreadlocks in, I think, the first Scholomance book. She was attacked on the grounds that the term is not politically correct, apologized, replaced a nicely written short passage with a weaker passage. The context does not put anyone down, insult anyone, so the objection struck me as unreasonable and her going along with it either cowardice or, more plausibly, agreeing with the criticism.
So far as the books themselves, I think the only thing that bothered me was in _The Golden Enclaves_, the third book. The link between enclaves and mawmouths worked dramatically, but seen as a comment on the real world it converted a reasonable point about the corrupting effect of large inequalities of wealth and power, on both sides of the relationship, to the claim that the rich get that way by harming the poor.
I believe the only defense of that claim in the general case — obviously it's true in some cases — is the view that not helping is the moral equivalent of harming. If you take that position seriously almost all of us, including Novik, are murderers, since we could have chosen to live on a part of our income, very high by world standards, and spend the rest saving lives in poor countries.
If that's how someone feels "in their most intimate thoughts" it would probably be better to just accept that that is who they fundamentally are. Otherwise, this sounds like gay conversion therapy. Just be a racist; the world will survive. I've known plenty of racists. They do fine as long as they are smart enough not to say anything racist in the wrong situation. Your hypothetical self-aware racist would be self-aware enough to do fine in our society.
EDIT: Society doesn't care if anyone is really racist or not. All that matters is that you act and speak appropriately.
This sounds like the idea in the OP of treating these reflexive ideas as if they are crazy thoughts, which can be rationally critiqued and disbelieved.
Even if these innate biases were as deeply ingrained as sexual preference, a 'self-aware racist' may not derive any pleasure from this inclination, nor would they necessarily believe that the expression of this bias is an intrinsic part of their identity.
Now that I've seen more information about the case below, I agree with you that my post above is not the way to go.
I think of it as being akin to not liking a particular genre. In my case, I don't care for romance novels or movies. My wife is a huge romance aficionado.
So we try to find cross-over type movies and novels, ones that have some romance stuff that I can be exposed to while also giving me some action or fantasy or whatever. Over time, I've lessened my aversion to romance by sheer exposure.
Analogously, I don't particularly like anti-racism as a genre. But I do enjoy history. So I still remember an Asian-American studies class that had a lot of history, but also a lot of serious discussions regarding discrimination and privilege and such. Likewise, I found the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates to be really interesting because he had a lot of historical information that I had never been exposed to before. Over time, my aversion to discussions of race wore down and now I don't find them particularly objectionable even if I don't seek them out.
So my advice is to figure out what you like and then see if you can combine what you like with what you want to consume. If you like romance, there are tons of romance novels and movies that add in social justice elements. If you like fantasy, or history, or action, the same is true. It's the equivalent of a Flintstone gummy - kids want the sugar, parents want the vitamins. Mix the two and everyone's happy.
In this vein, I recommend Lindsay Ellis's video essays as some possible content to explore. The overall genre is moderately-snarky nerdy analysis of pop culture (mostly movies and stage musicals) from a film/literary criticism perspective. It bleeds over a fair amount into social commentary when discussing the impact and cultural context of various elements, and most of this is from a "woke" perspective.
A lot of what I have disliked about "woke" discourse is the attitude more than the content. "Blue tribe" norms of advocacy and debate often rub me deeply the wrong way (specifically, I mostly agree with most of Scott's "things I will regret writing" essays), but Ellis's stuff very rarely does, and her content is one of the most "grey tribe" friendly packaging of "woke" ideas that I've come across.
I totally agree, although I think she hasn't made videos in a while, no?
She started doing new videos again late last year, but she's only doing them on Nebula instead of YouTube. I haven't watched them yet, as they're behind Nebula's paywall and I'm still in the process of talking myself into paying for a subscription.
The most common way to hide internal racist feelings, if people want to, is probably external strong anti racism.
Hiding the feelings doesn't really shift the world view that a person might recognize as tribal antipathy
If nobody can tell your feelings then it doesn’t matter. In fact we should judge people by actions and not words anyway.
This is the target audience for Ibram Kendi and Tema Okun and other anti-racism training workshop runners. Unfortunately, it's unclear that their workshops are actually at all effective.
I suspect this is a very difficult space for effective trainings to get into - between the people who distrust the entire idea that unwanted bias exists, and people who are willing to performatively adopt anything that claims to help, it's going to be very hard for an effective process to distinguish itself.
>This is the target audience for Ibram Kendi and Tema Okun and other anti-racism training workshop runners. Unfortunately, it's unclear that their workshops are actually at all effective.
Absoltuely not!
That's not even close to what they're aiming at. Kendi's audience is by design wealthy white liberals. Trivially so.
There's no empirical evidence that these trainings do anything more than inculcate censorship, rather than a change in worldview.
By analogy, it's similar to the RLHF, which simply changes the mask that the Shoggoth wears.
I raised this question precisely because there's no impact of these so-called "brave spaces" (whether on zoom or in f2f workshops)
What's some of the empirical evidence they inculcate censorship?
I highly recommend How to Think, by Alan Jacobs. It's very compatible with rationalism, but comes at the problem of bad thinking more from the point of view of working the feelings that drive things like conviction that the outgroup is a bunch of worthless jerks that should be deleted from the planet.
Looks interesting, thanks for the tip. The reviews on Amazon are intriguing. Jacobs appears to be capable of appealing to people across the political/theological spectrum. I just put a hold on it at my public library
> In our cultural climate, it'd be inconceivable to openly confess to such inclinations, unless they wanted to simply volunteer as a poster-child for "anti-racists."
Presumably the fact that they believe this is the reason they can't change their views. It's totally false, but if they're only around people who act as if it's true they'll never be able to "give in" to deviating from social norms. The easy (well, physically hard but mentally easy) solution is simply "move to a new place where they're not surrounded by social pressure to not change their mind", and then I would guess that it would happen overnight. It's simply not the case that the current "cultural climate" induces feeling this way in general; it's specific to certain in-groups and particularly people who are immersed in conservative agitation media.
Once they're around people for whom this sentence barely parses as English (wtf is a "poster-child for anti-racists"? 99% of not-racist people are just regular kind people who don't treat other people badly, and for most of the world "anti-racist" just means, be not racist but also assert that people around you have to be not-racist also) then it will be easy to feel differently.
> "anti-racist" just means, be not racist but also assert that people around you have to be not-racist also)
Looks like you caught a case of MSNBC-brain.
"The opposite of racist isn’t 'not racist'. It is 'anti-racist'."
"The claim of 'not racist' neutrality is a mask for racism."
"To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences"
"To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world"
"To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy"
"Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups"
Why are you listing all those quotes? They don't seem to have anything to do with what I said. I also have no idea what you mean by MSNBC-brain, but I've never seen MSNBC so maybe it makes sense if you have?
You may not be aware that the specific term "anti-racist" has been co-opted by a decent-sized slice of American society to have a very different meaning than what you appear to assume it means. That is the point that RiseOA was trying to make.
Also he is under the impression that MSNBC is the news outlet of choice among the demographic which he is quoting from. At a minimum it is true that the term "anti-racist" is used on MSNBC in the way that RiseOA is quoting which is different from how you seem to be using it.
I guess I'm peripherally aware of that co-opting, although citing it that way struck me as kinda weird. I've only ever heard thoss ideas from conservatives and other people who are mad about it. I think they have contrived more edifice around the word than it actually has.
I also occasionally hear the term in everyday usage and I think that the everyday usage better reflects a more non-loaded meaning. Meanwhile those quotes reflect the tenets of a sort of 'civic religion' that they're pressing one to adopt. But one can easily be not racist, and even plausibly anti-racist, without identifying with that religious identity. That's what I do. All the benefits of feeling like a good person and not being unkind to anyone, but without playing the weird political games that TV and Twitter will try to convince you everyone is playing.
I'm of a social strata that honestly doesn't know how to get MSNBC or Fox even if I wanted to, anyway (I guess you pay your internet provider and they install a plug or something? I've never really thought about it.).. It's a nice way to live.
There is no "non-loaded" meaning of the term 'anit-racist'. It's explicitly a political propaganda term.
> But one can easily be not racist
Define racism then
>All the benefits of feeling like a good person and not being unkind to anyone,
Kindness is a meaningless term. Some people think that teaching children that white people are "privileged" or discriminating them in hiring or college admission is perfectly 'kind'. I do not.
>TV and Twitter will try to convince you everyone is playing.
Every major institution in the country is 'playing this game' to some degree. Not only schools but even military academies are including books by black nationalists like Kendi in their curricula. The idea that this is just some loonies on twitter is hopelessly naive.
What evidence do you have that absent social norms, a person's reflexive racist thoughts would evaporate?
Not sure my statement made sense, and maybe that's why I am not following your reply. To try again, with a little more context: Unless one already buys into the perspective of Kendi et al, becoming a whipping boy for their vilification won't actually achieve anything substantive. There's plenty of reason to conclude that the current woke perspective, emphasizing systemic racism, wallows into a swamp of Marxist critiques. As far as their proposed solutions, what exactly do they offer? What evidence is there that the stuff they advocate is any more effectual than the workshopping and slogan slinging?
Also, aside, but in response to most of the replies here you asked some question of the form "what evidence do you have that that works?" Why do you want evidence so much? If being racist is bad then you may as well start trying to stuff and finding out if it works *for you*. The space of "things that work" is necessarily much larger than the space of "things that work and enough evidence of it working has been accumulated to convince you". Maybe you/they should go do some, like, citizen science, find out if it works, and report back! If a person only changes based on evidence they're going to be changing at a 20-50 year lag behind the people who are figuring out what works.
I do agree that self-experiments aren't constrained by what's already been discovered and shown to be efficacious. And even if it only works on 1 in 100, perhaps a particular "self-aware racist" will be in the affected 1%.
In this thread, I've mentioned recommending mindfulness, notwithstanding the paucity of randomized clinical trials for its effectiveness.
What other self-experiments come to mind?
I would think that it's worth trying any suggestion that they get, or maybe if get the same suggestion more than once or something. Trying anything is likely to help. I think that in some weird deeply-rooted neurological sense, the act of "changing your beliefs" and "contemplating changing you beliefs" are one and the same; to even contemplate approaches and try them is to allow a certain amount of malleability to the beliefs. Going about life allowing beliefs to change will cause new information to be incorporated and update to a new belief that has less tension in reality. Like in the racism case, there's an obvious tension: being racist is bad, but being not-racist the way people prescribe sounds degrading and humiliating. Well, when new information is sought out, it'll become more clear (I predict) that being not-racist *doesn't* involve that, and the people who say it is are just not people who should be paid attention to.
My other comment amounted to: "go actually talk to other kinds of people and see what they think". A silly way to do that would be -- go hang out in a quiet bar in a liberal place and strike up some conversations and ask people about their beliefs in a non-judgmental way. Of course that's just a method of trying my particular suggestion; I'm not trying to say it's better than other people's suggestions, just what kinds to mind. But seriously, getting a room or something in an extremely different part of society and just passively "hanging out" with people can go a long, long way to seeing the world differently. I'd recommend it in a non-touristy and quiet part of a liberal town for this particular problem. It is almost a universal rule that people will enjoy chatting with somebody who's open to having their mind changed and curious what other people think.
I guess it's just from personal experience. The person's beliefs (and sounds like yours as well) cause ideas like "to become not racist is to become a whipping boy for vilification" to sound logically coherent. But in the world I live in (in a liberal city in the South) that sentence sounds logically incoherent; it's not even slightly close to what being not-racist means; it sounds bizarre and delusional and heavily decorrelated with social reality. (When you phrase it that way my brain pattern matches to "someone's been listening to Fox News or worse.. and accidentally believing them". No idea if that's true but that's how it parses.)
The fact that the speaker _believes_ becoming not-racist is becoming a whipping boy (whatever that means, I quite literally can't imagine that viewpoint) is the same reason they can't/won't do it. They feel a huge resistance to it! It sounds pathetic and compromising and degrading! If I felt that way I wouldn't do it either!
So the way their mind changes is not "sucking it up and doing it", but dispelling the bizarre belief that makes changing their mind feel like "giving in" in the first place. Because, from experience, having non-racist beliefs doesn't feel like that at all. So if they go and spend time around normal non-racist people, they will immediately find that nobody thinks that way whatsoever (well some loud-mouths on Twitter probably do, but IRL people don't. Maybe you could find a few if you really sought them out.. but you can pretty much just roll your eyes and avoid them once you recognize it's a power-trip thing), so the whole framework just dissolves into nothingness and they can be not-racist without any compromise to their identity whatsoever.
I would guess that your present model of the "current woke perspective" has next to zero overlap with everyday progressives' opinions of what a good way to be is. And I'll happily agree that the woke perspective that you described -- which is not the on people actually hold but it's the one a few people *want* you to think people hold -- is totally toxic. Both sides of that debate *want* you to think that "being good" involves playing some self-sacrificing, degrading role like you described ... the progressive side wants it because gives them moral superiority (as it's implied that they've done the sacrifice and now they're good), and the conservative side wants it because it's obviously ridiculous so it paints their opponents as insane. It's polarization politics at its finest. But if you go and talk to people almost none of them do any of that; they're just casually not racist or not sexist or whatever, in a casual and non-sacrificial way.
My meaning wasn't that being anti-racist is some false posture, or that our society's shift toward greater tolerance and equity is some woke illusion.
I was simply saying that if a person copped to having reflexive racial bias, they'd likely be ostracized; the "poster boy" term assumed that they'd just confirm whatever political perspective others already held. It would not be a promising path to being introduced to effective practices for reducing or eliminating these biases. I don't know how prevalent such racist thoughts and feelings are. I'm pretty sure that it's a tendency that isn't measured in the Implicit Association Test for bias.
I guess I assume, with no way to prove it, that it's not really a thing that anyone has actual internalized un-changeable racism that they're just suppressing. I assume that "having a reflexive racial bias" is a learned thing that can be unlearned. Probably by figuring out exactly where it comes from, or figuring out exactly why the person is so persistent in not unlearning it. That's just based on how I think people work, and I guess I would be not terribly surprised, but probably disappointed, to find out that I'm wrong.
Like, I've felt racist-adjacent thoughts before, although in my particular life my resentment for other groups has been more around social classes than race. But I eventually realized I was feeling them at the same time that I figured out why: resenting a type of person for, say, embodying ways of living that I was anxious about in myself, or resenting people because I was accidentally blaming them for a problem that really wasn't their fault at all but I didn't have any other way to cope with, or just for having values very different from me that offended me by their existence. Whereas in fact everybody feels things like that... the difference between "shrugging and ignoring people who are different" and "having resentment about them infect all your thoughts" has a lot more to do with how secure and self-assured we feel -- that we don't have anything to prove by putting other groups down or changing others' minds or actions -- and not at all with their actual existence or beliefs.
All speculation of course.
Mindfulness meditation is intended to achieve an effect that might be useful for the sort of person you are describing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness
Here's a publication that seems relevant https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614559651
Their manipulation was to listen to a 10-min mindfulness exercise, and their dependent variable was impact on Implicit Association Test (IAT).
Both the intervention and the DV seem pretty weak sauce
This pub was suggested by GPT4, but it's not a hallucinatory reference
https://chat.openai.com/share/a3cf2b10-f5ad-4b57-a33e-7f41b7c528cf
I've also advocated this path. Since it'd be pretty hard to get people outside of the KKK to cop to any racist impulses, there's probably no evidence that can be collected to document the extent of its efficacy.
Distrust your own judgement - semi-radical epistemic scepticism.
Making judgements about things you feel strongly about that you can be confident are unbiased is really, really hard - if you think you can do it, you're more likely than not just being too charitable to yourself. (Often merely /making/ correct judgements about things you feel strongly about is much easier - the hard part is distinguishing the flawed ones from the unflawed ones).
But recognising "this is an area I have strong feelings about that will cloud my judgement, so even though this seems obvious to me I must keep in mind that it may still be false" is merely very hard.
The aspiring rationalist movement does not provide mental tools that will let you be confidently right most of the time. But it /does/ provide good tools to avoid being confidently wrong, if you're willing to pay the price of using them.
The person who confided this to me is pretty engaged in the rationalist worldview. The question they raised wasn't about distrusting their reflexive bias. Rather, their hope was to find some way to silence these atavistic reactions, since they're recognizably noisy garbage
My experience with meditation and mindfulness suggests that the recurrence of my thoughts is related to how much I engage with them.
Lately, I've gotten interested in radar jamming and deception, and in the countermeasures that are used against the jammers/deceivers. It's hard to find simple, clear information on what the state-of-the-art of these technologies are. Does anyone know about it?
Here's one question I have: if a radar is being jammed, it can solve the problem by switching to a new radio frequency. Of course, the jammer can quickly figure out what the radar did and then switch its own jamming signal to the new frequency. The solution seems obvious: Install simple computers in the radars that randomly switch frequencies once an attempt at jamming is detected. Aside from just jamming ALL radio frequencies, how can the attacker overcome that? Random switching is impossible to predict, so it seems like the defender should have an enduring advantage.
Another question: I've read that each military radar has unique strengths and weaknesses, and a specific kind of electronic "signature." Data on these factors are very valuable to enemies. What are examples of those strengths and weaknesses, and what defines a radar signature? Isn't a radar a radar?
Thanks for the great responses, everyone!
Erica's reply covers the jamming aspect fairly well (i.e., it's complicated, as you might expect, and often the goal of jamming isn't to completely "blank out" the target radar but to create spurious returns - this has the advantage of the opponent not simply turning the radar off, which is especially helpful if you're serving your jamming with a side of anti-radiation missiles), so I'll answer the other question. (Note - it's been over a decade since I worked in this area professionally. Any errors are due to my faulty memory and attempts at oversimplification.)
No, radars are not equivalent. At the most basic level, a radar signature is composed of simple measurements like wavelength, pulse repetition frequency, etc. This basic info is enough to generally categorize a radar by type: navigation, fire control, air search, etc. For example, the higher the PRF the more precise the radar's ability to distinguish targets - which is why a signal with a very high PRF is going to be coming from a fire control radar and not navigation.
In practice, militaries build up an electronic order of battle with information about the expected signal characteristics (the "signature") for radars known or expected to be in the target area, making it much faster to match a signal to a specific type of transmitter. This info comes from technical analysis of imagery or descriptions of the radar system, open source reporting, espionage, and keeping electronic surveillance gear nearby when a potential adversary is conducting exercises / actively fighting. (This is why you'll see the US position surveillance aircraft / ships near exercise areas.) Collecting signals from exercises / operations is particularly useful because operators will generally only use some frequency bands or vary techniques (types of PRF jittering, etc.) during active operations to confuse those electronic order of battles drawn up with incomplete information. (These are called wartime reserve modes.) The more signals you can collect from your opponent's real/real-ish world use the better.
All radars will have generic strengths and weaknesses based off the general function (fire control will have shorter range, etc.) and tradeoffs are made for a specific system based on how it's meant to be employed, plus radars will have specific modes that have their own strengths and weaknesses. Strengths / weaknesses here means things like dead zones, target discrimination ability, range, and so on. Multiple types of radars can be fed into a single system to help even out the weaknesses, and phased array radars can electronically form the radar beam in multiple ways to allow for tracking individual targets with enough fidelity for fire control while still scanning in a broader search mode in other sectors.
One problem with naïve "jamming" is the power budget required. In order to brute-force jam a frequency, you need to broadcast noise loudly enough to drown out the signal at every receiver you're trying to jam, and thanks to the inverse-square law that turns into a shit-ton of power when you're somewhat distant from your jammer. And the more frequencies you try to jam, the harder the problem gets: if you're trying to jam 100 frequencies, then you need 100 times as much power. Your opponent is only trying to use one frequency, so their power is 100x more concentrated than yours. You can overcome this by having a lot of small jammers closer to the thing you're trying to jam (inverse square law again, so being 10x as close is as good as being 100x as powerful), by following the frequency hops when the radar switches frequencies, by using stealth to make the signal as weak as possible so you need less noise to obscure it, using a highly directional transmitter to jam the particular target, biting the bullet and pumping an unreasonable amount of power into your jammer (may be workable if you're e.g. a major warship trying to jam a missile's on-board targeting radar), or by using more sophisticated ECM rather than brute-force noise. Also, the inverse-square law hurts radars twice: the strength of your signal when it hits the target is proportional to r^-2, and then the return that gets back to your antenna from your antenna is another r^-2 of that, for a total of r^-4.
A common form of "more sophisticated ECS" is DRFMs (Digital Radio Frequency Memory), which record incoming radar pulses and play them back with a delay, mimicking an actual radar return. DRFMs can be configured to modify the played-back pulse in a variety of ways, increasing the delay (making the return look further away than it actually is), modifying the intensity up or down, changing the frequency (changing the apparent relative velocity of the radar and the target), etc. "Range-gate stealing" and "velocity-gate stealing" are search terms for two of the classic ways DRFMs can be used to mislead radar operators.
Another problem is that receivers are usually directional, specifically configured to pick up returns from a fairly narrow range of directions. So if the jammer is to the east of you and the thing you're trying to radar is to the north, you just point your antenna to the north and cheerfully ignore the jamming. This is a little harder than it sounds, since antennas have unavoidable "sidelobe" directions where they also pick up some signal (positioning your jammer in a sidelobe being a major technique in electronic warfare), but it does make the problem of jamming a lot harder since your jammer needs to be either close to the same direction from the antenna as the target or in a specific sidelobe. Modern electronically-configured receivers make this even harder for the jammer, since these come with the ability to reconfigure the antenna and its sidelobes on the fly, or even to put a small blind spot specifically in the direction of the jammer transmitter. I'm not sure of the counters to these, apart from this type of receiver typically being big and expensive so not everything you might want to jam has this capability.
As for valuable data on military radars from an ECM perspective, these include the size and shape of the antenna's main targetable area and its sidelobes, the range of frequencies it can generate, how long its pulses are and how often it pulses (used for range-gate stealing), and so on. Signatures are also useful for identifying a radar. You detect a signal from an enemy, and you know it has certain characteristics (frequency, intensity, pulse length, pulse rate, etc). What is it? Is it an air-defense tracking radar? A civilian air-traffic control radar? A fire control radar? An incoming missile's homing radar? How you respond to each of these things is going to be very different, so it's handy if you can tell which one you're dealing with.
Is it fair to say that this sort of thing is what aircraft like the EA-18G Growler do? And that the large power budget required is why this is a task for a whole damn specialised aircraft rather than just some kind of module attached to a regular Hornet?
A few months ago I was trying to find out what the Growler actually does, but all the sources I could find were incredibly vague.
Aircraft like the Growler are built to carry much larger antennae, to loiter (which fighters are not built to do), and to carry a large crew of specialists to operate the very specialized equipment. There are some bolt on units for SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) attack craft, but they are much more limited in what they can do.
You might be confusing the Prowler & Growler; the latter is an EA-18G, built on largely the same structure as the F/A-18F Super Hornet (a fighter) and has a crew complement of 2 including the pilot (so hardly a large crew of specialists).
You're correct! Thanks for pointing that out.
I'm not familiar specifically with the Growler, but given what I do know I suspect it's a combination of power budget, the transmitters and receivers themselves (sounds like the Growlers has multiple electrically-steered radar arrays used to project ECM signals in narrow beams onto specific targets), and specialized hardware to calculate what signals to send (the DRFMs I worked on in the mid 2000s were about the side of a shoe box for fairly basic capabilities, and the Growler presumably has much more sophisticated hardware in its suite).
Much of the discipline revolves around ways to distinguish a genuine reflected pulse from whatever may be coming out of a jammer (the latter, for instance, is usually stationary, as opposed to a valuable target, which is normally an aircraft in motion.) That, and the currently-fashionable pill against radar -- RF-seeking munitions.
Plenty of open-lit sources on the subject, e.g. D. Adamy's "A First Course in Electronic Warfare".
I don't want to read a 330 page book.
I bet there are a lot of pictures! Jk
But you should consider reading https://www.navalgazing.net/. Bean used to drop long form comments into the old SSC, but now he had his own blog, and has probably a dozen good articles on this topic, from various angles (systems, tactics, aircraft etc.)
If levered ETFs are such a bad investment, why is the UPRO ETF (it's 3x the results of the S&P 500, calculated daily) up about 40x since 2009? If I'd put all of my money into UPRO on June 26th 2009, wouldn't I now have around 40x that amount? It was $1.26 on that day (its inception), it's about $40 today. The S&P 500 has increased about 5x in that time. Seeing as we're all investing in index funds with the assumption that they will eventually go up, isn't buying (index fund but 3x) at least 3 times as good?
Yes, I know all of the arguments against levered funds. Yes I understand that 3x leverage is only good for the day, not a longer period of time. Yes, I want to emphasize in all caps that I understand how volatility decay works- that it will fall more in market downturns, that it can actually have worse results than its index under some conditions (I think this was true for 2020). Yes I understand what a drawdown is, and how the arithmetic around them works. I get all that. But- my simple observation is that UPRO is up 40x since 2009. If volatility decay & drawdowns are such a bad thing, wouldn't it *not* be up by so much?
(Please for the love of God do not give me an explanation that includes how volatility decay & drawdowns works. I get it, I promise you)
Does the 40x return account for the several times it has done a reverse stock split?
Isn’t it really simple though? 2009 was the start of an enormous bull market. The drawdowns weren’t big enough to blow up the leveraged fund. If you believe a bull market will keep going (note: we’re in the 3rd year of the Presidential cycle, the best-performing year historically), by all means buy a leveraged ETF.
You may be interested in "hedgefundie's excellent adventure".
Anyway, yes, as you seem to mostly understand, it would have higher EV, but it's not guaranteed to always go up in the long run like the plain index fund is.
Is there a reason you're specifically looking only at a start date in 2009? I would recommend looking at a variety of start dates, including start dates both just before and just after major market events, rather than only looking at one that starts near the bottom of the last cycle.
Yes, the inception of UPRO was June 26th, 2009. To my knowledge there were no levered ETFs before the mid-2000s.
As mentioned below, there have been 2 market crashes during its existence, 1 of them being one of the worst ever. Still up 40x
You can easily simulate returns before 2009 by importing historical SPY data (e.g. from Yahoo Finance) into Excel (or e.g. Pandas) and letting it calculate. I highly recommend doing it manually rather than relying on prepared data, as volatility decay is one of the most misunderstood topics in finance. Also, you can calculate Sharpe or Sortino ratios and compare them this way.
If you invest 1000$ in a 3x levered ETF and the market doubles, then you end up with a profit of 2000$. But if the market drops by half, then you make a loss of -1500$, so on top of your initial investment you have to pay a debt of 500$.
For most normal investors, even the risk of losing everything is not acceptable. But the risk of losing all your initial investment AND getting additional debts on top is just not acceptable.
You point to one success where the gamble pays off. But sometimes it does not pay off, and then investors are in really bad trouble.
Re: your 1st paragraph- this would be true for buying something on leverage, but not a levered ETF. You would not have a debt using a levered ETF, that's just completely wrong.
>You point to one success where the gamble pays off
This 'one success' is the last 14 years, which includes 2 market crashes, 1 of which was a 34% crash and one of the worst of the last century
Uhm, sorry, no, then I don't understand how they work. In the product that I know of, you can go into debt.
And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not. Because those cause heavy volatility decay. This is a black swan event, so there may be many or few of them, and this is quite random even over 15 years.
For the UPRO, it won against S&P500 in the first years, where there were relatively few heavy crashes. In the last 5 years, S&P500 has won against UPRO, so that is a data point against the thesis that levered ETF are generally performing better.
In general, leveraged instruments do not drive expectation up or down, at least not if the stock development is the same as the cost of borrowing money. They are not "worse" or "better" in this sense, and I don't see a reason to expect that levered instruments are generally beaten by their underlying indices, or vice versa. But they increase variance, and usually the two goals of investment are
1) high expected return (primary),
2) low variance (secondary).
So to the normal investor, leveraging does not help with 1), but makes 2) worse. That's why they are not such a good investment in standard situations.
>In the last 5 years, S&P500 has won against UPRO
Again, just false. Returns from UPRO have exceeded the S&P 500 in the year we're in now, 2021 and 2019. You can just download the results from Yahoo Finance and check yourself.
>And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not
If I don't have any plans to sell, what do I care about the day-to-day volatility? Using that logic I wouldn't be invested in stocks at all
>In the last 5 years, S&P500 has won against UPRO
I meant that over the whole time period of the last five years, S&P 500 has won. Though the difference is pretty small, 49% vs 48%, so it might be fairer to call it a draw.
>>And the gamble is whether there are relatively many heavy day losses or not
>If I don't have any plans to sell, what do I care about the day-to-day volatility? Using that logic I wouldn't be invested in stocks at all
That's exactly the volatility decay that you asked NOT to explain. A levered index suffers extremely strongly from black swan events, relative to the index fund. If there are 1000 days where the index loses 1% each, and 1000 days where it gains 1% each, then the levered index will suffer a factor of 0.45 compared to the index. If there are 10 days with 10% loss and 10 days with a 10% win, it will suffer almost the same factor of 0.43. If there is a single day with 25% loss and a single day with 25% gain, this is again almost the same factor of 0.47.
So 1000 days with 1% loss (plus recovery) are as important as 10 days with 10% loss are as important as a single day with 25% loss. Black swans are extremely important for leveraged investment, and the most extreme ones are most important. If you have few and mild black swan daily losses, the levered fund is better. If you have many or hefty ones, you want the original index. And for the levered fund it makes a huge difference whether a severe loss is spread out over a week or happens in one day, so saying "the market lost 30% in a month" doesn't tell you much about whether that was a problem for the levered funds or not.
Even over a long time period, black swans are rare, and their number and extremity can vary a lot. I don't think it's literally true that single events dominate everything; my numbers were a bit too extreme, though not completely off the records. But still, that's why I am not very impressed by a single data point that spans 14 years. If you show me that similar numbers come out for other indices or other factors (2x, 5x, .... Well, we know what comes out with 10x), then I'll be more impressed.
>I meant that over the whole time period of the last five years, S&P 500 has won
SPY ETF on the market open of the 1st day of 2018, 267.839996
On the market close on 9/29/23- 427.480011. Up 59%
UPRO ETF on the market open of the 1st day of 2018, 23.576668
On the market close on 9/29/23- 41.169998. Up 74%
Re: the other stuff- but we had a black swan event called Covid, and we experienced a top 5 worst market crash we've ever had, and yet UPRO still beat SPY. You can't get any more black swan than Covid, I believe the Russell 2000 dropped like 40% in a day or something. It probably helps that *UPRO just about doubled in both 2019 and 2021*, I think that clearly more than helps make up for it, yes?
My original question was, here's a 14 year stretch with 2 separate large market crashes, and UPRO still outperformed its index. How bad can it be? I want to discus real world performance and not theory. I didn't want to hear boring 'well in theory' arguments, but you appear to have them in spades. My response is, if the black swans are so bad with levered ETFs, why did we experience 1 of them and yet it still came out ahead? I want people to *explain the real world data, not resort to theory*, and you seem unable to do that.
I don't want to hear a response that doesn't explain 'why did UPRO beat its index even after we lived through a black swan event'.
BTW, every single argument that you have could work just as well if you replace UPRO with 'stocks'. Stocks are prone to black swan events, the losses are worse than the gains, etc. etc. They experience decades of declines- the 30s, 70s, and 2000s. Japan still hasn't reached its early 90s market peak 30 years later. You could use that argument to be 100% bonds and 0% stocks. But we risk stocks, and in exchange experience higher returns. It appears that UPRO is just a higher risk/higher reward venture, no?
I suppose the answer could be that, if we hit another decade of market declines (like the 30s or 70s or 2000s), UPRO would obviously have a much worse result than its index, and so even after such a time period is over one would be starting a new market upturn from a lower net worth. But still- buying UPRO in 2009 is still better than buying SPY (the S&P 500 ETF), that doesn't change that fact
Yes, that's useful if you have a time machine, but you can't buy UPRO in 2009. You can only buy it in 2023. Will the next 14 years look like the last 14?
This has been looked at. It started with a major thread on Bogleheads (look up 'hedge fundies excellent adventure' or HFEA) that did a deep dive, and backtested across 40 years. The conclusion was that an all-equity levered portfolio was extremely unstable, and could underperform or even lose money across a long time period (10+ years). Going with a mix of both a levered equity and a levered bond fund helped, but only to a point.
There's still a lot of unknowns. Backtesting is imperfect, and may not account for all the factors that could come into play. And, of course, it's easy to get excited about a strategy like this in the wake of a very successful decade. But there's a reason nobody has yet concluded that these funds are the best choice for the average long-term investor.
I started a small HFEA allocation on the side, just for fun. Haven't decided if I'm going to increase it. But I'm far too close to retirement (10 years ideally) to risk my core position on it.
>But still- buying UPRO in 2009 is still better than buying SPY (the S&P 500 ETF), that doesn't change that fact
And since 2009, you would get even better return than UPRO with Bitcoin. Both instruments are riskier than S&P 500, and in this particular period, that risk would pay off.
Are there any big multi day events that gather a lot of this crowd? Rationalist group vacations?
The Less Wrong Community Weekend, a four day event, just happened a week ago.
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mSXghzqfsKEp46rJK/lesswrong-community-weekend-2023
Any idea how can I receive an update next time?
https://www.lesswrong.com/upcomingEvents
I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to ask. I also heard through word of mouth.
I've been thinking about the tactics of a situation where multiple candidates are competing for a nomination, might write a substack post about it, was hoping to bounce ideas off people here and, hopefully, get some new ones.
Consider, first, a campaign without an initially dominant candidate, the Democratic campaign in 2020 not the Republican in 2024. Different candidates appeal to different groups of voters. The more candidates are splitting the votes of a particular pool, the fewer votes each would get. So it would make sense for two or more candidates who appeal to the same voters to agree that all but one of them will withdraw.
If everyone agrees that they are starting with equal chances of winning the nomination they could use some random method, perhaps rolling dice, to decide who stays in. Ex ante that improves the odd for all of them, since if they are not splitting the votes the chance that the nomination will go to one of them goes up. If their initial chances are not equal but they agree on what they are, they can do the same thing with weighted odds. If they cannot agree on what the chances are, perhaps they could agree that whichever of them does best on three selected polls will stay in, the others withdraw.
Next consider the current Republican race. The candidates face a choice between two approaches. One is to assume that if Trump remains in the race he will win it and aim to be the candidate if Trump has a heart attack, or is assassinated, or for some other reason drops out of the race. The candidate will want to pick up Trump's voters so should be careful not to attack Trump.
The other approach is to try to beat Trump for the nomination. That looks very difficult at present but not impossible. It might be a more plausible approach in a situation where there is a leading candidate but with a smaller lead.
One version of that approach is to be the anti-Trump candidate, in the hope that the primary voters become disenchanted with Trump's approach. That is the tactic that Chris Christie is attempting. Another is to out-Trump Trump, as Ren DeSantis is attempting.
Comments? Other approaches?
>So it would make sense for two or more candidates who appeal to the same voters to agree that all but one of them will withdraw.
That only makes sense if the candidates are optimizing for the chance that someone from their ideological cluster will win. I don't think any serious candidate for high office does that. They optimize for the chances of themselves, personally, attaining the office, hang those other guys. If they're unlikely to achieve the office in question this year, they may optimize for being appointed to some high-level supporting position (e.g. vice-president or secretary of state), or for positioning themselves to win in the next election cycle.
Dropping out, pretty much minimizes the chances of any of those things happening. At least if you drop out before someone gives you a firm offer of the vice-presidency or whatnot.
Agreeing to drop out if you lose a coin toss or whatever, might make sense in this context. But then, so does coming up with a cheap excuse to reneg on that deal if the coin doesn't turn up in your favor - this isn't at all a standard kind of deal in politics, so this little bit of game theory won't be iterated. Just this once, where staying in means you *might* win and dropping out means you *definitely* lose.
This isn't to say that candidates for high office don't care about their party or their ideology. But by the time you reach the point of being a serious candidate for e.g. POTUS, you've passed through *many* gates where you had to choose between advancing the party or advancing your own career. That selects for people who sincerely believe that the party, ideology, whatever, absolutely needs *them* in a position of great power, and that *they* are the one who can win the general election, not one of those supporting characters who aren't up to the job.
Should the cost of running and losing be figured in? Even if a candidate likes campaigning (how many do?), there's still opportunity cost.
It seems to me that there might be a personal advantage to not running if the odds of winning aren't good.
Depends how good your fundraising is. You personally may end up spending very little.
In money yes, but not in time and effort.
Of course it could be that you enjoy spending a chunk of lifespan in that way. Some of the "perennial candidates" in US political history have seemed as if they did.
I was assuming that the candidate's objective was to win but also that the agreement to drop out after losing the coin toss or getting the lower poll result was in some way enforceable.
I think John makes a good point that it's not enforceable. The lack of historical examples seems good evidence that it's not.
Isn't modern democracy per se predicated on the assumption that the losers reliquish power voluntarily, in the wake of an election (which is essentially a poll)?
Lots of people have dropped out, including most of the Democrat field in 2020, to make way for another candidate.
We're not privy to the conversations or what was offered/threatened, so it's difficult for us to determine the likelihood or what it takes.
In 2008 I believed Fred Thompson was working with McCain in SC to take away votes from Huckabee and people close to the situation confirmed that is what happened. And in the TX AG race in 2022 Louie Gohmert gave up a safe seat in Congress to take votes away from Paxton in order to help George P Bush. And on the primary Election Day out of nowhere Forbes broke that George W Bush was the target of an assassination plot…does Forbes routinely break stories like that?? Anyway, powerful forces were at work in 2008 and 2022.
I don't think there's any hope of a Republican getting elected as an anti-Trump candidate. If Trump goes to jail and his reputation is ruined, that still doesn't change the reason that he is popular with a large segment of the population. There might be just enough room to thread the needle on "I support what Trump is doing but not Trump the man" - which I think is what DeSantis is trying?
Yes if Trump goes to jail it don’t be like Nixon where the voters turned against him, post impeachment. It will confirm him as a martyr in the eyes of many of his followers. The media and justice system are seen to be biased in a way that’s fairly new in history.
And there are precedents around the world of jailbirds elected president: Chavez, Mandela, Havel...
And some, like Mandela, are pretty much universally accepted despite (or even because of) their time in jail.
I think the key is understanding that not every jail sentence is just. When Putin put Alexei Navalny in jail for various things, nobody considers that legitimate. If Trump becomes the first former president in history to go to jail, with the flurry of charges against him (many of which are novel, stretches of legal theory, or straight-up bunk), then there's every reason to believe that at least his supporters, and likely some number of independents, are going to find them to be illegitimate. If the AG of New York can get elected on an explicit ticket of indicting Trump, without identifying what crime was supposedly committed prior to making that claim, there's a big problem. People aren't dumb, they can see what's going on there.
The fact that some of the charges may have been made against other people at other times doesn't do much against the fact that there's about 10X as many that no one, let alone a former president, would have been charged with.
Yea. Now, DeSantis has turned out to be surprisingly inept in that attempt. (At least surprising to me as a non-Floridian, I tend to assume that anyone who's gotten himself twice elected governor of a large state has some campaigning skills and/or some attractive personality traits.) But the idea was always a long shot regardless.
The challenge isn't Trump being widely popular by the politically-relevant definition of "motivates them to go vote for him"; he isn't. He lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020 after all; and given the turnouts in those elections only a bit more than a quarter of American adults actually voted for Trump in 2016 and/or 2020. But....many of those who do want to vote for him _reeeeally_ want to, that's been his secret sauce politically. They would be extra-hard for anyone else to peel off regardless of how skillful that candidate was in the effort.
Interestingly, they see Trump as genuine. Not that he doesn't lie, or that he doesn't try to cheat his taxes, or your typical measures of honesty. That he is genuinely in their corner. The problem for his enemies is that they don't seem to really get this. When they attack him, they are doing the one and only thing that guarantees his supporters see him as staying genuine. As long as his enemies are the his supporter's enemies, as evidenced by them going after him in the media, courts, everywhere they can, they are locking him in. Maybe that's on purpose at this point, to avoid a better (general election) candidate running, but it was definitely not on purpose to start. They thought that their attacks would have the customary effect of tearing down who they didn't like, but due to how much they themselves were hated, it had the opposite effect.
>it was definitely not on purpose to start.
I genuinely think CNN really did want Trump elected the first time around because they care more about people watching their trashy network than about what is good for the country. I think they knowingly helped get him elected. And they are doing it again, knowingly.
Nah, I know a couple of CNN management staffers personally and am closely related to a former senior editor at one of the nation's largest newspapers. You are vastly overestimating both the degree of beyond-the-current-week planning that goes into their work (I mean seriously LOL), as well as the degree to which anybody over there could stick with such a strategy even if agreed upon.
(Also no news media organization could successfully keep such a plan secret for very long. Every journalist working there knows that breaking such a story would make him or her instantly a legend within their field as well as richer and more famous than almost anything else that anybody not already a star could ever aspire to. The worker bees at CNN and MSNBC and Fox and the network shops -- the 30something journalists making shitty salaries to do 30-second standups from Thanksgiving parades and committee hearings -- would each taze their most beloved editor to break the news of a scheme like you're imagining.)
I'm not saying they planned anything or kept secrets. Only that they were smart enough to know that giving him all that free publicity would increase the odds he would become president -- and they were 100% fine with that. They could have stepped back and said: "Maybe we don't need to cover every one of his rallies." But they couldn't help themselves. They care about ratings uber alles.
I mean the executives, not the worker bees or Anderson Cooper.
Rather, if Trump wins, you're in *hangman position*. :)
Why did the war in Iraq/Global War on Terror in general lead to right-wing types becoming isolationist- but this didn't seem to happen after the Vietnam war, which was much more socially divisive and had way higher casualties? Unless I'm completely wrong about the Vietnam fallout.
I'm middle aged, so the right-wing turn from hawkish globalism to isolationism in the last 15 years has been absolutely head-spinning to live through. (Personal politics- vanilla center-left type who was strongly against the war in Iraq at the time). In the mid 2000s being on the political right meant a great deal of nationalistic enthusiasm for invading other countries thousands of miles away- we were maybe going to invade Iran after Iraq, possibly North Korea, and anyone else that looked at us cross-eyed too. Gems like 'we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here' were very common. Being against invading other countries on other continents was seen as traitorous and unAmerican. In an incredible turnaround, Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely seen as failures (which they were), and the American right has a very strong isolationist strain. Now many Republicans are questioning NATO, our treaty with South Korea, etc.
Was there such an isolationist turn after Vietnam, which again had way way more casualties than the GWOT? If not, why not?
I think it was more the Great Awokening than the War on Terror. Pre-Great Awokening, the US establishment was broadly viewed as right-wing, so invading and occupying other countries was likely to involve imposing right-wing values on them (that's "right-wing" in the US conservative sense of small government, capitalism, self-reliance, democracy, etc.; I'm aware that Saddam could also be considered right wing, but his brand of rightism was very different to the Republican Party's). Post-Great Awokening, it's viewed as left-wing, foreign conquest means spreading left-wing values, so the left is now pro-intervention whereas the right isn't.
What invasion has the U.S. left supported since the Great Awokening?
Which half of the US political spectrum is more likely to support maintaining or increasing US support for Ukraine, and which half is more likely to support reducing or eliminating it?
We're not the invaders this time. We're not even there.
But you are intervening.
The Soviet Union was bigger that al Qaeda is my guess. It was hard to turn away from that. After Iraq you could just stop talking about terrorism. But after Vietnam, you couldn't pretend that communism wasn't still around.
How do you distinguish between the GWoT "leading to right-wing types becoming isolationist", and the GWoT being the last foreign military adventure the US undertook before the right-wing types turned isolationist for some other reason?
Because the 2008 financial crash, the election of Barack Obama and his subsequent interventions, and the populist realignment of the GOP, seem like they could have driven this change all by themselves.
As probably the most rightwing person who would ever comment here, I find it rather ludicrous the right's retconnning of Saddam Hussein as someone we should have left alone. We probably should have acted sooner. We should have done a lot of things differently. We should never have gone along with the pretense that the oil was "theirs". So I would draw a sharp distinction between getting rid of Saddam and the occupation and Long War that followed. Let them revert to whatever rule they wanted. Leave them be until again threaten, rinse and repeat. The world is safer when states - even those invented by mapmakers - have reason to respect one another, there are no half-measures.
Saddam was contained by our enforcement of the no-fly zone and so invading Iraq made no sense. The NATO action to take our Qaddafi made perfect sense as he gave a hero’s welcome to the Lockerbie Bomber which can’t be allowed to stand after 9/11.
But once we invaded Iraq we needed it stable because of its oil reserves. Do you remember the Persian Gulf War??? Why do you think we sent ground troops to repel Saddam’s invasion of his neighbor??
Don't pretend you have WMDs if you don't. There, easy. If the oil is that important, we should have taken permanent control of the oil fields, full stop; or conceded that it doesn't matter who they sell the oil to. While not ridiculing the energy conservation moevement, of course, which is now a joke given recent events.
From what I remember, Saddam pretended to have WMDs in the same way that Obama pretended to be born in Kenya, which is to say not at all.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War which features an excerpt from the Rumfeld memo brainstorming for pretexts for an invasion.
Saddam was a terrible human being, but the policy of disposing foreign leaders who are terrible human beings empirically does not lead to good outcomes most of the time (Hitler notwithstanding). In retrospect, it is safe to say that Saddam or the Taliban regime were not the only thing which kept the Iraqi and Afghan people from enthusiastically adopting liberal democracy.
I just can't seem to share others' concern over whether people adopt liberal democracy, so y'all will have to carry on without me there.
Has this been determined to be fake?
https://nypost.com/2006/02/16/iraqs-wmd-secrets-saddam-boasted-on-tape/
Oh, corollary: if you've been cavalier about say, using nerve gas on your own population - then you really doubly need to avoid antagonizing the world's superpower.
Uh, invading Iraq was awful for America!! Wtf??
And do you know who Rex Tillerson is?? Do you know that he was an important advisor to Bush?? And do you know where Qatar is?? Because in 2003 Tillerson was investing tens of billions of dollars into Qatar to solve our energy crisis. So Tillerson wanted to invest tens of billions of dollars into Iraq and make them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
What moral authority does the United States have to depose a dictator if the quality of life for the people of that country isn’t improved? As it is even with the occupation it was a long hard road to rebuild Iraq’s quality of life to where it was before. Without any occupation things would have likely have been much worse.
I'd say that everybody has the moral authority to depose a dictator, just as everyone has the moral authority to rescue a kidnap victim or stop a thief. Unelected groups of thugs controlling entire countries are a moral abomination which should be wiped out whenever it is seen.
Of course having the moral authority to do so isn't the same as having the actual ability to do so. In practice, the US military is one of the few entities with the actual ability to do these things as well as the moral authority.
Suppose you have the ability to time travel back to the year 1200 (alternate timeline). By your standards, we should send swarms of predator drones back to start taking out all the monarchs, which certainly qualify as "[u]nelected groups of thugs controlling entire countries".
The result would be wars of succession all over the world, which would mostly harm the populations.
I don't claim that absolute monarchs or dictators are entitled to the ontological protections we generally afford the innocents. If someone killed some monarch planning a large scale military campaign, I would be ok with that.
The problem is that you can not transition from feudalism to parliamentary democracy using drone strikes. As an utilitarian, I believe that one should carefully consider the wider outcomes of any actions, including political assassinations and regime change operations.
If you’re not doing it to help the Iraqi people then it’s not justified though. You’re burning down a house to kill a bully ignoring all the other people inside.
The removal of the threat, which is taken seriously, because it is not a world of adults (us) and children (them). What the citizens of the country choose to do with it is up to them. One may have one’s suspicions about the use they’ll make of it - but they might have surprised everyone. One must admit it’s possible. Anyway, the authority to act has nothing to do with what form their government takes afterward. That should never have been the concern of the US Army.
A Pathan friend of mine mused, after 9/11, and the real distress which some, mostly Boomer lefties, felt at the prospect of bombing the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and Kabul, that if the situation were reversed, there would be no handwringing, no distress, just ferocity. Of course bombing Afghanistan was like bombing another century, as Tamim Ansary so convincingly wrote at the time.Still: simple consequences - not games, as with Pakistan, nor castles in the air as in Iraq.
The sight of “women falling from the sky clutching their handbags” may not stir you to action, but if it does not, you probably don’t need to worry overmuch about an excess of inappropriate moralizing in the world.
The hijackers in those planes were all Saudi nationals, weren’t they? How did invading Iraq become the correct response to an attack by Saudis?
Finally, my only other contention is that foreign aid is a terrible idea. Makes some think they've bought something, makes others think they've earned something. False pretenses are lethal in international relations in my (obviously lonely) view.
It absolutely was not the correct response. You mistake me very much.
I was speaking to this nonsense that has grown into dogma on the right, that we never should have taken Saddam out.
I actually do kind of like this idea that we should just thrash recalcitrant foreign leaders but not bother occupying their country afterwards- too much hassle. The real problem was always the occupation!
It's what Obama did to Lybia, as far as i'm aware.
McCain and Graham literally warned Qaddafi to his face that giving the Lockerbie Bomber a hero’s welcome would give us no choice but to take him out. Qaddafi was emboldened by the disastrous invasion of Iraq because he believed we didn’t want to do more nation building…we didn’t do nation building although Ambassador Stevens was in Libya in order to help them stabilize.
Just guessing here, but it seems that in the past, "establishment" meant right wing, and today it means left wing. If you are pro-establishment, you want more government action. If you are anti-establishment, you want less.
At the simplest level, Vietnam was sold as resistance to Communism, and for all the many complications to that story, it was not entirely false.
In contrast, Iraq was sold as ... something something 9/11 ... something something WMD. And that story was soon seen to be entirely false. Which made many people ask, "Hey, then what *was* it really about?"
Not sure if it's really isolationist or just "anti-left/liberal", and they are against supporting Ukraine (and Taiwan) because the current Democratic administration is for it.
I don't believe for a moment that Donald Trump is an isolationist. Doesn't he want to invade Mexico? I suspect he would love to start a war with Iran just for the hell of it.
Right-wingers are isolationists when Democrats are in power in the same way they are against low-interest rates when Democrats are in power.
Donald Trump is the only president in my lifetime (and considerably before) who didn't start a foreign war. He actually helped reduce our foreign interventions. He has not said a thing about starting a war in Mexico - although the Republican debates featured that conversation, primarily around teaming up with Mexico to help fight the cartels. He also overruled John Bolton, who did want to start a war with Iran, and fired him. That's actually wrapped up in the classified documents Trump took with him - transcriptions of conversations with John Bolton where Bolton tried to start a war with Iran and Trump refused.
That's part of the reason people like him. Globalists and Neoconservatives, who ran the Republican party since at least Reagan and now seem to run the Democrats, are pro-war and pro-intervention. Most people do not benefit from wars, and globalism is a mixed bag for the working classes (30-35%) and people without a college degree (62%). Some things are cheaper, but then maybe the good jobs that don't require a college degree get outsourced. I would much rather be a well-paid steel worker than a poorly paid Walmart stocker, even if the stuff I can buy at Walmart is much cheaper.
What foreign war has Biden started?
For that matter he ended one (Afghanistan) which ought to count for something.
Ukraine? He didn't start the war, but he absolutely got the US involved directly and escalated the war.
Oh okay. Well that seems like moving the goalposts significantly, in a couple of different ways.
Fair enough. I stand by the distinction and that Biden has done a lot to escalate conflict in a way that Trump did not. I used very imprecise language saying "start a war" as not everyone before him did either. I don't think Clinton did, from memory, but he sure participated in a lot of bombings and escalation.
The "trump didn't start any wars and others did" thing, when I've seen it written out, relies on double standards for what counts as starting a war.
Trump attacked Syria's government and killed a top Iranian general, both of which Obama/Bush/etc didn't do. Not to mention escalated use of drones in many areas. By the standards by which people cite various things as Obama/other president "starting wars", those should count as starting wars.
Killing a general in an intentional strike is significantly smaller than toppling a government (Libya) and obviously less than launching an invasion or expanding a war.
I'm not saying Trump never did anything militaristic in his time. I'm saying that what he did was categorically different, and significantly smaller than anything the last five, at least, presidents did before him. Excluding Carter I think you would have to go back to the 1930s to find a president who did less than Trump in that regard.
If you're going to include "expanding" wars on your list, then trump definitely did that!
"a top Iranian general"
Just a top Iranian general? You can't think of any other details about him that may be relevant?
Correct, and don’t forget about Trump enabling the Saudis to slaughter Yemenis by the tens of thousands.
>globalism is a mixed bag for the working classes (30-35%) and people without a college degree (62%). Some things are cheaper, but then maybe the good jobs that don't require a college degree get outsourced. I would much rather be a well-paid steel worker
The government is not a magic central planning wizard who can create certain economic & labor conditions, or recreate a decade from 70s years ago, by passing the right laws. The economy is not a series of dials and knobs that the wizards can just tweak to achieve the desired outcome. Most manufacturing is highly automated these days, and the less-skilled work moving to lower-cost countries is a major shift in how the world works. The government can't pass a law against other countries being cheaper any more than it can outlaw the tide coming in tomorrow. That era is now gone, in the same way automation removed the Luddites' highly-skilled weaving jobs
Didn’t it take our government’s buy in to NAFTA to get this shift going?
Maybe not a magic central planning wizard but a strong shove in a direction that made US manufacturing jobs move to the maquiladoras of our free trade partner, Mexico, inevitable.
> and the less-skilled work moving to lower-cost countries is a major shift in how the world works. The government can't pass a law against other countries being cheaper any more than it can outlaw the tide coming in tomorrow
The 90s called and demanded its economic philosophy back. Of course countries can build barriers to trade, they do it all the time. This is exactly what the democrats are now trying to do with China. Globalisation depends on laws passed by humans, tariffs passed by countries, international trade agreements. It’s far from being some inevitable law of nature. The Overton window is shifting on that one pretty quickly.
I don't disagree with you, but this message can be said in several ways.
One is "learn to code" type messages that are dismissive and disparaging to those who don't have a highly paid skill set. Hillary Clinton went to a West Virginia coal mining community and told them their jobs were gone and never coming back. She didn't even realize how poorly that resonated.
Another approach is to be sympathetic and work with these communities. It helps a lot, though these people don't want a *different way of life* they want to have the life they recognize and enjoy. It's a tough sell.
Or you could just tell them we're bringing coal back. And because a good bit of the problems in the coal industry can be (rightly or wrongly) blamed on federal policy - including outright attempts at banning the uses of coal - this is a plausible pitch.
Not that Trump was necessarily going to bring coal back on his own (or that his people truly expected him to), but it's very believable that he would 1) Do what he had the power to do, within reason, to benefit coal, and 2) Not intentionally harm coal. Biden, Clinton, or even a Republican like Jeb Bush could not plausibly make this claim and very likely would directly say and do the opposite.
Trump has said loudly and clearly that he wants to use the US army to attack Mexican cartels on Mexican soil. The current Mexican president and the current leading candidates running to be the next Mexican president have said loudly and clearly that the US better not attack anyone on their soil. It doesn't sound like the Republicans are off to a great start "teaming up with Mexico to help fight the cartels".
As for Trump not starting a foreign war: there's a decent chance his scorecard has four years remaining on it.
What are they going to do about it?
Probably re-nationalize all their oil fields all over again.
EDIT: And then it could alter the course of history. Mexico could ally politically and economically with Russia and China over the USA. Don't doubt that if the USA invaded Mexico militarily -- which is how Mexicans would view any US attack on their soil -- that a Mexican presidential candidate shouting "Death to America" and urging closer ties with Russia wouldn't beat out any candidate wanting to keep close ties with the US under the same circumstances.
Waging war against someone who is actually attacking you, is a highly non-central example of "isolationism". And there's been enough violence and criminality initiated south of the border and aimed north, that it isn't entirely hyperbole to suggest that the Mexican cartels are attacking the United States.
I don't think that sending the US military into Mexico would be a good strategy for dealing with the cartels, but if someone else proposes it I won't call them an "interventionist" or assume that they're going to be in favor of sending Javelins to Ukraine while flying Predators over Syria and Libya.
I guess I'm not hearing about all the violence the cartels are involved in this side of the border. I know that there's plenty of cartel violence in Juarez but very little in El Paso. Most of the violence in the US is done by US citizens. Or maybe there's a war going on this side of the border I'm not hearing about.
Sending the US military into Mexico to deal with cartels would be insane but, you are right, "interventionist" probably isn't the correct word in this context.
I also mentioned above that Trump would "love to start a war with Iran just for the hell of it". You don't have to agree with that, but my point is only that I don't believe Trump is an isolationist. I believe he is a belligerent man who would behave as a belligerent Commander-in-Chief given much of a provocation to be. It would take a belligerent Commander-in-Chief to use the US military against Mexican drug cartels in Mexico.
And, er, vice versa I assume. It is true that the right became more anti war when Obama was in power. It’s also true that the right are still more likely to support wars or sabre rattling against Muslim states, in particular Iran. What’s more interesting is the left opposing “isolationism” ie supporting American wars.
Is Biden starting any wars right now? He took a big political hit in leaving Afghanistan and has pretty much ended the drone wars.
Only thing is funding Ukraine against Russia, but that's not the same as "starting a war" (and if it does ... well, lethal aid to Ukraine actually started under trump, so it's a war *he* started under that (dumb) standard).
I'm inclined to believe that American foreign policy is determined by the "culture of American foreign policy", which is 100% independent of which party controls the White House. For example, Wilson said he was an isolationist but eventually entered the war. Johnson vastly escalated Vietnam, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with his personal or partisan ideology. Nixon ran on ending the war in Vietnam, then immediately expanded it. Bush W ran as "not a state-builder" then became a state-builder in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama was one of the few members of the senate who voted against authorizing the war in Iraq, ran on that in 2008, and then surged the troops in Afghanistan.
Trump ran in 2016 as an anti-war guy, and he didn't start one in four years. Perhaps we will find out over the next five how anti-war he really is.
Yes. The president takes over an establishment which is geared to preserve US military hegemony. It takes a strong individual to oppose that. With Trump it probably was that nothing needing a war came up during that time.
Poor Cindy Sheehan.
Although, it looks like she's still on the right side of the DoJ:
"In 2012, Sheehan was sued by the federal government for failure to pay back taxes. "I feel like I gave my son to this country in an illegal and immoral war. I'll never get him back," Sheehan said. "And, so, if they can give me my son back, then I'll pay my taxes. And that's not going to happen."[21] Sheehan appeared in court on April 19, 2012 and in IRS offices on May 9, 2012, refusing to provide information on the basis of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.[22][23] The government dropped its case against her in February 2013.[24]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sheehan
I think you are misunderstanding some things. First of all, prior to WW2 the American Right was heavily against interventionism and was very isolationist. They were known as the Old Right. During the Cold War the Old Right was pushed aside by the now infamous Neoconservatives. But you still had people like Taft who were still against NATO for instance. The Old Right pretty much was stagnant till the 80s and was revived by the Paleo-Conservatives. Basically Pat Buchanan was a rehashing of Old school Republicans. These new trends within the Republican Party were pretty much laid out by Buchanan and watered by Trump. Plus you also have to look at things like states with high military populations, they are more anti-interventionist than most people think. If you're from North Carolina and you're son got blown up by an IED in Iraq War and had some other relative blown up in Afghanistan, and seeing the outcomes of those wars, you have probably don't want to see of that in Ukraine.
US aid to Ukraine is just 0.2% of GDP and without a single lost limb or a dead American. If you want to win a Cold War against Russia there is nothing easier or cheaper than supporting Ukraine. An easy way to explain opposition to Ukraine is that the right is simply full of cynical grifters.
>US aid to Ukraine is just 0.2% of GDP
I really, really, really hope you never agreed with the people who said that Ameica "can't afford" to build a border wall. You can be oppose it for whatever other reason, but I find that these kinds of justifications for US spending are so often very opportunistic.
> If you want to win a Cold War against Russia there is nothing easier or cheaper than supporting Ukraine.
Who said we want to do that? Who even said we were in a cold war to begin with? The only reason we would be...is this spending in the first place, which is the very thing we're arguing about.
Well let’s see: one problem is that you have a genocidal psychopath with a nuclear arsenal who hates you and the other problem is that there are too many people coming over who want to cut your lawn for you. So yes theoretically you can prioritise the lawn thing.
> just 0.2% of GDP
> just
> 0.2%
> of
> GDP
I'm not sure the War on Terror is the main cause of it; I think it's got more to do with a factional shift on the right as the Republican base turned against their establishment.
My rough timeline is:
1985-1992: Cold War ends. The American right's isolationist streak goes back to WWI, but was basically subdued for as long as there was a hostile Communist superpower, and a foreign policy of preventing them from getting a foothold in Latin America and/or dominating Eurasia was at least broadly defensive (remember we're talking about the right here, so no sympathy for Communist/socialist movements and not a lot of concern for the plight of Laotian peasants etc). After the Cold War, the paleo-cons started to advocate for non-intervention, which tied into a dislike of the federal government generally for a mixture of constitutional, libertarian and, in some cases, "states rights" reasons; the worldview was that the justification for a muscular federal government was essentially a war measure and they were pushing for a second return to normalcy. This split culminated in the first Buchanan campaign against Bush, and was a contributing strain in Ross Perot's support.
1993-2000: The era of not much happening. Neo-cons are in the ascendant in foreign policy, but there's the start of a populist turn in Republican political strategy under Gingrich that culminates in GW Bush.
2001-2007: The War on Terror. Neo-cons are in government, being hawkish and globalist. The paleo-cons start to gain prominence as an anti-war faction, and a weird amount of sympathy from liberals (eg. Pat Buchanan on MSNBC). People who don't like the war and the Patriot Act start drifting into libertarianism and Ron Paul starts to take off. They don't remotely control the Republican Party though, which at this point is dominated by a mixture of evangelicalism, a watered down version of neoliberal economics economics and the neo-con idea of making the world safe for democracy.
2008-2015: Financial crash and Ron Paul candidacy. 2008 discredits the neoliberals to a huge chunk of the Republicans' base, and Ron Paul sucks up most of the populist energy. This massively strengthens the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party, and the establishment starts facing primary challenges. Iraq starts to become near-universally viewed as a disaster because the left and the anti-establishment right are both against it (also, it kind of is, but so was Vietnam). It's thus a convenient boot to kick the establishment with. It also gelled really well with anti-establishment-ism generally, as the Paul-ites could just copy and paste far-left talking points about Halliburton (this trick goes back to Rothbard).
2016-present: Trump era. It turns out the parts of Ron Paul's message that sunk in were the bits about crony capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats being in cahoots, but the libertarianism became a dead weight (why this happened is interesting; it seems the establishment co-opted the meat of it through Paul Ryan, so it started getting parsed by voters as "corporate tax cuts paid for by social security cuts;" this is unfair to the libertarians, but that's politics). Trump ditched the libertarianism and went hard on the anti-elite line, and was able to do this without being extreme on most issues because the extremism by this point was mostly just signalling anti-establishment credentials which he already had. He kept the isolationism because it gelled well with the protectionism he inherited from Perot, it was one of the popular parts of Ron Paul-ism, and "I'm opposed to that disastrous war policy" is an easy sell.
TL;DR: The foreign policy shift is an incidental consequence of the financial crash destroying the Republican establishment, caused by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul being the only anti-establishment force in the Republican Party at the time.
This is a good comment, thanks. But then why weren't the 70s viewed the same way as the 2008 financial crash? There were multiple oil shocks that caused drivers to queue up for blocks just to get gas. There was the worst inflation in a hundred years, to my knowledge- quite a bit worse than today. There was a deep recession in the early 80s that lasted for a couple of years. Wasn't the 10 year span after we finally left Vietnam maybe almost as bad as the 2008 crash, but more prolonged?
Also, we think about our era as cynical and losing social trust in institutions- but the relative fall in the 70s was probably greater. We had a President step down due to criminal activity, his VP was indicted, there was the Church committee on various abuses by the CIA, FBI, Cointelpro, etc. The civil rights movement succeeded in some ways, but hit its end with the failure of busing. Crime increased- a lot! My understanding is that the USSR grew relatively stronger in the 70s. Plus everything economic in my first paragraph
The Vietnam aspect of this question makes this whole thread really thought provoking for me, thanks for this.
I would argue that neoliberalism is what drove American interventionalism and this ideology is/was prevalent on the establishment right and left. The right wing hawks who were hawks in Iraq are still hawks today. It’s just that the right wing has had a populist surge that is against interventions. There's the anti-neoliberal left and the anti-neoliberal right and they have more in common with each other on foreign policy than they do with their respective establishment blocks.
I think it has more to do with a combination of factors. Working class people in rural areas are the ones seeing their local towns economically gutted and generally blame NAFTA (I think there’s some truth to this but even if I’m wrong, it’s how it’s portrayed). There’s a general sense that the establishment values people outside America more than working class Americans (even if this is wrong, it's how it's portrayed). I think this is a reaction to economics and the indignity of sending money elsewhere while people are struggling here. You might argue that we could do both or something, but the optics are not great when you’re in the American town that’s struggling.
But I want to address your core question, which I think was a very good one. Why didn't this happen after Vietnam? In 1972 when Nixon wound down the draft, working class wages were still in the upswing that lasted from WW2 to the early 1980’s. Also, that was one bad war. Now there’s a long string of them. The draft was partially class based, but less so than the volunteer system we have now. The opioid crisis in West Virginia was more lethal than covid during 2020 and 2021. And that's not going away, but deaths of despair are rising. Entire towns are being abandoned. It's only 5 hours from DC but it's like another world. Life expectancy is declining overall, but more importantly, diverging.
Vietnam was one war, and at the time you could argue that it was one "bad apple doesn't ruin all of neoliberalism. But the whole string of them does. Not just the wars, but economic neocolonialism failed as well. In 1982 Mexico was the first to default on major world bank loans and we began the SAPs, which failed.
I know you mentioned in a separate comment that the government is not a magic bag that can just push levers to make things happen however they want, and you're right. But a lot of politics is about optics, and the optics are terrible when we're sending money elsewhere and people are struggling here.
Do you know any influential scholar that identifies as a neoliberal? Since they are hard to identify.
For example, Milton Friedman defined himself as a classic liberal, not a neoliberal. Hayek died before the concept became popular, and also self-defined as a classic liberal.
The concept appears to be used almost exclusively on the left, and as a sum-up of what the author happens to dislike. It is something something neoclassical economics, but it also connotes to stuff the author more-or-less explicitly presents as bad, or stupid, or both.
Only once have I come across a scholar who defined himself as a neoliberal - but he defined the concept very different from anyone else. It was something about the liberating power of markets set against old-style patriarchal and feudal social structures (echoing classical Marxism: Marx hailed the liberating power of capitalism vis a vis feudalism, and as a necessary purgatory before entering the Pearly Gates of Communism).
...Plus, sort-of on the left, Foucault in his lectures on biopolitics can be interpreted as having a positive view of neoliberalism (not the only interpretation mind you, but see the discussion between Gary Becker, another prominent self-defined classic liberal, and some latter-day Foucaultians in University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory working paper No 401: Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker. A conversation with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt, October 2012).
...but apart from these, I have not come across definitions of neoliberalism that any well-meaning person might be sympathetic towards. Which suggests that the concept is mainly used as a diffuse, rhetorical bogeyman-device.
In short: The concept of neoliberalism serves as a barrier to communication rather than a concept that can facilitate communication between opposing ideological views (i.e. ideological views that are actually held by someone).
Correct me if I misunderstand you, but I believe what you’re saying is that if I met someone who I disagreed with, and called them or their ideas neoliberal, it would be a poorly defined term commonly seen as a pejorative and so it would either confuse the conversation or insult them (or both). And as you say, that would be a barrier to communication. If that’s what you mean, I completely agree with you.
However, this seems like a red herring that’s unrelated to the question, which was if there was an isolationist turn after Vietnam, and if not, then why. The contemporary conservative backlash would likely use the word “Globalist” rather than neoliberal. You’re right that influential scholars and politicians do not identify as a neoliberal, and I also don’t know a single scholar or politician who identifies as a globalist, which is also used as a pejorative like neoliberal. But the question is about why is there an isolationist turn, not about changing anyone’s mind on whether it’s a good thing.
"I believe what you’re saying is that if I met someone who I disagreed with, and called them or their ideas neoliberal, it would be a poorly defined term commonly seen as a pejorative and so it would either confuse the conversation or insult them (or both). And as you say, that would be a barrier to communication. If that’s what you mean, I completely agree with you."
...yes, you are right, that was my only errand in this context. I am glad we agree!
Understanding isolationist tendencies and counter-tendencies in US politics and culture is a very interesting topic of study, fully agreeing with you there too. (And speaking as a European, far from only of academic interest.)
...I am sorry if I perhaps came out a bit strong against your choice of concepts, no hard feelings I hope. But I spend my days in a scholary environment where quite a few speak loosely of "neoliberalism". And when doing so, they can be perceived as playing a power game rather than (really) communicating. The aim (which might not be concious, I do not regard people who seek hegemonic discoursive power as overt cynics) is to install fear in others that they may (also) be cast as outside of civilized company if they should dare say things like: "markets might be very useful sometimes". It can be a rhetorical strategy to limit the Overton window, as I guess people say in this forum.
...and I would assume we agree there, too, that this is bad.
On the taxonomy of liberalisms and who identified with them: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/77395.
Thanks for the link Mallard, very informative (and in agreement with my own view on different brands of liberalism - sort-of the same thing I guess:-)). Concerning the puzzle that according to critics neoliberalism is the dominant ideology in contemporary society, while at the same time it is more-or-less impossible to locate any scholar who self-identifies with the label, your link is also on point, to the extent that I cannot resist the temptation to quote:
"While there are many who give out and are given the title of neoliberal, there are none who will embrace this moniker of power and call themselves as such. There is no contemporary body of knowledge that calls itself neoliberalism, no self-described neoliberal theorists that elaborate it, nor policy-makers or practitioners that implement it. There are no primers or advanced textbooks on the subject matter, no pedagogues, courses or students of neoliberalism, no policies or election manifestoes that promise to implement it (although there are many that promise to dismantle it). Pedantic as it may seem, this is a point that warrants repetition if only because there is a considerable body of critical literature that deploys neoliberalism under the mistaken assumption that, in doing so, it is being transported into the front-lines of hand-to-hand combat with freemarket economics."
I think the same thing probably did happen by the end of the 70s with Reagan, but I don't have a great sense of the factional divides in the Republican Party then so I can only very hazily hypothesise (this is massively speculative, so assume I'm wrong). As I understand it the Republicans were broadly locked out of power at the federal level and were basically a regional coalition of the West and the Northeast, with the Northeast being WASP-ier. Nixon was Californian, anti-Communist, slightly anti-establishment (by ye olde standards, objectively less so even than GW Bush) and also basically a centrist. Watergate happened, Ford took over and lost, while the conservatives (almost the entirety of what's now the Republican Party, but then a minority) turned to Reagan.
All this was happening in a country with no internet and political parties that weren't sorted ideologically (the farthest right were still Southern Democrats), and surprisingly rampant left-wing terrorism, so breaking hard with an establishment consensus was basically never going to happen though. In this context, I think Reagan's "get the government out of the way" and monetarism were the economic side, and rollback (vs containment) was the concurrent foreign policy shift (in the opposite direction, because objective policies are largely, but not entirely, just totem poles to rally factions around).
Yeah this is a way better explanation than what I gave. People forget about the Old Right how for the longest of time, American interventionism was a Progressive Project( Wilson, Roosevelt, etc).
Not exactly my wheelhouse, but I think this is the result of the long tail of Vietnam fallout causing the circumstances to be completely different. 'Nam was the first war that really created a significant anti-war movement. Being anti-war was still a bold, far-left position. Before and during, being pro-war was the default position, with the left taking the "whenever it's necessary, so I'll support this war" side and the right taking the "war is the health of the state" more hawkish side. So when 'Nam turns out to be a bust, it's a loss shared by both the moderate left and the right.
Fast forward to Iraq, and the status quo has changed. The anti-war movement of Vietnam has had time to diffuse into culture, and is primed to be the default Left position. And indeed, that's what you see happening on once the initial patriotism of '01-'02 wears off: being anti-war becomes a much more default stance for the political left. Meanwhile, much of the right has retreated to the "whenever it's necessary, so I'll support this war" side. So when Iraq turns out to be a bust, it's really just the right who have egg on their faces.
Speculation time, but I think that this uneven "blame" for Iraq spurred (certain) right-wing figures to do what they (politicians) often do and claim "well actually, my position is the opposite of what we previously professed" and/or distancing themselves by saying "see, the orthodoxy of my party was wrong (but not me), and we should actually not [aim to be a part of the global community]". The latter bit is probably the stronger argument - if there were fringe isolationist elements of the right, they would be emboldened and strengthened by the "world police" side's "failures".
"Anti-war" has a long history. Take a look at the two world wars. The US was "neutral" for most of the first one, and arguably (depending on when you date the start) most of the second one as well. There was a lot of maneuvering necessary and a lot of things needed to happen for the US to declare war in both cases.
It also helped to confuse the issue that the first one didn't really have a communist side, and for much of the second one, the communists were allied with the Germans in dividing up Europe.
Im not American but here’s my take: there’s also a been a 360 amongst the people who opposed the take down of Hussein and who support taking down Assad (the consequences of which would be much worse).
What happened I think was Obama. He hovered up the anti war coalition and the went to engage in even more wars. War became fashionable with the left and unfashionable with the right. Then Trump starts his rise and he’s even more anti war. Trump is bad and orange and he’s a nationalist. Nationalism is now not going to war and internationalism is going to war, or threatening war across the world.
Trump is America first and that’s basically NAZI ideology, Internationalism is the opposite of that, and though it involves America imposing its western (majority) white opinions on the rest of the world, and hedging in China in Asia, it’s apparently the opposite of white nationalism.
The term isolationism is doing some of that work there too. Were you isolationist during your opposition to Iraq? The word carries a lot of weight, as it carries with it the idea that the isolationist is a Nazi sympathiser.
"Isolationism" is a misleading term, since it combines non-interventionist foreign policy with economic isolationism — high tariff barriers and the like. There is no logical connection between the two.
Good question. I don't know the right answer.
I think one answer is that the adversary in the Cold War was still clear, and right wing types weren't going to become pro-Communist.
Even after Vietnam, you could tell a coherent story about how the purpose of the war was to fight Communism, but in the aftermath of the Iraq War, it became hard to understand what the point had originally been (it was about WMD's but that turned out to be a lie, etc).
One big factor is that the waning of the war on terror coincided with the gay marriage debate and the rise of the LGBT movement and "wokeness" in general (and then COVID), which alienated many right wing people from the mainstream narrative about America and therefore American foreign policy. (In fact, I think this is more or less what Rod Dreher, a conservative journalist, has said about his own views.)
My guess is that it's about who the enemy is. Speaking as an American who isn't following Putin's policies closely, Putin strikes me as right-wing. He's anti-LGBTQ, nationalist, and presents a macho image of himself. If the Red Chinese pick a fight in the near future, I'd expect the GOP to turn away from isolationism.
That unthinking response is how the war party of the US can rely on different constituencies to support their policies.
Russia isn’t particularly anti gay compared to the Muslim world or Africa, and actually there were plenty of attempts to pathologize Islam post 9/11, albeit less on the anti LGB stuff (the T and the rest weren’t so important back then) more on being religious at all. In particular being anti-enlightenment. Over time, but not immediately, this began to be seen as right wing.
This is just another idea that we, the west, have the correct way of thinking about things and they (the non west) do not.
Of course the opposition to Russia's invasion is orthogonal to any of this. It should be opposed regardless.
I suppose that Saddam Hussein could be seen as anti-LGBTQ, nationalist and macho as well no?
True, but he was Muslim, which overshadows everything else.
Isn't it great that one's opponents always have a character flaw that can be used to explain away any discrepancy about one's predictions of them?
I may be interested in applying mechanistic interpretability to some deep learning models I am using in my research in astronomy. These are quite small models, few layers and thousands of neurons at most. What is the best tooling currently available? I am familiar with pytorch, so tools that seamlessly integrate with it would be best.
Yesterday, Richard Hanania tweeted:
"This has nothing to do with actually sympathizing with Russia. For a small government party, taking a stand on Ukraine aid as the number one priority simply makes sense given what a huge portion of the budget it is. Ukraine losing will save social security."
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1708475055930479003
Someone asked him what % of US GDP he thought was being sent to Ukraine. He replied:
"At least 40% last time I checked."
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1708491654586585148
This is an absurd thing to think and claim. It's many many orders of magnitude wrong. When told this he didn't apologize or correct, but deflected that it doesn't matter because of like people dieting of fentanyl or something.
If you are a supporter of Hanania, does this make you update your priors on his analysis of various situations? Regardless of your opinion on Ukraine/Russia, he either refuses to accept the actual value of Aid or he is willfully throwing shit out there just to make his point. Does that not point to the potential of similar behavior on other subjects? Why should we take him and his analysis seriously?
This seems to be pretty obvious trolling
It doesn't matter whether Hanania is stupid enough to believe the 40% figure, or stupid enough to think that trolling is the right move. Poe's Law is a thing, and we can find someone other than Hanania to provide us with insightful commentary or whatever going forward. He's done for in my book; his name is now hardwired to my bogometer and I don't see any advantage to recalibrating that.
In a follow-up tweet he says, "Russia isn’t seen as the aggressor in much of the world. Countries without the distorting effect of the western media like Eritrea and North Korea recognize it as a moral champion."
I think he was intending his tweets to be plainly obvious sarcasm and he clearly misjudged.
"Did you hear about Trump being so stupid the Secret Service would stream video of monkeys to entertain him, and Trump kept hitting the side of the TV to make him fight?"
"No, that didn't happen. It was a complete fabrication."
"Oh well, the fact that Trump is so stupid that the monkey thing was believable to me just PROVES how stupid Trump is!"
The local NPR station (WAMC) has a daily roundtable featuring journalists and professors of journalism. They treated it as fact.
It's trolling. He's making fun of the right-wing tendency to use Ukraine as a bogeyman. I think he also knows that some right-wingers will unironically believe his tweets, which is meant to highlight how innumerate they are.
I think he may have been surprised himself how many people still think these tweets are serious, which is why he keeps making them more comically ridiculous, but people still keep falling for them.
Wait. Was he trolling last week when he tweeted: "New form of equality is here. The year after BLM, 94% of over 300,000 S&P100 jobs went to non-whites."
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1706819030701797823
Followed by:
"Wow, blacks and Hispanics really knocking it out of the park with “less senior” roles.
If you’re a white guy trying to get your foot in the door, good luck."
Is that guy always trolling? How do you tell where his troll ends and his sincerity begins? Isn't he *very* anti-DEI? If so, then why is he trolling to exaggerate the impact of DEI? Does he like to troll his own fans?
I think that statistic is true.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/l
With some big caveats though. For one thing the largest share of that nonwhite hiring by far was in job categories like laborers, service workers, etc. For the categories above that Bloomberg's summary of the numbers is much softer, simply that those companies "increased their racial diversity".
In the "Professionals" category the 2021 nonwhite hiring was dominated by Asians. That trend is not new and has little if anything to do with BLM (to some degree the contrary actually).
Also, way down in the writeup they note in passing that "Many laid off in the pandemic’s early days (2020) were people of color, who were rehired when demand bounced back (2021)." So all of those rehires are being counted here but they don't estimate how many.
P.S. your link had a stray character, here it is corrected:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/
Most misleading is the word "hire" in the headline. The actual stat says "300,000 jobs were added." So that's a net increase after possibly millions of retirements, firings, and hirings. The 65-year-old cohort is much whiter than the 25-year-old cohort, particularly by self-identification. If millions were hired, the % of whites in the net increase != the % of whites hired. Very different numerators and denominators.
Thanks. I was taken in by the headline and probably should have read past that.
It's true Bloomberg ran that weird, misleading story (I can't read it, though.)
Hanania presents the stats -- maybe Bloomberg does too -- as if the results of the net job churn, likely over 10s of millions of people, is the same thing as "only 6% of new hires with S&P 100 firms went to whites", which is obviously not true.
"Too ridiculous for someone to earnestly claim" isn't a thing in politics anymore. If he thinks it is, he's the one who's missing something.
I'm surprised at how many people are falling for it here.
To expect people to interpret you in good faith as being sarcastic you first have to be someone people can trust to have the right opinion in the first place. You can’t be an alt-right oddball and then pull that trick. People will just assume you are an alt-right oddball on this issue too.
Alt-right? Isn't he one of those anti-Trump, pro-abortion atheist types?
He had somewhat more sinister opinions in the past that he’s now disavowed. But it was recent enough that as far as I’m concerned sarcasm rights have not yet been restored.
"Sinister" = doesn't pretend that every population magically evolved with perfectly identical genetics
I am embarrassed to have fallen for it!
In fairness, if you view Richard Hanania as too cringe-y and irritating to read then you're probably not hot on what the actual details are of whatever Damascene conversion he's having. Not sure why you'd be reading his tweets if that was the case though.
Me too.
Hanania seems really bad at statistics. Like most pundits, he's a vibes guy.
You fell for the troll
What does it mean to "fall for a troll"? Is the idea that even reading him at all is a mistake?
Believing that he was making a serious prediction when he said 40%
I don't know Hanania at all, but, given how many pundits are innumerate, reasoning: "He _can't_ have meant that number seriously. It is _obviously_ grossly wrong." is not a reliable deduction (unless the specific person has shown themselves to be numerate)
Was he trolling when he tweeted: "The year after BLM, 94% of over 300,000 S&P100 jobs went to non-whites."
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1706819030701797823
Followed by:
"Wow, blacks and Hispanics really knocking it out of the park with “less senior” roles.
If you’re a white guy trying to get your foot in the door, good luck."
?
that was based on an article in Bloomberg. Which does appear suspect. Nevertheless it’s not necessarily a troll - which I take to mean posting something deliberately false.
This tweet is part of the same thread:
"Russia isn’t seen as the aggressor in much of the world. Countries without the distorting effect of the western media like Eritrea and North Korea recognize it as a moral champion."
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1708492292963868704?s=20
This is all clearly a joke.
(This is not an endorsement of him by any means - I think he's both extremely wrong and morally repulsive.)
This response is clearly a joke, not sure about the original tweet: https://x.com/pidriarel/status/1708493471940501895?s=46&t=XyGoaTNK_gClOdJtjTZ7Vg
This, by the way, is basically accurate regarding how much of the world views it (with a smug trollish moral valance added). I say this as someone who's 100% supportive of Ukraine, but there are huge parts of the world who view the European empires as their version of Nazi Germany, the USA as having backed up the British/French/Portuguese/South Africans, and the USSR as the only people who stood up for them. To them, Russia invading Ukraine is roughly how westerners view the USA invading Iraq: a regrettable aberration, by the good guys. From there, it's basically a figure-ground inversion for every other part of the war. Hence the rather lukewarm response from South Asia and Africa.
That world view is fairly accurate, don’t you think? Except the “global south” actually doesn’t really care about European empires much, although there’s a rising use of the term Anglo supremacism. Especially in Chinese attacks on the west.
(Of course this isn’t universal amongst the global south either. The ANC can be forgiven for having some residual sympathy for Russia. Others are more suspicious of China. )
A lot of them really do care; they all teach about it in schools (that make modern progressive textbooks look like Cecil Rhodes), most of them have statues and street names all over the place of their anti-colonial struggle, and quite a lot of them have ruling parties whose claim to legitimacy still derives from it. Not to mention the hatred of current French encroachment in West Africa. The Chinese are more of an exception; the century of humiliation stuff tends to get eye-rolls, and they're more focused on conspiracy theories about the Americans wanting to Balkanise them.
Well that’s not very conspiratorial. I’m sure the spooks are doing their best to increase ethnic tensions in China, although it won’t work. The Chinese do care about the century of humiliation but these things wax and wane depending on present day circumstances - if the UK broke ranks with the US they would forget about it.
If it is a joke, it's not a very good one? That was suggested by some of the replies and maybe i should consider it to be the "answer", but this seems like unnecessary shit posting from someone trying to be seen as a serious thinker.
Yes, another one of his tweets was about how we could build a mansion for every homeless person in America for the cost of aid to Ukraine.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1708494302207410599
I think the joke has now been done to death and he should stop, but he just loves trolling too much.
I think he meant for that to be a joke, but it's pretty close to true.
There are 600,000 homeless people in America. If a "mansion" costs $1,000,000, it would cost $600 billion to give them one each; we've given Ukraine $100 billion (standard disclaimer that some of this is in armaments we couldn't have used anyway that don't directly cost money). So we could only give 1/6 of homeless people mansions - unless many of the homeless people were in families who could share a mansion, or we got economies of scale from building so many mansions at the same time, in which case we might be able to scrape through!
To be fair, though, it's not enough to just give someone a mansion -- you must also ensure he has money for utilities and maintenance, for however long he's living in the mansion. These expenses can add up quite quickly.
The cost is trivial compared to the build cost. Nobody scoffing at the claim that we could afford to build such mansions is doing so due to utilities costs.
So why didn’t we give all homeless people homes back in 2021? I think we both know the answer, which is why using “housing the homeless” trope both may be true and utterly misleading.
I mean the real reason is that fear of homelessness is one of the main motivators for millions of badly paid workers to drag themselves into work every morning and do jobs they hate. Homeless people are a deterrent.
My impression is that he's a writer without a strong grasp of math and is now trying to salvage a truly bad take. But who knows.
I'm sorry, he might be an annoying troll but you're failing the ideological Turing test pretty badly if you think that here.
I can easily pass the ideological Turing test on the anti-Ukraine side and even the pro-Russian side. What I can't do is pass the ideological Turing test for 40% of the budget is going to Ukraine. Likewise, I can pass the ITT for democratic socialism but I can't pass it for why AOC said that growing cauliflower in community gardens is colonialism.
I see how both statements grow out of ideological commitments. But that doesn't make them any less wrong and stupid. And frankly if they were trolling then it's an issue in of itself if you say stupid, false things as a troll.
I'm sorry, you're failing it again. He definitely doesn't think 40% of the budget is going to Ukraine. That's a transparently ridiculous number that he's picking to simultaneously make fun of Republicans and at the same time those who are taking him seriously. He's being an annoying troll and I wish people would stop taking the bait. I guess in a way by even responding to you I am participating in the whole mess.
Does that mean that he's literally only tweeting because he thinks stupid people might read what he says and believe it? He's literally just trying to make people more confused?
This sounds like a perfect demonstration for anyone who thought that there shouldn't be censorship, of what sort of thing censorship actually helps for.
The ability to recognize trolling is not the ITT. That's just trolling. And what you're participating in is the purposeful ambiguity people use where they can say anything, no matter how silly, and people will defend them as trolling or 'seriously not literally'. I object to it because it gives cover to all kinds of bad arguments and because aesthetically I object to the post-modern irony it involves.
For those interested in the climate change debate, Statistics Norway has just released an open-access (English language) Discussion Paper arguing that it is not possible, based on available data, to determine how much of the warming trend during the last 200 years that has man-made causes. The paper can be downloaded here:
https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-miljo/forurensning-og-klima/artikler/to-what-extent-are-temperature-levels-changing-due-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions?fbclid=IwAR19omFxGnEvemIQQ8uhOCOp4icVzwcQOo23NuZ7vPTDuQkIS5kuczBoDfA
...for the record, Statistics Norway Discussion Papers have been through an internal review process, but not external review. However, the auhors are acknowledged professionals, and Statistics Norway is the authoritative "go to" place for professional statistical analysis in Norway, and has a thorough internal review process.
Discussion Paper (no. 1007/2023) by Statistics Norway. Title: "Is it certain that the recent global warming trend is mainly man-made?" Copy from abstract and conclusion:
"...we review key properties of global climate models and statistical analyses conducted by others on the ability of the global climate models to track historical temperatures. These tests show that standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures. Finally, we update and extend previous statistical analysis of temperature data (Dagsvik et al., 2020). Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years....In other words, our analysis indicates that with the current level of knowledge, it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to emissions of CO2."
You're cooking something and you increase the heat. You observe with an infrared thermometer that within a minute, the temperature of the pan and its contents goes up. The amount it goes up is many times the variation in temperature over the preceding hour. There are very logical and very well-understood physical reasons why turning up the stove should increase the pan's temperature. What should be the default explanation: that the rise in temperature is just natural variation, or that it's because you turned up the heat? Is "correlation does not imply causation" a valid excuse when the general mechanism of causation was known almost 200 years ago, and when the exact mechanism (human emissions of CO2 increasing the greenhouse effect) was quantitively modelled to factor of 2 accuracy by Arrhenius in 1896?
My understanding is that the primary effect of CO2 on the greenhouse effect was, as you said, modeled correctly by Arrhenius in 1896. The main snag is that there are positive and negative feedback effects which effectively add up to multiplying the primary effect, and the value of that multiplier is uncertain. IIRC, one of the stickier points is the effect on clouds.
"you increase the heat" is doing about 99% of the work here. Closer would be "you exhale slightly harder than your previous breath," there is a statistically insignificant rise in temperature, and then the person next to you wants to use this "evidence" as justification to murder you, because your breath is increasing the heat in the pan such that there is a 1 in a quadrillion higher chance of some oil in the pan splashing onto their skin.
CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo) makes a similar critique as you do. They write:
“The researchers do not relate to physics and other natural sciences to discuss the relationship between CO₂ and temperature, but only a purely statistical correlation analysis. Science is about mechanisms, causality, or causality, not just correlations."
It is an interesting comment, as it relates to a debate that is central to policy debates more generally: What counts as “good enough evidence” for policies? More specifically, and venturing into theory-of-science territory: Is “mechanism-type causal reasoning” sufficient (where climate scientists obviously have much to contribute), or do we also need data and statistical knowledge investigating if the “mechanisms” we have theoretical reasons to assume present, are indeed the dominant ones?
Here, I believe it is fruitful to make a cross-reference to the debate about the “evidence hierarchy” in medicine and related professions. Usually, “mechanistic reasoning” is placed in the bottom half of the evidence hierarchy. See for example Jeremy Howick 2011: The philosophy of evidence-based medicine, chapter 10: “A qualified defence of the EBM stance on mechanistic reasoning”.
With reference to Howick, the (related) problem with your & Cicero’s argument is that we/researchers/professionals are never guaranteed we have an overview of all the “mechanisms” that might be triggered in a causal sequence (or following an intervention). The total number of mechanisms might be larger than our best theories suggest; including unknown mechanisms that may work in a different direction, or that a known mechanism may trigger unknown counter-mechanisms.
This is an argument that statistical competence is of value in itself, in order to find out what is going on. Implying that the competence of statisticians at Statistics Norway is relevant as such.
Let me hasten to add that this does not make the Cicero argument that “mechanism” knowledge is important, null and void. Only that the people who engange in this debate should be careful not to label each other’s competence irrelevant, or (even worse) attack the man rather than the argument.
And just to be clear, I made a link to the working paper available since I believe this is a paper from a usually credible source that might be of interest to those ACX readers who follow the scientific debate on climate change; I did not and do not intend in this comment thread to enter the much larger debate what, if anything, should be done, including how to do risk assessments of different intervention strategies, including risks related to “wait and see”.
I think my own and others reaction to this paper is interesting, in showing some serious bias against believing any evidence against human caused climate change. My approximate reactions were such:
- Statistics Norway is a very reputable source (I'm Norwegian), so this should be worth checking out. Surely the paper is not arguing that climate change is not caused by co2 emissions?
-Skimming the abstract and paper: This sounds like climate change denier propaganda (climate change is caused by magnetic storms and sun cycles). Maybe the authors are not trustworthy after all. Checking the foreword stating that the paper represent the authors opinion, not Statistics norway (ssb), and seeing one of the authors is a retired engineer. Maybe he is an old crackpot, still humored by ssb?
- Reading some more and checking what the paper is actually saying again. The abstract actually says we can't know co2 cause climate change, and the effect of co2 seems to weak to have an effect on temperatures the last 200 years.
- Realising that this seem to be evidence against human caused climate change from a source I have reason to trust. Thinking I have should update on that belief, as a small piece of evidence, but clearly not to the degree of overturning what I believe is the current scientific consensus that climate change is clearly caused by human activity.
"maybe he is an old crackpot"...you are dangerously close to attacking the man rather than going after the ball (argument) here.
Leppi is talking about his emotional reaction at that point, not his considered opinion.
Absolutely, to be clear I'm discussing my instinctive thought process, biases and knee-jerk reactions here - none of this should be taken to by my opinions. Also the crackpot part was partly meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks, and sorry Leppi, I was too crabby here to begin with:-).
Apparently, the paper is an updated version of an article the main author (John.Dagsvik@ssb.no) got published in 2020 in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (peer-reviewed and published by Oxford University Press). Which suggests that he is "whole wood" as a researcher, as we say up here.
My first thought here:
I don't have the time or desire to read their whole paper, so maybe they address this, but should we even expect climate models to correctly reproduce anything more than the recent past? Beyond a certain point I would expect us to lack crucial information to model earlier climates. We can know what climates were like thousands of years ago, but do we have enough knowledge of all the different inputs to model them well? If we can model the last couple hundred years with some accuracy that seems like the best we could expect given the complexity of the system.
We know the big picture range of temperatures, and we know that previous temperatures (definitely not caused by humans) have been significantly higher and lower than anything in the last 200 years or the next 200 years (at current rates of increase). This includes times when humans were alive and walking the earth, and a much wider range prior to.
If we don't believe we can model anything outside of the last 200 years very well, we don't have solid ground to determine much of anything regarding whether humans have or will influence the temperature.
Well we have plenty of theoretical reasons beyond our models to believe CO2 and other green house gases should increase the temperature. Long before we had models we understood the physical mechanics of climate change.
This paper gives me reason to be skeptical of the output of our models, which I already am (but the IPCC reports already account for this skepticism, giving fairly wide bands for what is possible). It does not give me any reason to doubt that CO2 and methane and others are increasing the heat in the atmosphere. The physics of that is pretty incontrovertible, the only thing to discuss is the magnitude. This paper alone is not really much in the way of evidence that there is 0 effect either, just that it's difficult to determine the total effect, which it is.
So I just kind of skimmed through it, and as someone who is very much not a climate modeller, but who has some familiarity (a graduate level seminar going over climate models), I feel like this paper is actually not terribly important for lay people and how they think about climate change.
It seems like it's at least potentially a good and valid critique of climate models and their limitations, but the base level facts of anthropogenic climate change don't actually require the complicated models.
Based on just the extremely simple temperature reconstructions we have, with no modelling necessary, our prior should be "something has radically changed in the past 200 years that does not appear to have occured prevously". And anthropogenic CO2 should be the strongest contender for "what changed".
Now, I don't mean to imply that the details don't matter. The specifics of how much we expect the global climate to change are actually pretty impactful, as well as to the degree of control we have over that process.
But I think for anyone who isn't a climate doomer, then a paper that shows our current models aren't all the way up to the task of fully modelling the changes isn't that big a deal.
And, in my opinion, we didn't need this paper to argue against the doomer position (and anyone who still holds the doomer view I don't expect to be swayed by one more piece of evidence).
So in summary: from a lay person perspective, this paper really shouldn't shift our opinions much as long as we didn't hold the (admittedly unfortunately common) extreme doomer position, but that extreme doomer position was already not consistent with the best science, so this critque of climate models, even if it turns out to be completely true, doesn't seem particularly impactful.
The paper is not only saying that climate models don't work. It also appears to be saying that we can't know if increase in Co2 caused any temperature changes, and that the changes may be due to natural causes. Actually, the abstract is saying that the effect of co2 appears to be too weak to explain the temperature changes over the last 200 years. I don't know what to make of this, but it seems controversial given that the ipcc, and the scientific consensus says climate change is definitely caused by human activity.
I'm not a climate doomer in and of itself but combining agw with all the other things we are inflicting on the planet and the churning international tensions i could talk myself into prepping.
And that claim, that the past 200 years of warming might just be natural variation, should require _much_ stronger evidence. I believe that it might be true that our _models_ aren't good enough to say whether or not the warming is real (although I'm skeptical of even that claim), but we should view that as problems with the modelling and not actually evidence that the warming isn't real.
As a critique of our current modelling, this paper seems potentially reasonable (I'm not a good enough modeller to assess it myself). As a claim that anthropogenic climate change isn't real (that is to say: the warming we see isn't caused by humans at all), a simple statistical analysis of models is no where _near_ strong enough evidence for us to believe it.
Basically, the temperature plot tells us that, for 100% sure, _something_ at least slightly odd is happening in the past 200 years (since we haven't seen this rapid a temperature change in our temperature reconstructions over the past tens of thousands of years). CO2 seems like a pretty reasonable explanation on a lot of levels. Any critique that doesn't propose an at least equally probable cause should be taken with a grain of salt.
> in our temperature reconstructions
So, assuming a made-up model of the past where we assume that the temperature didn't change very much in the past, we haven't seen these levels of temperature change in the past?
The reconstructions I have seen, the hockey stick papers and critiques of them, only go back about two thousand years. Where are reconstructions of global temperatures that go back over the past tens of thousands of years?
Literally the first result I clicked from google scholar. There are many others:
http://www.appstate.edu/~perrylb/Courses/Peru/5015/Readings/Marcott_etal_2013.pdf
This only goes back 11,000 years, but even so I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, in reconstructions that get older, the scale is going to minimize the recent data. 200 years on a 50,000 year plot doesn't look like much no matter how rapid it is. So the plots that get shared/talked about tend to be from smaller scale plots, where the difference is more apparent. But that doesn't mean it's not _there_ in older reconstructions.
Are you arguing that there exists, in the longer records, time periods with equally rapid change?
That would be pretty monumentally important if so. I'd be interested in seeing that.
Agreed, this is far from strong enough evidence to believe that climate change is not caused by humans. Though it is (weak) evidence in that direction from a source I believe to be trustworthy. Also, it is possibly somewhat stronger evidence that the ipcc position that climate change has been clearly proven to be caused by human activity may be wrong. Ofcourse, this does not mean we should stop acting as if climate change is caused by co2 and green gas emissions, given the consequences - but maybe it means that we should be more inclined to also explore other options If this temperature change is caused by something else, it may be just as harmfull, and I would like to know what is causing it.
I think to go backwards. I haven't seen the evidence that climate change is caused by humans. I have heard about some models but on the level that human body is regulated by 4 humours, i.e., without sufficient evidence about the details.
The presented models as described in the comment by David Friedman are performing very poorly.
The strongest evidence would be that the global warming is happening at the same time we have industrialized, that is, we have released a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. It gives some credence to this theory.
But it could also be coincidence. We have merely starting to make more detailed observations. We don't know how fast the temperature used to change in ancient past. Currently I remain agnostic on the issue – like 50% vs 50%.
This article gives some credence that it is not human caused but I would need to check how good is their analysis. Can we have an independent body like Cochrane group that evaluates these claims?
Also, there was a recent article that claimed that environmental regulations that limited sulphur emissions on sea vessels have been the cause of accelerated warming. It appears that many have accepted this story uncritically. I don't believe it. It seems too convenience and our models are no where near so good to definitely prove it. We should be more sceptical about such stories. Shouldn't even publish them without proper context because it just forms narratives without evidence. We need to make a habit of evidence based science instead of stories.
On the subject of climate models, some time back I looked at the first four IPCC reports to see how well they predicted global temperature. The first badly over predicted, for the next three temperature increase has been within the 90% range of the prediction/projection.
I then did a straight line fit to the data available at the time each IPCC report came out, starting when warming restarted in 1965. It beat the IPCC projection four times out of four. I conclude that the IPCC modeling is not consistently biased but is very weak prediction:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/testing-ipcc-projections-against
Related, and possibly of interest:
Weather data for the US is available from NOAA for the past 100+ years, with a high level of geographical precision. I picked a single example here: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/divisional/time-series/3001/pcp/12/12/1895-2021?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000 , to provide a gateway.
The data can be cherry-picked to bolster virtually any position in the climate debate.
This is the take that has always made the most sense to me. Reasonable to believe that there has been substantial anthropogenic climate change? Sure. Proven? Surely not. Discourse in the whole area is such a mess.
In late 2021, this was added to the Mistakes section (#41):
"In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
Has Scott elaborated on this anywhere?
I suspect if Scott held in his hands a ballot with Warren on it, as I have, he would not vote for her Republican opponent. I actually have a good reason to vote for her - I also have a Cherokee grandmother, and she is favorable to native american issues, which is important to me. Yes, she is a politician...lesser of evils...
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-204?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=4170687
> Lots of things over the course of years, but the latest is her "inflation is just caused by corporations being greedy" campaign.
This is useful context - thank you!
(Also, not a whole lot of elaboration on a shift of "smart and good" to "dumb and bad" - though contributors to the thread other than Scott offer some more flavor)
Relevant: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1470971190550269955
Re: Czech Republic. IMO so far it's not that interesting in terms of TFR increase initiatives, as they haven't actually reached the 2.05 threshold necessary to sustain the population level. But there's 3 other countries that have managed to bring their TFR back to normal, as per World Bank data.
1. Kazakhstan. From 1.8 in 1998 to 3.32 in 2021
2. Georgia. From 1.55 in 2003 to 2.08 in 2021
3. Tunisia. From 1.96 in 2002 to 2.08 in 2021
As far as I know, none of them had particularly generous social programs. All of them did see a huge improvement in their economy over the past 20 years but usually this results in *decreasing* rather than increasing TFR. These should be the countries to learn from, not Hungary or Czech Republic which have failed to produce tangible results so far.
[Edited to update the list]
Where did you get that 2020 Iran figure? Here is a rather different picture:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/294115/iran-fertility-rate/
Vietnam may have peaked in 2020, is now slipping back down. 2.034 for 2021, 2.026 for 2020, 2.019 projected for 2023.
Sorry, I got Iran wrong, you are right. Updated the data as of 2021.
Thanks.
Regarding the three countries now listed, combined they total a bit over 40M population. Meanwhile nations totaling a population in the billions are going in the other direction (below the TFR and still falling). Easy to see why the demographers doing global population projections keep having to revise downward these days.
Speculative, but maybe what all these countries have in common is that they are optimistic about the future?
In contrast, most Western countries seem irrationally pessimistic, with a bunch of end-of-the-world type fears dominating their identities.
Your speculation is a main hypothesis in the field. "Optimism about the long-term economic future" is considered by many researchers to be the main factor behind (relatively) high fertility. More important than specific givernment programmes to boost fertility.
Otoh they all seem to have done it unintentionally, which makes it hard to learn from them how to actively cause it.
I'm looking for a "work buddy" -- the idea is that we'd meet over discord/zoom for a couple hours and keep each other accountable during the work block (report what we're planning to accomplish, and then whether we've accomplished it). Right now my work schedule involves long chunks of uninterrupted time and I'm finding it hard to stay on track. I'd love for this to become a regularly (daily?) thing, but if you would like a one-shot work buddy (someone to meet for an hour and force you to get started on whatever you've been procrastinating on) I'd also be down. Also, I'd love to know of any preexisting groups I could join.
Contact: test128902 [at] gmail.com
You might consider focusmate, which can either be random matches with a specific block (usu just an hour). There's also an option to use it in coordination with people you know "You can schedule sessions directly with a friend, or have them schedule your sessions by using your invite link"
If you don't find a work buddy, do you know about Beeminder?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1254717/full
What are the best books on ADHD for high-IQ women?
For background, I am the partner. She is extremely talented and knows she has ADHD, but struggles to manage basic symptoms. It is certainly affecting our relationship.
Ideally, the book would speak directly to her experiences, would provide advice and guidance, and also be a good, intriguing read.
I'd also love to hear from women in this situation, or for their partners.
Taking Charge of Adult ADHD by Russell Barkley spoke directly to my experiences and provides advice and guidance (but is not really an "intriguing" read) https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Charge-Adult-ADHD-Second/dp/1462546854/ref=sr_1_6?crid=21T5B02VRSY92&keywords=adult+adhd&qid=1696258551&sprefix=adult+adhd%2Caps%2C72&sr=8-6
Russell Barkley also has a book about loving someone with ADHD if you are interested in that for yourself (I have not read it, but have heard good things): https://www.amazon.com/When-Adult-You-Love-ADHD/dp/143382308X/ref=pd_bxgy_sccl_2/134-9891188-1912906?pd_rd_w=zEVt2&content-id=amzn1.sym.21b577c4-6435-4581-8b53-49da41e27328&pf_rd_p=21b577c4-6435-4581-8b53-49da41e27328&pf_rd_r=EH5R6R040STSPAHXGECN&pd_rd_wg=iKHfe&pd_rd_r=e9fcd64b-fa0c-41a1-b944-afb746954327&pd_rd_i=143382308X&psc=1
Barkley is one of the top ADHD researchers so the information will be accurate and scientifically based, though pretty dry. Hope can get partial credit for this answer!
Thank you so much.
Is she on medication? If it's not alleviating basic symptoms then she should contact her doctor about that.
She is sometimes on, sometimes off. Getting a doctor is hard for her, because it takes planning and organization.
We're coming up on Columbus Day again, and our annual fight on whether or not we should be celebrating the guy in the first place. One argument I think is given too little weight, is how incredibly reckless his decision to sail west was in the first place. His miscalculation of the circumference of the Earth and relative position of the far East is just staggering – not least since far better estimates had been around for thousands of years.
So I wrote down my thoughts about Columbus as 15th century tech bro: https://nordtomme.substack.com/p/columbus-reckless-stupidity
(and I illustrated it with a map and a blinking gif, that I know Scott would hate, but that I am nevertheless a bit proud of.)
The comparison between Columbus and the modern "tech bro" archetype isn't a bad one, but I think it should be considered as a mark in favour of tech-bro-ism rather than a mark against Columbus.
Yes, Columbus engaged in a high-risk high-reward project based on some rather optimistic assumptions. In my view this is a fantastic thing, and something to be encouraged. We don't advance as a species by trying things that will definitely work, we advance by trying things that might not work. This is the spirit that we celebrate when we celebrate Columbus Day, the spirit of trying things that might not work and sometimes discovering something new along the way.
Of course much of the "how silly was this?" question hinges on how much supplies they had, and whether they were planning to turn back if they didn't find land before reaching the point of no return. If they did and they were, then the whole enterprise wasn't even all that risky (at least no riskier than any other long voyage in a 15th century ship).
I appreciate and understand what you say. But in my mind, there’s an distinction between good entrepreneurs and tech bros. The former are disciplined, often obsess about getting the product right even if it’s a simple MVP, start small and scale quickly, take calculated risks and think about risk mitigation. If they fail, they pivot. This gives them the confidence they need to press forward.
Tech bros, in my mind, copy the superficial, highly visible qualities of such entrepreneurs, but not the foundation. They launch half-baked ideas, scale quickly with no proof of viability, have (or fake) unwarranted confidence, and when they fail, they fail spectacularly.
I don’t know if you’ve read the post, but I think Columbus was clearly in the latter category, and I feel like I explain why.
As to your last point, his crew was already on the brink of mutiny a few days before they found land (though not the land they were looking for), because they realized they wouldn’t have enough provisions to make the return trip if they had to.
Empirically, we celebrate people for doing bold audacious things that change the world, not for playing it safe. Or, to take the other usual criticism of Columbus, for being nice. If you want to celebrate the nice guys who took only modest, calculated risks, sure, go for it, but I don't think many people are going to find that appealing.
If you don't want to celebrate someone because they conspicuously leave a box or two unchecked on the Perfect Role Model profile, then don't expect to celebrate very many people at all. Unless you don't look too closely, in which case why are you looking so closely as Columbus.
Bold, yes. Audacious, yes. Changed the World, yes. Columbus is in. Leif Erikson or Amerigo Vespucci or whoever else you want to slot in their place, not so much.
"Conspicuously leaves a box or two unchecked on the Perfect Role Model profile" is one hell of a euphemism for "led slave raids in which over a thousand people were kidnapped and enslaved".
I think "yes, obviously Columbus was an unspeakably evil man, but he was also bold and audacious and his achievements changed the world, and that makes him worth commemorating even if not celebrating" would be a more defensible position if the first, most important, part of it didn't to get lost or played down so much - as you're doing here.
I agree that if your standard is literally "doesn't leave a box or two unchecked etc" then that won't leave you many people to celebrate. But if it's merely "didn't initiate and participate in mass enslavement and murder" then that still leaves quite a lot.
Did you read the post where I lay out my case in more detail? I think there’s a significant difference between bold and audacious (like, say, Magellan, Roald Amundsen, or 1960s NASA) and Columbus.
He didn’t think the world was too small, he just thought China was much bigger (a reasonable mistake, considering what they knew at the time)
Seems I'm wrong, he made both mistakes. Probably should have double checked before posting, but I remember having this conversation online a few years ago and my double checking back then turned out differently. I guess Wikipedia marches on...
He made both mistakes.
That's not correct and the mistake is not reasonable. I make the case in the article.
It's also a really random holiday for United States-ians to celebrate; it's basically the start of the unpleasant story of how Latin America was founded. They should really celebrate Caboto discovering North America for the English and starting the unpleasant story of how Anglo America was founded.
"It's also a really random holiday for United States-ians to celebrate"
If I go by Wikipedia, in one way it's a very USAian holiday to celebrate:
"For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following a lynching in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration"
If Juneteenth is now being pushed to placate African-Americans and/or progressives, then Columbus Day was the forerunner of that, lynchings and all.
It's possible that Columbus day lowered anti-Italian prejudice. How could we tell?
I wondered at first glance, is Caboto a typo? Now I realize, once wikipedia spared me an exposure of my provincial ignorance, that this is something more like a flex of greater cosmopolite awareness than I had until now: "John Cabot (Italian: Giovanni Caboto c. 1450 – c. 1500) was an Italian[3][4] navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. "
I literally got Caboto from googling "who discovered North America" while typing that, after checking how to spell "Vespucci" and finding out in the process that he didn't discover North America like I thought.
It seems that Colombus Day was pushed by Italian-Americans who wanted to overcome the bad image (organ grinders, ice cream sellers, and Mafia criminals) their ethnic grouping had - part of the "spics, wops and dagoes" view by nativist Americans.
So they picked a heroic figure of the discovery of America to show that they had every bit as much right to be considered foundational Americans as the WASPS.
Time marches on, and now ooops. We're very very sensitive about these things.
But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*. The WASPs who made and broke treaties with the tribes and drove them onto reservations can't point the finger at Chris for being "he was even more terrible than us" because yeah, but you weren't supposed to be that bad either.
So once you start knocking the culture heroes off their pedestals, it's not going to end there. And if you pick somebody different for October, in a little while they too will be excoriated for wrongthink and badness. This is not saying Columbus didn't do bad things - he did - but all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of woke progressivism.
There's an awful lot of room between "perfect" and "lead slave raids that kidnapped over a thousand innocent people into slavery".
For what it's worth, I personally think that a good start for engagement with history would be the acknowledgement that "not being evil" is a fairly recent innovation (and still very much a work in progress), and that a large majority of pre-modern rulers, and many pre-modern non-rulers, behaved appallingly.
But that's a fairly extreme position - in this case I think I can fairly argue both "it won't happen..." and "... but it would be a good thing if it did". And there's a /lot/ of space between "a decent human being whose flaws are small enough to overlook and excuse" and "as evil as Columbus".
"But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*. "
Well, presumably there was a first person who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last ice age - but finding out his or her name would be ... difficult.
You mean...people who had literally nothing to do with the country of the USA coming into existence?
a) I was looking for a non-contentious candidate for "discoverer" of the Americas.
b) Actually, at various points in the process European settlers in the colonies that eventually became the USA traded with the native tribes, so that certainly _affected_ the formation of the USA. I do not know how much it mattered. A bunch of important New World crops, particularly maize, had been cultivated before European settlers arrived, and that was surely important.
I'm not sure we have to scrap everybody. You just have to scrap the people who were in positions of power.
That's happened many times before - Europe's got lots of places dedicated to 1st century Judeans, just not to Pontius Pilate or any of the people in charge. Instead, they're most dedicated to a bunch of nobodies who were persecuted and killed by the Romans.
Over time, we came to find out that the nobodies actually had some important and interesting ideas. Today we build statues of them and name things after them.
I'm confident that if we get rid of Columbus, we'll find lots of other admirable people to celebrate, just not ones that were in positions of power.
They weren't "a bunch of nobodies", they were the leaders of arguably the most successful religious movement in history.
During their lives, they were nobodies. That's why Pontius Pilate puts Jesus on trial, and not the other way around. That's why Christians were getting fed to the lions, not the Romans.
After their lives, their fortunes rise and fall. That would happen with obscure Native Americans too - while during their lives they were nobodies, tomorrow they might become the most famous leaders of all time. The future is wide open.
"You just have to scrap the people who were in positions of power."
Everybody was in a position of power, according to privilege theory. You'll have to find obscure Native American tribespeople to venerate because they'll be the only ones Pure Enough (until somebody digs up something in oral tradition that no-nos Chief A or Wise woman B).
Is that any different than venerating 1st century Judeans?
There are lots of people who wielded more temporal power than, for example, Saint Paul. We survived the transition from venerating Augustus to venerating the Apostles - why won't we survive the transition from venerating Columbus to venerating obscure Native Americans?
"why won't we survive the transition from venerating Columbus to venerating obscure Native Americans?"
Over a hundred years ago, Columbus Day was celebrated for several reasons, including political, and Columbus was a National Hero for the foundation myth.
Pick your Native American or haloed other person to replace the holiday. Then tell me that one hundred years from now, opinions about what is bad and who is bad won't have moved on so that they too must now be pulled down (maybe they were meat eaters, the monsters!)
Mores change. I don't care about Columbus Day, it's not a celebration in my country, and it's no skin off my nose if it's celebrated, dumped, or changed to Colours Of The Wind Native American Women Frolicking In The Forest Day.
But there is no guarantee that you can freeze the values of today and have the anodyne pick for replacement remain considered anodyne, and not instead an exemplar of the Worst Tendencies Ever. A hundred years ago Columbus was the hero needed. Today he's a monster to be excoriated. A hundred years from now, what will be the crimes that Colours of the Wind will stand condemned for? You can't put a limit on that, that is the point I am trying to make: not that "Columbus was okay and we should keep the day" but "today's hero will just as easily become tomorrow's zero".
As you can see from the history below, if Colours of the Wind Day is a replacement national holiday to acknowledge Native Americans and be some sort of official apology for their treatment, so was Columbus Day for how Italian-Americans had been treated. Maybe in a hundred years time that aspect will have been forgotten and instead there will be objections to celebrating the murderous war-mongers who tortured and killed (non-human) persons (hunting and fishing for food; the vegan pledge link included the plaintive appeal of a vegan who refers to fish as people and worries about them suffocating when seeing people fishing in the park).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day
"Many Italian Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and not of Columbus himself, and the day was celebrated in New York City on October 12, 1866. The day was first enshrined as a legal holiday in the United States through the lobbying of Angelo Noce, a first-generation American, in Denver. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907.
For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1892, following a lynching in New Orleans, where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. The proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. During the anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets, and politicians used rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These rituals took themes such as citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and the celebration of social progress, included among them was the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy.
In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: "The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation (1) designating October 12 as Columbus Day; (2) calling on United States government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Columbus Day; and (3) inviting the people of the United States to observe Columbus Day, in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies that express the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of the discovery of America." ... In 1941, Italian and Italian Americans were interned and lost rights as "enemy aliens" due to a belief they would be loyal to Italy and not America in World War II; in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as "enemy aliens" announced on Columbus Day along with a plan to offer citizenship to 200,000 elderly Italians living in the United States who had been unable to acquire citizenship due to a literacy requirement, but the implementation of the announcement was not completed until those interned in camps were released after Italy's surrender to the Allies on September 8, 1943.
In 1966, Mariano A. Lucca, from Buffalo, New York, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday. These efforts were successful and legislation to create Columbus Day as a federal holiday was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on June 28, 1968, to be effective beginning in 1971.
Since 1971, when Columbus Day became an officially recognized Federal holiday in the United States, it has been observed on the second Monday in October, as commemorated by annual Presidential proclamation noting Columbus' achievements."
So there was a time in American history before we had Columbus Day. We currently have it. In the not too distant future we may no longer have Columbus Day.
Instead, we may replace it with something new, which may, in turn, be replaced again with something newer. I don't really see that as a problem - if anything, that's an integral part of the human experience.
But here, maybe instead we keep Columbus Day and we instead just add holidays for each ethnic and national group that has faced discrimination in America. Would you be in support of that?
I'm equally confident they will be racist or sexist or homophobic 100% of the time.
Sure, and Saint Paul wasn't without sin. If you're going to be honoring humans, you're going to be honoring sinners, with maybe one or two exceptions (depending on if you believe in Jesus and/or the sinlessness of Mary).
From what I've seen, most people are okay with elevating and honoring the righteous, even if they're not sinless. In contrast, most people aren't okay elevating and honoring awful people - no one is clamoring for national Jeffrey Dahmer Day or anything.
If we view sin/righteousness as a continuum, are we really going to say that there's no one more righteous than Christopher Columbus in all of American history?
It's not "is there no one more righteous than Christopher Columbus", it's "all our righteousness is as filthy rags".
Pick anyone you like out of American history, and for most of them there will be an immediate objection. Someone mentioned Lewis and Clark for a replacement Explorers Day. Well! Lewis and Clark were colonisers and agents of enabling colonisation, exploitation, dispossession, and extirpation of the indigenous peoples by their mapping expeditions opening up new territories for conquest. Sacagawega was a race traitor, since she enabled the success of their mission:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea
"By August 1805, the corps had located a Shoshone tribe and was attempting to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. They used Sacagawea to interpret and discovered that the tribe's leader, Cameahwait, was her brother.
...The Shoshone agreed to barter horses to the group and to provide guides to lead them over the rugged Rocky Mountains. The trip was so hard that they ran short of food. When they descended into the more temperate regions on the other side, Sacagawea helped to find and cook camas roots to help the party members regain their strength.
As the expedition approached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt to enable the captains to trade for a fur robe they wished to bring back to give to President Thomas Jefferson.
...Her work as an interpreter helped the party to negotiate with the Shoshone. But, she also had significant value to the mission simply by her presence on the journey, as having a woman and infant accompany them demonstrated the peaceful intent of the expedition. While traveling through what is now Franklin County, Washington, in October 1805, Clark noted that "the wife of Shabono [Charbonneau] our interpreter, we find reconciles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace." Further he wrote that she "confirmed those people of our friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter".
Is such a disgraceful quisling worthy of being honoured?
"Sacagawea was an important member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early 20th century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.
If you think that sounds extravagant, remember in 1971 Columbus was inoffensive enough to get a national holiday and now, fifty-two years later, the day should be scrapped because he was so wicked. How do you think attitudes will have moved on fifty-two years from now, and the heroic Indian woman will instead be a filthy tratior quisling who sold out her people to help the invaders and colonisers?
In 1959, Sacagawea was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. In 1976, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2001, she was given the title of Honorary Sergeant, Regular Army, by President Bill Clinton. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame."
We need this so badly.
I'm a cautious fellow so let's start small with this.
I hereby declare the next 5 minutes from this moment to be a celebration of happiness, live and achievement, in memory and honor of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Happy Dahmer to you friend!
Re: "no one is clamoring for national Jeffrey Dahmer Day" Texas chose an interesting day...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/texas-boston-strangler/
Well then I want a Divine Day, in honor of that actress who ate dog shit at the end of a John Waters movie. Just try to make a case that wasn't brave!
There are virtues other than righteousness worth celebrating.
I agree with that, although I do think that righteousness is necessary, but not sufficient, to be publicly celebrated.
By way of example, it's the 50th anniversary of OJ Simpson's landmark 2,000-yard season. Do you think we'll see any celebrations?
if we’re talking opposition to gay marriage that’s everybody pre this millennium. Including Obama and Hilary.
Columbus may have been no worse than the *specific* people who broke treaties, but he and they were *absolutely* far worse than most people of their time.
You changed your picture!
I did! Rather, I downloaded the Substack app, because they've been pushing it so hard, and it sounded like it might be useful, and when I logged in there, it had a blank image so I uploaded the most recent one I took with my current hair color.
However, the app doesn't seem to be as useful as the e-mail/browser combo. When I'm reading in a browser, I can collapse comment threads by clicking on the line next to them, and when I get a response notification e-mail, I can jump directly to it by clicking. In the app I haven't figured out how to do either of these things. If I can't figure them out (and/or no one can explain them to me) then I might delete the app and just end up with the new picture as the souvenir of the experience. (It was due for an update anyway - I think the previous picture was from 2018 and was just the easiest one I had around when Matt Yglesias started his Substack.)
I can''t see your hair color in this new photo. Is it brown? Or some more exotic dyed color?
It's green! I definitely can't see it at the small scale here, and even when I click, the larger one is still cropped, but when I click again I get the full rectangle and it's clear there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say Columbus was misunderstood or misrepresented.
But when you start the pebbles rolling, don't be surprised when an avalanche ensues.
Columbus should be stripped of his status and the memorial day junked. Very well.
And what next? Because he wasn't the only one. Now we've the precedent of turning past heroes to current zeroes. Washington is already getting the "he was a slaveholder and just as bad as Jefferson" treatment. How about scrapping Presidents' Day, seeing as how it is officially Washington's Birthday and intended to commemorate him? Just whitewashing (heh!) the day by renaming it isn't good enough, the same way renaming Columbus Day to Discovery Day wouldn't be good enough.
We already have precedent of turning heroes of the present into zeroes, and vice verse. Literally in this case, Columbus was plucked from being a minor historical footnote to being an American emblem by deliberate action, and may return to being so in just the same way. National myths are reinvented, recontextualized and reimagined every generation. You can argue that specific people should and shouldn't be put on a pedestal, but saying that we shouldn't change the occupants of those pedestals at all is arguing against the tide.
I'm not saying we shouldn't change the occupants, I'm saying that changing them based on moral considerations of the day (as witness OP's new comment on 'I'm not celebrating Genghis Khan rape week') means that with the changes of time and history, anyone we pick *today* to replace Columbus on that pedestal is every bit as likely, in the time of our descendants, to be turfed off from Crimes and Misdemeanours that we're not even considering right now, but that will be the big Moral Consideration of *that* day.
I'm predicting meat eating, if veganism does manage to become a groundswell movement, but it could be for any reason. Being the incorrect shade of brown. Cis-het ness. Too tall. Didn't condemn the use of orange as a traffic light colour (how many millions of colour-blind people died due to this dangerous imposition and the indifference of the general public???)
It's hard to know. Will the current level of moral fervor last?
Still Amherst is going strong, as a name.
"But if you scrap Columbus for being terrible, you have to scrap *everybody*."
No. Columbus was particularly bad, even by the standards of the era (i.e. the era of the Spanish Inquisition).
Even if you think selling nine-year-old girls as sex slaves, beheading or chopping the hands off natives for minor crimes, or giving your men 100 lashes for not collecting enough food sounds like normal 15th century behavior, his "own" colonists revolted against him, and he was ultimately arrested by the Spanish crown, and stripped of his titles.
It's okay to single out Christopher Columbus for special condemnation.
(I also almost called him Chris, but decided that that would be an insult to the *real* Chris Columbus, who has given humanity so much: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001060/ 😉 )
PS: And you don't have to pick another individual. It would be better to pick a theme, like adventure and exploration, and not put some fallible person's name on it.
I pick Divine, the John Waters actress.
If none of these things were true, I would expect opposition to Columbus day to be almost identically strong as it is currently. Hatred of Columbus is so overdetermined that he could have been wildly progressive for this time in these respects and he would still be hated.
Columbus is hated for lots of reasons, many of which I don’t agree with. So you may have a point.
I’m not a huge fan of Columbus, as I’ve made clear, but my main objection to a Columbus Day is that I think there should be a high bar for putting a person’s name on one of our very limited number of days. (I’m not convinced it’s a good idea at all.) And I don’t think Columbus clears that bar.
If we had 7000 holidays named for historical people, I don’t know that I would have singled out CC. (Maybe, but maybe not. Even if I think he was particularly bad, even for his time, there are a lot of bad “great” people throughout history, so competition could have been stiff.) As it is, we have MLK, Jesus and a handful of weird saints (Patrick, Valentine) whom I don’t know enough about. But I really don’t think ruthless, reckless CC is worthy of that company.
But then don't we have to also change the name of Columbus, Ohio, Columbia University and the country, Colombia?
It would hardly be the first time a city or country changed its official name to wash off unwanted imperial/colonial flavor, but that’s for the citizens of those places (and the institution) to decide.
Nope, sorry, we're seeing this in action already.
So we unperson Columbus because he was so terrible. Right, that's done.
Then we move on to the next guy down. So he only gave people *80* lashes and wasn't as bad as Columbus, but are we saying 80 lashes is okay? Obviously not. He's next on the chopping block.
Guy who didn't give any lashes but chopped off hands. We okay with hand chopping? No? Dump him.
And so on down.
You can certainly single out Columbus for "special condemnation" but once you set the wheels in motion about pulling down the 'heroes of yesteryear' for being bad awful horrible people, it never stops at just this one guy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/19/us/portland-george-washington-statue-toppled-trnd/index.html
The good old “everything I don’t like is a slippery slope” argument… But of course not everything is actually a slippery slope.
No, the good old "I read the news" argument.
They scrapped a memorial to Lee's horse. When you start holding the cavalry horses accountable for the sins of their masters, then tell me I'm invoking the slippery slope.
https://www.wluspectator.com/home/2023/7/12/traveller-plaque-on-stables-removed-grave-marker-to-be-replaced
Reading the news is, in 2023, not the best way to learn about the world. Most of it is designed to outrage you and make you engage with it (click, comment, share), not to empower you to form opinions and make decisions. There are crazy things going on, but most people are nowhere near as crazy as they seem in the news.
As for the horse, I don’t know the story. How did it earn this plaque?
I think that, in fact, recent events have proven that everything is a slippery slope if you don't put your foot down to stop it somewhere. It's not fallacy, the world really is full of slippery slopes.
Yes, there are slippery slopes in the world. Self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing trends are a law of nature. Some of their attributes is that they don’t have
sufficient stops on the way to “unacceptable outcome”, and that the forces working in the opposite direction aren’t strong enough to break and possibly reverse the trend. I don’t think either of those things are true in this case.
Inside certain ecosystems on the left, excesses of wokism have become slippery slopes, and are intolerable, but society at large has different stops and forces in play.
This seems overly dismissive given that their response to you gave an example that actually happened. I don't doubt that numerous other incidents could be given if anyone wanted to spend a few minutes on google.
Is slippery slope fallacy a fallacy when reality does in fact show a slippery slope?
I don’t see statues being toppled by rioters and protesters as even being on the same continuum as having discussions about the legacy of historical persons.
The slope is interrupted by any number of legal, political, moral and social bumps. It is ridiculous to think that if we collectively decide to rename Columbus Day (not likely anyway), we would suddenly slip and fall and rename our capitol city next. But if we do, it will probably be a democratic decision, after a long and heated debate, and not just the inevitable effect of having rethought Columbus’ hero status.
So yes, it is a fallacy, even if you can share old news headlines to help bolster your narrative.
Lionizing individuals born before 1950 is. Even that might be a stretch. If you use woke progressive values, then no one on earth is safe to revere.
At least according to WH Prescott's History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (caveat: very old, quite possibly out of date), Columbus' colonists revolted because they thought he was too heavy-handed *to them*, not to the natives, and most of the stuff about him being cruel and bloodthirsty was reported by his enemies.
You're right that the actual historical person Christopher Columbus was considered a POS by his own peers during his own lifetime. So in that sense the attempt to un-do his secular sainthood (which is not too strong a phrase for how he was talked and taught about when I was a kid in American public schools) is well justified.
That said, the modern-day efforts to de-platform Columbus have not been based on him as a person any more than the original creation of Columbus Day was. It's about broader questions/issues/arguments about our history of which he happened to be a potent symbol. That is also why the idea of changing the holiday to something like "Discovery Day" or "Exploration Day" would still have to fight through some of the same headwinds (as mentioned below here). I'm not very optimistic that the idea could succeed TBH, given the current infantilism of our culture and politics.
I agree with all of this. I don’t expect anyone to rename the day anytime soon. But I think the way to change the culture is to talk about these things.
In the much bigger picture, I think our culture(s) is pretty good at a handful of holidays – and is phoning in the rest of them (C-day being a prime example). I’d like to give the whole calendar a good jolt, keep the holidays that are culturally robust enough to stand, and replace the weak ones with something more meaningful to more people.
Someone else suggested turning C-day into a day of atonement, with fasting and solemnity, rather than parades. I’m not entirely convinced, but at least that adds some much-needed depth to the whole thing.
Columbus Day *was* a one-off Day of Atonement for the murder of Italian immigrants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
"The 1891 New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants in New Orleans by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history. Most of the lynching victims accused in the murder had been rounded up and charged due to their Italian ethnicity.
...As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World.
...The contrasting American and Italian attitudes toward the lynchings are perhaps best summarized by Theodore Roosevelt's comment. Roosevelt, then serving on the United States Civil Service Commission, wrote to his sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles on March 21, 1891:
Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.
The incident has been mostly forgotten in the U.S., relegated to the footnotes of American history texts. However, it is more widely known in Italy."
Given such racist and anti-immigrant attitude on display, should Roosevelt's image be chiseled off Mount Rushmore? Is he somebody worthy of honour and celebration?
One big problem with the day-of-atonement concept is the selectivity of it. E.g. I'm opposed to slavery and very much glad we don't do it anymore, and the "we" includes lots of peoples in the Americas long before any Europeans showed up. I once sat next to a woman at a Midwestern professional conference who got visibly upset about the opening land-acknowledgement statement, and it turned out that she was a local and was a descendant of one of the tribes whose land the Odawa [the group being honored by the land acknowledgement] had taken via genocidal assault. Etc.
A Day of Acknowledgement genuinely aiming to acknowledge and inspire contemplation of the largest horrors of our full collective history, _that_ I could support with enthusiasm. It would in the big picture be healthy and ultimately forward-looking. And perhaps one day there will be a large human society whose thought leaders possess the maturity and thoughtfulness to make such a thing happen....but today's USA is very much not that society.
Seems to me that most of history is the story of people chopping off each others heads, hands, feet, peckers, etc. in fights over resources and over who's right. Maybe we should just have an Our Species Sucks day.
I live in a substantially Italian neighborhood. I'm expecting fireworks.
I suspect he had heard and believed tales about Vinland back when he visited Ireland and/or Iceland, and lied to the Spanish crown about his reasons to want to sail west.
He probably relied on the Navigatio of St Brendan and there is a sort of folk tradition that he landed in Galway first and spoke to pilots there about lands further west of Ireland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_the_Navigator#The_Voyage_of_Saint_Brendan_the_Abbot
"The Navigatio was known widely in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Maps of Christopher Columbus’ time often included an island denominated Saint Brendan's Isle that was placed in the western Atlantic Ocean. Paul Chapman argues that Christopher Columbus learned from the Navigatio that the currents and winds would favor westbound travel by a southerly route from the Canary Islands, and eastbound on the return trip by a more northerly route, and hence followed this itinerary on all of his voyages."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Christopher_Columbus_(Galway)
"The Monument to Christopher Columbus is a monument in Galway, Ireland. The memorial was erected in 1992, the year of the Columbus Quincentenary, to commemorate Christopher Columbus's visit to the city in 1477. It stands next to the Spanish Arch."
I used to think so. But if that were true he chose the riskiest route possible, close to where Mansa Musa's predecessor's two fleets disappeared, and far, far south of where Vinland was supposed to be. It would have been better, then, to follow Leiv Eiriksson's fairly well documented route.
Also, his diaries show he clung to his delusions even after finding land.
Leif Erikson's route takes one to Newfoundland, and trade with Newfoundland wasn't going to make anyone rich. Particularly not if you have to launder the profits through Icelandic and English ports on your way back home to Spain or Italy.
The goal was to establish a new and more convenient route for the actually lucrative China/East Indies trade, based I suspect on the not-unreasonable guess that since the Vikings reported that the coast stretched south from Vinland and the Chinese reported a coast stretching north from Korea, the two might be connected. So if you're headed for a rich market fifteen hundred miles southwest of Vinland, and you're starting a thousand or so miles south of Iceland...
I understand and agree, except that guess *is* quite unreasonable if you don’t botch the math. For a brief overview of bad assumptions and miscalculations he made, see the full post.
In general, we don't celebrate a particular person, really, we instead celebrate a myth or an idea or a set of values. I celebrate Christmas even though I'm totally atheistic and don't even fully believe Jesus actually existed (as a man, let alone the son of God). Someone could even claim that Columbus is worth celebrating precisely because he made such a momentous discovery against all odds and all established opinions. In other words we celebrate the discovery, the spirit of discovery, the defiant stance against authority, the confidence in one's own ideas, individuality in general, not the man himself.
I say we keep Columbus Day. Very few people know the details of the discovery, all that matters is the idea of discovery, not whether the particulars were correct.
The most parsimonious explanation of Christianity is that Jesus existed.
An interesting argument, which would call for giving the holiday a different name. Of course "Discovery Day" would generate some of the same semi-historical fainting spells that Columbus Day does, while amping up the semi-historical sputtering from Italian-American heritage groups.
I strongly suspect however that each side would be unpleasantly surprised to find that fewer people are much interested in their respective tantrum today than was true 5 or 10 years ago. So yea that could now work if state and federal legislatures were willing to have enough of a collective spine to let the fussing blow itself out.
We don't call Christmas "Family Day" or "Togetherness Day" or "Ham and Cranberries Day." It's named after a person. Whether or not you care about that person has little bearing on whether or not you celebrate Christmas in the US.
I agree with this. An Explorers' Day, where we can tell the story of Columbus, but also the stories of American heroes like Armstrong & Aldrin, Lewis & Clark, etc. but also incorporate stories about explorers, pioneers and adventurers from other cultures and traditions (not least Native Americans).
>but also incorporate stories about explorers, pioneers and adventurers from other cultures and traditions (not least Native Americans).
So, people who had almost nothing to do with America's founding or growth?
Maybe, or maybe not. Depends on what people want the holiday to really be about, after thinking and talking it through. Holidays aren’t required to have explicitly patriotic themes (see Halloween, Thanksgiving ++). There are plenty of other values to celebrate.
Personally, I think patriotism is best expressed through such other values. (E.g. I prefer being part of the country that actually celebrates the spirit of exploration is better than being part of the country that smugly pats itself on the back for saying it celebrates the spirit of exploration, but really only cares about its “own”. This is even more important for other traditionally U.S. values, such as opportunity and democracy.)
Why should we do that?
So basically the opening-credits sequence of "Star Trek: Enterprise", minus of course the science-fiction bits.
https://youtu.be/cBBJPMNH2oA
Me and a friend got into a cordial argument about therapy. My potential problem with therapy (although I guess it would be more correctly stated as a potential problem with therapists) is that, since it is a professional practice, you are meant to treat clients in a certain nonjudgmental, unconditional positive regard-y way; regardless of your personal opinions. But this also implies that there is a potential degree of fabrication/construction/faking which a therapist might be doing, in the case of, e.g., them disliking you at a personal level but having to act as a therapist regardless. (this shouldn't be extrapolated to me having the fear of being disliked-presume the client is a serial abuser, or a school shooter, or someone else who you would personally find abhorrent.)
This separation, as a professional, is entirely sensible. However, with someone who I am being almost completely honest with, and who I am trusting to handle my emotions-it seems hard to trust someone who is acting more like a therapist than like a person-who isn't letting their opinions color their behavior-because I'm not in the market for that sort of validation, I'm in the market for honest conversation. the fact that a person is wearing the therapist 'mask', if you will, makes it seem somewhat manipulative, in the sense of me being completely uncertain about if how my therapist acts is in accord with what they actually believe. That degree of acting-on-beliefs, that sense of coherency, is very important to me. (I want to talk to a person, not to an institutional gestalt of best practices.)
My question, from everyone and-more importantly-actual therapists, is the following: is this warranted? do therapists have the ability to separate their profession from themselves to this degree? and if so, is it reasonable to be worried about this sort of non-coherency?
It's possible to dislike someone and nonetheless be kind to them and have a genuine concern for their well-being. I'm not a therapist but I do it all the time in my everyday life (or try to lol).
The question you raise seems parallel to the ones defense lawyers deal with when they know their client is guilty. Would you refuse to have a lawyer represent you unless they genuinely believed you were in the right? (This isn't a perfect analogy since defense lawyers have the judge and the prosecution to balance them out, but therapists are also operating in balance with the subject's own convictions and the subject's peer group).
I actually think you're right about the non-coherency aspect. Lawyers, therapists and other advocacy-based professionals have to be able to compartmentalize a certain amount - to act in a way that upholds "justice" or "health" as a general concept instead of reacting to the case as an individual. Up to you whether you find that kind of behaviour intolerable.
Psychologist here. Actually every effective therapist I know talks about their patients with affection and respect. I don’t think it’s possible to be very helpful to your patients unless you are genuinely interested in what it’s like to be them, and care about their welfare. If you’re faking it, people can sense that. If you’re not faking it, just being someone who gets it and is on their side is already very helpful. It’s like a tonic — not a cure for their particular difficulty, but good for the person’s overall wellbeing. Also, CBT, which is what many of us mostly do, is, in it’s bare naked form, a bunch of dry, obvious-sounding mental techniques. CBT for anxiety disorders is an escalating series of quite scary challenges. People are not very likely to fully commit to doing the CBT stuff unless they feel like the person prescribing it really gets it about their problem, and sincerely wants to help them get better.
Of course it’s true that many patients are people the therapist would not want to be friends with in their personal life, and many have beliefs the therapist disagrees with, but the thing that keeps all that from wrecking the connection isn’t the therapist pretending to agree with the patient and pretending to like them as a friend. People who are in trouble and are sitting there telling you the truth automatically *are* interesting, and if the therapist’s goal in listening to their story is to understand what it’s like being that person, & how the person ended up where they are, it’s really not relevant whether the person has tastes and opinions they do not share. I had someone who had a kink for giving and getting enemas. To me, there are few things less sexy than enemas. I asked them to explain to me what was hot about enemas, and they talked about being vulnerable, and letting someone into their body, and the hotness of being transgressive. All that was pretty easy to understand. I. could do a mental mapping, along the lines of “enemas for them are like what [various things] are like for me.”
Connecting with a patient is a different kind of connecting that what you do with friends and lovers, but it’s not fake.
That "effective" in your first sentence is carrying a hell of a lot of weight. Do you know many ineffective therapists?
Yes.
So do they not talk to their patients with affection and respect?
They do not talk *about* their patients with affection and respect.
I agree with this. You can be genuine with patients while not liking everything about them, or even while disliking many things about them. The idea of regarding your patients positively doesn't mean liking or affirming everything about them, but reflects the therapist's stance toward the patient as a whole person and the treatment.
For what it's worth, I do know someone who was fired by their therapist. Maybe it's good to know that that can happen if there's a true disconnect?
My wife is a therapist, and though I would never claim to speak for her, I would say one thing I get from discussing it with her is that her main job is to find the best way to help the client. If revealing her personal beliefs about a certain aspect of a client are not going to help them, and may actively harm them, then she isn't going to be totally honest about those feelings. That doesn't mean she is lying to the patient exactly, if they asked her a direct question about her feelings I get the sense that she would answer it honestly, but she might not bring it up as a topic of discussion if she doesn't feel like it will be helpful.
Again, I'm not trying to speak for her, but that's my impression. Take that for what you will.
Leave your therapist if you feel they are not being genuine.
This recent article from The Washington Post seems relevant to your question (this is a link to a non-paywalled version of it): https://archive.ph/xUs6i
>However, with someone who I am being almost completely honest with, and who I am trusting to handle my emotions-it seems hard to trust someone who is acting more like a therapist than like a person-who isn't letting their opinions color their behavior-because I'm not in the market for that sort of validation, I'm in the market for honest conversation.
With an emphasis on the last sentence, and as someone who don't know much about therapy, I'm not sure that's what you ought to look for in a therapist. Validation and conversation you get from friends/family, and if you absolutely have to pay someone to get these, I think prostitutes are the common fallback.
Being involved with some people with serious problems (depression, autism, and god knows what else), I like to joke that I'm doing the job of a therapist while chatting with them, listening to their problems, trying to give them advices/opinions to "chill them out" or help them (often both), but it's just that, a joke, and I'm not, in fact, doing the job of a therapist. Or, if I do, I'd be really fucking worried by how well regarded therapy has become.
I wonder how many of the people you make that joke with are properly -aware- it's a joke. I've met a few mediocre therapists where sessions kind of devolve to just commiserating about "work is stressful" without seeking out the root causes of my issues.
Than again, when I quit the job in question most of my issues cleared up, so maybe that says more about my situation than the therapist.
The modern medical theory of cognitive behavioral therapy really focuses on the patient and identifying unconstructive behaviors, understanding them, and replacing them. In the US at least probably 80% of therapists practice this or something like it.
The answers aren't really supposed to come from the therapist. Their feelings towards you aren't really important, they are more of an experienced machine for asking the right questions based on your answers and proposing the right metaphors that make your brain click on some new model. It has been to a small degree already successfully partially automated and will get extremely more so with better language ai.
They are really much more interested in getting you to be honest with yourself than being honest with you. Their opinions aren't really part of the clinical mechanism. So to answer your question directly, it's a feature not a bug for the kind of therapy overwhelmingly practiced.
I'm a therapist who does CBT, and I do not think you are right. I am much more effective than I used to be as a CBT therapist, not because I got better at CBT itself, but because I got better at developing a collaborative relationship with the patient, so that we can work together on their problem. CBT techniques are tools.
Much of CBT comes down to exactly what the person's friends and relatives have been saying to them, with increasing exasperation, for months or years: "If you want to feel better, get out of the house and do something. All that negativity you are spewing about yourself and your life is obviously invalid -- you have plenty of evidence that the stuff you're saying to yourself is not true. And as for your phobia -- you have to face your fears." The person's friends and relatives are absolutely right about all those things, but hearing them has not helped the person at all. They have not motivated the person to try any of the suggested techniques. All they have done is make the person feel like everyone is sick to death of him and his problem.
The therapist has to find a way to understand the person's problem, and then develop with the person a model the both find valid of how it works, and then introduce the CBT techniques in terms of the model -- as experiments to do in trying to weaken the structure of the awful thing that has taken over the person's head.
Is advice from friends/family ineffective because of "who" it is coming from? For example, if I tell my spouse to do something, I can only do this as a "spouse", with all the baggage of years of marriage this entails (only used as an example, any resemblance to real persons is coincidental). There's no objective neutral space for me to give this advice from, nor for the spouse to receive it.
Which is where a good therapist comes in, not even necessarily directly "give" the advice, but working as a neutral sounding board for the person to come to realization, "well maybe this was a good idea after all".
Does this make sense?
There’s nothing wrong with friends and family giving advice of the kind of I described to a depressed or anxious person — stuff like “try getting out of the house and seeing a friend” or “if you face this fear you might be able to just push through it.” I’m sure that many times advice like that is just the nudge somebody needs, and it helps them and they eventually recover on their own. But the people who end up in therapist’s offices stuck in states of hopelessness or anxiety are people for whom the common sense advice did not work for one reason or another. They are stuck in a loop. Once they have reached that state, they are impervious to the usual advice, and when people say it all the stuck person feels is that they do not get how stuck he is, and that they have lost patience with him.
Those people won’t listen to advice from me either, if I roll it out early on. I have to first listen to their account of their problem until they and I both feel like I get it. I ask them what their model is of their depression, and usually they don’t have one, beyond “chemical imbalance” or some much. Then we can start to build a model of how the depression keeps itself in business. I get them to monitor their thoughts and see if we can catch the depression in the act of keeping itself in business, stuff like that. They’ve all already told me long before that advice like “get out of the house and see a friend” does not work. So at some point I ask them what happened when they tried it. Very often it turns out that their trying it consisted of thinking about going out, and “realizing it wouldn’t do any good.” So then we’re in a position to talk about how their depression showed them a movie of it not doing any good, and for them to start doing little experiments to test how accurate their depression’s propaganda movies are. That’s the gist of it. So ultimately it does come down to their doing a lot of the thing friends and family had advised them to do, but we’ve come at that from another direction, and at that point it makes sense to them to at least try some of the stuff.
' Very often it turns out that their trying it consisted of thinking about going out, and “realizing it wouldn’t do any good.” '
Oh that is so relatable... In the long run I solved this one for myself by creating an obligation. Don't just sign up to Planet Fitness for 10 bucks a month - get on a schedule with classes at specific times so that there's a sense of duty to go. Over time same people come to the class so a camaraderie of sorts develops, and now I, like, have another pull, to see the training buddies, and feel bad if I don't show up.
>Oh that is so relatable...
Oh, yeah, I think everybody has some of it. I do my own taxes, and each year my first attempt at sitting down to get the papers in order consists of thinking about how the important ones are all mixed in with other stuff and will be hell to find, and probably something crucial will be lost, and I will be enormously frustrated by the search, and . . . So I decide to get online and crap around instead of getting the documents in order.
Boy, I wish I had a therapist like this who could help me move forward on certain things.
Due to having been raised in a sad and mad home steeped in sklavenmoral and an identity of ourselves as righteous Victims I am fiercely opposed to such sentiments.
This makes it hard when the entire system is trying to "help" me by coo'ing pity about X event or Y "condition".
Say ADHD. I prefer to regard it as something akin to "being in the moment" and as morally neutral as skin color.
That bring the case, I am not looking for a way to "manage", "deal", or "cope".
I definitely need information and assignments and UNDERSTANDING, but not pity or photocopied pages from books whose entire language presumes a "poor you" approach.
I assume that if cognitive therapy would be useful for me it would be primarily for unlearning learned helplessness but also, for me to buy into the idea that I am not actually helpless wrt certain things I would need some hand holding behavioral therapy (otherwise how has helplessness been disputed? I've tried successlessly so many times that it seems to me that what I have learned about the boundties of my abilities is quite accurate).
In the past any behavioral "advice" from friends and family was the equivalent of beating a quadriplegic into running.
It hurts like a motherfucker.
Is there any useful you recommend?
As you can tell from my hatred of the Victimological Standard of my parents (whose own parents were sad/mad/crippled holocaust survivors) I have most certainly NOT given up "trying" to succeed where I have yet to do so (despite the passage of nearly 5 decades) but I see no reason to suffer through "trying" things I have tried unsuccessfully many times before.
If you have a one-time CBT assignment that takes under 6 hours and whose hoped-for positive results are evident that very day I would very much like to try it.
Where I am not Alexander I am very contentedly Diogenes, but it is not clear to me yet where
the outer borders of Alexandria lie so I don't want to presume Diogencian limits simply because I have yet to regularly surpass them.
I can't give you the behavioral assignment you've asked for because I don't know enough about you to come up with one I'm sure would give you quick results, and you sure as hell don't need any more unsuccessful attempts to add the the list. Also, I do not do treatment of people I meet here. I do, though, give advice, so here's some for you.
-If you have good insurance or enough funds to pay out of pocket, you should be able to hire a, smart, unsentimental therapist who is committed to CBT and good at it. Tell them exactly what you wrote here about the kind of approach you want and ask if they are willing to do it. And you and the therapist should treat *that* as an experiment too. At each session, evaluate together how effective it was. If it was not effective, try to figure out why it was not. Is the reason that it was no informative some way? If so, then now you both know something useful. Use it.
-The best way to identify committed and experienced CBT therapists is to go to Psychology Today & search for someone who has the A-CBT (Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy) Certification. I believe the Association for Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy also has listings, but you want someone *with the certification*. In general, psychologists are more committed to the CBT approach than psychiatrists and social workers, although there certainly are practitioners in these other fields who are accomplished CBT practitioners.
-If you cannot afford therapy with a really good pracitioner, look for online resources that approach things in ways that are a good fit for you. Some CBT books are quite practical, and not ooey-gooey. Beeminder is a good resource. You might find there or on this forum someone who also wants to work on changing patterns, and would be willing to partner with you.
Thank you for responding.
At the moment I don't have the funds to hire someone but the very fact of your responding is itself encouraging.
In appreciation and admiration for your doing so I've bookmarked your page and look forward to having a read through some of your pieces.
I hope you have a great evening.
I hope you do too. You might not need to pay the therapist out of pocket. I live in an expensive east coast city and most of the therapists here refuse to contract with insurance companies and only accept direct personal payments. But I'm pretty sure that in many parts of the US many therapists accept insurance, and you would only have to pay a copay of about $10-$35 per session. Therapists on Psychology Today state whether they take insurance, and if so which kinds of insurance. Anyhow, wishing you well.
Tentative advice, since I haven't solved my problems, but some things are definitely better.
Find ways to pay attention to more of your self It sounds like you've already done some work in that direction.
The goal is to reflexively notice that both your problem and your internal attack for having the problem are small parts of yourself. You've got more and better going on.
It's a slow process, though.
The legend about Alexander and Diogenes has the following occasional addendum.
Alexander: "If I were not Alexander I would want to be Diogenes"
Diogenes: "If I were not Diogenes I would still wants to be Diogenes".
The point of which is that Alexander is glad to lack desires that he can not fulfill but definitely still wants to fulfill those desires that are attainable.
But Diogenes makes the Ecclesiastian claim that even if he could have most things, he would still rather be free from effort and extra desires.
I myself lean strongly towards acceptance of the Diogenene/Buddhist/Ecclesiastical perspective but socially this is difficult for me to sustain for reasons that would require too long a biography to justify here.
My youtube channel currently serves no purpose (because it has no audience) other than to collate an eclectic collection of videos to provide a few random data points to help ease the confusion that occurs fairly regularly when people meet me and believe that I am either the literal actual messiah (last week alone I offhand recall two separate people legitimately and sincerely asking if I was a literal, non-corporeal angel) or alternatively somebody who asks too many questions / knows too much / is too indefinable.
It won't give you any holistically accurate view of myself but does provides a scattershot view.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgebCpkexR4afrjwf4-Ygxdh&feature=share
Suffice it to say that as an extremely ADHD, somewhat autistic, individual gifted in various fields who refuses to give in to societal forces while retaining all sorts of oddities from his upbringing is somebody who would benefit from having two cents to rub together.
I do not care for money or for any other personal achievements or goals but when something inevitably goes wrong on account of my propensity to seek out and speak to all of the interesting people, it would be nice to have a few bucks for the doctor, lawyer or bribe.
That's why, I've decided to consider whether there is more Alexandrian dominion that I ought to have another go at despite my being able to be quite insanely happy with (relatively) nothing.
My only REAL issue with what the pathologists call ADHD is the impediment to solvency it offers.
Obviously starvation is never great. But I'd long ago accepted that, "eh, what can you do". Recently however, having been first attacked for being male (a not uncommon situation for men these days) and a year later cheated by a sociopathic fraud dental organization that is essentially an affinity scam, I'm madder than I have been in decades and interested in gaining at least enough lucre to get the dental treatment I now require and to fight back against the culture that had the audacity to glance sideways in my direction.
I'm still not very angry. Like I said, Stoicism/Taoism is my joy.
But I am angry enough that I set up a youtube channel and stated my willingness to enter public life if there is a public that wants me to, and to have another go at gaining financial security.
This just speculation-- I was actually gobsmacked by the idea of being the sort of person who could seem like the messiah to others, even just a couple of people.
This will not stop me from having theories or writing about them.
Tentatively, it's your detachment from common human desires which makes you seem like a high religious figure.
The detachment, taken as far as you've taken it, could plausibly be a result of a childhood where your desires and needs were unwelcome.
I believe anger serves the function of energizing territorial defense. Running afoul of the bad dental association has caused you to realize you have territory..
I think I'm not communicating effectively - that is exactly what I mean to suggest is typically done using CBT.
What isn't in there that I took to be OPs main question is "honest conversation where the therapists opinions and beliefs color their responses".
That's not to say you aren't supposed to build a relationship with the patient - but you aren't sharing with them if you think they are being dramatic or if it seems like they're as bad for their people as their people are for them or to just tell them what they think the right answer is (the way their people might).
If I'm misunderstanding either the op or you I'll defer - I've experienced a lot.of therapy first and third hand but I am not a trained therapist.
Clinical cognitive behavioral therapy does not utilize this information except for making the best guesses at what questions to ask the patient and what metaphors might work for recontextualizing the thought or behavior patterns that are being worked on. You can just look up manuals for how to do CBT to confirm this.
I don't know that I find your argument compelling for why therapists operate differently than this. Someone with good skills at countertransference will be superior at asking the right questions and providing the right metaphors, but in the talk therapy overwhelmingly practiced in the United States the therapist is intended to be basically completely substitutable with any other equally trained therapist.
Has anybody here read Alexander Grothendieck's La Clef des Songes?
I saw a recent article about 28000 pages of his writing on "philosophy", and this seems to be the best-known of his non-mathematical works.
Well ok, it is here: http://cm2vivi2002.free.fr/AG-biblio/AG-clesonges.pdf
And thank you for pointing to it -- Apparently he was able to talk with God like the guy in #32 of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2023 could?
Robin Hanson and Agnes Callard's 'Minds Almost meeting' podcast reliably infuriates me because of the mismatch in the two hosts' thinking styles but it really is the only podcast I know of where people talk about genuinely philosophical topics off the cuff and on net I really enjoy it. Does anybody know of similar podcasts?
Sam Harris has a lot of episodes that are very philosophy heavy. E.g. https://pca.st/episode/55be7325-d7ce-42c8-ba70-38afcbb56488
Maybe "Very Bad Wizards"? It's two philosophy professors (I think) chatting, I think sometimes they'll read/watch something beforehand and chat about that.
I haven't gotten super into it, but I know people who love it! It's a little too much philosophy for me (like it's far above my level) but that might be a plus for you! Even for me it doesn't sound pretentious at all.
Thanks I'll check it out
VBW listener from like episode 10 here. I am super into their work and it's not that high-level. Only during their philosophy segments, they assume a few intro philosophy and psychology classes, but even without that it's not terribly hard to keep up, especially if you end up googling the names they use anyway. Very casual conversation, easy to listen to.
All their other segments are very laymen friendly. They have an analysis podcast series about the greatest show of all time with no close second, Deadwood. Highly recommended.
Arguments about free will usually turn into arguments about definitions, but as a definition of one type of "free will", can we not say that a person has free will over a particular action if they would have chosen differently if offered a sufficiently large incentive?
For example, for a million dollars I'll happily hold my breath for a minute, so I have free will over that. But I can't consciously slow my heart rate to 30 bpm, so that's outside the scope of my free will. A man can resist taking his first shot of heroin if you offer him a million dollars instead, but maybe the thousandth shot of heroin is impossible to resist and hence beyond free will.
I'm thinking of this definition particularly in the context of crime and punishment. If a criminal could possibly have been incentivised not to commit a particular crime then it makes sense to declare that they had free will when choosing to do it, and hence to punish them for it, because the existence of this punishment becomes part of the incentive structure that exists for others considering the same crime.
Among atheists the argument can only ever be about the definition, because the concept, which made sense in a religious context, loses coherence outside that context.
I will always refer to a simple thought experiment:
An alien with godlike powers has put you in a room. You have two buttons, a red button and a green button. If you press the green button, the experiment ends. If you press the red button, the alien will use its godlike powers to reset the room to the exact configuration the room began in, including you, including quantum configurations. You have free will, and also you prefer to hit the red button, and begin the thought experiment by walking up and pressing the red button.
So what happens, and what does this say about the notion of free will?
>can we not say that a person has free will over a particular action if they would have chosen differently if offered a sufficiently large incentive?<
Well now we're defining 'incentive'. If you hold a magnet up to metal, you're providing it an incentive to move, the stronger the magnet the stronger the incentive. Gravity and obstructions incentivize a drop of water to follow this path down a wall instead of that one; change the obstructions and you change the path. But I don't think anyone wants to argue this means a piece of metal or drop of water has free will.
No, but if you can prevent the metal from moving by whispering "psst, I'll give you a puppy if you stay still" then it probably has free will.
There's no doubt that the likelihood of a person, or even a rat, doing something is influenced by what they have learned about the likely rewards and punishments of the act. I don't see how bringing the idea of free will into it is relevant. And actually I think the term "free will" sounds like it means something, but in fact does not. Wtf is the opposite of free will -- paralyzed will? will in handcuffs? will whose butt is stuck to the chair with superglue?
Well,.you can't tempt a rock or a robot with inducements.There's a decision making ability tangibly some entities have. And the will can be unfree in the legal sensee, when an individual is compelled.
I think your mention of individuals who are compelled to do something is an example of the kind of thinking that makes the term "free will" seems to make sense. "Free will" sounds meaningful because in thinking about it we use as a model of what it means for a person to be free. Clearly a person can be constrained a lot, little or not at all in what they do in a given situation. So then we think, well, OK, so a person's exercise of their will is similar, and subject to the same states: a lot of constraint, a little, or none.
Really? Ok, tell me what the thing called will is, and what are the conditions that are analogous to a person being constrained a lot, a little or not at all.
Are you saying free will is an incoherent concept?
>I think the term "free will" sounds like it means something, but in fact does not.
Yes, usually when I ask a follow up question, the best response is a copy and paste. Thank you so much.
You have responded to 2 separate posts of mine with the same sort of low-effort, needling question, one in which you don't put any of your own ideas out that, just ask in a snarky tone for me to expand on what I said. In the case of free will, I had said clearly what I think: the phrase sounds like it means something, but actually does not. What I said is not exactly that the concept of free will is incoherent, but that the phrase "free will" has no clear meaning. I do not know whether that comes down to saying that the concept of free will is incoherent, because to me the phrase "free will" does not capture a concept. Also, I am not really sure what an incoherent concept is. But mostly, Skull, I do not feel motivated to put more effort than I have into responding to your posts, because you are snarky and give nothing back.
The rules on this forum are clearly more strict than I thought, presuming you're a fair representative. Needling! Snarky! I wish you hadn't put any effort in at all if it was such a waste of your time.
From a physics perspective there is no free will because of spacetime. Every event exists in one observer's future, and in another's past, and both viewpoints are equally valid. That means past and future have already been determined, unchanging, and there is no room for free will.
At the same time, this lack of free will doesn't matter for our day-to-day business because it's not even in theory clear whether or not we will ever be able to visit the past and run observations or perform experiments on free will. For all we know we only get this one timeline, so we might as well continue to punish bad actors and reward good ones and convince ourselves we did something to change the future for the better.
The block theory isn't known to be true.
>Every event exists in one observer's future, and in another's past, and both viewpoints are equally valid.<
I am extremely skeptical that someone's prediction of the future is equally valid to someone's memory of the past.
It's not about predictions, or memories. It's about raw physics, of which everything else (including humans with their memories and predictions) is made of, no matter how many layers of complexity you have to go through.
What you call the present, the past, or the future all comes down to your frame of reference:
https://youtu.be/GwzN5YwMzv0?si=hOtzYtOU5mHs3Ctu&t=421
What is a "viewpoint" of the future if not a prediction. Your link is talking about mirrors; the future is not a mirror. If you're arguing there's no free will because the future is already perfectly known like a mirror's reflection, you don't have an argument.
The mirror and photons are part of the thought experiment, simply a way to establish simultaneity and illustrate the point by omitting unnecessary complications that are impossible to describe mathematically. Nonetheless we can use a prediction and its outcome if you prefer, the basic argument doesn't change.
A prediction is an expectation of what the outcome of a certain event will be; it hasn't happened yet from the perspective of the observer making the prediction. For example, "global GDP will rise by more than 2% within the next year according to some source" is the prediction event, and the GDP figure released by that source next year is the outcome event.
As the video I linked above explains, for any 2 events (in this case prediction and outcome), you can construct one observer for which the prediction and a third, unrelated event are simultaneous, and another observer for which the outcome and the third event are simultaneous. Since nothing privileges one observer over the other, both are equally correct in their perception.
The only way to resolve this apparent paradoxon is that simultaneity, and thus the temporal order of events, is subjective, relative, and that we live in a universe where the future exists with the same unchanging realness as the past; we just don't know the future yet because we haven't yet travelled there through spacetime.
>you can construct one observer for which the prediction and a third, unrelated event are simultaneous, and another observer for which the outcome and the third event are simultaneous. <
Okay. Seattle will play Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl this year. What's your third event that's happening both now and in February?
Really physics doesn’t scale up enough to explain even free will at the level of the simplest animal. It can merely explain what primitive particles can do.
Even the most complex animal is bound by the laws of physics, just like e.g. the most complex (and apparently intelligent) piece of software is bound by the manipulation of bits. Complex behaviour can be created from relatively few, simple rules.
"Every event exists in one observer's future, and in another's past, and both viewpoints are equally valid. That means past and future have already been determined, unchanging, and there is no room for free will."
That of course implies that there is no such thing as indeterminism, which violates some other assumptions there.
I used to find statements like yours fairly convincing, but was uncomfortable with ... something about them I couldn't put my finger on.
I found this classic Eliezer Yudkowsky article really useful for understanding why this framing is fundamentally asking the wrong question, I recommend reading it in full.
The quick summary is that asking whether the "future" is controlled by "physics" or by "you" is fundamentally a wrong and confusing framing. In reality, "you" live inside and are part of "physics", so the laws of physics *are* the mechanism by which "you" control the future. Determinism and Free Will are compatible, and moreso than that, physical determinism is *required* for free will to exist.
This of course leaves some wiggling in the exact definition of "you" that's relevant for a given conversation, but that's a larger conversation I'm not looking to trigger now.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-physics
Libertarian Free Will is Worth Wanting Because It Allows You To Shape the Future.
Determinism doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were -- before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born.
(Note that this is still true of multiversal theories. In multiversal theories, future states have probabilities that differ from each other and change over time, but can't be changed)
Libertarian free will allows the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A". Moreover, these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones.
Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past -- it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation).
>some wiggling in the exact definition
There it is. Compatibilism cannot exist without some form of re-definition. I don't know why people can't just use the term the way everyone understands it. There's nothing wrong with admitting that there is no free will. If something in your life changes because of that, that's a psychological problem, not a metaphysical one.
I'm curious what you see as how "everyone understands" the definition of free will. I think my go-to definition would be something like "to have free will is for your actions to be controlled by you, rather than caused by parts-of-reality-that-are-not-you". I happen to legitimately believe that I am also a part of physical reality that evolves according to the laws of physics, so saying something is controlled by the laws of physics doesn't actually provide any information about whether it's controlled by part-of-reality-that-is-me or parts-of-reality-that-are-not-me.
These all seem like the most natural default definitions that describe how I think about the world, but I'm aware they're not universal. In particular, I there are people that think of themselves as being some "immortal soul" that exists outside of pysical reality and is not subject to the laws of physics, I'm curious whether that's the definition that you think is the default?
I don't mean to make a distinction between "you" and "physics". Of course any system, no matter how complex, is ultimately physics and governed by its rules whatever they may be. What part of my statement did you find to contradict this?
You seem to have a lot of faith for the block-view of spacetime....but it's not the case for all (I don't, for example - i am more like Wolfram view that GR is just a consequence of the underlying update process, expressed in a continuum geometrical framework), within the physics community or in general. And before GR and Quantum field theory are merged it is really a matter of faith, because there is no coherent model yet and even less a single interpretation of the models.
"I'm thinking of this definition particularly in the context of crime and punishment. If a criminal could possibly have been incentivised not to commit a particular crime then it makes sense to declare that they had free will when choosing to do it, and hence to punish them for it, because the existence of this punishment becomes part of the incentive structure that exists for others considering the same crime. "
If you only care about this as a way of decreasing crime (by changing the incentives) then you don't need an opinion on free will or not. You can just run some experiments and see if crime goes up or down.
One (over the top?) example: We might try executing (this Tuesday) all the prisoners in jail/prison for violent felonies and see if the violent crime rate drops over the next few years. I don't need to care about whether the folks in jail/prison had free will or not to measure the change in violent crime rate.
a) I agree with you
b) One consequence: All else being equal (which admittedly never happens) it makes more sense to apply punishments to criminals who have more forethought than to criminals who have less forethought. The CEO who makes multi-year plans is more easily deterred than the person who never thinks beyond the next five minutes.
See Greene & Cohen's "For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693457/pdf/15590618.pdf
Aside from the specifics of the Free Will to decline the first shot of heroin discussion, most people are introduced to the allure of opiates when they break a leg, have dental surgery or maybe are in the process of passing a kidney stone. The starting point is often a doctor’s prescription.
A lot of heroin addicts in Appalachia got their start thanks to greed of the Sackler family pushing OxyContin.
My understanding is that this is almost entirely a false narrative, and that the vast majority of opiate addicts get started the same way that other drug addicts do, they take them "recreationally" for shits and giggles. People who take opiates for legitimate medical reasons have little trouble ditching them when they no longer need them.
One more example to drive this home.
Say you are the host of a popular syndicated AM talk radio program with views on drug use similar to your own, so in October of 1995 you say:
“There’s nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”
Eight years later news outlets start to report that you are under investigation for illegally obtaining prescription pills. It turns out you have been obtaining hundreds of prescription pills per month over a period of several years. You've been "doctor shopping" to obtain multiple prescriptions for drugs that would otherwise be illegal.
You realize you are in trouble and check yourself into a treatment facility.
A few years later a man who uses hateful rhetoric against liberals similar to that which you pioneered is elected president and he awards you the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/limbaugh-drug-addiction
If your life is on track you probably will take a couple of Percocet after having your wisdom teeth removed and after a couple days switch to Tylenol. You will still probably notice that they made you feel rather niiiiice though. But no big deal, life is good.
If on the other hand you’ve got a kid with a chronic illness, have unpaid medical bills, aren’t getting along with your wife that well and the rumor mill at work says job cuts are coming, you might notice that when you take the Percocet, you feel pretty good and for a while at least you believe that everything is going to work out just fine. Well then you are going to want more of that relief. This guy is going to be more vulnerable to spiraling into addiction.
Not because he’s a worse person but because his life is much shittier and a few hours of relief and piece of mind might be worth what seems like a small risk that will become much larger with time.
This is why I say the guy who’s life is chugging along just fine probably has more free will in his tank than the guy with a host of problems.
A Look at West Virginia. From the DEA:
“The extraordinarily high abuse rate of opioids is attributed in part to the large number of jobs in heavy manual labor such as mining, timbering, and manufacturing. These professions often cause injuries to workers that are treated with opioid pain relievers, which in turn can lead to addiction.”
It goes on to add that another factor is high unemployment and people living lives of despair.
It doesn’t say that the high abuse rate is because the state is populated by an inordinate number of people of low character.
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2018-07/DEA-WAS-DIR-024-17%20West%20Virginia%20Drug%20Situation%20-UNCLASSIFIED.pdf
The Sackler Settlement:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-scrutinize-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-settlement-2023-08-10/
Yeah Gunflint but the Sackler family couldn't help pushing Oxycontin because being rich as fuck has been shown to cause people to be less compassionate, so the poor Sacklers didn't have free will.
When my grandfather was dying of mesothelioma in 1938 he wouldn't have morphine because he feared addiction.
That’s a shame. End of life agony is without a doubt an appropriate reason to use opiates.
This idea seems pretty close to Scott's debates with Bryan Caplan about mental illness, just with "Constraints vs Preferences" replaced by "Inside vs Outside the scope of free will".
Using your examples, "choosing" to do something given an incentive like getting a million dollars still doesn't involve free-will ultimately, in the sense that you can't choose how you respond to any incentive. Your emotional responses, thoughts and choices kind of come out of nowhere. You say that you can't slow your heart rate to 30bpm. That's true, but you can't choose your thoughts either. They just appear in consciousness out of nowhere (it doesn't matter if you weren't doing anything of if the thought came up because of what you just saw on TV).
But it does make sense to talk about deliberate/intentional actions, because it helps understand how someone might typically behave.
A serial killer, even without free-will, is the sort of person that will still kill despite all the incentives not to commit horrendous crimes. It makes sense for them to stay in prison, both to protect everyone else and to serve as a deterrent for anyone considering committing murder.
Someone who kills accidentally (still no free-will) is probably not a threat in the future and might already be suffering from the guilt alone. Should probably still go to jail for a much shorter period of time, to incentivize people to be careful and to publicly show that killing people is taken very seriously.
Someone who generally behaves well, but with the right incentives might behave poorly (e.g. needs money, robs a store), would sit somewhere in between the two cases above.
In any case we have the concept of "mitigating circumstances."
Sometimes people are talking about ultimate free-will which no one seems to have, but then someone starts discussing deliberate/intentional/conscious actions instead. Many long boring discussions are mostly people using those different definitions.
", but you can't choose your thoughts either. They just appear in consciousness out of nowhere"
1.You, the conscious mind can still choose between impulses.
2. Impulses.don't come from literally nowhere, they come from neural.activity -- Maybe unconscious neural activity, but your unconscious is still "you", in a sense.
Does the fact my conscious mind does not pre-arrange the thoughts that pop into it mean they are not my thoughts?
Nothing in an ordinary person's subjective experience suggests that. Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get urges to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker, or to attend football matches if I am a football hater. My promptings are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
>1.You, the conscious mind can still choose between impulses.
No, you can't. This "choice" is something our conscious mind *experiences*. Your conscious mind "choosing" things would mean it would have to think about something before you think about it. The choice emerges in consciousness, to put it there you need to have made the choice non-consciously.
>Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do.
And the kind of things "you would do"...are precisely those things you have done in the past as a result of your biology and your environment. You didn't consciously choose to be the way you are, now or in the past.
"The choice emerges in consciousness, to put it there you need to have made the choice non-consciously"
Says who? The conscious mind exists for a purpose,, and it cannonball evolved just to be a passive witness...such a conscious mind would take up resources without contributing functioning.
"You didn't consciously choose to be the way you are, now or in the past."
Conscious decisions are influenced by unconscious habit *and vice versa* -- habits can be jnstilled.
>Says who?
It's logically incoherent to suggest otherwise.
Deciding something is something I experience - the thought that I want to pick option A over option B appears in my conscious mind. It cannot be put there by the conscious mind, because that means I would have had to had the conscious thought of 'I pick option A'....before I have the conscious thought 'I pick option A'.
All thoughts simply appear in consciousness, and they must arise from
>The conscious mind exists for a purpose,, and it cannonball evolved just to be a passive witness...
Maybe so, maybe no. You can't simply assume that this is true. You need to actually explain how it's logically coherent for some immaterial 'experience' to influence material brain matter. It's like saying that an image analysis computer program needs the output on the computer monitor to do the analysis. No, the analysis is the voltages on a silicon chip. What you see on the computer monitor is simply the output from those processes, and it's incoherent for there to be any way for the visual output to affect the actual processing, because anything that appears on the screen must already be in encoded in the processing unit, so it will just get the information from there.
We mostly can't have proper brain function without conscious experience, but this is simply a product of the role of the brain in generating conscious experience such that the only way conscious experience is lost when the brain doesn't work. You can't pull out the computer monitor when you're dealing with the brain.
>such a conscious mind would take up resources without contributing functioning.
You're simply assuming this, when it's possible that it arises as a byproduct that doesn't take up any meaingful amount of cognitive resources. You're also assuming it was selected for through evolution which isn't necessarily true either.
>Conscious decisions are influenced by unconscious habit *and vice versa* -- habits can be jnstilled.
No, everything has to have an unconscious basis. We experience the conscious thought of making the decision of wanting to instill an unconscious habit, but that experience itself has to arise from unconscious brain processes. Which means that actually, the unconscious brain is influencing the unconscious brain.
You're literally talking about consciousness here as if it's a soul or something. Half of what you say demonstrates an extreme materialism, the other half talks about the mind in a highly immaterial way.
"Deciding something is something I experience "
Experiencing something is not exclusive of doing it.
" the thought that I want to pick option A over option B appears in my conscious mind."
It would appear if it was generated somewhere else, and it would if it appear of it were generated by the conscious mind.
". You need to actually explain how it's logically coherent for some immaterial 'experience'"
I didn't say anything at all about immateriality. Conscious is not defined as immaterial, nor is it defined as just conscious experience. Consciousness is, among other things, a kind of functioning. Doing things consciously is different from doing them absent mindedly or reflexively. Conscious functioning has a known neurological basis -- it can be knocked out by trauma and drugs.
"You're literally talking about consciousness here as if it's a soul or something. "
You are , I am not -- see above.
You seem to be talking about different things than me.
When I used the term coming from nowhere, I didn't mean literally nowhere. Yes, it's from neural activity. The thing is that both impulses and choices come from neural activity. The point is that it's beyond any control **in the ultimate sense**.
The conscious mind doesn't really choose anything, just witnesses a "choice" being made. That is, one impulse "winning". It does come with the experience of choice, but the choice will still just be neural activity which you have no control over. If you feel like consciousness is like a soul that controls neural activity, then for me that just doesn't really make any sense.
You mention randomness. When I said it came out of nowhere it didn't mean it's random. I meant that it will be perceived as having come out of nowhere. It'll mostly definitely be not random, since it'll be the result of the state of your brain, which is my point.
It's like your consciousness is like a movie screen where you'll perceive all impulses and choices showing up, including the feeling that you have control over them. Ultimately though it's just brain activity being dictated by information input, genetics, chemical state and so on.
“ The conscious mind doesn't really choose anything, just witnesses a "choice" being made”
Sure it does. I consciously choose to do things every day.
Maybe you just think you do. If your mind is in fact a physical/chemical process, it's entirely deterministic: the atoms could only ever have one arrangement given their past, and that's the arrangement that caused your body to take the action you took. You have the qualia of having made a choice, but that's not real evidence. If you do things without consciously choosing, that would be strong evidence that you don't make choices, but only observe them.
Your first sentence sounds like a description of epiphenomenalism, i.e. mental events/qualia are just side effects of physical processes. The problem with epiphenomenalism is that we're capable of talking about qualia, i.e. the atoms in our brain arrange themselves in such a way to cause our muscles to produce speech about qualia/consciousness/etc. If the experience of qualia is just a side effect with no influence on physics, why would the atoms in our brain ever end up doing that? It would seem that somehow, the qualia/mental events themselves _do_ cause physical changes to the atoms in the "physical world".
Of course, that's still not proof that "free will" exists. The way in which mental events affect the physical world is still a mystery. That process could also be entirely deterministic, or entirely random (in either case, "choice" isn't a factor).
If you were to train your mind, you'd probably have much more control over your thoughts. Just because you can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done (admittedly it's hard work and takes constant attention). But here's an example for you that I think you'd even be able to do. The next time you hear a popular song that turns into an earworm — i.e. it remains running continually through mind — choose to hum a different tune in your mind. I always Hum the Girl From Ipanema when a particularly obnoxious popular earworm gets caught in my head. The fact that you can choose a different earworm to override the one you've got involuntarily through your head proves that you can have control over your thoughts — at least if you wish to. Repeating a mantra or saying the rosary would have the same effect of silencing unwanted thoughts (at least if you practice the repetitions diligently over months or years).
A good meditator — and I am not one — can eventually train themselves to be empty of random arising thoughts. Likewise, they can choose to focus their one-pointed attention on a single thing such as visualizing all the iconographic details of a Yidam or the detailed layout of their mandala mind-palace. Anyway, it's hard work, and most people really don't have the patience to sit quietly and meditate for an a hour or more day-after-day (because it's very boring, at least in the beginning), but it is possible to take control of one's mind.
You don't choose to decide to hum a different tune. That decision arises mysteriously.
Like most comments you're talking about a different thing than me.
The next time I hear a popular song that turns into an eardrum, I might "choose" to hum a different tune in my mind. But that will happen because:
1. Some song gets stuck in my head (didn't choose that)
2. The memory of having read this comment comes up (didn't choose that)
3. The impulse to follow the suggestion is stronger than the impulse of not following the suggestion (didn't choose that).
It's the question of ultimate free-will vs deliberate/conscious/intentional action
It seems like in example 3, you made a choice. All choices can be reduced to impulses, but you can have involuntary impulses and voluntary impulses. I think you need to go back and refine your arguments because you've just admitted that in certain situations you can (a) override involuntary impulses, and (b) using a voluntary impulse, you can choose the method to override the involuntary impulse. Further down this thread, you get hung up about the I. Don't worry about the I. For instance, Buddhists get along quite well without the I, but they posit free will. I think where you people who dismiss consciousness and free will is that you insist on making the I some sort of external process disconnected from the society of processes that are going on in your mind.
3) yeh you did.
"The point is that it's beyond any control **in the ultimate sense**."
What about non ultimate senses? (You can disprove anything by setting the definitional bar high enough).
I can't decide, in advance, exactly what my thoughts are going to be ...that would be somewhere between pointless and impossible. But,according to my own subjective experience, I (my conscious mind) am not compelled to act on every passing thought. Why shouldn't the inability to refrain from acting in passing impulses be a notion of control that could be the basis for a scientifically acceptable theory of free will?
Who defines free will as the ability to think what you're going to think before you've thought it? That is only one notion of "compelled". Mentally healthy people are not compelled by every passing thought . Meditation might show you that thoughts arise unbidden, but if you were compelled to act on unbidden thoughts, you would not be able to stay in the cushion long enough to meditate.
Here is some neuroscience:-
"How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles."
Why couldn't control consist of refraining, vetoing, or filtering?
We do have conscious control, because deliberately think about specific things. Indeed, deliberate, and conscious thinking is what we mean by thinking as opposed to daydreaming or whatever. The fact that thoughts just pop into your head when you are sitting in meditation reflects the fact that you are not actively trying to do anything in particular. But you still make a conscious choice to meditate.
"non ultimate senses" is what I describe as voluntary/conscious/intentional behaviors.
I have no particular affection for the term free-will, but it's usually used in the way I am using it. I'm ok with using any other term.
Whether or not I act on unbidden thoughts is the result of yet another thought, which again pops into perception on its own (the result of more brain activity.)
When we daydream, we are thinking and have the perception of lack of control. When we are deliberately thinking, we are thinking but have the perception of control. The difference is only in what is perceived consciously, which is itself generated by brain activity. But in both cases we are witnessing whatever is appearing in consciousness.
When I'm thinking deliberately to solve a problem I have no idea where the train of thought will take me as those thoughts just pop into perception one at a time. I do have the feeling that I'm thinking them, but if I pay close attention it's still be just thought after thought just like one notices in meditation.
In meditation people are deliberately trying to notice this process. Eventually they perceive the state of no-self which is basically removing the feeling that one is the creator of their own thoughts.
"The difference is only in what is perceived consciously, which is itself generated by brain activity."
No, there are objective e differences between someone who is concentr ating, someone who is daydreaming, and someone who is off their head on drugs.
"When I'm thinking deliberately to solve a problem I have no idea where the train of thought will take me as those thoughts just pop into perception one at a time"
Why does that matter? If deciding everything in advance is the only thing that counts as control, then you would.have no control. But it isn't the one and only thing counts as control.
"basically removing the feeling that one is the creator of their own thoughts"
The subjective feel ing. Objectively, you are in control...who else is?
While I think I understand the appeal from a theoretical standpoint of thinking of our conscious experience as being outside the chain of causation which causes us to act. I don't think it can work that way. Both of us are capable of writing about the experience of making conscious decisions, and it seems absurd to think that our ability to write about these experiences is causally unconnected with our having them.
Something being perceived consciously will influence future thoughts. The memory of having perceived something is still relevant data. But what or whether I write about it is still the output of regular brain activity of which I have no control over.
When you say that you have no control over the output of regular brain activity, I'm a bit puzzled as to what entity you think qualifies as being you.
Do you never intentionally think about something, perhaps a series of thoughts related to a subject? Is that chain ever something that you would not otherwise want to think about, like perhaps a project at work?
Sure, some thoughts pop into my head without prompting from my conscious self. But a whole lot of what I think about are things that I choose to think about and intentionally work on. I have a mentally demanding job that often requires consciously choosing to think on some subjects that I really don't want to think about at all.
Again, the free-will vs intentionality discussion.
I do intentionally think about something, but I did not "choose" to want to do that. Neither do I know where the train of thought will lead me. Thinking deliberately is similar to reading a book or listening to a podcast. I'm witnessing the output of thought appearing in consciousness. The difference is that it comes accompanied by the sense that I'm creating the thoughts. But that's just perception like everything else.
“ I do intentionally think about something, but I did not "choose" to want to do that.”
Honestly Paulo, like a lot of people who dismiss consciousness you have a very sloppy use of language.
The first use of I there is you admitting you can control your thoughts and the second part there’s a different I being controlled by some undefined agent. Obviously not an external agent, though.
There’s a tendency in this kind of argument to make the subconscious some kind of mysterious external entity when it is also part of the mind and all signals are occurring in the brain. That my thoughts seek to come unbidden, when they do which isn’t always, proves nothing of free will.
Do you think there are people with a desire to kill that don't do it? To me, it's obvious that there are many people who refrain from fulfilling their base desires, some of which is easy for them (clearly fitting your theory), but for some it's definitely difficult.
Your first point is close to what Melvin's main point was - definitional differences. If I want to watch TV but instead recognize that the trash needs taken out and do that instead, I would say that I'm exercising free will to choose, but you likely see that as motivated by competing interests (whatever pressures exist that push me to take the trash out competing with my other desire to watch TV).
At some point it just gets silly, though. Like if I did something I clearly don't want to do and causes me harm to prove to you that I have free will, you might say something like "the incentive to prove me wrong induced you to those actions" and I feel like there's no way to resolve that discussion. People do really difficult and unrewarding things all the time, which seems to clearly refute your position, but you could always retreat to one of several mottes - such as "there was some inscrutable internal preference that was unknown to the outside" or "the difficult and rewards were different than we calculated and it's actually positive for this individual."
Pretty much everyone has desires to do all sorts of things that then refrain from doing. But they didn't choose their desires, nor their ability to refrain, nor their impulse not to enact those desires. Those things just appear.
You didn't choose to want to watch TV (the desire came out of nowhere) and you didn't choose to recognize that the trash needs taken out (it also came out of nowhere).
If you did something you clearly didn't want to do to prove me that you have free will, then you wanted to do that thing. But you didn't choose to want to prove me wrong. That's just how you ended up feeling after reading my comment. Choosing not to feel how you felt would be like choosing not to believe that 2+2 = 4. Either you do or you don't.
If you develop a brain tumor that happens to stimulate a part of your brain that makes you a lot more responsible, you'll always take the trash out etc. Are those choices? From your subjective point of view, you'd think so, but does it make sense to say so? What if there's no brain tumor? Well, did you choose your brain? You didn't choose your environment nor your genetics not anything else that can influence your behavior, emotions and thoughts.
It's not a motte. You're talking about something different from me (much more related to the concept of deliberate/conscious/intentional actions). Which kind of means that we ended up doing exactly what I mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous comment.
Yeah, I've been down the road on enough of these conversations about free will to know where they end up. I disagree with many of your statements, but it comes down to the definitional issue Melvin brought up in the first place.
I don't happen to think that my desire to watch TV comes "out of nowhere" and know that such desires can be trained. But I know that you could just retreat to another level of introspection where the desire to train yourself not to watch TV comes out of nowhere and so on. I don't think there's a reasonable way to conclude the conversation.
To be clear, when I mean out of nowhere, I mean as the normal process of brain activity. It comes out of nowhere at the level of perception (and generally with the feeling that you were the creator of the thought).
But yeah, if we were to keep going, we'd probably end up in circles for all eternity :D
Sam Harris and Dan Dennet's conversation on free will is pretty much that the whole time.
I think most of wrangling that goes on about this comes from the idea that you can only hold people morally responsible if they had free will to choose.
We're all little automata. I will hold you morally responsible for being an automata with an incentive-response structure or heuristic behavior structure that leads to things I think are bad. (Either cuz bad outcomes or because of nebulous predilections to being against the whatever it is). Indeed I don't have a choice on the matter.
This behavior will incentivize automata more aligned with me.
That reminds me of a story that I refer to as Napier's Commentary on Moral Relativism.
The context is that the protagonist of the story, Sir Charles Napier, was a general and military governor in British India in the 19th century. In his memoirs, he quoted himself as responding thus to a petition against his enforcement of laws against the practice of Sati (or Suttee), in which widows were compelled to immolate themselves on their late husbands' funeral pyres, on the grounds that the ban was an unwarranted imposition on local customs:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Tangentially, it should be noted that the practice of Sati is the subject of considerable modern historical debate, with the prevailing view being that it was definitely a thing but its frequency was greatly exaggerated in Western (particularly British) cultural imaginations because it played into self-serving narratives about how colonialism was supposedly a mutually beneficial (or even altruistic) enterprise of bringing the blessings of civilization to "savage" subject peoples.
It is interesting to compare our reactions to widow burning and female genital mutilation.
If there is a parallel universe where both were eradicated during colonialism, people probably say that FGM is just a racist myth; an implausible excuse for white colonialists to feel superior.
In an opposite direction, in a parallel universe where both are practiced today, people horrified by widow burning are accused of racism, because hey, if those women want to be burned, who are you to stop their sacred religious practice. (If an immigrant woman says that most women actually don't like to be burned, she is quickly cancelled by the woke mob.)
I live in a very woke city and spend time with a large number of woke people. Not a single one supports FGM on grounds of freedom of religion.
Or you could hold people responsible as if they had free will, and let the new incentive from holding them responsible affect their internal calculus about what activities are worth doing. At some level we don't really care if people are free to choose evil or do so because it makes economic sense for them to do so, if the same action on our part has the same effect. Increasing prosecutions for theft will have the effect of reducing theft (or vice versa) whether people have free will to choose or are reacting to incentives that are on some level outside of their "control".
More or less what I was trying to say, except that the strategy works whether you pretends there's free will or not
I like this definition a lot. It feels like a System 1-System 2 thing, or perhaps a metacognition thing.
One thing it does is take time discounting out of the equation. Here's an edge case: an addict is shortening their life by a lot; he'd may be willing to pay $1b to live an extra ten years. If he keeps going, does that mean he is rejecting a $1b equivalent to do heroin?
Not everyone calculates the value of their life the same. Some people even kill themselves, indicating that they view the value of future life at some level less than $0. Some people value present experience far higher than future possible experiences. It would be difficult for us to determine if someone taking 10 years off of their lives in exchange for a present value is economically positive, negative, or neutral for them, at least a priori.
An honest but starving man steals a bread loaf for survival. Being offered a sum the is enough to buy the loaf would incentivise him to not steal. Did the guy have free will over his decision, even if he would starve to death otherwise?
Under this definition, yes.
The incentive doesn't have to be a million dollars if that particular incentive perverts the thought experiment. Imagine that by personally starving to death you can usher in a utopic golden age for those left behind. Or imagine that you know stealing will be punished by eternal punishment in the afterlife.
Some people have chosen to suffer or even die instead of stealing or otherwise harming others in pursuit of their own interests. How would you explain such a situation?
Well, there's still no free will, just a different balance of incentives and impulses.
Your perspective is helpful in everyday life, and thinking about designing incentive structures in society, but doesn't do all that much for the moral implications of determinism.
"Well, there's still no free will,.. "
That depends in what you mean by free will.
Not really. It was an internal critique of Melvin's proposed definition of free will.
Melvin's example relies on incentives that are not under the control of the free will in any definition. A million dollars, an addiction to heroin, etc. It doesn't make sense to define free will as something you have, as long as you would have done something else if you change the impulses and incentives.
Whether the impulses and incentives are physical or physiological, psychological or financial, subconscious or keenly felt… None of it changes how free we are to make a different decision, as long as changing the decision depends on changing the inputs. And so I don't see much freedom in that – it's more like a capitulation to determinism.
The every-day helpful distinction Melvin made, however, is more of a question of volition: the difference between being thrown into a pool, falling in, or jumping in. But that is freedom only in the trivial sense that no one denies exists. I've never heard anyone deny that we have preferences, desires, needs, etc. and act on those, so that's not really up for discussion when people talk about free will. The question is whether we are free to navigate those impulses when making a decision, or whether we are just blown about by other impulses.
Having said all that, however, I see from your reply to Paulo Esteves, above, that we are probably not going to come to an agreement on free will in a comment section. We see things very differently.
So, I can answer what I mean by free will, but I don't expect to convince you.
Going back to the example of the pool… The only sense in which I think it makes sense to question and discuss free will, is in asking whether the human mind and universe works in such a way that you – personally, consciously, non-randomly, and free of outside influence – could have *not* jumped into the pool when you did, in fact, jump.
That summarizes what I think most people mean by free will, by the way: It's personal, conscious, non-random, and not significantly shaped or influenced by external factors. If it fails on either point, it's not really free and/or not really will.
I think our decision-making fails to some degree on at least three, possibly all four, points. And so I don't believe any definition of free will that I've seen or heard proposed. (Except those that just refer to uncontroversial volition, as discussed above.)
I don't even understand what actual free will would look like. How does it work? Where does it come from? Does it create itself? If not, how is it free? Why would we even want free will? What good it would do anyone to stand outside the interconnectedness of the universe in that way? Why would we want to make decisions that are not fundamentally shaped by our culture and our environment?
(These aren't rhetorical questions to put forward an argument from ignorance. I am sincerely interested in understanding the strongest version of a secular conception of free will if someone wants to explain.)
I can sympathize with some form of compatibilism, in that many people have an experience of free will – volition again – which keeps the engines purring. But at best, that experience is an illusion that is fairly easy to break. At worst, it's a bit of a bait and switch regarding what people care about when they discuss free will. (Free will is often used as religious apologia for the problem of evil; compatibalism lends a hand.)
There's a book I read, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem that addressed this in one of it's thought experiments.
Suppose there are two serial killers: one could be incentivised not to kill by paying them a billion dollars, and the other is beyond reach. As far as I'm concerned they should both be behind bars because I'm not willing to foot the $1b bill to stop the first serial killer from killing people.
There's also something circular about your definition: what would it take to incentivise somebody not to succumb to the original incentive?
The idea is to pin down the concept of free will by hypothetic questions. We're not crafting criminal law policy here.
Similarly, I know someone who CAN lower their heart rate to whatever pace they want.
Read an interesting piece on the relationship between CO2 and cognition
https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/we-need-more-research-on-how-co2
Does anyone know more about this topic / or have a different perspective on the literature?
The main claim of the piece is that there isn’t enough research. I’m interested in what people make of the research that already exists
I am unsure what the proposed mechanism of action is. CO2 is not some exotic toxin, it is the main waste product of cellular respiration. In fact, the reflex to breathe is based on high blood CO2 levels.
If you increase the CO2 content of air from 0.04% to 0.1%, my guess is that you would breathe a tiny bit more to compensate for the lower concentration gradient limiting the speed of diffusion from lungs to air. The air we exhale seems to contain some 5% CO2, so you would have to increase CO2 to the percentage level before you see some big changes in respiration. (Of course, CO2 levels above 5% will mean that the body will be unable to maintain the preferred partial pressure of some 50mBar in arterial blood, and I can see that having nasty physiological effects.)
So I am confused about how this works. Is it the added strain of breathing slightly more? Is it some secondary effect of breathing? Slightly more O2 in the blood does not seem like a bad thing? Loss of water to breathing?
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word
This study is relevant:
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06056-0
They put a canula in people's noses and measured inhaled CO2 % with various masks. With an ambient of 400ppm CO2, no mask resulted in 2700ppm inhaled (due to breathing some if your own exhalation). Wearing an N95 mask resulted in 25,000 ppm, way higher than any of the experimental treatments mentioned in your review.
So we would expect to see substantial drops in test scores during covid in schools that forced kids to wear masks 8 hours per day. Which we did, but lots of confounders obviously. But if 25,000 doesn't have extremely debilitating effects then i am skeptical of the experiments finding significant results with 2500ppm.
The ethics of forcing kids to inhale high concentrations of CO2 for 8 hours a day for two years, we'll let's just say it wouldn't get past the IRB.
Minor comment: I would guess that most kids weren't wearing N95s, and that there's a lot more airflow in the masks that people commonly wear.
I guess the all the same arguments would apply to doctors, woodworkers, etc. who were wearing N95s before the pandemic though.
Scott wrote about this year's ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open-door-policy/
Thanks
What are reasonable measures of power and who holds it? Thinking of eg https://open.substack.com/pub/nicholasgrossman/p/the-new-rights-theory-of-power-is?r=64bha&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
It doesn't matter how "conservative" the leaders of a university are on some personal level. They either don't care about their personal values enough to stop the institutions they lead from operating on the basis of ideologies that were literally held only by far left political radicals a few decades earlier, OR they have so little true power over these insitutions that they can't stop this from happening and are thus not relevant.
The only thing that matters is the policies in place at these insitutions, and in this case far-left ideologies have an insanely outsized influenced on how virtually all major institutions are run today.
That post correctly identifies the theory but fails to engage with it in any real way, instead playing arguments-as-soldiers to dismiss it as quickly as possible.
To pick one paragraph:
> University presidents, trustees, and football programs tend conservative. The most common major is business, with health professions second. All social sciences combined are third, which includes more quantitative economists and political scientists than identity theorists. Fourth is engineering.
The implication being that business/health/economics/political science/engineering are neutral-to-conservative majors in terms of their political alignment, and that by counting up students in each major you can determine the net direction in which the university is effectively pushing things.
The first one is only somewhat true, in that back in 2014 (the last year for which I could find good data) only about 22% of business majors identified as liberal out of a 3-option scale (liberal, moderate, conservative), which is in line with the overall population. But all the other fields he lists are more liberal (health related is 38%, engineering 39%, and all the others basically >50%).
But that's a minor quibble. The bigger issue is that the idea that faculty aren't the ones calling the shots on curriculum, and the very concepts that he readily admits are left-wing (DEI, gender studies), have been made into mandatory courses in multiple universities (UC San Diego helpfully lists which courses qualify for the DEI requirement at https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/programs/dei/index.html). That's the kind of thing the right is talking about when they're talking about using power to shape the conversation/electorate: Every UC graduate will need to actively participate in courses expounding the DEI perspective, none need any exposure to the opposition. Meanwhile his example of "contribution to the right" is the University of Chicago's letter (which you can read here https://news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/Dear_Class_of_2020_Students.pdf which is merely enshrining principles most 90's liberals could have gotten behind). That is, he's using the fact that one university largely stood still and got left behind by its peers, to define a right wing, to deny the very shift that left UChicago an outlier in the first place.
I don't know man, but I think looking at where the ideas come from is a decent line of inquiry. I'd hazard for the left they come from university campuses and for the right, idk, talk radio or internet communities (think Q)?
This is a really good angle, I can't believe I've never heard it stated before. It also explains why we all care about Disney/Hollywood so much.
I'd like to check a theory. Part of what happened to cause a lot of elderly politicians at the top with no obvious successors is that health care got just a little better. With an extra ten or twenty years of healthspan (not great health,, necessarily, but not falling over) there was no urgent need to hand power over to younger people.
I don't think so.
I think what has happened is the internet, turning politics into the same thing it has turned everything else into; bubbles reinforced by social status. The people who would have gone into politics went into these bubbles first, and either got frustrated and lost interest, or played the status games with their political beliefs until they became unelectable outside of narrow areas where that status means anything.
I think this is looking a the wrong half of the question. The US has primaries, and if there was someone good waiting in the wings, they'd have stormed the Democratic side in 2016 in particular. But, putting ideology/policy to one side, the younger ones were all just a bit... crap? Obama, by contrast, was young, not crap, and was president for two terms. The phenomenon that needs explaining is really why all the young Democrats are so awful.
My personal theory is that after being taken by surprise in 2008 Hillary spent the entirety of the Obama administration quietly undermining everyone who could be a threat to her nomination in 2016, which meant destroying the careers of every other prominent Democrat born between 1945 and 1975. In the end Hillary didn't get the White House but the massive gap in the Democrats remains.
Really though, I don't think there's a huge lack of competent politicians on either side who could be President, it's just that the media refuses to cover them. Take Doug Burgum for instance; I think he'd probably be a better President than any of the front-runners, but the media has no interest in covering him because the narrative of the election is already decided and he doesn't fit into it.
I've never heard of her destroying careers or undermining in a general sense, just that she made it clear that she was going to be running in 2016 and no one should get in her way.
I don't think there's anything particularly distinctive here about the Democrats. The Republicans don't seem to have anyone under 75 who motivates them to vote either.
But young smart politically active people skew heavily democrat - they should have the pick of bunch.
It's really hard to judge the Republicans because of Trump; trying to factor him out, De Santis seems fairly close to what I'd expect a generic upper tier Republican primary candidate to be like, and not obviously lower quality than Rick Perry or Ted Cruz or whomever. Haley and Scott similarly seem like they'd have been towards the edge of the stage on the main debate 8 or 12 years ago, and Ramaswamy goes in the weird outcomes of Trump category. I'm not really their target audience so it's harder for me to judge, but I don't get the same, "Can't we find someone better to read the same lines" vibe as I do from some of the Democrats.
The same trend is underway in some other sectors, notably business leadership, which supports the idea that improvements in health care for older people is at least part of it.
The great sorting of US culture/identities has likely been an enabling factor as well. Not that there haven't always been places that would elect a familiar-looking corpse to high office [see Thurmond, Strom; Byrd, Robert; Rayburn, Sam; etc]. But it is somewhat more frequent now, yes.
Interestingly the trend has gone the other direction with regard to big-city mayors. Right now the longest-serving mayor of any of the nation's 50 largest municipalities has been in office for just 12 years. That is a big change, just a generation or two ago it was still normal for an established city-boss type figure to be heading into his 4th or 5th term in those jobs all around the country. The combination of term limits and jungle primaries seems to have forcibly shifted that particular trend line.
My first reaction is that it's due to intra-party seniority incentivizing long terms, but the death of earmarks ought to have mitigated it.
So I suppose I should be boring and say that we should get data on both retirement and successful challenges, and see what they tell us.
Or, how bad is the Republican primary field? Anyone have numbers? My impression is that most of those people don't look too decrepit. Sure, Trump's old, but that's got nothing to do with the rest of the political system. He's a narcissistic honey badger. Come to think of it, Bill Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama were all pretty young, too, and Hillary felt like a Trumpian aberration, and Biden was originally chosen as VP 15 years ago partly because he was old.
But to be naughty and throw out unfounded theories blaming the culture war, maybe there been a decrease in actual challenges to sitting politicians because the parties worry about damaging successful national politicians? Or maybe elections are now all about national stuff and not local stuff, so there's no point in replacing a national politician if they toe the line? Or perhaps the culture war means that the only new politicians we've gotten are ideologues whose only skill is convincingly parroting the latest bullshit, but enough of the electorate is still old enough to recognize this?
Good place here to point out that Bill Clinton, GWB, and Donald Trump were all born in the same 10-week span in mid-1946. (Obviously they were different ages as President.)
It might also be due to the safe seats - if you're elected in a very blue or very red seat, you're pretty much assured of that seat for life. A block of cheese could win the election if it just had the right party affiliation. And once elected, if you're not more than usually incompetent, people will probably keep voting you back in. You make connections, you network, you get onto committees and so on, so the party has no incentive to boot you out: you know the ropes and a new guy (or gal) would have to start from scratch. So as long as you keep both your constituents and the party happy, you'll hold that seat for as long as you want it.
I think the status aspect is also part of it; being a US senator is an important job and people defer to you. Politicians have at least a trace of vanity and self-importance, or they'd never run for office, so why would they give up being a big cheese and the person at home to whom others go for favours, to be just another ordinary retiree?
No-one has safer seats than Japan. But there are also Britain and Australia that have them.
Perhaps modern media (and social media) amplifies the Matthew Principle where more and more status goes to the people at the top and there's not much room for challengers
Americans constantly make the mistake of not checking what the situation is in Canada, let alone the rest of the (developed) world before proposing some theory.
Geriatric politicians is solely an American problem, it occurs in no other developed democracy! Therefore it cannot be related to general technological improvements because they also apply in other countries. It's due to the electoral system that the US has.
Edit: there seems to be some problem with this website at the moment but the data can be found here https://data.ipu.org/search?fields%5B%5D=field_age_average&field_region_target_id=All&items_per_page=10
"Geriatric politicians is solely an American problem, it occurs in no other developed democracy!"
I don't think that's quite true: Churchill was nearly 77 at the start of his second term.
I was thinking of Mahathir Mohamad when I wrote that. Sure I don't consider Malaysia a fully developed country, but it's on the cusp. He was 94 years old and Prime Minister.
You call yourself a Rationalist and yet seem incapable of excluding outliers. This is basic statistics...
73 years ago. More recently (on leaving office):
Sunak: 43
Truss: 47
Johnson: 58
May: 62
Cameron: 49
Brown: 59
Blair: 54
Major: 54
Other than Brown, May and Johnson, all of them became Prime Minister in their forties.
The most obvious thing is that PM isn't an elected position. It comes from being the leader of the party in power, which implies that before you were PM you were the leader of the party *out* of power, and that sort of fight takes a lot of vigor.
Maybe directly electing people is a bad idea. Lots of democracies don't. Just saying.
Only two of the people on that list (Blair and Cameron) were ever leader of the opposition. The rest replaced members of their own party.
Also, lots of people cast their votes based on whom they want as Prime Minister, not whom they want as their local MP. Prime Minister isn't technically an elected position, but in practice it sort of is.
You'd also need to define "developed democracy" narrowly enough to exclude Weimar and Paul Hindenburg.
And he was not even the oldest Prime Minister, that was Gladstone, who was PM until the age of 84.
Looking at this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom_by_age there's quite a rash of long-serving and elderly PMs from the late 18th to the early 20th century, and then they stop. No post-Churchill PM has been older than 65, and the current dude is only 43.
This leads me to come up with a theory that elderly politicians is a disease that you get from being the most powerful country in the world. Power is great, but the amount of power you get from running a second-rate country isn't enough to overcome the temptation for a comfortable retirement. But the power of being PM at the height of the British Empire, or even an especially important US senator in the 21st century, is too addictive to ever give up.
I think there are differences in how politics works now vs the nineteenth century (less respect for seniority and family, TV, having to appeal more directly to voters), that make it much less likely for a British political party to choose such an old person to be leader (and you have to be leader to become PM), or for that leader to choose such old people to be ministers.
In America you can become really important as a long time congressperson. But there isn’t really an equivalent in the UK. A member of parliament doesn’t really gain the same kind of prominence just by being there a long time.
You're probably generalizing from too few examples here. African dictators are known for being very old as well, provided they survive and retain control. Part of the problem there is the fear that if they ever give up control, their enemies or successors will have them killed. A very different incentive from anything seen in the US or UK, despite resulting in the outcome we're discussing.
Trump is facing a weaker version of that problem. If he doesn't get elected president he might end up in prison.
I agree. It's interesting to consider whether the Democrats are forcing him to push harder to become president again.
Also interesting that two sides may see the same fact differently - Republicans may see that as Democrats weaponizing the judiciary to go after Trump and his only hope is to become president, and the Democrats may see that as Trump weaponizing the presidency and their only hope is to prosecute him until he can't become president.
I don't think it's just due to the electoral system, either. In most countries, politicians are happy to retire (on generous pensions) when they reach their sixties, just like normal people do. Who the heck wants to still be working in their seventies or eighties?
"Who the heck wants to still be working in their seventies or eighties?"
People who like having power over other people.
Good point. I think a parliamentary system probably more efficiently cycles out the older politicians.
For comparison:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/877732/house-of-lords-members-by-age-group/
The House of Lords isn't elected (and has no terms) and so has very little power, it's not comparable.
I think the point of my comparison (if there is one) was that the US somehow managed to replicate roughly the same structure despite holding regular elections for the Senate and giving it actual power. So it's like the Lords, but much more of a practically important issue rather than a largely symbolic one.
The Senate was intended to fulfill the same function as the Lords, hence not being directly elected at first.
Yes, the House of Lords is kind of where politicians retire to, in the UK.
That sounds (not surprisingly) like the Canadian Senate.
And specifically, healthcare greatly improved the physical consequences of aging, but did next to nothing for the mental consequences. The "elders" of yore looked wrinkled beyond belief, but had a mental acuity matching their real age of 50.
Source for the idea that mental acuity span isn't increased?
My own ass unfortunately.
But I was more thinking along the lines of : assuming aging rate remains constant between medieval times and now, what can modern medicine do to compensate ? It can:
* give you a wheelchair for when you can't walk anymore
* feed you when you can't work the fields
* give you new teeth, new hips, pacemakers etc.
But if it's your brain that is getting old, there's a limited set of mental prosthesis that are available : a time manager app ?, a memo app ?, wikipedia ?
I would appreciate it if people give some indication of the sources of their their statements. Even as vague as "common knowledge" or "sounds plausible".
The skin and the rest of the body may not be so disconnected. Smoking is bad for the innards *and* rough on the skin.
I think that gen x might be particularly weak for some reason. I don't have a good theory why.
"...characterized as slackers, cynical, and disaffected." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X)
"It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care." (Office Space)
Even if the Boomers had been interested in their posterity, we sure as shit weren't interested in being theirs.
Generation for whom lead poisoning peaked as children
My guess is that in the previous generation (baby boomers) places were scaled in university to make room. When the decline in the birth rate in Gen X occurred, the distribution struggle was no longer there. Possibly coupled with a still stuck mentality that you have to fight for a place. In summary, Gen X simply had it easier and was therefore less ambitious.
That's just a gut feeling. I myself am from late Gen Y (raised by Boomer parents) and notice the difference in mentality compared to slightly younger or same-aged people who were raised by Gen X. It certainly can't all be explained by that but I suspect it at least plays a role.
Tangetially: I'm currently dating someone whose parents are also boomers but grew up in East Germany while I'm from West Germany. We discussed that topic and there are certainly some aspects in how we look differently on the world that could be explained by that.
I don't know if this is true or not - can you contrast changes in healthcare (specifically healthcare of the rich) vs age of leaders across countries?
It's not just politicians; there's a similar trend in business (and, I understand, in academia) of people just not letting go.
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/09/04/americas-bosses-just-wont-quit-that-could-spell-trouble
Last week I was reading through the Iran Wikipedia entry and realized I have an exceptionally poor mental model of the country and their global influence. Generally I only ever hear about Iran when their nuclear program is discussed. So this might be a bit overly broad, but how do *you* think about Iran? Are there any interesting insights to be gained by contrasting their mostly Muslim culture with Western society?
More generally, have you recently found any of your models were woefully inaccurate and been forced to make updates?
As far as I can tell, the only middle eastern countries with a more stable democracy than Iran are Israel and Turkey. Iraq is the only other non-monarchy bordering the Persian Gulf, and its democracy hasn't been stable for very long. Like Iraq - Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia all had elections that led to long-term dictatorships that then led to violent uprisings in the past decade or so. It obviously isn't running great, but in many ways it is doing better by western metrics than other regional governments.
I was fortunate to have a couple of Iranian coworkers - they were excellent people characterized by kindness, humour, intelligence, and generosity.
I know that two is a very small sample, but my impressions of Iran certainly improved after working with these two.
There's a lot of really great cinema from Iran. For movies that give glimpses of the legal system, try "A Separation" (2011) and "Close-Up" (1990). (The former is an accessible but gripping family drama; the latter is fascinating but very meta - it is about the real-life trial of a man who impersonated a famous Iranian film director and gained the confidence of an upper middle class family, and combines footage from the actual courtroom with reenactments of the events by the people involved.)
My mental model was also updated dramatically by watching a lot of Iranian films. Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation", mentioned above) has made some very good films, even if he apparently stole the plot of one ("A Hero") from one of his students. "The Salesman" (2016) is about a young professional couple who are both involved in a community production of 'Death of a Salesman', and this premise alone upended a few misconceptions I had about Iranian life. I think Jafar Panahi is even better, though his films are more political - both "Taxi" (2016) and "No Bears" (2022) are IMO excellent stories that are uniquely Iranian.
My mental model of Iran is that it could be a moderately wealthy country (a fairly highly educated population, including women, and lots of natural wealth) held back by an incredibly backwards government and an extremely conservative slice of society that holds a disproportionate amount of power.
Also, excellent food.
Backward, not backwards
So basically a lot like Israel
You're right that they're both very similar, both you have the reason wrong. They're both held back by the radical far-left communist fundamentalists who prefer to be poor as long as their neighbor is poorer.
Sort of, but in Israel the "far left" are (somewhat weirdly) the parties labeled as "right" (either the religious parties advocating for more requirements-less welfare or modern Likud with its corruption/protectionist policies).
(This wasn't always true, religious parties used to be more centrist and Israel has a history of socialist left parties, but it has been for the last few decades).
Israel is already quite wealthy, and it's hard to see in what way it is being held back by anybody
It's held back by the haredim and by the need to maintain a large army in pursuit of pointless irredentist goals.
Israel is a middle-income country significantly held back by its religious/militant communities(much like Iran), as well as a protectionist government that protects various sectors at high cost to the country. It's not poor by any means, but it's much poorer than a country with it's amount of resources and tech industry should have.
This is a ridiculous statement. Israel is clearly an extremely successful and innovative economy. As someone else pointed out, perhaps as successful as 7th richest in the world. What 'resources' does it have that imply its position should have been higher? Do you think tech industries are things that just happen to economies? No, they get created. Notice how Iran and Pakistan for instance, don't have them.
I've actually lived in Israel, which I'm guessing you haven't. It's not third world, but it's very blatantly not "rich" in the way that America, Japan or western Europe are (and that's the umc secular parts. The religious and Arab parts are significantly poorer). This is one of those cases where raw numbers give you a facially absurd conclusion and you need to dig into why they're wrong.
Israel is the 13th-richest country in the world by income per capita, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita), 7th if you exclude tax havens and (total or partial) petrostates. It's not "middle-income."
This is incredibly misleading - PPP is more accurate, but still needs to be adjusted for things like bad infrastructure. If you've actually been to Israel you can tell it's much poorer than that, even in the rich secular part.
You may or may not like Israel's specific policies or its religious right. But objectively it's significantly more economically successful than Iran ($52k per capita vs $4k per capita and much of that $4k from oil). It's also no longer a middle income country with GDP per capita having more than doubled in the past two decades.
My mental model is Israel is that it is an incredibly successful country built on the European mold that is doing its best to become a cross between Iran and 19th century South Africa
Well here’s one:
“ In the last five years alone, Iranian women have made up more than 60 percent of university entrants”
Which means they go on to have jobs. This alone should tell you that Iran is doing better than most Islamic countries, and probably most countries, on that statistic. And far better than Saudi Arabia.
Hmm. I learned something about Saudi there.
I can’t fault substack for trying to compete with twitter, but the latest app update was the last straw for me. The last thing I need in life is another rage bait delivery service. I’m back to reading just via email. Do any of you actually enjoy the new design or have had success curating the “tweets”?
"App" and "app", what is "app"???
I have a set of links in my web browser's bookmark file that point to the substacks of the people I want to read essays by or comment sections curated by. E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com or https://daviddfriedman.substack.com Periodically, I visit those links and I usually find interesting things to read. At no point am I delivered anything resembling a "tweet"; rarely do I see anything even close to rage bait and then only because someone I choose to follow decided to do some rage-baiting.
Same here. I'm reading these comments now in Firefox on my laptop.
What do you mean by the "tweets"? I have been getting, via email, posts from substack blogs I've never heard of and that irritates me a lot. Is that what you're talking about?
I like the Notes feature and don't mind the app redesign. However, over the weekend something about the algorithm changed (or my inputs to it changed in some way i don't understand) and my notes were filled with wacko "i used to be a left but now love the right" vaguely conspiracy theory related people. Not flat earth conspiracies, more in the RFK Jr, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tiabi style of conspiracy. High quality shit posters.
Yes. Now my notes feed shows Substack boosting posts just asking questions like “has Taylor Swift been activated to boost a Newsom campaign for President”. Conspiracist rage bait.
I got the same thing! Easy enough to block or mute via notes but havent figure out how to block/mute form someones "blog" page.
I use an RSS aggregator. (Newsblur)
I hate it! I want my subscription feed front and centre and notifications easily accessible. Instead both are shunted to weird corners with a “which gives a fuck” stream of random content on my front page.
Yeah, this also affects the writing interface (there's an omnipresent button to tweet but writing a full post requires navigating three menus). It's pretty bad.
There was always a notes feed. That’s what I am still seeing.
I've requested an option to remove it entirely. Agree, it's garbage and the opposite of why I enjoy Substack.
I just look at it when I get an email prompt. Sometimes someone says something interesting. I don't feel an urge to participate. I never did much with twitter, either.
This may seem a couple of stupid questions about Trump's retained documents case but why did he take the physical documents anyway? Did he not know how to use the camera on a cell phone? And if he had taken digital images of them would it still be an offence?
"And if he had taken digital images of them would it still be an offence?"
Considering that "Hillary's emails" contained classified docs improperly removed from a secure server, no reasonable prosecutor would have gone after OMB if it were just electronic copies.
Yes it would definitely still be an offense, and possibly add new ones depending on how the images were taken and transmitted. Though, ironically, it probably would have reduced his risk of being caught because no one would have been looking for the documents.
You're assuming he had rational reasons for it; but he didn't, his reasons were irrational and driven by his personality disorder. You can't understand the paper situation until you understand this (any more than you can understand Elon Musk buying Twitter by talking about how you just don't understand what financial analysis Musk could have which justified the purchase and wondering what '4D chess' Musk is playing).*
Trump is a narcissist {{citation needed}}. One of the idiosyncratic behaviors of narcissists is 'trophies': a desperate need to keep souvenirs of the past about how awesome they are, to prove to themselves & others again and again that they existed and had an important life, not just the best life, the most awesomest life. The need to make & keep trophies approaches the level of life-and-death obsession as part of maintaining their 'narcissist supply'.
That's why he took them, why digital images were no replacement, why he suicidally kept showing them off to anyone who came within 10 feet of him, why he lied (or made his employees/lawyers lie, same thing) about having them to investigators, and why he didn't return the trophies until essentially physically forced to.
Trump has engaged in trophy behavior before, like newspaper covers featuring him, but it's never been a big deal because you can just buy a magazine and put it on your wall, no big deal. Unfortunately, he has, surprisingly and irrationally, chosen to build his post-presidency narcissistic edifice on the idea that he is a hero who stopped nuclear war (in multiple ways), as *proven* by reams of *highly classified documents*, which apparently include some of the most sensitive stuff like the US's very scarce HUMINT in Iran.
I remember the first newspaper article I read about 'classified documents at Mar-a-lago' which did not mention them being immediately returned for a slap on the wrist - my jaw figuratively dropped as I said to myself, "oh my god - he's made them *trophies*! That's the only reason to take so many and then refuse to return them. He could get away with it *so easily* just by returning them now and blaming clerical error, like everyone else does. But he won't, he *can't* return them, because he's made them trophies, and as a narcissist, losing years' worth of trophies would almost literally be like dying for him. All the federal government has to do is give him some rope, in the form of trading off keeping the trophies today for consequences a long time from now, and he'll hang himself. He won't even think twice before ordering employees to lie or shuffle stuff around to hide it so he can keep it, and he'll probably even keep showing them off to random people in order to maintain the narcissistic supply. He'll drag it out for months and create a paper trail a mile wide, irrationally digging himself in deeper and deeper. He just can't help himself, the narcissism is who he *is*, that's why personality disorders are so utterly intractable. The only question now is whether the investigators have the guts to do it."
Turns out (like the Twitter board) they did.
* I couldn't help but read every article on the Musk Twitter purchase & Trump classified papers. It is very rare to see such important people destroy themselves in ways so clearly traceable to specific well-known psychiatric causes (bipolar & narcissism, respectively). We may never see such crystal-clear incidents play out again, much less simultaneously the way they did on the national stage in 2022.
Couldn't it just be that Trump expected that he'd be able to brazen it out? Or that refusing to return the documents would garnish him headlines and red meat for his base?
I'm definitely not saying that he's not a narcissist in the everyday sense of the word but if he anticipated any real consequences (like an actual for real prison sentence) I think he'd have returned the documents.
Neither of those make much sense on their own, and they make far less sense when you consider what he was doing with the papers or why he couldn't just copy them or pick out a few to hold back etc, or concede after the first government challenge and talk about that for the next few years as an example of how terribly he's persecuted. This is why most people thought it'd be a nothingburger and Trump would wiggle out of it just as he wiggled out of everything before - there just was no rational reason to do anything but turn the papers over immediately when he was rumbled. There were only irrational ones, where the bottom line was prewritten - 'hold onto the trophies at all costs' - and it only remained to come up with excuses and delays like ordering employees to fly the documents out to hide them.
Trump is facing criminal charges. Musk just stands to lose some money, of which he has plenty.
'destroy themselves' is a bit of an overstatement, but I couldn't think of the right word between that and 'damage', which is too mild-sounding. Trump may end up in prison where it's unclear if he even can be elected president, so that would in fact destroy his political career, but we'll see; if nothing else, the completely unforced error of the papers are wasting a lot of his time and energy when he's supposed to be... [checks notes] 'running for President'.
And you are greatly underestimating the toll on Musk of his unforced error: aside from losing somewhere around a tenth of his nominal fortune (and much more of his *liquid* fortune, hence his desperation to keep Dorsey in the deal or use debt to pay for it) in a completely unnecessary and wasteful way, his reputation has been shattered and his mystique has never been more battered, he's made more enemies than ever before, and he has now wasted at least 1 year of his time & energy out of the around perhaps 20 good years he has left, so he's already squandered ~5% of his remaining career on this albatross, and this is leaving out the increasingly loony politics that he's echo-chambering himself into (and I don't just mean his tweets getting stupider every month, but other stuff like a sudden obsession with illegal immigrants...?). Isaacson put it well when he said that Musk's current course looks like it ends in becoming Howard Hughes.
The issue is not that he has stolen some paper and cardbord boxes, but that the ink on the paper spells out classified information. A digital representation of the same info would be just as offensive. (Practically more so, because the likelihood of the info spreading further is much higher when it is conveniently stored on some hackable device than on paper.)
Taking cellphone pictures of a few ten thousand (or whatever) pages does not seem like a fun way to spend a weekend.
I would also be careful about modelling Florida Man (or anyone, really) as a rational actor whose long term goals determine all of his actions. People do stupid, impulsive stuff often enough, not everything counter-intuitive is a masterful 5 dimensional chess move.
(This being said, not everything he does should be so considered a random brain fart. Him saying something outrageous and the liberal media picking up on it is how he won the primaries, after all. The Guardian is still campaigning for him: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/30/donald-trump-california-speech-robbers-shot .)
Show-and-tell just isn't the same with a couple of digital photos. Probably the "my boxes" theory still explains it best.
https://reason.com/2023/06/13/the-my-boxes-theory-is-all-you-need-to-explain-trumps-behavior/
Because he didn't care about getting in trouble (if he had he could've just sent them back when asked).
Ad Czech fertility rate: I suggest to compare it with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia over time. Ourworldindata has a handy tool for that: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate.
Pattern in those countries is broadly the same: gradual fall from the peak baby boom of the 70s, then sudden further fall in the 90s, imho connected to regime change (1989), then gradual rebound in early 00s, which plateaued and then slightly fell after a few years (this is imho caused by the Great Recession), and then rebound when economy improved.
Czechia stands among those countries only in so far in that it had much deeper fall in the 90s and then much more robust rebound. Imho this is partially self-correcting mechanism at work (availability of housing stock etc.).
Given this tweet: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1708629197617336398 , has Elon Musk now fully sided with team Russia? Or is it just another pathetic attempt at trolling the libs, like his next tweet: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1708632465282150796 ?
I'm pretty sure Elon is mostly just on Team I Don't Want To Hear Any More About Ukraine, Shut Up About Ukraine Already. That this attitude in the US benefits Russia in its war, is I think incidental to Elon Musk. I have no doubt that if the man wanted to say anything good about Russia or Vladimir Putin, he'd have X'd or Tweeted it very explicitly by now.
Elon stuck his neck out to help Ukraine in the early days of the war, and a lot of Ukrainians treated him rather rudely when they found out his support wasn't unconditional and he thought they should be looking for a negotiated settlement rather than a triumphant military victory(*). That he now thinks poorly of them and wants nothing to do with them, is petulant and unseemly but not difficult to understand.
Elon is also now firmly on Team Defeat the Woke Mind-Virus, and many of his teammates in that conflict will gladly egg him on in any anti-Ukrainian expressions he wants to indulge in.
* A position shared by much of the US National Security apparatus, if I read things correctly, but they usually don't say that part out loud. Musk does not do "tact".
Isn't he simply playing to a part of the Republican base? The news I read suggest that some Republican politicians are trying to paint aid to Ukraine as a waste of money abroad which could be spent home (in Musk's case, maybe to further his Mars program, but that's irrelevant to the tweet), and even managed to suspend that aid for a while because of government funding crisis.
This tweet supports that narrative, but it's Elon siding with Reps, not with Russia, and they are not exactly siding with Russia, either, just trying to get votes from people who supported the kind of isolationist, America-first policies some libertarians (e.g. Ron Paul) proposed way back in 00's, and which Trump kind-of-inherited as a part of his base.
Why choose sides? There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war but it makes politicians powerful and important so the fighting continues.
The main reason to choose the Ukrainian side is to support an international order that prohibits unilaterally invading another sovereign nation for the purpose of incorporating it's territory into your own state. That is the interest of almost all nations.
So, invading it to install a puppet government, as the US has done in very recent history, is perfectly okay?
I didn't say that at all.
That's the abstract point. The practical point is preventing Russia taking pver one country after another,.
Putting the war itself to the side, as well as the history that got us here, and also putting aside any hint of non-zero-sum thinking:
Russia is a dangerous enemy, but Ukraine is neither.
This is like outspending the USSR until it falls apart due to internal contradictions: cheap at any price. Especially since we're not actually doing the dying. The USSR probably felt this way about the Vietnam War. If we get a chance to do this to China, too, we should go for it.
Destroy kill conquer consume.
(TLDR: we have a **great** reason to do this. If you want us to not do it, you need a counter-argument that's at least in the same league.)
While a million dollars and a dead Ukrainian may seem (to a certain kind of American) like an attractive price for one dead Russian, there's no obvious path by which the current casualty rate leads to a Russian state collapse, and even less so to some replacement of the Russian state that's in any way palatable to American interests. At the moment, the main effect is teaching the Russians to be better at autarky - and, of course, there are plenty of economic costs and risks imposed on the West by the current war, beyond direct spending.
Also, the rose-coloured myth of wily Reagan outspending the Soviets into submission is very anthropic-flavoured. You may argue that the Soviet demise was ultimately inevitable, but it certainly wasn't inevitable at the point it happened. If, say, Vladimir Putin had been in charge in 1990 instead of Mikhail Gorbachev, the show might well have ricketed on for another twenty years, and ended in a much more dangerous way - not impossibly with a reckless military roll of the dice, with all the nuclear escalation potential that entailed.
What counts as Russian state collapse?
An easy version would be territorial fragmentation, which is a fantasy occasionally entertained by semi-serious people (e.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration/ )- there are maps out there depicting a rump Muscovite state alongside new republics in the Caucasus as well as Sakha and Buryat republics, possibly Karelia, etc.
Something on the order of the Soviet collapse would qualify, however - a forced/turbulent leadership change, an ideological transformation (not that Russia has much of an ideology anymore apart from crude nationalism), an economic crisis forcing a turn inward and significant dependence on foreign goodwill, and a major decrease in the ability to wield military power and corresponding reduction in regional influence.
I don't think Russian state collapse is likely, although I suppose it is possible. More likely is convincing Putin and his successors and supporters that invading countries in order to grab land is not in their interest.
If Ukraine agrees to hand over the crappy eastern Ukraine regions occupied by Russia in exchange for ending the war, would it have been worth it to Russia? That may be a face-saving ending, but I can't imagine it would be enough for Putin to have invaded if he had the chance to start again.
What is crappy about the Donbas and Crimea?
In terms of internal Russian politics, getting those territories could be seen as defeating NATO, a win for Putin even if not for Russia.
I agree, but I was trying to go along with Moon Moth's framing of 'cheap at any price', for which (if literally read) I assume the reward has to be no less than the rival's state collapse. If it's just about incentives to influence the behaviour of the Russian state, then it's no longer zero-sum.
Of course, the Russians (and many in the non-Euro-Atlantic world) hope for the reverse lesson to be imparted to the West - inflexibility when integrating rivals who have inconvenient regional interests into the global security architecture results in unacceptable costs. The dog will eventually kill the porcupine, but it might not be better off for it.
Personally, I don't expect Putin's regime to collapse, but I still think that blocking its expansion into Ukraine is the smart move.
I should note here that I don't **like** this argument, and would welcome a good counter. I think there's a decent case to be made that China (and perhaps Xi) can be dealt with safely in a more friendly way than we're doing right now. But with Russia and more importantly Putin, I get the impression that we're a decade or two too late for that.
> There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war [...]
There is, but it is a dishonest argument that ignores the fact that only one side in this war invaded another sovereign nation without provocation and just cause, and only one side committed absolutely atrocious crimes against the civilian population of a foreign country, and only one side is suffering the humanitarian catastrophe of having entire cities leveled by artillery. And it also conveniently forgets that if Russia unilaterally stops fighting, the war is over and everyone can go home in peace, but if Ukraine unilaterally stops fighting, Ukraine as a sovereign state will cease to exist and Russian atrocities against civilians will continue unhindered.
>There is, but it is a dishonest argument that ignores the fact that only one side in this war invaded another sovereign nation without provocation and just cause, and only one side committed absolutely atrocious crimes against the civilian population of a foreign country, and only one side is suffering the humanitarian catastrophe of having entire cities leveled by artillery.
There's literally a dozen things the US have done in the past 2 deacdes that could be described by this, so either you're furiously angry at the US to the point of wanting it violently overthrown, or this is really just a BS rationalization for a position which is entirely dependent on Russia being the ones doing the invading.
Does "Russia unilaterally stops fighting" include Russia surrendering Crimea?
Of course – Crimea is legally part of Ukraine. The cessation of Russian hostilities would be incomplete without returning all of Ukraine's territory.
Serious question here - how many dead Ukrainians and hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GPD is Crimea worth? No, really, how much?
And we're told that we need to keep giving Ukraine billions of dollars so Russia won't invade the rest of Europe. There is absolutely no conceivable way in which Russia retaining Crimea has any effect on this whatsoever.
" and only one side committed absolutely atrocious crimes against the civilian population of a foreign country,"
The word "foreign" is the only thing that makes that statement true.
Which "absolutely atrocious crimes" did Ukraine allegedly commit against its own population, and which future crimes of Ukraine against its own people would be prevented by Russia conquering Ukraine?
The Russians certainly claim provocation and just cause for their invasion. They will also be quick to point out the casualties - well into the thousands - resulting from Ukrainian suppression of separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014.
I don't believe these rationalisations justify the current war (or that the war is not a strategic failure on Russian terms), but let's not pretend that the doctrine of pre-emptive war is a wholesale Russian invention, or that Ukraine didn't embark on a stringently nationalist path since Maidan, culturally suppressing the Russian (and Hungarian, and occasionally Tatar) linguistic minorities.
That suppression of linguistic minorities is analogous to that practiced by France (and only very recently being somewhat softened): its purpose is to forge the population into a united nation-state, all in it together. While lamentable in some ways, in the present state of threat followed by crisis, it's wholly understandable that they would want to embark on such a project (of course, the invasion itself has been doing their work for them, forging a Ukrainian identity far more effectively than any purely internal campaign).
I hesitate to agree with that analogy. For example, France allows elementary instruction in Basque, while Ukraine effectively scrapped all state-funded instruction in Russian by 2020.
I also find myself less understanding of this than you, because I don't agree that enforcing ethnic homogeneity makes for strong states where restive minorities are involved. Reconciliation, as in (eventually) Quebec or Northern Ireland, is much preferable to the Balkan approach.
With regard to the effect of the invasion on national identity: true in general, and a big element of Russia's strategic failure. But only partly true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and untrue in Crimea and in the aforementioned eastern oblasts of the Donbas. In the latter case, a significant plurality of the Ukrainian-identifying population has (understandably) fled, tilting the balance.
" France allows elementary instruction in Basque"
It does NOW, yes. Like I said, this has very recently begun to change (and starting with Basque due to the violent psychos of the ETA, unfortunately). What you should be comparing Ukraine to is not France in the same moment of linear time, but France in the same phase of nation-state development, where you got beaten and expelled for speaking Occitan in school.
> "if Russia unilaterally stops fighting, the war is over and everyone can go home in peace"
Don't be so sure.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/24/ukraine-launches-special-operation-in-crimea
Ukraine has repeatedly stated that they don't just want to take a defensive position in this war, they want to actively push into Crimea and take it back despite Western polls showing that most Crimeans would prefer not to be apart of them. What reason do we have to believe that Ukraine would stop fighting when Russia does?
On top of this, Ukraine has stripped workers rights and political opposition rights during the war. That's fine during a war, but what reason do you have to believe that when post-war comes around those rights will come back instantaneously? They also have a history of corruption.
To be clear: I support Ukraine in this war. What I don't support is the idea that it's impossible for Ukraine to be considered bad also. There is a vicious reaction from people when you even dare suggest that Ukraine is anything other than a perfect little angel, and that's just bullshit.
Yes. If Russia stops fighting, the Ukrainian army will march into Crimea (and Donetsk and Luhansk etc). It will do so because the Ukrainians want to do this, the Ukrainians have every right to do this, and not-fighting Russians can't stop them from doing this.
At that point, the war will be over and everyone can go home in peace. I suppose it's theoretically possible that the Russians could say "we're not fighting but we're not going to go home, we're going to hold a sit-in right here on what are presently the front lines", but that would be pointless and they'd probably get hungry and go home pretty soon anyway. Realistically, if the Russians decide to stop fighting, they'll just be going straight home where they belong.
If the Russians stop fighting, there is no more war. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, there is no more Ukraine. Every criticism that can plausibly be levied against Ukraine, utterly pales in significance to that.
Why the hell should the US fund Ukraine retaking some territory that is irrelevant from a security perspective? To "own" the Russians out of liberal ethnic resentment?
It's not about Ukrainian territory per se, it's about the opportunity to eliminate a "peer" competitor at a steep discount.
Actually it may be true that there is a lot of corruption in Ukraine but it is pretty irrelevant as far as the morality of the war is concerned. It is like saying that the morality of gang violence in New Jersey is somehow changed by Bob Menendez being credibly accused of corruption.
Is it like people who live in corrupt countries are more legitimate targets of war crimes?
Crimea is legally part of Ukraine.
Also about Crimea. Whether or not it is realistic for Ukraine to retake Crimea, it is not as though they are going to admit that or voluntarily relinquish their legal claim and lose something they could have used to bargain with.
> Ukraine has repeatedly stated that they don't just want to take a defensive position in this war, they want to actively push into Crimea and take it back [...]
Taking back Crimea _is_ a defensive position, because Crimea is Ukrainian territory. It's only been 9 years since Russia invaded the peninsula, which is not nearly enough time to consider it rightfully belonging to Russia.
> [...] Western polls showing that most Crimeans would prefer not to be apart of them.
So after many native Ukrainians residents have fled from Crimea, and Russia has planted its own citizens there, most "Crimeans" don't want to belong to Ukraine? Yeah, that sounds like a legitimate opinion survey...
If I break into your house, throw you out, put my name on the mailbox, and then after nine years when someone asks me, claim that – given that I'm its resident now – your house should belong to me, does that make me its rightful owner?
> What I don't support is the idea that it's impossible for Ukraine to be considered bad also.
The fact that Ukraine's government has corrupt elements doesn't change a single bit about the situation overall – especially when considering that Russia's government is much worse.
Gallup ran a survey in 2014, after the annexation but before any supposed population transfers (it would be good to have a source for that btw) which showed that the majority of Crimeans thought that the referendum results reflected the popular will https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-research-brief.pdf
>"The fact that Ukraine's government has corrupt elements doesn't change a single bit about the situation overall – especially when considering that Russia's government is much worse."
It doesn't change who is in the right with regards to the war, what it does change however is whether or not someone is allowed to make an anti-Ukraine shitpost on twitter. No comment on whether Musk is right here, I think Ukraine should take US funds.
>"So after many native Ukrainians residents have fled from Crimea, and Russia has planted its own citizens there, most "Crimeans" don't want to belong to Ukraine? Yeah, that sounds like a legitimate opinion survey..."
You clearly don't know the facts: even the actual Ukrainians still living in Crimea do not want to be apart of Ukraine. Again, according to Western polling, not just Russians.
> There is the argument that the Ukrainian and Russian politicians are all a bunch of thugs and terrible people and they could stop the war [...]
I heard this from a Russian doctor who is married to a Ukrainian musician. It is perhaps more subtile than you are making it. As an individual you have the right not to choose sides, or the right to be a pacifist. If you fled Ukraine because it was corrupt, and then war breaks out, it is reasonable (especially if you have family on both sides of the conflict), to say that both governments are terrible and do not represent their citizens. Of course one side is more terrible, but that doesn't disallow you from bad mouthing politicians on both sides of the conflict and seeing both sides as immoral.
> It is perhaps more subtile than you are making it.
There is really nothing subtle about this war, or about who is the aggressor and who is the victim. This is not a case of "You invaded us! – But only because you attacked us first! – To retaliate against you bombing us! – Because you...", the blame falls very clear on one side alone.
I think you're forgetting the context of this thread, which is that Musk makes fun of/complains about Zelenskyy asking for foreign aid to help defend against a murderous invader that slaughters the people he's responsible for. And here you go on about "both governments not representing their citizens", and "seeing both sides as immoral", wtf.
Well, you are obviously passionate about the issue, and you hope that Ukraine will fight to the end because they have the moral high ground. I think this article addresses that oversimplified view:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/22/ukraine-war-ethics-morality-murky/
From that article;
>The Korean War ended in a stalemate and negotiated armistice and the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were clear U.S. defeats, but the geopolitical consequences of these failures were mostly local;
That strikes me as a highly questionable assertion.
I have recently come across the question of "how bad was colonialism?" a couple of times. Now, there's no denying that many atrocious crimes were committed by colonialists, but it's always important to consider the counterfactuals. Once one part of the world gets on track with science and industrialization and international commerce, while other parts of the worlds are literally still on a stone-age level when it comes to technology and institutions, can that conceivably be a stable situation? Would it even be ethical to leave indigenous peoples on their stone-age level, with outrageous child mortality and constant tribal warfare? What would have been the most benevolent way to bring those societies that want to join the modern world up to speed?
Lots of people in the replies know way more about this than I do, this is my little additional two cents:
Europeans did sign treaties with native North Americans. They also blatantly broke many of these treaties. Even if everything else were exactly the same, honoring the agreements that were made seems extremely doable and more positive for native North Americans.
Native Americans did not rise to the level of signing breakable treaties with each other, so its weird to hold Europeans to a higher standard than the natives. Does existing on the same land mass or looking similar mean you get to treat other groups worse?
So, fully I don't know anything about this besides what I learned in grade school, and I'm Canadian so I also may have learned about a different group of people.
But from my understanding, indigenous people frequently traded with each other, and had explicit treaties that were commemorated by wampum belts. I vaguely remember that the Iroquois federation (I forget the aboriginal name for it) was an alliance of 6 nations. Which seems like a pretty strong example of this sort of thing.
The Columbian exchange and international economic integration was undoubtedly positive. The counterfactual that's relevant is not an alternate history where that exchange never happened. It's whether a bunch of invading Europeans who then exploited native labor for personal profit didn't happen.
The most benevolent alternative would have been just giving away technology for free. But that's not realistic. What was realistic was a more equal relationship and an order less dominated by conquistadors. Which arguably would have been better than what we got for everyone except the conquistadors themselves. But since they actually held the territory they were the ones who counted. As seen when the King of Spain tried to get them to change certain policies and got told, basically, no.
From what I understand, the disease asymmetry doomed the Americans. Even if it had been American ships that reached Europe and returned, there would still have been plagues that would devastate the civilizations of the Americas.
That's accurate. The moment some eskimos wandered over the Bering Strait (or whatever is the accepted population-of-the-Americas theory at present), they doomed their descendants to decimation by Old World diseases the moment contact was reestablished. There's no plausible timeline where this doesn't happen, serviceable oceangoing ships are just that much farther down the tech tree than vaccines. Erusian mentions the conquistadors, but they had little activity in North America and some of the pandemic theories suggest an absolute 95%+ population wipeout there (for example, it's often asserted that the massive bison herds of the Great Plains and the plains themselves were both made possible only by the total depopulation of the formerly agrarian, densely inhabited Great Plains region; i.e. even the lifestyles of the indians with whom European settlers came into contact were a novel artifact of the disease collapse).
There would have been plagues (and contra common myths the Europeans didn't understand this at the time). But the conquest and rule by conquistadors made it significantly worse. There's a natural experiment between the Tlaxcala (who got to rule themselves under Spanish hegemony) and areas under direct conquistador rule and you get much higher mortality in the latter.
On the other hand, you have the Mississippian civilisation, which collapsed due to disease after far less direct interaction with the Spaniards than even the Tascalans had.
I'd call having a string of garrison forts and regular slave raids into their territory fairly direct. Though disease also definitely weakened them. I guess it's less direct than the rule that was present in Mexico. But it's still nowhere near pure disease based collapse.
I was under the impression that the Mississippian civilisation had collapsed between de Soto's expedition and the next European travellers to pass through the region, though maybe I'm mistaken.
Another example would be the US east coast, which had already suffered demographic collapse before the first European colonies were established there (indeed, the colonists could only establish themselves because the previous inhabitants had all been killed or left).
Colonialism was net-positive. This is not to say that the colonial powers didn't commit, as Shaked Koplewitz says, unforced moral errors, but on the whole the track record of colonialism was overwhelmingly positive. British colonialism in particular was a net-good which in hindsight should never have been dismantled; Egypt has inarguably been worse in every way since the British left, and India is the same even though it may be less obvious at a casual glance. It was the British who got rid of the Thuggee and abolished the sati; the latter especially would almost certainly still be practiced at least in parts of India if not for them. And this is only one example of the fact that British 19th century morals are inarguably objectively better than Hindu 19th century morals.
Another oft-neglected point is that while people talk a lot about how the British conquest of the subcontintent was imposition of foreign rule and so on, it's not like India was being ruled by regional assemblies of democratically elected local inhabitants before that; the Mughal emperors weren't the least bit less foreign than the British, nor did they share the culture or religion of their subjects; they forced Islamic law and ethics on a nation of Hindus and Sikhs. (As for extractiveness, let's not even start. The British may have been more effective, but the sin of venality can hardly have existed in stronger manifestation than in Aurangzeb.) And when they did get self-rule, look what a hash they made of it! India is to my knowledge the only large state whose main geopolitical enemy is itself (in the form of Pakistan).
While personally I'm not decided either way and I think there is quite a difference between Company rule and the Raj, one point to add to your view is that Pakistan's diabolical treatment of Bangladesh would have been unlikely to have happened under British overlordship.
There are some primitive tribes still existing, "industrialising" them officially discouraged and seems to be broadly accepted as an unethical thing to do.
The Prime Directive.
The vegan moral absolutists would argue (in other contexts, they won't volunteer this here) that since industrialization would allow them to give up meat consumption, they should do so. It's just not a priority target for assimilation.
What's ethical in these discourses depends on what is salient. Identity politics has more pull.
While true, I can't help but feel like we do that the same way we keep animals in zoos and environmentalists want nature preserves, not because we think that a significant portion of the world living in tribal states is a good thing.
There's too many confounders and no controls, but I suspect that our stance on that has changed as more and more of the world has become westernized. If 50%+ of the world was tribal right now, I think we'd be trying to fix it as a major world problem.
This, precisely. They're an immensely valuable scientific resource if left in their historic way of life, but it's rather bad for their future kids (extant adults would plausibly be net harmed by the shock of transition, but the argument for the infants yet to be born is very clear)
“Colonialism” was a great epoch of history that lumps together a remarkable constellation of governments—from Leopold’s Congo at the worst, to Cromer’s Egypt at the best.
To take the worst, there is no defending the Leopold's Congo Free State, but by the time of Mobutu (1960ish), it had greatly improved the lives of Belgian Congo. You can read the New York Times reporting on the declining quality of life of the people once it was decolonised (and first hand accounts of the locals lamenting it) http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html
I'm against colonialism because I think people should have the freedom to sort out their own shit (even if they don't. And even if they decide to e.g. ethnically cleanse and line their own pockets (like what happened when Britain handed over rule to the Arab ruling caste of Egypt)), and colonialism often involved morally reprehensible actions by the colonizers. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a blatant political distortion of history
>from Leopold’s Congo at the worst
Worst mostly due to the behavior of the congolese themselves against their countrymen (unless we're to believe that Leopold somehow convinced otherwise unwilling Congolese to kill vast numbers of each other without ever having set foot in the country)?
I think persons should have the freedom to control their own lives even if they do it badly. But your "people should have the freedom" means some people ruling other people, and I don't see how the rulers living in the same territory as the ruled makes that freedom. Given the choice between a British ruled colony in which individuals are relatively free and the same territory under an oppressive local government, what is your argument for preferring the latter?
My argument is purely that I would personally prefer it. Like all great positions, it's based off my feels.
I'd prefer to live under our exploitative oligarchy than an alien force that enforces strict harmony, not entirely mapping onto our morality, while it extracts Earth's resources. It's admittedly my utilitarian blindspot where I know it would be better, but God it would make my gorge rise.
>I'm against colonialism because I think people should have the freedom to sort out their own shit
A chunk of colonialism was performed to protect settlers (sometimes settling in unoccupied areas) from the agression of nearby natives, or, as in Algeria, to put an end to centuries of pillaging & rape in the mediteranean.
"Let them sort their own shit" don't really works when "their own shit" involves enslaving or scalping your civilians, and they love doing it.
Yes. I said above they should have that freedom, even if I think it's horrible. I think people in other countries should have the freedom to claw out each other's eyes and eat their own shit. The other end of the spectrum is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World expanding to South America.
I'm sorry, I must have misread this, but I can't parse it any other way than that you think the Barbary pirates should have the right to rob, kill and enslave the other peoples of the Mediterranean, but European powers should *not* have the right to do the same thing to the Barbary pirates?
Surely this is not actually your opinion?
I'm ignorant of the Barbary pirates. But maybe Somali pirates are similar? I think if you enter Somali national waters, you should be as indignant at being taken hostage, roughed up, and/or killed, as you would be if you entered US national waters and got physically detained by the coast guard.
I just think of it like if an alien force colonised earth and criminalized insults because they are immoral. Sure, insults are immoral, but let us animals rule us animals.
This doesn't scale well into the future as earth gets increasingly globalised, I know.
Barbary pirates operated throughout the Mediterranean, and occasionally in the Atlantic as well, frequently abducting entire villages of people to sell into slavery.
If Somali pirates were regularly landing on US soil and kidnapping US citizens, and the only practicable way for the American government to stop them was by occupying the coast of Somalia, would it be justified in doing so?
>I think if you enter Somali national waters
Disregarding the whole question of the legitimacy of pirates over territorial waters, you really should be aware that Somali pirates are not constrained to the Somali territorial waters, and the whole concept of Piracy involves a hefty dose of contempt for laws, soverignty, or the life of others.
The Barbary Pirates were not operating in territorial waters, they were operating in as much of the Mediterranean as they could manage.
What if the alien force colonized Earth and enforced laws against murder and robbery and such but not a lot of other things? Why do you prefer the human rulers who criminalize insults, and criticism of their rule, and collect half your income as taxes, and require you to fill out long and confusing forms if you want to do anything?
> I'm against colonialism because I think people should have the freedom to sort out their own shit
Does that make sense? Why would a locally run government necessarily be expected to give people more freedom than a foreign-imposed government?
It isn't the case always, but apriori I'd guess if ruling elite considers its subjects to be part of the ingroup, things should be better for subjects.
They should, but then many pre-colonial ruling elites considered their ingroup to be other members of the ruling elite, not the subjects they ruled over.
Well, yea, but there has been a spectrum of in/outgroupness. E.g. Hungarian aristocracy in Middle Ages probably thought about their subjects more as an outgroup than Polish aristocracy.
Except that in pre-modern times, the ruling elite has typically gone to extremes to "prove" that the subjects are not part of the ingroup. The ruling dynasty is usually ethnically distinct from the locals--think Manchus in China, Mary and William in England, Mughals in India. They typically claim some glorious ancestry for themselves that are not shared by the commoners.
Oops, sorry, I see you meant different William. My English history knowledge is not exactly perfect, as you see, but larger point imho stands.
Normans are an excellent example of premodern colonizers.
What you say was true often, but not "typically". England was ruled by the English before the Norman Conquest, then by self-identified foreigners, then again by the English, after Normans got assimilated. I've read somewhere that Henry V. was first post-conquest king whose native tongue was English.
Similar story in China. Qing - foreigners, Ming - natives, Yuan - foreigners, Song - natives, and so on.
Mary was English.
I don't think either William or the later Hanoverians made a point of emphasizing their foreign origin.
Looking at results comparing similar colonized and uncolonized places, it seems true both that (a) colonialism was a net positive for colonized areas and (b) colonialism did a lot of bad stuff and unforced (moral) errors.
Was apartheid worse than the Zulus almost wiping out native South Africans?
Where that was not colonialised, is it clear that the reason it was left alone was something other than, it wasn't worth stealing?
Does building a farm and exporting the produce count as "stealing"?
Yes, on someone else's land.
China was definitely worth stealing, and the Japanese tried hard; they just didn't succeed (except in Taiwan). Ethiopia was also worth stealing, as evidenced by the fact that Italy tried but failed.
This doesn't prove anything - colonialism wasn't based on strict cost benefit analysis. Europeans wanted colonies because they *thought* they would be good to have, and in many cases this was purely a matter of national pride. Portugal wasn't meaningfully benefitting from its colonies but firecely held onto them for the sake of having an empire.
Well-said - these points are not contradictory.
Couple points: 1) colonialism wasn't limited to Stone Age level civilizations, 2) when the West became dominant, it was imho inevitable that it would go on a rampage, I see no reason why e.g. counter-factual Ming China would behave better had it became as dominant as the West, 3) rampage was nevertheless bad and huge crimes were commited, 4) in unrealistic scenario with Western dominance and no crimes, lives of indigenous people would be better, 5) I think some modern countries (Brasil, India, Papua-New Guinea, maybe Indonesia?) have real world policies of coexistence with primitive (I know, problematic term) societies vastly better than what colonialists came up with.
> when the West became dominant, it was imho inevitable that it would go on a rampage
Even if the West didn't go on a rampage then someone using Western weapons would have gone on a rampage. You can see what happened to various Native American or Hawaiian tribes which managed to get hold of western weapons before their local rivals did -- they went on a rampage of their own.
Yeah. You always need to be wary of "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have" excuses, but in some cases, it's probably true. Then the case needs to be made "if I hadn't done it, someone more malicious would have done it, with a far worse outcome", which may hold true for some instances of colonization, and not at all for others.
It's hard to think of a group of people who would have behaved better than the British did while having the power Britain did.
The counterfactual that I would like to see analysed is how fast the technological progress would have penetrated stone-age societies without colonialism. If a friendly western trader wants to sell you guns in exchange for pelts and they happen to have a few ABCs to give as a customer reward, how soon until your whole culture has adopted the written word and everything that goes with it.
If you want to introduce writing to your culture, you don't need to wait for the Western traders to teach you - the Cherokee script is a classic case of stimulus diffusion.
Most of subsaharan africa didn't meaningfully have written language.
> Would it even be ethical to leave indigenous peoples on their stone-age level, with outrageous child mortality and constant tribal warfare? What would have been the most benevolent way to bring those societies that want to join the modern world up to speed?
Your post makes it sound like you think that colonialism was effective in reducing child mortality and tribal warfare, and in bringing those societies "up to speed" – a claim I would classify as dubious to outright wrong. Maybe I misunderstood what you said?
Agreed. The modern state of California has better mortality rates than before American colonisation but that doesn’t justify the colonialism.
I think it’s clear that the technology would have spread anyway and whatever Native American state would have existed would have picked it up.
I am claiming that modern medicine and technology is very efficient at reducing child mortality, malnutrition and other evils, and that a modern central government is very efficient at reducing tribal warfare (as well as general crime). At least some missionaries and colonizers were at least partly motivated to spread these advances (apart from lots of other, much less noble motivations).
The question is, what would have been the pathways to rolling out modern civilization without the nasty side effects of colonialism? And, more fundamentally, was it inevitable - "can that conceivably be a stable situation"?
First, you would need to establish a link between colonisation and adoption of modernity, which seems essentially nil? Places that were or weren't colonised (say, look at Thailand and Ethiopia vs peers) seems to be broadly in line with their regions. Japan's modernisation kick-started by foreign gunboats, but then had its own momentum. China likewise, potentially kickstarted by (Japanese) aggression, but it was pretty clear the internal situation was unstable anyway.
I think it's very, very difficult to read a history of the East India Company in India and not conclude that it made things dramatically worse in what was already a very volatile time in India at the point of the collapse of the Mughal Empire; the EIC almost unquestioningly made the Bengal Famine of the late 18th century dramatically worse, and pillaged the country with no regard for long-term prosperity.
Similarly, it's extremely difficult to interpret the colonialism that happened in West Africa and interpret it as anything other than pillage that made things much, much worse for people there (not that things were great, mind you, but colonialism created e.g. an endlessly deep market for slaves, mass violent conscription to take materials out of the country with only enough infrastructure to go from the mines to the ports, etc).
The most 'borderline' cases are where the colonialism was 1) With the intent of incorporating the area into the governance structure of permanent settlers, and 2) Done relatively late into the Enlightenment. Probably the most generous examples here would be New Zealand and Algeria, and even then they're not exactly spotless.
Re: your first paragraph, the obvious (though not necessarily right) counterargument would be that these places largely modernised because the alternative was being conquered by European powers. Without colonisation, this incentive wouldn't be there, so they'd be less likely to modernise.
Re: West Africa, most of the colonialism there was motivated by a desire to stamp out slavery: https://unherd.com/2021/09/how-liberals-made-the-british-empire/
It's hard (but not impossible) to imagine places that were already agricultural / settled not at any point adopting modernity, but I'm less confident for sufficiently remote hunter gatherer societies.
On the West African point I think we're discussing different time points here, and different places (namely I'm earlier, this is in the late stages and pretty idiosyncratic to the UK who did a real 180 on slavery) but I do accept the absurdity of the "civilising mission".
Your first point is good, but I cannot think of many countries that were far behind the curve but escaped being colonized (maybe the -istans in Central Asia? Don't know enough about their history... but they were eventually assimilated by the Soviets - does that count?). Ethiopia was eventually surrounded by colonies, which might have forced them to adapt faster than otherwise.
Japan is a good example of a country that successfully, and consciously, imported modernity, but they were in a much better position to do so than many other countries in terms of organization, education and know-how. Would that approach have worked for, say, Australian aboriginees?
I think the only honest answer here is "we don't know", and 'better' clearly is a pretty debateable term.
Australian Aborigines almost certainly have much lower child mortality and death by infectious disease than pre colonisation, but does that justify the plagues, massacres, and displacement that killed over ninety percent of the pre colonial population? Even today, these are not exactly thriving communities.
The -stans were colonies of the Russian Empire, conquered during
the 19th century.
It's claimed that black people use the n-word so much to 'reclaim' the word and 'rob it of its power'. Is this a defensible claim? It seems to me the n-word has literally never been more powerful than it is today. And yes, that includes during slavery, perhaps even especially compared to then.
My first thought goes to N.W.A.'s song "Niggaz 4 Lyfe". It's clear to me from the lyrics that the term is being used in a way that deliberately reverses the valence. I don't think people like Ice Cube spent an afternoon pondering how best to reclaim offensive words. More likely, it started off as an obvious opportunity for sarcasm. Grandstanding about "reclaiming the narrative" does sound like a rationalization, though not completely without basis.
Black people, being a minority, have limited say in what the word means and how it is used across society. It's a white word, after all, not a black one, and its current totemization is a white project.
White people being 'not allowed' to say the n word is heavily enforced by white people. The overwhelming majority of is usage today is by black people, and if they chose to never say it, the word would rarely be said at all.
Lots of groups playfully use a derogatory name for their members. It's like people on here referring to themselves and others as "nerds." I don't know how you'd figure out what a particular group's purpose in doing that is. It's not like they agree on the rationale, and vote on the matter.
I feel like you're looking at the result of a lack of governing council...
My impression is that the US LGBT+ movement has been fairly cohesive in the past 20ish years, with pretty good coordination. I don't hear a ton of disagreement about major terminology or policy generally. But, it's a much smaller community, with much more consistent problems, which are largely discrimination based. I think that this is why we see a lot of cohesion about things like the word "queer" or pronoun usages.
However, the American black community faces much more diverse challenges, which include broad poverty and violence, in addition to both historic and current discrimination. There are also a lot more of them, and you can't be a closeted black person. As a result, I do hear a lot more differing opinions, and even those who don't want to be advocates, or as public about their views, are still immediately granted the label of black. So, yeah, you're obviously going to see black people using the n-word casually, as a slur, being offended by it, reclaiming it, and holding a ton of other positions.
I think that because of this lack of cohesion, many white americans are left with the experience that if we were to use it, someone who thinks it bad would yell at us. However, it also gets used casually by people who don't care as much or believe in reclamation, and so it's not a coherent set of rules because... well.. "black americans" actually captures a pretty culturally diverse group of people.
>However, the American black community faces much more diverse challenges, which include broad poverty and violence, in addition to both historic and current discrimination.
Almost all violence against black americans is committed by black americans. Seems like a fairly straightforward challenge to overcome.
Hey, you are all over this comment tree and it's a little obnoxious. I'm not against seeing some right wing opinions in the debate, but you have like five separate replies to the effect of "woke is bad". Don't hog the debate.
Nope, my comments have literally nothing to do with wokeness, in each case I am directly addressing what somebody was saying, and I literally could not care less whether or not you think I'm obnoxious or if you're willing to tolerate "right wing opinions".
Sure, in the same way that all crimes could be prevented by having people not commit them. But if you are a law abiding citizen, there is only so much you can do to stop it. And, once again, there is no special legal structure or governing council to specifically address crimes committed by and against black Americans, so, not so straightforward
This would make sense if black people so much as acknowledged that black crime was even a problem or that black people are to blame for it, but these are minority opinions.
Most black people I've ever seen talking about violence involving black people think unarmed black people being killed by police is the biggest problem facing black people (without almost ever being able to quote the number of unarmed black people killed by police each year to the closest order of magnitude).
I've seen black people be frantic about black crime and have organizations to try to discourage it. Unfortunately, I don't remember names, but this effort goes back decades at least. It isn't related to current politics.
If you want someone on the intellectual side rather than the organizational side, check out Glenn Loury, a black conservative economist.
The idea of a "governing council" fascinates me. Does the Académie Française have authority over racial slurs? I don't know any French slurs, but I assume they must exist.
No clue. But I do think that native American tribes seem to have been effective at controlling when words related to them are used; sports teams are a good example, but I also can't remember the last time I heard someone say "Indian" to refer to native Americans.
For a counterexample, you might look at the evolution of the word Queer. In my lifetime it went from damaging slur to cherished term. I don't recall much of any attempt at making the word something that could only be said by certain people (gay and allies? just gay?), but perhaps it went though such a phase but quickly.
I don't think there's any hope in actually reclaiming a word while enforcing a norm that it's forbidden, even if only to a subset of the population. I also don't think that there is any coherent goal to "reclaim" the n-word.
>Queer. In my lifetime it went from damaging slur to cherished term
In my life it’s gone from a quality a cricket pitch had.
Several years ago, when I was teaching high school in Oakland, I heard an Asian American student address another Asian American student as "nigga." The several African American students standing next to them did not bash an eyelash. The "a" variant simply has a different meaning.
The classic study of the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYY3g95Uy6E.
There's no chance in hell the average black american is okay with white american saying nigga. People have faced seriously consequences for simply singing the word as a lyric to a rap song.
Are you sure it was the AVERAGE African American who got upset with people singing lyrics to a rap song?
Maybe not, but if you can face severe e.g. career consequences for it, the idea that the word isn't more powerful than ever is hard to defend.
It is absolutely not acceptable on the whole for white people to call black people nigga except in extremely specific circumstances. Maybe some friends do it, maybe some black people don't care, but overall its not accepted.
I think it's indefensible. When some words are permitted to a subset of a society but taboo to the rest it creates a permanent tension.
African-Americans want control and veto power over their own culture while simultaneously wanting full acceptance into general American culture. These two things cannot be achieved together. Either they push for a separate country that they can control or drop their cultural veto and let things mix naturally, i.e. bi-directional assimilation.
PS: I am not an American. I think they should go for separatism, the US is too big and inefficient anyway.
Another potential example is the use of the f-word that means a bundle of sticks within the gay community.
While the n-word has arguably grown more powerful, it's also no longer used as a weapon against Black people. If anything, now it's used defensively against non-Black people.
But the point is, if it IS used against black people, it has literally never had as much as an effect on them as it does today. It's not an exaggeration to say that many (if not an actaul majority of young men at least) black people today would literally become almost homicidally angry if it were used against them, which surely makes it not only more powerful than in the past (when being called the word was surely far more routine and unshocking to them) but perhaps the most powerful word that exists today.
Last week UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman made a speech in Washington DC to the AEI. In it she said some things about immigration and integration that in any other time but ours would have seemed like plain common sense. Predictably in Britain's Virtue Signalling Party one-party state she was furiously bad-mouthed all across the MSM and political establishment. But what shocked me (and I'm not easily shocked) is that I couldn't find a single supportive thing on any Uk-based Substack either.
Hence this Open Thread.https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Completely outrageous of her to suggest that multiculturalism has failed. Obviously diversity is our greatest strength.
In entirely unrelated news, the Metropolitan Police are currently stepping up patrols for fear that a conflict between two different countries thousands of miles away might spill over onto the streets of London: https://news.sky.com/story/met-police-step-up-patrols-after-number-of-incidents-in-relation-to-israel-and-gaza-conflict-12979772
You can’t present your ideas in such incendiary language and then object when people criticise you instead of engaging with the substance of the argument.
Weird how people like you never apply such logic to anything the left ever says. The left can be explicitly hateful towards white people and any problem with this is chalked up to 'white supremacy'.
Firstly I haven't 'objected' to anyone else's comment and secondly this comment string has been both productive and respectful.. at least until you came along.
Sorry I was referring to Stella Braverman’s comments not yours.
Ah...I see! Well sorry for misunderstanding you.
I agree Graham, with your assessment that many of the elements of Braverman's speech sound like common sense but, to answer your implied question, Braverman's speech retreats to a motte of reasonableness after months and years of performative cruelty. Even this otherwise reasonable speech claims that "Six in 10 in red wall seats support stopping migrants’ small boats from illegally entering the UK by using any means necessary." What does this mean, "By any means necessary"?
I think there is a reasonable solution to the immigration crisis but, unfortunately, discussions about immigration have been subsumed into the culture war which makes sensible discussion impossible.
FWIW, all of the criticism that I have read of the speech focuses on her argument against multiculturism. I don't find it surprising that people would push back against this.
> Even this otherwise reasonable speech claims that "Six in 10 in red wall seats support stopping migrants’ small boats from illegally entering the UK by using any means necessary." What does this mean, "By any means necessary"?
I don't know, why don't you ask the six in ten red wall voters?
If you're asking whether it's necessary to kill people in order to stop the boats, then no, I think it probably wouldn't be. These generally aren't the fastest boats in the world and it ought to be possible to intercept them and arrest the people on board.
"Performative cruelty" like overseeing the highest levels of net immigration in British history?
Being cruel is not the same as being effective. In fact conflating the two has been a common mistake throughout history. Regardless the Conservative Party has never been and never will be in the business of limiting immigration. Not that any of their core voter base will ever notice that fact or punish them for it.
Performative cruelty actually is a pretty effective strategy when dealing with illegal immigration, we've done it quite successfully in Australia. We u. ed to have a big problem with boat people, but eventually, slowly, through loud performative cruelty we managed to convince them that invading our country was not worthwhile; the best case scenario was that they'd be held in detention for a few years while we decided whether to send them home or else resettle them in Papua New Guinea.
There was nothing cruel about it.
Sure, it's possible to be cruel without being effective. But are there any actual, concrete examples of these "months and years of performative cruelty", or is it just based on some vague feeling that the Conservatives are right wing, and therefore must all hate immigrants?
As we know you and I are in a different place on the political spectrum.... but we (unlike so much shouty discourse on both ends) manage to have good correspondence. As for Suella Braverman, I can see how she might be a bete noir for the Left but everything she's ever said (to my knowledge anyway) should be music to the ears of a genuinely philosophically conservative political party. But in the UK we don't have one.
I'd guess that the debate about multiculturalism drowned out all other criticism. I think it's an important discussion that we should have but when you juxtapose it with Braverman's plan to ship refugees to Rwanda, it sounds a bit more sinister. Opening discussion about the 1951 Refugee Convention sounds sensible but when you accompany it with a threat to leave the European Court of Human Rights, it sounds less sensible. It's red meat to the culture warriors on the right and it's a red flag to the culture warriors on the left.
Collaborating with the French to slow the stream of illegal migrants sounds eminently sensible to me but when Starmer did the same last week, Conservative HQ demagogued it as a "shocking open door policy on immigration". It's hardly surprising that commentators (on the left and right) glossed over that bit.
What's wrong with a plan to ship refugees to Rwanda? It seems like win-win; anyone genuinely facing persecution in their home country gets to resettle somewhere else, but nobody is encouraged to falsely claim refugee status in the hopes of undeservedly moving to a richer country.
Have you run this plan by the Rwandans yet?
Did the countries of the world that filled Europe with millions of their refugees run it by Europe first?
1. A principled case against immigration is unfairly maligned, but causes of this are cultural, a distant result of denazification which transcend "the blob" and MSM. E.g you wouldn't say Pope Francis is part of the blob (?) but he still peddles a pretty strong pro immigration message.
2. Any major initiative to reduce illegal immigration is going to be administered by government agencies I.e the blob. So to fight the blob you must become the blob. Also costs a lot of money which isn't allowed because borrowing is "maxing out the credit card" and raising tax rates is bad.
3. Saying that, I expect this rhetoric along with the anti-green stuff will be moderately successful for the tories, maybe not enough to win but maybe push Starmer into a more unstable government, either with a waffer-thin majority or a nightmare SNP supply deal
Not sure why you wouldn't call Pope Francis part of The Blob.
Those subtile Jesuits...
First it was the department of education, then it was the whole UK government...
The UK government as a whole is perhaps the most woke in the world, other than maybe Sweden
Whatever. "Blob" originally meant "unresponive, hard to change", not "woke".
Can you summarize or outline the things she said about immigration and integration, for those that haven't listened to the speech?
The part which a lot of people have an issue with is the assertion that multiculturalism has failed.
I think that going from "having people living in parallel societies is bad" to "therefore multiculturalism is bad" is about as convincing as going from "car accidents are bad" to "therefore motor vehicles are bad".
That analogy makes no sense. Cars exist independnetly of car accidents. "Having people living in parallel socities" IS mulculturalism itself.
There is a vast landscape between a homogeneous society where people favor the same culture independent of their origin and strictly segregated parallel societies with their own languages, shops, schools and laws.
If an ethnic minority prefers visibly different clothing, or food, or speak other languages among themselves, or tends to follow a different religion etc, that is already multiculturalism. In the US, all kinds of migrants tended to cluster around their groups of ethnic origin instead of doing their utmost to conform to the ideal of the median American.
By and large, this turned out okay. Today, most US citizens of say Irish or German origin are very much not living in a parallel society, but prefer to live in the mainstream larger US society.
I believe that a multicultural society is a natural consequence of having different ethnic or ideological groups in a pluralistic society. If you enforce one culture on everyone ("this is the state sanctioned church, go there or leave the country"), then you can have a mono-cultural society. If you don't do that, your overall culture will be a sum of different clusters of subcultures (e.g. sports, music genres) and naturally migrants will use that freedom to create their own subcultures.
Maximally segregated parallel societies can be troublesome, and there is certainly something like too much tolerance for value systems incompatible with the broader society, but there is also plenty of multiculturalism which is not pathological.
<i>By and large, this turned out okay. Today, most US citizens of say Irish or German origin are very much not living in a parallel society, but prefer to live in the mainstream larger US society.</i>
Though that mainstream society has in turn been fundamentally changed by repeated waves of immigration. Somebody who valued the more WASP-y American culture of the republic's early decades might reasonably say that they'd prefer to forgo the immigration and keep the original culture, just like someone in the present who values English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc. culture might reasonably not want to bring in a million third-world immigrants a year.
What else is multiculturalism other than having people live in parallel societies? And has there ever been a country that did multiculturalism successfully over a long period of time (say, a century or more)?
"What else is multiculturalism other than having people live in parallel societies?"
Presumably, having people from different cultures living together cheeck-by-jowl, *not* in ghettos.
If people are truly living together cheek-by-jowl, then they cease to be of different cultures pretty quickly.
But that's called "assimilation", not "multiculturalism".
So how many countries have managed that in the long term?
The Roman Empire?
Most of the empire was locally monocultural, and to the extent it wasn't, it was mostly traders, military leaders, artists and so on i.e. an elite slice of other cultures. It wasn't just millions of arab/sub-saharan africans moving to majority Roman cities the way the UK has that now.
I think you underestimate the extent of Roman soldiers being deliberately settled in conquered lands to provide a loyal core. This resulted in a lot of cultural and religious syncretism.
For flow in the other direction one needs to look more at the Republic, and remember that it took many centuries and a few wars for the various Italic allies to come to be considered truly Roman
"Most of the empire was locally monocultural, "
So the only thing multicultarlism means is having different cultures in their own ghettos, but that isn't multiculturalism because they are all individually monocultural?
And "Most of the empire was" doesn't include Rome!
Imperialism isn't the same as multiculturalism.
Nope, but imperialism does not imply mono-cultural either. In fact, most successful empires tolerate the cultures of the conquered people.
If the British had forcibly inflicted their cuisine on all the subjects of the empire, I guess they would have had to deal with a lot more revolts.
Excellent answer.
Is Anglo Saxon culture the same as Celtic culture? The UK hasn't made up its my d whether it's ok be country or four, and that's been going on for centuries.
Different native american tribes had different cultures, sometimes radically so. And yet almost everyone treats european cultural displacement in the americas as categorically different than what resulted from native american tribes butchering one another.
This type of logic is literally only ever applied to defend Europeans having foreign cultures imposed on them, never anyone else.
<i>Is Anglo Saxon culture the same as Celtic culture?</i>
In modern times? Pretty much, yeah. The cultural differences between England and Scotland aren't noticeably greater than those between different parts of France or Spain, and are noticeably smaller than those between, say, Minnesota and Alabama.
Not to mention, the constituent countries of the UK are (or were, until mass immigration got going after WW2) individually very culturally homogenous. There might have been cultural differences between England and Scotland (though not very big ones in the grand scheme of things), but there weren't many differences between Perth and Edinburgh, or between London and Birmingham. Nor did you have Scottish ghettoes in major English cities, or vice versa. "A series of ethnically and culturally homogenous countries which happen to be under the same government" might count as multiculturalism under some definitions, but it's a very non-standard example, and it's not the brand of multiculturalism on offer at the moment.
"he constituent countries of the UK are (or were, until mass immigration got going after WW2) individually very culturally homogenous."
So the only thing multicultarlism means is having different cultures in their own ghettos, but that isn't multiculturalism because they are all individually monocultural?
I notice her speech has been citicised by such lefties as Rishi Sunak.
At this point, I begin to wonder whether certain people are using "left" to mean "not far right".
Compared to the median voter, the Conservatives' revealed preferences on immigration are indeed left-wing.
I agree that the UK conservatives are less anti immigration than most voters. I still don't see why that would make them left *wing* as opposed to centrist, since I still don't view the political spectrum as consisting only of two extremes. In fact, one could make a conservative argument for immigration: it's good for the economy. IOW, a conservative is allowed to be more of a fiscal conservative than a social conservative.
So supporting the highest levels of immigration in British history is "centrist" now?
Ironic, since "far right" today means "not far left". At no point in history beyond a few decades ago would Sunak be remotely describle in Britain as "right wing" on any almost social issue, nor was "we shouldn't bring in so many immigrants from sub-saharan africa or the middle east" describable as an exclusively "far-right" position.
> Irononic, since "far right" means "not far left".
Obviously not, since more than two values are available
https://www.aei.org/events/keynote-address-by-uk-home-secretary-suella-braverman-uk-us-security-priorities-for-the-21st-century-web/
It's amazing how gone the UK is.
I'm not that cynical. I give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that she passionately believes what she's saying. And if there were more like her then the UK would actually have a conservative party (rather than the Virtue Signalling Uniparty that it actually has). Guess we're not on the same page here.
Is anybody an expert in psychometrics? I need help evaluating papers ORs.
I realized a family member had mental illness and now want to know the risks for my children. I'm making a "how many kids at what paternal ages means how much risk" model but need to know what parameters to put in. I have some confidence in the math, but less confidence in my ability to evaluate the validity of the papers from which I pull ORs.
https://substack.com/@kirkegaard is your man
I am suspicious of Empathizing-Systemizing theory of autism and sex differences, and suspect that the original data the theory was constructed from is sufficient to disprove the theory. I wrote up the details for my test here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6q3vr5t9kXFGkHbMC/a-content-analysis-of-the-sq-r-questionnaire-and-a-proposal
However before I charge ahead with an expensive test of the theory, I would like to adversarially collaborate with one or more people who believe in the theory to ensure that my investigation will actually be convincing.
If you are interested, consider joining the Rationalist Psychometrics discord to discuss: https://discord.gg/tanzAJQ3