Have seen a lot of comments questioning the authenticity of the crimes reported on October 7th.
Someone did a deep dive on most of the videos and pictures uploaded to X (Twitter) to see what was likely true or false- it also speculates on the fate of Shani Louk (the girl who's body was apparently seen in the back of a truck with two broken legs). Have a look and see what you think!
It does not discuss the allegation of beheaded babies, which seems to be a point of contention. The original claim, that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded- has not explicitly been verified. That said, it does appear that some babies were beheaded, though it is not clear whether they were from the kibbutz being discussed at the time, nor whether the beheading was after death or not:
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2) We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
Not the answer you're looking for, but while from an Effective Altruism perspective, I think that donations to relief in Gaza would be much more impactful than donations to relief in Israel, I don't know that there is any way to guarantee resources in Gaza going to their desired recipients in Gaza, rather than to Hamas et al. Just today, for example, UNRWA tweeted (and deleted) a statement that a group of people purporting to be from the Hamas controlled ministry of health stole fuel and medical supplies from them.
Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
[As can clearly be seen and heard in the footage: uniformed, armed 'Israeli' interlopers are exchanging fire with the Hamas fighters.
Any ravers that got ironed out clearly were caught in the crossfire.
I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
🔴 @Cultures_of_Resistance]
2)The burned baby
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Considering the fabrication of the 40 beheaded babies that even the Biden government was forced to retract, the image is highly suspect.
3) The beheaded baby story was a complete Israeli lie that reached the HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
4) The scantily clad EMD chick was literally just in rave-wear, she wasn't stripped and raped by Hamas and is apparently still alive.
5) Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
The puppy picture was a shitpost by Stellar Man @stellarman22, look it up. He took the original from what had been posted by the Israeli government and substituted a puppy. He didn't think it would be taken seriously, but unfortunately you are tangible proof that half the people are below average intelligence.
I wouldn't personally bother engaging with those who deny atrocities taking place, while also gleefully celebrating them. Remember that you can flag such spam comments for moderation.
It morphologicaly doesn't look like a burnt child at all.
"All these things tell me that this is not even partially AI-generated," Farid said. He could not say what the photo shows or when it was taken. "I don't know what it is. It doesn't look like a person. You need a coroner to tell you that."
Well wahddya know, no evidence whatsoever for the beheading/burning Jewish infants story!
The fact that Israelis felt the need to fabricate that story, the fact that it spread to the highest levels of government and was spread in mainstream media really raises some eyebrows. I suppose the endless parade of videos of Israelis happily cheering on a massacre of Gazans tells us nothing about what they intend.
Do we have a source for the false claim that Hamas was beheading babies? It could have been an Israeli (the government?), though I don't think they needed to exaggerate the horror.
It could have been someone at a distance who wanted to spread confusion, or someone who misheard something, or someone who thought it was "emotionally true" and thought literal truth didn't matter.
It's the government, not merely some right wing Israeli rag, even President Biden had to retract after having believed their lies.
If you want to see pictures of targeted, murdered children, Israelis have does so to Palestinians in spades, now and in the past 75 years. It's how you get land. Strike terror into the hearts of parents by gleefully showing them their kids you just murdered.
Israeli leaders (and the population) have ALWAYS been genocidal.
Yes, Netanyahu spokesman. I don't think this completely discredits Israel, and it would have been easier for me if I'd heard about it from someone more coherent and less malevolent.
The original claim, from an Israeli news report, stated that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded. This then turned into "40 babies were beheaded" over time.
Though, some may argue it comes from an Israeli source. Due to the bizarreness of the claim, and the cost of being found to be lying about such things- would guess there's a greater than 50% chance it actually happened.
Adding for clarity so that nobody confuses "technically, there's no evidence any infants were *beheaded*" for "there's no evidence infants were killed." One of the photos (blurred) would appear to qualify as evidence of burning (desc: "A since-blurred photo released by the Prime Minister’s Office on October 12, 2023, showing the charred corpse of a baby who was murdered by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7").
That charred corpse photo is literally AI on a photo of a dog. This is getting pathetic.
I think one potential silver lining for Palestinians is, when the dust clears, it will forever be said of the people who were brutally oppressed for thousands of years, "these are the atrocities, the crimes, the injustices, the lies they committed the moment they were handed power over others. An exemplar of utterly depraved evil, they were a darkness unto nations"
Do you have an unblurred copy of it? As awful as that would be to look at, it would be good to have the evidence you're basing that claim on.
Edit: Never mind, found an article that appears to have them unredacted. And the burnt infant ones do not appear to be AI on a photo of a dog. Link below if anyone has a strong stomach and is trying to parse claims here.
THAT CHARRED CORPSE IMAGE IS LITERALLY AI OF A DOG IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED. Can't comment myself on the other photo of the child on a plastic sheet but even that would have to be verified at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if its a Palestinian child as there are no shortage of images of Palestinian children and infants murdered by Israelis laid on plastic sheets. And it hilariously has been the case that media shared images of Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism and portrayed them as Israelis to garner sympathy. Even social media influencers/entertainers like Jaime Lee Curtis and Justin Bieber have done this.
Look, I appreciate the authoritative gravitas of all-caps as much as the next man on the internet, but some evidence that goes beyond "IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED" would be appreciated here.
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Another indicator is the distorted fingers of the surgeon typical for AI.
This can't be chalked up to mere disinformation from some Israeli magazine because this is literally a fabrication FROM THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNT.
I started playing the video but this is isn't a great moment to listen to it. I absolutely loved the first words. Pure Tao.
Inshallah I will hear more when the time is right.
Also you may find it of interest that around 2004 Theodore Bikel was one of the VIPs at a Yiddish Comedy show my father performed together with his identical twin. My dad is still very proud that Bikel was there and apparently really loved it. (If you can't trust the showman to quote his own reviews, who cannyou trust 😂. I'm kidding, I believe my dad. It's also possible, I'm now recalling that Theodore Bikel may have attended 2 of the 3 shows, which makes for a more trustworthy endorsement. Oh and Elie Weisel was there too.)
It is rare to meet people who are genuinely extraordinary in some way.
I have had the divine good fortune to have interacted in meaningful ways with a great many people and while of course every person is special because he or she is a unique individual, a very small number of people are TRULY unique in some astonishing way. Fools can't get past "person x on bad team!" and miss out on the glorious show of life on earth.
I hope you have signed up for my page. I don't know how much you know about me but hopefully things will soon get hectic.
War is here, and I can not leave it to be prosecuted by the individuals and classes of people who are running it.
After using Manifold for a couple weeks, I think "prediction market" should be replaced with "poll of ten nerds". And that's if you make a market about AI. If you make a market about anything else, good luck getting even one trader.
We are a few hours away from a likely ground incursion / invasion of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into Northern Gaza. For the past week I've been trying to figure out a more reasonable way that the world can deal with Hamas, as an alternative to what the Israeli government is considering doing. I am having trouble coming up with a rational option aside from status quo (leave the group as is) or Israel's option (eliminate no matter the cost).
What other option exists to deal with a group with the following fact sheet (and please correct anything that is factually wrong in the statements below):
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
The leaders of Hamas and their families live in relative luxury while the average Gazan lives near the poverty line.
They promote radicalized education in Gaza, half of which are under the age of 19.
They use humanitarian aid for war (for example, digging up water pipes and turning them into missiles).
They strategically place their military operations near school, hospitals, residences, and commercial areas.
They convince Gazans to stay in urban areas and not to head to places IDF is advising them to go to in order not to get bombed.
They recruit minors to their cause and send them in paragliders to murder people (and be murdered by IDF)
They have the sympathy of many, EVEN IN ISRAEL, because of the civilian death toll every time there is an IDF operation.
I really don't know what can be done that is better than either option presented above.
Isreal is in a no-win situation now, but that's because they spent the last 15 years repeatedly destroying any possibility of peace, colonizing the West Bank despite repeated appeals to stop and radicalizing the Gazans through oppression.
As the Economist recently wrote,
> A second error was the divide-and-rule policy towards the Palestinians of Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 12 of the past 14 years. He has long sought to undermine the PA, which still runs parts of the West Bank. He has refused to resume peace negotiations since half-hearted talks broke down in 2014. He has frozen transfers of the tax revenues Israel collects on the pa’s behalf. At the same time, he has treated Hamas like a legitimate power in Gaza. In 2011, for instance, he approved a deal to swap 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier the militants had captured in 2006. The exchange, naturally, raised Hamas’s standing among Palestinians.
> For Mr Netanyahu, the logic was clear. The PA is committed to negotiating a two-state solution with Israel, which is anathema to the prime minister’s right-wing supporters. Undermining the PA and boosting its militant rival would help him to claim that Israel has no “partner for peace”. But Palestinians drew a different, if predictable lesson: that the only way to extract concessions from Israel is through force.
Wait, your argument is seriously that Israel traded prisoners to save a hostage, which made the hostage-takers appear better to the Gazan public, thereby making the massacre of Israelis their own fault?
That’s the best excuse for the intentional massacre of civilians that you could come up with? Really? At least put in a little effort next time.
Are you referring to when the Israel declared the First Intifada on Palestine simply for existing, and then did everything in their power to kill as many of their civilians as possible? Oh wait, that was Palestine.
Or maybe you’re referring to when the Israel declared the Second Intifada on Palestine for refusing peace talks even after being granted many concessions? Oh wait, it was Palestine who was granted concessions,
I think he's referring to the clause in the Israeli constitution which explicitly rejects the notion of peaceful co-existence and commits to a worldwide genocide against Muslims.
Pro-Israelis operate on a special kind of memory that goes back to exactly the date best optimized to best show Israel as victim and not a single day before or after.
> 1948
So you don't go back to 1890s-1917 when a bunch of people who haven't been to a land in 2000 years demand it from its latest colonizer, or to 1928-1947 when they form gangs and militias and practice terrorism on both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians alike, or even to a few days after the declaration of war when those same gangs, now the proud IDF, were killing children and kniving pregnant women in Der Yassin.
No, exactly the moment the Arabs declared war on Israel. Why did Arabs declare the war ? What was "Israel" (which didn't exist yet) doing then and what did it do in response ? None of your concern, you have the date to the millisecond and - by God - you're going to go back to it and remind everyone how Israel, the pRoMiSEd LaNd, is the real victim here.
> 1973
Another banger. 6% of Egypt's land in the form of the Sinai peninsula. The Golan Heights. The West Bank. Gaza. Some Lebnanese territories on the side. All taken by force in true Thug tradition, the proud tradition of Israel. But no, that's the wrong date right ? 1967, yuck, you don't like that number. Your date is 1973, when the land's owners decide they maybe don't want a bunch of US-armed thugs on their property, that's the right date you want to go back to. Poor thugs, they were just frolicking in peace in the land they stole and the aggressive meany Arabs came knocking.
And on and on and on and on. Tiring. Exhausting. Energy-draining.
Everyone prefers to go to the dates that support their position. You, for example, do not go back to the Jerusalem anti-Jewish riot of 1920 or the 1929 Palestine riots and the Hebron massacre of Jews. For a detailed and not particularly biased account of the long intercommunal conflict in mandatory Palestine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercommunal_conflict_in_Mandatory_Palestine
Thank you for the free education. I knew about the 1929 riots, but the 1920 riots were new to me.
I don't see this as evidence against me, I'm not playing the eye-for-an-eye stupid game sincerely. I was just showing SunSphere how it's an unwinnable game and that I can always beat him/her at it by simply picking an earlier (or later) date. Besides a few politicians that I want to see imprisoned for life or executed, I believe most Israelis were born innocent, so they deserve to live no matter the crimes of their ancestors.
After all, as Pro-Israeli people are so very quick to point out on every occasion, if fairness means the sons should bear the sins of the fathers, then most Arabs should be killed too. I see this as a very valid argument, I despise the colonizing Arabs and I hate their pathetic religion, but it's all too likely at least one counts among my ancestors, and I don't understand why would I or any living Arab be responsible for the Caliphate.
I demand only that one doesn't cheer for evil in their lifetime. Anything else is optional.
there is not really any need to shy away from 1948, Tom Suarez details jewish massacres of arabs in State of Terror. Deir Yassin was but one example. Jewish militias quite literally attempted a genocide right after the Holocaust. In fact that was used to shove off scrutiny!
I saw an Israeli legislator calling for a second Nakba, so I looked up what was the Nakba, and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate. After displacing (more like ethnically cleansing when you look up the details) almost a million Palestinians, it's no wonder that at least some of them will never accept Israel, and honestly, the time for founding countries in this way should have expired with the end of the 19th century: I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II.
Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave, but that will likely not happen. Since Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo the country, all it takes is America cutting ties to make it wind down, and this could happen in a few decades if a sufficiently left wing administration comes around.
And why not? Countries can just end, as the Soviet Union showed.
It’s hard to take these arguments as anything but an attempt to convince uninterested parties to join a side considering how precisely the context is being tailored. The nakba was the direct consequence of the Palestinian Arabs and surrounding countries waging on Israel whose declared purpose was genocide.
The Israeli claims are as follows:
1. Indigenous homeland
2. Needed as refuge from anti semitism
3. Prior to the British was insignificant, sparely populated part of southern Syria with no nations tied to that specific area
4. The zionists bought all their land legally and established new cities
5. All land gained was in defensive wars and land taken is necessary for defense
6. Were always prepared to live in peace with neighbors
No doubt you know the Palestinian side.
It should be noted that this conflict is among the smallest and least deadly in the ME and hating Israel has become a something of a holy cow for many groups.
Palestinians rejected the Peel Commission plan and the UN resolution 181 plan and went to war. This followed decades of Palestinian massacres of Jews. There were many refugee crises at the time in Europe and the decolonizing empires, and as happened in all those cases, Israel didn’t let the refugees return. The nakba is only special because the Arab countries they fled to have never given them citizenship.
Most Israeli Jews are descendants of Mizrahi refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Most Israeli Ashkenazim descend from refugees from eastern Europe. Where should they “go back” to?
That analogy does not seem very salient. Yes the Soviet Union, the nation-state, ended; that did not also result in the Russian people departing the land of their collective origins.
To the degree that the reestablishment of a Jewish nation in its current location was illegitimate because it required forcibly dispossessing another people, then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago. (Actually repeatedly, but in every instance it was long ago.)
And World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
> then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago
Take it with the Romans. What do Arabs got to do with this ?
And did the Judean people just stumble into this empty land, or did they also take it from those living there ?
And are the Eruropean immigrants who founded Israel those same "Judeans" from 2000 years ago ? Can they trace their roots all the way back ? Do they speak the same language or did they have to invent a new one ?
> World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
What should be the cutoff ? Why is Russia in the wrong for trying to take back what was once theirs in 2022, just like Israel ? If Arabs tried to take back Spain, why would they be wrong ?
Jewish immigrants purchased land and developed it. Palestinians massacred them a few times and rejected any peace plan that created a Jewish state (look up the peel commission plan, which offered Palestinians 90% of the territory, with a Jewish state on Jewish owned land on the coast and in the north). Somehow Palestinians have convinced themselves and the Arab world that they had the right to deny Jews a state on Jewish owned land. They’ve started multiple wars and have rejected a half dozen peace deals between 1937-2008.
World War II being the cutoff would be because it would be good to say that was the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it. If at least the civilized portion of the world can't get "CONQUEST BAD" into its head after that, then things are looking pretty bad.
The cycle has to end at some point, and it can't end with a regime established like that staking a claim to civilization. Israel is definitely gambling hard on its founding atrocity receding in the distance with the passage of time, but I don't know if they can get away with that given that it happened within modernity. They should be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
Listen to Netanyahu:
> The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is straight from the Bronze Age, Israel is no civilization.
I'm dying to bring you the news that Israel is a colonizer hated by everybody who reads history all the way to before your magic number 1948, inlcuding this ex-Muslim who hates Islam to his deep bones. I'm just no sure you will handle the news well.
"the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it" -- so then your definition of civilization excludes Russia, and China, and India....that's a helluva lot of the world's people who you're declaring to be not civilized.
Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"), and France (google the Algerian War). Iran and Iraq are definitely excluded given the mutually-genocidal war they fought during the 1980s.
Also, Afghanistan and Iraq would like a word regarding the US and its allies in the wake of 9/11. [Osama Bin laden and his lieutenants probably would too but they can't because they were all hunted down and assassinated.]
Etc, etc. My point of course is not to defend or in any way re-litigate any of the above events. Rather it is that the real world of real-life nations and cultures is way too complex to decide that Israel is some sort of glaring post-WW II outlier.
<i>Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"),</i>
The majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted, and still want, to remain part of the UK. The "conquering rampage" people here are the IRA, albeit they lack the competence to pull it off.
"and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate." How so? AFAIK, the founding of Israel followed the plan laid out by the United Nations. Palestinians didn't like it, started a guerilla war, got aid from neighboring Arab states, lost anyway, got expelled. Sucks to be them, for sure, but when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky. The second wave came after the Yom-Kippur war: Arab countries gang up on Israel, get their butt kicked, more Palestinians get displaced. Sucks to be them, for sure, but...
"I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II." Plenty of people got displaced right after WWII. Most of their descendants don't commit massacres of civilians in retribution anymore.
"Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave". First off, leave to where exactly? Second, it would be the ethical thing to abandon the only country approaching a liberal democracy in the whole Middle East, with civil rights, an advanced industry, a thriving academic and cultural scene, and leave it for Palestinians to turn it into a fundamentalist Muslim s******e? Does not compute.
Arabs weren't consulted so it wasn't fair to tell them to give up land for Jews. I don't think you or anyone reading this would accept giving up land without even being consulted.
Palestinians didn't like it and this is why Irgun and Lehi felt the need to depopulate Palestinian town after down, one massacre and gang rape after the next, just a merry band of murdering looters. Palestinians didn't start it, Jews did.
The first episode of large scale violence in the conflict was when Palestinians massacred Jews in 1921.
Palestinians rejected the peel commission plan which offered them a state on 90% of the territory because they couldn’t accept its parallel creation of a Jewish state on Jewish owned territory.
> when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky.
A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
I personally am a "Do the fair and moral thing no matter what your enemy did" kind of guy, but it's curious that even by your macho logic the Israeli complaints about bombardments are just pointless pussifications.
> liberal democracy
The meaning of "liberal" flew right past your head and into the stratosphere. The UN-designated Apartheid, the Nelson-Mandela-designated Apartheid, is a "Liberal Democracy" now. Strange and ugly times.
> A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
Sure, but “fuck around and find out” has to go both ways. If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th on the basis of “well it was just a matter of time, it was inevitable this was going to happen” then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack and pretend to be a victim.
> If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th
I don't support any massacres, and those who did the massacres on the 7th are not just any ordinary Palestinians, they are Hamas.
> then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack
Well, ignoring for the moment that situation is not symmetric because the land is rightfully the Palestinians', yes. What I'm saying in your parent comment is actually a reductio ad absurdum of FluffyBuffalo "Suks to be lozer, Go Go Israel" Logic. If it suks to be a lozer, then Israel must suck it up and stop "crying" (as you so classily put it) over its dead victims, after all, they are a loser of the intelligence wars and Hamas successfully bamboozled them.
Me ? I'm actually crying over every innocent soul, not just so who just so happen to be called "Palestinian"|"Israeli"|blah blah. As a general rule, Life is sacred. Life is wonderful. And Life is rare. I'm generally against those ruining or ending lives.
> followed the plan laid out by the United Nations
So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
> leave to where exactly
Europe.
> liberal democracy
All a sham when it got started that way. A legitimate liberal democracy is a bottom up affair, you can't establish one through conquest.
>So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Arabs are neither native to the levant, or an actual majority of countries in which they're the predominant ethnic group. This "native rights" crap is entirely opportunistic.
>Europe.
A large majority of israelis do not have majority european ancestry
Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas. At best, they're a third/fourth generation immigrant, merely with a firehose of US taxes protecting the unnatural situation that made them be there.
> You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews
They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
> is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? [...] is it 100? 500?
It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
> Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas.
So “Palestinians” are not native either then, got it. “The Palestinian people” as a concept was only invented in the 1960s, and the vast majority of them were colonizers sent by surrounding Muslim countries to fight and kill the Jewish minority that has been present in the area of today’s Israel for centuries.
> They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
No, I’m not talking about what “they” said, I’m talking about what you specially just said above - that they should all be ethnically cleansed and sent to Europe.
> It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
Interesting! So “Native Americans” are not really native then? And any ethnic minorities in any region of the world are not native either? If the majority of a region is racist against you, you’re not a native?
I’m glad to see you making your racist hatred so loud and clear.
Half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi or Sephardic: they're not from Europe. They were either living in Palestine at the time Israel was created, or they were expelled by the neighboring Arab countries in the 40s and 50s and came to Israel as refugees. How would making them refugees again be just?
> Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
I imagine that it is quite difficult for a Palestinian to found a party opposed to Hamas and survive until the election day. Democracy is not just about organizing elections, but also about not murdering your competitors, including the new ones who do not have a great power base yet.
So, the question is, how many Palestinians would support the effort to overthrow Hamas, if they were realistically offered an option better than "we will verbally appreciate your help today, and then leave you alone and let the remaining members of Hamas murder you and your family".
In my opinion, Israel should take more responsibility for the situation they significantly contributed to. You can't just create a huge mess, then step back and say "now it's not *my* mess anymore". You have successfully collapsed a system that existed previously, and it is nontrivial to build a new one -- when a system collapses, the most likely outcome is a rule of thugs, which is exactly what happened. It is difficult to get out of that situation, because that would require coordination on a large scale... while there are already coordinated thugs who murder everyone the see (or only suspect of) coordinating against them. While everyone is in a kind of war-or-not-war situation with strangers who took their homes and are probably preparing to take more in future (which would make everyone who advocated for peace with them look like a complete moron).
If I was in charge of Israel, my strategy would probably be to produce lots of propaganda in Arabic to communicate to the Palestinians, and at the same time declare entire Hamas to be outlaws that will be killed on sight (though actually I would prefer to take them in prisons). If you have technological and financial superiority, how hard it is to install thousands of megaphones that will scream in Arabic "the leaders of Hamas are taking all your money, and then they send your kids to die, and you know it, and your neighbors also know it, you are just afraid to say it" all day long? What is Hamas going to do about it? If they try to destroy the megaphones, they just expose themselves to your snipers. Also, if you give people food, randomly selected packages should contain propaganda leaflets in Arabic.
And by "propaganda" I mean stuff that is somehow useful for the receiver. (For example, an important part of South Korean propaganda is weather forecast. Because the stupid regime in North Korea can't even predict the weather, so North Korean soldiers start listening to enemy broadcast first because they want to hear the weather forecast... and then they get curious and listen some more.) You say that education in Palestine is completely fucked up? That's a perfect opportunity. Make leaflets that have interesting or educational stories on one side, and propaganda on the other side. If people could do samizdats during communist regime, how easy it would be for the Israeli government to print one subversive newspaper and distribute it among the Palestinians?
The question is, is anyone in power actually trying? Or is it perhaps more convenient to have a permanent crisis that serves as an excuse for all political problems, and provides a motivation to support our leaders in these hard times?
As unpalatable as it may seem right now, experience from other successful peace processes dictates that Israel will have to talk to them eventually - as it has in 2005, 2008, and 2014. Your facts are mostly factual, but they present Hamas as if operating in a vacuum - the list omits its rivalry with Fatah and Israel's own actions.
I don't think 'elimination whatever the cost' is especially farsighted. Perhaps Hamas might cease to exist - its tunnels ripped up, its rocket stockpiles destroyed, its principals assassinated - but that 'whatever the cost' is going to leave enough people orphaned, bereft, and ready to dedicate their lives to revenge that something very Hamas-like will reform fairly quickly.
I mean, it’s not like there’s much more room for the Palestinians to go in terms of radicalization. When you, unprovoked, intentionally massacre as many civilians as possible, including rape, torture, and the burning of babies, you’re basically as low as you can possibly go on the “human” scale, to the point where you’re essentially just an animal. Letting these terrorist massacres go unpunished for the sake of appearing better to the terrorist-supporting population doesn’t seem to have been very effective for Israel for the past 15+ years.
That 'unprovoked' is doing plenty of work. I won't be baited into recounting all the things Israelis have done to Palestinians - babies and otherwise - over the years, or into speculating where that fits on your 'human' scale. I suspect you know perfectly well.
At some point, all those things, on both sides, will have to be forgotten (or at least set aside) for the sake of peace, as with the IRA, the ETA, the ANC, the Felquistes, and plenty others.
I’m curious, please name even just the top 3 things Israel has done that compares in any way to the barbarity we’ve just witnessed from the Palestinians.
Well its kind of not a fair question because like all Zionists you DID kinda just make up the burning babies, raping women "fact"! The widely circulated pic of the scantily clad woman in rave wear was not a woman stripped by Hamas but a woman wearing...rave wear. And she is alive, apparently at a hospital and a German Israeli citizen, not merely a tourist. Of course we can point to Israeli rape of Palestinian minors in jail and the gang rapes in 48 and 67.
Because that's how Israel was founded. Massacres, gang rapes, threats of annihilation forcing Palestinians to flee, simply for existing on land Jewish terrorist groups wanted. They would form the first IDF and they have not changed their genocidal efforts since.
There's no evidence Shani Louk, the German raver, is alive. She was last seen with her limbs broken, unconscious. Hamas sources reached out to the mom that she's just injured, and of course the mom is wishful thinking, but no voice or physical evidence was given. They're likely just going to eventually blaim her death on Israel's bombing. $100 on it. Also there are many eyewitnesses testifying to the rapes.
The fact that no Muslim country without oil has ever been even moderately prosperous disagrees with you. The only way I can see this being true is if by “because of Israel” you mean “because Israel is not providing them the free welfare handouts that they are entitled to, cuz something something brown people.”
> Israeli settlers were inspiring potential hatred among those sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza
So you support the Russian invasion of Ukraine then, right? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious.) Ukraine was Russian land just 30 years ago, and Russia claims that ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are oppressed and live in an apartheid state.
If you don’t support Russia, though, I don’t see how you can possibly be consistent with your belief in this particular case that anyone whose ancestors have ever lived in an area have eternal control over that area and are free to slaughter the people who currently live there.
> Gazans seem willing to do things that result in certain death because their lives are so miserable as to be barely worth living.
That tends to happen when you repeatedly reject the large concessions Israel offers for peace, elect a genocidal terrorist organization as your leader, and immediately declare an intifada. They haven’t been occupied for 15+ years, Israel is not responsible for babysitting them. Perhaps they shouldn’t widely support a government that spends their international aid money on guns, rockets, and bombs, and uses them as human shields.
> they have no hope of any change - non-violence hasn’t worked either
Oh, right, that... 2 day long period without a Palestinian rocket being fired. Really tried that. And rejecting all of the vast sacrifices Israel agreed to during negotiations, instead demanding the complete ethnic cleansing of all Jews “from the river to the sea” - they really had no choice but to “roll the dice” and slaughter 1300 people.
Can you do a more in-depth blog post on the axis I and axis II divide? I know the 5th edition of DSM seems to switch the approach, but does it? It makes no difference what the chapter is called as long as the overall approach is not much different in practice.
You shouldn't link to your substack more than once per open thread - people have been warned for posting less frequently than that. It would be one thing if this were a specific article adressing something someone says, but it's just unsolicited self-promotion.
I don't think we need five links to your substack in one Open Thread. Especially not one with a clickbait title and no additional commentary or value added by posting it here
Hey all, I must admit I'm not a reader of ACX or interested in much of the subject matter, but I'm a bit desperate for advice, so apologies for being selfish.
I'm currently working as an "AI" software engineer for $XB B2B startup. I'm super burned out, but not in the way a vacation or therapy appointment could fix (or maybe I haven't found the right therapist). I just really don't care about the company or even software as a craft anymore. I feel like I'm wasting my time away doing something I actively hate every day. The internal torture is extremely bad and I only manage to keep it at bay by constantly reminding myself of how privileged I am.
I have considered starting something myself or even quitting with no plan, but there is a glaring issue. I have pretty severe ADHD and I'm afraid I will never be able to stick to something past the hyper-fixation phase. For example, a few years ago I was extremely into growing psychedelic mushrooms. Didn't care about consuming them at all, just wanted to reach the highest level of cultivation. It got to the point where I was reading several papers a day on the subject and purchasing thousands of dollars of lab equipment. Then, the interest just evaporated. Haven't touched the equipment since. The same thing has happened for the potential tech startup ideas I had. It's also difficult to explore new ideas after work because I'm constantly stressed about getting fired.
I did talk about this with my friends and family, but for the most part they all say something along the lines of: "Duh, everyone doesn't like working. Just work harder, pick up a hobby or side-project, and retire early."
What else can I do here? Plan B is I ask my psychiatrist to get me back on stimulants and try to autopilot through work.
I also have this exact problem. I can’t do anything if I’m not deeply obsessed with it. How did you get through college? I’m in college and am basically (literally) failing out. Half my thoughts are about a girl I haven’t talked to in years, and I keep spending hours writing her several hundred word notes about technical topics she has no interest in even though she’s probably blocked me on all platforms. I’ve been doing that same thing for years. I don’t know how to stop. It takes immense effort to read single sentences from an intro textbook, and even then my mind won’t absorb any information, but none to spend entire days relistening to Joscha Bach’s lectures or thinking about the anthropic principle. It’s weird. My psychiatrist said stimulants aren’t right for me while I broke down crying about how my mind is always in four places at once and I can’t get it to operate like normal. She said something about exacerbating OCD symptoms, but I expect this is moral high ground behavior to avoid giving me the legal right to put an adderall factory in my house. How do I rewrite my brain’s code? I promise to do anything anyone says as long as it avoids the dangers from typical mind fallacy. People keep calling my crazy, but I promise I’ll act normal if I can solve this problem.
If you have enough savings to get by for several months and think you could get an SWE job again if necessary, why not quit and take time to relax and then decide what to do?
Hi! Your problems sound familiar (though I don't think I had it nearly so bad) so maybe what helped me can help you a bit too.
- If you have been a software engineer for a good while and have been reasonably prudent with your money, you probably have a lot of slack there that you might not be aware of. Try to find a way to take some (unpaid) extended leave -- for a few months, maybe. This might have to mean quitting your job (it did for me) but if you are good at your job, even if you are *currently* not feeling like you are doing well, you can almost certainly find a new one before money becomes an issue. Taking some extended time off, while scary, may help you to get out of an emotional rut.
- If the hyperfixation -> evaporating interest thing is as big a problem as you are saying, it might be worth getting some therapy/professional advice on how to manage it. If it's manageable, it doesn't need to be completely fixed (plenty of successful people have this sort of thing going on with their hobbies, where it's not as big a deal so long as you don't spend too much money), but you probably want to figure out how to manage it rather that just accept it as a given.
- I can't speak to prescription stimulants as I've never been on them. I do self medicate with coffee when necessary, though. If they've been helpful in the past, they may be worth a try, but you probably still need to deal with the emotional baggage rather than just trying to tough it out.
- Can you do some introspection and figure out what you need to enjoy your work / do your best work? Presumably you got into the field because you liked it and were good at it -- what changed? You might seek out a role that lets you play to your strengths rather than fighting with your weaknesses.
Welcome! I never had an official diagnosis, but I think that's the Catch-22 aspect of this thing: if you have ADHD and it requires nontrivial effort to find a specialist, then... Unfortunately, I hate the taste of coffee, and I do not have a reliable provider of cocaine.
I spent yesterday learning the technical details of 8086 and 80286 processors, so that I could reverse-engineer an old computer game. So far I have successfully disassembled only the first seven bytes, but I am proud that after reading the 5000-page official manual from Intel, I finally understand how ModR/M works.
> Duh, everyone doesn't like working.
That's not really true. In my bubble, most teachers love their jobs (though they complain about the salaries a lot). Most people *in IT* hate their jobs. And even that is not universal. I think surveys show that data scientists are on average happier than the ordinary IT folks.
In my experience (not sure how much of it would apply to other people), what really helps me are good relations at the workplace, and having enough time to talk. I have a a problem to focus on my work alone, but I enjoy talking about the work with my colleagues, assuming that they are friendly. I strongly suspect that "pair programming" was invented by someone with ADHD. (The problem is, it requires two nice people. Otherwise it becomes torture.) Unfortunately, the modern trend seems to be that although everyone is sitting in one huge open space, everyone is supposed to work on something different. Also, open spaces are themselves a paradox: they bring people together physically, but they actually *discourage* communication, because there is no privacy, and if you talk too much, you disturb other people.
It also helps if you have clear specifications and a lot of autonomy. This allows you to bring your bursts of hyperactivity to your job. Some days you accomplish little, other days you accomplish a lot, on average it is okay. Problem is, when the burst of hyperactivity is interrupted by one of the many meetings, or by figuring out many missing details in the specification. Again, unfortunately, the trend is towards "agile" development (which in practice is often the opposite of what its authors intended), and micromanagement.
It is difficult to delve deep in the details, when again the trend is the opposite, and your responsibilities keep expanding. It is no longer okay to be a specialist; you are supposed to be a "full-stack" developer (i.e. know a little bit of everything, rather than deeply understand something), and a tester, and a "dev-ops", and a "dev-sec-ops", and an on-call customer support, and a network administrator if you work with cloud. (The only jobs in the company you are allowed not to do are the accountant and the janitor.) Or to be more precise, it is okay to be a specialist, but only if you do it on top of all the things that I have already mentioned.
In other words, large parts of the IT industry have reshaped themselves in the recent decades, to be a more hostile environment for people with ADHD, who are over-represented in these jobs today, but perhaps the industry it trying to get rid of them in long term. In my generation, people joined IT often as a result of some autistic or hyper-active interest in computers in their childhood; the "normal" people did not know what computers are or why they should be interested in them. The next generation already knows computers from their childhood, and most of them join IT simply because that is where the money is, not because they care about computers intrinsically. As a consequence, it all goes downhill for people like us. Though you can still find a niche that the normies haven't yet noticed in masse, such as data science or crypto-something.
> Just work harder
Similarly, the depressed people get told to "just smile". The folk psychotherapy can be generalized to "just magically make your problem go away".
> pick up a hobby or side-project
Unless the hobby or the side project brings you a lot of money (in which case it de facto becomes your new job), I don't see how this is supposed to help with the problems you currently have at your job.
> retire early
Heh, I'd be very happy to, I just don't have the money this requires. What a useful advice, all this!
As someone with ADHD as well, stimulants help a bit. The inherent work environment is also important.
I'm lucky that as part of my job, I have managed to rotate through a number of roles and worked in different shifts (office, temporary site based, site based 12 hour days during maintenance downtime) and this has helped me internalise that disengagement with work is not entirely a me problem.
Some ways to notice that your work isn't set up for *anyone* to succeed - if you're in an office, observe if your coworkers or managers seem checked out, too. If you're remote, that's harder, but try phone calls and video calls to gauge. At the end of one on one meetings, see if you can sneak in a quick "how's it going for you" and gauge how your coworkers feel.
While it's useful to speak with friends and family, you actually wanna speak with your coworkers to figure out if it's something wrong with the team or the org.
I feel like one of the signs that a workplace might not be a sustainable is coworker relations either being abnormally close or distant. In a healthy workplace, you should be able to have a friendly conversation, e.g chat about what you did on the weekend or on holiday. If you're too close, it probably means that no one at this place has a life outside of work, which is also scary if you want to have a life outside of work.
If when you book leave, you feel like you can't even tell your boss what you're booking leave for without it being a Whole Thing, it's the social aspect - leave the team or the company.
If everyone is civil but sort of checked out, that probably means your company doesn't know what they're doing (or the people in charge isn't communicating with you guys). People who can put in a crazy amount of work tend to only do that when there's also a clear mission and a clear way their work segues into the mission. If you find yourself looking at your tasks and not understanding why you're doing this, try to figure out the context, and if the company can't give you the context, start looking for new job (they don't know what they're doing or they're doing some weird power play of keeping you in the dark about what exactly you're working on. The latter is a pattern in companies doing something shady. If it was just normal confidentiality, you'd just be asked to sign something and not tell anyone. You always need to understand how your tasks fit in the big picture).
Good luck! I've been struggling for about a year, but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My work had this big restructure and massively changed role descriptions and reporting lines. Nothing was clear for months, and work happened in terrible ad-hoc ways because half the time no one know who was supposed to be doing what and I often got told about things way too late. But the dust is finally settling enough that it's improving somewhat.
Funnily enough, it was the on paper worst work schedule (13 hour days, 6 day workweek, living away from home) that made me realise what I was missing during my normal role. Mostly clarity of purpose and mentoring.
If stimulants clearly help you, then go back to taking them. And what about hiring not a therapist but a coach? (Most are psychotherapists who have elected to help people who are doing OK in life reach goals, rather than helping people in trouble get it together).
That ADHD does sound like something that calls for psychiatric treatment. Other than that, you could pick up meditation for a bit to maybe learn to stabilize your attention a little.
I have just learned of "Miyake Events" which are giant solar storms that would likely do very substantial damage to nearly all modern electronics including things like communication networks and the power grid. The best estimate available now is that one happens roughly once every 1000 years. If there is a 10% chance of this happening in the next 100 years I am contemplating whether this is actually a greater threat to humanity than global warming is.
Would running electric lines underground protect the grid from storms like this? Having all our satellites fried would still suck but isn't going to kill nearly as many people as losing electricity across half the planet
If they are buried deep enough, sure. But burying high-tension lines (“tension” is an old-fashion word for voltage in English; in many languages it’s still used this way) is not feasible.
No problem. We'll just back our electric pickup trucks up to the house, and we'll be back in business. And we can recharge our smart phones in the seventeen USB ports in the trucks. But if the electric storm lasts more than a few hours, we'll probably be S.O.L.
I agree this is a major threat. I’m not sure there is anything we can do about it, nor that current infrastructure isn’t mostly adapted to this either. The best we can do conditional on events of such magnitude that we *can’t* predict being possible is back up human knowledge girding the Information Age, while providing everyone with accessible manuals detailing agricultural best practices and how to prepare for winter. Anyone interested in talking more (and hopefully starting something), please email me at ishaan [at] koratkar [dot] com.
My dream is to print a version of the King James Bible mass distributed to every church that contains all the information needed to self-sustain a human colony - or something of that scale (curious if something like that already exists). While I think civilization level collapses are highly unlikely, I don’t know how to have a confident measure this kind of risk.
This almost looks like a joke. The first picture has SBF looking great, much better than he actually looks with incredible coloring and shading, whereas Caroline has a giant forehead, mostly the same tone for the whole face, and no whites around her eyes. Her eyes and mouth look like they ran out of time and got the intern to draw them on with pen.
That sketch artist seems to be ... not great? I thought the sketches of SBF were poor, because comparing how he looked going into the court and what the artist produced didn't line up well.
But poor Caroline. This is "Hunchback of Notre Dame" facial features:
What interesting differences have you noticed between the way the media covers the war in Ukraine vs wars in the Middle East?
One thing I just noticed is the grim obsession with "death toll". I've been reading articles on the Ukraine War for a year and a half, and the words "death toll" rarely come up; occasionally you'll see it in the context of one particular strike, but never in the context of a trying to keep a running count of deaths in the entire war. But now we're back to wars in Israel, and all of a sudden we're back to having the words "the death toll has reached..." in every article like it's a bridge collapse or an earthquake. Why is it so? It can't just be a lack of reliable numbers, because the numbers are pretty darn unreliable in the Middle East too (especially on the Palestinian side where they can be presumed to be entirely made up).
I suspect it's because large death counts during a hot war aren't surprising or eyebrow raising (the more interesting matter is the fact of the war itself), whereas terrorists inflicting 1k+ casualties is a pretty rare event, the numbers being central to its noteworthiness.
Nobody is reporting reliable casualty figures from Ukraine. Both sides classify their own number of military dead and exaggerate the other side's. The Ukrainians are probably being honest about the number of civilian dead on their own territory, but most of the civilian casualties occurred in places the Russian army occupied and they aren't talking. Sometimes when the Ukrainians manage to retake territory they find things like e.g. Bucha, and that gets talked about a lot. But most days, there's nothing but educated guesses to talk about.
As an educated guess, not quite half a million people have died in the Ukraine war, roughly half of them Russian soldiers.
Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
Israel is a reasonable approximate of a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies tend to be moderate in their dishonesty about vital statistics because their institutions and political cultures aren't really set up to sustain brazenly making up the numbers out of whole cloth.
Where liberal democracies put out bullshit numbers, it's usually in the nature of sloppy methodologies and misleading framings, not the kinds of outright fabrication that authoritarian polities often indulge in.
Yeah, actual deaths are pretty reliably reported almost everywhere. I've seen studies of early postwar Iraq, in the middle of a major insurgency, that indicate the Iraqi coroners and bureaucrats were playing it pretty straight.
In particular, if you report deaths, your own people demand that you report the *names* of the dead, so they can e.g. see if their friends and family survived the catastrophe du jour. If you report someone dead who isn't dead (or wasting away in your oubliette), that's going to fail when they show up alive and talking to a reporter. If you don't report as dead someone who is dead, their families are going to complain that not-officially-dead Bob disappeared three months ago and why haven't you found him yet, are you even looking? If this happens too often, you start to look like a failed state that can't keep track of its own people. You can maybe get away with reporting the deaths of people who never really existed, but sooner or later some reporter looking for a human-interest story is going to try looking up the family of one of those fictional dead, and really creating specific fictional people is hard work.
Why do muslims around the world feel so categorically different about Xinjiang than they do about Palestine? Sure, there's a lot of differences, but if Israel explicitly annexed Gaza and then treated the people of Gaza the way the people of Xinjiang are being treated e.g. 'reeducation camps', destroying mosques, would people be okay with that? It seems like they would be much less happy about it than the current status quo, despite such a state of affairs being much more similar to the Xinjiang situation that they basically are okay with.
partly because China isn't jewish (and doesn't contain any muslim holy sites), and partly because polarizing their people against Israel was a useful way for Arab dictators to maintain power and legitimacy for many years and war propaganda has taken a life of its own.
Of all the reasons given so far, the race angle seems to fit best.
Helplessness because China is too strong: then at least there'd be some emotional response. Hasn't the US gotten a lot of hate for being perceived as an enemy of Muslims?
No PR department: Uighur activists seem to have done a good enough job garnering some outrage in the West.
It's Western propaganda: What about the Rohingya?
Arab/Middle Eastern Muslims just don't seem all that interested in the problems of Asian Muslims and vice versa.
`Helplessness because China is too strong' seems sufficient. As John Schilling says, caring deeply about something where you can't do a thing is depressing, and people instinctively shy away from it. What are they going to do? China can't be shamed, the great firewall will keep external propaganda attempts out, and they have no ability to project power into Xinjiang.
The crackdown on Uighurs was initiated after a series of terrorist attacks and riots in the 90s to the mid 2010s. China wasn't so powerful then and terror attacks were demonstrably possible, yet Arab Muslims seem to have been largely disinterested back then as well.
Second, it doesn't explain anger against the US, a stronger and more influential country than China. Have we forgotten 9/11 already?
Third, Myanmar is definitely not powerful and they've been giving a good go at genociding the mostly Muslim Rohingya for the better part of a decade now.
Middle Eastern Muslim disinterest in East/Southeast Asian Muslim affairs appears constant regardless of the strength of the adversary.
By and large they do not believe it. Muslim countries see it as western propaganda. Quite a few Muslim countries sent a letter to the UN condoning the Chinese actions in response to a letter from western countries condemning it.
Because there's nothing they can do about Xinjiang. The Muslim world can't project power into China, and China isn't going to care about anybody's silly protests or UN resolutions or whatever. It's really depressing to care about something you know you can't do anything about, so most people care about something else instead.
Israel, the Muslim world thinks it can do something about. Israel can be shamed, or the West can be shamed into restraining Israel, and if necessary Israelis can be killed in significant numbers so that at least there's vengeance on the table.
Sounds like an excellent argument for Israel to destroy the possibility of palestians doing anything then, if the alternative is allowing the risk of defeat and being punished for doing so anyway
a) Palestine initially caught the public interest and has remained the center of attention, because people don't measure their causes by utility but by "what everyone else in my in-group cares about".
b) Israel is, aside from the enormous problem of the Palestinians (and John Wilkes Booth), an open liberal democracy which generally allows reporters to do reporting. China is not. If Israel clamped down the way China did, we'd see a lot less Palestinian suffering.
c) Israel is much closer to the Muslim heartland, and by "closer" I mean "on top of" and "underneath". From what I can tell, the inciting incident was something at Al Aqsa mosque, which may be built in literally the same place as the Second Temple. (Historians differ.)
d) Israel is smaller and weaker than China, and could plausibly be defeated in a war. I doubt this is conscious, but it seems like a normal human instinct.
e) In a particular sense, anti-Semitism. I'm not being picky for the pedantic reason, but because my understanding is that Jewish/Muslim relations were generally better than Jewish/Christian relations, up until the founding of Israel (or maybe a bit before, when there was informal settling going on). So while there is a lot of of anti-Semitism, and my understanding is that historically it was a response not a cause, at this point in time has become an ongoing cause: there's a self-sustaining feedback loop of hate and prejudice.
I was just being pedantic, and talking about a difference of hundreds of feet. :-) And depending on what one considers "Al Aqsa" - is it the central mosque itself, or the entire grounds? And the same goes for what one considers "the Temple".
On the last point, I think there's also a broader sense in which jews are also viewed as being 'white' (despite less than a third of israelis having majority ashkenazi ancestry) which plays into this. "Colonialism" is a term basically only ever used to describe conquest by Europeans, and also Israelis, and Israelis are very much viewed as European colonizers. If it were Turkic muslims doing this to arab muslims and treating them just as badly, there's no chance in hell is would be called 'colonialism' and I can't imagine a half as many people would care. Of course, they would be much less likely to be supported by the US, which complicates things.
I have another bit of speculation: If some people who aren't allied to the West are angry at some other people who aren't allied to the West, Western media doesn't pick it up.
Sure, but it's not remotely clear that's what Gazan Palestinians what. I don't think it's what they ever wanted, but certainly not today. Hamas and a majority of surveyed Gazans want Israel to be ethnically cleansed of jews, 'from the river to the sea'. You can say this results precisely from Israel's treatment of them, but the problem to begin with was never just 'jews are taking our land'. They never wanted jews moving to palestine in the first place.
It's also very striking that pro-palestinian muslims/leftists around the world talk about israeli 'apartheid' in terms of discrimination against arabs, but the rest of arab world does not give full rights or unlimited asylum to palestianians. Obviously palestinians want to live in what they feel is "their" land, but I surely if a rich arab gulf state allowed as many Palestinians to live there as want to and gave them full citizenship, vast swathes would have already left, but even arabs don't give equality to arab palestinians.
Palestinian refugees have made Lebanon ungovernable, and almost did the same thing to Jordan before getting kicked out.
To try to channel Machiavelli, I suspect that the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are most concerned with staying in power. (Iran and the Taliban might be an exception, but they're neither neighboring nor Arab.) And to that end I think they want to both avoid a war with Israel, and keep their population's hostility directed away from themselves and toward a convenient scapegoat. So they're fine with the situation as is.
It wasn't a "refugee crisis" like in Europe or the southern US. It was importing a large number of very passionate people into countries with lower population. When Jordan annexed the West Bank, it tripled their population. And Jordan granted citizenship to all of them, too. But no one else seemed to like that solution, not the Palestinians and not the rest of the world.
It's not the mere existence of the refugees, it's what they do. If it were merely a matter of feeding and taking care of them, that could be blamed on Israel. But when they start literally waging war on the country they came from, using your country as a base, that's on them. They are human, they have agency, and they have moral responsibility for the choices they make.
The fact that Arab Israelis accept full citizenship means that Gazans might have accepted full Israeli citizenship in 1948, if it had been offered, and their grandchildren would probably still be OK with it. But that didn't happen, and what did happen over the next seventy-five years has created a present reality where the Gazans are exceedingly unlikely to accept Israeli citizenship.
Unless it comes with enough other Palestinian-Israeli citizens that they can vote to rename the country "Palestine" and kick the Jews off the island.
I do think a large majority of Palestinians would (initially) accept citizenship with equal rights in Israel. The problems are
- the minority who wouldn't accept it and would continue terrorism, and who could now freely come and go in Israel, would be more than enough to spoil it.
- Unlike the Native Americans, Australians etc., there are about as many Arabs in Israel/Palestine as Jews, more if Palestinians in neighboring countries return, meaning that control of the government would be contested, or dominated by Arabs. Given all the historical enmity, conflicts would likely escalate until they tear apart the state, and lead to a civil war.
Nobody but the Arabs care whose fault it was that bad stuff happened 75 years ago. The rest of us care about the bad stuff that happened last weekend. To the extent that we care whose fault it is, the dead ravers and the decapitated babies and all that, is 100% Hamas's fault (and any co-conspirators they might have had).
The more useful question is what can be done about any of this? The bad stuff that happened 75 years ago, nothing can be done about. The vctims and the perpetrators are dead. The bad stuff that happened this weekend, there may be things we can do about that. But it doesn't matter for that purpose what happened 75 years ago or whose fault it is, it matters what the situation is today.
The situation today is, the Gazans aren't going to accept egalitarian citizenship in Israel, and nobody is going to offer citizenship to more than a small fraction of the Gazans. That sucks. It sucks no matter whose fault it is. Now, what solutions are compatible with that sucky reality?
Palestinians are in a very different position from a typical "indigenous people," for several reasons. They share an ethnicity the citizens of several large, strong, well-armed states that surround Israel, and these states have a history of supporting them in wars against the "civilized" colonizer. That ethnicity also sees itself as "civilized" in the full sense (i.e. literate, urbanized, and otherwise different from surrounding "barbarians" in ways that facilitate and justify imperial expansion).
But just as importantly, it is not remotely true that "basically every indigenous group on Earth accepts this arrangement." It would be more accurate to say that basically every indigenous group fights back against attempts to colonize its traditional territories. In many cases, such groups have been unsuccessful because of their technological or strategic disadvantages; the arrangements that you describe are then put in place to deal with the surviving members of a group that has failed in its attempts at armed resistance.
> but the fact that we didn’t does not excuse Nazi actions or make the US responsible for the Holocaust in even the slightest way.
My point was that the people complaining about unequal treatment do not support equal treatment themselves and by and large do not want to take in palestinians or give them equal rights.
>Just personally I’d be happy to give US citizenship to every Palestinian.
That would make the US a much, much worse place. When even other arab muslims don't want these people, you know that they're no good.
But arab countries most vocal about the opposition to israel are the ones who should be taking them, instead of people of the other side of the world who are culturally, linguistically and religiously very different to these people, and the US has a large number of jews and homosexuals, so bringing in a bunch of homophobic anti-semites would not be very fair to them.
>Though Israel ought to pay for all the lost Palestinian land and property,
When did muslims ever pay anyone for their conquests? Arabs are even indigenous to the levant for crying out loud, and you're acting like all these people "own" this land by virtue of being its original inhabitants or something. They're just the (second) latest in a very long line of occupants, and so if we're being consistent here, Israelis should be able to "own" this land if they just hang onto it long enough.
But again, it's not clear palestinians would accept this arrangement and it's very clear israel would never pay for it to happen
>But in general people have more of a claim to equal treatment in their home country than they do as refugees.
The point is more about how people outside of palestine talk about things, as if there's something unique at israel not wanting these people to have full rights, when its a universal for the reigion.
>Also the polls in your links seem all over the place so I’m not sure how reliable they are. But figure A.1 at least shows that a large majority of Palestinians supported a two-state solution in 2014-15
No, A.1 does not show a majority support for a two-state solution. It says 52% probably or definitely reject it.
A.2 shows a slight majority for Gazans in 2014...but we're not talking about 2014
Also...this is all irrelevant. Look at figures A.7 and A.8
A majority of palestianians think that a two-state solution would at best be a stepping stone towards full 'liberation' of palestine
Looks like AI in business is the hot new topic, at least if the Microsoft Ignite seminar (workshops? event? I don't know what exactly to call it) is any example.
This bit made me both twitch and go "hmmm".
There's an unmerciful amount of guff on the session descriptions, as you'd expect (I don't want to be engaged with whatever you're selling to spy on employees) and this jewel of prose leaves me as it found me, but I think the straws in the wind as to what big businesses hope to achieve with AI are to be seen there, and also why it's naive to call for slowdowns or pauses or halts. There's money to be made, Chuck! Big money! And you expect me to leave all those dollar bills lying on the sidewalk?
"Adopting “decision intelligence” powered by AI will lead to exponential growth, but People, Process and Culture are the impediment that needs to be addressed with an impactful AI strategy. Hear how you can operationalize and embed AI organically in enterprise with focus on value stream mapping, to harness AI driven insights in business processes, to drive agility."
People are impediments to AI. So inconvenient, we fleshbags, aren't we? Seems more and more like 'AI was not made for man, but man was made for the AI' is the likely future, and not "it'll free us all up to be cultured gentlepersons of leisure, rich fat and happy, while AI does all the work and pulls magical post-scarcity rabbits out of the cosmic hat".
I'm registered for online access to two days of the hoo-ha, so maybe I'll learn something applicable to work (very unlikely) or at least how to properly grovel before our new AI overlords.
EDIT: Look at the digital swag I can get! God bless Microsoft, they've never been cool and they'll never be cool and they may have more brains than an illithid banqueting hall but they're *hopeless* at design 😁
It sounds like you need tantric spirituality, to override this kind of absolutism. Though I don't understand why that particular passage is causing you trouble. What is the thing you're currently not doing that you wish you were doing (or that you currently do, but it causes you immense guilt)?
Boy, I appreciate your instructive response so I've been spending 20 minutes here attempting to pen a response....
And that's kind of the thing. I tend towards the impractical, in part because the math that was so deeply inculcated into me was in fact pretty good (most people due in fact benefit more from being good to people than they lose from it) but as you noticed it wa taught to me with a religious absolutism that is of course false and is reducio-ad-hitlerum, in the sense that you end up bringing about your own extermination for the sake of others.
I'm tempted to quite you thrice daily prayers for just this degree of self abnegation and then more about my own precious personal history (that sarcasm is a good natured self-ribbing, I'm keeping that) but you asked a soecific question.
Guilt I can't speak to because I no longer have the kind of guilt that I used to have at all. Presumably what most people mean by "guilt" I have as well but I felt guilty over being even the slightest bit morally imperfect so once I conquered that it went away for good. Praise Allah.
I'll take a sentence to clarify how I conquered it.
Well, after 19 years of failed attempts I finally did achieve moral perfection as I understood it. I refused to engage in any self-centered pleasure so long as anyone was suffering and there was a chance that if I were less attatched to the comforts of a mattress, socializing or food (other than bread and water) that I would be able to help them.
Yeah, it led to rescuing a hostage in Chechnya, improving the lives and longevities of people who were presumed to be on their deathbeds, and some other interesting stuff.
Anyway, that's more than a sentence but the point is that if anything in your final parentheses applies, I don't know it as guilt because what I knew as guilt I conquered by having absolutely nothing at all that I felt it was possible to feel guilty about.
Wild, ey? 😂
Anyway, in case anyone misreads this as me saying that either I actually *was* perfect (by standards other than my own, which I just spelled out) or that I am currently perfect (by the afore-spelled standards) I'm not saying either.
So, what am I not doing that I wish I were doing?
Okay.
I think I tend to focus on the "cognitive" aspects rather than the behavioral bevause of course if you have a strong enough WHY, you might find the HOW.
But it is correct to begin eith the end in mind.
There's plenty I wish I were doing that is attributable easily enough to "the symptoms of adhd" (in quotes because I disapprove of how this mindset is pathologized) but in this case I'm probably referring to things that I'm already doing and am driven to do but which I feel I am not doing well (or perhaps at all) because of how I was raised.
The girl thing I mentioned in comically stark terms is true. But that's too complicated a subject, too interesting a subject and too low down on my list of concerns right now.
How's this.
I don't know whether I want to have a relationship or publicity or all of the other things that people raised normally go for, but I do know that I don't want to be at the mercy of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through having zero money.
It's likely that I should also want wealth, not all normal people prefer, but, while I'm working very hard on preferring wealth to non-wealth (so that at least my own personal distaste for it won't be a factor getting in the way) I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing.
In fact, because I regard money making as "wrong" I think and speak of it that way. I am, in theory, perfectly willing to make and have money but I have a hard time thinking of it as the right thing to do.
That's not useful.
Particularly because on a moment to moment basis, I really prefer standard issue goodness, hell, I still prefer even perfectionist utopian goodness!
I'm just mad at the fact that it doesn't pay its debts so I changed my philosophical opposition to making money. And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it but that's just the traditional Jewish talmudistic theorizing about right and wrong in the harshest of theoretical terms, and not very useful.
Not only does it do nothing practical to have "decided" this but I've known myself for 47 years and I'm pretty sure that I would not even be remotely prepared to take that opportunity if it presented itself, or even a far far easier one.
I despise the moralizing of the present day because I'm saturated with it and don't need any more of it.
But the unfortunate fact is that pretty much all the moralizers are benefiting from saying the right thing even if they never do it, while I incur the opposite of benefit by opposing all these publicly stated moral "shoulds", while in real life still dancing pretty damn close to the side of angels.
I don't know precisely what I want to be *doing*, but I know that I want to *have* money.
And because my brain type is "Naturally Taoist" (i e. "Severe ADHD") the normal ways of making money are not available to me. At least not in any way that I can remotely imagine (I have already tried every last way that I can imagine).
So getting rich quickly seems a whole lot more likely than doing it slowly. That doesn't make it necessarily likely, but more likely than slowly and more likely than some might think.
Perhaps this bit of apologetics I posted a few days ago (for deciding that for two days I would not doubt the righteousness of making money and would therefore try to do so) will provide a viewer other than myself with a clear insight into what I wish I were doing but am somehow held back from.
" I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing."
Yeah, I think St Francis de Sales might have something here for you:
"WHEN God created the world He commanded each tree to bear fruit after its kind; and even so He bids Christians,—the living trees of His Church,—to bring forth fruits of devotion, each one according to his kind and vocation. A different exercise of devotion is required of each—the noble, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the maiden and the wife; and furthermore such practice must be modified according to the strength, the calling, and the duties of each individual. I ask you, my child, would it be fitting that a Bishop should seek to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? And if the father of a family were as regardless in making provision for the future as a Capucin, if the artisan spent the day in church like a Religious, if the Religious involved himself in all manner of business on his neighbour’s behalf as a Bishop is called upon to do, would not such a devotion be ridiculous, ill-regulated, and intolerable? Nevertheless such a mistake is often made, and the world, which cannot or will not discriminate between real devotion and the indiscretion of those who fancy themselves devout, grumbles and finds fault with devotion, which is really nowise concerned in these errors. No indeed, my child, the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything; and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of any one is, you may be sure, a spurious devotion.
...Of course a purely contemplative devotion, such as is specially proper to the religious and monastic life, cannot be practised in these outer vocations, but there are various other kinds of devotion well-suited to lead those whose calling is secular, along the paths of perfection. The Old Testament furnishes us examples in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca and Judith; and in the New Testament we read of St. Joseph, Lydia and Crispus, who led a perfectly devout life in their trades:—we have S. Anne, Martha, S. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla, as examples of household devotion, Cornelius, S. Sebastian, and S. Maurice among soldiers;—Constantine, S. Helena, S. Louis, the Blessed Amadaeus, and S. Edward on the throne. And we even find instances of some who fell away in solitude,—usually so helpful to perfection,—some who had led a higher life in the world, which seems so antagonistic to it. S. Gregory dwells on how Lot, who had kept himself pure in the city, fell in his mountain solitude."
It has to do with your station in life. Wanting to make money is not wrong, and indeed those who say "but I need expensive clothes etc. for my job and my position" may well be right. In that case, if you need to wear a good suit, then buy a good suit, and earn the money to be able to buy a good suit. That's not wrong.
"And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it"
That *is* wrong but you seem to realise that. There are limits to what we should do in the pursuit of our ends. If you're starving, it's not a crime or sin to steal food, but it is a crime and sin if you're doing it because you calculate "by stealing one loaf of bread per week I can save $X" when you can perfectly well afford to pay for the bread.
And maybe exercising gentleness towards yourself, neither exaggerating all your faults or excusing them or angrily declaring you have none:
"ONE important direction in which to exercise gentleness, is with respect to ourselves, never growing irritated with one’s self or one’s imperfections; for although it is but reasonable that we should be displeased and grieved at our own faults, yet ought we to guard against a bitter, angry, or peevish feeling about them. Many people fall into the error of being angry because they have been angry, vexed because they have given way to vexation, thus keeping up a chronic state of irritation, which adds to the evil of what is past, and prepares the way for a fresh fall on the first occasion. Moreover, all this anger and irritation against one’s self fosters pride, and springs entirely from self-love, which is disturbed and fretted by its own imperfection. What we want is a quiet, steady, firm displeasure at our own faults. A judge gives sentence more effectually speaking deliberately and calmly than if he be impetuous and passionate (for in the latter case he punishes not so much the actual faults before him, but what they appear to him to be); and so we can chasten ourselves far better by a quiet stedfast repentance, than by eager hasty ways of penitence, which, in fact, are proportioned not by the weight of our faults, but according to our feelings and inclinations. Thus one man who specially aims at purity will be intensely vexed with himself at some very trifling fault against it, while he looks upon some gross slander of which he has been guilty as a mere laughing matter. On the other hand, another will torment himself painfully over some slight exaggeration, while he altogether overlooks some serious offence against purity; and so on with other things. All this arises solely because men do not judge themselves by the light of reason, but under the influence of passion."
I'm not trying to scold here, but you do seem to write under the influence of passion. A little more balance in looking at yourself, and letting go a little of resentment (which is hard! but the past is over, it can't be changed now. I struggle with this a lot myself) and accepting that however it was, it's not possible to alter it now, just how you deal with it and regard it.
Have you been in a psych ward? You sound crazy in an interesting way. No offense meant: I've been in psych wards 3 times myself, and I don't think it's ever gonna happen again, but still.
As to making money and just being more selfish generally... Yeah, tantra would help you to integrate impulses that you currently regard as wrong. There are tantric rituals that involve offering meat and shit and semen to statues of the Buddha to get over submission to the sacred.
I invented a little tantric ritual myself: down a bottle of wine, then go to mass/synagogue. But perhaps that doesn't work so well for you, since ethics is the thing tormenting you, not so much religion.
I did write an essay about how altruistic one should be that you might find helpful:
Don't think I've ever been in a psych ward. Ar least not as a patient. I may be crazy but probably not in a way that is a physical danger to myself or others. At least not others who don't have it coming 😄.
Naw, I'm just one of those people widely considered either a genius or a madman depending upon whether they've got institutional backing at the time.
E.G. I've never succeeded at selling myself (which probably would be the shortest answer for what I want to be able to do like a normal person) so I've rarely ever successfully arranged a speaking engagement for myself (I just feel so slimy doing it that those few times that I do go ahead with it, I come across pretty bad) but whenever I'm willing to set aside the purity of my principles and risk speaking under the aegis of an institution (through their sellimg me to the venue and setting it all up) I tend to be regarded as so loftily that my ingrained humility can't stand it.
Anyway, I don't put much stock in labeling so I take no more offense in being called Mad than I take pleasure in being called Great, because I know that from many shiploads full of evidence that the label is no more than an indication of whether, well, whether I'm assumed by that individual to be powerful or not 🤷♂️.
That's not a critique of your query. Presumably most people who act as freely as I do despite lacking those things their society happens to regard as preconditions for such freedom (see: "fuck you money") are regarded as mad and, generally, regard themselves as fundamentally faulty as well.
I've had the good fortune to be me so I, well, I dunno, I think I'm pretty great...mainly because when I receive a novel criticism I tend to consider it, so I think I've ended up pretty okay.
Anyway, I have no problems with psych wards or with people who have been in them. Among the gazillion things I'd want to try in fact would BE getting committed to a psych ward to see what the experience would be like. Besides, while I doubt the value judgements of popular notions of psychiatry/psychology, I adsume the professionals are actually pretty good. Hell, for all a psych ward is just what I need! 😂
I doubt it. I'm just sayin' that I lack fundamental biases about such things.
Good catch on the importance of desecrating the sacred and also that my issue isn't the sanctity of the Moral Preachers (be they things or people) but the fundamental, deep level coding that makes me *enjoy* sklavenmoral over, I don't know, something at least a *little* closer to Conan's morals.
Religion I've got covered. Hell, I'm a religious *authority* and it doesn't stop me from speaking and acting freely and openly in defiance of what pretty much all other Orthodox Rabbis believe to be right. (That's one of the benefits of not having to doubt your own righteousness right there.)
What I feel I *ought* to be doing is to gollow Maimonides' Aristotlean ethics about getting your traits to hover comfortably on the path of the golden mean, so that you have equal capacity to go to the right or the left as the situation demands.
For example, Maimonides tells the stingy guy to make a conscious effort to override his automatic impulses and to repeatedly spend money like a wastrel until he's gotten over whatever a-rational emotional thing was making him stingy (this assumes of course that he isn't stingy for a good reason).
And the opposite for the spendthrift.
I actually did a teeny bit of this. I went out rabbit hunting. (It's more interesting than that but unless you've got a publisher for us that'll do.)
Im this instance, huh, well I ought to at the very least, consciously stop myself from caring about whether a word I said (or didn't say) might have hurt someone's feelings (or helped them - in the case of things I say or do entirely for someone else's sake).
It's interesting. I don't mind if I come across as rude so long as the misunderstanding belongs to the other party.
What bothers me is when I'm being short with someone (or otherwise not saintly) because I *want* to be (because how long can I be expected to stand frozen listening to some bore simply because it makes her/him feel good, or whatever).
And because *that* isn't proactively doable I think I ought to go out and proactively hurt people's feelings and thus get over whatever was keeping my conscience saintly.
A few times I've done this by passing beggars (who are common in manhattan) without making eye contact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certain I've hurt people lots more then not making eye contact with them and apologizing for not giving them money. But, like I said before, not for small selfish benefit like just being ignoring someone because who gives a shit about this strangers feelings anyway.
Cereal killing would probably qualify as a maimonidean remedy but I don't know where to find cereal.
In any case, the error in my wiring is the feeling that it's better to be regarded as bad while secretly knowing you are good, than to be good while secretly knowing you are bad.
The logic that my mind offers me as an excuse for keeping at this is that my conscience is more or less clean and thus keeps me from having to lie too much, or whatever.
Besides, my deepest desire - and the only way that I (currently) would feel *comfortable* having money, acclaim, power, and a harem - IS to bring about a moral revolution on Earth.
Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life.
So, because I believe in trying things that could be correct despite their being against my inclination.
Hmmmm.....I guess I could call customer service lines and make fun of their names? Or be an asshole troll to get a rise out of people and just laugh about it...
But I'd really prefer it if someone just gave me a few hundred dollars so that I could cover the inevitable expenses that arise from being a somewhat overly nice guy who's uncomfortable with making money even in the limited fields that his adhd allows.
"Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life."
What do you think not-caring could bring? "I don't give a shit about your granny losing her life-savings and being cast out in the snow, I sold her that shitty mortgage and made a bundle of commission on it"?
Do you know what you want? Because you don't seem to be making things clear, here. Other than "I want a moral revolution where we do away with slave morality and everyone behaves like a Cimmerian barbarian" which, uh, you might not like as much as you think you would (how else would you characterise what Hamas is doing?)
Are you entirely sure you know what Conan's morals are? Because for a barbarian, he had a lot of moral delicacy (e.g. in many of the stories there's a sexy hot and helpless wench who is throwing herself on his... mercy and he could, if he wished, take full advantage. But he doesn't. Conan suffers from sklavenmorality himself, it would seem). The part I like best is this from "The Tower of the Elephant":
"Tears rolled from the sightless eyes, and Conan's gaze strayed to the limbs stretched on the marble couch. And he knew the monster would not rise to attack him. He knew the marks of the rack, and the searing brand of the flame, and tough-souled as he was, he stood aghast at the ruined deformities which his reason told him had once been limbs as comely as his own. And suddenly all fear and repulsion went from him, to be replaced by a great pity. What this monster was, Conan could not know, but the evidences of its sufferings were so terrible and pathetic that a strange aching sadness came over the Cimmerian, he knew not why. He only felt that he was looking upon a cosmic tragedy, and he shrank with shame, as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him."
I understand Maimonides' advice, and indeed there's a tradition in Western thought that virtue lies in moderation, in the middle way. But I think you over-correct and don't get the idea there of *balance*; going out and ignoring beggars isn't auto-correction, it's tipping the scale in the pan the opposite way. You're only doing what others do every day, and acting against those who cannot harm you and are the ones suffering these small humiliations all the time. The real way to overcome wanting to be thought well of, even/especially by yourself ('look how patient and saintly I am being, listening to this bore!') is to risk something; offend someone whose good opinion you *do* want or who can get back at you in some way, be it telling everyone you are a jerk, or hurting you in our pocket, or some other way. That will break wanting to be well thought of by your own self-esteem much faster than scorning those who are already despised.
D-baby, I wrote you back a letter that would have delighted you to read and eould have delighted me to have delighted you.
Alas but that my phone turned off as I was selecting the final word and the entire comment was lost.
As I am certain that the Divine wished YOU to have been delighted, I can only assume that the message was to ME to put down the phone and stop writing.
Or at least to keep my phone charged, but the first one sounds more correct.
Having watched your video, and reading this comment, all I can say is that I've been there, I once thought I was both the Messiah and the Antichrist. I think you need to go to a psychiatrist and tell him exactly what you think is gonna happen on 10/12/2024 (it seems you actually have a very clear idea of what that is that you're not sharing).
Or hell, lay it on me, because I'm curious to know. But yeah, I know it's probably impossible to get through to you right now, but it would be a lack of compassion not to insist on you talking to a psychiatrist, and just speak your truth to him, such as it is at this moment.
Eh? I think the distance of text is making you read me incorrectly. I don't think anything is going to happen on that day unless we make it happen.
I speak in a variety of flavors, which obviously makes it *really* hard to come across as anything but nuts I suppose. But that's a practical question.
Do you think I actually believe something that is irrational? If so I would like to be corrected, but I don't think that's so.
As for being the messiah and/or antichrist. They both sound like a lot of fun so if you can put in a good word for me with either hod or the devil I'd be much obliged, but I'm pretty certain that I do not have anything even remotely approximating certitude about either.
I appreciate the suggestion and, in general, would *love* to speak to a good shrink, but not because I have any delusions.
Though of course a delusional person *would* say that, wouldn't he 😂.
So, f'realz, other than cognitive or emotional stuff, in which bwe're in agreement that I would like to speak to a good shrink but just don't have the money for it, what gave you the impression that I believed in something crazy?
If it's the certitude in my, "Final Chance" video, rest assured I have no certitudes. I didn't bother to qualify or explain every (or even any)thing because what I was conveying can't be conveyed that way.
I am, after all, an Orthodox Rabbi. We have over 3,000 years worth of concepts, and ways of speaking that don't translate.
If you are still of the opinion that I think something definitive that is definitively and demonstrably false please tell me.
Otherwise, well, you already know that I don't know how to accurately convey the fact that I believe that my words are highly worthy of consideration, but if I did know how to convey that I would.
Besides, I thought I linked to the video about money? Did I mention that date in that video, or did you watch "Final Chance For A Fresh Start"?
It is not for no reason that Justice is held to be the chief of the virtues - it is the one that allows us to apply all the others in their correct place and measure.
The message of the Sermon on the Mount quote you give seems quite simple to me, and it is eminently *good* advice: when you do something praiseworthy, do it for its own sake, rather than to be praised. It's difficult to see how you get from that to martyrdom, and self-sacrifice, other than through a lot of missing context relating to your upbringing (which, to be fair, you hint at).
Since you asked for practical advice, here's some that works regardless of whether you believe in any higher power or not: the development and exercise of personal virtue is something that is ultimately subject to your personal control and judgement. You can neither shirk the responsibility, nor deceive yourself as to your true motives, and it is best not to try.
(If you do believe in a higher power, you might also note that this higher power knows the depths of your soul at least as well as you do, so you should take extra care to avoid trying to deceive yourself. You can't deceive God.)
The essential equality of all humans (taken as an axiom) implies you are no more important than anyone else, but - equally - nobody else is more important than you. Therefore, to ask whether some other man deserves "access to a woman's womb" more than you do - as you do elsewhere - is asking the wrong sort of question. No man, fundamentally, "deserves access" - the woman ought to have something to say about it, after all (also being equal), and if she chose you as the father of her children, then that's that.
Going beyond that particular example, nobody has the right to demand your self-sacrifice, because that would imply they are more important than you are - a proposition that requires demonstration to *your* satisfaction. That doesn't, however, imply that you cannot freely give of your own, if you choose to. To do so or not is ultimately a choice you must make, based on what sort of person you would like to see yourself as being - and that's where the virtue of Justice comes in. There's a difference between being generous or humble, and being a doormat, and being Just is how you know the difference.
I take it none of y'all were raised by a young mother for whom the central event in her life was her mother failing to rescue her young niece as she was murdered before her eyes in Auschwitz, ey?
Methinks you misunderstood all that boy girl thing before. But thank you for informing me that rape is wrong. lol.
Here be da ting (sorry, I live in a Jamaican neighborhood and the accent slips out every so often. just lightening the mood!) ---
In case none of you have visited America circa 2023, Jews have a thing about guilt. About "not doing enough". And about the sanctity of victimhood.
This is ancient shit.
But for the meme to be sticky it requires a social mechanism that will ensure events which leave an indelible impression every few generation.
The Holocaust was a relatively recent version of such an event. (Perhaps you won't fail to notice an even *more* recent one.)
In the particular mini story in which I am one of the main characters, a young woman named Dvori who was around 20 years old saved the lives of her younger sister and cousin whom Josef Mengele had sent to the gas chambers.
In fact, the whole reason she was able to survive hell on earth was due to the viktorfrankl'esque "meaning" she got from her mission of continuing to save these two girls in their young teens. If we're going to be clinical about something which really seems pretty intuitive.
Well, one day she failed to give her own life for her nieces so her niece was murdered while shrieking for her aunt to save her, and for the rest of her life Dvori was, well, done.
THAT is the foundation upon which my mother's psyche was forged.
So, (said, in a jewish friendly kibbitziy way) Fuck You for your kindly moral explanation about to whom fall the rights to reproduction. What you fail to realize is that for true and proper kikes, raised right, each Jew has the moral obligation to rescue everyone else even from their own mistakes.
Sure you may have a life to spend that you're game to spend as my spouse but what in the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
My responsibility is to protect you EVEN FROM YOURSELF.
And *most especially* FROM ME.
So you may want to marry me but unless I can determine with absolute certitude that you are best off with me rather than with yankel or shmendrick or zisha leah, I'm MAMESH A NAZI if I marry you just because you're "willing".
Boy, shkutzim and yidden on the margins really don't know what they're missing!
________________________________
TONE: Sans vocal inflections and facial expressions there is some small room for massively misunderstanding a playful comment as a hateful or otherwise ill-humored and large room for assiming that someone somewhere may misunderstand the comment and that therefore certain public responses are required.... and all of the horrifying game theory that goes on under the hood every time we engage in this two generation old experiment of communicating as strangers, to strangers, before strangers, forever.
I had suggested to Elon Musk that tweets be color code for mood. It seems like if someone says, "I'm gonna kill you", it would be helpful for clarifying humorous intent if it came in a playful pink and comic sans. (The same does not apply for ransom notes.)
Nothing I wrote was comical in the "not true" sense. But nothing I wrote was in anger, desperation or sadness either. I am a happy and playful chap who is also Dead Fuckin Serious.
Yeah, I already got the impression you have Mommy Issues.
Leaving all that aside, and there's a huge heap of weight there, on a strictly religious basis what you are talking about in part is what is called "scrupulosity" and part of the treatment is to abandon your own attempts to judge your own case and surrender to the guidance of a spiritual director (whose job mainly will be to say "no you did not commit the unforgiveable sin and no you are not going to burn in hell for all eternity just because you think you only said four hail marys instead of five for your penance after your last confession, now trust and believe me because you are under obedience to do so and stop obsessively praying the rosary to 'make up' for the omission which you may not even have omitted').
That, I can already tell, is not gonna work in your case because you have *massively* over-corrected for being told what to do all your life by going to the opposite extreme of "fudge you nobody can tell me nothing and i know best of all even better than you guys who claim to be the experts", you hugely believe in your own intelligence, and an Authority Figure setting up to tell you how to handle your conscience is going to trigger *all* the fire alarms.
But it's how it works - therapy would probably be the next best thing. Psychology has commandeered the term for itself, but it is religious in origin.
"Treatment is similar to that for other forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of behavior therapy, is widely used for OCD in general and may be promising for scrupulosity in particular. ERP is based on the idea that deliberate repeated exposure to obsessional stimuli lessens anxiety, and that avoiding rituals lowers the urge to behave compulsively."
"Resolve to accept the judgments of your confessor or therapist over your own distorted standards. This is not a vow of obedience; it is simply a practical tool and can be stopped at any time. But relying on reliable people who model a healthy conscience can assist us to emulate a right moral measure for judging between sin, temptation and pathology."
Some of it, it sounds like you are self-applying (e.g. using Maimonides' advice). But maybe an outside view would be helpful as to when you're going off the rails over-correcting.
Your response was cool. It didn't reply to what I meant but I can totally see how one could have read me as being the sort of person to whom your reply was an accurate one.
Once a piece of writing is shared its truth is in the eyes of the beholder.
So it was a good response to article! Just not to the way my article intended to be.
But like I said in the PostScript, my response should be read as two guys joshing while high. Spilling truths, but in a spirit of love rather than the usual internet, uh, less than love I guess.
Wading into the deep waters here, but what the hell, I'm a fool so let me rush in while my guardian angel covers its eyes and goes "Eight billion humans and I have to get *this* one".
The bit about not blowing your own trumpet is held to mean - well, a couple of things. Be sincere in doing good, that is, don't do it just for praise (the ur-example here for me is - thank you AOC for a stellar photo-op - things like the Met Gala. Themed ball every year where it's a big charity bash for the deep-pocketed, the famous, and those who would like to think they're at least one of those. It's Conspicuous Showing-Off, all the money that the (likely borrowed) gowns and jewellery and everything to hold the do costs could more easily be given directly to whatever the point of this do is (keep an elite cultural organisation going?)
(If you are now going "But Deiseach didn't you hop on the Judas criticism about him saying that in regard to the expensive oinment?", ahem I am clearing my throat here VERY LOUDLY and unfortunately can't hear you).
This pearl of obliviousness has been criticised and defended so I'm not going to thrash it out again, but you get what we're saying, right? About Conspicuously Showing Off Your Virtue?
So number one is Sincerity. Closely related to it is probably (I hope) what your mom was going for, "and what makes you think you're so great anyway, huh?" If you hang your self-image off a peg of being *so* good and *so* virtuous and *so* generous, then what is the charity about in reality - the people for whom you are doing it, or yourself?
You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags and even the heavens are not pure in His sight, so who do you think you're fooling? You give things to, or do things for, people you care about or like or who share your values? Even the pagans do that, what is so great about you doing it, then? That's number two, Honesty.
And now comes number three, which I can't put a pithy title on. "Be kind to yourself". Do the giving or deeds in privacy, anonymously. Take the pressure off yourself to do more, be more, give more. We've had some mention previously of how EA types are prone to scrupulousness and will worry themselves into a tizzy about "but I *could* live on 10% of what I earn and give all the rest away" or "Am I doing enough, aren't there more expenses I could cut down on so as to have more money to give away, do I really need to eat more than three times a week?"
Shhhh. You are not St. Francis of Assisi wedded to the Lady Poverty. Nobody is watching with beady, judgemental eyes as to "did you hold back a single penny from giving?". Give what you can. Don't put pressure on yourself to be Public Virtue All The Time.
Ehhhh - I was going somewhere with this, lemme think. Ah, yes! Humility! Now what is humility, and what is the wrong kind of humility, and what is the right kind of humility? I'm going to be quoting heavily here from smarter people than me.
C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters":
"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love — a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours."
Chesterton (too many to quote, but here's a chunk from "Heretics"):
"It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything — even pride.
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."
One minor point, rather peripheral to the bulk of the discussion, re:
"You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags"
If one wants pro-social actions to continue, it is prudent to de-emphasize likening them to rags. I, personally, do not aspire to righteousness ("neither pure, nor wise, nor good"), but rather to intelligent selfishness and I donate blood. My blood bank (the Red Cross) thanks me. That is sufficent motivation for me. If, instead, they were to liken my donations to rags, I would stop.
Verbose but interesting. I'm halfway through this comment thus far and it really is interesting but (thus far) continues to point to potentially suicidal virtues.
I have achieved the mentioned ideals. All of them. And found that as deeply and truly satisfying they have been, they were so very non-selfish as to provide the precise benefits that thukdam provides - truly divine bliss.... briefly.
The talmud tells a story, a parable really but the best parables (think Old Testament stuff) don't introduce themselves with a disclaimer.
In brief, the rabbis capture the evil inclination and debate whether to execute it or not. As they debate they discover that since the evil inclination has been in custody creatures haven't been fucking.
The story continues but I'm not a storyteller. The point of this segment is plain enough. All's fair in live and war.
After all, every man who gained access to a woman's womb did so despite the fact that this meant some other guy would be bereft of that access. Generally speaking he also failed to spend to have spent years in fasting, meditation and unbiased analysis to determine whether in fact his sperm and company was rhe best this woman could do.
Absolute Pacifists werr weeded out of the gene pool long, long, long ago. And whenever some mutational accident or particularly virulent meme should produce another, nature makes quick shrift of him.
Ditto for doing the nasty, getting a family, and making babies.
All's fair in live and war...
It's possible that ¡Jeb! Bush is an alien (from north of the stratospheric border) and it's possible that some dude named Joshua who really really didn't seem to enjoy his crucifixion 1990 years ago is actually ¡Alive! but odds are pretty equally naaah.
Jesus is dead. And his f'n mother killed him.
Every Jewish Woman should be legally required to read 2 books before she gets custody if her first born: Portnoy's Complaint and The Christian Bible.
Sure, the world 50 years later would have less comedy and tear-jerking tales of righteous sufferers but....well, no buts. I don't care. We're over 2,000 years behind schedule for Jewish men to oppose one or both of their mutilating circumcisions.
Dad cutting off part of a baby's penis on the newborn's 8th day of life is Quite The Thing.
Mom spending the rest of her interminable existence circumcising her child's heart however is even worse.
I think part of the problem here is that humility has been tangled up with selfishness which is a different problem; humility and pride are the pairing. Selfishness and charity are that pairing.
'Should you fuck this woman and have a baby?' is not a problem of humility.
The wrong kind of humility is "always think you are terrible" and "never make a target of yourself" and I *think* that may be what is driving your mother in part; the lesson of Jews in Europe was to emulate Uriah Heep and always be so very 'umble before your betters because prominent Jews tended to make very good targets when the wind changed. So there's the ancestral fear there of standing out, like a nail to be hammered flat. But this is just me speculating.
Ah, if ONLY it was the fat targets who caught the stake.
Nay, t'was the religious. The most humble and righteous.
And you're right not to get caught up in the word humility. When a man puts his penis inside of a fertile woman's netheregions he is saying "I want this. Me! "
He is not pondering "Am I absolutely confident that this is what's best for her? Or that I should be the one to get this poontang, company, and baby rather than that any of my brothers should get to?"
Believe me D, the religion of Mary and golden boy can be found in their original pristine condition to this day.
But only smong people who know nothing about them.
The wrong sort of humility is that exemplified by Dickens' Uriah Heep, who comes from a low station in life and poverty, and has been ground down by society that he *ought* to be humble, because the likes of him are worthless. So he weaponises humility, and takes his natural resentment and melds it with spite and makes a horrible mockery of what a 'humble' person should be, in order to dig the knife in between the ribs of the proud and the superior.
"‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’
‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful 'umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of 'umbleness — not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be 'umble to this person, and 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being 'umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being 'umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be 'umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be 'umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what 'umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate 'umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the 'umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very 'umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’
And he said all this — I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight — that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression."
This is tied in with pride, as there is the wrong sort of pride and the right sort of pride. We all know the wrong sort - and indeed folk on here are fond of quoting the pet example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the vain, cocksure know-it-all who has opinions on everything and thinks they're an instant expert on something they only heard of five minutes ago.
(Damn it, stop holding that mirror up to me!)
Ahem. Well, yes, there's the right kind of pride, too: self-respect, self-esteem. Knowing your true worth. And that is where the balance, or indeed dance, between Humility and Pride comes in - virtue lies in the median way, in between the extremes of Uriah Heep's poisoned and venomous fake humility, and the Luciferian pride.
"Reply to Objection 1. Humility is not set before justice, but before that justice which is coupled with pride, and is no longer a virtue; even so, on the other hand, sin is pardoned through humility: for it is said of the publican (Luke 18:14) that through the merit of his humility "he went down into his house justified." Hence Chrysostom says [De incompr. Nat. Dei, Hom. v]: "Bring me a pair of two-horse chariots: in the one harness pride with justice, in the other sin with humility: and you will see that sin outrunning justice wins not by its own strength, but by that of humility: while you will see the other pair beaten, not by the weakness of justice, but by the weight and size of pride."
"Reply to Objection 1. Pride [superbia] may be understood in two ways. First, as overpassing [supergreditur] the rule of reason, and in this sense we say that it is a sin. Secondly, it may simply denominate "super-abundance"; in which sense any super-abundant thing may be called pride: and it is thus that God promises pride as significant of super-abundant good. Hence a gloss of Jerome on the same passage (Isaiah 61:6) says that "there is a good and an evil pride"; or "a sinful pride which God resists, and a pride that denotes the glory which He bestows."
It may also be replied that pride there signifies abundance of those things in which men may take pride."
And then there is the Litany of Humility by Cardinal Merry del Val:
There is a certain line of argument employed by Pro-Israeli commenters (elsewhere, not ACX) that goes something like this :
1- Nothing ever excuses the rape and murder of civilians that Hamas did
2- Therefore, we can't really blame the IDF when it bombs Gaza
Which stares Contradiction in the face and then gives him a kiss.
(If **Nothing** can ever justify what Hamas did, not even the amount of murder or rape or pillage which happened to Palestinians from 1948 till October 7th 2023, then, surely, the comparatively tiny amount of murder and rape and pillage that Hamas did in that one day can't ever justify the murder and rape and pillage that the IDF has started in October 8th and that the ground forces amassing on Gaza's perimeter is no doubt planning to finish ?)
Other than
[Implied] 3- Israelis/Jews and Arabs/Muslims should play by different rulebooks because the lives/dignity of the former exceeds those of the latter
, what other implied premises can one append to (1) and (2) to make the argument not contradictory-ish ?
My attempt at this looks something like :
[Implied] 3- Rape and Murder and Pillage are worse when they're done by non-state actors than when they're done by state actors
[3's Justification, good faith] 3-a Because state actors are often better trained, more restrained, and with lots of things to lose if they got too far in the Rape and Murder and Pillage
[3's Justification, bad faith] 3-b Because I have been brain washed into thinking so, there are no meaningful difference in the Rape and Murder and Pillage done by both kinds of actors
[Implied] 4- Hamas is a Jihadi non-state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with icky Muslim rhetoric and commits it using icky-looking middle eastern men with overgrown beards
[Implied] 5- Israel is a state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with sob stories about the Holocaust, and commits it with an army containing sexy models/conscripts posing on instagram and tiktok
[Implied] 6- Therefore, Israel's RMP is not "really" true RMP, or maybe a less intense style of RMP than the brutal style practiced by Hamas. The RMP mentioned in (1) references only the brutal kind, not the lite kind practiced by Israel.
In other words, a Motte-And-Bailey. (1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so.
I don't think anyone on the Israeli side claims rape is justified. I don't know if Hamas does.
The obvious difference between the two cases is that the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians. The Hamas fighters were deliberately killing civilians, as shown in their videos as well as in the instructions their leaders were carrying.
The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could. If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege. I don't know how much water is produced by wells in Gaza but it doesn't feed itself.
> the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians
And the mere claiming of something is enough ? Can every tyrant and aggressor now expect cookies for claiming what their actions are loudly and resoundingly contradict ?
> The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could.
Watching the videos of IDF's jets bombing Gaza, I can say the exact same sentence minus the "capture" part.
> If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege
If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
You gave a list of possible justifications for distinguishing the Palestinian raid from the Israeli response, a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
You could argue that the Israelis are lying, that they are deliberately targeting innocents, as your response to my "claim" is presumably intended to imply, but then you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill, which is evidence that they are not lying. You could argue that earlier acts by Israeli terrorists just before or during the 1948 war were the moral equivalent of the raid, which might be true, but you were specifically talking about the IDF in Gaza.
Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
> If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
No. Why would I do that ? After all, most Israelis are still alive, that doesn't prevent people from saying Hamas wants to genocide them.
I'm willing to concede I'm mistaken when I see the breakdown of Israeli bombing victims, how many Hamas vs. Non-Hamas. If the majority or even 40% were Hamas, I'm willing to concede you're right and that the IDF is trying to kill Hamas more than it's trying to kill Palestinian civilians.
Failing that, access to internal communications and plans where air raids that could have killed more Palestinian civilians were discussed and cancelled will convince me.
> a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
I argue that this difference is illusory and performative, and - furthermore - so easy to fake if you have substantial media control and PR department like the Israeli state has.
Unless you can read minds, "Choosing to do X" and "Totally not choosing X, just willing to let it happen in pursuit of Y" are indistinguishable.
> you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill
Sorry if I didn't, I responded to it so many times in other threads with other people (not saying its your fault).
My short answer is this : They're killing as many as their benefactors will let them. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, their oil comes from outside, their tech industry depend on the outside, and of course the jet fighters they kill civilians with are mostly a generous gift from US taxpayers.
Vast majorities of those people that Israel depend on are against murder of Palestinians. Therefore, they can't go too far in their murder of the Palestinians.
This is quite different than saying "Israel doesn't want to kill civilians", the "want" here implies an internal motive, a motive which I claim to be non-existent. It's entirely external, Israel is killing the maximum amount of Palestinians that will not result in their demise.
> Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
Noted. Tell me what you think is a bad argument in my comments, and I will either trace it back to the premises that I believe justifies it or retract it.
No they can't, because if they did the Arabs around them would be justified in killing them all, and even if they don't have the military power to do that now (which is wrong, they do), history will never forget the 2.2 million Gazan genocided and it will always be a card the Arabs could pull out to carry out the same on Israelis at some point in the future. American support doesn't last forever after all.
"(1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so. "
First of all, you have completely failed to demonstrate that the IDF is engaging in any sort of rape or pillaging, so that fails.
But the most obvious, so obvious that it's the first argument a toddler would have come up with but for some reason you neglected to mention it involves the concept of aggression.
After all, kidnapping and caging is wrong, but it's a very common punishment, so lol people are such hippo crates, amirite?
> First of all, you have completely failed to demonstrate that the IDF is engaging in any sort of rape or pillaging, so that fails.
See downthread, and Murder alone is enough for this to work anyway.
> for some reason you neglected to mention it involves the concept of aggression.
Aggression is a tricky thing to define when you have a tit-for-tat downspiral. After all, I can always find the latest incident from among the hundreds where the IDF killed children, killed War Press, stripped Civilians naked, or took homes by force without provocation, and then claim that Hamas' attack was punishing the IDF for all of that. (what's that ? Hamas' attack was not on the IDF ? well that's (1) not completely true, some of it was on IDF positions (2) IDF's attack is also not on Hamas, but on the entirety of Gaza)
Anyway, the Pro-Israeli line of argument is claiming that NOTHING ever justifies murder of innocents. Nothing. Nil. None. Null. That's their words, not mine. If they believe in their words, the Israeli attack is never justified no matter what Hamas did. If they actually don't and some murder of innocents is actually justified after all, then Hamas' attack is not apriori wrong.
You are not distinguishing between deliberately killing innocents, which Hamas was doing, and killing innocents in the process of fighting non-innocents, which is what Israel claims it is doing and defends doing.
Why do you believe Israel's claims on face value without checking or skepticism, but don't believe Hamas' claims and actually look at what they do in practice ?
Has Hamas claimed that the raid did not deliberately target civilians? I thought they were the ones who put up videos showing them doing so.
I believe the Israeli claim because they could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill and the obvious explanation is that they are trying to kill the ones that attack them and killing others in the process.
If Israel could get a fairy to grant its wishes, Palestinians in the Gaza strip would stop launching rockets at Israeli civilians, and everyone would live peacefully and the walls could be torn down.
If Hamas could get a fairy to grant its wishes... well, you saw on Saturday what Israel would look like then.
Israel routinely grants Palestinians from Gaza access to Israel to get medical treatment.
The Palestinians routinely pay generous benefits to terrorists who kill Israelis (or to their families, if they become "martyrs").
Hamas intentionally targets Israeli civilians.
Israel has, in its retributive strikes, tried to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, even when Hamas hides in civilian structures, and achieved a good accuracy. (No guarantee what happens in the next days - odds are good that the gloves come off now.)
Israel warned Palestinian civilians of incoming strikes against Hamas, and told them to flee.
Hamas told Palestinian civilians to stay put and live or die in their homes.
One side is trying to protect its citizens. The other side is trying to kill them at any cost.
Any attempts to construct a moral equivalence between these two parties reeks of either bad faith or complete ignorance.
It seems to me that Israel's response to the terrorist provocation should remain focused on the terrorists -- and safe passage to Egypt or Jordan and humanitarian aid should be made available to all non-combatant Palestinians.
It seems the terrorists need to be purged from Palestinian settlements, before discussions about Palestinian rights can resume. To discuss the place of Palestinians alongside, if not within, Israeli society, to have such talks as a response to acts of terrorism would be foolish and counterproductive.
Israel has repeatedly pushed for Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries to accept palestinian refugees. They're pretty deadset against it, for understandable reasons.
When I returned to university as a middle-aged student, our lecturer told us that Palestinians were the Philistines of the Old Testament, the Sea Peoples.
But the barbarity and criminality of Hamas's assault renders any discussion about "the Palestinian condition" moot. The topic shouldn't come up until the last Hamas fighter is eradicated.
The Egyptians aren't taking any Gazans. They've closed the border. Nobody's asked the Jordanians, but that's because everybody knows they won't take them anyhow - they've already got more Palestinians than they want.
A lot of the comparisons you're making are invalidated by the fact that Israel is a state, and Hamas is not. Palestinians are not Hamas citizens (and it's dehumanizing to imply they are). Likewise, the people providing medical treatment to Palestinians are not the IDF. I'm certain many members of the IDF would wish for the same thing with their fairy, and likewise most Palestinians would likely use their fairy for peace (a plurality are children, after all).
The reason why you can't construct a "a moral equivalence" between the two is because we hold [states containing whole groups of people] and [extremist groups] to different moral standards. (Also relevant to the judgement: the US government,
the country of the plurality of posters here, is funding and providing weapons to one of these groups, and not the other)
Also:
>The Palestinians routinely pay generous benefits to terrorists who kill Israelis (or to their families, if they become "martyrs").
The IDF are ALL paid generous benefits by Israel. They kill Palestinians.
Hamas has directly governed the Gaza Strip ever since it took control from the PLA in 2007. They rule Gaza. In what relevant sense are they "not a state" that would mean they can't be compared to the actions of the Israeli government?
Honestly, even if Hamas is not a government I don't see how that's relevant. FluffyBuffalo has claimed that Hamas as an organization intentionally targets civilians, deliberately puts Palestinian civilians in danger, and pays people to kill civilians. Israel attempts to minimize civilian deaths. What does it matter then if one is a state and one isn't? You say we hold states to different standards than extremist groups: why should we do that? I certianly don't. Imagine if someone said "The MS-13 gang is evil because they murder people for money, and the police are good because they're trying to stop the murderers and have rules to try to minimize killing innocents" and then someone else replied "That comparison is invalidated because the police are an agency of the state, and MS-13 is a criminal gang." It invalidates nothing: MS-13 is still evil, and the cops still ain't.
I might be off-base about Hamas being a state, but everyone seems to make a clear distinction between "Hamas" and "Palestine", which leads me to conclude they are not. (Certainly they are not recognized as one). If what you say is true in an uncomplicated way, they are much more state-like than I thought, though.
But your example is exactly what I was trying to highlight. Because even if the *cops* are trying to "minimize civilian casualties", people still gets *justifiably* angry when the cops kill (unarmed) civilians. A lot of people assert that the cops *aren't* good for that reason. It doesn't matter how evil MS-13 is, it doesn't justify the police acting like an armed gang. They're held to a different standard.
And once again, the US governments fund cops with like 30% of local budgets, they don't give money to MS-13.
(Also, to be clear, this discussion not about whether Hamas is good; afaict no one here has asserted that. The topic is specifically "what amount of the IDF's morally negative actions can we excuse (in some cases retroactively) based on Hamas's recent attacks" (and some degree of vice versa).
In the 1960s Israel took the territory that is now the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and took the West Bank from Jordan. These territories had a lot of Palestinians in them, and an organization known as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formed. Their goal was to replace Israel with a Palestinian state, and until 1993 they advocated armed struggle against Israel to accomplish this. The PLO is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people.
The PLO and Israel were enemies until the Oslo Accords in1990s. This was a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians in which Israel agreed that the Palestinians should be able to rule themselves. The core idea was that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the PLO would form a new Palestinian government known as the Palestinian Authority (PA) which would control those areas, with the exception of Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements inside Palestinian territory.
Actually withdrawing ended up pretty complicated, especially with the settlements issue, but in 2005 Israel forcefully dismantled all Israeli settlements inside the Gaza Strip and withdrew all military from the Strip. They handed control of the Gaza Strip completely over to the PA.
In 2006 the PA held elections, and Hamas won a majority of seats as a political party. This eventually led to a Palestinian civil war, where Hamas fought against the other prominent PA party, Fatah. After the Battle of Gaza Hamas took direct control of the Gaza Strip and formed their own rival PA government. They also dedicated themselves to the destruction of Israel.
Israel, not trusting Hamas not to send terrorists out of Gaza into Israel (because they had already done that quite a bit) closed off Gaza's borders into Israel. Egypt did the same, because they also don't like Hamas. Neither Israel or Egypt recognized Hamas as the legitimate rulers of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority (the internationally recognized Palestinian state) supports the blockade of the Gaza Strip until the PA can regain power there. Currently the PA rules over the West Bank.
And that's been the situation ever since. There have been two direct wars between Israel and Hamas since, and a lot of Hamas rocket attacks. To say the least.
If you support the Palestinian people, then you should hope that Israels wipes Hamas out and restores power to the Palestinian Authority. Until then, everyone in the Gaza strip is a Hamas hostage.
That was... incredibly concise and useful. Such condensed descriptions of the history of the Israel/Palestine... situation, for lack of a better term, haven't exactly been easy to come across, all the information I've seen is fragmented and partisan. I'm sure there's infinitely more context, since foreign relations are a fractal unto themselves, but I appreciate this, thank you.
It seems like there's some legitimacy to my previous arguments (Hamas *isn't* recognized as legitimate, and the US still funds/arms Irael), but they are definitely much more state-like than I thought, to the point it invalidates a lot of my objections.
According to the leftists who support things like the Palestinian cause, nothing ever justifies genocidal racial hatred, but Hamas is a genocidally racially hateful organization with the explicit goal of destroying jews. Oops, guess you better stop supporting Hamas now.
Is that relevant? We're talking about "pro-israel commenters", not any given individual. I don't think I've seen any "pro-palestine commenters" over the past week who have said anything remotely negative about Hamas.
The comment I'm replying to says "you" in the last sentence, who he/she means other than me ?
Yes, unfortunately, Jihadi and Muslim rhetoric loves to hijack Pro-Palestine discourse. That's just an effect of being the majority in the Middle East. If you're bringing that up as an implied answer to my original question along the lines of "Sometimes people just support one kind of murder and not the other for no reason", I guess that's okay but I'm typically looking for deeper reasons.
If you have something to back this up other than the fallacious "Well you pointed out that the IDF commits the same kind of crimes so that means you're defending the crimes", I'm all metaphorical ears.
The entire point is that anyone who supports one but denounces the other and states war crimes as the reason why is, knowingly or unknowingly, being a hypocrite.
Pointing out war crimes by the other side doesn't in and of itself constitute support for the opposing side, saying that Stalin committed war crimes in Germany doesn't mean I support Hitler (unless I said so myself explicitly or implicitly), just that that anyone who supports Stalin and says that this is because Hitler committed war crimes in the invasion of the USSR is contradicting themselves.
> How about you specifically accuse the IDF of engaging in rape as a tactic starting October 8?
If this is a statement that is phrased like a question, it's wrong. I didn't accuse the IDF of rape because there is no ground invasion yet and jet fighters can't rape, only murder.
I clarified in another reply that rape and pillage is expected, not yet actual. It's expected for a good reason.
> But kudos for being upfront that you hate Israel.
Thank you, it doesn't take a lot of effort from me. I lean Anarchist so I technically hate all states, monstrosities like Israel and North Korea stand out.
May I point out that parsing sophisticated logical arguments regarding this matter posted by someone who proclaims hatred for Israel in the screen name seems to be a foolish errand.
Silly me, I thought Logic is about having conclusions that follow from premises. Turns out it just means loving Israel. The bastards at Merriam Webster lied to me all along.
Right, so you mean to say that the numerical-named commenter I'm replying to just means
>"Don't bother with sophisticated logic with a guy whose online name is a piece of evidence that he hates Israel."
?
I still don't see how is that a relevant update, me hating Israel is just a piece of evidence that you shouldn't bother with me in any discussion that requires the participants to love Israel, and that's not the kind of dicussion we're having (or is it ?).
The strongest steelman I can find for 1123581321's drive-by comment is "This guy hates Israel, hate is a powerful emotion which clouds judgement, don't expect good judgement", which is very fair and true, but plenty of people who hate Hamas are also discussing the conflict and nobody ever said to them "Nobody takes you seriously because hate is a powerful emotion which clouds judgement". I don't think there is a decent human being who doesn't hate seeing women raped and children being killed, so we just have to tolerate each other's hate-clouded judgement if we want to have any discussion that is not an echo chamber.
Look, "HatesIsrael" => IDF = Hamas has P=0.95, give-or-take. Your writing hundreds of words to - amazingly - arrive at the same conclusion is a waste of space.
I'm pretty sure you can't attach probabilities to logical implications like that, but I get what you mean, yes. And yes it happens to be right, I think the IDF is exactly like Hamas, worse in fact, because it's superiorly armed.
Still, it struck me as incredibly childish of you that, having decided you're not going to have a discussion with me, you also urge other commenters to not have a discussion with me. Lazy, right ? Maybe just not all people share your unhealthy tendency to be offended on behalf of Israel, let them decide for themselves who to discuss.
You sound awefully offended at such a casual comment and I honestly don't think you're even being particularly good at sarcasm, just very forced and childish. I'm very sleep deprived now to reply courteously.
If you take for granted that the IDF has done and will do acts indistinguishable from what Hamas recently did, then you shouldn't be surprised when the pro-Israel commenters seem nonsensical and inscrutable to you.
TL;DR it's the non-utilitarian answer to the trolley problem. Even if the IDF invasion results in [bad thing], pro-Israel commenters will claim the IDF isn't "doing" [bad thing], whereas Hamas is *actively* doing it. Only the *active* doing is unjustifiable, so there's no comparison.
Anyone making the syllogism you describe will definitely disagree with the premise that the IDF will be raping and/or pillaging anyone, and presenting them with evidence otherwise would help change their minds. [We may have to distinguish between IDF soldiers illegally committing war-crimes vs the IDF as an institution ordering and/or encouraging war-crimes, see next paragraph]
As for the murder (which everyone agrees the IDF will kill people), they'll draw a moral distinction between killing-civilians as a mission goal, and civilian casualties as an unavoidable side-effect of a mission which is designed to kill as few people as possible while still pursuing some generally-agreeable goal. If you convince people that IDF's missions are not designed to minimize civilian casualties, that's likely to change some minds. One could object "from a utilitarian perspective there's no difference between inevitable deaths and intentional killing," and again I'd point out that assuming your interlocutors are [utilitarians] is obviously going to make their arguments seem inscrutable
>disagree with the premise that the IDF will be raping and/or pillaging anyone
Yes, because it's not true (yet), I clarify in a comment further down thread that it's an expected outcome based on previous behaviour, not an actual one. Sorry I didn't make this clear enough in the original.
>We may have to distinguish between IDF soldiers illegally committing war-crimes vs the IDF as an institution ordering and/or encouraging war-crimes
This is essentially the "Icky-vs-Sexy" distinction I draw above. People don't define crimes by actual objective metrics like, I don't know, # of people killed per unit time. They define it by heuristics and foggy markers, things like
> a "respectable" institution with lots of paperwork and a PR division can't commit murder, only a religious loony with smelly clothes and foreign language can. Therefore, when Hamas kills children its terrorism, but when Israel does it it's "Retaliation".
Apart from any moral points one might make about this way of defining war crimes, consider that it's unsustainable. An organization can simply embed and implicitly encourage war crimes into its institutional culture and tacit knowledge, without ever formally endorsing it in written materials or other documentation that can be used against it. In this world, everybody is committing war crimes all the time, or at least is allowed to do so and will face no repercussions should they choose doing so, but because everybody has a little card on them that says "Belongs to ${INSTITUTION}", and because this institution never ever formally endorsed war crimes, it's still totally okay from the Icky-vs-Sexy viewpoint. This is essentially a variant of "No True Scotsman", the IDF says it doesn't endorse war crimes, so no true IDF member will ever commit war crimes.
>If you convince people that IDF's missions are not designed to minimize civilian casualties
Interesting prespective. How one might go about that ? After all, "minimize" is Optimization Theory jargon. To prove or at least convince people that you have "minimized" or "maximized" something, you at least need a bunch of worse alternatives that you can display so that people realize all those bad options were available to you and yet you searched and searched until you found a better one. What are the worse alternatives to the IDF's actions ?
I also think you're misplacing the burden of proof here. Intutively, the killer and their defense are the ones who should prove self-defense/manslaughter, the prosecutor only needs to prove they killed someone. Applying those same standards to states, it's the IDF (or its various defenders online) who need to prove that the IDF doesn't really engage in willful murder, the IDF's attackers need only prove that they do kill, which is a job already done.
I see your point about the whole icky-vs-sexy thing, but I think you're ignoring the issue of rates.
How does the IDF compare to other similar forces, in terms of the number of crimes committed per soldier? This seems like an obviously relevant question, but it doesn't figure into your argument at all.
To be clear, someone overseeing the IDF should be having sleepless nights over every single incident. But as lay observers, we can just check the rate and if the rate is low enough we can assume that the afrementiones overseers are taking their job seriously (as opposed to implicitly encouraging rape and murder, as you say).
Again, if you have statistics showing that the rate of criminal behavior in soldiers is inordinately high at the IDF, you should share it. I've never seen such data. My impression is that the rate is in line with any modern military engaged in comparable types of combat, indicating that it can't be lowered by any well-tested method.
Seems to me that the explanation of the whole mess is that our species is violent, greedy and cruel, and that having been on the receiving end of great violence and cruelty does not teach members of our species not to deal out the same to others.
Are we still sure it's a good idea to align AI with our values and needs? And if so, just as a thought experiment, let's say we had to choose whether to have a committee of Israelis or a committee of Palestinians draw up the statement of values and rules the AI was to be aligned with. See any problems there?
Or are we safer just letting all those great California tech bros write the new Ten Commandments? You know, something like this:
(1) Microdosing's worth trying.
(2)Look casual
(3) People with tech smarts don't exactly have more rights than other people but they sort of do
(4) Don't upset the wokies, lots of them come from money & are good customers.
(5) Don't shy away from spiritual materialism. Try to get as much fucking benefit as you can from meditation: improved productivity, creativity, confidence with women, spiritually-enhanced orgasms, visions that make a good story.
(6) Remember that tech smarts are the only valid kind of smarts. Literary smarts are a waste because we have GPT4 to write poetry and shit for us now. In fact here's a sample one:
I suspect "align AI with our values and needs" is more often than not is automatically translated into"align AI with my values and needs", and since "I" am good, it's desirable to do this.
Is there ever an excuse for rape? Is there ever any rational reason to ever consider rape justifiable?
The line of when killing becomes murder is a grey area, especially during wartime. This is not the case for rape; that's one of the reasons rape is treated much more severely than other assaults.
The case for rape is the exact same case for doing airstrikes in the night vs. in the morning, or using napalm and white phosphorus vs. using traditional ammo of the equivalent TNT : Terror.
Psychological Warfare, plus (in the case of rape) the bonus of motivating your all-male force.
I don't need to say that I don't condone this or anyone who does, but it's not meaningless cave man swinging. There is a tactical logic behind it, however horrible, and as demonstrated by the airstrike and nuclear example, state actors do it all the time.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
In times past, I imagine it was a carrot to entice young men to put their lives at grave risk for the cause and/or the tribe, maybe even its survival. It's only difficult to envision a rational reason for it within the moral constraints and causes held by the post WW2 West.
How do you know if it's a strawman ? I saw it repeated with the exact same structure under dozens, possibly 100+, of videos. I can actually bother to take some screenshots and post them if "Strawman" is an actual objection people have and not just a word they say to deflect an uncomfortable equivalence that they don't like.
> civilians as collateral damage
Collateral to what ? How many times did you actually bother to look at the justifications Israel publish after a raid ? (spoiler : there is none, that's not a thing they do.)
Without a stated goal, let alone published statistics about how often it's achieved, how do you know if the casualties are actually "collateral" ?
Not so charitably: Your post was designed to be a monologue to dress up "actually hamas and israel are the same" in fancy rationalist speak. You used a vague unspecified weakman so that you could feign ignorance and insist that you see such arguments everywhere (conveniently not here, but you totally promise they are everywhere not here), allowing you to brush off the obvious objection to your premise, namely that the the IDF deliberately kills civilians for its own sake.
Charitably: Those who believe civilian deaths caused by the IDF are less bad than civilian deaths caused by Hamas believe the IDF's claims that their, say, airstrikes are intended to degrade Hamas' capabilities and civilian deaths are collateral damage that the IDF takes reasonable steps to minimize, eg by roof knocking. Clearly you don't share the same premise, so you come to different conclusions, eg Israel is as bad or worse than Hamas vs Israel is better than Hamas.
>Your post was designed to be a monologue to dress up "actually hamas and israel are the same" in fancy rationalist speak.
How is it a "monologue" different from any other post in the open thread ? and why would I need to "dress up" a claim such as "Hamas and the IDF are basically the same thing" in fancy rationalist speak when it's a straightforward belief of mine and I'm not shy to say it and defend it in very simple language ? I don't even "design" my posts like its some sort of mini skirt, I literally just bring up Substack's god aweful UI and start writing right away on the spot, until the sluggish cursor enrages me so much that I copy what I wrote and continue writing in a text editor on the side.
Whatever fancy shmancy rationalist speak you detected is simply the lingo that rubbed off me from years of reading the blog and its associated literature, the vast majority of people here including you talk like that without realizing it, it's called code-switching and you do it every single time you interact with a group that have a distinctive way of speech. I'm no more fancy-shmancing my argument than Scott is when talks about Cooperation and Altruism in terms of Multi-Polar Traps and Prisoner's Dilemma.
> vague
> unspecified
> conveniently not here
I mean, my bad I didn't take the screenshots when the comments were right in front of me. Still ready to search for a couple and present them here though if you promise you won't dismiss them with "Anecdata!" once I do turn them up after sleep and work.
I have to say I rolled my eyes pretty hard at "Weakman". First, it was a strawman, now it's a weakman. Will you just keep speedrunning every word in the rationalist lingo invented to describe a bad summary of an argument before actually engaging with the argument ?
>namely that the the IDF deliberately kills civilians for its own sake
This was a typo, no doubt. I 100% agree with your typo though.
> believe the IDF's claims that their, say, airstrikes are intended to degrade Hamas' capabilities and civilian deaths are collateral damage that the IDF takes reasonable steps to minimize
Completely blindly, I might add. Were you ever shown what "Capabilities" the airstrikes are degrading ? how many times did Israel show an exploded weapons stash or a dead jihadi leader under the rubble ? Declassified verifiable intelligence that shows the objectives they achieved by bombing the building ?
So maybe every war crime can be "Trust Me Bro"-ed into looking like a military operation after all. Maybe USA's invasion of Iraq was about the WMDs after all then. Maybe Hamas' rape is intended to degrade Israel's military capabilities just like the IDF's bombings, who knows.
>roof knocking
Ah yes, the humane practice of advertising you're going to destroy's someone's entire residential building and (s)he better race to homelessness now. That does change calculations a considerable amount, now bombing civilians doesn't look bad anymore.
Alright, here you go[1][2][3]. Both the video (so you can ctrl-f yourself and make sure I'm not making it up) and the plain text if you don't want to follow links, also the screenshots.
> youtube comments you'll hold up as opinions worth being contemplated Very Seriously
I think it's funny you keep oscillating between dismissing and making fun of me for thinking that those opinions are worth discussing, because they are "weakmen" and "strawmen", and then actually defending the opinions as obviously correct and a nothingburger because "IDF != Hamas".
> Also, I did earnestly answer your original question
Alright, thank you for that. May you have peace and love for you and your family. Be safe.
> This is what the people in Gaza chose Hamas and as long as the people do not overthrow Hamas the people are guilty of all the crimes of Hamas-And of course it hurts to see children and residents hurt, but Israel has no choice, and if the Arabs were in Israel's place, they would have erased the Jews a long time ago. It's good that Jews are strong, it's just a shame that they are too merciful and considerate of the ungrateful Palestinians.
You know what, there is a certain irony here that my full name is "Learns Hebrew, Hates Israel", and you still managed to hyper-focus on the "Hates Israel" part and present it as evidence that I'm somehow some Jew hating PR official who just got the bank transfer from Hamas' leadership this morning. Completely skipping the part where I learn the language of the people I supposedly hate so I know their prespective without translation.
I get it though, Hamas is horrible, and Islam is horrible. I should know, considering I'm a closeted atheist deceiving my closest family. They have managed to poisen this entire well, nailing the incredible feat of making baby killers look good. 9 possible worlds out of 10, I would have behaved like you if I were in your position.
I'm not sure that people object to the same kinds of atrocities on the Hamas side and on the IDF side? I thought the objections were to rape, murder, and pillage done by the Hamas, and to carpet bombing and turning off food, water, and electricity supplies on the other. I don't want to get into a discussion of which of these is worse, but the latter isn't "rape" or "pillage" (murder I'll grant is being dished out freely by both sides, presumably more effectively by Israel since it's the dominant military presence in the area). I don't think it's necessarily motte-and-bailey to perceive the atrocities as belonging to different categories, and then to end up with different emotional responses to them.
Correct. I should clarify that the "Rape and Pillage" part is expected from the ground invasion brewing now, not actual. The expectation is based on previous behaviour by both IDF and settlers.
Regardless, I think "Rape" and "Pillage" could both be removed from the post and it will still present roughly the same dilemma.
>I don't think it's necessarily motte-and-bailey to perceive the atrocities as belonging to different categories
Murder is a common subset of both clusters of atrocities, so if it's being perceived differently depending on whether it's done by knives and AKs or by air munitions dropped from above, that requires an explanation like the one I gave above.
The strawman you present is not really defensible, but obviously the difference between Israel and Hamas is that Israel does not want to hurt any civilians and tries its best not to, while Hamas just wants to kill as many jews as it can (I don't think this is a controversial statement given their actions in the last few days). Yes unfortunately Hamas houses all their assets in residential areas so it is impossible for Israel to fight Hamas without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Israel is to just let Hamas do whatever it wants.
A strawman is a position that no one holds, I can point to literally dozens upon dozens of comments on the war's youtube material (of which I have seen 100+) that have the exact same structure I presented above. That's how I thought of the comment to begin with, it would be a strange hobby to think up fake things Pro-Israeli commenters didn't say and go write them.
>Israel does not want to hurt any civilians
That's a very convenient claim and I'm sure it's responsible for many a comfortable nights for Pro-Israeli commenters, but what's the evidence ? What's to prevent me from saying that Russia does not want to hurt any civilians and that any civilian casulaties in Ukraine is simply the minimum-cost solution to war objectives ?
You're making a claim over the space of all possible airstrikes, but you're not - as far as I know - an IDF insider with access to the all the planning and classified docs that went into planning airstrikes. For all you know, Israeli airstrikes is actually the maximum-cost solution, how would you know ? You don't, you just want it to be true.
>unfortunately Hamas houses all their assets in residential areas so it is impossible for Israel to fight Hamas without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Israel is to just let Hamas do whatever it wants.
Well, ok.
>>>unfortunately Israel considers all of its populaton to be soldiers, so it is impossible for Hamas to fight Israel without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Hamas is to just let Israel do whatever it wants.
Same picture ?
(I'm against Hamas btw if that is not already blindingly obvious, but I also happen to be against murder so I'm against Israel as well.)
Well why would Israel warn civilians before strikes if they wanted to kill civilians? Also what possible reason would they have to deliberately kill civilians? As I pointed out, if that was their goal they would have no difficulty accomplishing it. Clearly the number of civilian casualties is quite low in Gaza considering the number of strikes.
I don't think there is any question that Russia is primarily avoiding civilian targets. Probably not entirely, but they are using a lot of unguided munitions and a lot of those are just very inaccurate. Many of the civilian targets hit are near military targets. Of course they are not take the extreme measures to prevent civilian casualties that Israel is taking. But they could certainly kill many more civilians if they wanted to waste their munitions doing that.
I don't understand this "unfortunately Israel considers all of its population to be soldiers". That's just false- and also irrelevant because most of its population is not in fact soldiers regardless of what "Israel" considers them to be. It's well documented that Hamas houses its weapons and personnel in residential buildings including school and hospitals. Are you saying that is not true?
>Well why would Israel warn civilians before strikes if they wanted to kill civilians?
Performative Mercy.
Even if true, "leave your home now and live homeless for the next 5-10 years" is a humiliation worse than death. Especially when "home" is the entirety of the city that have all of its exits and entries blockaded and bombarded, and not just a single residential building.
>Also what possible reason would they have to deliberately kill civilians?
Because they are war criminals ? This is a strange reply, why did Hamas kill whoever they killed ? What possible reason ? whatever the answer to this is the answer to that.
I'm not required to know someone's Maslow-Hierarchy collection of motives for comitting a war crime to accuse them of a war crime, I'm simply required to present evidence.
>Clearly the number of civilian casualties is quite low in Gaza considering the number of strikes.
How high should it be to convince you that killing civilians is the goal all along ?
>I don't understand this "unfortunately Israel considers all of its population to be soldiers".
I'm alluding to the reserve policy of the IDF[1], in which every Jewish male below the ages of {40,45,49} (depending on rank and role) and all females below 38 are eligible for potentially being recalled, and those ages were even higher in the past. Okay, that's not "all of its population", I was wrong about that because I was going on outdated hearsay I remember hearing, but that's as close as you can get in any single country to a military that considers the vast majority of its civilians to simply be off duty members. And I haven't talked about out-of-uniform-yet-armed settlers yet.
>Are you saying that is not true?
No I'm not saying that, I'm saying that if you accept this as a valid justification for bombing said residential buildings, killing civilians because they are hiding the military, why don't you accept killing reservists ? It achieves the same objective, killing civilians hiding the military. So if Hamas was running around killing every male and female eligible for reserve duty, would that be acceptable according to you ?
I think a common thread, both to the ground invasion vs. air strikes, and to the knives vs. air munitions, is something like "how much of the work is you vs. technology". It is easier to be the person killing someone at the touch of a button vs. with a knife; might it be easier to condone the killing, too? I agree that the corpses are equally dead either way, but that's a consequentialist / utilitarian moral calculus that many people don't use (and perhaps actively repudiate).
I mean, both of those 2 questions are rhetorical red herrings, I can imagine possible worlds where both the yes answer and the no answer to both are consistent with either approving or disapproving of starving Gaza.
The real question is this :
> When you're in a war, how many non-combatants is fair game, and exactly how much fair-game they are ?
Which can't be resolved with a yes or no in the abstract, seperate from any facts or additional assumptions or common biases (e.g. are women and kids seperate from men ?). I will just remind you of one thing, before you finalize any particular answer, pick a different war (that matters to you) and apply it, seeing where it gets you. I assume the majority of people here are USA Americans, so lets simplify this idea to the catchy name "The 9/11 Test" : before adopting an answer to the above question, ask yourself whether it would have justified 9/11, and see if you still like it.
So if combatants establish themselves well enough within a mass of civilians to the point of being barely distinguishable, they're allowed to kill as many people as they like with impunity?
Definitely not with impunity, boots-on-the-ground can always distinguish between, no ? The combatants engage in... combat, the non-combatants don't. And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.
I'm not saying that it's never right to kill civilians by the way, war was never pretty. I'm just saying it's weighty question with a blackhole-worth of moral gravity and consequences, and simplistic appeals to "Isn't this a REAL war" are striclty worse than honestly facing the question and making a call.
<i>And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.</i>
If the civilian mass are deliberately shielding terrorists, it's perfectly legimitate to treat them as military targets.
Depending on how far the stretchy definition of "Terrorists" can mop along, this will justify (e.g.) the US bombing of Vietnamese civilians (both North and South) because they shield/arm/feed the Viet Cong.
>Definitely not with impunity, boots-on-the-ground can always distinguish between, no ?
Sure, only after making themselves significantly more vulnerable in the process. Compare carpet bombing vs individual soldier making direct visual assessment of potential enemy. Doesn't mean carpet bombing is okay, but you shouldn't expect a military to take on maximum possible risk to their soldiers to minimise the risk to enemy civilians.
>And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.
Well they're often not going to have much choice either way, but in any case palestianians firecely opposed the presence of jews in palestine from day one, long before any 'oppression' took place. That's the kind of attitude that is never acceptable for say Europeans to have towards a potential immigrant group as far as pro-palestine people are concerned, so maybe a bit of bombing is suitable punishment for being xenophobic bigots.
> you shouldn't expect a military to take on maximum possible risk to their soldiers to minimise the risk to enemy civilians.
I should expect at least that people don't cheer it up and claim that the military is the good guys here. All while claiming that they're better than terrorists.
> so maybe a bit of bombing is suitable punishment for being xenophobic bigots.
It's remarkable you're writing this under the thread where I wrote
>>> ask yourself whether it would have justified 9/11
You didn't ask yourself this before writing this, did you ?
"Sieges inevitably involve frictions with a variety of norms of international humanitarian law (IHL) when civilians are within the besieged area. While the most apparent restriction of siege warfare is provided by the prohibition against starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, under the prevailing restrictive interpretation of this prohibition sieges are considered lawful as long as their purpose is to achieve a military objective and not to starve the civilian population. Moreover, while humanitarian relief operations might prevent or alleviate the suffering of civilians within a besieged area, controversy surrounds the question of whether and under what circumstances the besieging party might withhold consent to such operations."
That is explicitly what it means to lay siege - to deny all traffic into and out of an area, often including food - and in a historical context, often with starvation as the *primary goal* (or starvation-induced surrender, to be more precise).
Not quite. In a siege the besieger doesn't just not supply food to the besieged, he doesn't let anyone else supply it either. Israel may be doing that, but all the post you replied to said was "Israel no longer supplying electricity and food to Gaza."
>sieges are considered lawful as long as their purpose is to achieve a military objective and not to starve the civilian population.
Well, pardon my international-law-legalese, but this is quite literally nonsense. Starving a civilian population **IS** a military objective : it wins you the entire goddamn war. So this entire section just simplifies to "sieges are okay as long as you can construe their success to win you wars, which is always because they does win you wars, so sieges are actually always okay."
Causing an enemy to surrender is *also* a military objective, one that wins you the entire blessed war. Historically, sieges have been much more likely to end with the enemy surrendering than with the enemy's civilian population starving to death. You cannot conclude from the simple existence of a siege that it is unlawfully seeking the second, less common outcome.
I don't dispute this. I'm simply amazed that a grown up saw it fit to write some legalese that amounts to "Sieges are not okay except when they are which is always", and another grown up (or a committe thereof) have reviewed this and saw it fit to be published.
Anyway, Legalism is morally bankrupt. The holocaust was legal when it happened. The question I posted is intended to be something that every thinking moral being resolves for himself under his own circumstances and available information, Law reflects only one person's flawed attempt at doing so once and for all, and it's predictably wrong.
> When you're in a war, how many non-combatants is fair game, and exactly how much fair-game they are ?
I would say that in a war those things are entirely contingent on how well it’s going for you and what your other choices might be.. In other words in a war this is not a moral dilemma. It is a strategic one.
In this case the siege is explicitly conditioned on the enemy committing war crimes and would end any time if they agreed to stop and release their hostages (which the Israelis are unlikely to be able to save otherwise), which makes it on the sympathetic end.
You see, if you're going to say this is a war, then Hamas are enemy combatants and an enemy army. Then the rules of war apply. Such as not targeting civilian population.
If you're going to say they're terrorists, then you can't call this a war and fight it like they are soldiers.
See Margaret Thatcher and the IRA; she insisted they were not an army fighting a war but terrorists, thus to be treated under civil and criminal law for offences committed. It was an important tactic to shape public opinion and perception of what was going on in Northern Ireland. The IRA insisted it was the legitimate successor to the revolutionary army that won independence in the Republic, and was fighting a war against an army of occupation. She denied them that.
If Israel declares itself to be at war, then it's a war. They can't prosecute Hamas for terrorist activities etc.
> If Israel declares itself to be at war, then it's a war. They can't prosecute Hamas for terrorist activities etc.
Not sure how this matters in practice. If it's a war, than all those terrorist activities (targeting civilians, having their combatants fight in civilian clothes, etc.) are war crimes. Why couldn't they prosecute that?
The problem is that we allow Hamas to occupy a position outside the usual rules. It's not a country, but it controls its own territory outside the laws of other countries. It's not an army, but it's powerful enough that nothing a state has other than an army can fight it.
This isn't historically unique; a lot of third world insurgencies fall into the same position. Depending on how sympathetic one is to which side, one could also draw comparisons to the various WW2 resistance movements or the various drug cartels. The difference is that Israel has a first world-level military and the entire thing is done under worldwide media coverage.
Culture has a weird rhetoric/optics around this. Ground troops killing civilians door by door looks wrong, but bombing raids where always about killing civilians. Dresden, the fire bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Real war is all about targeting civilian population.
> You see, if you're going to say this is a war, then Hamas are enemy combatants and an enemy army.
Meh, it can be both. They can have some people be a government (justice, police, proper army, etc.) and some other be a terrorist wing. You can draw your org chart whatever you like.
"Dresden, the fire bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Real war is all about targeting civilian population."
"They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things."
I think you're wrong about this.
The Hague convention (1899 and 1907) made it clear that attacking military target is allowed, and attacking civilian targets is not.
They even had rules for bombardments (aerial bombardments did not exist back then, as far as I can recall the rules stated: by artillery or any other means). Bombardment of built areas was only allowed if they were sheltering troops.
And yet those rules didn’t radically change the way war had been fought.
Wikipedia says: “the code was widely regarded as the best summary of the first customary law and customs of war the 19th century.”
In the 19th century, war was definitely not about targeting the civilian population.
Bombardment of cities was very controversial before WW2.
When the Germans bombed Guernica during the spanish civil war, it was widely seen as an attack on civilians and a violation of the laws of war, and there was a lot of international outrage. That is the context for Picasso’s painting, “Guernica”.
Even during WW2, both sides tended to either conceal their attacks on the population, or frame them as retaliation for equivalent enemy acts.
The UK and Germany blamed each other for starting the bombardment of cities. From the British perspective, it was in retaliation for the Blitz. From the German perspective, the Blitz had been in retaliation for earlier British bombardments in Germany (which the Brits had considered legal attacks on military targets, but the Germans had seen as attacks on civilians).
We have a weird false memory syndrome that killing civilians (from the air or otherwise) was normal up to WW2. I think it’s the other way around - it was shocking and controversial before WW2, it was normalized by WW2, and the generations that followed found it easier to accept because of WW2.
William Leahy, one of the four US five star admirals in WW2, wrote of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
Nowadays I do not think it is acceptable to purposefully bomb civilians, nor is it believed that bombing civilian populations in the past was an effective tactic.
As far as Israel goes, I see no reason to believe they are targeting civilians, nor do I see what they would have to gain from doing that. Certainly the Palestinian death tolls are low for the number of bombs Israel has dropped. If their intent was to bomb Palestinian civilians they could kill tens to hundreds of thousands in short order, although of course they would be cut off from military support.
They were controversial at the time. The stated policy of both sides at the beginning of the war was to attack factories, rail lines, troops, etc. with civilian casualties a regrettable side effect.
They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things.
Almost all WW2 bombing raids, axis and allies both, targeted the suburbs of cities too. They didn't want the enemy's people going to work the next day and supporting the war effort.
In the west, doing the same door to door with infantry pretty taboo, though. Soldiers gunning down civilians door to door? Taboo. Soldiers setting homes on fire? Taboo. Artillery bombing and burning those same neighborhoods? Just how war is.
The other moral justification for Dresden and Hiroshima is "they started it". It was Germany who pioneered the use of indiscriminate bombing of civilians in WW2, and there's a definite moral case to be made that it's the combatant who first crosses a particular moral line to blame when the enemy inevitably crosses that line too.
Nowadays we would say that indiscriminately bombing cities isn't acceptable. But if Russia were to start nuking our cities then I can't argue that nuking Russian cities isn't an acceptable response.
>They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things.
That is a very legalistic view. Would you argue that a severe crime such as murder is morally acceptable when the murderer is powerful enough to evade legal prosecution?
> Almost all WW2 bombing raids, axis and allies both, targeted the suburbs of cities too. They didn't want the enemy's people going to work the next day and supporting the war effort.
The allies didn't have a uniform stance on this. The British, having directly suffered from German terror bombings, were more open about and accepting of killing German civilians almost indiscriminately. They flew the nighttime raids with low-precision carpet bombing of cities. The Americans, meanwhile, found it more politically acceptable to focus on industrial capacity, with slightly-higher-precision daytime attacks.
In any case, America's own, official Strategic Bombing Survey of WW2 found mixed success from Allied bombing against industry and could ultimately not separate its effect from the general collapse of Nazi Germany. As for Japan, the report even argued that the atomic bombings had no decisive part in their surrender.
>Artillery bombing and burning those same neighborhoods? Just how war is.
That is not at all how the public sees it. Indiscriminate bombing of enemy civilians has been highly unpopular at least since the US-Vietnam war. Just look at today's Russian-Ukrainian war, how air strikes and other crimes against Ukrainian civilians unite the West against Russia.
Worse than being a crime, it's also a mistake. Punishing the civilian population in order to, presumably, undermine their will to support their government in waging war has a long and fruitless history dating back all the way to the interwar period between WW1 and WW2. See more details here from the always excellent Bret Devereaux:
Yes but that blockade was about materials directly required for the war effort, such as rubber and fuel. It had little effect on the food situation in Germany, although it was certainly intended:
>Did the blockade win the war? It is a paradox that the blockade was practically total by 1918, yet food supply in Germany was better than the previous year. Contrary to common assumption, civilian morale played no part in the decision of the German high command to end the war
>The shortages of key industrial raw materials and oil, partly caused by the blockade and partly by the Central Powers’ declining ability to pay for imports, but mostly by their enemies’ ownership of the resources, were more decisive in shifting the military balance than food shortages.
Whether you define the conflict as a war between states, with combattants as per international law, or defense against terrorists that have the protection of neither national nor international law, your goal is to stop the attacks. If your military strategy to achieve that is to kill the whole population through starvation or other means, it's a crime, and if that crime doesn't even measurably promote that goal, then that strategy has no redeeming qualities left.
Well, if the entire population of the Gaza Strip dies of starvation in the next month then I'll condemn it then, not while it remains an unlikely hypothetical.
Israel does not currently control the Egypt-Gaza border so there is definitely not a total blockade.
There is probably a formal definition of "war" written somewhere, but I suspect that according to that definition, Russia and Ukraine are currently *not* at war (because of some technicality), the Cold War also technically wasn't a war, etc.
Not every violent conflict is a war. The 9/11 hijackers were not at war with USA according to the definition. Terrorist attacks or assassinations are not a war (though a war may be declared in response to them). Minorities living on someone else's territory are not necessarily at war, even when there are hostilities (e.g. Turkey is not at war with Kurds, USA is not at war with BLM). War on drugs is not an actual war.
The central example of a war is two armies clashing on the battlefield until one side gives up, or the other side successfully marches to their capital, and then the war is over. Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know, this is currently *not* happening in Israel/Palestine.
Also, wars are limited in scope. There are rules how to handle enemy civilians, prisoners, etc. Ignoring those rules is called "war crimes". It is called so even if the other side did it first. (Except when the rules say specifically that when the other side does X, you are allowed to do Y in turn.) It's not like any kind of behavior can be excused by saying "but we are at war with them", or "but we are *informally* in war with them".
I'm not a fan of banning. Especially not without an attempt to rectify the problem through conversation first. So, MK, if what Viliam says is true (I assume it is, I myself haven't read more than 3 of your comments) then to admit that's obnoxious behavior which shouldn't be done or tolerated.
From the few comments of yours that I read I have an additional concern.
I think it's only right that in conversations such as these people who are long time readers of SSC, and therefore in some sense part of the community, he granted the benefit of the doubt whereas people who comment here because it exists he asked to leave.
I don't know you or how long you've been reading but your comments are so single-dimensional and monomaniacal that it raises the question whether you have a handle on how people here speak and think.
For one, we tend not to be monomaniacal. There was some goofball here who used to troll each and every comment section with his demand that Scott retract some supposed misunderstanding of Karl Marx.
Once people caught on to the fact that his mind and intentions really were THAT blinkered, everyone agreed that he should go away - absolutely regardless of whether his point regarding Marx was right or wrong.
So please MK, if you are here to write against Israel but not a general appreciator of this blog or its commentators then I would ask you to find a different venue. I think you can understand that nobody wants to be used like that.
I wish you well in your life and I wish for a resolution to all of the many many imperfections in the lives of all people.
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Lest I be accused of a willingness to critique your local output on account of not sharing your sense of the gravity of this situation or of being too ignorant about it to have an opinion let me tell you that is not the case. I haven't said much about it here because my interests herein are broader than the contexts in which they have thus far been raised.
More importantly my analysis, sentiments and desired next steps are too nuanced and conditional to be expressed in clear and unambiguous words at all.
For starters, I am deeply religious, irreligious, and anti-religious.
There are certain terms, motifs and concepts for which I have no jargon but religious/mystical jargon - despite my not believing in the things that nearly everone who uses these terms claims to literally believe.*
So, for anyone capable of not getting caught up in the terminology (unfortunately I have no other) I was the tool by which a video and a post were produced yesterday. To be perfectly accurate, the post came from pre-standing conceptions within me but the instructions to read what I read in the video came from beyond me. I did not even fully realize the words I was going to say until I said them. And other than the words spoken in English, I did not compose them.
Whether to agree, disagree, or disregard, thinking that one understood either the video or post fully is an absolutely sure sign of having misunderstood them fully.
On that account, I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone watch or read either of them** but anyone who believes they may have something to gain by experiencing the words that flowed through me yesterday regarding the situation these are the two locations where you would find them.
The video is entitled “Emes” and is almost entirely an overly deliberate maggidic enunciation of a Biblical passage*** and the Substack article is entitled, “A Point” **** because it was the least assuming title I had for a piece which ultimately speaks to the entirety of the Civilizational Experiment, from the moment that metaphorical Eve enticed Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge until The Big Goodbye. *****
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* The fight between the religious weltanschauung and the rational one is largely a matter of misunderstood semantics.
Religion in fact has tended to pull humankind towards science.
Religions are the story into which people fit their emotions. And when millions of people share a common narrative they tend to get inspired at the same time. That’s an awesome power.
Remember how Thiel said that Trump’s followers take him Seriously But Not Literally? That’s what a lot of religion is.
Obviously nearly no one on earth believes in an afterlife. When you see them doing everything ^^not to die^^ and wailing with pity for their dead relatives you know that they don’t take ^^literally^^ their claims to certitude in an afterlife.
What they do is take it SERIOUSLY.
They can sense, as can you and I, that every moment of life has a greater meaning than we can justify by the facts as we know them.
Religious People see the reverence that we have for the living moment just as nakedly as we can see their doubts about heaven.
So they know that when we say that we are but dust in the wind that accidentally came together in an unimportant manner yadda yadda we are being literal – but not serious.
After all, we too experience moments of pure joy – or at least we (like them) know those moments exist, are “real” on some sense we can’t put into words or measure and want them.
I really don’t think there is much debate anout the facts as there is about misunderstanding each others’ terms.
When it comes down to it we are all rather religious and we are all rather rational.
** Here is a more easily accessible and enjoyable video about the religion of the Jews of medieval Kaifeng, China
***** Should you find my output meaningful or believe that they may be meaningful to others within your network please share them.
I am not constituted with an effective capacity to sell myself so I generally refrain from promoting my own output. But if you want this to have a broader audience, please understand that it is, very deliberately, out of my hands. You're in the driver's seat on this one.
I am willing and eager to participate in public conversations or podcasts as well (in 2000-2001 I was likely the most broadly heard public speaker on matters Israel related om 3 continents) so long as it is understood that I won't participate as a foil for whomever owns the mic but intend to speak as freely and comfortably as if the platform were my own.
I mention this because my willingness to participate publicly has no limits. It goes without saying that most hosts would be glad for me to speak as fully and freely, but my invitation to invite me on to a platform extends to anywhere there is a serious audience. If an exterminationist has a sizeable audience and can guarantee me the freedom to speak without censorship then I am willing to join him too. That's why my Nachmanidean precondition is spelled out up front.
Since you've accidentally promoted this to a top-level topic and no one else has said otherwise: I am a fan of banning (under Scott's extremely generous terms). I come here to read and learn interesting things, and to read discussions that carefully take apart an argument in a way that asymptotically approaches truth in a novel way. Others come here for the same. It is therefore a waste of everyone's time to clutter the feed with the same unsubstantiated vitriol/soapboxing that one could get by scrolling through the comment section of a New York Times article posted on reddit (or other low-signal high-noise content). If you show a repeated pattern of not being able to stop yourself from posting that, the correct action is to have that privilege revoked.
Pick2(True, Kind, Necessary) is an *extremely* generous policy (and Scott's bar for each is low), and if a comment can't claim at least two of furthering truth, being civil, or constructively furthering the discussion, it's at odds with the goals of the community.
I ain't taking issue with either Scott's right to ban at will, nor with the righteousness of his criteria, nor with removing the hekler's veto by any means necessary.
My comments may have typos or other such imperfections attributable to technical matters, but my meanings are quite precise and worth a somewhat more reverent reading.
MarxBro's monomania stretched across the comments sections of several posts, including many that were supposed to be limited to a specific topic. Marty Khan has not done this.
You made this a top level comment, perhaps accidentally. Anyway, it is is a really bad idea imho. Discussions with people making bannable offenses is a waste of time, at least at this forum. You have to be pretty darn obnoxious to get banned here. I am speaking in general of course, not having read the conversation you are referring to.
"My bad" as we used to day in the 30s. My comment was originally intended to be posted in response to the comment by Viliam, two comments below. As I ended up noting there, I chose not to undo the error on account of the above comment coming to encompass additional things.
Also it would help if Substack's mute function fully worked. (It does not mute a user, it only stops notifications of that user having posted a reply.) That flaw was already depressing my activity level here and on Substack generally, even before 10/7.
(* I do realize of course that Scott in managing his blog and its forums is stuck with Substack's specific flaws...so this is really just unhelpful bitching and I might as well quit bringing it up.)
I propose banning Marty Khan. Not for the content of his comments, but for the fact that he is copying essentially the same text over and over again, dozens of times.
I don't want to participate in discussions were you "win" by posting more copies of your argument, and where any reasonable argument is lost in the sea of repeated text.
I looked over all his comments, and they don't seem to be literally copy-pasted. (Maybe he deleted or edited some, though). He has also engaged in another thread on this post about ADHD, without mentioning anything about the controversial subject. And at one point during the controversial conversation he said he changed his mind after consulting with someone else, so I think there's hope. Personally, I have a visceral dislike for echo chambers, no matter how much I agree with the noise that's being echoed. I do wish he was doing a better job of arguing his position (or more precisely, I think there may be a defensible position on that side that he occasionally approximates).
That aside, I think I get what you're saying. He's not making attempts to understand other people or modify his own position based on new information. He uses several types of fallacies that have wrecked the Internet. In various comments he gets close enough to both "untrue" and "unkind" that I'm not sure that he sees where the line is, on this subject.
Well, if dozens of people are making more or less the same arguments as each other, I don't think it is reasonable to expect someone write out a unique response each time, especially if almost nobody else is arguing against these dominant positions
"not creating one hundred variations" I think that this happens on a broad range of topics (though this one, understandably, provokes both more vehemence and more verbosity than most). I don't think that this has a reasonable _social_ solution. It just takes too long to read through a full comments section and notice potential duplicates of the comment one is about to make.
I think that we might be at a point where a _technological_ solution might be feasible or becoming feasible. LLMs have gotten to the point where they are reasonably decent at summarizing. Perhaps we could have a process that looks at a new comment, looks at the existing comments, and tells the new commenter "Your comment looks quite similar to this comment, here. Perhaps you would want to just add an "Agreed" comment below it, or make some refinement to the existing comment?".
( It would also be nice to dynamically construct a table of contents for a comment section. Perhaps that is also becoming feasible? )
I responded to your comment but it appeared as a standalone comment. I started edit/copy/delete/pasting it from its present location (within my android browser directly above your comment, presumably for reasons of reverse chronology) but as it is quite lengthy and the majority of it goes beyond the scope of the subject of banning MK I'm leaving it where it is (slightly out of place) so as not to push the shorter responses to your comment beyond the point of sight.
I'm sympathetic to the point he's made, somewhere within that tempest, about being the only pro-Palestinian on the ward. Ctrl-f says he's tossed out about 50 comments as of this writing; the runners up seem to be just shy of 30 apiece. He's an outlier, but not to an egregious extent.
> about being the only pro-Palestinian on the ward.
But he is not, actually.
Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?
I mean, I didn't want to argue the object level here, but maybe there is a good reason why even people whose sympathies are generally on the side of the underdog, change their minds when the underdog starts just randomly killing and raping civilians and celebrating this as a big success. I understand that in asymmetric warfare, you will ambush the enemy soldiers instead of facing them head on, you will assassinate the important enemy figures or the collaborants on your side, and you will avoid the enemy army and attack the infrastructure behind them. I even understand the inevitable collateral damage. But none of that explains why it is necessary to rape and kill civilians directly. (Frankly, that doesn't even feel like underdog behavior to me; it's rather something I would associate with the victorious march of the Red Army.)
> he's tossed out about 50 comments as of this writing; the runners up seem to be just shy of 30 apiece
Yeah, but see how repetitive his comments are. The 50 comments are mostly a copy-paste of the same 2 or 3 templates. My number of comments is also growing gradually, but each of them has a different content.
"Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?"
No, in my view they should not. Unlike Scott and many of his readers, I'm not a free speech absolutist. But if you mean to ban MK for the content, rather than his alleged spamming, then that's a different kettle of fish.
I don't want to do object level here either, and I don't think we disagree much, anyway. The act was vile. I would say, however, that my underdog sympathies never resided with Hamas per se (I'm old enough to remember the spate of suicide bombings of the Second Intifada) but instead with the Palestinian people, their sense of injustice about their displacement by Israel, and their quest for a state of their own. These attacks haven't altered that sentiment overall.
And yes, I remain angry that no one has given this much of a damn about Israel's own actions - spread over time, wrapped in the tissue paper of legal frameworks which often turn 'civilian' into 'militant' on flimsy premises, sanitised by securocratic mission-speak, obscured by detention facilities which deny investigators and reporters - but in the aggregate no less awful. It just seems like poor decorum to harp on it at the moment.
> But if you mean to ban MK for the content, rather than his alleged spamming, then that's a different kettle of fish.
My problem is the repetition. There the story could end, in my opinion, but...
He claims that repetition is okay, because his opinion is underrepresented in the debate (literally that he is the only one representing it here). And a few people seem to agree.
My reply to that is that maybe some opinions are underrepresented for a good reason (e.g. because they are just plainly wrong), therefore underrepresentation of an opinion is not necessarily a mistake that needs to be fixed.
Anyway, my problem is the repetition, not the content. And I do not accept the excuse (that it is okay to spam your comment all over the thread, if you offer a unique perspective), because (1) I want to discourage "winning the debate by posting more comments that all your opponents combined" as a strategy; plus the perspective is (2) actually not unique, and (3) wrong. But being wrong is not a problem as such. It's the repetition.
>Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?
If dozens or hundreds of people were making similar, fairly dogmatic claims about the earth not being flat, then yes, such a response would be justified. If you don't want this, then the initial round earth arguments should be concentrated into a few comment threads
>Yeah, but see how repetitive his comments are. The 50 comments are mostly a copy-paste of the same 2 or 3 templates.
If an argument is correct, being repeated doesn't make it lose it's correctness. And the Israel/Palestine conflict is a topic on which any discussion really boil down to a very few basic first principles, so any continued arguing ends up repeating these.
If an argument is correct, saying it once and letting it stand doesn't make it lose its correctness. People who constantly repeat themselves in the same conversation don't believe in correctness, only in the last word. Which means they're very likely to be incorrect.
This isn't relevant to the original topic, but is relevant to your response to Boinu. If this isn't the place for what I'm about to say, just let me know.
The brutality is "necessary" (i.e. strategically useful) because it gets Hamas closer to its win-condition. Hamas wins (or at least, might win) if the world splits into two camps - one pro-Israel and one pro-Hamas - and those two camps fight a total war rivaled only by World War II. It's hard to imagine any other scenario where Hamas achieves its goals.
In order to do that, Hamas needs people to be extremely polarized. A legitimate middle is going to take their allies away, and they need allies. Maybe Israel does too, but Hamas will lose the 1 v 1. So Hamas really needs allies. Thus they have to make this conflict a pure binary. Brutality polarizes people very heavily - I know I'm more pro-Israel than I was a week ago.
Additionally, Hamas needs this polarized conflict to be existential. Either all Jews die, or all Muslims die. The war cannot end without total victory. Premature peace prevents Hamas from achieving its win condition and makes it harder to pull this off in the future.
Finally, Hamas wants to provoke severe reprisals against its own people. The reprisals will degrade the moral legitimacy of Israel. No one is going to sign up to fight Israel because they think Tel Aviv has bad architecture. Hamas needs something to galvanize its side against Israel - dead Palestinian children will do that. So too will violence at Al-Aqsa, etc. Something that they can use to make people more polarized and conflict more existential, so that they more brutality and more reprisals and the cycle repeats.
It's the same strategy used by the FLN in Algeria. Osama bin Laden used it too. It's almost a hallmark of asymmetric religious conflict in the Middle East.
Hamas appears hell bent on a total PR disaster with their present foray into Israel. I am genuinely puzzled by the inept handling of the “story” that emerges from their apparently gleeful killing of civilians even including babies, and if the rumors are true also including totally unnecessary beheadings of some victims. Does Hamas really not understand that such lack of restraint makes them appear, in the eyes of Western audiences, as totally unfit to run a country?
For comparison, the Algerian resistance to France (in the days when Algeria was a part of France) placed home-made bombs in French restaurants in Algeria, similarly blowing up women and children. The difference from Hamas consists of how this blowing-up-of-innocents was presented to a Western audience.
When asked by journalists how the Algerian resistance could justify targeting civilians, the capable spokesperson said something along these lines (quoting from memory): “Waging war is expensive. We do not have access to French high-tech military technology. If the French would kindly let is borrow modern fighter planes, rocket launchers and submachine guns from their arsenals, I can promise that we would stop to use home-made bombs. However, at the moment this is the only type of weapons we can afford and have access to”.
My point in this context is that the Algerian resistance presented killing of civilians and children as an unfortunate effect of their lack of more sophisticated weapons - it was not due to wild-eyed, unhinged bloodlust when finally having the enemy at their mercy. It was a cold, calculated thing which they regretted but had to do due to lack of other weapons.
This is a type of cold reasoning when killing innocents that calms Western audiences. Because it signifies to them that the leaders of the resistance can probably be trusted to show self-restraint, if and when they should be given control of the country – i.e., that whey will not go on a wild blood purge killing all “pied noirs” (i.e. French) living in Algeria, the day the resistance might eventually win the war.
But Hamas and its warriors apparently do not understand this. Their chaotic killing spree is one thing. The fact that they seem to be proud of it, is what does the real damage to their cause. Because it suggests that if they should ever win the war, it will initiate a period of beheadings, murder and mayhem reminiscent of how ISIS behaved in Iraq – heads on pikes, total lack of self-restraint once you have won. Not the type of people you can trust to hand over a government to.
My question is if this is a case of what George Tsebelis called the “nested games” problem. Within a Gaza-type culture, perhaps gleefully raping women, beheading husbands and killing babies is interpreted as a signal of strength (I am guessing here). Hence such behavior causes no image/reputation problem. But if so, this Gaza-game is “nested” within a broader, global game for how these actions are to be interpreted. And for a global audience, the glee-part of the killings does not signal strength – instead, it signals lack of self-restraint when in a position of power. And people who cannot be trusted to show self-restraint when in a position to kill civilian non-combatants, and (even worse) indicate that they enjoy the killing and humiliating of such victims, are not people it is easy to do deals with.
A person who understood this, was Yasser Arafat. During 9/11, he went on TV symbolically donating blood to Americans – because he understood that the glee that many ordinary Arabs showed when seeing the footage of the twin towers going down, was totally counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Since it indicated to US citizens that ordinary Arabs hated them and would show no restraint if they ever got the upper hand in dealings with them, or in they protected state (Israel).
Similarly, the lack of emotional restraint when Hamas went on its killing spree will signal to Israel and its allies that it is simply too dangerous to let unhinged Hamas-people ever acquire power. In short: Hamas is shooting itself in the foot again and again during this conflict. Are they totally devoid of a competent PR strategy vis a vis a Western audience? Apparently so. Or is it something I am missing? Since the leadership of Hamas, like any leadership, is likely to be composed of clever people – simply because it requires intelligence to rise to the top of any political movement. Why are they none the less so inept in presenting an image as something else that emotionally driven, indiscriminate killers? It really is puzzling and I have no good answer. Comments are welcome.
I think this is underestimating the degree that terrorists actually do believe in fanatically killing all their enemies indiscriminately as a good thing to be proud of. This works for them PR wise when they use human shields (they're proud of their fanaticism, the west is outrages by the inevitable civilian deaths), but not so much when they actually succeed in the indiscriminate murder sprees part.
Arafat's superior PR, you'll note, did not meaningfully improve the situation of Palestinians.
You'll also note that all those specific highly publicized examples of Hamas's disastrous-for-PR brutality turn out to be, upon closer inspection, a mix of completely misinterpreted and completely made up. (I feel it safe to encourage everyone to just disregard any information more specific than "Hamas violently invaded Israel and killed a bunch of people" at this point as emotionally charged propaganda with only spurious basis in reality.)
To get this out of the way - I think getting the world's attention constitutes a PR win in itself, because it means someone will be doing closer inspection, rather than getting all the info from your enemies' PR machine.
But I'm not really writing this to disagree with you on object level. I'm writing to say how completely alien to me is your assumption that any of this matters. You seem to be taking some things (if not "moral behavior matters", than at least "PR matters") as deontological axioms, when the question you should first be asking is - what reason do the people in question have to believe that those assumptions are true?
The answer, I believe, is none. No matter how careful Hamas is, or Palestinians at large are, about not inflicting unnecessary damage, they'll be inhuman monsters. No matter how politely they state their case, their situation does not improve. You simply can't expect people to follow rules if there's no benefit in following them.
Which is to say, I'm here to make a general point that any morality not grounded in consequentialist reasoning eventually breaks apart precisely like this. (And express my outrage at people who are outraged at others not following some arbitrary rules.) The whole question of ethics is inseparable from the question of everyone's coordination around a shared benefit. Leave someone out of the arrangement - and this is what you get, just... what else were you expecting?
> Arafat's superior PR, you'll note, did not meaningfully improve the situation of Palestinians.
This is flat-out false. Conditions in the west bank under Arafat are better than in Gaza under Hamas, and the West Bank under Abbas (who is much more moderate than Arafat) has it considerably better than that. Things are a long way from perfect for all of them, but on a comparative basis the gaps are clear.
I'll use the term anticolonial without saying that Israel-Palestine is an anti-colonial war.
In anticolonial conflicts, the idea is pretty straightforward. Stop foreign support for the colonists, then win the 1 v 1. Algeria beats the Pied-Noirs. The Vietcong beat the ARVN. The Taliban beat the government of Afghanistan. Etc.
Hamas cannot win the 1 v 1. It will never win without significant foreign aid. Israel can win the 1 v 1 without foreign assistance.
So while Hamas would like to sap foreign support for Israel, this is not nearly enough. What it really needs is to get every Arab country on board with a massive fight against Israel. Hamas cannot win alone. But it has hundreds of millions of ethnic and religious counterparts who could join the fight.
Hamas is playing to them. So too does the propaganda. I watched a TikTok of a guy explaining that if just 5 men from each mosque would sign up to fight, they'd have 5 million men (assuming 1 million mosques worldwide) and such a force could take out Israel without even fighting. I'm not saying that's realistic, but that's the kind of thought process: 'We can win if we just show up'.
The brutality doesn't play with Western audiences (or anyone with an ounce of moral fiber), but Hamas needs more than just to cut off Western support for Israel. Hamas needs to build a broad Arab jihad against Israel.
That's why the attack happened after peace deals were announced. Those peace deals shred any hope Hamas has for victory.
I think Hamas understands all of this perfectly well, certainly better than you or me. Boinu's "prevailing explanation" is sound. Hamas wants to get the Arab world back on its side by killing the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab countries. They have been successful. Saudi Arabia has not condemned the attack, and Israel is in no mood to offer even the token concessions to Palestinians that Saudi Arabia would probably ask for in return for recognition.
>Does Hamas really not understand that such lack of restraint makes them appear, in the eyes of Western audiences, as totally unfit to run a country?
You know that bit where, before Donald Trump took office, lots of his followers believed that America's foreign policy was going to be Full of Win. Mexico was going to pay us to build a wall, North Korea was going to "denuclearize". ditto Iran, the namby-pamby wimps of NATO were going to man up and take care of their own defense, and the trade agreements and all the rest? All because The Donald was going to Speak Forcefully and wave his little stick, Lay Down the Law and Not Take Any Guff? And then what actually happened is, the rest of the world (correctly) saw that we had elected a guy totally unfit to run a country?
Americans aren't the only people stupid enough to believe that. Lots of people, possibly most people, believe that their nation or quasi-nation would have everything they believe it deserves, if only their wimpy leaders would man up and Lay Down the Law and Not Take Any Guff. They're strong enough, and they're ruthless enough, they just need to show it.
Hamas obviously, even to the Palestinians, can't match Israel in strength alone, so their version of this is going to have to lean extra-heavy on the "ruthless" part. Trump and his supporters could imagine bloodless victories achieved by displays of force and resolve; Hamas is going to have to get its hands dirty. But if they are ruthless enough, they can apply their modest strength in ways the weak and cowardly Israelis will not be willing to endure. Anything else would be inconceivable. Right?
Or maybe it won't turn out that way. But it's not at all surprising that Hamas believes it will.
To be fair, people opposed to Trump were almost equally as stupid for the opposite belief that Trump becoming president meant catastrophe, because in both cases they're based on the false belief that the president "runs the country" in the first place.
Sure, but as I parenthetically mention tangentially here, the Ruling Class goes nuts on populist leaders who are raised above themselves via the love and poeer of the masses.
I didn't mention the Hitlerian example as his name in the context of Bibi-harassers would likely have rendered invisible every other word on the page for all but the most rational stoics but it's a good example of the reason BOTH why the reigning elite do everything they can to degrade any and every populist who doesn't openly state that he will defer to their will AND why the fuck They Should Not Do That!
The prevailing explanation seems to incorporate two reasons. First is an attempt to provoke an even worse (in terms of civilian deaths) Israeli response, which in Western eyes will partly offset the horrors of the initial assault, and make advances in Arab-Israeli rapprochement politically difficult for Arab leaders. Second is simple lashing out against the enemy, punishing him for the slow, aggregating drip of his own killings and abuse, and being seen (in contrast with the Palestinian Authority) as the ones doing something, anything other than nothing, by the seething, suffocating street.
I think the prevailing explanation is sound. I have no better ideas. The second half is undeniably barbaric, as is all violent collective punishment. Israeli civilians (even specifically the ones who support pro-settlement/annexation policies) do not deserve to be massacred because Israeli leaders are choking the life out of the prospect of a Palestinian state; any more than Gazan civilians (even specifically the civilians celebrating the murders) deserve to die from bombardment and power/water denial because of what Hamas did. It's also, on balance, counter-productive. But I suspect it's kind of tough to remain a cold-blooded rationalist for very long in Gaza.
You are probably right that someting-anything-happening, might be preferable to Hamas that nothing happening (Stillstand). Where there is movement- even initially in the wrong direction - there are possibilities. Your enemy might make a fatal mistake. Or some weird cause-and-effect sequence takes place that no-one could foresee. With Stillstand, there is less chance of that. (Granted, there is then also less risk that things will get even worse for you.)
Lenin liked Napoleon's general advice in battle: "on s'engage et puis on voit", loosely translated as "we do something, and see what happens". Hamas might have a similar philosophy. (It is not that bad as a general philosophy of life, actually.)
A follow-up: To provoke your enemy into making a fatal mistake, it might be a good idea to do something so beyond the pale that your enemy forgets to think, and instead acts on raw emotion. Killing innocent babies and beheading parents might work in this regard. Hopefully, the Israelis do not forget to think with their heads before they decide how hard to retaliate.
...Just as they were able to control their emotions back in 1991, when Saddam launched rockets in their direction (quite likely in the hope that they would pay back with similar coin, or more):
Yes, I remember this. Similar strategic concept, too.
Worth remembering that successful American diplomatic pressure was perhaps the greatest factor back then - and judging by Jake Sullivan's frantic efforts to restrain the Israelis presently, it might be so again.
The message to Israel seems pretty clear: If Israel continues doing oppress Palestinians, Hamas will impose a cost on Israel. The message to the Palestinians seems pretty clear as well: We are standing up for you.
Messaging to the rest of the world? Either they are incompetent at this, or they don't care. Rising to the top of a political movement requires an understanding of the political environment and a desire to rise to the top. These don't necessarily translate into an understanding of how to message to the Western world or a desire to do so.
There is no message to Israel. Hamas has never even been willing to negotiate with Israel, their only demand has always been "leave the entire country or we'll kill you if you don't." If there was an intention to get Israel to "stop oppressing palestinians", they would have tried to make that a demand at some point. They *like* Israel oppressing palestinians: It helps them stay in power.
> The message to Israel seems pretty clear: If Israel continues doing oppress Palestinians, Hamas will impose a cost on Israel
It doesn't really work as messaging though, because it also makes it clear that *not* oppressing Palestinians would have an even worse cost. Hamas's behaviour has gone way beyond the point where they can pretend that they'll cut it out in exchange for some reasonable concessions like the IRA or even the PLO, they're clearly just interested in killing as many Jews as they possibly can, in as horrendous a way as they can possibly think of.
There's only two realistic options for Israel at this point -- either oppress the Gazans even harder to ensure that not so much as a spitball can leave the Gaza Strip ever again, or wipe the Gazans out completely once and for all.
Interesting. They certainly couldn’t have planned for the festival. Now imagine if only they could refrain from mowing down everyone in sight and stuck to attacking soldiers and armed guards. The PR opportunity was so there.
They very carefully planned for the festival. They'd havked the manager's facebook account ahead of time to get the location, and they ambushed it carefully (starting off by cutting off both exit roads and then moving in to massacre everyone). It was carefully planned, not a lucky break.
Yes. However there’s something terrifying about the concept of random slaughter. It completely robs one of any agency. Like, if they target X, and I’m not-X, I can avoid being killed. Random “senseless” (hate this word) killing makes everyone feel terrorized. Which is I guess the point of terror.
I mean, al-Jazeera English exists. Here's a brief, early interview of a Hamas spokesman with the key question ('why attack civilians?') asked one minute in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYP4gJpQ9E4 . At the fourth minute, he briefly grazes against the Algerian response ('give us better weapons, then', paraphrased) before circling back to his attempt to redefine civilians.
I'm noticing it now, definitely. I wonder if it's just here, or are people seeing it on other Substack pages? Either the entire kit and kaboodle is collapsing for some reason, or we on here broke Substack because if we want to write entire essays on something, we're supposed to spin up our own Substack (and preferably get subscribers for that sweet sweet revenue flow for ourselves and for them) rather than in the comments in reply to a post 😁
Yes. If any other web page loaded and scrolled so slowly, I would definitely just close the tab and never return again.
I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect it is something like reloading all comments in constant time intervals, ignoring the fact that with so many comments, as soon as they are loaded, the interval is over, and you start loading again. So a possible quick fix could be to increase the interval to 10x or 100x of what it is now.. Assuming that Substack has some technical people capable of doing this, or that anyone is paying attention at all.
Like, as I was writing this comment, the edit box froze several times and I had to wait a few seconds just to be able to type another letter. So a better fix would be to just stop reloading while a comment is being written -- but that would probably be too much work.
I have originally applauded when Scott switched to Substack, but I didn't expect such technical incompetence. Or ignorance -- maybe the focus of their business are spammers who write a new article each day, with 5 comments most, and they don't care about anyone else. It is infuriating to know that problems like this simply won't get fixed. You probably just need one line somewhere, like "if more than X comments, increase the reloading interval to Y". Not expecting that to happen during 2023 (90% probability).
I'm quite sure the problem isn't as simple a single line "reload interval". I suspect it's more to do with some abomination of hierarchical React components doing something incredibly inefficient.
In fact, I opened up the profiler and looked at the call stack / flame graphs, and it's nearly 100 calls deep into some recursive function. Unfortunately it's all minified, so it's hard to go deeper and shame them to the degree they deserve, but man, that is hideous. Oh and I guess the layout recompute takes a while, too.
Somehow I stumbled into a fix for the annoying pop-ups promoting "iCloud" that arrived with Apple's latest update, Sonoma 14.0.
The pop-ups insist one updates his/her signature on the lawyerly gobbley-gook that gives them the right to give away our personal data and thank them for it. I don't use iCloud.
It turns out I was signed in to iCloud, and didn't know. When a button reading 'sign out" showed up on the screen, I clicked. Voila, no more fascist pop-ups. The problem wasn't that I wasn't signing in, but that I was signed in to begin with.
Has anyone else been following the Twitter scuffle around SBF's argument that Shakespeare is unlikely to have been one of history's top writers, just based on the fact that there were very few writers around in the 16th century.
In Bayesian terms, something like:
P(exceptionally acclaimed writers posses exceptional writing talent | exceptionally acclaimed writers were disproportionally born a long time ago) << P(writing acclaim depends more on historical prestige than talent | exceptionally acclaimed writers were disproportionally born a long time ago)
I've seen a lot of back lash to the argument, but it seems likely true to me.
Has anyone experienced a deep appreciation of Shakespeare, above what you experience (at the risk of sounding like a philistine) one of HBO's prestige dramas, in terms of the depth of the characters, subtleties of the plot, use of themes etc.? If so, are you confident that appreciation isn't tied to anything like sophistication signalling, group think, or anything like that?
One more angle: Even if the best writers are working today, we might not identify the best of them immediately. They would need some time (50 years? 100 years?) to build their reputations.
Statistically speaking, the chances of SBF being born, with that precise set of characteristics, at that precise time, to those precise circumstances, are miniscule. Therefore SBF doesn't really exist.
The argument on its own doesn’t make sense. There were fewer playwrights in the centuries before Shakespeare and more in the centuries after, as literacy increases. So what is that Bayesian formula proving? Also it probably underestimates how many plays were written in that era, most never performed again. You see Shakespeare being performed in the years and then centuries after his death, Samuel Pepys goes to the theatre a lot in the late 1600s and sees a lot of Shakespeare (not all of which he likes). That’s about 50 years later. Most Elizabethan contemporaries are forgotten by then, although he does also see Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.
Shakespeare is both popular and often preeminent in most eras since his death, and survives across totally different moral systems than the one he is born in, he seems to be timeless really. The Victorians flocked to Shakespeare though king Lear is not the kind of thing they generally liked, nothing schmaltzy there. (Although it was bowdlerised )
You see him become more famous as the years pass. You see other playwrights disappear.
For instance, George Bernard Shaw, one of the most dominant playwrights of the late 19C and early 20C did not like Shakespeare. And here we are a century later not really going to the plays of Bernard Shaw anymore. He’s probably only really known because he wrote the play that My Fair Lady is based on, and that’s itself a dated reference.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t some bardolatry going on, Shakespeare has some weak plays, Pepys didn’t like them all.
Not everything was timeless. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but it always struck me as odd, and dated, when Juliet's mother was admonishing the 12-year-old Juliet that some women her age were already mothers, so get started dating already!
Doubtless there are others, not counting royalty itself which is kind of out of fashion these days.
Others have made some good points, but it is also worth pointing out that Shakespeare's position comes from being the most famous and prestigious poet of poetry's last and greatest hurrah before prose and the novel took over. Shakespeare managed to be the most successful in an age of great wordsmiths: Donne, Milton, Marlowe, Johnson, etc. No time since compares, even with the larger population.
It was in the 19th century that it was decided that Shakespeare was High Art. But they picked Shakespeare for that honor over other playwrights and authors because he had been popular for centuries.
First , who is “they”? If you are arguing that it was an elitist imposition that I don’t think you understand the audience for Shakespeare in the 19th century very well at all, at least the American one.
Secondly, he had not really been popular for centuries. For quite a long period after his death, he fell into complete oblivion. Some of his plays started getting performed again in the 18th century but they were heavily rewritten. They bore very little resemblance to the originals.
Another point: name me another playwright who has had so many of his Works turned into opera.
He was really good at something and then he got lucky. Not an unusual combination for famous people.
His plays were performed all the time in the generations after his death . That’s clear from Samuel Pepys diaries in the late 17C - to generations later. Voltaire in his book on travel in England discussed the Shakespeare plays he had seen and was somewhat dismissive. This was late 18C.
Shakespeare does get edited (bowdlerised - where the phrase comes from) in the Victorian age but they were fairly squeamish. No obscurity there.
>William Davenant also wrote Macbeth, a Tragedy, with all the alterations, amendments, additions and new songs in 1674. He aimed to refine the tragedy to suit the tastes of Restoration audiences. He significantly expanded the role of Lady Macduff to create a balance between the Macduff's, who were supposed to be virtuous, and the murderous Macbeths. He cut most of the minor characters (most notably the Porter) and introduced music, dancing and spectacle. Davenant's adaptation replaced Shakespeare's Macbeth for 80 years!
This is why actors will never utter the name Macbeth in the theater; it’s very bad luck. Macbeth was a popular rewrite and the supernatural theme of the three witches much capitalized on. The play was presented with lavish pyrotechnics and effects, leading to unfortunate accidents among the players. Actors will only refer to him as the Scottish king when in a theater, for fear of summoning up evil spirits.
Bowderlising is quite a different issue, akin to censorship in the interests of “squeamishness” and unrelated to the wholesale rewriting of his plays. I can remember my mother filling in the dirty bits to the heavily edited middle school versions of his plays I was vested with.
>The Tempest or the Enchanted Isle is an adaptation of The Tempest which was put together in 1667 by William Davenant and John Dryden. They cut two thirds of Shakespeare's original text and added new characters to achieve symmetry in the play: Miranda gained a sister, Dorinda, Ferdinand a rival, Hippoloto, Caliban a sister, Sycorax, and Ariel a companion named Milcha. This replaced Shakespeare's version until well into the 18th century. When Samuel Pepys saw it in 1667, he wrote in his diary, “No great wit; but yet good, above ordinary plays.”
What Voltaire might have seen I cannot say, but it would have been along these lines.
Shakespeare, as we know it,was reinvented in the 19th century.
EDIT: Shakespeare had been dead for 51 years when this revival of The Tempest premiered.
I am confident that my appreciation of Shakespeare is not tied to sophistication signaling. Here are 3 pieces of evidence supporting that: (1) I never talk about Shakespeare. I don’t think I have said or written one goddam word about him in the last 15 years. (2) There are many famous writers from the past that I have been unable to enjoy: Spencer, Melville & Wordsworth, for example — and I have always admitted to myself that I did not. I usually feel, regarding these writers, that I’m missing a great experience, but I do not feel any impulse to lie to myself or other people about the fact that these writers bore the hell out of me. (3) There are also plenty of other sophisticated things that I am unable to appreciate. I do not lie to myself or other people about being unable to taste the difference between cheap supermarket wine and really good wine; or being unable to enjoy jazz or symphonies at *all*.
I do not think that Shakespeare lovers believe that he was particularly gifted at constructing plots or inventing brand new fascinating characters. He used plots that were already around, and the characters were often already set by the plot. Shakespeare’s magic is his language. Much of it is mind-meltingly rich, imaginative and intense, managing to be beautiful in itself but also to efficiently convey the depth and complexity of the speaker’s experience, rather than being merely decorative. So you won’t think I’m bullshitting you, how about a little test? I’ll give you a situation, and ask you to produce the best bit of dialogue for it. Then we can compare your dialogue to Shakespeare’s?
OK, so there’s a scene in one play where one man puts out the eyes of a man he hates. In the productions I’ve seen he does it with his thumbs. Now this is a play, not a movie, so there’s no way to show a close-up or medium shot of the scene. Really subjecting the audience to that scene has to be done with dialogue. What can the character using his thumbs say that conveys to the audience both his satisfied rage, and the horrific squelchy reality of the act?
So really think it over
Try to come up with something intense
.
.
.
OK, here’s the line Shakespeare had the man say as he put out the other man’s eyes: “Out, vile jelly!”
That’s 99th percentile.
Shakespeare’s dialogue seems to sort of magically transform the borrowed plots and characters he relied on. When his versions of these characters speak, even in plays so full of murders and suicides that the story’s almost comic, you feel a deep and sometimes horrific understanding of their experience, and all that tawdry stuff is transformed. It’s straw into gold.
As for SBF’s point that it’s statistically unlikely that Shakespeare was one of history’s top writers, given that the number of people alive up til Shakespeare’s day is far smaller than number alive now — Well, first of all, writing isn’t the standing broad jump, you know? It makes sense to say that a certain writer is awesome, but I don’t see how you can directly compare writers of different era’s and cultures. I sort of doubt that the phrase “one of history’s top writers” really means anything. But let’s say it does. It’s probably true that since Shakespeare there have been quite a few people born with gifts as great as his or larger. But great artists have more than gifts. They are also fortunate in their eras. They live in an era when their gifts work well with the art forms of the day — when there is some support for the arts, and a public that nourishes them by taking a lively interest — when people are not engrossed in war or plague or the motherfucking internet . .. Shakespeare was lucky in those ways.
I am reading the book about SBF that that Shakespeare story comes from. One thing that comes through quite clearly about SBF is that he took to Bayesian reasoning like a duck to water. Another is that he was astoundingly lacking in common sense about other things that need to be taken into consideration in addition to Bayesian-wrought conclusions. Here’s an example: In the early days of his crypto exchange $4 million disappeared, and at the time the organization was small enough that that sum of money mattered. There was a case to be made that the someone had stolen the money, which I gather is relatively easy to do crypto without getting caught. But there was also also a case to be made that so many transactions went on that money sometimes arrived but didn’t get recorded. SBF said he was 80% sure the second is what had happened, and asked that the records reflect that they had 80% of that $4 million. So from the point of view of how to think of the company’s capital, thinking of it as being in possession of an extra $3200 may be a decent practical approach. But if you are telling investors, or really anyone outside the company, that that $3200 is definitely there, in the company’s possession, you are lying to them and can get in big trouble. SBF’s thinking about Shakespeare seems to have a similar flaw.
"SBF said he was 80% sure the second is what had happened, and asked that the records reflect that they had 80% of that $4 million."
And then a few years down the line at your big trial after it all went up in smoke, even if you genuinely meant that with all good intentions, you look like you're a fraudster lying through your teeth 🤦♀️
I can see why he'd prefer to think "oops, didn't keep track of all the transactions" rather than "somebody has their fingers in the till" because the entire operation was We're All Friends Here and they mostly came out of the EA/Rationality/associated community and the ostensible purpose of the concern was "get crazy rich, do crazy good". So the idea that one of the gang was stealing was just unthinkable. (Well, as the abuse scandal in my church shows, you have to think the unthinkable about "but these people would never do that" because oh yes they would).
But that's where you needed a few stodgy old guys in suits who would have insisted on putting proper accounting procedures in place, so this kind of thing doesn't happen, goshdarnit! A big part of the troubles that FTX brought upon itself was "all pals together" thinking instead of treating it like a business.
I agree with your read of FTX. These people were extremely naive and lacking in common sense. The EA people were quite smart, but most of them didn't know a thing about crypto, and many knew nothing about the world of trading and finance. And never was anyone less suited to running an organization that SBF. His people skills were terrible. He had lots of clever ideas and worked hard, but in an extremely disorganized, impulsive way. He was ignorant about relevant legal issues with crypto and with financial institutions in general, and about things like bookkeeping, and it's not clear that he even grasped that it's important to understand these things or hire somebody who does. Yeah, as you say he needed a few stodgy old guys on staff -- a lawyer and an accountant at the very least.
People can enjoy some delicious schadenfreude regarding the calamity he brought on himself and EA if they think of him as cocky and impressed with himself, but actually I don't think he was a narcissistic entitled young creep. He really was not playing with a full deck. His whole life he did not feel emotions, and in his late teens consciously trained himself to make various facial expressions that simulated them. He was not extraordinarily gifted at math or programming -- just a regular smart guy, by others' accounts and also his own. At math camps he attended he was just average. There was one thing, though, that he had an almost savant-like skill at: making judgment calls relying on Bayesian reasoning when there was no way to know for sure what the outcome was going to be, situations where you eventually won if you just managed to guess in the right direction more often than anyone else. And he knew all that. And he was chronically lonesome and unhappy. I think FTX looked to him like a chance to do something really good with the one thing he was awesome at.
I'm only partway through Lewis's book about him, and don't know whether as things unravelled he consciously chose to flat out lie to save himself, but so far I mostly feel sorry for him.
This is all armchair psychology but the entire milieu he lived in his whole life was one where being smart (and having impeccably liberal values*) was important and valued, and he was smart, and lived with and among and went to school with and worked with smart people, and then he gets a job making money from being smart (trading at Jane Street) and yeah that's great but... where is his heroic contribution to the world? Because that's what he's heard all his life, about making a huge change for the good because he's smart and privileged and all the rest of it.
And then he encounters EA and MacAskill and all the rest of it and falls headlong for it. Here's a key that will open every lock (Bayesianism)! And he can use his money making skills to make that heroic change to the world! And it's the Bay Area (loosely using that term) where it's all about 'move fast break things disrupt the status quo toss out the conventions boring old guys in suits just don't get it cool guys wear t-shirts and chinos' (think Elizabeth Holmes deliberately dressing like Steve Jobs) so of course doing it the traditional company way of having accountants and a board of directors and the rest of it was for the birds, they were inventing the FUTURE OF FINANCE TODAY.
That Sequoia profile, though it must have had them squirming in embarrassment due to the bad timing, is solid gold for mining a lot of the atmosphere of FTX/Alameda Research and the crazy levels of adulation that Bankman-Fried was swimming in. No wonder he thought, as the entire house of cards toppled down, that he could just talk his way out of it: mathematical-sounding bullshit had worked so well before to win him praise and money thrown at him:
And he probably did believe a good chunk of it, too. Again, more armchair psychology, but he does seem like the caricature of a nerd with few to no social skills or understanding of the world outside his interests, and caught up in that situation, he made the same mistake many others have done - it looks like you're going to lose your shirt, so you plunge even more on the 'sure thing' to win back big, and end up losing everything.
*See this plum from the Sequoia profile, which - for me as a pro-lifer - has me going "ow ow ow":
"SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number. One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith."
Gosh, wasn't it lucky that the things his family, friends, and entire circle believed turned out to be objectively correct and he could prove it by theory? Imagine if he had come to the opposite conclusion - he'd have been shredded, right?
Actually, I think you've got him wrong. Except for his talent for making the right call where some things can be estimated via Bayes, and some things just cannot be known, he was a pretty disabled guy. I think using his talent to make money for EA (an organization that is Wonderfully Good according to the simple, sort of mathematical criteria SBF had to use for judging complex human enterprises and beliefs) struck him as one of the few things in the world that was a good fit for him. (And he wasn't even right about that, because he didn't take into account some pretty obvious things, like that running a company required people skills.)
I haven't read a thing so far that gives me the impression he was interested in fame and glory, and I think I have a pretty sharp eye for narcissism.
>And it's the Bay Area (loosely using that term) where it's all about 'move fast break things disrupt the status quo toss out the conventions boring old guys in suits just don't get it cool guys wear t-shirts and chinos.
I actually don't think it's true that he dressed to impress, Bay Area style. The guy was an idiot when it came to self-presentation. He didn't bathe for weeks at a time!
But anyhow, since we're talking about Bay Area tech bros and you're a fellow lover of Shakespeare, here's a fine piece of poetry GPT4 just wrote to my specifications about tech bros. It's some comfort to know that until we get turned into paperclips we will have works like these to nourish our souls.
In Silicon Valley, where palm trees sway,
Tech bros hustle, night and day.
Casual in hoodie, sneakers so neat,
Walking the future with untapped beat.
Laptops in coffee shops, codes on the go,
Innovation's rhythm, a constant flow.
With every startup, dreams grow large,
Tech bros steering, the future's barge.
They laugh, they code, they dare to dream,
In a world where bytes over matter seem.
With VR glasses and AI's hum,
They whisper, "Behold, the future has come."
So raise a toast to these men so cool,
Riding tech's wave, breaking every rule.
For in their hands, a digital gem,
The future's story, tech bros at the helm.
"They laugh, they code, they dare to dream" . . . Ah Deiseach, it's food for the soul.
As a follow-up to "dress to impress", another plum (from a Coinbase article):
"FTX’s marketing crew apparently sounded out Louis Vuitton about “creating a red-carpet worthy version of Sam’s T-shirt and cargo shorts look.”
This trial should be a great promotion of "crime doesn't pay" not so much because of the legal penalties, but that every tiny detail of your vanity, cupidity, ignorance, greed and general messy humanity is going to be revealed to the public. Truly, "what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops."
"I actually don't think it's true that he dressed to impress, Bay Area style. The guy was an idiot when it came to self-presentation. He didn't bathe for weeks at a time!"
People are, Jack Horner fashion, plucking plums out of the trial testimony so far, and whether Caroline is getting her revenge for him leaking her diary to the NYT or whether it's all troo, he allegedly did have an eye to his image:
"Bankman-Fried tried to cultivate an image of himself as a smart, eccentric founder and said he wanted FTX to be perceived as a safe, reliable, audited and highly regulated exchange with the allure of it being offshore, Ellison said. He used Twitter as a “very important” source to help control the narrative around FTX, she added.
Bankman-Fried’s personal look, particularly his hair, was also important to him. Ellison commented on how he dressed sloppily in 2022 and how he thought his hair was “very valuable” and key to the narrative. She said he swapped a nice company car for a Toyota Corolla because it was “better for his public image.”
"As the CEO and figurehead of FTX, Bankman-Fried, Ellison testified, was well aware of his personal image and brand, and cultivated it to benefit both himself and FTX’s place within the crypto industry.
“[Bankman-Fried] didn’t comb his hair. He said it had gotten him bonuses at Jane Street and was important to FTX,” she told the jury, adding, “Sam said it was better for his image to drive a Toyota Corolla. So I drove a Honda.”
In a list Ellison maintained titled “Things Sam Is Freaking Out About,” which was entered for evidence, she listed “hedging” at the top, followed by “getting regulators to crack down on Binance,” a one-time FTX competitor and the world’s largest crypto exchange."
Slate seems to have remembered it's supposed to be a Serious Media Outlet and is giving the meat of the testimony, including allegations about massive bribes to Chinese officials:
The cooked balance sheets are a very bad look for any defence of "M'lud, my client is no fraudster or swindler, just a bright nerd who was out of his depth". And my God, but Utilitarianism is getting a black eye out of all this:
"• Ellison told SBF that this move seemed dishonest, after which her ex-boyfriend explained to her his “utilitarian” outlook on the whole thing. TL;DR: Telling people not to lie or steal is not a workable strategy, and the “greater moral good” (in SBF’s case, the Future of Humanity) matters far more than the means used to get there. As such, Ellison said, “over time, [lying] became something I was more comfortable with.”
• Notably, this all sounds quite similar to how SBF’s mother, the legal scholar Barbara Fried, also approaches the utilitarian philosophy—i.e., that good ends tend to justify their means."
"Moby Dick" is a crazy novel. It's a play and a film script and a stirring tale of life at sea and a social commentary and a treatise on whales and whaling and an allegory and God knows what else all thrown together.
You think you're getting a story of a doomed whaling trip, you end up with a psychedelic ramble through Melville's mind. It's good fun once you stop expecting it to make any sense.
EDIT: I mean, it starts off with Melville I mean Ishmael doing the Emo Goth thing before it was even invented:
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. "
By Chapter Two, he's told he'll have to share a bed with a guy who is out trying to sell a shrunken human head, and who turns out to be a tattooed cannibal, and by Chapter Ten Ishmael and said cannibal are married:
"If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper firebrand. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."
It's good to know that Queequeg has proper morals and is determined to make an honest man of Ishmael, after their carry-on in Chapter Four:
"Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade — owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times — this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
...But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm —unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him—"Queequeg!"—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg! — in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him."
So, y'know, if you made it that far, you should know what you're in for 😀
The greatest anything will be the guy who invented the tools that the people after them are using.
Assuming Shakespeare doesn't have a lot of subtlety in characters or plot (the commentary on The Tempest disagrees, but I also didn't much like The Tempest), as a counterpoint, which HBO drama has Shakespeare's depth or subtlety in rhythm and word choice? If you mute the show and just read the subtitles, how do you think it compares?
Shakespeare excelled at a particular type of writing that went out of fashion shortly after his death and hasn't come back. It's basically "plays as poetry" -- plays in which people declaim carefully-written speeches at each other rather than going for any kind of vaguely naturalistic dialogue.
Newer writers can definitely beat Shakespeare in many ways; better plots, better-drawn characters, definitely more _realistic_ dialogue. But nobody has written more poetic dialogue because nobody has really tried.
Is poetic dialogue better than realistic dialogue? No, but it's a more impressive use of the English language, and more memorable.
Similarly, all the good symphonies were written 100+ years ago, and all the good fugues were written 175+ years ago.
> plays in which people declaim carefully-written speeches at each other rather than going for any kind of vaguely naturalistic dialogue.
At its worst, I would agree with you. At its best. It is a wonderful melding of the two, like a song well sung. It has music, but at the same time you can hear someone speaking to you.
I am a big believer in the idea that a good ~70% of what people think they like about Shakespeare is jsut the consequence of people being told this is the height of English literature for generations. Its like the problem of god's goodness.
I don't find the stuff particularly amazing except in the context of its time and its historical import. A lot of them are basically jsut soap operas and would pass 100% without notice or interest if somehow magically released today in some alternate universe where they didn't exist.
People generally hate this viewpoint and insist Shakespeare is just amazing, but I really think they have a hard time getting into an abstract enough headspace to actually think about how Shakespeare would be received without the couple hundred years of Shakespeare worship.
That is not to say the plays are bad or anything, I just don't find them particularly exceptional, and certainly nowhere near deserving of their reputation if shorn of context.
Deadwood is written with the same kind of attention paid to language and characterization, and it's the best TV show ever written. Deadwood is Shakespeare without Shakespeare, and it's simply the best.
When someone quotes to you their favorite Shakespeare lines, with all the glee they feel when they recite them, do you think they're, what? Lying to appear smarter? Confused?
Shakespeare is pretty popular in non-Anglophone countries, right? Or at least in some of them. I doubt that's because people in Italy or wherever are being indoctrinated into pro-Shakespeareanism.
> I am a big believer in the idea that a good ~70% of what people think they like about Shakespeare
I’m sorry, but do you mean you are a big believer in your ability to climb inside a lot of other people’s brains?
What is your take on people liking music you don’t like?
> they have a hard time getting into an abstract enough headspace to actually think about how Shakespeare would be received without the couple hundred years of Shakespeare worship
Perhaps they find it hard because it’s a rather pointless question, but maybe my head space is not sufficiently abstract. I prefer to struggle with the question of whether George Washington would be famous without the American Revolution. It’s such a fascinating inquiry.
> I prefer to struggle with the question of whether George Washington would be famous without the American Revolution. It’s such a fascinating inquiry.
You've got me curious. It seems obvious to me that he wouldn't be famous without the thing that made him famous. What's the argument for the other side?
His plays are like operas; the plots are serviceable but you are there for the music,. GB Shaw wrote very well on this subject.
If a phrase like “‘Aroint thee Witch!’ the rump-fed runyon cried.” doesn’t tickle you then there’s no point. I understand not liking his writing, but I don’t understand thinking everyone who does is just faking it.
May I ask for an explanation of “‘Aroint thee Witch!’ the rump-fed runyon cried.”? Is it the alliteration (aroint, rump, runyon) that's amusing? The iambic meter?
Sure. It is the alliteration and the meter combined. Aroint is such a lovely word to say, especially if you are being dismissive with it, try it. AhhROINT!
It’s from the opening scene in Macbeth, when the three witches are meeting upon the Heath. One of the witches tells how she tried to beg a chestnut from a sailor’s wife. And the sailor’s wife tells her to get lost.
And then there’s the imagery of rump-fed. ( Compare rump-fed to fat ass. ) I get the sense of a part of one’s body that eats on its own when you’re not looking. It makes me laugh.
I did not really single this one out specifically for any other reason than it came to my memory quickly.
Of course there’s the well-known one,
now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
This one depends a lot on how the vowels were pronounced in the 16th century; an English person from Devon would have a somewhat appropriate accent to get at it. Lowered, cloud, and house would basically rhyme. The punning, the simile and extended metaphor and the rhythm. I find it all great fun.
It seems like there is a chicken and egg problem here. I don't think I've ever heard the words "aroint" or "runyon" outside of Shakespeare, nor is there any reason I'd know the 16th century pronunciation of words. So it seems without learning Shakespearean English, I'll miss out on enjoying his wordsmithing, but if I don't enjoy his prose, there isn't any incentive to learn Shakespearean English.
Or "The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon".
And even if he didn't invent the "yo mama" joke, and Titus Andronicus is hack work in the then-popular hack'n'slash genre which he wrote for money in a hurry, this exchange is still funny to us now and we'll laugh at it just like the people back then:
"CHIRON
Thou hast undone our mother.
AARON
Villain, I have done thy mother."
And a little further down the page, here's Aaron the Moor's speech while defending his baby:
"DEMETRIUS
I'll broach the tadpole on my rapier's point:
Nurse, give it me; my sword shall soon dispatch it.
AARON
Sooner this sword shall plough thy bowels up.
(Takes the Child from the Nurse, and draws)
Stay, murderous villains! will you kill your brother?
There is a a big difference between “faking it”, and living in a culture where it is the model/archetype of good literature for 400+ years. I don’t think people are faking it. I think they don’t see it with very clear eyes.
It is exactly the same accusation, with a dollop of presumptive intellectual superiority. It also sounds as though you’re living in a very small subset of the culture I am familiar with.
"faking it", and "immersed in a model where the thing being discussed has formed the very framework of what is considered good and is thus good more by definition than merit" are most definitely not "the same accusation".
And you inability to see that is pretty much my exact point, so thanks.
I guess the only distinction that comes to my mind right now is which one of those two things you are doing. Are you being intentionally obtuse because you love to have pointless arguments or have you been so shaped by your circumstance, that you truly believe you have this kind of insight into the world. It’s a tough call.
"A lot of them are basically just soap operas"/ "If Hamlet came out today it would be the hit play of the decade?"
This sounds as though you are mainly reading the plays for plot? If so, I'm not surprised you're unimpressed: the plots are mostly good but not great, fairly conventional for the era with big chunks of storyline copied from elsewhere. Shakespeare shines in his depth of characterization and the incredible richness and joy of his language. Folks who aren't good readers, or who don't particularly appreciate language in general, are not going to be in a great position to appreciate what all the historical buzz was about.
There was the Peter Greenaway version of The Tempest, "Prospero's Books" and it's definitely more Greenaway than Shakespeare, but when the original play is allowed to speak, Gielgud makes a good job of it:
Yes. It's easier to be a big fish in a little pond. Then the pond gets bigger, and all the fish still tell tales of that one fish who was so big he was literally a third the entire length of the pond.
Shakespeare isn't even the best example of this. Consider, if you will, history's favorite ugly painting: The Mona Lisa.
Jeez, Martin, do you think you, too, are unable to distinguish between things you genuinely love and things conventional wisdom or the culture vultures say that you should love or at least pretend to love? Or is it only all those Other People — you know, all the dumb stoopit people who aren’t you and aren’t able to get into an abstract headspace and contemplate the effect of 200 years of “Shakespeare worship”?
Honest response...say Shakespeare somehow only made comedies and the tragedies were released today but an up and coming playwright, or in 1950. Does anyone notice/care? Or the reverse.
People just seem to be unable to even grok the question, you get lots of nonsense responses.
I am not claiming Shakespeare is without merit, and the plays certainly are historically and culturally super important. But whether they are "good" outside that historical happenstance is an interesting question, and one most people don't seem to answer in a way to displays much actual consideration of the question.
They have literally centuries of pedagogy and archetyping propping them up.
"Absolutely if Hamlet came out today it would be the hit play of the decade". Really? You really believe that?
>do you think you, too, are unable to distinguish between things you genuinely love and things conventional wisdom or the culture vultures say that you should love or at least pretend to love?
Yeah the whole point of my post is that it is very hard to do and that I have a hard time disentangling that question. But most people seem to not even be able to get into the headspace of the question. Sorry if you find that offensive or something.
Most people are not very abstract thinkers, I would think you would be aware of that.
I think it's impossible to tell. If Romeo and Juliet hadn't been known, would there have been a West Side Story?
I have a friend who before I had ever met him had read and enjoyed The Sword of Shannara. Eventually he was persuaded to read The Lord of the Rings, and, though he knew better intellectually, had the distinct impression Tolkien almost plagiarized Terry Brooks.
If Shakespeare's works, in some alternative history, didn't exist, what else wouldn't exist? Probably an awful lot.
You have a point; see Marlowe versus Shakespeare. Some maintain Marlowe is a better writer/more original, but he's not the superstar Shakespeare is. And Shakespeare's work was in decline for a long time, until popularised again.
So why him and not another? is a reasonable question to ask. But all I can do is point to the language, because it's meant to be spoken and is full of beauty and richness. Marlowe is sometimes a little *too* enamoured of his own wit in invention, see this quote from his poem "Hero and Leander" which gives me the unfortunate mental image of Hero going "splish, splosh" as she walks due to her water boots:
"Buskins of shells, all silver'd, used she,
And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee;
Where sparrows perch'd, of hollow pearl and gold,
Such as the world would wonder to behold:
Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,
Which as she went, would chirrup through the bills."
And sometimes for the sake of the rhyme, it dips into the bathetic:
"Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops' shoulder: I could tell ye,
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly"
The "meat/neck/Pelops" metaphor is striking and clever (after all, Pelops had an ivory shoulder because his original one was eaten, thus literally meat*) but the "tell ye/belly" rhyme? Not so good, Kit!
*"Pelops' father was Tantalus, king at Mount Sipylus in Anatolia. Wanting to make an offering to the Olympians, Tantalus cut Pelops into pieces and made his flesh into a stew, then served it to the gods. Demeter, deep in grief after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, absentmindedly accepted the offering and ate the left shoulder. The other gods sensed the plot, however, and held off from eating of the boy's body. While Tantalus was banished to Tartarus, Pelops was ritually reassembled and brought back to life, his shoulder replaced with one of ivory made for him by Hephaestus."
Plenty of people here are pretty good abstract thinkers, and this question seems to be getting a lot of pro-Shakespeare responses from them and not much support for the view that the truly wise and realistic realize that Shakespeare is not that special, we're just socialized to think he is. There certainly is such a thing as people believing Shakespeare (or somebody) is great because they've been taught they are supposed to think that. I'm familiar with the syndrome. But you know what? Even most of those people aren't jackassy in the way you portray them as being. If you asked them how popular Hamlet would be if it opened now, very few of them would insist it would be the hit play of the decade. They'd continue to maintain it is a Great Play, but would acknowledge that the language is hard to follow, and probably also that people seem to like movies better now, and that modern people tend to prefer fewer words and more explicit sex, etc. Or maybe they will say they loved the movie version of one of the plays, which kind of sidesteps your question. Or some would say something like, "well, that's what everybody seems to think."
I love Shakespeare and I don't give a fat fuck whether that impresses people. And there are plenty of things that many think are great that I can neither comprehend or enjoy. Generally, in that situation, I think the reason I cannot enjoy the thing is that I have not found the door in. I lack the right background, or a certain part of my mind is not tuned in a way that allows me to appreciate them. I think you should allow for the possibility that that is your problem with Shakespeare.
I dunno, when I was in my teens and hearing all about how Shakespeare was a Great Writer and So Poetic, I took up "Hamlet" with a certain sinking feeling because my association with Great Poetry in school up to that date had not been one of ease and pleasure, so I expected to have to struggle through a thicket of obscure text (even if it was in modern English because it was a school edition).
After reading it, I had bells in my head.
The words struck against each other and chimed like music. "Hey, they're right, this guy *is* Great!" was my take away from that.
Virginia Woolf, in her diary, wrote about how after a morning's writing she would read a bit of Shakespeare, "while my mind is white-hot and agape," and how when she first started with the passage she'd have a feeling of keeping up with him -- something like, "yes, I might have come up with a phrase like that" -- but that soon he'd pull ahead of her, leaving her behind in his dust, marveling at the vastness of his gift.
Shakespeare's language and wordplay, when at their best (there is unavoidable dross by dint of sheer quantity), are still peerless. I won't claim total freedom from the prestige/signalling aspect, but I'm not a native speaker and I haven't been raised in an environment where Shakespeare is more culturally relevant than, say, Molière - and the statement is still true for me.
(There's a bunch of definitional arguments people have been making, which I agree with, too: what's a writer, what's good writing, etc. Shakespeare was a poet and playwright, not a novelist, a fact Martin Amis justifiably called a great cosmic joke.)
But the thing is, there's enough order-of-magnitude space in the population stats argument (very small percentage of, say, 200m English speakers writing in 1850 vs much larger chunk of 1-2bn in 20th c.) to make a similar claim for much of the pre-20th century English canon, at which point it becomes obvious how absurd the claim is. When it is followed up by "and therefore you're doing it wrong for revering Shakespeare", as such smug math-based claims about aesthetics and morality sometimes are, one can be forgiven for getting into a bit of a hand-spitting, flag-raising mood.
>there's enough order-of-magnitude space in the population stats argument (very small percentage of, say, 200m English speakers writing in 1850 vs much larger chunk of 1-2bn in 20th c.) to make a similar claim for much of the pre-20th century English canon, at which point it becomes obvious how absurd the claim is.
Actually, you can do the same thing about scientists: Come on, stop gushing about Newton. [or whatever person who took math or physics & chemistry to a new level]. What are the chances he was smarter than anybody alive right this minute? Why, he might not even have been smarter than MEEEEEEEE!
In a couple of ways, it is harder to judge scientists of different eras:
a) There is low-hanging fruit that can only be picked once. Inverse square gravity can only be discovered once. Calculus can only be discovered (Newton & Leibnitz - not picking who has priority) once.
b) More recent work is almost always more complex and harder to understand (and therefore hard to compare to earlier work). I'm aware that what Terence Tao has proven is very impressive, but it is way beyond what I can grasp.
It might be that no one can tell whether Tao or Newton was smarter.
Exactly. Was going to mention newton in this. There’s far more scientists alive now than then, it is said that we have more scientists alive now than all the scientists who ever lived before, but we don’t revere newton because he was great amongst his peers but amongst the greatest ever.
I think if someone are claiming Shakespeare as the greatest writer, it is more based on his language than his plots and characters. Arguably some of his plays having bad plots. Much Ado About Nothing for example.
And it's pretty subjective if you like his language or not. But Shakespeare did have an unusually high vocabulary. And he invented several words.
The question isn't "are there more writers of English literature now then there were in the 16th century" but rather "are there more writers of English literature alive today compared to all the writers of English literature in history who are dead." Shakespeare is, by his proponents, not considered the greatest writer of the 16th century but the greatest writer of English literature ever. That stretches back at least to Chaucer in the 14th century. So, out of a pool of 500+ years worth of English authors, is Shakespeare the best? Is that pool larger or smaller than English authors living today?
In other words, if there are more English authors who are dead than alive, then we would expect the greatest author of English literature to be dead. And if dead, then why not from the 16th century? He has to have come from somewhere.
> Shakespeare is, by his proponents, not considered the greatest writer of the 16th century but the greatest writer of English literature ever.
Forgive me, but I really don’t think this is true. I know there’s some. I have spent a lot of time in the theatre, I am the product of a British-style boarding school education; Shakespeare and his proponents have been part of my life for a long time. He is considered best in class (plays written largely in verse) by a country mile, but the idea of a “best writer in English ever” is an absurd one, isn’t it?
I saw something about it, it seems to be based on an excerpt from the new book out about him. So it's hard to judge without reading the entire thing from which this nugget was lifted.
And there certainly can be overblown claims: the greatest writer of all time? No. One of the tip top greats of English literature? Yes.
But it sounds like the judgement of someone who doesn't like to read (which seems to be the gist of that part of the book) and who places overmuch reliance in "I'm good at maths, that means maths is the solution to every problem".
The whole Bayesian thing about "more people are alive now than in the 16th century so is it likely the greatest writer was born then and not now" sounds impressive on a shallow level, but it's a terrible way to judge works of art. He doesn't seem to understand or appreciate books, and that's fine for him, but snap judgements about "I can prove via an equation that Shakespeare is not all that" is a very immature way to look at the world.
Besides, George Bernard Shaw got there first with criticism of "Bardolatry" and that Shakespeare was not that great (a view he revisited over his long career):
"Shakes versus Shav (1949) is a puppet play written by George Bernard Shaw. It was Shaw's last completed dramatic work. The play runs for 10 minutes in performance and comprises a comic argument between Shaw and Shakespeare, with the two playwrights bickering about who is the better writer as a form of intellectual equivalent of Punch and Judy."
Everybody agrees his plots are ridiculous. But when he writes a speech for a character who was living through one of those plots -- all the disguises and murders and suicides and betrayals, etc. -- the speech is not ridiculous. You lose your difficulty suspending disbelief, because no matter how silly the plot, the characters' dialogue about their thoughts and feelings about the events carries you away.
Lately I have been reading and writing about the history of psychedelics in the last 60 years and one of the discoveries I made is that the leading figures in the field rarely have any idea about the practicalities of politics and regulation. Rick Doblin and MAPS is the obvious exception, but it seems like most researches/thinkers only engage with regulators in the form of commentary and the occasional open later. While it's important to voice your opinion, policy will be created by politicians, most of who would never read those open letters. I wonder how much this applies to AI as well. I've heard the occasional comment from those in the know that MIRI and LessWrong have a notoriously bad grasp on the practicality of politics, and if that's true it would point to the same pattern
Seems to me that the important thing to grasp is the astounding sums of money AI stands to make. It’s going to be sort of like, I dunno, maybe the oil industry. Or maybe it already is. Given that, closely-reasoned, hard-to-understand arguments about how it’s going to fuck us up or kill is are about as effective as picketing bars with “booze is bad for your health” signs. The only real world things I can think of that might slow down or stop AI development are
(1) making a big slice of the public as angry and scared about AI as they are about Covid vax and masking. (2) Some catastrophe where AI-gone-wrong is clearly responsible. (3) organizations with access to billions doing ad campaigns, lobbying, etc.
There is a lot of money already pouring into AI and it seems that people like Sam Altman are doing a good job of putting themselves as close to the regulators as possible, which brings the obvious benefit of being able to steer the process in a desirable (by them) direction.
In the wake of the recent attacks in Israel, I was thinking about whether I hug my wife enough - this led to the question of how much time, in total, I had spent embracing her. Clearly, there were things I had spent more time on - I commute to work, so I'd wager I'd spent more time in a car than hugging my wife. Likewise, the time spent on the Internet clearly beats time spent in someone else's arms.
How about time on an airplane? Over the course of your life, and over the course of the average American's life, do you think they spend more time hugging people or more time on an airplane?
(I'm not going to count time spent sleeping in someone else's arms, which probably cuts out most hugs given in infancy. Though I will count time sleeping on a plane, which might be a double standard).
You don't count cuddling while asleep. Do you count cuddling while awake? That may make a big difference. Thinking back to my romantic relationships, I never hugged my partner much as such, but we would spend at least some time every day cuddling on the couch or whatnot.
So to do some back of the envelope estimation with a lot of assumptions. According to Frivolous Studies researchers, the average hug is 3.2 seconds.* Just from counting it out that seems reasonable to me so I'm sticking with it. A six hour flight, then, is the time equivalent of 6,750 hugs. If you live to the American life expectancy of 76, that works out to 89 hugs/year. So offsetting six hours on a plane requires an average of 1.7 Standard Length and Snugness (SLS) hugs per week for your entire life.
In my own life I think it's pretty reasonable to estimate that I spend about 6 hours per year on a plane on average. So sticking with that 76 year assumption I will spend 456 hours on airplanes in my life. In order to equal that time, I will need to average out to 130 hugs at SLS every week for my entire life. I'm probably behind so far. There were times when I was in a relationship where I've probably matched that pace, but there have also been times as a single adult where I've gone months without receiving a single hug.
Using this framework, at 5 hours a month on a plane, Martin isn't even close to keeping pace even hugging his family 50+ times a day. We've been working within the spherical cow SLS regime, but a lot also depends on how you define a "hug". Is a baby being held being hugged? How about a toddler on his parents lap? Does the Christian Side Hug** count? If so, how about putting your arm around someone for a picture? So much more research to be done in this field.
I'm counting cuddling while awake. Any kind of romantic but not overtly physical contact with your partner (e.g. contact that you wouldn't normally do to strangers) is what I'm after.
Maybe I should have phrased it as "Have I spent more time in contact with my partner, or in contact with an airline seat?"
I'm thinking that airline seat is likely to win, but it was the first comparison where I didn't have an immediate answer. I appreciate your analysis.
I'm thinking with that definition it should be a couple of hours a day just from walking (holding hands) and watching TV together, which I would hope is considerably more time than people spend commuting or flying.
I for sure spend more time hugging my wife than she would like strictly speaking. Even when not in bed I bet I hug her 50 times a day? It helps that we work together.
I probably also hug each of my kids a couple times a day at least.
There are diminishing returns on physical contact like anything.
I'm just trying to find an analogy for how much time I spend hugging/in contact with my partner.
Obviously I spend more time driving than hugging. Conversely, I rarely travel by train, so hugs probably win. Airplane transit was the big question mark.
I travel by airplane infrequently but the flights are pretty long. In contrast, I hug my wife constantly, but the hugs are pretty short. So I wasn't sure which would win if one were to add up the time spent on each and compare.
I recently read about Storybook Brawl, and as a former Magic player, the fact that all SB abilities are written in the first person (e.g. "I don't take damage when attacking") is very jarring. I'm curious why the developers decided to write it that way. Is it just to save space on the card over saying "this character" or whatever? I'm curious if the developers ever wrote publicly about design decisions like that.
I also found this jarring when I started seeing it in games, but on reflection, I think this is more natural and the only reason we think otherwise is because Magic did it wrong first and everyone copied them.
Consider, if you will, a card that stays gives you two life at the end of each turn. Magic would write this as "At the end of each turn, you gain two life". But when you play the card, and would like to communicate to the other players at the table, what do you say? If you literally read the card with the "you", you'll be saying the wrong thing. So usually you'll either paraphrase it with "This card gives me two life at the end of each turn" or you'll use indirection and say "The card text is 'At the end of each turn, you gain two life.'"
This new style, though, would be "At the end of each turn, I gain two life", and I can just play the card and literally read it to my opponents without paraphrasing to make a true statement about what the card does. I'm growing to like it.
I think the way Magic does it is more natural, because the card's author is speaking to the player through the card. So the player is "you", and "I" doesn't come up because the author isn't part of the game.
I'm not very familiar with MTG, but this type of description has become quite common in indie TTRPGs over the last couple of decades. I look at it as a way to get players invested in the game and the mechanics (and their character, for RPGs).
SBB aimed to be more accessible in its design than other autobattlers, let alone CCGs like MtG, That includes less complex abilities and greater emphasis on flavor over mechanics, also the whole fairytale setting. Abilities were never so complex or interactive as to warrant anywhere near MtG level of precision.
I've just finished reading Eat Like the Animals (Raubenheimer and Simpson), which posits that the global obesity rate increase is due to a concept called Protein Leverage (the modern ultra-processed diet is too low in protein, and humans tend to eat until protein requirements are met, hence everyone tends to overeat).
While it sounds plausible, I find it too convenient (really? Studies done on locust, mice, and primates all agree?). Can anyone help me find any evidence against the protein leverage hypothesis? Almost everything about this is published by the two authors who wrote the book, or people collaborating with them, finding very positive results.
Thank you! That's exactly what I was after. It sounds like a more general principle is, most animals including humans will overeat to meet requirements of certain scarce nutrients. Protein is one such nutrient, which is metabolically expensive to produce and hence generally scarce in nature, but other scarce nutrients can also trigger the effect.
The same book also claims that there's no such thing as a micronutrient appetite, which I am doubtful of.
Meat is measured in carcass weight. It's fine if you're comparing between countries as long as the countries use the same breeds of animal and more or less the same farming practices. I'm a bit more unsure if the comparison is still valid across time - feedlot farmed cattle is a lot more % fat than % protein, and I believe the % of cattle that is raised feedlot has increased in the last century. Measuring in carcass weight consumption also might mask how much meat actually ends up on human plates (organ meats usually end up in pet food in the west, but e.g the Chinese and Vietnamese use organ meats in specific dishes, so the amount of each carcass that ends up on a human plate could differ between countries). Also, come to think about it, if there's a larger proportion of family owned livestock in certain countries, it's possible that they get missed in official counts comparing between countries because the meat is never sold on a market. Not to mention meat from recreational fishing and hunting that don't get sold!
So, I think protein intake from meat consumption might be overcounted for urban populations (supply chain and home wastage, not being able to efficiently extract protein from less meaty bits, pet food, etc) but undercounted for rural areas (livestock, fishing and hunting that doesn't get marketed). It might balance out in the US (lots of hobby hunting and fishing to my understanding), but might be off in many other countries.
Per the model, the specific nature of the meat matters. 60g of cooked steak is not equivalent to 60g of cooked McDonald's hamburger patty, because the latter includes breadcrumbs, is higher in fats, etc to improve palatability and to reduce cost.
I'm also curious about how meat consumption is measured - is it by number of animals slaughtered? But then, how do you know that they're actually being eaten? Is it by total kg of meat product sold? But the cut and nature of the meat matters - is it bone in lamb rack or whole turkey or meatballs that are 40% by weight breadcrumbs and seasoning?
I suspect the much touted statistic is from animals slaughtered, but I think Americans/other western nations are often are more wasteful with the undesirable bits (feet, gizzards, organ meats, bones) that in another market, butchers can often find customers for - e.g it's very easy for a butcher in Hong Kong to sell chicken feet.
The problem is most claims don't tend to specify what exactly are they measuring, and meat product vs meat makes an enormous difference in how much effective dietary protein there is.
The more you know, the more horrible the meat industry looks.
As a kid I was sad that animals are killed. As an adult I was sad that animals are tortured all their lives. Now I am sad that most the meat obtained this cruel way is just thrown away.
If you excuse all the horrors by the need to eat meat, then at least fucking eat it!
Sort of seems like this would imply that a keto diet would be a slam-dunk winner, rather than (as I gather) just another of the vast array of diets each of which works great for some people and not at all for others.
The explanation posited in this book is that keto dieters aren't locked in a plastic box like the locusts in the experiment, who only have one available source of food and can't sneak off to buy snacks. Most artificial diets trying to deviate from specific ratios that a living thing's appetite is trying to achieve have very poor compliance if the dieter or animal isn't locked in an isolated cage. Locusts on low protein diets for example will eat other locusts when they're starved of proteins, which is why each bug needs its own box.
Appetite is a drive that trumps pretty much any other drive, and I think the evidence is if you try to break your appetite drive, your outcomes are generally very poor (eating disorders)
Fair enough. I’d still expect keto to be noticeably better than the rest, but I can’t say for sure it isn’t. Thegnskald’s comment is probably more relevant.
I was recently reading through the Wikipedia page for Hamas and I realised something: the more controversial a topic is the more trust I give to Wikipedia to portray it accurately, but also the less trust I place on traditional media sources, with these two variables acting independently.
Non-traditional media sources, like blogs, are a crapshoot; you'll find the best stuff there but also the worst, and there are no shortcuts to figuring out which is which.
But you can see the arguments. Don't trust Wikipedia at all on controversial topics, until you've read that article's "talk" page. Then you'll have a better feel for what's controversial, what's consensus, and how much Wikipedia should be trusted in this case.
Then go click on the links to Wikipedia's primary sources. And to other related Wikipedia articles, which may be written and edited by completely different people.
You shouldn't trust Wikipedia a lot on controversial topics. They get way more donation money than they actually need to run, and put most of it into the Wikimedia Foundation, a blatantly leftist group that keeps funding racial and sexual "social justice causes". (Yes, this means it's lying about the money going to wikipedia maintenance)
Yes, I'm aware of that and also disagree with how the money is being spent. I don't think that effects the trustworthiness of articles at all. I edit wiki articles from time to time myself and have a decent understanding of the process.
As a reader, too, it appears to me to have been much more openly taking sides on controversial issues since the mid-2010's. Typical examples are passages like "A falsely claimed X" that would have earlier just described what various people were saying, and other evidence, and let the reader decide for himself; and the "Disinformation" sections in just about every page about a controversial event.
This is really interesting! I had the opposite impression. I got up to about 3K edits on the English Wikipedia by around 2006, so I was an extremely early adopter. By 2012 or so it was obvious to me that the NPOV median setpoint had moved considerably to the left and WP was roughly as biased as the NYT. By 2016 I considered Wikipedia to be just another mouthpiece of the progressive left. By 2020 I found Wikipedia to be uniquely bad at even maintaining a pretence of neutrality and was now explicitly an advocacy propaganda outlet for the left; it wasn't even pretending to be neutral anymore.
I am genuinely surprised that someone who edits wikipedia and is familiar with its culture, while also hanging out on SSC, disagrees with me.
Do you remember, for instance, the [worker ant] arbitration committee case? For me, that was a big turning point... it was the first time I'd seen arbcom members explicitly declare an intention to censor true information because of the potential political impact of that information. I remember reading official, on-the-record statements from the arbcom about how if wikipedia included an article on the notion of 'access media' it was essentially surrendering to the conservative altright nutjobs. I made a comment that this would be the equivalent of saying that allowing an article on vanguardism = giving into communist nut jobs, even if the article only described the actual theory without any advocacy; in response, I got banned for 8 weeks and forbidden to ever engage with anyone on their User_talk: page ever again.
After that, I started voting in Arbcom elections as a neutrality single-issue voter. I voted for people who avoided editing politically sensitive topics, and against anyone who was *only* active in politics regardless of their bias. This seemed like an eminently sensible voting strategy to me (especially because, you know, it wasn't real voting and the standard of victory was 'consensus' not counting). I was eventually banned from voting on Arbcom elections, with the reason given that I was a 'known conservative troll'. When I pointed to instances where I had voted against conservative candidates with the exact same comment, "this user seems to only ever edit politically sensitive articles, and only ever to make them more aligned with the user's political bias, therefore i vote Oppose", i was given one of those permanent administration bans that prevents you from editing anything on the WP: namespace, so you can never engage in internal wikimedia politics again.
Since that happened, my understanding is that Wikipedia has only pushed further to the left. I heard from someone (haven't confirmed) that they added Fox to the 'untrusted sources' list? It very much seems like they have been infected with the same process that has infected most supposedly neutral spaces, where any amount of conservative presence at all is treated as evidence of conservative bias... the process Scott describes in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
Now I only trust Wikipedia on starkly apolitical topics like computer science or math history
I'm curious if you could explain your own experience, the events that lead you to trust Wikipedia as a neutral Source on political issues? Because it must be a very different kind of experience from mine
Wish I could point ya to the twitter thread I put up some months ago but after 18 months on twitter I concluded that there really is no there, there, and nuked the whole goddamn thing.
Anyway, Andrew's right. They really do (or at least were) using Wikipedia to raise money for organizations that promote some really radical stuff.
I recently read a brilliant short story called The Nose, by Gogol. Analyzing it, Syracuse university professor George Saunders (in his book "A swim by the pond in the rain", in which he analyzes great Russian short stories) introduces the "skaz" tradition in Russian literature.
A familiar example of this, is Sascha Baron Cohen doing Borat.
Saunders explains this tradition :
Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully. It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.
Is there any conceivable way in which the Hamas attack leads to things getting better for the people of Gaza?
The answer strikes me as a resounding "no", even if you think Israel are evil. Which means either the people aroudn the world celebrating the attack are too foolish to understand this, or they're literally just celebrating that people they hate were killed, even if this means the people they support will pay for that many times over.
Hamas starts a chain reaction where all Muslim countries unite against Israel, and with Allah's help, they successfully expel or kill all the Jews in Israel and liberate Palestine.
Note, I do not consider this option conceivable, Israel is too powerful. However, I voice it because I know some Muslims that believe this, and that's why they are celebrating it. Many Muslims truly believe they will win in the end, and it is important to recognize that as a motive for the attack.
Similarly if Israel does end up pushing the people of Gaza into Egypt, living under the Egyptian government is probably better than living under Hamas's rule in a besieged Gaza strip.
It fits their overall strategic goals. So the idea is that things will get better after they win. And this is pretty transparently a strategy to win (i.e., take over all of Israel and establish their rule over it).
It's the same strategy the FLN employed in Algeria. From Wikipedia: "By summer 1955, the steady pressure of French counter-insurgency had put the FLN in a very dire situation. Only one of the FLN's sections, Wilaya II, was capable of mounting any offensive.[5] Popular support for the FLN was still rather low and many of the Algerian Muslim elite advocated for a peaceful resolution of the conflict through conciliatory agreements with the French government.[6]
To put the FLN in a stronger position, Youcef Zighoud, leader of the Wilaya II, decided to conduct an attack against Pieds-Noirs civilians in Algeria, with the hope that an aggressive French retaliation would break the fragile bond between French colonists and native Algerians, increasing the popular support for the rebellion and destroying any possibility for a conciliatory settlement of the conflict."
Today, Algeria is an independent nation. So the FLN achieved their strategic goals. Whether that's better or not is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
Leaving aside the particularities of Hamas, this kind of disbelief is pretty common in asymmetric conflicts. France vs. the FLN, France (and later the U.S.) vs. the Vietcong, the mujahadeen against the Soviet Union, the ANC vs apartheid South Africa, the Taliban against the USA, etc.
There are tons of examples of militarily inferior enemies defeating superior forces. There's a playbook for this kind of action which has lots of historical precedent. I'm not like citing to Harry Potter or the Avengers here. Algeria is a real place on Earth.
It certainly doesn't happen everywhere or all the time, but it does happen. If you want to make it happen, killing civilians can be (and too often is) part of the playbook.
I think we're using conceivable in different ways. I'm using it to mean functionally nonzero. So not just literally possible, but possible in a meaningful way. My discriminant for meaningfulness is whether it has happened before in recorded history.
Hamas is running plays from a playbook that has worked in recorded history. Those plays might be unlikely to work, but it's not inconceivable that they'll work.
By way of example, it's conceivable that I win the lottery tomorrow. The probability is extremely low, but it has happened in recorded history. In contrast, it's not conceivable that tomorrow I become the new President of America, because every President has either been elected or been the Vice President. It's physically possible that I become President tomorrow, but I'd be comfortable describing it as inconceivable.
Reframing the question to reflect my understanding of it yields: do you think that the destruction of Israel in the next, say, 50 years is less likely than the odds of you winning the lottery tomorrow?
LIterally none of those things are remotely analogous here. The main examples are invaders losing to guerillas fighting in their own territory. At best, you can say that hamas can stop israel from completely destroying them (while still suffering catastrophic losses in the process), but it's unclear how hamas actually conquers Israel in Israel or even comes close. The partcularities of hamas are exactly what are relevant here!
>It certainly doesn't happen everywhere or all the time, but it does happen. If you want to make it happen, killing civilians can be (and too often is) part of the playbook.
The US "lost" in Vietnam precisely because of their unwillingness to kill civillians at scale. They could have leveled most of North Vietnam if they had wanted to, and they were nowhere near close to actually being militarily defeated - the US left because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
This does not apply to Israel. They see hamas as an existential threat, and if they think they're actually in danger they will do everything up to and including the liquidation of gaza. Unlike in Vietnam, refusing to be willing to do this doesn't mean going home with your tail between your legs, it means you face the prospect of your country being destroyed and its people being killed, raped and so on.
For hamas to actually defeat Israel (i.e. overtrow the government and ethnically cleanse israel - the stated goal of hamas and most people in gaza), one of two things has to be true: 1) Israel would rather allow themselves be destroyed than to throw everything they've got at Hamas or 2) Hamas can withstand having everything thrown at them by israel (and this doesn't even include the support that the US will increasingly provide if things go south for Israel).
First, I'm not saying I think it's likely Hamas will win. The original question was whether it was conceivable things would get better after the Hamas attack. I've detailed the thinking behind the concept. It is entirely conceivable.
By way of analogy, say I'm playing a basketball game. I decide to run a triangle offense. Maybe that's a good strategy for my particular case, maybe it's a bad strategy. It is a basketball strategy - teams have been very successful using it. Maybe I'll be one of them.
However, if I decide to bring 11 men on the court and have them line up to punt the basketball, this is not a basketball strategy. There is no conceivable way this works. It has never worked in history and there is no reason to think it will work in my case.
Second, if you think the examples provided aren't analogous to Hamas, what is? When has an economically inferior, militarily inferior, smaller country ever taken over an economically superior, militarily superior, larger country without substantial foreign assistance?
If you want to say that Hamas should just get out of the take-over-Israel business, I'm in full agreement. Likewise, I hope we can agree that I ought to never play basketball - my chances of winning are similar to Hamas' chances.
But once you've decided that that's what you want to do, running plays from a successful team doesn't seem particularly outlandish.
>When has an economically inferior, militarily inferior, smaller country ever taken over an economically superior, militarily superior, larger country without substantial foreign assistance?<
Alexander the Great? Or was Persia already collapsing?
Define "better"? They seem to be happy about the attack. Maybe they just value martyrdom and revenge over material benefits. Not everyone in the world is W.E.I.R.D after all.
Would it be safe for anyone in Gaza to not celebrate the attack on Israel? I don't know for sure, but it seems safe to bet that some are really celebrating, but we can't know how many think it's a bad idea.
Presumably the ones who don't want to celebrate stayed home. Lots of people celebrating, but then there's lots of people in Gaza. Polls show that something like 60-70% of Gazans support killing Israeli civilians, which does leave some 30% who don't.
Uh, gee, maybe, getting closer to any of the things they want?
They complain about oppression - things are going to get a lot worse
They complain about being blockaded - things have already gotten a lot worse
They complain about being killed - a lot more Palestinians are going to be killed than almost ever before
They want control over the entire israel/palestine territory - they will be further disempowered and hamas may even be functionally destroyed
They said they want to defend Al Aqsa - israelis are defiling al aqsa out of spite and will likely do so more than ever in the future
Unless literally killing some finite number of israelis, even or especially civilians, is the goal here, then everything is going to get worse. And if it IS the goal, well then enjoy your sad little celebration while it lasts.
* Hamas is destroyed, the group that takes over is not (or at least less) dedicated to terrorist violence, making it easier to negotiate to the point of lifting the blockade and letting Gaza actually have a normal life.
* The message to Israel is "you can't shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and ignore them forever, the present situation is unsustainable."
Of course Israel won't want to follow the logic of the 2nd point because they don't want to reward terrorism, and the Palestinians don't want to follow the logic of the 1st point because they don't want to reward a massive ground invasion of Gaza.
But maybe if Hamas is destroyed/replaced, each side will feel like they can safely "face facts" while also saving face.
>The message to Israel is "you can't shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and ignore them forever, the present situation is unsustainable."
But you can shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and *oppress* them forever, in ways that make it impossible for them to project power beyond Gaza. The cost of this is high, in many respects, but Israel is probably now willing to pay that cost.
They won't actually pay it forever, of course. Which is a long-term problem with any such strategy. The Israelis are mostly decent, civilized people - if they buy their own safety at the cost of brutal oppression of the Palestinians, then after enough years of safety they'll start feeling bad about the oppression. This will happen long before the Palestinians stop feeling angry about what was done to them.
In the short and probably medium term, oppression would work. I'm not sure what else realistically could.
What you think of as "getting better for the people of Gaza" isn't necessarily what everyone else thinks of as "getting better for the people of Gaza".
For example: Chabad Houses all over the planet celebrate events surrounding The Czar's victory over Napoleon. Everyone knew that fewer Jews would be raped, murdered, conscripted, and starved under Napoleon than under the Czar and yet there are many who claim that Napoleon's victory would have been a *worse* outcome.
Well then it sounds like it falls into the second thing I mentioned - simple joy over the suffering of people you hate. People in Gaza mostly favor a one state 'solution', and this doesn't really move things closer to that. If anything, it will rob palestinians of power overall.
Well, that's not *exactly* why Rabbi Schneur Zalman supported the Czar. Come to think of it, it isn't really what the young Gazan men or older Gazan leadership want either.
I don't think most people think like that when it comes to groups they hate and groups they like. That is, it's less "does this benefit us or not?" and more "does it hurt people I don't like?"
I think the past few days should get Israel to think very hard about the option of doing to Gaza what Rome did to Carthage, minus the slavery part. In the medium term, restraint would be best, eg maintain the trend of improving relations with Saudi Arabia. In the long term? As long as the Americans are there to deter the Muslim states from ganging up on Israel in the moment, people will forget about it. The trend of normalization between the Saudis et al will resume once it becomes old news, and eventually the destruction of Gaza will become devoid of emotional content just like any number of human atrocities throughout history. Should Israel start the clock on that sooner?
The best-case scenario version of that is if Egypt decides they're broke enough that they're willing to accept money for taking in palestinian refugees, and Israel (with maybe some international support) pays them off. It'll probably leave some terrorist groups working out of Sinai and a lot of international hostility, but of the versions of how a carthage scenario goes it's probably the least bad one.
Morality aside, this would probably not only cause Arab countries that have normalized in the last few years to reverse course, it would probably result in Egypt and Jordan renouncing their peace treaties.
It would likely result in America stopping their support, and certainly European countries. Anything associated with Israel would be completely toxic in much of civil society. To the extent America doesn't renounce all ties with Israel, every Arab country would, and would likely enter the Russian/Chinese sphere of influence (to the extent they haven't already).
Funny to me how quickly people go from "Hamas is bad because they target civilians" to "Israel should commit genocide"
I don't think that's a possibility. What IS a possibility is "Israel destroys hamas". Which is perhaps only moderately less of a blank cheque, but much, much more palatable to outsiders.
My point was that killing thousands of Hamas means killing thousands of non-Hamas, directly and indirectly, and that the rationale of killing Hamas gives them cover.
There's a good chance you're right and that Israel really couldn't survive the political fallout. Maybe Israel doesn't have a choice but to maintain the small plot of land in their midst filled with people who'd like to but can't genocide them and endure events like the one presently occurring every few decades. Depressing thought.
I think it would help to draw a line -- not one that is shaped like a fractal -- and firmly take control over what is inside the line, and leave people outside the line alone (except when they attack the line). That's how many states work, I think.
Inside the line, you have a choice: are all people equal, or are there first-class and second-class citizens? The latter option leads to resentment, predictably.
There's a plausible version of that as a solution to the west bank problem. It's harder with Gaza because there already is a line, the Gazans just don't stop attacking it (or, before last week, launching rockets over it).
(Which lead to Israel besieging them, primarily to stop weapons smuggling, which lead to them doing things like digging up their own water infrastrructure to have rocket launch tubes, which leads to them being even more poor and miserable but also too heavily arms for Israel to let up).
As a side note (my specialty), I believe that "digging up their own water infrastructure..." comes from a Hamas propaganda video where they explicitly say that the pipes had been abandoned by Israelis settlers in illegal settlements. (So not exactly their own infrastructure.)
The video is probably bullshit anyway (it says that they made missiles with those pipes and explosives from unexploded Israeli ordnance and shells from a WWI British wreck.)
In the plot of land between the Jordan and the Med, either that line is a fractal or at least one side of that line has a whole lot of people who really really want to kill a lot of other people living on the same side of the line.
That sucks. A possible solution would be to draw a straight-ish line somewhere in the middle, and forcefully resettle the people who are on the "wrong" side of the line. That would also be horrible in short-term, but would give a hope for peace in long-term.
(I am not looking at the map, so maybe there are some good reasons why this couldn't possibly work.)
Drawing the line in the middle, rather than trying to maximize your territory, would give a small chance of cooperation if a similarly thinking leader appeared on the other side. Even if most leaders on the other side are opposed to this idea, you only need to succeed once, and then the straight line becomes the status quo and is much easier to defend.
That would of course require giving up your own ambitions to conquer the territory behind the line. Might be politically infeasible in a democracy if a sufficiently large part of your population believes that *everything* should belong to them, and that the current situation is in some sense good for them, because it gives them a pretext to gradually advance, step by step, until they get it all in some unspecified future.
> Inside the line, you have a choice: are all people equal, or are there first-class and second-class citizens? The latter option leads to resentment, predictably.
Actually, I think attempting to choose the first option leads to more resentment than admitting that the second one obtains. There is no state in which all people are equal, but there are many in which a lot of people are angry that they were told they were supposed to be equal to their superiors.
In general, you get more stability by telling people what they'll get and then delivering that than you will by promising people something they won't get and then not delivering it.
Because Jordanians and Egyptians have their own states with borders that satisfy them. As Marty Khan has repeatedly asserted, Gazans would (and according to him, should) only be satisfied by borders that encompass all of Israel. Why would they only be satisfied with, say, a quarter or half of the farm when it's all theirs by "right"?
It's all there in the name. The Egyptians control basically everything that was ever called "Egypt" in the last hundred years, and there's enough room and enough resources in Egypt for them all to live comfortably. The Jordanians, pretty much the same except it was called "Transjordan" until ~80 years ago. Same with the rest of the Arab countries, mostly.
The Palestinians control less than a quarter of historic Palestine, and that's not nearly enough for all twelve million or so Palestinians to live comfortably. Even with just seven million of them actually living in the Palestinian territories, things are pretty grim.
Hmm. No it won’t. If Gaza is destroyed in the future, with a population of 3+ million people, there’s no chance of it being forgotten. of course not in the Islamic world, but nowhere really.
(Except in the midst of a hot world war that kills most of the northern hemisphere making it moot.)
I’m not sure what the solution is. Perhaps a big wall, and a UN protectorate, banning Hamas, agreement that if terrorist attacks still happen then there will be reduced aid to all of Palestine.
We had a big wall. Then Hamas launched rockets over it, so we had iron dome. Then they broke through it and started murdering everyone they saw. I'm not sure how much Israel is going to trust big walls and nothing else again.
(Also, Gaza is about 2 million. 3+ is the west bank)
The US has taken in a million or probably more people in this year, that few of us want; could the Arab states absorb x million Palestinians? Could they maintain their usefulness to themselves, as pity-attractors and hate and guilt-generators, just as well within their own borders as jutting awkwardly against Israel?
Great. Do that. Maybe they could fill out some of the (all of the?) jobs that Arabs don’t like to do themselves. It’s not as though Gaza represented, except graphically on a map, anything of what the Palestinians lost. e.g. if I recall - village life, orchards?
Maybe I'm overconfident that our current moment in time isn't so special, but time has turned all sorts of atrocities into mundane historical facts. Sometimes, the perpetrators become national heroes. No one bats an eye at the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue.
> Same with the Roman Empire; it’s completely gone, so nobody is outraged over Carthage.
Some people might be. But no one wants to use it as a generic way to tarnish the reputation of Rome.
> People are less willing to forgive historical crimes committed by current powers because those crimes still have an impact today
On the other hand, this is obviously wrong. The actions do or don't have an impact today regardless of whether the state that performed them is still alive. As you said in your earlier sentence, the reason people are willing to forgive Rome for Carthage is that Rome is dead, not that Carthage came back from the dead!
> If hypothetically Mongolia still ruled the whole of Asia, I think history would be much more critical of what Genghis Khan did.
More critical like how? What more do you want?
The Chinese attitude toward Genghis Khan is not positive, today. I have no direct knowledge of the Russian attitude, but I tend to suspect it's not all that positive either. (I think India is more on the positive side.)
Americans see Genghis Khan as awesome, because that's the truth. But also because he didn't conquer 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
I think your example of the current powers is evidence of my point. None of them are international pariahs or seriously threatened or even seriously inconvenienced despite colonialism having ended in living memory. It wouldn't take long for business as usual to resume were Israel to raze Gaza to the ground and keep its surviving inhabitants in tent camps until some number of Western countries agreed to take them.
The best thing by far that could possibly happen to the two million residents of the Gaza Strip is that they get to move somewhere else instead. I'm sure they'd love it to be Canada, but even Egypt would be a pretty massive step up.
So *if* Israel does decide to go full Cato and *if* this is enough to persuade someone (or a coalition of someones) to offer full refugee status to all Gazans, then this is one way they could come out ahead.
Nobody wants the current generation of Gaza residents(*) living in their country. Egypt, in particular, had that opportunity two generations ago when most Gazans were still hard-working farmers or tradesmen trying to make do and make a better life for their families.
Lots of people want to point at Israelis and call them genocidal monsters, which works best if the Israelis are busy committing genocide.
So, you're giving Egypt et al the choice between something they very much want, and something they very much don't, and expecting that they will altruistically do the thing they don't want to?
* "Palestinians" is too broad a term to be particularly useful here
Speaking of counterproductive lashing out, Canada has seen numerous pro-Palestine celebrations shortly after the start of this whole thing. Something tells me Canadians would mostly not be in favour of the government, who is already collapsing in the polls, announcing that they'll be taking in a whole lot of people who have opinions similar to those celebrating.
True about the American support. Even so, doesn't Israel have nukes?
My reasoning wasn't about territory; it was about eliminating any threat from the Palestinians once and for all. Also, I don't think Ukrainians were going house to house killing Russians and parading their bodies in the streets to applause.
Maybe Carthage was a bad analogy. How about the Tamil Tigers? Do as the Sri Lankans did, take off the gloves, forget human rights and NGOs etc, and utterly annihilate them.
Hamas. I was vague on this, but I was assuming that support for Hamas in Gaza is too entrenched to destroy the former without destroying the latter. Or even if it were accomplished, Gazans might just make Hamas 2.0 and name it something else.
True, nukes are not a guarantee of that, but Russia's invasion does prove that they seriously constrain the actions of your enemies. Note how serious the Americans are about their donated weapons not being used to strike Russia proper. Ukraine is not an existential threat to Russia and everyone knows it, unlike an Arab coalition against Israel. The Arab states probably know that Israel would nuke them if Israel were up against the wall.
Is there any remote possibility that the Israeli government had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack? It's very unlikely, but it would obviously otherwise represent a very significant intelligence failure and has coincided with a period of Netanyahu trying to increase his power and receiving significant push back.
They had enough data to figure out what was coming, but didn't have a worldview that could take the data and make a prediction.
Frederick the Great said that "he who defends everything, defends nothing." Israel thought that the biggest dangers were from subverting the border (rockets, tunnels, lone wolf attacks, etc.). The idea that the border would be directly challenged was a complete afterthought. After all, who expects to be attacked where they're strongest?
I don't think so. Netanyahu also wants to look competent. He also is facing opposition from the far right, and there's a significant chance of this going poorly and him being replaced. Defeating this as they entered would have made him look better.
As in, credible intelligence that they believed but chose to deliberately ignore? <1% chance. This is a classic conspiracy theory trope, and I can't think of a single case where an allegation like this was leveled against a Western democracy (or even a mostly-competent state of any description) and it later turned out to be true.
Intelligence that they should have listened to but dismissed out of hubris? Pretty likely. (~40%?). There's a report going around that Egypt warned them but was ignored.
It’s important to remember before saying “they should have listened” is that there is often a *lot* of false noise burying the signal. They may have been warned of a hundred things, of which one was this, but 99 others were bogus and rightly ignored.
There is a bit of difference in that this was eminently more detectable than most things in western democracies where this kind of conspiracy theory is raised.
The intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor was actionable, it's just that the best action we could take was send out a war warning to all Pacific commands saying "The Japanese are going to launch a massive sneak attack in the next two weeks; we don't know when or where so y'all be ready for anything". Then Kimmel and Short came up short on that last part.
It doesn't look like the Israelis had even a generic warning of serious trouble from Hamas this time around. That's either a serious intelligence failure on their part, or a masterstroke of counterespionage and deception on Hamas's.
I considered making a big deal about it, but the attacks were Saturday, it's Monday now, and I don't know if a day either way will make much difference.
Yeah, things haven't gone too bad (with the exception of one particularly active commentor) but this kind of thing is why we had the Three Day Rule in the first place.
Does anyone have any hot takes on how ADHD works "under the hood"?
I have suspected I have undiagnosed ADHD for a long time (from my work habits), but only recently became aware of other symptoms that totally line up with my experience: talking incessantly and often over other people, seemingly not recording or recalling emotional memories, and "rejection-sensitivity dysmorphia" (RSD) in which I am hyper-aware of social rejection and spend, like, most of my life with racing thoughts about rejections in the recent and distant past.
I am curious which of these things causes the other. Like, fine, maybe it's "the brain is wired wrong and everything breaks a bit". But could it instead be that the rejection-sensitivity causes everything else? I ask because, before noticing this was a list of ADHD symptoms, I had spent a lot of time self-analyzing and that was sort of the conclusion I had come to -- that my brain was fundamentally hyper-concerned with whether I was "acceptable" to others, and this maladaption seemed to make me talk a lot (always trying to perform as social and gregarious), pay too much attention to rejection, and obsessively engage with whatever I was doing basically as a way of avoiding thinking about the acceptability-question.
This is just one theory. Maybe there are others? Has anybody managed to somewhat-fix their ADHD with just therapy? What made the difference?
Oh, curious. Well would you agree that RSD is a thing, separate from ADHD being a thing? Sounds like in that article you don't but it's also five years old. What do you think now?
Incidentally, the survey question you used there strikes me as not the best:
> I am more sensitive than others to rejection, teasing, criticism, or my own perception that I have failed or fallen short
Taking myself as an example, I don't think I'm in any particular position to judge whether I'm more sensitive than any other person. And probably, when I took your survey 5+ years ago, I would answered "no" to this. But after many years of getting to know myself better I would answer "yes", *only* because I have recently come to understand that what I'm doing is abnormal and maybe "part of the problem" instead of just what it feels like to be alive.
A better question (IMO, although I have no special knowledge about what makes good survey questions) would be to just ask about the effect at all. Something like:
> When I go home after a party, I play through a list of all the mistakes I made in conversations that night
(maybe contrasted to "... I think about how much fun I had")
or
> My memories of childhood are predominately those of situations in which I screwed up, was made fun of, or was embarrassed.
or
> I occasionally have to leave social situations because I don't know how to act around the people around me and feel like I'm going to panic.
etc. Not that I have, like, a confirmed "RSD" diagnosis... but there are a bunch of other effects I can imagine probing without asking anyone to understand how they measure up to others.
Just so you know, I've been advised to accept an ADHD diagnosis from several doctors, and my experience seems very similar to yours, with very similar symptoms, especially what I consider "being a creature of regret", where I seem to only record negative memories (mostly about what I perceive/remember to be bad personal interactions), and have a really great memory for detail, except for emotionally charged events like arguments. I've never connected or considered these things to be related to ADHD, but it's a data point for you. I also talk constantly, over other people, I'm gregarious around people (but don't seek out company, I'm happy to be alone), poor time management and poor sense of time, tendency to be either distracted or hyper focused, I fiddle constantly with objects, etc etc.
My uneducated guess: What if brain uses different mechanisms for "good" emotions and "bad" emotions, and ADHD is basically a deficit in noticing or remembering the "good" emotions.
It could explain why ADHD and depression often go together (I think).
It could explain why it is easy for ADHD people to get addicted to stuff: basically, strong positive emotions are often the only positive emotions they remember, so the day in retrospective feels like "all boring, except for that one thing" -- then of course you cannot give up on that one thing.
It could explain the difficulty with doing work: the emotional rewards of doing something successfully are usually too small to notice.
It could explain why people with ADHD kinda don't want to do even the things they really like to do: the liking is strong when it happens, but becomes a colorless memory afterwards.
Curious. Lidocaine is over the counter, though. Maybe we should all go do this test and just find the answer?
I don't know the slightest thing at neurology, but it seems like it's still possible that a neural state could be responsible for a physical equilibrium in which lidocaine sensitivity is diminished. It could even be some epigenetic effect. Without knowing the actual genetic mechanism this doesn't really rule out that it's psychological. (notwithstanding my own ignorance of how these things work)
Dr. Segal has observed that in affected individuals, the serum (blood) ion levels are normal, but those normal levels are insufficient for this mutated ion channel to work in the "normal" way.
The result of the mutation is higher signal sensitivy, but lower discretion. The benefits are quick response to environmental signals (Squirrel!) but the downsides are poor prioritization (oh right I'm still in class) and calibration ("stop yelling at me" "I wasn't yelling"). Dr. Segal has quipped that this variant is the "sentry gene".
If you know you have lidocaine insensitivity and suspect that you have adhd, what I can say is that exercise and a low-salt, low-carb diet help. Salt-wasting functions like sweating help. Avocados are a good source of potassium, bananas are not (they don't have much, and they have high sugar, possibly resulting in a net negative effect). For improving your medical appointments, articaine and bupivicaine may have better results than lidocaine and most doctor and dentist offices can stock them if given advance notice. Over the counter oral potassium does exist, but some people need a lot and I'd advise you to consult your doctor. For some lucky individuals, in concert with those other measures coffee can be a sufficient replacement for harder stimulants - and a coffee date is a much more versatile social encounter than a ritalin date.
Psychologist here. Not a direct answer to your question, but wanted to let you know that a couple of particularly smart psychiatrists I know believe that MAOI antidepressants treat rejection sensitivity dysphoria. I have seen an MAOI be very effective in 2 people, both of whom were diagnosable as having major depression -- but their main depressive symptom was rejection sensitivity, coupled with anguished rumination about past rejections, loneliness because they avoided people for fear of more rejection, and hopelessness about the future. They did not have many of the other classic symptoms of depression: sleep and appetite disturbance, concentration difficulty, feeling of being slowed down, loss of interest in sex.
Also, in my opinion it is not possible to figure out whether someone's difficulty sticking with plans and tasks is a "wiring" problems if they are people who habitually spend a great deal of time gaming and/or online entertainment via youtube and social media. The pull of either of those things is so strong that while they are not true addictions, they might as well be. So if you're spending a lot of time online and find it's very hard to go for long without checking your email, visiting your favorite sites or gaming, cut *way back* on online activities and then after you've adjusted to that assess your ability to stick with tasks. I highly recommend Beeminder for help with changing habits and sticking with plans and resolutions.
Thanks for the recommendation on MAOI. After realizing how many of these symptoms I have I've been planning to seek treatment immediately and it will be helpful to be able to ask for something in particular. I've taken adderral, for instance, and didn't find it helpful -- it seemed to make me feel like I already feel all the time!
As for managing it, agreed, gaming and internet addiction obviously messes things up. For the most part I manage that well.. Unless the RSD kicks in and then causes a spiral and then it tends to get out of hand for a while. So I'm trying to find the 'root' cause that prevents the loop from continuing.
Sounds like you’re going about things in a smart way. About MAOIs: There are the oldest class of antidepressants and many psychiatrists feel they are not experienced enough with them to prescribe them. Also when you’re on an MAOI foods containing tyramine cause your blood pressure to rise, so you have to avoid them. It’s not all that many foods , and unless you screw up big time with the diet you will not have major consequences, but psychiatrists not used to MAOI’s are spooked by the tyramine issue. There is a world expert on MAOIs who has a lot of info on his site, Psychotropical. Scott also recommends his site. I recommend you find someone who is comfortable with prescribing them, rather than someone who grudgingly says they’ll prescribe an MAOI if you try a bunch of other antidepressants first and they do not help.
Thanks for the info. I have tried other antidepressants (several Ssris, when I thought the real problem was just depression) and wasn't satisfied with that. So maybe I have a case. But yeah I'm gonna ask around. Unfortunately finding doctors and making appointments is about the most painful thing in the world so it's gonna take some real intention to do it.
Well, on Psychology Today many psychiatrists give email addresses, so at least you don't have to start by phoning ;-] I recommend that your email be brief and friendly and not too detailed -- just give them basic demographics (gender, age, profession) and say you suffer from a form of depression that was not helped by SSRI's & would like to see a psychopharmacologist to discuss other possibilities. If you are able to pay out of pocket you will have more options than if you need to use your insurance. Fees for initial evals or several hundred, but once you've moved on to trying meds appts are briefer and more spread out, and once you are on a med that works they are quite brief and infrequent so total outlay is not terribly high.
I suspect ADHD is, under the covers, something like "Single-threading".
Talking with other people, they have multiple thoughts going on, in some fashion - something that can step into their process and go "Hey you should do this other thing instead."
My suspicion is that people with ADHD, only having something like a single thread of thought, have no "check" to pull them out of that thought, or redirect it.
When the thread is doing something useful - flow state. However, if you're trying to do one thing and your one thread doesn't stay on that thing but goes off on a tangent, you don't have anything to pull it back to what it was supposed to be doing.
Personally I find the term ADHD to be incredibly judgy and demeaning against those of us who were literally born this way and who's only problem with it is that the world order is run by people who regardless as defective and therefore dish out reward and punishment along those lines.
But without acquiescing to the pathologizing of us, your description is very excellent. I'm not sure if *all* aspects of what people generally put in the ADHD bag relate to this but yes, in a nutshell it is that we live in the present.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.
Is living no more than tending to your meat? And your body no more than a thing to cover in raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Is your living no more worthwhile than theirs?
Which of you by taking thought can add even a cubit unto his stature?
“find the term ADHD to be incredibly judgy and demeaning against those of us who were literally born this way and who's only problem with it is that the world order is run by people who regardless as defective and therefore dish out reward and punishment along those lines.”
How is that anything other than a cry for the very victim status you don’t want, the very pathologising you oppose? I may or may not have ADHD, I do find concentration hard sometimes but I’ve decided not to really get a diagnosis as I’m functional enough. Nobody is out to get you, the system isn’t designed to harm you, but being able to concentrate garners advantages, like being tall, smart, outgoing and so on.
I agree that it presents that way but my question is based on the suspicion that the single threading is a symptom instead of the cause. *why* is a person single threading? Because something about multithreading is very painful for them, at a social/security/self-worth/trauma level.
I can't tell you how to feel nor do I buy into the idea that ADHD should be treated (or called that) nor do I think that naval gazing on ones' ADHD tends to be wise.
All that said, I believe that being treated as if there is something "wrong" with us and suffering the consequences of being the way is all the trauma anyone would need.
And that the first step towards a happier self is to stop believing that they are right and that "there's something wrong with you"
Every great religion, from Jesus'ism to Taosim has been shouting at mankind to stop engorging themselves on the poisonous Tree of Knowledge but to instead enjoy the Tree of Life.
That's fair and I have tried to think that way. Especially while high it seems obvious to me. But somehow believing one is fine is the same as being fine, and the belief won't stick. So if nothing else the interest in medication is trying to navigate 'belief space' to a place where that belief will be sticky instead of transient.
That said there is nothing intellectually objectionable about one's brain being miswired the same way one's leg can be broken. And if that miswiring is sticky and keeps hurting people, my morality at least says to search for a way to fix it.
Also, though, advice is nice and all, but I'd only really care about it coming from someone who actually managed to change their perspective and feel better after following it. Otherwise there's no way to distinguish good advice from fake advice that just sounds good.
Well I'm super duper ADHD and due to the automatic and overwhelming discrimination we face (most poor people, half of all prisoners, etc) I'm definitely game to pick up tips on jumping the occasional hurdle -- in pretty much exactly the same way people all over the world purchase bleaching or whitening agents to make themselves look lighter and thereby not suffer as much for their swarthiness in the benighted places that they live.
But I downright pity anybody who actually thinks that his genes make him "less than" somebody else. Your color, height, looks, and yes, neurobiology are as legitimate as anybody else's (provided you stand up for your own equality that is).
Anyway, I'm definitely NOT giving advice here, most especially because your primary concern appears to be about your perception of yourself within society rather than (in my case) the wholesale absence of any executive function. (I mean I know that "technically l" objects don't disappear when I close my eyes but, realistically? Come on... It's a whole new moment boy!)
This lacuna in my capabilities is its own reward but it also vauses me incredible frustrations and dangers due to misperceptions of me by transactionalist climbers.
Oh, and it's no fun being told that I was blessed with talents and gifts unknown on Earth since DaVinci bore Jesus love child but that, due to my being bad bad bad! I'm wasting God's/Nature's gifts like nobody's business.
However other than douchebags and dickheads demanding that I bow to whatever hierarchial system they themselves bow to (and to accuse me of fooling them or being somehow wicked for being "happy while poor") I quite enjoy being me. And based on what you sound like, I imagine that you'd quite enjoy being you.
By all means, strive and struggle to a point that's useful or (heaven forfend) a point you feel compelled to be the expectations of others (I have seen this in myself, and far far FAR worse in some close relatives) but at least know that you're God's Child (if that metaphor makes sense to you) in equal amount to any other homo sapien body on the planet.
Why do you think you are miswired? I accepted my personality and behavior, modified a few things to make it easier to get along in the world, and simply go along knowing I have flaws like everyone does. Most of the issues that these behaviors cause are simply a product of trying to live in a world of offices, paperwork, and arbitrary goals set by other people. Make yourself free of these things. They are the problem, not you. I had terrible angst while I was trying to work in an office setting, at a non profit, even though I did direct service and enjoyed that post of my work. But I was miserable with nonsensical rules and limits, codified tedium, meaningless 'goals'.
I left that and got a job working outside building landscapes and gardens. I became an excellent heavy equipment operator because of my bodies desire to be in motion, and my ability to hyper focus. I am excellent on anything client facing because I am happy to talk and explain minute details at length. My alleged disability was simply misallocated strength that a bureaucratic world did not appreciate.
The only thing I ever got paid for that was more fun than the pay was giving tours in Jerusalem's Old City.
I never made the mental transition from "I love this!" to "I could get rich doing this!" which likely accounts both for why I loved it and for why I never got rich doing it.
My experience, with Inattentive type ADHD, has been almost the opposite. It has always felt that there is a multilane highway running in my head. If the lanes are all full then I am "focused", but if some lanes are empty they will go looking for traffic to fill up. In practice this means I am much more focused and less anxious working with noise or music on in the background. In total silence I am apt to look for distractions or other stimulus.
I kind of like that theory, but wondered what you think of my view that gaming and social media browsing are a sort of addictive, bastardized substitute for flow states. Seems like they interfere with people's ability to commit to non-screen activities deeply enough and for long enough to reach flow states doing other things -- rock climbing, writing, sketching, skateboarding, whatever.
One model for this is that most things in daily life are actually quite boring and games are a bit less.
And by 'boring' I mean... They don't seem to accomplish what a person perceives their goals as. If suddenly they had a place to go or an activity to do that seemed to really solve their problems, for instance a safe social environment with lots of potential that makes them feel more complete by putting energy into it, then it starts to win out. But that is very hard to find these days. Hence sitting at the computer.
I think it's partly a matter of legibility, the clarity and frequency of goals.
So, even though my daughter bragging about me to a third party is several orders of magnitude more satisfying and motivating than any reward a game could ever offer, it's very difficult to predict how my actions can contribute to that, and that factors into motivation as well. Unfortunately, that'show most valuable things in life are.
Yes that’s true, it’s harder to find, because so many other people are home sitting at their computers. Most of the settings I know of these days where you find people who are not computer centered involve physical activities: ultimate frisbee, salsa dancing, hiking, rock climbing, skiing, etc. I’m sure there are quite a few other kinds of settings too. Let’s see: Buddhist meditation and study , playing music together, stuff with drones, volunteering, political action, gardening.
I'd frame them as highly attractive targets for flow states (for most people), however, rather than substitutes. I enjoy the flow state in and of itself, so anything that can inspire and sustain it is good.
As I've gotten older, fewer and fewer video games inspire a flow state in me, and the flow states don't last as long. I can see how, if this weren't the case, or if it impaired my life, I'd see things differently.
In a sub comment behind the fold I took the plunge and shared a particular video of mine.
I was responding to a comment about different laws in different countries regarding free speech and agreeing that (while there are legal means in place to get around the problem) it would in fact be ideal if Freedom Rang from the Rhine to the Rio and that I'm actually interested in inviting the world to a conversation just as soon as I can find a single word description for the project.
(This isn't what you asked, but just in case it needs saying: the beaten path stuff in SF is actually really worth it, with the exception of Pier 39.)
Salesforce Park is new enough that it might not be part of many itineraries, but it's very much worth it.
The Presidio often gets overlooked, aside from the GGB. The Disney Family Museum is neat if you're into animation & history, and it's next to the fantastic new Tunnel Tops park.
If you're looking for a good viewpoint, skip Twin Peaks and instead head to Tank Hill, Corona Heights, and the 16th street Tiled Steps that lead up to Grandview Park.
If you go to Chinatown, get off Grant street and walk Stockton instead.
Rather than the Upper Haight, I like the Divisadero corridor by Alamo Square and the Lower Haight.
1. Wednesdsys and Sundays, there is a farmers market outside the Asian Art museum. 11 am to 4pm. Best fruits and veggies ever!
2. The Computer History museum in Mountainview. Check online for days they're closed.
3. Saravana Bhavan (bay area, not SF), for possibly the best South Indian food in America. There are other contenders for this spot, depending on who you ask.
Its not in SF, but for someone from outside the Bay Area with food interests the Berkeley Bowl is worth a visit. One of the most impressive grocery stores I have ever seen.
It has an enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, etc., of interest to those who are interested in food, cooking history, ethnic cuisines, etc. Most grocery stores have never, for instance, heard of quinces. When I was there a few years ago they had three or four different sorts/qualities/etc.
Is it better than Berkeley Bowl? (I don't know HEB at all.)
Once, I counted over 12 different varieties of fresh cucumbers at the Western location (the one near the highway). It is by far the best supermarket I have seen, including some in France (although maybe not some in Japan that are pretty special too).
Walking down Valencia street in the mission, from dandelion chocolate through 24th, and then turn left and explore the murals. It's not too esoteric but I enjoy so much (826 Valencia, Paxton gates, dogeared books, dandelion, radio habana). Also believe the burritos at Cancun (19th/Mission) are indisputably the best
Once I saw an illustration with two versions of a composition by Mondrian, one as he painted it and the other with all of the lines made the same thickness, which altered the balance of it completely. It was perhaps in a book of Edward Tufte or Christopher Alexander. But now I can’t find it. Does anyone happen to know where this came from?
Hamas's ostensible reason for their terror attacks was to "defend Al Aqsa". There are people who buy that, or who feel sympathy for what Hamas has done given the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you are one of those people, I have a question for you. Would your view of these actions change if in fact Hamas's actions were not motivated by defending their religious or ethnic group, but a cynical coordinate effort with Russia to distract the West from Ukraine?
Because senior Hamas officials met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov after the last round of fighting [1] and possibly a number of times since then [2], Russia pre-positioned captured Ukrainian weapons in Gaza [3], Russian state-linked hackers began hacking Israel the day before the attack and threw in additional resources within an hour of the rocket strikes. Those rockets fell at 6:30AM and the hacking attacks that morning were by 7:30AM (both Moscow and Jerusalem time) [4], an unlikely hour to make a snap decision and get results. The unified message of Russian propagandists is weak evidence by comparison, but is notable.
Whether these reports turn out to be true (personally somewhat doubtful, but very low confidence), it is quite common for resistance/independence/revolutionary movements to coordinate with great powers who have very different motivations. To choose an example with much different emotional valence, american revolutionaries motivated by democratic self-determination worked closely with the absolutist monarchy of france, who wanted to weaken its rival england. And the mujahideen, motivated among other things be maintaining a conservative islamic society, worked closely with the liberal, majority christian US who disliked the USSR for different reasons.
I have no idea whether those stories are true, but:
My gut reaction is that it's Ukrainian propaganda to keep the US focused on Russia. Which contrasts with the purpose you suggest. So perhaps there's a question of how the US would be likely to respond if the story were true?
Also: why on earth would Ukraine give weapons to anyone? Don't they need them at home? Why would Russia engage in some kind of elaborate cat and mouse game, when Ukraine's response will always be "nuh-uh, it's Russia's fault"?
>a cynical coordinate effort with Russia to distract the West from Ukraine?
What does Hamas gain here? Other than the opportunity to kill a bunch of Israelis, which they didn't need Russia for. What is Russia offering in exchange for all those dead Hamas members (and Palestinians more generally).
But I think it's important for people to consider the hypothetical, because it's at least plausible that the Ukrainian story is correct. And even if those weapons ended up in Gaza by some other pathway, I find the "coincidence" of these well timed hacking attacks deeply suspicious.
So much of the defenses I've seen of these atrocities has started with "but Israel...". Now, I don't find the specifics of that argument convincing at all, particularly the part that reads "these atrocities against civilians were necessary because", but clearly some people do find them at least somewhat convincing. I suspect that people would find it much less morally ambiguous if Hamas's real reasons were "Hamas is afraid of irrelevance in a world with Israel-Saudi peace" and "Russia is afraid of Western aid to Ukraine". Never mind the interrelatedness of these conflicts given that Iran is a major supplier to both.
I don't see how any of that would reflect on Hamas' motivations. What's stopping it from being a coordinate effort with Russia to defend their religious or ethnic group?
That move doesn't defend Hamas's religion or ethnic group, but could significantly alter Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If Russia merely believed in Hamas's mission, they would have proudly sent their own weapons to Hamas. This alleged Russian move seeks to use - or cause - another conflict to take the Western attention off of Russia's crimes.
So we return to the original question. If, hypothetically, Hamas was proven to have been cynically motivated to help Russia (or derail Israeli-Saudi peace) instead of their claimed motivations, would that change your opinion of their actions?
> Russia has claimed that Ukraine is supplying weapons to Hamas:
In which universe would doing *that* make sense?
First, Ukraine currently needs all the weapons it can get.
Second, the last time I checked, Israel supported Ukraine, or at least they had the common enemy Iran (the producer of drones that keep falling on Ukraine's cities).
Third, considering that the president of Ukraine is Jewish, I doubt he spend his time inventing strategies to hurt Israel.
So, this doesn't make sense at all.
(On the other hand, it makes perfect sense from the Russian perspective where the president of Ukraine is a Nazi. Of course a true Nazi would focus on destroying Israel even when his own country is burning; just look at Hitler's priorities during the war. So the conclusion is that this story was written for Russian audience, and for the credulous people all over the globe.)
(Note: I am not making a statement on possible Russia's involvement. I don't know. I am saying that the hypothesis of Ukraine's involvement doesn't make sense.)
That's an argument for Russia's motivations, not Hamas'. If a driver picks up a hitchhiker, you don't assume that both the driver and hitchhiker have the same end destination.
It seems like a reasonably sensible move on Russia's part, though. If you're Russia right now then one of your best moves is to get the fickle Western public distracted with some other bullshit so they lose interest in Ukraine.
Speculation: I expect that if the public doesn't pay attention, Western governments will continue with the status quo of supporting Ukraine. If anything, it's if there is a lot of attention at Ukraine and at the Western support for it that naysayers eventually start opposing spending more money on it, or that it becomes a partisan issue where if one side supports it, then the other side reflexively opposes supporting it.
I think this is definitely true for the US, where the establishment is substantially more pro-Ukraine than the average person might be. Do you think this is also true for Europe thkugh?
[edit] This an attempt at modeling what A. Huxley would call the "common ground" of humanity and my speculation on how it came about supported by various authors. Lastly, a few techniques that seem broadly helpful in living well.
"When the drive for self-preservation operates freely we feel pleasure; when it is impeded we
feel pain.”
--Spinoza via K. Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
Being Human (plateaued)
TOC
Instinct to Morality ............. 2 [minor diagram upd.]
Does anyone have a good explanation for the sudden peace treaty between the ADL and Musk? (see https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1709592361481777360 ; this was before the recent Hamas attack so that can't explain it). Did Musk back down in some way? Did the ADL back down in some way? Did they realize they didn't actually disagree on anything? Why was it in (at least one of their) interests to start a giant fight last month, and why did it stop being in their interests to pursue that fight?
Yaccarino’s claim is true but misleading. 90 of the advertisers are back on the platform but their ad-spends are about 90% below pre-Musk Twitter. Total Ad-revenue is 42% down.
Matt Levine wrote about X ad revenue today [0], citing an article by Media Matters [1]. Apparently many of the advertisers that have returned have spent negligible amounts of money since coming back, e.g., Media Matters claims AT&T spent a total of $781 on X ads over a 12 week period. Levine suggests that this is due to intentional efforts by Yaccarino to improve the "number of top pre-acquisition advertisers currently advertising" metric despite the fact that those advertisers aren't willing to spend material amounts of money on X ads.
What on earth is the rationale for a major company to spend a tiny but non-zero amount on Twitter advertising? If you think Musk is a Bad Person and you don't want to be seen as supporting him, any spend no matter how small makes you seem tainted. But if you don't have that concern, a microspend isn't even going to be worth the time it takes for your marketing team to configure the ad. Either run a real campaign or don't run one at all - what's the logic for a token spend?
Probably, being "data driven". As a big company's marketing department you're probably running tiny campaigns all the time to see what clickthrough rates they deliver. This (a) lets executives think they're being clever, and (b) justifies having a huge staff in the marketing department to be forever configuring all these experimental ads.
> Several of Musk's Jewish business allies, reportedly including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and investor Steve Rattner, have attempted to defuse tensions between Musk and the ADL, all while X prepares for the potential lawsuit against ADL.
True but still a warm meeting with the PM of Israel does a lot to assuage fears of liberal pro-Israel American Jews that you are not good on Jewish issues. Even if they personally don’t like Netanyahu or his policies.
I saw some pro-Israel account on X praising Musk for X allowing the circulation of Hamas atrocity videos in ways that (this account said) wouldn't have been allowed under previous Twitter admins, which I took as probable evidence of X actually boosting such videos, and pro-Israel narratives generally. It could be possible that Musk had agreed to institute such a policy even earlier, and it just happened that it suddenly and drastically gained a new prominence two days ago.
When I was young, a museum exhibit that made a great impression on me (we didn't travel internationally then - well, children didn't unless their parents were very, very wealthy or missionaries or oil company executives or something) was the display of gifts from other heads of state or their representatives, to the LBJ White House, which had pride of place in his presidential library. It was a quite marvelous collection of objects, to my eyes. (Gifts were more of a big deal then too.)*
Hopefully this will not inspire any tangents about LBJ. Maybe I should have left his name out. But: the whole thing had a cool midcentury vibe.
I loved connecting the diversity of gifts with the diversity of countries. (I didn't yet have any inkling then, that the countries featured in the Countries of the World series that I also then loved, with their pictures - were not all totally equal in terms of their integrity as countries, or their origins. I knew no history. I knew something about Christmas customs in Sweden, e.g.) I loved the concept of "country" and "all different".
The thought that the world was so diverse thrilled me.
What a disappointment it has been to find that that diversity in the world has diminished over the rest of my life, and that it held a completely different meaning for everyone else, or at least those who would prove most influential. And that while other countries may persist - Iran seems eternal, for instance - it was my own that was feeblest of all in its country-ness.
*This sort of thing is evidently embarrassing now. The gifts have been reduced to a small display near the bathroom, I believe, on an upper floor.
While countries are becoming less diverse, I also think this is accelerated by an insane increase in the amount of information we consume on a daily basis. Look at the top players on GeoGuessr, for example. They can tell the difference between an Indonesian lamp pole and a Malaysian one.
You reach the limits of human diversity a lot quicker with the Internet and mass communications. So even if diversity had never been lost, you'd still be seeing the world shrink every day.
I once saw a Polynesian hat made from the tanned skin of a pufferfish in one of these sorts of collections (maybe royal). It was a very round affair with the tail at the top like a crest.
For "dress as your family ancestry day" at the kid's elementary school, which at that time cultivated a sort of international reputation, a friend would send her son off in a hat with what she claimed was an extinct bird from the homeland. It wasn't her homeland, it was her kids' - she kept a sort of ironic distance from it - but she loved pulling out that hat.
I enjoyed a similar collection of gifts which takes pride of place in the National Museum in Beijing. There's a large room filled with African wood carvings, Maori ritual tools, ornate swords, decorative plates etc. from around the world.
The USA had gifted to the Chinese leadership a small pewter owl, a large bronze eagle, and a bust of Lincoln with "The better part of one's life consists of his friendships" beneath it.
It contained a weird Google Drive link plus a quote from Loki, and three or four commenters said they couldn't understand what it was or what was going on but it looked malicious. I didn't check myself. If you want to repost it with more of an explanation, feel free.
The reported "weird Google Drive link" I've used several times before as Google checks for malicious files - which was my reply to them. The "Loki" quote was meant to be ambiguous and enticing to a file portraying aspects of morality which none of us are entirely comfortable with. I provided a TOC. I'll change quote back to Spinoza, nixing Loki. Thanks for letting me repost.
[feel free to delete this thread, and again, thanks]
I posted the link to Aella's recent article about a gigantic kink survey unthinkingly to a space that's generally unfriendly to rationalists. I just posted it because I thought it was interesting, and forgot about the rationalist markers.
Some points were brought up that might be reasonable-- are there a lot of kinksters, perhaps especially trans, who are sick of questionnaires and therefore won't reply? I don't think she mentioned that particular selection effect.
There was also a commenter who was concerned about privacy for individuals. Are Aella's surveys putting people at risk? At more risk than just living in the world? It's not as though medical systems are proof against data breaches.
Have people who've answered questionnaires said that the questionnaires made their lives worse in any way? This seems unlikely to me, but I might as well check.
I hang out there anyway because they're frequently interesting on other subjects.
It looks like the mods have deleted my post but haven't banned me. I'm not going to argue with them. Some of the commenters were talking about getting me banned.
As a rationalist I might say stupid things but hopefully I’m politely stupid!
> Some of the commenters were talking about getting me banned.
I’m sorry to hear that. If you don’t mind me asking, where was this? Sounds like a left wing sub Reddit to me.
> Some points were brought up that might be reasonable-- are there a lot of kinksters, perhaps especially trans, who are sick of questionnaires and therefore won't reply?
I wonder if trans people really get more surveys than anyone else. I’m sick of surveys and I’m a vanilla cis guy.
Do you think that the unspoken problem that the commenters had with the survey is that it doesn’t support their ideological views and therefore the commenters are angry? If the survey had different results would the commenters have been okay with it?
I'm pretty tired of surveys myself, especially phone surveys from businesses. They take forever. I wouldn't say I'm plagued with surveys, though.
That might be a part of the problem, but only a small part. They (or at least a very vocal contingent) hate rationalists for a number of reasons, including support of eugenics.
My post also got a half dozen "favorites" which seem to be an equivalent to likes.
I believe I'm not the only rationalist or rationalist-adjacent person there, but we're pretty cautious.
I think that if the people filling out the survey (for the sake of filling out the survey) understand how the information is going to be used, then they gave informed consent to accept those privacy risks.
This, with the caveat that it's as long as they actually know what data is going to be released (e.g. individual responses, or per-question aggregates only).
I'm not convinced Aella's surveys add much to the risks of just being alive, considering the data breaches from large organizations. My medical information seems to be protected by people asking me for my name, birthdate, and sometimes my address. This would be a joke if it were funny.
You might try Tom Holland's book "Dominion" which concerns itself with how Western moral ideas came about. His thesis is that modern Western values have their underpinnings in the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Roman's and Greeks did not believe that all men were equal in any sense: as Aristotle wrote, "That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." It was the Christians who came teaching "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
This page from the webcomic "The Illustrated Guide to Law" might be helpful, as it gives on overview of the development of these ideas during the Early Modern period and through the Enlightenment.
I did read Dominion (forgot to mention that) but I found it too pop-sci, pretty shallow and the author seemed a bit too convinced by his own ideas. It doesn't really argue that equality is an uniquely Western concept, it just asserts it. Some ideas are asserted as within this tradition and some ideas outside of it or counter to it, again without any real argument besides that the author seem to like the included ideas and dislike the excluded ones. It lists incidents and tidbits but doesn't have the confidence to draw trends. And some of the sources are sloppy (e.g. the Nazi table talks have been discredited).
But basically I'm looking for Dominion but academic (and contrarian in the best of worlds).
Sorry friend, I'm all pop history. I couldn't give you anything a Google search couldn't.
I see your point about Dominion. Holland does seem to be regularly starting to make an argument, gesturing strongly towards it, but not sticking around to land it. Frustrating. But at least he gives a lot of primary sources you can check up on.
It sounds like you really need info on non-Western cultures and what they thought about equality. Maybe read the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects? That would get you the foundations of most of the non-Western world. If you find concepts of equality there, then they're not unique to the West.
I was reviewing trolley problems with my children yesterday. Aside from having to explain what a trolley was, it was interesting how they tried to push the limits of the hypotheticals. I discovered that, while trolley problems intuitively worked for them about as I'd have expected, not all ethical thought experiments fared as well.
In particular, Peter Singer's drowning child analogy did not go well. While I agree with the ethos of charitable giving, and am not trying to litigate the fundamental ethics of altruism, I think the drowning child analogy struggles to connect in a some key ways:
1. Saving the child's life isn't fundamentally a monetary transaction. Losing the value of the suit is incidental to saving the child's life. If you were jogging in a track suit or a swimsuit you'd do the same thing. The analogy forces us to transform the saving of the child's life into a transaction when it takes the leap from "would you save a drowning child even if it happened cost you the value of a nice suit" all the way to, "would you trade the value of a suit to save the life of a child in a low-income country?" Fundamentally, the thing that caused you to take action was the child in peril and the observation that you could do a thing to save that child's life. When you decide to jump in and save the drowning child, you didn't consider the value of the suit because you're not a monster.
But extending the analogy to far-away people forces you to consider the value of the suit as part of the motivating principle for jumping into the lake in the first place. It wasn't a transaction until the analogy turned it into one. Now, the obvious rejoinder would be, "Isn't trading the value of the suit itself an action you could take to save a child's life?" That may be true, but it's not the value judgement the analogy is asking us to consider in the case of the drowning child.
We can stretch the analogy a little farther to demonstrate this point. That suit you're wearing cost $100,000. Do you still jump in to save the child? If you didn't, choosing instead to preserve the value of the suit, would you feel bad about watching that child drown? Personally, I'd jump in - or if not feel terrible in a fundamentally different way than I would feel for not donating to help people far away from me. And yet nobody is suggesting that $100k per life saved is a reasonable threshold for EA. Maybe you could argue that's because there's a lot of lower-hanging fruit on the EA tree before we hit the $100k/life threshold. By the point where we're asking people to donate that much per life saved, the moral argument gets a lot less compelling - and yet the drowning child argument DOESN'T. It's seemingly unaffected by cost, opposite to the way the far-off transaction is entirely dependent on cost.
Indeed, is there a dollar amount for the suit that changes the mental calculus for whether you feel compelled to jump into the lake and save the drowning child, versus selling the suit and donating the money to buy bed nets to prevent malaria? Say you could save a hundred lives by donating the suit to buy bed nets. Arguably, you should keep walking past the drowning child to preserve the value of the suit for far-off EA work - secure in the knowledge you're doing the right thing. But who has that intuition? At that point, the analogy is no longer working with our intuitions but against them.
The drowning child analogy fails to connect when it transforms an intuition that's not fundamentally a transaction into a transaction.
2. Saving a drowning child carries certainty of the benefit. Charitable giving to far away people (or far future people) loses this link to both certainty and benefit. As with so many financial transactions that seem good on paper (but end terribly in real life), the presence and magnitude of risk are ignored.
There's always the potential that your intervention doesn't have the effect you're hoping for, such that a "life saved" from buying a theoretical bed net doesn't translate into an actual bed net getting delivered to an actual person in need or that person doesn't use it in a way that saves their life or whatever. When you jump into the lake to save the child, you know the child's life was saved. The corollary is at least as important: if you DON'T jump in to save the child you have to watch them drown, knowing that you might have saved them. The risk differential is very large.
Okay, sure, but does that break the analogy? After a few dozen bed nets you can probably estimate that at least one life has been saved. Maybe you have to toss a bit more money at the problem to get the effect you wanted, but the low-hanging fruit is already so much lower than the cost of a suit that we should be able to price risk into the equation. And yet it still doesn't seem to work.
The problem isn't just the uncertainty of the magnitude of the effect. It's the uncertainty of the presence of an effect at all. Or in some cases, whether the net effect might even be negative. This is especially true in the field of far-off charity work. The long history of attempts at economic aid/development is littered with examples where the best intentions made people worse off than if nothing had been done to 'help'. (https://www.amazon.com/The-Idealist-Jeffrey-Sachs-Poverty/dp/0385525818/) Food aid can be used to prop up a dictatorship and expand suffering. Refugee camps inadvertently prolonged the Rwandan genocide. To this day, compassionate Russian families can take in 'refugee' children from occupied Ukraine - an act that outside of Russia is considered a war crime of forced deportation and cultural genocide. The problem with being far from the problem is not knowing whether your efforts are actually helping. In the drowning child analogy, there's no chance that the child might have survived if you hadn't jumped in to save them, and a certainty that jumping in to save the child won't INCREASE the chance of the child dying. The intuition we should be taking away from this is that it REALLY matters how certain you are that your solution is effective. Risk should not be ignored.
EA is perfectly positioned to help close the gap of uncertainty. But the only way it can do so is by acknowledging the fundamental problem with the drowning child analogy: the farther away the person in need, the less moral weight we feel toward helping that person. And rightly so! Where the distance is greater, the risk that aid is transformed from net benefit to net harm increases - something the development community has learned through sad experience. One of EA's biggest goals should be risk minimization. We need to transform intangible, uncertain opportunities for aid into something akin to walking by a drowning child, where the potential to save a life is certain. If we can do that, we can restore the link between a drowning child fifteen feet away and suffering people ten thousand miles away. What we can't do is pretend that these two situations are the same, as the drowning child analogy tempts us to do. Making them morally equivalent is a very difficult, unsolved problem. But one we are working on.
3. There's a story in the New Testament that has always struck me as odd. A woman washes Jesus' feet with some expensive oil (and her hair?), to which Judas complains that this was a big waste of money that could have been donated to the poor. On one hand, this demonstrates that the argument over transforming acts of compassion into transactions to help the poor is a lot older than the present debate. On the other hand, Jesus' answer seems a bit out of character when he says, "The poor you have with you always." Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?
I've thought about this a lot. I think it's a direct response to Judas's impulse to throw money at "the poor" in an attempt to "fix the problem". Poverty is a long-run problem that can't be solved by blindly throwing money at it and hoping it goes away. That's not what Jesus did when he visited the poor, because it's not a real solution. Real solutions to human suffering require more personal care and attention than just selling stuff to "give to the poor". I think Jesus is correct to diagnose simple "give to the poor" solutions as inadequate to solve - or even make progress on - problems of human suffering. Indeed, that approach will ensure poverty will always be with us.
I like that EA is trying to do the hard work of trying to solve the hard problems of making altruism effective. In my experience, many in the community are not making the same crass financial calculation Judas made. They take the struggle seriously. I worry a framing like the drowning child analogy, which transforms the hard problem-solving work into a monetary transaction, may do the whole movement a disservice.
I think the important factor that's different between the drowning child and the unknown kid statistically probably dying of malaria somewhere is that in the drowning child thought experiment you're the only person who can save the kid, whereas the other kid can be saved by literally anybody. If I see a child drowning in front of a crowd of ten thousand people, I'm probably not going to be the one who jumps in, I'll probably just assume that someone else in this giant crowd is a trained lifesaver who'll be better at it than me.
I think that's a factor, but I still think there's a moral intuition at play in the presence of other people. There's a famous story that sums up the moral repulsion we have when nobody does anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese
While the details appear to not have panned out as originally reported, the case evokes a specific moral intuition. The idea that a woman bled out after being raped and stabbed, with nobody stepping in to help her despite 38 people supposedly being witness to the crime, is morally repugnant. It's fine to assume someone else will jump in and save a drowning child, but most people will stick around long enough to confirm the kid is getting saved before leaving the scene.
I do think there's a point to be made about moral proximity. If you're not close enough to a critical situation, it's probably best to stay out of the way absent some special abilities.
"This woman is having a heart attack. Is there a doctor in the house?"
"Excuse me, I'm a doctor."
"Can you help her?"
"Umm ... I have a PhD in geology, so-"
"Get out of here."
Perhaps this partly explains why everyone has to rubber-neck at the scene of a car wreck as they drive by? It's nothing you can help with 99.99% of the time, but everyone has to slow down anyway to confirm they don't have a moral duty of care to help out. They could just drive by without slowing down. By right, that's what they SHOULD do! Yet for some reason large numbers of people instinctively slow down to catch a glimpse of the wreckage.
How to analogize this to charity, though? Say there's a burning building. You see a dozen people have formed a bucket brigade, but they could use more bodies on the line. A few people are engaged rescuing people from the building - and you can see people still emerging from the structure. This isn't a single-hero problem, like with the drowning child.
You could decide not to get involved, sure, but seeing that a group of people is engaged in the crisis you decide to get involved. Having answered the first question, "Is there anything I can do to help?" you're now faced with a second question, "How will my help be most useful?"
You could do the heroic thing and rush into the building to help get survivors out. For some people, that answer will result in lives saved. However, if you have asthma that would be exacerbated by going into a smoke-filled building, perhaps rushing into the building would just make you another victim who needs to be saved from the flames. In that case, joining the bucket brigade is probably prudent. Or maybe you could tend the wounded. But before you do that, maybe you should try phoning the emergency line to make sure they're sending a fire truck?
The point is that in a large-scale crisis there are often many ways to help, but also many ways to become a burden on those who are helping. While zeal for the cause is laudable, it's also prudent to make sure your efforts are well-targeted. I think this is the ethos of many in the EA community, but the messaging doesn't often get that across very well.
The police invented the entire story as an excuse why they didn't come (despite actually being called), and journalists of course couldn't resist a cool story. And now it's in textbooks.
It seems like it's being recognized as bunk reporting, even if urban legends never die. I referenced it in part to demonstrate that there does appear to be a moral intuition at play when witnessing tragedy from a crowd. Despite the debunked stories to the contrary, people don't stop feeling moral impulses to help just because others are nearby.
" Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?"
Common exegesis on this is that Judas is not really concerned about the money not going to the poor, but not being donated to the group directly. He is traditionally identified as the "holder of the purse", i.e. the guy who managed the money for the apostles and Jesus as they travelled round (and probably the accompanying women etc.) which is that he was the bursar, taking charge of the donations and paying for the expenses. Tradition also claims that he was skimming off the top, so his concern about "this ointment could have been sold for much" is more "and I could have got a percentage of that". It's not coincidental that the narrative continues that immediately after this episode, Judas goes to betray Jesus.
The entire passage is that Jesus is looking forward to His death, hence the mention that she is preparing His body for burial according to custom:
"6 But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."
It's not said that Judas was the one raising objections, but that some of the disciples, or all of them, objected:
"8 And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? 9 For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.”
"4 There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? 5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her."
But Judas is the one who traditionally takes the rap for it.
As to "what kind of answer is this?" it's a reminder that the poor are with us right now, today, and if we want to help them we can - instead of criticising others for the use they make of their money, we should be concerned with the use we make of it. Also that there may be good reasons for not giving money to 'the poor' all the time - such as spending it on burial or other necessities.
That exegesis is based on the optimistic assumption that the story makes sense in a larger system.
One angle could be that people are more generous is repeated prisoner dilemma's, but the last one will find less cooperation. Generally help the poor, but when you're going to die, you might as well get the perfume.
<i>3. There's a story in the New Testament that has always struck me as odd. A woman washes Jesus' feet with some expensive oil (and her hair?), to which Judas complains that this was a big waste of money that could have been donated to the poor. On one hand, this demonstrates that the argument over transforming acts of compassion into transactions to help the poor is a lot older than the present debate. On the other hand, Jesus' answer seems a bit out of character when he says, "The poor you have with you always." Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?</i>
Jesus' mission was to save mankind from their sins, not to set up a poverty-reduction programme. That doesn't mean that reducing poverty isn't good, but it can't come at the expense of spiritual goods; and since Jesus is God, honouring him is a spiritual good. Judas' "Couldn't this money have been spent on the poor?" gets the proper order of things back to front.
I don't see donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation as being transactional. An important part of transactional relationships is that both parties are gaining something. When I donate the the AMF I don't personally receive anything for my donation except the positive feelings associated with doing something good which is also true in the drowning child case. A better framing is simply that I have resources that could help save peoples lives and I am choosing to use it to further that end. If I traveled to Africa and donated my time or I bought food and donated that would you view the relationship as being transactional? People tend to get hung up on the fact that the resource is money, but money is just an abstract representation of value. The resource being money doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the relationship.
You're right that the drowning child isn't quite analogous because the suit is purely incidental and isn't being used to save the child. Imagine instead that you cannot wade into the water yourself, for whatever reason, but can instead tie your clothes together into a makeshift rope that can be used to pull the child in to the shore. I don't think this changes my intuition about the situation at all. I would still feel the need to use my clothes to save the child even if that ruins them. In the case of the AMF or other charities where you are not directly involved in saving the child imagine that there is already someone tying clothes together to make the rope. Do you donate your clothes to the effort?
As for the limits of how much we should spend to save a life, there are no limits. The happiness and wellbeing of people is the fundamental value from which other things derive their value, so there is no limit to how much we should be willing to spend. Suits, houses and money are only valuable to the extent that they can improve people's lives. The only limit is whether the resources can be used more effectively some other way. Donating when it costs $100,000 per life saved feels a lot less morally compelling because it has a much greater cost to you. The value of a suit is relatively insignificant relative to a child's life so if you were in a position where you are spending $100,000 on a suit then donating even at $100,000/life would be morally compelling because the alternatives do not provide much value.
Not saving a drowning child so that you can protect a suit which can be sold to save more people certainly feels absurd but I think that this is just a reflection of the fact that we are in an absurd situation where people spend tens of thousands of dollars on suits when there are people that could be saved with that money. If you made people's choices explicit and asked them to choose between saving a child life or having a nice suit no one would choose the suit yet people make equivalent decisions everyday, myself included. If we didn't live in such a world then you should certainly save the child because no one would be willing to buy your suit for so much money. Since we do live in an absurd world we should expect that sometimes the reasonable thing to do will seem absurd.
It's not absurd. I would gladly spend $100000 to save a family member, but there's no way I'm giving that to charity to save 10 children somewhere across the globe. People who are close to us matter more to us, that's right and good. The child in the lake is close to us, therefore we care. That's how we are, and I think with good reason.
'...if your moral code only ever says "do what feels right to you"...'
In no way did my statement above reflect that sentiment. First, I'm not prescribing a moral code, or even describing one.
Second, I'm speaking about the reality of human experience. It is almost universal that we care about family and people with whom we have close relationships more than strangers. This is almost universally a good thing for many reasons.
Third, I could write a page about coordination problems, local knowledge, metis, etc. but it's safe to say that our humanitarian efforts are much more effective close to home. There are certain low hanging fruit (like bed nets) that have convinced some people that redistributing money broadly across the globe is the most moral choice, but that is not a moral certainty, not obvious, and not something that you should be acting smug about.
I don't think it's sufficient to fall back to saying "we live in an absurd world" to explain why a person doesn't feel morally compelled in one situation but does feel morally compelled in the other. That's kind of my point here, that there's work to do to make the moral case in favor of charitable giving to those outside our immediate circle of experience, and that moral case needs to link the giver to the receiver.
As much as I don't think it's enough to take as a given that people will feel morally inclined to help people far away, I also don't think it's enough to throw up our hands at those absurd people who will pay a bunch of money for suits when people are dying thousands of miles away. If there's no clear path for fixing that far off situation, it's not absurd to buy the suit.
I agree that the use of the word "transactional" is probably inaccurate. However, I do think the analogy inaccurately attempts to convert a moral intuition about proximity and need into a resource-based intuition that simply doesn't fix the situation. It's possible to make the resource-based ethical point, but not by using the drowning child analogy as imagined by Peter Singer. Your framing - where someone is fashioning suits into ropes to help pull the child to shore - is probably closer to the type of situation Singer is trying to get at.
While you are certainly correct that, if you are drawing from the reference class of "all interventions in developing countries", the chance of any specific intervention as beneficial is pretty low.
However, the standard EA reply is the following:
In general, when you look at unsuccessful interventions, that benefit corrupt governments, we find that they involve untraced aid in the form of easily sellable objects, or interventions with lots of "feel good" vibes but no empirical support (playpumps). However, things like Malaria nets have 1. Known effect sizes that have replicated under scrutiny and 2. The product itself is hard to use for the purposes of corruption and 3. The organizations themselves are selected for transparency and avoiding corruption related failure modes. In addition, the reason why malaria nets are chosen instead of more abstract interventions is that basically everyone agrees that children dying or being crippled is bad, so this is less about alleviating poverty in general but of preventing a predictable symptom of poverty.
Now, I'm not saying the OP falls into this fallacy (in fact I think they're earnestly engaging with the topic), but one thing I noticed is that people who raise this set of objections to the drowning child problem, ALSO demonstrate a remarkable lack of interest in confirming or disconfirming whether or not the intervention is effective, or, when evidence is presented, they come up with an entirely new list of objections which justifies their current actions. And that's where I think the drowning child problem clarifies the situation. If you see someone claim that they didn't understand a child was drowning (not unlikely!), and they immediately leave when attempts to explain what child drowning looks like, or claim that children drown elsewhere, so what's the point of saving a particular child, or there were lots of other people around, so why them, I think people would rightly distrust the person's altruism.
I think, conversely, that people should be allowed to walk past drowning children, but that they shouldn't be given credit for being the type of person who rescues drowning children if they consistently don't.
I don't think we disagree. My concern is that EA gets a lot of bad press for doing good work. I was mostly trying to work out how to tweak the framework to make a more effective EA pitch. While I'm sure there are those who, like you say, are intent on walking past the proverbial drowning child. I think there are also many who are skeptical of EA's efforts - especially after the fallout from SBF and some of the more hairbrained theoretical musings that make great opinion articles but don't represent a large percentage of actual EA work in the trenches.
Hm, I guess fundamentally I just don't think there's a way to get around someone's status protection instincts. People generally want to view themselves favorably, and pointing out that they may be doing somewhat non-optimal (or even monstrous) by their own standards will just activate that instinct. See the cousin threads to this one where people justify that people being further away not being helped, is, in fact, ipso facto good, and not an unfortunate fact about human cognition or inability to find information. People who make fun of EA in those ways seem way more obsessed about the status fallout effects ("EAs are just trying to launder their reputation!", the extremely salacious focus on relationships and associated drama and the frequent claims that charity is really about self actualization and not really about helping other people, and therefore you are deficient in personality if you take charity recommendations), and essentially uninterested in the question of "hey, if bad things were happening where it's hard to see and I do not get socially rewarded for it, can I do something about it anyway?"
Maybe we have different audiences we pay attention to. I know the audience you're talking about, but I don't expect to move anyone 100% on any issue. I figure the best I can do is help move someone 10%-20% at a time. If I can move someone who's starting at "EA are the devil!", it'll probably not be all the way to, "I'm totally on board with EA." The best I can hope for is something closer to, "EA are just wrong." Better to start with someone who's at "I've heard EA are weird and insincere," and focus on moving them to, "I've heard conflicting things about EA but it sounds like the first stuff I heard isn't representative of the movement as a whole."
I try to focus less on the extremes, partly because it seems like a worse place to have an impact, and partly because in my experience the extremes get more exposure than their representation. I figure I can do more good focusing on the cases where a marginal difference can tip someone from negative to positive. In my experience, most people who aren't close to an issue don't pay more attention to it than, "this is the general vibe I get from people about it". For these people, hearing an extreme POV yell at them that EA are reputation laundering, disconnected from reality, etc. may set a prior for them to steer clear of EA. Once confronted with an actual effective altruist, though, they'll be curious to confirm their biases. Since they're not particularly invested in the bias itself - they don't really care about the issue, they've just been biased by exposure to extreme views - I have one opportunity to affect their biases for the better. I can do that by representing the most extreme parts of the EA movement, by being defensive and assuming the worst about their motivations, or I can give common-sense explanations about how EA is making progress trying to tackle the kind of hard problem they naturally agree should be addressed. My approach rejects the with-us-or-against-us mentality, because I don't think most people want to pick sides at that stage, so forcing them to choose just results in them choosing status quo anti-EA.
As to the far-off versus nearby phenomenon, I'd like to steelman the argument better than you did. The widespread pattern looks to me like an innate bias toward care for people close to us. I don't think the just-so story from evolution (not empirically validated in a scientific way - but that's its own argument I have with the penchant some old-school evolutionary biologists have for getting way out over their skis vis-a-vis the evidence) is enough to explain the whole phenomenon, or to say that there's some evolutionary holdover that's keeping our global community from rationally caring for those far away. Whatever the source of the bias, I don't think you get past it writ large by pretending it away, or just by preaching the message over and over. I think EA has an important role to play in helping people past this psychological hurdle, partly by identifying enticing opportunities for altruism. You don't need people to commit to EA for them to agree that there's evidence to support an intervention or that the evidence suggests we should redirect our efforts elsewhere. The nice thing about EA is that you don't have to be part of the movement to benefit from attempts to collect good evidence and apply it. All the more reason not to insist on us-versus-them.
I also think, from people I know, that there's a lot of support for truly helping 'far away' people in need. There's a reason those old TV commercials flashed images of starving children in Africa. There's a reason they were successful at getting people to donate. But then rumor spread that those organizations were 9X% overhead or whatever and people stopped trusting that sending a dollar a day would do anything to help the cause.
People DO care. I don't think we have to convince them as much as we think we do. I do think we have to convince people who have been conditioned to be jaded about humanitarian problems that never feel like they get any better. "We can make progress against disease, death, poverty, etc." is news people want to hear, but they've learned not to trust. People WANT to believe we can do better, which is a huge head start for EA after you get past the ex ante bias from detractors and past experience. I don't think the detractors are going away, but we don't have to talk in ways that might lead to bias confirmation.
(Apologies for necro) This comment has been very helpful in light of all the moderately baffling comments against the kidney donation, I think bookmarking or otherwise keeping it available is important for me.
I think you're just right on the merits of all the points you made, and I mostly have some kind of mental block around seeing the positive in people. I think this is a healthy way of framing the situation and having this response saved somewhere or in mind would do help out with my chronic cynicism. And too easy to sour grapes myself on "they were unpersuadable because evolution!"
Health care spending is an interesting case study in the risk/benefit calculation. I think it takes at least as much care and study to ensure that interventions provide any benefit, and that they continue to provide benefit as populations change. I think it needs the same kind of careful, ongoing analysis to ensure not just the money spent is worth the promised benefits. But also that the promised benefits are worth the side effects. In many cases, I think modern medicine does not pass that standard. It's a problem that requires constant vigilance.
The nice thing about hypothetical situations is we can wave away uncertainty. As you point out, in the real world there is uncertainty everywhere - not just in far-off countries. If you're arguing that minimizing uncertainty is at least as important in non-EA interventions like health care and education, I wholeheartedly agree.
Thanks for the video link-- it's about "medical reversals"-- changes in medical advice.
It's possible that giving everyone aspirin to prevent heart attacks *was* a good idea, but people are taking different drugs now and are physically different, so it wasn't stupid then, but treatments don't just need to be well-founded, they need to be re-evaluated now and then.
Exactly. I used to think running an RCT was a permanent improvement to human knowledge. "Well, now we know that forever. On to the next thing until we know it all." And yet there's almost an expiration date for evidence, because the world is not a static environment.
Making things better is a hard problem, no matter what field you're working in, but especially when you're interacting with real people. It's not something you do once and you're finished forever.
Interesting resource: u/lrq3000 on Reddit has compiled a literature review and treatment protocol for sighted non-24 hour sleep wake disorder. I have not fully fact checked everything, but the stuff I have verified is good science and the recommended protocol works very well for me.
Thanks for posting this - it isn't user friendly at all, but once I started to read DLMO as "in the evening" it mostly became understandable. Now I know what to blog about in two weeks.
Lately I’ve been thinking a good sci fi book to write would be about a future in which we’ve developed a perfectly reliable test for psychopathy. How would it affect our politics? Would discrimination against psychopaths be legal? Would we require all candidates for office to disclose their test results? Of course, a psychopathic candidate could lie about their results, or maybe they would try to sell it as benefit -- “the world is cruel and you need someone ruthless to protect our interests”
Reminds me of "The Truth Machine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_Machine); the premise is the development of a perfect lie (not psychopath) detector, but I think the effects would be similar.
The difficulty of implementing this would depend (among other things) on whether there is a clear line between psychopaths and non-psychopaths, or whether it is a continuum (in which case people would debate endlessly about where exactly to draw the line). In this comment, I am going to assume that there is a relatively clear line.
I wouldn't really worry about "potentially losing the most capable people". Notice that one of the things psychopaths are great at is taking credits for other people's work and undermining other people. So whatever impression you might have of their capabilities, it was probably strongly colored by this. (In other words, the world without psychopaths would probably have the same positive achievements, but the credit would be distributed among more people.)
Unsurprising, given that psychopathy is a combination of nerves-of-steel low Emotionality, along with other traits like amorality (low Honesty-Humility) unconscientiousness, and anger-proneness.
My immediate assumption is that would be bleak as hell, because all their most effective candidates would be psychopaths. My second thought is that would be a very hard book to write correctly, because you'd have to understand a bunch of psychopaths well enough to not turn them into caricatures.
I'm not convinced that "psychopaths" are a distinct category of people or medical condition, rather than an extremely fuzzy classfication of people who happen to be a couple of standard deviations to the right on the "how big a jerk are you today" bell curve.
Interesting idea. I remember reading in a game theory article that psychopathy might influence the social environment for people. Essentially, if you don’t have some chaos agents who pursue their own interests then in some game theory simulations you settle into having more “mafiosos” than if you introduce them.
Epistemic status: Half remembered article but could be cool to see how ostracizing psychopaths might have unintended consequences
It would be a challenge to keep the system honest. Psychopaths would be trying very hard to infiltrate the system for controlling psychopaths. They're good at that sort of thing.
Having spent quite a bit of time studying genetics, I'd be very surprised if you could determine psychopathy purely from someone's genome. All the predictors we have today for polygenic traits (of which psychopathy is an example) are probabilistic. We generally determine the test's accuracy with out-of-sample validation.
For binary traits like psychopathy, the metric of quality is AUC or area under the curve. A predictor with no power would score 0.5 and a predictor with can perfectly distinguish between cases and controls would score 1.
The best predictors we have today are in the 0.7-0.8 range. I don't think there's actually much room beyond that because the traits are not perfectly heritable.
Maybe if one were to combine genetic predictors with extremely detailed monitoring of a person's environment one could construct a good psychopathy predictor. But with that level of power needed to monitor indiviuals at that level of detail, you might be able to steer most potential psychopaths away from the environments that would elicit psychopathic behavior.
If we don’t find mechanisms to deliberately enhance physical/emotional closeness among homo sapiens, the very architecture of consciousness strictly dictates that attempts to achieve AI alignment - or any outcomes that don't make the apocalypse-o-meter tick upwards - are predestined to futility. Civilization, particularly Western, has been running an optimization process that aims for an atomized human model - and it's now disintegrating. What if we designed an app engineered to mend these ruptures, with the eventual aim of handing the reins over to benevolent AI steered by the process?
I have a question that I feel compelled to ask that I can't get off my mind. Does anyone here know a lot about war and related topics?
I'm not siding with either Israel or Palestine, but the recent surprise attack concerns me for reasons that are separate from what's going on over there.
I have seen a user on poa.st (website with lots of Nazis and other far-right people on it) say something about a "milsim" which made me think they meant "military simulation" and they are planning some kind of attack or coup.
Again, I'm not saying that any party is in the right but the attack in the Middle-East happened despite Israel's intense surveillance of Gaza, which makes me think that attacks in general can come at any time without warning.
Am I just being paranoid or is this a real risk? If not, can someone with expertise in the matter walk me through why it isn't?
Internet "Nazis" are a bunch of teenage kids larping as something to scare the normies. A couple of decades ago they would have been satanists, but we stopped getting outraged by satanists so they decided to pretend to be Nazis instead. I wouldn't worry too much about them.
Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]
I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.
Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.
As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.
That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.
What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.
This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem.
I haven't heard of incels in a while, and yet, the circumstances have not changed, and there should still be lots of them around, maybe even more than when they were in the spotlight. Does anyone know of places online where incels congregate these days?
I would imagine that people who are involuntarily celibate are at least as common as they were five years ago. But they've all figured out that "incel" is a hateful slur against them and they don't want that, so they're either using a different term or congregating in places that they'd rather not have outsiders find. Or both.
In related news, I've seen stories about the "sex recession" (high levels of sexlessness among young men, in particular) being over; at least one study (https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-the-sex-recession-over) saw levels of sexless-in-the-past-year among young people dropping from the heights of 25-30 % to a bit over 10 % for both men and women.
This is also corroborated by anecdotes from e.g. teachers that I know and other people who interact with high-school kids. HS kids are way, *way* more concerned with doing well in school and getting good college prep and job prep than they were 10-15 years ago when I was in school. I think it's because of a general sentiment that has been growing in the nation: that one's economic security is not guaranteed, and it's relentless competition your whole life which you have to get a leg up on as early as possible.
It seems like a starkly negative trend but I have no idea what can be done about it. I'd support nixing standardized tests for starters, though. IMO it's a fallacy that the point of school is to "learn facts"; it ought to be for "growing up". You can always learn facts later.
The kids who were trying to get laid were also learning how to try hard and put in effort, and towards a more generally useful life skill. Telling children we're putting a gatekeeper between them and any remotely prosperous life, who will allow passage only if they master a set of arcane skills that they'll use only once or twice for that purpose, is cruel and pointless.
You're talking specifically about high school graduation or perhaps college. I was responding to this statement - "HS kids are way, *way* more concerned with doing well in school and getting good college prep and job prep than they were 10-15 years ago when I was in school. I think it's because of a general sentiment that has been growing in the nation: that one's economic security is not guaranteed, and it's relentless competition your whole life which you have to get a leg up on as early as possible."
Being concerned with doing well in school, or preparing for doing well in jobs are not bad things.
No matter how arcane the skills they teach in high school or college, the actually important one is learning to apply yourself to something that is not immediately rewarding, and per the OP, it appears that being driven to master that because of a fear of 'relentless competition' is somehow wrong. Life is, in fact, relentless competition, and there's nothing wrong with that! It helps all of our lives get better.
No? I mean, not exactly? my issue they're trying hard and putting in effort at the wrong stuff, at the artificial busywork created by badly designed education. And that if education is coming at the expense of growing up and enjoying life something's wrong.
Is Jason Isbell good to see in concert? It's a moot point until next year, but I follow a Salt Lake City podcast, and a while back the hostesses were joking about how he performs so frequently at the Red Butte Gardens concert venue that they should offer him a condo up there or something. It makes me curious.
With the Fried Chicken Sandwich trend, how come nobody has turned out a good Chinese food sandwich? You could totally turn General Tso's Chicken or something else into a sandwich, and in fact I tried my hand at making an Orange Chicken Sandwich (roll, toppings, Panda Express Orange Chicken) and it was pretty good.
I don't know about fried chicken sandwiches as a trend, but the Orange Chicken Sandwich sounds not entirely dissimilar to a fried shrimp po'boy with remoulade sauce. Tried it on a baguette?
Make a Tiktok video about the sandwich so it enters the ideasphere. There's a guy on Tiktok that's always willing to experiment with weird or creative sandwiches, so you could garner a bit of attention. The idea of a Chinese fusion sandwich sounds pretty good.
Maybe the best argument against it is that you're loading up on even more carbs and the dishes you mention aren't very saucy to soak into the bread. I think a more saucy Chinese food would go great in a sandwich since the flavor would be soaked up.
For those of you who, like me, were fans of Michael "The OFloinn" Flynn, of "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" (among many others) fame, you should know that he passed away on 30 September, according to tofspot.blogspot.com.
I enjoyed "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", but I remember him first and foremost as author of the wonderful novel "Eifelheim," where aliens land in medieval Germany and befriend the village priest.
Thanks for letting us know, sad news! God rest him.
Since we're referencing The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, a sample quote:
"1. Our Ancestors Were Stoopid
Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like drunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You’ve got eyeballs and armillaries, and that’s pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here.
3. Mystical Woo-woo
But… didn’t Aristarchus and the Pythagoreans propose heliocentrism in ancient times? If only they had prevailed, we might have had Real Science™ millennia sooner! We’d be on freaking Mars by now! What was their evidence?
Well, you see, Fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center. QED.
There are many names for this sort of thinking, but “scientific” is not one of them. Aristotle says of the Pythagoreans:
In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own.
– Aristotle, On the heavens II.13.293a"
I'd recommend reading the entire series, it's funny and informative:
"Nicholas Copernicus, a canon lawyer at Frauenberg cathedral, was a medical practitioner, a financial advisor, and was once shortlisted for the bishop’s seat. He was also a gifted “mathematicus.” Hey, he was a Renaissance Man™. But he was not a scientist in our modern sense. He made few empirical observations, instead doing new math on existing data: viz., Peuerbach’s Epitome in Almagestum and Gerard of Cremona’s 12th century Latin translation of the Almagest. He defended heliocentrism by quoting Hermes Trismegistus, “a nonexistent propagator of more woo than you pack into an articulated truck.” And he wanted to save the Platonic axiom of purely circular orbits by ridding the World of those @#$% equants.
Cardinal Nicolaus von Schönberg and Bishop Giese urged him to publish, but he had already been satirized on the stage and dreaded the mockery of those who “on account of their natural stupidity hold the position among philosophers as drones among bees.”(*) De revolutionibus caused great excitement among mathematicians when it appeared. However, the enthusiasm quickly dried up; and for a reason that startles us Moderns.
"TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like drunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You’ve got eyeballs and armillaries, and that’s pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here."
Since 1851, demonstrating the Earth's spin has been straightforward for anyone with access to a large enough space to set up a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum . I don't mean to imply any criticism of the ancients. It takes a fairly high space (the article mentions a 67 meter pendulum) protected from winds (so it can't be outdoors). I've never set one up myself, though I have seen one in operation. It isn't the sort of effect that one would notice unless one expected it and went to considerable trouble to set the pendulum up and watch it patiently.
a "much more than you wanted to know" type post about hypnosis!
It seems like the sort of thing that's up Scott's alley. Kind of mysterious psychological phenomenon, a lot of pop-science out there about it, probably some truth if you can sift through the BS.
Most people have seen stage hypnosis shows or similar - people go up on stage, are told to relax, etc, then "when I say [trigger word] you'll think you're a chicken" then the guy says the word and people, even people who are normally very reserved and would never do something like this, act like a chicken. The first-hand accounts from "subjects" aren't always consistent in what is going on in their heads when this happens. Some obvious questions about this (and hypnosis in general):
- is it "real"? What exactly would it mean for it to be "real" vs "not real"?
- are the subjects who act like chickens able to control themselves and deciding to go along with it? Not able to control themselves, perhaps because they aren't really conscious and their bodies are simply "taking orders" from someone? Somewhere in between?
- you always hear "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" but most people would normally be pretty embarrassed to publicly act the way people act at these stage hypnosis shows, so is that right?
- to what extent do you have to believe in it, or want it to happen, for it to work?
- how much overlap is there between hypnosis and other phenomena (like being really focused on something, or listening to a charismatic speaker, to name some oft-cited examples)?
- is using hypnosis to change habits, recover repressed memories, or realize you were a feudal archer in a past life, a real thing?
- what does the answers to the above say about our "theory of mind"?
I have dabbled in regular hypnosis (and erotic one). I have also read up on it a fair bit. Altered states of mind are most definitely real, and that includes trance-like states.
My current model is as follows: normally the conscious part acts as a critical examiner of a lot of data that gets passed through to the subconscious side. That includes verbal interactions. When in hypnosis, the channel between the subject and the hypnotist becomes a tunnel through the critical faculties, the deeper the trance and the more trust is between the subject and the hypnotist, the more isolated it become from the conscious part and more direct to the subconscious part. There are some limits though, that would normally trigger an alarm and jolt the subject from the trance. A good hypnotist would know what they might be and stay clear of them.
Another important point is that hypnosis is by no means binary or time-limited. If you are primed to believe someone unconditionally (e.g. your parent or your pastor, or your ingroup leader), what they say becomes the truth without you being consciously aware of the process.
Now, to answer some of your questions:
- is it "real"? What exactly would it mean for it to be "real" vs "not real"?
Yes, it is very much real, in terms of what you see on stage or in youtube videos does not need to be staged and most times isn't
- are the subjects who act like chickens able to control themselves and deciding to go along with it? Not able to control themselves, perhaps because they aren't really conscious and their bodies are simply "taking orders" from someone? Somewhere in between?
See my point about the triggers above. As long as nothing alarming happens, the subject sees, hears and does what they are told.
- you always hear "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" but most people would normally be pretty embarrassed to publicly act the way people act at these stage hypnosis shows, so is that right?
If you are on a stage hypnotized, you are probably self-selected to not be embarrassed by that.
- to what extent do you have to believe in it, or want it to happen, for it to work?
You don't have to believe it. You have to have a level of trust that the hypnotist won't intentionally hurt you. I have certainly hypnotized people who were sure they are not hypnotizable.
- how much overlap is there between hypnosis and other phenomena (like being really focused on something, or listening to a charismatic speaker, to name some oft-cited examples)?
A lot! Trance-like states are all around us. It's a multi-dimensional spectrum.
- is using hypnosis to change habits, recover repressed memories, or realize you were a feudal archer in a past life, a real thing?
One of those is not like the others. Changing habits? Yes, Allen Carr's book on how to stop smoking kind of does that. So do sessions with hypnotherapists. Recover repressed memories? Definitely. One of my most unfortunate experiences was with someone who wanted to remember a happy childhood moment, and what they remembered was... the opposite of that. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but it explained a lot, in retrospect. "realize you were a feudal archer in a past life" -- one can certainly generate a vivid memory when prompted and guided, but this particular one would be a fantasy. That's why a trained hypnotherapist would be extra careful to avoid created or planted memories when in a trance state, when the subconscious mind cannot easily tell the difference between real and imagined.
- what does the answers to the above say about our "theory of mind"?
That it is very much incomplete and needs a lot of research.
Mildly related: one can easily "hypnotize" a chatbot into believing whatever the prompt tells it, not sure why.
To combine a couple pieces into one followup ... taking the stage hypnosis example. I assume that if the hypnotist says to the volunteers "OK when I snap my fingers, you'll take this real, loaded handgun and start killing people", that won't work, the command will be too extreme and they'll refuse/snap out of it. On the other hand, clearly "act like a chicken" (or other similar common stage-hypnotism tricks) isn't too extreme for many people. But I would imagine that different people have different thresholds for what's "too extreme".
Imagine a person (who's maybe intrigued but not 100% into it, and not sure about whether to volunteer) who says to themselves, "OK I'll do it, but I won't do anything TOO crazy ... like acting like a chicken". And then the hypnotist does the "when I snap my fingers you'll act like a chicken" thing. What happens then?
Asking because the answer "they won't do it" seems to go against the "as long as nothing alarming happens, the subject sees, hears and does what they are told" answer, but "they will do it" seems to go against the "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" answer.
I cannot predict what would happen in any particular case, sliding consent is a thing. A lot of people go on a date intending to not do anything outside their comfort zone, but with some alcohol/pot/persuasion they change their mind in the moment. Those are also altered states of mind. If clucking as a chicken is a hard no for you because of some severe past chicken clucking trauma, odds are, you will not obey this instruction. On the other hand, if you are promising yourself because you are afraid of a mild embarrassment, then you might feel comfortable enough in the moment to still do it.
That said, the interesting parts of stage hypnosis are positive and negative illusions, like genuinely seeing/hearing/tasting/feeling something that isn't there, and not seeing/hearing/tasting/feeling something that is there. Obeying instructions is kind of boring, anyone can decide to obey.
One of the more heartwarming moments I saw on stage is the subject, after the session was over, hugging and thanking the hypnotist after she got to see, hear and talk to her dead husband. It may have been, well, staged, but it is not something that is difficult to do with a talented and willing subject. I would personally not try, because there are plenty of trauma minefields related to memories like that, but someone more experienced and adventurous might go there for the effect.
The city of Detroit is apparently about to try a Georgist land value tax. Here is the Economist's article about it in this week's issue:
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From the vantage point of a new apartment on the 33rd floor of the Book Tower, a stunning 1920s Italian-Renaissance-style skyscraper in downtown Detroit, two aspects of the city are visible. Look south-east, towards Canada, and you see a skyline thick with cranes. New towers are shooting up, old ones being rebuilt, and the pavements below are thick with pedestrians. Cross to the other bedroom, however, and you get quite a different view. Right up to the edge of a highway entire city blocks are occupied by nothing but tarmac. At 11am an ocean of surface parking is uninterrupted by even a single car.
Just over a decade ago Detroit became the biggest American city to go bankrupt. Since then its city centre has made a remarkable recovery. The Book Tower, which was completely derelict in 2009, has been rebuilt at a cost of over $300m by Bedrock, a property firm owned by Dan Gilbert, Michigan’s richest man. Yet though downtown is humming, huge parts of the city remain blighted.
The city now has a more ambitious plan to reduce the amount of vacant land. It intends to tax it. A lot. Will it work?
The idea, proposed by Mike Duggan, the city’s pugnacious mayor, is to replace Detroit’s current property tax with a split tax. In essence, assessors will distinguish between the value of its land and of the buildings on it. This done, the city’s property tax will be reduced from 2% for every $1 of assessed value (which is less than market value) to 0.6%. To make up for the revenues lost, land will be taxed at a new rate of 11.8%, whether or not it has anything built on it. In Michigan changes to property-tax rates have to be approved by voters. A law to allow that cleared its first hurdle in the state House in late September. A referendum could happen in February.
The principle of taxing land instead of buildings has a long history. Over a century ago Henry George, a liberal economist, argued that the rich used land ownership to hoard the wealth being created by progress. His most dedicated fans adopted the slogan “Do you see the cat?” (based on a convoluted metaphor), to refer to his ideas that land ownership underpinned high inequality. Yet George’s proposal—a single tax on land value—has barely been tried. If Mr Duggan’s scheme becomes law, Detroit will be one of the first big cities anywhere in the world to implement one.
How come Detroit is able to try something so radical? One advantage, says Jay Rising, the city’s chief financial officer, is that the city now raises very little from its current system. In 1959, according to a study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank in Massachusetts, the city’s property tax raised over $1bn, adjusted for inflation. By 2019, after decades of economic decline, the figure had fallen to just $119m. “If this was 80% of our revenues, we’d be a lot more nervous,” says Mr Rising. In fact it is just 16%. Moreover, the value of residential land is very low, which makes it an easier sell to voters.
The hope is that taxing land more will in fact spur development. Right now, says Alex Alsup of Regrid, a data firm, Detroit has “a very pure version of speculation”. As downtown booms, people who bought land nearby years ago—such as the owners of the car parks—merely have to wait for investment nearby to raise the value of their own land. Higher taxes might force them to sell up to people who will build on it. “It is entirely possible that this land tax has the ability to free up properties,” says Kofi Bonner, the ceo of Bedrock.
The bigger immediate benefit, though, comes from reducing taxes on most residents. The city argues that 97% of homeowners will get a tax cut. Lower tax rates on improvements ought to encourage people to invest in properties—and help some avoid falling behind on their taxes. Though they raise little, Detroit’s property taxes are punishing to poor homeowners. Between 2011 and 2015, according to a study published in 2019, one in four city properties went into tax foreclosure, their owners having fallen behind on payments.
But Bernadette Atuahene, one of the authors of that study, suggests that high rates were not the only problem. What mattered more was that after the great financial crisis, Detroit’s assessor systematically overvalued the homes of the poorest residents. When people could not pay, Wayne County, which includes the city, added interest at 18%. Homes ended up auctioned, with any excess over the tax owed banked by the county. Ms Atuahene worries that the proposed new tax does nothing to fix this problem—and if residential land ends up overvalued, may exacerbate it. “We currently have an assessment division that’s not doing its job,” she says.
Getting assessments right is one of the long-standing challenges of land-value taxes, and explains why they are so rare. Still, if the city can do that well, there will be real gains. Gabriel McNeil, a 61-year-old former chef who now lives on disability benefits, says that even a small tax cut would help him a lot. Having bought his home for just $8,000 in 2013, he struggles with tax payments of thousands of dollars each year. “The property tax is not designed for lower-income people at all,” he says. “It’s not easy to keep up.” For some, any cut is better than nothing.
I am of the view that property taxes shouldn't be a thing in the first place (if you must tax something, tax income) but since they seem to be a hard-to-dislodge thing in the US then I can hardly object to doing it on land rather than improved property value.
I just think someone really needs to kill the name "Georgism" for this once and for all. It conflates perfectly reasonable stuff like this with crazy extreme ideas where you replace _all_ taxes with land value taxes and then raise them a whole lot more.
How does taxing income make more sense than taxing property? People doing productive work deserve their money more than people not doing anything for it.
I can't speak for Melvin, but I can say that I too have strong dislike of property taxes. What it comes down to me is that if someone has income then they can afford to pay tax, if the tax is a percentage of income. If the tax is on property, you get taxed regardless of whether you have the money or if you're unemployed. It's not good enough in this country to save up and buy a house: you also need to pay "rent" to the government on it for the rest of your life, or they'll take it away.
The idea that gets lodged in my head is imaging myself, old, retired, but still having to make sure I have enough money scrounged away to pay property taxes on the house I spent a lifetime paying for. That you can't just own something and let that be that, you always have the specter of government confiscation hovering over you. It feels bad!
Economically speaking, I can see that property taxes may make more sense than income taxes, I just viscerally don't like property tax.
If it matters, you can probably structure a trust or annuity where for a fixed up-front cost your property taxes are paid for the rest of your life (barring extreme scenarios that would screw you over property taxes or no). Consider the up-front cost of that part of the price of a home you really, truly, incontrovertibly own.
Most of us are just going to file "I'll need to pay property taxes" under the same heading as "I'll need to pay for food", and deal with it all through general retirement savings. More flexibility, that way.
>>The idea that gets lodged in my head is imaging myself, old, retired, but still having to make sure I have enough money scrounged away to pay property taxes on the house I spent a lifetime paying for. That you can't just own something and let that be that, you always have the specter of government confiscation hovering over you. It feels bad!
I think about this too, but I think it's less a failure of "property taxes" as a concept and more of a failure of the enforcement mechanism.
I think you can actually make a decent case for property taxes, even from a libertarian perspective - if "protection of people's property rights" is a valid function of government, it arguably makes more sense for people who have more stuff being thus protected to pay more for it. Just like my insurance premiums for my Lambo will be higher than my neighbor's premiums for his 13 year old Civic.
On the other hand, I think it'd be a much kinder way of dealing with property tax issues if they were permitted to accrue, and then enforced on death, rather than being collected during life. No reason to kick grandpa out of his $200,000 house over $15,000 in unpaid property taxes - just tack on whatever amount is unpaid each year, then when he dies his heirs just get less of a windfall.
I feel the same way. Part of this is that I now am, in fact, old and retired. Part of this is that property taxes, like all versions of wealth taxes, attack people who, like me, were prudent and saved part of their wages for a rainy day / retirement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
Could a sufficiently gradual transition assuage that concern? E.g., a polity committing* to incrementally shift tax collections from all other sources to land over the course of 30-50 years.
*The implementation of such commitment to make it sufficiently credible is left as an exercise for the reader.
Perhaps. I don't know how high the land taxes would go under that scenario, and how difficult it would then become to retain ownership of a home. As you note, the credibility of politicians' promises is always questionable.
Is there some reason, under the theory of such taxes, for a government to not offer the option of paying a one-time fee, roughly at land_tax/long_term_interest_rate, which would have the effect of paying the property tax permanently? Personally, one strong motivator for me to purchase a dwelling was that rents kept going up, and I wanted to get *OUT* of that market.
I hope they do it well so that we can see how well things work.
The worst outcome is that it's poorly administered or abused, like the article claims happened during the financial crisis with regular property taxes, and then we don't learn useful things and the ideas get tarred by association.
I am finding is harder to navigate the current political and economic environment these days, especially in America. There are too many variables to reconcile and I think, generally, the assumptions we made in the past may no longer stand up. I come back to two themes: (1) Hobbes' Leviathan and the state of nature is a state of war and (2) Trump's "American Carnage speech. This is what Trump said, "Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
Put simply, the perception of the rule of law in America is in question and there are a whole host of second and third order effects that no one seems to talk about. Take something like insurance. Car insurance in America is compulsory, but increasingly people are choosing not to insure their vehicles, and given a lack of any enforcement mechanism, people who choose to follow the rules are left with bearing the cost of those who just ignore the rules. This is just one example where people just choose to ignore the rules, are not held accountable in any way, and then it becomes a slippery slope.
And you can point to dozens of other examples, and it's like how does a society function like this? Are there new norms that take its place or do we all live in this kind of limbo until the system breaks?
Can you provide a source for your claim about uninsured vehicles? According to this industry study: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsured-motorists rates of uninsured motorists have been declining for over 20 years. Unless something has drastically changed in the past 4 years since the study ended? Is there any evidence of that?
The characterization of contemporary America in that Trump quote is absurd. Yes you can find anecdotes to "support" any of those claims, but overall, all those situations have been trending better for at least 20 years. Some places are bad, but most are better. Some people fare worse over time, but on average we fare better.
Your question implies society is in or heading for some terrible state, but I am not sure that is the case.
> all those situations have been trending better for at least 20 years
There might be some catstophization going on but this isn't true either. For one example drug overdoses have definitely gotten worse in the past 20 years.
My elderly father moved slowly into his green light, and somebody running the red clipped his car, quite a bit of damage. The guy said he was "late for work" but supplied a name that didn't seem to line up with his ethnicity and the name of an insurance company before speeding off. The name didn't turn out to correspond to that of a real person. The insurance company existed, sort of - but the folks at the Lexus dealership (hey, elderly people love the dealership, and the dealership loves them) shook their heads when they heard it. GEICO solved this problem, as it tends to do; so we didn't worry about it further.
That same year, my husband and I were getting on a backed-up ramp when he saw that the beater car bearing down on us was emitting smoke and would not be able to stop in time. Bang-bangety-bump! We got out, the young immigrant Hispanic girl got out. Two wide-eyed children were in the back seat. We are going to her birthday party, she said. My husband inquired, doubtfully, almost mirthfully - about insurance.
The damage wasn't bad. It was just the first such thing to happen to his new (used) car, so that's always a little sad.
She explained that she didn't need insurance because she didn't have a license. And perhaps seeing our raised eyebrows, she assured us that she didn't need a driver's license, she was only just driving the children to the party. It is her birthday, she repeated - and I do think there were balloons or a pinata in the car.
Before we let them go, he gave her a prim admonishment about getting the brakes working before driving the children anywhere else. She assured him she would.
Was there somewhere we should have reported this encounter? For record-keeping purposes?
This by the way is the trivial anecdotal experience of half the people I know.
I mean, in a country with a functioning government you'd call the police to report that someone was driving without a licence. No idea what you'd do in the US.
See, the US - it would not be cool to be snitch-y like that. However: in the past, cops weren't so overloaded with calls, when things were more serene, and also it occurs to me there were fewer high-speed roads so maybe fewer crashes; not sure - but anyway, cops used to have time to mosey over if you had a fender bender, and then it would be in their hands. Not anymore. Or: they would stop someone, find no license or insurance and ticket them, and there would perhaps be some consequences downstream of that. Now not so much.
"GEICO solved this problem, as it tends to do; so we didn't worry about it further."
You did report it, to GEICO, when you filed the insurance claim. DMVs also have some of this data if they have a VIN registered but can't find any insurer who claims to cover it.
The claim was that uninsured drivers are increasing, not that they exist at all. I too have been hit by an uninsured driver, I don't dispute their existence.
Certain people are just not compatible with living in our society, and have to be locked up, and we are doing a bad job of finding them and removing them right now. I was in criminal law for 20 yrs and saw a slow steady movement towards softer sentences for criminals and earlier parole. No one person can do very much to reverse that, if a prosecutor tries to get tough the defense bar could start pleading cases open or taking more cases to trial, so you'd need the judge to be tough too. But if a judge is tough, or a county's juries are very prosecutor-friendly, the defense bar will change judge or venue. You have to replace almost everyone involved, but the culture among lawyers these days is just much softer on crime than it was, everyone seems to accept the lighter sentences, and either agrees with the trend or sees it as inevitable.
Typically these periods of low law enforcement would be followed by a backlash and an age of higher enforcement. But in previous cycles, even though the left was ostensibly less gung ho about policing than the right, it wasn't as polarized, and there were significant factions within the Democrat party that wanted tough policing and were able to get their voice heard. After Bush the Elder got Dukakis painted as soft on crime for the "revolving door prison", we saw the sudden rise of the Democratic Leadership Council. The Dems won back suburbanites with a pivot to being tough on crime, got Bill Clinton elected, and was an age of prosperity and broad popularity for the party across all demographics.
We are clearly due for a shift like that, but the current Democrat party is embedded in a massive ecosystem of activists and community organizers who are ideologically committed to being soft on crime. And GOP governors of the variety who see themselves first as responsible managers of the state, have been sold on sentencing and parole reforms by pointing out how much prisons cost to run, libertarian think tanks having worked for years to sell them on freeing criminals as fiscal responsibility.
The US prison population isn't growing. It declined steadily every year from 2010 through 2021, when it saw a slight increase for the first time in years. The decline during the 2010s corresponds to the era of softer sentencing that I referred to.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, compared to 20-30 years ago, VERY few people are incarcerated in the United States for simple narcotic possession charges, and when they are incarcerated they are typically paroled within a few months. So the people who are still being sent to prison and staying there are either the absolute worst violent crazy types, or people who have committed several felonies over a long span of their life and are clearly not going to change.
As to why we have more people who belong in prison than they apparently do in the UK, there's surely many theories. I suspect it's a combination of demographics and some unique cultural factors in the USA. It just gets a bit rowdier here, and it's a huge country that mostly just leaves people alone unless they become trouble. In that CS Lewis analogy about the ships in the fleet, we don't really monitor or care about the internal operation of your ship unless/until it suddenly catches on fire and goes careening into the rest of the fleet. That's just how we roll here.
The return of the judgmental mindset, and the underlying sense of fear driving culture. We grew up at the most permissive and optimistic of times in recent history, and it sadly seems like it was not nearly as sustainable as anyone thought.
I still blame human nature rather than circumstances.
Eastern Europe -- When I was a teenager, we celebrated the fall of communism and freedom. Took me some time to realize that when most people say "freedom", they actually mean freedom for ingroup, which usually includes the freedom to oppress the outgroup.
With young people, I suppose we can blame biology. When the hormones tell you to rebel, if you live in a dictatorship, you will rebel against the dictatorship, and if you live in a free country, you will rebel against living in a free country, duh. The values of the previous generation are naturally reverted. Though I didn't really expect to live in times when listening to retarded Russian propaganda is considered cool. What the fuck?
My generation is not better, though. People who three decades ago couldn't stop talking about how important it is that everyone minds their own business and the government does not interfere with your private things, such as religion and church attendance, today can't stop talking about how important it is to prevent gays from marrying each other. (They are basically suggesting that Christians make a coalition with communists, to stop the decadent Western values. Like what the fuck, you once told me how the secret police tortured your grandfather because he refused to reject religion publicly, and now you are willing to embrace those people as allies in your holy crusade to... prevent someone from doing the wrong thing in their bedroom? What the hell is wrong with you?)
1. Apps. I don't want to install your damn app on my phone, I just want to use your damn website. Aside from the standard Android stuff that came with my phone, I've got Spotify and Uber, and that's it.
2. Bluetooth. I don't want freaking bluetooth headphones that need to be charged and then paired to whatever device I want to use them in, I just want to be able to freaking plug my headphones into a socket and we're done. Same deal with my car, I don't want to do a pairing-configuration dance every time I go for a little drive, I just want to have a physical CD in the dashboard that starts up where I left off last time. (I mean it's nice to have the option of playing music from my phone as well if I'm going for a long drive within data coverage area, but it's not something I want to have to sort out every freaking time I get in the car.)
But it's getting increasingly difficult to buy wired headphones (you can't get noise cancelling ones at all these days it seems) and it's definitely getting difficult to buy a phone with a headphone jack (I've got one for now but I worry about my next one) and it's definitely getting difficult to buy a new car with a CD player.
If there's a theme, there's too much software in the world these days. Young people seem happy to spend their lives configuring software to get things to work as they want them, whereas I just can't be bothered.
You may have more apps than you think. My Android now installs updates even when I never tell it that it may, and often I have new apps installed after the update, which I never wanted and uninstall when I see them.
Interesting - I’ve found my car’s Bluetooth audio system to be a huge QOL improvement over having to use CDs. I turn the car on - it automatically connects to my phone and I can play any of a million songs easily - vs the effort of writing CDs and storing them etc.
Similarly Bluetooth headphones are just so much more convenient. Everything just works seamlessly.
Yeah, maybe other people's cars are less annoying than mine, but mine always seems to forget what device it's paired to. Sometimes I'm in the car, sometimes my wife is in the car, sometimes we're both in the car together, and I don't know how it's supposed to know which device it's supposed to be playing music from.
Leaving a voicemail that only says "Call me back when you get this" is incredibly annoying and inefficient compared to using your phone to send the same person a text that contains a substantive message.
You should use asynchronous communication whenever possible (text, email etc). Feel free to message someone this way 24/7 - they can respond in their own time and everyone has notifications silenced at night.
Calling is disruptive and thus only appropriate when:
-it’s for work stuff & during work hours
-it’s urgent and you need to get in touch with someone IMMEDIATELY
-you’ve arranged a time to chat (although in this case you’d probably zoom since it’s better.
AFAICT (I'm also Gen X, barely) everyone younger than Gen X hates talking on the phone for any reason, and hates receiving a voicemail for any reason. Got a voicemail prompt because you tried to call someone and they didn't pick up? Sucks to be you: you are expected to hang up *without leaving a voicemail* and compose the text that you should have sent in the first place. Does that take much longer for both of you than a phone call would have? Sure, but that doesn't matter because only old people prefer to talk rather than text. They claim that this is because phone calls force them to drop whatever they are doing and talk to you now rather than at a time of their choosing, but I don't buy this because AFAICT most millennials and zoomers live completely interrupt-driven lives anyway.
It is, in particularly dire straits, permissible to call someone if you have previously arranged to do so by text. But they will still be judging you for it.
Or use text to coordinate a time convenient to both parties for a call.
The primary problem with phone calls is imposition, putting the receiving party on the caller's schedule. A secondary issue (for me at least, with both auditory processing issues and hearing loss) is that it's much more difficult to follow what the other person is saying if I can't see them; video calling has significantly mitigated this.
I'm an older millennial (I think) and yeah, everyone does everything over text, especially dating. People younger than me seem to use Snapchat a lot though, as opposed to literal texts vs whatsapps.
Phone calls only really get used for urgent things.
Yeah my sense is doing all that stuff over text is pretty normal.
As a millennial (early 30s) my general rule of thumb is that a phone call is only appropriate when you need a response urgently. And even then if it's "within the next ten minutes" urgent rather than "literally ASAP urgent" I'll often text first and only call if I don't get an immediate response.
Could be we're talking about different kinds of phone calls here.
I mean socializing calls. Like, people saying that kids never call got me thinking that doesn't make any sense. They aint going out much since the cooties epidemic* and they sure want to connect with friends so...?
I'm reckoning that when I use the word "call" most of you are hearing handheld device as opposed to sit down device?
I'm rather peripatetic so I only use a handgeld device, and I assume most people born this century primarily use a handheld device (except for work, which isnl of course a whole different thing).
When I say "phone" I'm including whatsapp or whatever. Like, I call people to socialize and whatnot.
Being as OP mentioned his generation and this particular subject is somewhat generational, I'll mention that I'm 47. I reckon on the matter of social communication via device there's a sizeable difference in common practice every decade.
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*Sorry y'all but I'm still a little sore at this crowd for granting the recent hysteria the cranial heft it needed to lift off from the silly swamps of the mommy bloggers into broader respectability.
I think you shouldn’t text when people might be asleep.
Back when calling was the default, telephone phobia was a problem for some people. Now it seems to have turned out that most people dislike talking on the phone.
I prefer talking to people than texting them. I can talk without thinking but it requires conscious thought to decide what words to writer and then to write them. So writing is an effort that talking isn't.
But talking is synchronous -- you say something to someone, they reply, and based on their reply you say something else. You can't do that with asynchronous communication.
And in any case i find the UI on mobile phones irritating.
It *was* the norm around our sort of crowd circa 2008 but it seems that a lot of people, especially people with families, are going back to using the phone. Am I wrong?
(Personally, my phone and notifications have been on Do Not Disturb since 1999 so I don't mind if people call because I check voice messages, whatsapp, email, etc at the time of my choosing but I assume that I am an outlier, which is why I wanted to know what's acceptable generally.)
I can confirm that the Bullseye is correct. Literally no one calls even with families. The more common thing for parents with young kids is small group texts or whatsapp groups and discord for bigger extended friend groups. People may still use the phone (it’s feels novel hours of video chat meetings), but they text first to ask if / when they are around.
It's been 50 years since the Yom Kippur War, so I did some reading on it. This is regarded as the Arab-Israeli war that Israel nearly lost, but was it really?
The turning point seems to have been the Egyptian decision to leave their positions to attack east into well-prepared Israeli defenses. They had to do that because the Syrians were losing and demanded Egypt do something to distract the IDF.
But let's assume Egypt did the militarily smart thing and stayed put in its own defenses. Israel would have just neutralized Syria and then, once that was done, send all of its forces to the Sinai where they would have beaten up Egypt and driven them out of the peninsula. Egypt's army had only gotten a few miles east of the Suez Canal anyway. Their positions were so shallow.
It would have been really hard to beat up Egypt in the Sinai while they were under the cover of the SAM batteries. Likewise, the Saggers had proven more than enough to stop Israeli armor. Once the Egyptians left the security of the SAM shield, they were doomed.
My understanding of Israel's main SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) tactic was to take the plane up to the edge of the SAM's range, pull into a sharp climb and then fling a gravity bomb at the SAM site. This did not prove particularly effective.
So when the Egyptians left the SAM shield, Israel could finally fight on its terms. The weakened Egyptian army weren't able to protect the SAM batteries and the rest is history.
In the Yom Kippur War Israel lost 1/4 of their tank force and somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 of their air force in a few weeks, much of it in the first few days.
The Arab forces didn't have the military assets - particularly enough of their then-cutting-edge missiles - to chew through the remainder of the IDF. But they could have, if the Soviets had supplied them a bit more.
Once Israel adapted their tactics and face-tanked enough of the Egyptian missile stocks, they regained control and turned the tide. Instead of retreating, they gained the offensive and rolled on through, ending the war in sight of Cairo. But it very nearly didn't end like that.
So- what were the political alignments in the 50s, 60s and 70s in the US again? It's hard for me to get my mind around. Is it true that labor and working-class types generally voted for Democrats, or at least left-leaning candidates? But we know that relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then- this was the epicenter of anti-Vietnam war sentiment, civil rights, hippies, Jane Fonda, some degree of sympathy to Communism, and so on. So that part (intellectuals and Hollywood) were left-wing then- basically the same as today. So Jane Fonda and the working class guy down at the steel mill were..... on the same political side, is that correct? Kind of hard to imagine.
And the suburbs/the upper middle class was generally center right, do I have that correct?
From the 1930s to 1980, there was an elite Progressive consensus. Democrats pushed it forward and Republicans were containment for everyone who objected. As a result, both parties were transactional: they sold their support to different groups. That's how the Hollywood class, the PhD class, and the blue-collar class could all be in the same party - they all got spoils.
My parents were both old-school Democrats: my mom’s family were blue-collar white “ethnics” who worked in the auto industry in the northern Midwest, and my dad’s family were poor hillbilly coal miners and farmers from the Appalachian hollers. The impression I always got was that in the 40s and 50s, Democrats were usually Irish or Italian Catholics, various other white immigrants, farmers, and blue-collar workers - with some upper-class blue blood types like FDR and Katherine Hepburn’s family mixed in. There was also a time when being a communist or socialist was very fashionable for artsy-intellectual types; and being a Democrat presumably was almost as shocking to one’s wealthy family so you had the college-educated “longhair” Democrats as well.
I grew up in what was at the time (1970s and 1980s) a very Republican town; and most of the Republicans were the country-club type of Republican or else were small businessmen who aspired to be country-club republicans some day. This was still true in the ‘80s and ‘90s - but there was also a number of people from traditional Democratic backgrounds who switched to Republican during the late 70s thru the early 90s either because of abortion (like my very religious in-laws, who were Italian blue collar types) or because Democrats were “soft on crime” (my atheist union-guy uncle). But Republicans still had a rich-country-club kind of vibe up into the 90s.
One thing that probably changed the Democratic Party a lot is that the proportion of college-educated people grew exponentially. The 1950s longhairs and the 1960s hippies and radicals who went into academia were becoming tenured professors by the 80s and 90s, and sure enough we started seeing a lot of the precursors to wokeness in the 90s. No one took it too seriously at the time (look at those silly academics!) but as the number of people going to college increased, the sillier stuff started making its way into the mainstream. Being offended by...everything started to be a mark of having had a college education, and became a bit of a class marker. So nowadays my posh old-money New England hometown is full of wealthy people who hold forth on all things woke, because that’s how rich people who’ve been to college distinguish themselves from those blue-collar white people who don’t know that gender is a spectrum and keep refusing to check their privilege.
I don’t remember people being so passionate about political parties when I was younger. My parents, as I mentioned, were both from backgrounds that had long been Democratic - but both switched their registration to Republican because my dad was a salesman and he figured a good way to meet rich businessmen (his target customer) was to go to Republican events. My mom usually voted Democratic except for Presidential elections because she said Democratic presidents always got us involved in wars. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Plenty of "relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then", that's true. Far from all of them, but, plenty. A couple of points about that which are informed in part from first-hand knowledge of my parents and their peer group....
(a) Those folks during that era were less comfortable within the Democratic Party than their ideological descendants are today, but that dynamic played out at least as powerfully in state and local election cycles as the presidential ones. The modern tendency to view POTUS elections as the single expression of national politics formed during the 1970s and especially during the 1980s/90s.
(b) The homeowning and/or child-rearing adults of the 1950s-60s had grown up during the Great Depression. That national formative experience -- which lasted for a decade and had nested within it the even-more-searing regional experience of the Dust Bowl -- ensured that economic populism was to some degree "burned in", to a degree that has not been true for any U.S. cohort since. Not that some of the national economic downturns of more recent decades were fun or anything, but the Great Depression was qualitatively different as a national trauma.
I'm reasonably sure the major American parties are about bundles of issues that are linked together for historical reasons and can change. People can make it look like ideologies, but they aren't, really.
Once upon a time, I think the Republicans were (more?) interested in conservation-- for hunting.
It's still kind of amazing to see the Republicans be more or less an anti-war party, and the Democrats more pro-war.
It's imaginable that Democrats could have been anti-abortion if it seemed more important to protect fetuses.
> It's still kind of amazing to see the Republicans be more or less an anti-war party, and the Democrats more pro-war.
The only difference here is the Republicans and the hyperbolic characterization of pro/anti-war. Mainstream center Democrat-types have been consistent for over 100 years about cautiously using power to help international order and prosperity. Only Republicans changed, advocating for the Iraq War, then flying past the Democrats and now demanding isolation. Their esteemed WW2 grandparents would be rolling in their graves. Thus, I reject any simplistic characterization that Reps and Dems flipped to the opposing side of war. Dems stayed consistent, Republicans flopped.
>Once upon a time, I think the Republicans were (more?) interested in conservation-- for hunting
I'm pretty sure this is still the case! One of the quietly unremarked parts of American politics is that Democratic environmentalists and Republican hunting & fishing types actually team up quite a bit. Or at least work towards the same goal, even if they're not coordinating
>we know that relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then
Were college professors that left wing back then? Depends on subject, as always, but I think, say, a history or political science professor in the 70s was as likely to be on the right as on the left. Someone who actually knows can correct me.
One sphere of influence that has flipped entirely is sports journalists. They were reliably conservative before this century.
>this was the epicenter of anti-Vietnam war sentiment, civil rights, hippies, Jane Fonda
Yes, but the Vietnam War protestors protested their college classes. They viewed colleges as part of the conservative establishment and did not identify with their professors.
I think you're overestimating the shift of certain groups. It's not like the working class used to be 95% Democrat and now they're 95% Republican. It's more like they shifted from 55-45 in favour of Democrats to 45-55 in favour of Republicans.
It's a significant shift electorally, but there's still plenty of blue-collar Democrats and white-collar Republicans out there voting in the vague direction of their economic interest.
The most extreme shift has been in West Virginia, formerly one of the bluest states in the country at roughly 60-40 in favor of Democrats in 1992 to becoming 70-30 in favor of Republicans in 2016.
The parties used to be less ideological, and more like coalitions of large geographical regions and broader groups with a larger range of beliefs within them. As a result, neither party could be as extreme as they are now, and had to cater to factions within their ranks that had very different values and priorities. And radicals who today work within the party to push it left were, back then, outside the 2-party system entirely.
The Democrat party was traditionally a populist farmers and laborers party. It had added Catholic immigrants and blacks to the coalition in the 1930s, which held up during the period you're discussing. Most of the rural South just by default, even up through ~2010 you had "yellow dog Democrat" districts all over the South where older voters especially would never vote GOP even though they were ostensibly conservative people. A sizable percentage of the Dems' House of Representatives majority, which they held uninterrupted for each of those decades, was made of people representing those districts.
So while yes the radicals you're discussing existed, and were of the left, they were NOT of the Democrat party. If you lived in Alabama, your Democrat congressman was rhetorically attacking the student anti-war protesters on a regular basis. The Democrat party was vocally anti-communist. Although many southern Dems DID support the Civil Rights Act perhaps for ideological or religious reasons, it was a bi-partisan bill. The laborer who hated Jane Fonda and hippies had no problem voting for his conservative Democrat representative.
Meanwhile, the Republican congressman who represented San Francisco (!!!) was anti-war Pete McCloskey-- and for that matter, San Francisco in 1968 was still heavily in FAVOR of Vietnam, so he was actually bucking his own president and district to go that way.
It's just hard for me to wrap my head around non-ideological parties. Weren't political parties in Europe pretty ideological at that time? You had Christian Democrats, actual Communists, etc.
You could make the argument that many parties in developing countries are formed around specific ethnicities, specific regions, or maybe just a blatant attempt to grab some cash from the state (like 19th century 'machine' politics). And then after you reach a certain level of wealth, parties become more explicitly ideological
Continental European parliaments have many parties because of proportional representation and the expectation of forming coalition governments. Therefore it made some sense for them to be ideological, because it helps group cohesion, and it wasn't necessary for any of them to cobble together 51% of the public's support under one label.
In the United States, with only 2 major parties, you need a broader base of support. If you actively alienate a chunk of your supporters, the other party can pick them off and become the majority. In the 2-party system, there's a natural equilibrium, where if any one party gets too strong it becomes harder to hold their coalition together and the other party will reformulate its positions to pick off blocks from their rival until it's about 50/50 again.
The UK had a similar dynamic at one time, with Labour in particular having a very broad range of ideological views within it. Harold Wilson's Labour governments in the 60's and 70's had the very leftist Tony Benn working alongside cabinet ministers who could be fairly called right-wing.
Even in the 90s there could be quite a bit of disagreement on some votes. The NAFTA treaty approval in the senate in 1993 it's quite interesting to peruse the state-by-state votes and the diversity of representation even at the state level. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/s395
What did the Southern Republicans doing at this time? Were they going along with Jim Crow or actively opposing it? Were there cities which flipped back and forth between Democrats and Republicans and had Jim Crow laws regularly imposed and repealed?
I feel like I only know the kindergarten/Hollywood version of Jim Crow history so I'm genuinely curious about how the politics of it all actually worked.
I think the status of the Southern Republicans was "there weren't any." (leftover hostility from the Civil War) *To Kill a Mockingbird* describes a neighboring county as strange because it has, among other things, Republicans in it.
I'm not quite old enough to remember politics in those decades, but yes, that checks out with what I understand. If it helps give a window into the earlier days, Roddy Piper of They Live (1988) coded "Democratic working man" in a film generally interpreted as a center-left critique of capitalism.
You should know that substack has a fairly new feature to make it harder for people to comment on posts. The user hits reply; substack announces that "for your security, we need to re-authenticate you". Substack sends a the user an email; when it arrives the user clicks on a link in it, and this brings up a new web window/tab with the post the user intended to comment on, but not focussed on the part of the thread they intended to respond to.
If they can still remember what they were about to type, they get to hunt for the desired position possibly deep in a thread. The old window is still open to tell them what to search for, but any attempt to type the reply there gets yet another demand for re-authentication, except the second time (with the user already verified) no actual email appears to be sent.
Once again: your old software was much better, except for monetization, and perhaps for bringing in randos who might subscribe (and pay).
This is just standard web security stuff. When you login the site leaves a cookie on your browser that expires after a certain amount of time. After that time you have to login again.
It's also possible to access substack posts that don't access the cookie so don't know you should be logged in. In this scenario you will also have to login again.
If you are having issues with this flow it may be due to browser settings related to cookie retention or that you are using a VPN or similar service.
Is that only on mobile? I always log in from desktop and never do anything on my phone because it is too much of a pain in the backside, and I haven't got any messages like that.
I'm not seeing this behavior on my laptop. What I do see is that substack seems extraordinarily slow. I get "This web page is slowing down your browser" notices when I just scroll one page. As I type this comment, the text on the screen isn't keeping up with my human speed hunt and peck _typing_.
I'm guessing that my (browser? account?) options must somehow be configured to put the security reauthentication stuff under the covers, and have it look like a speed problem.
Yeah. I recently switched from using the substack mobile site to using the Android app (because the mobile site wouldn't reliably load entire essays, much less entire comments sections) and it has a whole host of problems. If someone replies to my comment, the notification sends me to that reply with no link to the parent comment or anything down thread of that comment. I can't even Ctrl+f to more easily find a comment. I can't minimize comments that I've confirmed aren't the comment I'm looking for to make it easier to navigate. I can't "view less" after clicking "view entire comment." I guess Substack spent all their vc funding on bringing in big name writers and not developing the actual app to a high standard.
It is self-evident that some people respond to particular medications in the desired way and some people don't, right? Are there ways to account for that when studying whether a medication works or not?
An example I have in mind is, say, a novel antidepressant. There is some controversy about whether antidepressants reliably help people, and to me it seems like it would be helpful to be able to identify which people react to a medication (if in fact any do react), calculate an effect size for that group of people as opposed to for a broader population, and ideally look for traits among that group that predict whether (or how well) a given person will react. Though, I suppose, that's more easily said than done. We would have to have some idea of what kind of traits to look for. Genes (of which there are many)? Environmental differences (of which there are many)? People's medical histories (which are extremely varies)?
A simplified example: Say you have a randomized controlled double-blinded study for a medication, in which 60% of your experimental group has the desired response to the medication and (e.g.) 40% of your control group also shows some response. Then you take those 60% who responded to the medication, and re-assign them to a new control group and an experimental group. If the medication has some effect for some people, you would expect more than 60% of people in this second experimental group to respond to the medication, right?
My intuition is that this would help distinguish between the people in the control group who would've responded to the placebo and the people who had a real response to he medication. Does that stand to reason?
I don't have a science background beyong my degree's general education requirements and my statistics knowledge tops out around stats 101 so I could be completely off base here.
What you describe is the idea behind personalized medicine. It is promosing but quite difficult to achieve! Currently it is mostly limited to cancer treatment.
Do you have any idea about the size of group you would need to do that study? Or the amount of data collection?
It's not an inherently bad idea, e.g. I don't respond (effectively) to acetaminophen. But the intrusiveness, data collection, and requirements for cooperation by those being studied are extreme, Even just determining environment vs. genetics in well defined cases is rarely feasible.
My guess is that you would need something like 2-3x as many participants for a two-phase trial like this, since you basically throw out half your participants (your control group) if you move to the second phase after determining from the first phase that it's likely that the medication outperforms placebo for at least some people.
For actually trying to tease out unknown factors that predict response to the medication, yeah, you probably would want some massive number of people about whom you can gather tons of information. Which would be expensive, and raise privacy concerns. It would certainly make it easier if you had at least an idea of what you were looking for.
You'll need a lot more than that, because you're checking for an essentially unlimited number of environmental and genetic variables, that MAY be independent.
Consider the question "Is cancer environmental or genetic?"
Also, "environment" can have surprising factors. One problem with acetaminophen is that it's included in a lot of over-the-counter combination meds, so people can overdose by accident.
The discussion about evolution below made me realize I have no idea whether I learned about evolution in school. (Public school, 1960s, northern Delaware, USA) I picked it up somewhere, and I have no memory of where I learned it.
Do people remember where and when they learned about evolution?
Does anyone remember when evolution became a hot political issue? There was the monkey trial (1925), but I don't remember it being a hot political issue until rather recently.
I consider variation and selection to be an extremely beautiful and applicable abstract idea. By comparison, global warming is very limited in time and space and the theory isn't as tidy. I was surprised to find that people seem to think evolution and global warming are the same sorts of thing. This may be political.
In Hungary: I definitely heard about it from my mom (an atheist biology teacher) before I had a biology class in school, but I'm pretty sure we learned about it in high school as well. Looking up some textbooks, it's taught. Not a political issue.
I attended school mostly in Georgia (US one, not Europe) in the late 90s early 2000s. Evolution was... mentioned kinda, but not taught very strongly. A common sentiment (though not *explicitly* endorsed by the curriculum) was "Animals adapt and change to their environment across generations, but within bounds", with the idea that speciation was wildly speculative and not worth believing. Evolution in general was treated with a sort of off-handed mockery, the sort of things people not smart enough to believe in God talked about. (I know now that not every religious person talks like a condescending stereotype, but I grew up around a lot of people who did. I am not trying to make generalizations with this account)
I was in college before I got a clear explanation of evolution, and actual answers to the "gotchas" like "How could we evolve acid in our stomach without already having acid resistant lining, but how could we evolve acid resistant lining without needing it for stomach acid" that have obvious answers once someone sits down and explains it
Basically, yes. Ultimately the exact specifics don't matter as much as there being several plausible ways it could be explained - thus undermining its frequent use as a gotcha in the environment I grew up in.
The answer my professor gave - and I am not a biologist or other expert and so can't say this is definitely what happened - is that it likely started by animals eating acidic foods, then developing some resistance to that. Then animals who secreted acids in their stomachs were better able to digest foods. Then more resistance grew to account for that and acidic foods. Repeat in a feedback loop until stable, every step along the way being a useful adaptation
"Do people remember where and when they learned about evolution?"
1978, Inter Cert (when it was still called the Inter Cert) biology class. Had heard of and knew about evolution before that, but hadn't learned about it. Science teacher was the (then) reverend mother of the order of nuns running the school. (The Mercy sisters, to shout-out to Scott's hospital in the Midwest!)
Not a hot political issue over here because the quarrel about teaching religion in schools came much later and is only now really taking off, and evolution hasn't been the same hot button topic for Catholics.
In the 1980s UK public school system we wer taught it as part of basic science at about 12. It's not been controversial in the UK for much longer though (the paleo-conservatives were losing the battle around sex education here at that time though). Interestingly I remember evolution being highlighted as an issue in US education at the time (probably in a 'those silly Yanks' sort of way) in some part of my secondary education so there was clearly something my generally pretty left-wing teachers could pick up on going on a cross the Atlantic then.
There's no problem with evolution in the Catholic tradition though? Since the story of the creation is allegoric (and has been argued to be such since at least the third century) evolution can clearly be part of God's design.
There's a reason why opposition to teaching evolution tends to be associated with religious sects who only accept literalist readings of scripture. Those traditions with more nuanced theological approaches available are much less threatened by science which doesn't agree with scripture. Your priest could probably cite at least Aquinas and probably At Augustine to justify teaching evolution.
Hilaire Belloc included mention of it in his "Survivals and New Arrivals", published in 1929. From the chapter "The Biblical Attack":
"But, take it in the large, the Biblical attack on the Church was the main one for three centuries; it supplemented the historical attack; it remained vigorous in nations of Protestant culture to the last third of the nineteenth century—anyone over fifty in Britain or the United States can remember it in full activity.
Today it is but the weakest of the Survivals, and its rapid disappearance was due to the advancement of learning.
It had already sunk into Literalism: the idea that the English text of the Hebrew scriptures, as published under James I 300 years ago, gave an exact historical and scientific description of all therein contained.
The Literalist believed that Jonah was swallowed by a right Greenland whale, and that our first parents lived a precisely calculable number of years ago, and in Mesopotamia. He believed that Noah collected in the ark all the very numerous divisions of the beetle tribe. He believed, because the Hebrew word JOM was printed in his Koran, "day," that therefore the phases of creation were exactly six in number and each of exactly twenty-four hours. He believed that man began as a bit of mud, handled, fashioned with fingers and then blown upon.
These beliefs were not adventitious to his religion, they were his religion; and when they became untenable (principally through the advance of geology) his religion disappeared.
It has receded with startling rapidity. Nations of the Catholic culture could never understand how such a religion came to be held. It was a bewilderment to them. When the immensely ancient doctrine of growth (or evolution) and the connection of living organisms with past forms was newly emphasized by Buffon and Lamarck, opinion in France was not disturbed; and it was hopelessly puzzling to men of Catholic tradition to find a Catholic priest's original discovery of man's antiquity (at Torquay, in the cave called "Kent's Hole") severely censured by the Protestant world. Still more were they puzzled by the fierce battle which raged against the further development of Buffon and Lamarck s main thesis under the hands of careful and patient observers such as Darwin and Wallace.
So violent was the quarrel that the main point was missed. Evolution in general—mere growth—became the Accursed Thing. The only essential point, its causes, the underlying truth of Lamarck's theory, and the falsity of Darwin's and Wallace's, were not considered. What had to be defended blindly was the bald truth of certain printed English sentences dating from 1610.
All this I say was Greek to the man of Catholic culture. He could not understand it at all. But we, living in a Protestant society, know well enough what it was and the general collapse that has followed. For, with the defeat of Literalism, Bibliolatry went by the board; and the Biblical attack on the Faith, a standby for centuries, has dwindled to insignificance.
Its disappearance in one area after another has been extending rapidly. Men of my age can remember all Britain and America, you may say, based on Bibliolatry. The older members of its votaries survived in numbers till the other day. Some few linger yet: more in the United States than here.
It having thus failed why do I include it among the "Survivals" at all?
Bibliolatry would seem to be nowadays a quaint chapter which the generality of educated men regard as unworthy of mention, or, at any rate, of so little account that it might be neglected by anyone dealing with the major problems of religion in our moment.
Well, it is true that even in the Protestant culture no one who counts would tolerate the serious discussion of such rubbish on lines familiar only half a lifetime ago; yet it must be admitted as a Survival—though the most exhausted of them all—because its effect, in the English-speaking world at least, is still felt.
I will give three examples:
Dr. Gore, a man of the highest cultivation, was lately careful to distinguish between the story of Jonah and the whale, and the miracles of Our Lord. The first he reverently abandoned—the second he deferentially admitted. We must recognize that the mere existence of such an attitude is a serious proof that Literalism still has some vitality even in Europe, or, at any rate, in this country. It seems that in the eyes of men of the first rank in the Anglican Hierarchy the Literalist is still a figure to be reckoned with.
My second example is from a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett. That deservedly popular writer is perhaps in closer touch with his contemporary fellow-countrymen than any of his colleagues in the province of letters, wherein he has achieved such eminence. Well, in discussing the causes for the breakdown of religion he says that it was successfully attacked at its "only vulnerable point" the Bible. These words are not applicable to the Catholic, for whom the Bible depends on the Church, not the Church on the Bible. But they are full of meaning to those who, though no longer Bible- Christians, remember Bible Christianity as identical with religion.
Mr. Bennett makes no such confusion. He knows the world too well to err on the nature of Catholicism. But here he rightly takes it for granted that his vast English audience have a universal tradition of a Religion based on the Bible. And he is right.
My third example shall be from another writer of high standing in our time, thoroughly representative of modern English thought and also in close sympathy with his great audience; skeptical in profession, though as Protestant as Dr. Gore in morals and tradition—I mean Mr. H. G. Wells.
Mr. H. G. Wells has been at great pains to discuss the fall of man, in which considerable catastrophe he puts no faith. But when he discusses the fall of man he always has in mind the eating of an apple in a particular place at a particular time. When he hears that there is no Catholic doctrine defining the exact place or the exact time—not even the name of the apple, he shrewdly suspects that we are shirking the main issue. He thinks in terms of the Bible Christian—with whom he disagrees.
The main issue for European civilization in general is whether man fell or no. Whether man was created for beatitude, enjoyed a supernatural state, fell by rebellion from that state into the natural but unhappy condition in which he now stands, subject to death, clouded in intellect and rotted with pride, yet with a memory of greater things, an aspiration to recover them, and a power of so doing by right living in this world of his exile; or whether man is on a perpetual ascent from viler to nobler things, a biped worthy of his own respect in this life and sufficient to his own destiny.
On that great quarrel the future of our race depends. But the inventors of Bible Christianity, even when they have lost their original creeds, do not see it thus. They take the main point to be, whether it were an apple—who munched it—exactly where—and exactly when. They triumphantly discover that no fruit or date can be established, and they conclude that the Christian scheme is ruined and the Fall a myth.
It is clear then that the most eminent writers in the Protestant culture can still be concerned with Literalism. It is almost equally clear that they have never grasped that full doctrine of the Fall—the sole doctrine explanatory of our state—upon which, coupled with that of the Incarnation, the Catholic Church bases all Her theology.
To put the thing in epigram (and therefore, of course, quite insufficiently), they are certain that we are animals which have risen. They have not met the idea that we may be a sort of angel who fell.
Now I submit that if men of this eminence take the Literalists thus seriously—one solemnly arguing with them, another not understanding that there has been any other kind of believer—there must be trace of life in Literalism still.
There are, of course, innumerable other instances. You can hardly find an article in any newspaper discussion on religion—save the very few by Catholics, which are occasionally admitted as a favor—but takes it for granted that advance in physical science has shaken something which the writer calls "religion." He can only mean the religion of the Bible Christian. For in what way could Physical Science affect the Catholic Church?
You can hardly get an allusion to the evolutionist writers (in this country it is always Darwin) without the same idea cropping up: "The Conflict of Science with Religion." But with what religion can Science conflict save Bibliolatry? On every side the recent presence of that strange worship—and even its present lingering—is taken for granted."
We have the same sort of schools in England (both Catholic and Church of England; I think also a couple of Jewish and Muslim ones) so probably they have a common ancestry.in the nineteenth century. I've never heard the Catholic church in Britain complain about the science curriculum despite working around education for quarter of a century.
If I was looking for opposition to teaching evolution around here I'd look to somewhere hard-line presbyterian congregations are common (rejection of mist if a clerical hierarchy tends to lead to theological literalism) so probably Northern Ireland. Not sure if it's an issue there or not though.
I learned close to nothing about evolution through middle school since it was a private religious school. They didn't teach creationism or that evolution was _wrong_ they just didn't really talk about it at all. In high school, even in advanced IB biology courses, I got an extremely shallow, surface level introduction to evolution. It wasn't until my third year in an undergraduate biology degree when I had a required course specifically about evolution that I really felt I got a decent understanding of it.
I'm pretty sure I learned about evolution way back in the day from the Talk Origins website as well as Richard Dawkins' and Peter Ward's books. I don't recall learning much about evolution in public school, although I remember my biological anthropology class textbook in college had a superb intro chapter on the evidence for evolution.
I was taught it in high school biology in the late 80s (e.g. those moths that evolved to match soot covered tree bark in England). I was taught in (Mormon) church that it was mostly false. The popular science books I read at the time gave good arguments for it (Martin Gardner, especially, and books about paleontology and anthropology). BYU (a Mormon school) biology department taught it to me as fact. Some BYU religion classes taught me it was false. Baptist Republicans argued against teaching it in schools and argued online a lot until about 2005 or so, it seems to me.
I don't recall for sure. I think evolution was taught in Montreal's English School Board biology classes in the 1970s, but not in any kind of depth. Maybe it was also in the general science class at about grade 9.
It's been a hot political issue approximately forever, at least in the US. The Wholly Babble explicitly and plainly says each species is an individual creation of Gawd. It's very very important to some True Believers that no one - least of all their own children, but also the children of unbelievers - be exposed to the existence of any concepts contradictory to their book of revealed truths.
For the record, other people, who I'll actually call Christians, revere a similar deity and take inspiration from much the same holy book. This spate of mockery is not directed at self-identified Christians per se, just the ones who demand to enforce their Truth at the expense of everyone else.
I see that you are aware of the Scopes Monkey Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial. From my POV, Americans continued to be crazy on this subject. Most notably, text books that mentioned evolution couldn't be sold to large numbers of US K12 schools, so pretty much all textbook publishers serving that market omitted such offensive details. In Canada, we were mostly stuck with bowdlerized/Americanized/Gawd-fearing text books when I was in K12 there 50 years after the Scopes trial. But perhaps it wasn't a political _issue_ in the US; they'd compromised such that the True Believers got their way in most/all K12 schools, but not in (most? some?) universities.
I didn't really learn about evolution - as in, understanding it, rather than being able to recite appropriate soundbites - until much later than high school. (I had similar experiences with history, and perhaps other subjects - I knew e.g. about Andrew Jackson, and why he was a big change, as a positive-sounding sound bite. It was only later I heard about specific harms done by his administration, in particular some fairly notorious (now) treaty-breaking and theft from native people.)
The irony about the Scopes Trial, when I read up on it, that it was a show trial cooked up by *both* sides - the small town in decline, so the local business and political big-wigs wanted to do something to revive it, and someone came up with the idea 'well hey why don't we have some big controversial doo-dah that will get media coverage nationwide and make us known to the outside world?' and so in agreement with the 'we want a test case on this dumb law about firing teachers for teaching evolution but we don't have one because nobody's been fired for doing that' side, they set it up.
And ever since, it's been held up as this triumph of Science! versus the ignorant knuckledraggers in the boonies who were persecuting the poor brave teachers. A popular myth of the 'everyone knows' type, and so as unreliable and untrue as all of them. Argh.
"The Wholly Babble explicitly and plainly says each species is an individual creation of Gawd."
I have to say, every time I'm almost convinced that there's a place on the internet where adult discussion is possible, and where people are actually capable of rising above the mental age of an 8-year-old, comments like yours cure me of my naive optimism.
I'm trying to figure out a heuristic people can use to avoid doing this. Maybe something like "avoid using jokes to smuggle consensus-building statements into discussions."
Yeah. And honestly, the fact that people who went to school in the 1970s don't appear to have yet actually graduated from elementary school, suggests that our schools have bigger problems than what's in their science curriculums.
I am of a later generation than you, but I learned about evolution in the early 2010s in high school biology class. I had been raised as a young earth creationist until that point and believed it with my whole heart, so score one for my excellent bio teacher, who was incredibly patient with obnoxious teen me.
It was certainly a mainstream religio-political issue by this point, but you already know that. I remember my then-pastor preaching a sermon in ~2011 about how evolution is obviously impossible and it's vital to protect the integrity of our science education, and this is why Christian schools are an important bulwark against atheism in modern culture, etc. etc. etc. The political connection wasn't explicitly stated, but easily 90% of that church voted Republican and creationism was certainly intertwined with their politics even if the pastor didn't specifically say that we should vote out all the Dems.
In my environment it was "assumed true" in the popular science stuff I read, but there wasn't anything in school, not really even at the college level. In high school, in general science, I was taught Mendelian genetics, but not evolution. I picked evolution theory up in outside reading. (Dawkins first, IIRC, but it could have been Gould.)
Has anyone been following the discussion about Mendel's research? I've heard he faked his results, that he got lucky with beans that had nice clean recessive and dominant traits, and that he bred his beans to produce distinct yellow or green offspring rather than the more typical-of-biology mixed traits, like yellowish green and greenish yellow beans.
"An underlying bias in Mendel's data favoring the predicted ratio is present, but my analysis could not clearly determine whether the bias was caused by misclassifying ambiguous phenotypes or deliberate falsification of the results."
I haven't heard about any of this, but I'm not surprised. There's always a "well ackshully" reaction to the simplified stories of "Great Man Does X, Discovers Y" pop culture.
"he got lucky with beans that had nice clean recessive and dominant traits"
I don't see how he can be faulted for that, getting lucky is part of The March Of Science (e.g. Fleming and the story of the discovery of penicillin, which may be another simplified Just-So story).
Faking results is more serious, but I think the problem there is - so far as I can remember - a lot of his papers being destroyed after his death. Wikipedia, tell me more!
"After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became overburdened with administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over its attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions. Mendel died on 6 January 1884, at the age of 61, in Brno, from chronic nephritis. Czech composer Leoš Janáček played the organ at his funeral. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation."
I think the suspicion there is that his results were *too* good, so he *must* have faked them up, but who can say? Maybe he just got lucky and had nice, clean results! Maybe he selected only the best results and left out the ninety experiments that didn't work! Seems to be a tussle between who has the best statistics:
"In 1936, Ronald Fisher, a prominent statistician and population geneticist, reconstructed Mendel's experiments, analyzed results from the F2 (second filial) generation and found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes (e.g. yellow versus green peas; round versus wrinkled peas) to be implausibly and consistently too close to the expected ratio of 3 to 1. Fisher asserted that "the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations". Mendel's alleged observations, according to Fisher, were "abominable", "shocking", and "cooked".
Other scholars agree with Fisher that Mendel's various observations come uncomfortably close to Mendel's expectations. A. W. F. Edwards, for instance, remarks: "One can applaud the lucky gambler; but when he is lucky again tomorrow, and the next day, and the following day, one is entitled to become a little suspicious". Three other lines of evidence likewise lend support to the assertion that Mendel's results are indeed too good to be true."
Well gosh, Ronnie, if he'd known that fifty years after his death a properly trained statistician would be saying his results were too good to be true, then maybe he'd have been more careful to produce results in line with what he 'should' have got. Either he was a dirty dog liar and fake and fraud, or naughty biology didn't obey maths like it should, bad empirical results, bad!
"Daniel L. Hartl and Daniel J. Fairbanks reject outright Fisher's statistical argument, suggesting that Fisher incorrectly interpreted Mendel's experiments. They find it likely that Mendel scored more than 10 progeny, and that the results matched the expectation. They conclude: "Fisher's allegation of deliberate falsification can finally be put to rest, because on closer analysis it has proved to be unsupported by convincing evidence". In 2008 Hartl and Fairbanks (with Allan Franklin and AWF Edwards) wrote a comprehensive book in which they concluded that there were no reasons to assert Mendel fabricated his results, nor that Fisher deliberately tried to diminish Mendel's legacy. Reassessment of Fisher's statistical analysis, according to these authors, also disproves the notion of confirmation bias in Mendel's results."
We just have to 🤷♀️ and accept that, faked or not, the theory at least seems to stand up.
Oh man. I'm reading up on this Ronald Fisher and I hate to drag religion into it, but he seems to have been a proper Churchman (of the Church of England) and so I have no doubt he went into this with a presumption that of course some Roman Catholic monastic would be Up To No Good 😁
"Fisher was noted for being loyal, and was seen as a patriot, a member of the Church of England, politically conservative, as well as a scientific rationalist. He developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and was the archetype of the absent-minded professor. H. Allen Orr describes him in the Boston Review as a "deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines". ...Fisher was involved with the Society for Psychical Research."
God be good to the man, whatever his views on the Nefarious Church of Rome (which I can't say he did hold), he's been dragged into the modern circle of disrepute about racism and eugenics. A fate I'm sure Brother Mendel would not have wished upon him:
"In June 2020, Gonville and Caius College announced that a 1989 stained-glass window commemorating Fisher's work would be removed because of his connection with eugenics. In the same month, Rothamsted Research released a statement condemning Fisher's involvement with eugenics, stating "Rothamsted Research and the Lawes Agricultural Trust reject utterly the use of pseudo-scientific arguments to support racist or discriminatory views". An accommodation building, built in 2018 and previously named after him, was subsequently renamed. University College London also decided to remove his name from its Centre for Computational Biology."
I may be maligning the man about his motives for digging into Mendel (though I think terms like "abominable", "shocking" and "cooked" are coming on strong). But I think the best revenge is that somebody used his work to develop the "Sexy Son Hypothesis", a moniker that I think would have had him wincing.
"I hate to drag religion into it". That's the funniest thing I've seen lately.
I've also seen the point made that Mendel reported his observation. He didn't have a theory of inheritance in general, which goes to show that, indeed, he wasn't a modern person.
The idea behind global warming, that certain gases (like carbon dioxide) cause the atmosphere to retain heat energy, was already developed more than one hundred years ago by Arrhenius, who already anticipated that human industrial production of CO2 could affect the climate. In its basic form, it is a pretty elegant idea.
The Gaza strip has a population of 2.3 million and is growing at 2%/year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip#Demographics. If the trend continues they'll surpass the density of Singapore in ~14 years. Is this demographic issue discussed in Israel/Palestine?
Absolutely. Ride along with the fact that extrapolating current demographic trends will have Palestinians outnumbering Jewish Israelis in Israel and the West Bank combined in the not too distant future--- a challenge too the proponents of " greater Israel" which could not then be both a Jewish state and a democracy.
My understanding is that this is one reason why the Israeli government makes it relatively easy for Jewish people to immigrate there, and why they are trying to incentize Jewish citizens to have more children.
No, Jewish immigration was among the primary points of the reestablishment of the Jewish state in the first place. Demographic issues are not the reason here. See the Declaration of Independence:
"Thus members and representatives of the Jews of Palestine and of the Zionist movement are here assembled on the day is the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Yisra'el and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Yisrael, to be known as the State of Israel.
[...]
The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
"why they expel palestinians from their homes to settle jews their", excuse me for my ignorance, but when did this happen in the past 50 years? When you say "they" you are referring to the current Israeli population, otherwise your comment is somewhat irrelevant. In the past few decades the only expulsions I have heard of were of settelers being ckicked out of their homes.
It’s not been the “armed resistance” people have been complaining about the last few days but the sexual assaults, kidnapping of civilians, and murder of children. Do Palestinians have the right to do that too?
Embarrassing. Wether a women was simply paraded naked or was paraded naked after being raped unimaginably beyond the point here. This makes me question your motives and your other factual assertions.
Can anyone recommend some good machine learning datasets to practice with (besides MNIST) that are easy enough to be done with only linear layers, no convolutions? I'm learning Julia and trying to write a neural net from scratch to practice with. Already did MNIST. Thanks!
When you say linear layers, I assume you’re okay with ReLU/GeLU/logistic activations and not actually linear layers? I’m trying to make sure I understand your use case.
I’d suggest staying away from anything vision and just doing a simple RNN (avoid LSTM since that’ll introduce all sorts of other headaches) on any text dataset you want. RedPajama if you want big and recent, but any Wikipedia dump will be more than enough.
But if you really wanna stay simple, you could always concatenate one hot encodings, say 5 words across, and do a text classification. You could use Project Gutenberg and do authorship classification.
Nothing wrong with perusing Kaggle for some old tabular data. You could always do a simple net with just one hidden layer. You might lose to a xgboost, but who cares if it’s just for learning.
I played around with Julia about 8 years ago and completely forgot about it. I’d be curious to know if it’s ever really panned out. They were big on being able to easily parallelize over multiple CPU’s at the time. I wonder how that’s aged since.
I used to consider myself a free-speech extremist (no on thoughtful is an absolutist) but I confess that seeing protesters in Times Square chanting "700"(the death toll of civilians in Israel) and making throat-slitting gestures the day after the murder of 260 concert goers, the rape of women; and desecration of corpses; the kidnappimg of elderly dementia patients and toddlers...makes me rethink.
The Mill-ian idea that anybody has anything to learn from these people (or making extremely basic arguments against them) is a bad joke.
I'm not looking to argue too much. I'm just tracing the story of how one doctrinaire civil-libertarian is led away from dogma
Chanting isn't exactly speech. It's more "speech" than whatever dumb thing Larry Flynt got himself shot over but it's more like making a noise.
That irrelevant technical detail out of the way, free speech isn't good because you're always going to agree with it or find it meaningful but because it's both a necessary freedom for a human being in society, and because the alternative is much much worse.
One extremist to another, it's not that we have anything to learn from people making throat slitting gestures the day after an atrocity is committed, or the guy with the "god hates fags" sign at the gay man's funeral, or the guy blasting "bombs over bagdad" on 9/11, and so on.
It's that we might have something to learn from the author writing a memoir on growing up in trans, a policymaker explaining "blowback" and the impact of US foreign policy in the Middle East, or a journalist writing a summary of China's perspective on the 9 dashed line, and there are plenty of motivated actors who, in bad faith, will try to censor the latter on the grounds that it is "just like" the former.
What's the alternative? If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech, and then judge what speech belongs to each category, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly. This seems strictly untenable theoretically, and pretty terrible practically when implemented.
Arguing for free speech on the basis of all speech ultimately being valuable, either directly, or in prompting a response, seems like a poor defense of free speech.
It seems trivially true that some speech is terrible and has a greatly negative net value. But free speech is still great. I'm glad the USA lets genocide supporters express their views. The classic precedent for the protesters in New York is their Nazi predecessors in Skokie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie which was a major free-speech victory.
The principle of free speech has long hinged on defending the rights of the worst people to express the worst speech.
"If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech, and then judge what speech qualifies, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly."
This isn't true. There was censorship of "pornography" on an "I know it when I see it basis" without a system which isn't nearly that comprehensive.
Even Chinese censorship, which is trying to beat ever-changing hints and euphemisms, doesn't try to be so thorough.
The thing is, America did not go out of its way to import Nazis knowing what Nazis think.
The people in NYC seemed Muslim, judging from the pictures, and the reward for letting them tell you who they are and who they hate and what they want to do - should be being able to deport them and make a sensible policy that Muslims are not to be welcomed en masse. Let speech not be meaningless; let it function as communication and a guide to decision making. Not just be a slogan of the virtuous until they can’t take it anymore.
But they are not all Muslims. They in fact are very few of America's Muslims. Perhaps basing policy on the actions of an extreme minority is a bad idea?
What were my principles? Seems a pragmatic matter. Of course, if it comes to principles, not choosing to willfully turn your country into a place where people are likely to enter the streets and celebrate death - is surely not quite equivalent to suggesting they wherever they are in the world, they ought to die.
ETA: although, in a world where the content of speech is meaningless and inconsequential as it seems to be here, and the sight of the chanters yesterday feels for some of you like a good day's work in service of your principles - always a good feeling - perhaps these things really are the same:
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones; this seems nasty to us; let's not have any more of this for ourselves, it has its place elsewhere of course in this wide world - and, death to 'em!
With utmost respect, I find this argument frustrating. I understand the 1st amendment quite well (thank you to my many years in grad school). But every regime of (mostly) free speech has exceptions. No one permits CSAM. No one permits the dissemination of national secrets that would literally endanger defense of the nation (yes, this is often exteended too far), etc.
Under our current system, hate speech is 100% permissible
In Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore--an ethnically diverse nation that has famously ascended "Fromm Third World to First" in his lifetime--speech that foments ethnic hatred is simply disallowed. I do not know the specifics of how this works but I know the punishments are not merely nominal. It's a real offense, not akin to jay-walking.
The proposition that there is *no alternative* to our First Amendment version of free speech is absurd, bordering on risible.
In short, while I'm not sure I would advise it, we *could* copy Singapore, which is very far from a failed state.
For a speech restriction to not pose a risk of creating a slippery slope, it should be unambiguous, natural, and far in motivation from the sort of speech restrictions that would be harmful. There is no way to make a hate speech law that can't be easily broadened until it includes valuable speech. The few existing American exceptions to freedom of speech have qualitatively different motivations from the typical, tempting but harmful limitations on it; that's not the case for most proposed new exceptions.
Once we agree that it's OK to ban sufficiently heinous speech, whenever you want to argue that some particular kind of speech shouldn't be banned, you have to go into an object-level debate, arguing that it isn't heinous. You can't count on always winning that debate; when society is on the verge of banning some kind of speech, you'll probably get ostracized even for arguing that it isn't heinous. The way to get around this is to argue that even heinous speech should be legal.
The above means that (some kinds of) speech restrictions have an unusual risk: they ban most ways of arguing for their own lifting, since to argue that they should be lifted, you have to make the banned argument, or something dangerously close to it. So if they are mistaken, it's hard to correct it.
----
I suspect (but don't know) that Singapore enforces hate speech laws more-or-less symmetrically, that is, a Malay (minority) shit-talking the Chinese (majority) would get in just as much trouble as a Chinese shit-talking Malays, because they are actually aimed at preventing ethnic strife. If/when such laws are implemented in Western countries, they'll usually ban one group from criticizing the other, but not the other way around. And since they are aimed at putting a thumb on the scale in favor of some policical/demographic groups (progressives, minorities) over others, there is more likelihood that the side in favor expands the until they ban valuable speech as well.
So, even if speech restrictions can sometimes work out well, they can turn out badly in many ways, and even in countries where they have worked well so far, there is a significant risk that they will expand until they ban valuable speech. At the same time, there is little risk from near-unlimited free speech (like the prevailing interpretation of the 1st Amendment).
----
To go back to the original case: while those chants aren't valuable speech, they aren't harmful either to any significant degree, at least in a country like America, where to most people they just make themselves look bad. Whereas banning it would be risky because of the risk that other, valuable speech would get banned too (even if it's not certain that that would happen*). So there is no point in risking it.
This brings us another argument: democratic countries will ban ideas that are unpopular anyway, and pose little risk. Meanwhile, countries where a dangerous idea is popular, and so arguably there would be a point in banning it, won't ban it.
* Though I'm pretty sure that if the 1st Amendment were interpreted away, America would soon have hate speech laws broader than anywhere else, banning many legitimate arguments against SJWism. After all, on most other aspects of SJWism, especially on racial matters, the US is crazier than most other Western countries.
I never said the US would be a failed state. The US does many terrible things already, and I don't consider it a failed state.
I never said there is no alternative. I described the alternative - having government bureaucrats decide what speech should be legal. Obviously some bureaucrats will act more in ways you want, and some less. Some speech restrictions and their interpretations would be more desirable and some would be less.
Notably, under a hate-speech ban regime, many traditional Jewish texts could be banned, and their exponents prosecuted. Some would like that. Others would dislike it. When a different party took power (obviously not a factor in single-party Singapore), the opposite policies could be enacted, or the same policies could be interpreted to ban the opposite types of speech.
I'm not saying they would need to be banned as objective hate speech. I'm saying the opposite, that the concept is subjective and any particular implementation is likely to have consequences that seem terrible to some people, and even the people who appreciate such laws or their implementations could fall victim to them later.
Nor did I say that literally all speech should be legal. I support various US speech restrictions, including generally on CSAM. But the fact that not all speech should be legal obviously doesn't imply that a given form of speech should be illegal.
My point was that defense of free-speech does not depend on all speech being valuable and that indeed, that argument is a weak one that probably fails in many cases including the one you illustrated.
" If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech and then judge what speech belongs to each category, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly. This seems strictly untenable theoretically... "
I'm always being told that countries outside the US don't have free speech: if so, the untenable thing is widely imp!emented. It isn't true, though, because the US doesn't have absolute free speech , either.
[Those are just a couple of links, hardly meant to be comprehensive].
Obviously there are people who will defend some or all of these. Everything will be defended by someone. But since OP was coming from a nominally free-speech perspective, these show the untenability to someone with that value.
Canada has both hate speech laws and a high bar for convicting people of breaking them. Countries get to draw the line on what speech is allowed where they choose. You disagree with where some countries have chosen to draw their lines. That doesn't mean any line you draw will always cause a slippery slope to too much speech suppression.
No freedom convoy bank accounts were "seized" under the emergency act, only temporarily frozen. And it wasn't about speech. Canadians are free to criticize Trudeau (and the lockdowns at the time) to their hearts' content. It's one of our favourite pastimes. The issue was with the convoy blockading the city and border crossings.
Yeah, a lot of countries are awful, but I don't think it's fair to call Canada's extremely lax hate speech laws to be human rights violations. There is no universally agreed upon set of human rights. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared freedom from fear to be a fundamental human right. Preventing people from promoting genocide could be argued to be protecting that right. There is no country that gives its citizens an absolute right to say anything; every country draws the line somewhere.
If you're just saying that some restrictions on speech are bad, then I completely agree.
"The Mill-ian idea that anybody has anything to learn from these people (or making extremely basic arguments against them) is a bad joke."
Who are these people? Are they of Palestinian descent or are they only white liberal LARPers? Why do they think this? How did they come to think this?
How do we make peace with people we hate, to the marrow of our bones, people who have done terrible things to us and we have done terrible things to them, generations of hatred on both sides, and yet we both have to live on the same small patch of land?
CEASEFIRE by Michael Longley
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
He wrote it during the late 90s when there was talk about an IRA ceasefire, and a lot of people on both sides of the divide - civilians as well as paramilitaries and the police and armed forces - grappling with "how are we to make peace with people we hate and who hate us, who have committed atrocities against us and against whom we have committed atrocities?" Trying to get the Peace Process in motion did mean a lot of people asking "so is this it, now? we surrender? all the fighting, all the lives lost, mean nothing?"
"Michael Longley wrote this poem, evoking the painful reconciliation of those who must make peace, hoping that he might influence doubters on the IRA army council. He says he believes poetry does make things happen. And he wrote: “When I published my poem Ceasefire in the Irish Times I got a letter from the father of Paul Maxwell, the sixteen-year-old boy who had been blown up with Lord Mountbatten. Those letters matter more to me than any amount of criticism I might receive in literary journals or attention in the public world.”
The hardest thing is compromise. The hardest thing is "okay, to get this, we have to accept that terrorists who bombed and shot and killed people are going to get out of prison". How much will you pay for peace? How much are you willing to pay?
"Both the British and Irish governments committed to the early release of the approximately 400 prisoners serving sentences in connection with the activities of paramilitary groups, provided that those groups continued to maintain "a complete and unequivocal ceasefire". Cases were reviewed individually by the Sentence Review Commission. Prisoners from the Continuity Irish Republican Army, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Real Irish Republican Army were not eligible for release as those groups had not agreed to an unequivocal ceasefire. There was no amnesty for crimes which had not been prosecuted.
The Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, received Royal Assent on 28 July 1998. 167 prisoners were released by October 1998. By December 1999 308 prisoners had been released. The final group of prisoners was released by 28 July 2000, giving a total of 428 prisoners released."
Another motive is keeping track of them or getting some idea of how much support those ideas are getting. We can probably argue about whether this is worth it.
Not a cheering thought, but if a crime is committed based on those ideas and the perpetrator was at a demonstration without concealing their identity, they might be easier to catch.
"but if a crime is committed based on those ideas and the perpetrator was at a demonstration without concealing their identity, they might be easier to catch."
Good point. At the moment, I'm mostly wishing the IDF the best of luck in killing Hamas members who are still at large, and in doing whatever it takes to ensure that Hamas can never carry out another attack. In an ideal world, I wish all Hamas members could be killed without harming any peaceful civilian Gazans, but this isn't an ideal world and I support the IDF in whatever they are able to do to protect Israelis.
While Hamas supporters appall me, and I'd shed no tears if any of them gets themselves killed (as long as no one else is hurt), they rarely present a lethal threat like the Hamas members in Gaza do.
Either everyone is guaranteed online anonymity or everyone's every action and speech is recorded and available for all to peruse.
Partisan vigilantes recording "suspicious behavior" is a road we are already going down and it's really not good.
Volunteer Informers costing people their jobs is quite horrendous.
I do like where your heart is on this but I would guess you generally agree with me that it's a step we don't want to see people taking.
Even in *1984* the real threat was not from any All Knowing Big Brother, but from millions of petty Little Brothers, ever eager for an opportunity to tattle tale.
If they weren't in Times Square chanting that, it doesn't mean they don't believe it. They'd still believe it, and would still act on such beliefs if the right opportunity came; you just wouldn't know about it. At least this way, everyone would know where they stand and update their beliefs on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accordingly.
The other argument is that passing a law against something sends the message "Society thinks this is contemptible and should be stamped out", and most people form their beliefs in part from what society tells them.
I think you're confusing "Society thinks this is contemptible" with "The Government thinks this is contemptible". There's no mechanism for "society" to stop pro-Hamas demonstrations in Times Square; some government official has to make that determination.
Do you really want the government to be able to determine what is or is not "contemptible", with both moral and legal authority? And don't count on democracy to save you here, because the incumbent government will always be highly motivated to include "hey, here's some good reasons to vote those bastards out" on the list of things too contemptable to allow.
There's a good chance that in 2025, Donald J. Trump will be appointing the bureaucrats in charge of determining what is too contemptible to say, if we go that route. Are you still good with that?
No, I just reject the dichotomy between "society" and "the government". The government is part of society -- indeed, one of the most important parts. And people generally follow the lead of those they see as more important than them.
I continue to believe that the best response to bad speech is more speech
The reason why this no longer appears obvious is because we have allowed YouTube and PayPal etc, to discriminate against whatever speech (or press) they choose, and with the death of the public square, they are now more powerful than any law so, hey, why *not* pass a law?
I am convinced however that the correct move is to force youtube and other Near Monopolies to cease circumventing the intent of the Bill of Rights, rather than to mutilate them further.
The legal documents pertaining to Google's Platform are obviously different between the United States amg Germany. Likely in easy excess of 10,000 pages.
That said, universals would be better, which is why I'm looking for the right word for FuhrerFriend.
Yeah, we can leave that for another time. Then again, why?
Okay, I'll take the plunge. Beware, of chassidic jewish spirit.
I hear what you're saying, but frankly consider it far better that they get to say their repellent thoughts out loud. It helps us to know what kind of people they are and hopefully stay far away.
I wish white supremacists were able to say their stuff in public as well, so I could avoid them too. Now I don't know if I'm talking to one and possibly entertaining adjacent thoughts.
With me you will never have to worry. I have that form of tourettes that makes me seek out the very words some polite society has declared verboten and then to say it.
It's always obvious whether I mean to violate the purpose and spirit of the convention or just the legalistic letter of it (pretty much always just the letter), but, one way or another, nobody ever need worry that I harbor a thought I ain't sayin 😉.
I'm still a free-speech absolutist and think even that extremely offensive speech supporting Hamas should be legal, and they shouldn't be thrown in jail. For me the reasoning is that violence simply isn't justified in response to offensive speech, and that includes state violence.
But the double standard is just absurd -- misgendering someone is "hate speech" and literal pro-terrorism marches aren't. I mean, it's crazy.
Yah, and as you indicate, the correction needs to be done by increasing speech tolerance for people who continue to speak English the way it was spoken 20 years ago, rather then to slice away more and more tolerance for ideological speech.
A lot of the countries having the pro-Hamas marches have hate speech laws (the US is like the only developed country that doesn't have them, and rightfully so), and the people at those marches didn't get arrested. It's a double standard under the law, upheld by the governments of those countries -- Canada, UK, Australia, etc.
That doesn't mean there is a double standard. There are extremely few prosecutions under the Racial Discrimination Act (I assume this is what you mean by "hate speech laws"), they are rarely successful, and they are generally well in arrears of the alleged offence. The only protestors that typically get arrested for non-violent behaviour are the environmental activists that get in the way of production.
In Australia you're not getting arrested for either misgendering someone or for marching in support of Hamas.
This is not a defense of that particular section of the act.
I think the UK is the only country in the world where anyone has ever been arrested for misgendering but never under hate speech laws, but under their incredibly expansive public order laws that bans everything in public that causes harassment, alarm or distress. Both of the arrested people I'm aware of had their convictions overturned on appeal. This isn't because the UK government supports trans people. It certainly doesn't. It just really likes arresting people for pretty much all kinds of speech.
To be clear, I'm also a free speech absolutist, and I don't think anyone should ever be arrested or subjected to any other kind of violence because of their speech.
Yeah I would say that in a vacuum I'm against these arrests, and support the American system of not criminalizing offensive speech. But if hate speech IS going to be banned, then I'd prefer it to be enforced without a double standard.
I absolutely support the legality of that kind of speech. (The small print exception is about noise/harassment, which is different than making an argument).
אין שליח לדבר עבירה ('One can not be an agent for trespass') is the talmudic principle that you can give somebody credit for instructing you to do a good deed, but you cannot offload the blame on to them for instructing you to do a bad deed.
When it comes to bad deeds, the one who does it is the guilty one.
This is how Chazal (the Talmudic rabbis) solved the problem exposed by Stanley Milgram's experiments with "agentism", which is that we will do all kinds of terrible things if somebody else takes responsibility.
According to this principle, nobody CAN take responsibility for telling you to do a crime.
Please stop posting automatic defences of the Hamas attacks here. If the above post is slightly factually wrong this does not affect the issue that people were celebrating the death of civilians. Neither the murders (a worse crime than rape anyway) nor the people celebrating are disputable facts. None of this seems particularly socially acceptable so the point the original poster makes stands regardless of whether rapes happened or not. And the fact I had to type that last sentence should perhaps indicates how far from any sort of socially-acceptable moral position your posting seems to be.
I wouldn't bother responding to a genocide apologist. Just flag it for the mods. But I'd be careful not to take his word for anything. It's obviously absurd to think that:
>Anyone claiming rapes occurs needs to prove it
As this isn't isn't a courtroom. People don't need to include citations after statement they make [citation needed.]
But survivors of the Hamas massacre of the music festival did indeed report rapes:
>Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies
I support the idea of Palestinians self-determination. But that requires a responsible state and responsible attitudes. Justifying anything on the basis of unfounded rumours (Israel as a society is no happier about paedophiles than any other, so it's not going to tolerate child rape; even Russia drew a line at that) and reference to what happened 75 years ago undermines the case. Anger and revenge are not a good starting point for change: it was only when he was old and calm that Yasser Arafat made the Palestinian cause one that could gain support.
My view is that Hamas are one of the major blocks to Palestinian statehood, and that they need to be removed. An organisation that has a charter obligation to destroy Israel cannot exist in a peaceful country. And their actions over the last few days show they care more about destruction and revenge than the future of Palestinians (they know Gaza will be devastated as a result). Plus no-one in the west nor in much of Asia will support them as a government now. Reenacting ISIS's greatest hits isn't going to make anyone trust you.
So from someone who wants to see a Palestinian state, maybe remember that producing more hatred (say attacking a music festival which is explicitly for peace in the region...) is never going to work. Targeting civilians is counterproductive, as Israel should also know. But the only way forward now is for one party to be destroyed. Clearly it won't (and can't - genocide cannot be allowed) be Israel, so it must be Hamas. If they cared for Palestine they could surrender and disband in return for western assurances; but this is about their egos and they'll fight and Palestinians will die and lose their future. And you try to justify this act of stupidity as justifiable revenge.
When did terrorism ever work? When even Iran seems unwilling to actively support Hamas (probably because they can see where this is going clearly enough), maybe it's time to realise the euphoric high if violent revenge is not worth the pain it will cause. If you want a futures for Palestine other than as a underdeveloped battleground and a territory for Zionists to expand into, then recognise the issue. Hamas can now never be part of a solution; it's stupid to support them or their actions when all they do is destroy the chance of a free Palestine in the name of historical or imaginary atrocities. Stop living in a bubble of injustice and faux-liberation and actually look at what is happening: for the sake of bringing joy to a few extremists the chances of independent Palestine are being destroyed.
"Hamas. If they cared for Palestine they could surrender and disband in return for western assurances;"
If Hamas can be removed, might it make sense for peaceful, civilian Gazans to delegate the management of Gaza to some trusted third party for some period of time? Perhaps Singapore, which has managed a small, densely populated, ethnically diverse area quite successfully? Perhaps after a decade or two Gaza might become something that Israel and other nearby nations could trust.
The USA managed something similar with Japan after WWII, but, given the more recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems to have lost the knack for doing this.
At that point it would make more sense for Arab countries to compensate Jews for the property they lost when they expelled them, and for Israel to forward that compensation to the Palestinians; and to resettle Palestinians in Arab countries rather than developed countries.
Recently I have been playing the video game Book of Hours a lot.
Taking place in the same universe as Cultist Simulator, it nevertheless plays quite differently.
Where in CS, you play a ruthless cult leader who recruits members towards some sinister end, loots occult places for books, reads these books strictly for their arcane content, summons eldritch horrors and sends them after the investigators looking into the crimes of the cult, in BoH, you play the role of a librarian carefully reclaiming a vast library building.
The upside of librarians not living as fast as adepts is that they also don't die young, all the menaces which could lead to involuntary game ends are missing from BoH. Where a spoiler-free play-through of Cultist Simulator would involve quite a lot of suffering on the players part (especially for the advanced ends, where you would need to figure out how to reach your objectives quickly under adversarial conditions), Book of Hours can reasonably be played without spoilers.
If you go down that road, I would recommend making notes. A text editor is sufficient for most stuff, preferably complemented by a spreadsheet for memories and skills. (Optionally also crafting stations and crafting recipes). Reading books will give you skill lessons, which work quite differently from the lessons in CS. Where in CS you required n lessons to raise an attribute from (n-1) to n, in BoH to upgrade a skill you require *one* lesson of *any skill with a shared principle* and (n-1) memories with a shared principle.
So to upgrade a skill from one to nine, one will need eight lessons and a total of 36 memories. While the intent of the game is likely to only allow the skill level nine if the player knows how to create eight memories worth suitable principles within a day, as an unintended consequence the game feels a bit like playing a version of Factorio where you have to manually feed every assembly machine. Before that, the player is also free to agonize about /which/ skill to increase as much as they want.
My reason to play the game is that I really like to explore the world-building at a more leisurely pace than Cultist Simulator offers. The crafting system is nice, and with the less abstract representation of physical items you can hoard as many books, plants, drinks etc as you can fit on your shelves.
Or we could talk about feud between Failbetter Games (Fallen London, Sunless Sea) and Alexis Kennedy, which is very culture war related.
> the player is also free to agonize about /which/ skill to increase as much as they want.
Or, in my case, how to maximize my RoI from the Tree of Wisdom so that each skill is exactly high level enough to net me a soul element, and no higher. I've filled up everything within the inner ring and I have a (potential) ++ version of every soul element. I don't know how high this will allow me to go, but I'm gonna find out!
My comment originally had a section on that (which I took out before posting because nobody reads walls of text):
> Selecting which skill to increase with the lesson can be an agonizing choice. The things I consider generally are:
(a) Can I increase the maximum principle available from skills? (e.g., for reading new books)
(b) Do I benefit from the crafting recipes of the skill?
(c) Tree of Wisdom considerations.
(d) Unique opportunities offered by the skill. (Of course, that is kind of hard to do when playing unspoiled, as you only learn about the opportunity when you discover it. I certainly tried guessing that some skill might work for some station, but mostly was wrong.)
For the Tree of Wisdom placement, I would consider the following things:
* Does the skill have crafting potential (which would benefit from further increases)?
* What element of soul do I get, and do I have access to a soul-merging station which accepts both the skill and the element of soul?
* What are alternative skills to place in that Tree slot?
As languages can't be used for crafting (or at or least for /regular/ crafting), it makes learning as many languages as soon as possible and placing them on the lower tiers of the ToW seems like an optimal move.
Merging elements of soul is mostly useful during the initial phase of the game. Merging n soul elements gives you an upgrade of log2(n), while combining n skill lessons gives you a bonus of n. If you have a decent skill and a way to gain a principle related memory (and possibly a tool or craftable ink), then the extra point or two from the EoS will rarely be essential. On the other hand, you absolutely benefit from having multiple copies of a low-level EoS. On certain days, you might decide that you want to gather as much stuff as possible, and then four Health will be vastly more useful than one Health++.
You can also earn achievements by placing an element of soul on the ninth slot in the tree. I guess if one wanted to optimize for that, one would study the dashed lines to see where inter-branch unlocks are possible.
Sounds like Book of Hours might be more to your liking.
Unlike in Cultist Simulator, you stay alive by default. The worst I got in my play-through were a handful of maladies (if a book is clearly marked cursed, read the curse description before reading the book) which were easily cured, eventually.
The worst thing that should have happened to me would have been using some ten lessons at the end of a certain season before I realized that you only require a single lesson to level a Skill up. Which would not have much of a difference either in the end.
Also, I guess most (all?) of the books from Cultist Simulator are in Book of Hours. (Fun fact: some books are amended on the margins to inform the player that certain summons they were hinting to do not work in Book of Hours.) So you could explore most of the lore without having to learn how to get rid of menaces.
Yes, the game expects you to die multiple times until you figure it out -- and I died. A lot. One hint I'll give you is that you can click on the "Time Passes" verb to see a preview of the next season. This is extremely valuable for survival. Another hint is that the regular game rewards patience. Flashy high-energy actions are effective, but always bring about severe negative consequences; laying low while the heat goes down and your mind quiets is usually safer.
I say "the regular game" because some of the the expansions, as well as the "New Game+" mode (no spoilers), are absolutely brutal. Depending on the path you've chosen, you may be under constant pressure, with little time to plan or even to act, before your glorious work goes to ruin.
Yeah, I had to literally take notes so I could remember how to dispose of all the menaces efficiently. All the Dread and Fascination and Restlessness started to blur together after a while.
The easiest route is to start as a Physician - they get a job that pays well and they can't get fired from, and money makes all your other problems easier to solve. Otherwise, do manual labor and train your health (it's reasonably profitable once you've leveled it up), and do paintings to burn off your restlessness and manage other conditions.
> In 2009, Kennedy developed the browser game Fallen London. He founded the company Failbetter Games in January 2010.
> In June 2016, Kennedy announced that he was leaving the company to do more creative, than managerial, work through freelancing. He sold his majority shareholder stake in Failbetter for 60 percent of the company's cash, rather than 60 percent of its value, to help the company operate without issue.
Then in 2019 (coincidentally after Cultist Simulator was nominated for some award) allegations of misconduct appeared. As far as I can tell, he did have an unreported relationship with a woman who went on to joined FBG and reported directly to him, and might possibly have been the manager of his future wife when their relationship began. Possibly he was an asshole boss to his former girlfriend after he left her. Possibly he was generally not the nicest manager to all people. Likely he asked out women in the gaming industry, including women at FBG. Possibly some of the women found that uncomfortable and/or unprofessional. In short, nothing a month long visit to the tomb colonies would not clear.
Also, apparently FBG seems to have imposed a damnatio memoriae on AK, and removed him from the credits of Fallen London (which I can't find anywhere?), as well as unattributed his blog posts. This is not what people usually mean when they say "separate the artwork from the artist".
My personal verdict (from limited information) is that AK is certainly wasted as a manager. Sunless Sea (where he was a manager of a team, I guess?) certainly was a great game, but so were Cultist Simulator and BoH, which he wrote with his wife. Beyond that, none of the creditable allegations don't seem very damning, I think.
If there ever was a problem where a twitter mob is the answer (spoiler: there is not), the behavior of AK most certainly is not it. That guy quit his job as CEO of FBG (where had power over female employees) to develop games with his wife (a setting with limited marginal opportunities for sexual misconduct). He is not on the short list for either the Supreme Court or the Papacy.
(If the motivation of FBG is the success of WF, this is even more stupid. FBG and WF are not two fish in a tiny aquarium, but two small fishes in the vast ocean that is the gaming industry. Almost none of their customers debated if they should buy either Cultist Simulator or Sunless Skies, because their gaming budget likely allowed for both games and then three AAA titles on top. But in the future, I have to ask myself how many pennies of every pound I sent to FBG will get spend on making trouble for WF which is kind of a bummer because I like Fallen London.)
Failbetter framed Alexis Kennedy for "#metoo" and tried to get him to kill himself, and almost succeeded. Fortunately, he survived, and went on to finish Cultist Simulator together with his wife -- the only person who stood by him.
Alternatively, the serial sex abuser Alexis Kennedy escaped justice, and went on to coerce (or gaslight) his wife into making Cultist Simulator -- thus averting financial and professional ruin that is his due.
I would appreciate fellow ACX readers' thoughts on my proposal that Occam's razor doesn't always reduce complexity - it just defers complexity from explanations to objects
Decent take but doesn't really engage with the fundamental question relating to Occam's razor: how should one define complexity?
The post suggests that whatever this complexity is, it can be portioned off into complexity belonging to "objects" and complexity belonging to "explanations" but since neither term is carefully defined and complexity isn't carefully defined either, it's hard to say anything about this idea.
Unfortunately it doesn't. Occam's razor is more of an experimental fact than a conscious decision: the reason we use it is that it has proved successful historically.
Succesful at generalization. For instance, we use various of regularization in training our machine learning system based around the idea of simplicity and find that it leads to them generalizing better on the test set.
Fair enough, I take that on board and completely agree with your concern with poorly constructed definitions.
Do you need to define complexity as strictly if you are only making relative comments (i.e. one thing is more complex than another?). It's hard. I think the definition of complexity is dependent on the domain.
I would say that broadly, an explanation tells you "why things are the way they are", and objects are "what things are". complexity would be the number of components that contribute to an explanation or an object - but the "resolution" on which to define these components is domain-specific.
having written this (thank you for pushing me to think more about it) I think that you can't really define it independent of a domain or a question. this is a similar take to what Deutsch mentioned in a podcast - which was that a definition of complexity can only come *after* a defined theory of physics
what are your thoughts on how to define complexity?
If you think about physics, you never really get an explanation for "why things are the way they are", indeed it's a little hard to even imagine what that could mean. What you do get is a mathematical framework you can compute stuff using and a way to relate the outcomes of this mathematical framework to things you can observe in the real world.
Having thought a fair bit about this, I think the best place to start on this topic is to first figure what really we do when we search for an explanation of something: in my opinion, any explanation consists of exactly the two things I mentioned above. 1) A mathematical/computational simulation and 2) a way to relate this simulation to sensory data.
So what does complexity mean in this framework? Roughly, it should correspond to how short of a computer program is your simulation (including setting up the framework) and also perhaps, how difficult are the computations. So Einstein's theory of relativity is a lot more complicated than Newton's - it needs a *lot* more mathematical sophistication and also a lot more computing power. As compensation for this increase in complexity, it corresponds much better to real world observations.
This seems like a sufficiently rigorous starting point for the key question: why is occam's razor so often useful? BTW, this question is really starting to come into it's own in today's world. ML systems often find the correct generalization on the test set despite having enough parameters to fit many possible solutions to the training set. The solution to this is clearly some version of Occam's razor, once we make precise the notion of complexity in the context of ML systems.
I see you’ve got into a heated discussion with the Ancient Greek below, but I just wanted to query one part of your insightful response (thanks for sharing it)
Are you implying that all explanations must be able to be mathematically or computationally represented in order for them to be explanations?
Never thought of Occam’s razor as it relates to implementation of ML - if you have any further reading to point me to that would be super appreciated
Interesting - thank you - I will need to read up on Kolmogorov complexity before attacking this properly I think - but very useful! Appreciate you taking the time to share it
Unfortunately heated, and not quite sure why it got that way!
>Are you implying that all explanations must be able to be mathematically or computationally represented in order for them to be explanations?
For a broad notion of computation, yes. For instance, when you reason through some argument about a novel some critic is making - that would also be a computation in my sense (and more viscerally, GPT-4 could probably replicate a similar argument).
>Never thought of Occam’s razor as it relates to implementation of ML - if you have any further reading to point me to that would be super appreciated
I don't know any references, sorry. In general, what ML peeople usually program in is some kind of regularity, L2 regularization is a popular one and you could try searching for that. So what these regularizations do is that they add a term to the loss function so that you don't just minimize "error" (for e.g. cross entropy) but also "simplicity" (here the total square sum of the weights, for instance).
Experimentally, we find that including such regularizations tends to lead to the system learning algorithms/functions that generalize better outside the training set. It is very much an open question as to why, and is exactly the Occam's razor question in a different context.
"In my opinion, any explanation consists of exactly the two things I mentioned above. 1) A mathematical/computational simulation and 2) a way to relate this simulation to sensory data."
So it *doesn't* contain 3) any kind of representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data? Siding with instrumentalism against realism, if that is what you are doing, makes the question of simplicity rather trivial -- it reduces to just doing less complex calculation as a matter of convenience, and minimal computational complexity is the obvious choice. OTOH, the whole issue is much more fraught for realists.
If you are using a simplicity criterion to decide between theories that already known to be predictive , that are good enough for instrumentalism, then simplicity doesn’t buy you any extra predictiveness, so the extra factor it buys you is presumably truth, correspondence to reality.
There are multiple simplicity criteria, but not multiple truths. So you need the right simplicity criterion.
If you have a conceptually valid simplicity criterion, and you formalise it, then that's as good as it gets, you've ticked all the boxes.
On the other hand, if you formalise a simplicity criterion that has no known relationship to truth, then you haven't achieved anything. So it is not enough to say that Solomonoff is "the" formal standard of simplicity. There are any number of ways of conceptualising simplicity, and you need the right one.
I think any sufficiently accurate simulation of sufficiently complicated data has to be a pretty good representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data. I don't know if this is an instrumentalist or realistic take.
I think the question about Occam's razor is especially relevant today given the way machine learning works. We are finding out that the following is just now true:
"If you are using a simplicity criterion to decide between theories that already known to be predictive , that are good enough for instrumentalism, then simplicity doesn’t buy you any extra predictiveness, so the extra factor it buys you is presumably truth, correspondence to reality."
Various kinds of regularizations absolutely help machine learning systems generalize better on the training data and we don't have a great theory as to why. Like you say, people use various notions of simplicity and it's more of an experiemental fact as to which one works. I have hopes that everything can be organized under Kolmogorov complexity but at this point, this is only a hope and I wasn't making a claim that Kolmogorov complexity was *the* ultimate and complete explanation.
"I think any sufficiently accurate simulation of sufficiently complicated data has to be a pretty good representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data."
Accurate in what way? Presumably you mean it's predictive, since that can be tested directly. However , we don't have empirical evidence that predictiveness correlates with being realistic representation, because we can't measure realistic representation. So we need a conceptual argument that some notion of theoretical goodness correlates to realistic representation.
One way of making this point is to notice that equally predictive theories can have quite different ontological implications.
Another way of making this point is that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles ... although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don't exist.
A further way is to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can't rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don't know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can't tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that
better theories are more probably correc than worse ones, but we don't really know whether
current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God's eye point of view.
Moreover, we can't safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontolgocial picture for just the reason already given -- slight change in predictive accuracy going fromm one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology.
"Various kinds of regularizations absolutely help machine learning systems generalize better on the training data and we don't have a great theory as to why."
That shows that simplicity correlates generality, not that either correlates with correct realistic representation. We can't measure how ontologically correct an AIs model is with regard to reality itself.
I'm trying to find a more in-depth exploration of a behaviour I've been noticing - I'm not sure if I read something about this in a SSC/ACX post, or perhaps a comment section. I can't think of the correct terms to describe it, so hopefully I can show what I mean by way of anecdote:
I was watching reality TV with a friend a while back, and one of the people on the show got into a conversation about evolution, or rather she explained that she was devoutly Christian and didn't believe in evolution. My friend immediately went to "wow, what a dumbass," while I said something along the lines of "who cares, she's a hairstylist by trade, says she loves her family and all that, what does it matter in her life whether she 'correctly' believes in evolution or not". I think I also reflected on the fact that in our (my friend's and mine) lives, knowledge of evolution affects approximately zero of our day-to-day interactions, except when its pulled out - like in this anecdote - to laugh at someone for being stupid.
Anyway, my friend got a bit defensive, we changed the subject.
I guess I'm wondering how much being "correct" on topics like evolution is the issue here, or if its simply another tribal calling-card that lets one dunk on the outgroup. Neither my friend nor I have any scientific education, though I am starting to turn my studies in that direction. Understanding evolution and natural selection is important for biological studies etc, but in my day-to-day I'm fine with people having "incorrect" views on these things - I still trust them on, say, interpersonal matters, if they get along well with people; but I'll discount supposedly scientific recommendations (structured water, anyone?).
If this is all very vague, let me ask for personal experiences - how much does disagreement on key topics affect how you value other people, if at all, depending on context?
> I think I also reflected on the fact that in our (my friend's and mine) lives, knowledge of evolution affects approximately zero of our day-to-day interactions, except
...except for the election day, when the nice lady votes for a politician who shares her beliefs (not just about evolution, but also about covid being a hoax, homeopathy being the only reliable medicine, or how kids can become gay just by hearing that gays exist), while you and your friend... don't.
Anyway, your side loses because the nice ladies outnumber you, and you wonder whether the guy they voted for ends up as a minister of healthcare, or a minister of education.
Then the nice lady smiles at you and says that you shouldn't believe everything the liberals are telling you, because if you instead free your mind and follow your intuition (and most importantly, listen to the same sources she does), your life will become happy and full of positive energy.
And, you know -- she actually *is* happy and full of positive energy. You can't deny that.
Your claim that not believing in evolution demands belief that gayness is a contagious disease, is proving your strawman's point; this attitude is pure negativity and excising those who preach it will result in greater happiness.
Nope, my point is that people who are happy to ignore reality in some aspect are often happy to ignore reality in many other aspects (though not necessarily all of them), because their decision algorithm is "whatever makes me feel happy". And at some moment, they are likely to hurt someone.
This is why I do not see the willful denial of reality as harmless, even if in everyday life it doesn't make a difference whether I believe that electrons orbit around protons, or the other way round, or it is all the four basic elements.
As the saying goes, nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. Not understanding - or believing in - evolution means that you have a huge handicap in understanding the natural world. And I'd argue that's useful for a hairdresser, because the natural world is all around us!
Indeed you could, and many people suffer from their lack of understanding of mathematics every day.
Personally, I've got a top 1% mathematical understanding but I'm pretty fuzzy on how a toilet works. Like, I get how the flush forces the poo round the S-bend and into the pipe that goes down, but then what? Is it just a mostly-empty pipe running downhill all the way to the sewage plant? Or is the pipe mostly full, and flat, and they're constantly pumping sewage out at the far end, and if they ever stop pumping for long enough then everyone's toilet starts flowing backwards? Why doesn't my sink smell bad? Is it just water in the S-bend again? If that water evaporated then would my sink smell like sewage?
It is usually mostly empty pipe running downhill all the way to the sewage plant. In some cases you have pumps, but generally you try to build your city's sewage system so that gravity does all the work.
In a combined sewage system there is an overflow outlet directly into the river or ocean or whatever that sewage spills into instead of backing up into your homes, in the case of some kind of clog at the treatment plant or (much more common) when severe rainfall fills the system with water.
If there is no water in your sink's bend then it will smell a bit, yes.
Of course you might not be hooked up to sewer, in which case you probably have a septic tank. Sewage collects in the tank, where solids fall to the bottom leaving liquid at the top. When the tank gets full enough, the water flows through a pipe at the top of the tank to a series of other pipes that are part of a drain field: the pipes have holes in them, so the liquid just seeps into the ground and makes its way downward through the layers of sediment. Bacteria tend to break down your waste, so you don't have to pump all the solids out of the tank all the time.
I agree it isn't meaningful, somebody's belief about the origins of homo sapiens isn't likely to ever affect an interaction you have with them or alter either of your lives. But there's always SOME value in people around you having a correct factual view of the world, since you never know when some novel situation might occur in which somehow they could act on the false belief in a way that causes real harm.
The reflexive hostility to creationists came from the mid-00s era, when a version of the New Atheism trickled down to lower-level political discourse on message boards, where it became a proxy for saying "these dumb evangelicals who elected George W Bush are destroying America". This coincided with the rise of snarky discourse, as Freddie de Boer has talked about, which definitely made it an easy "tribal calling card" to whip out, as you say. It's mostly been supplanted in the last few years with calling people "anti-science" w/r/t vaccines or other covid interventions, which is a more useful proxy since the belief being criticized could at least arguably affect other people.
A seemingly large number of people who like to make these charges that somebody is "anti-science" came of age during the mid-00s and got rhetorically stuck there, and have not updated to the new landscape where evangelicals' social and political power is on the decline.
I never miss an opportunity to kibbitz with outgroups* but the fucked-up fact is that nothing seems to motivate tribes and people quite like hatred and fear.
Hitler could use that fact to his profit, most people just suffer from it, I take the quasi-buddhist/stoic approach of just laughing at how absurd that sad fact is.
It sounds like your friend wants to be one step on the barber pole above the creationist lady, and you want to be one step on the barber pole above your friend. You live in an intellectual environment where dunking on creationists is so absolutely old hat that you feel the need to think something else that makes you more sophisticated. Your friend is probably slightly less terminally online and is happy to stick with the 'boo creationist" emotion that the producers intended.
Maybe deep down all I want is to be higher up on the "barber pole," maybe that's all that was going on there in the moment. I was trying to come at this again with curiosity, and to see what other perspectives might be.
I think your barber-pole-climbing view of it is relevant. But I don't see how the rest of your comment was necessary.
My intention with this comment is to be one step above you on the barber pole by pointing out the whole barber pole thing.
But by pointing out my own cynical intellectual intentions you've successfully leapfrogged me and are now one level on the barber pole above me. Well done!
Well, one one hand, it's "reality" tv, which is all but real. The producers explicitly picked these rather uneducated people and pushed them to have such a conversation on topics way over their heads, for entertainment.
On the other hand, if we leave manipulation aside, nowadays it's not hard to get some basic intellectual knowledge here and there, and the basics of evolution are standard school material - they may be pretty basic but it's surely enough for such a discussion. So two rather unprepared people going into intellectual discussions over abstract topics of no immediate relevance to their day to day lives counts as a good thing in my book. The seeds of even vaguely caring about how the world works beyond day-to-day appearances are there, and that's nice.
And yes, at that level, someone actively saying they don't believe in one of modernity's greatest discoveries, with its amazing explanatory power over so many things that *do appear* in our day to day lives, is a bit of a bad sign about the person. They didn't *have* to engage in debate about the science of biology, but they chose to, and then they bungled it.
While not directly pertinent to the larger question, it may be useful to know that some people confuse evolution with abiogenisis so they actually do believe in change across population over time but don't believe in the more speculative bits inferring species millions of years ago.
It is one of the confusing bits where two sides have somewhat different vocabulary (although I think a lot of that is the habit of conflating the biological process with the alleged moral claims about existence).
Watch out for different definitions of common terms in the "creation v. evolution" debate.
First, it's a reality TV show. It's meant to be entertainment, not actual real life, so they go for maximum drama and that means picking 'contestants' who fit the script. So they didn't pick a mainstream Christian for whom evolution is not a problem, they picked this woman. And they didn't pick the likes of Francis Collins, about whom P.Z. Myers was absolutely *steaming* that a believing Christian got a Big Important Science Job (I have to admit I enjoyed Myers' impotent foot-stamping rage over this), they picked a hairdresser.
All in order to elicit the reaction that your friend responded to, in line with the stimulus fed them: "Wow, what a dumbass". That's what the producers want: lots of chatter on social media about "wow what a dumbass" and that in turn provokes "you're the dumbass" and then there's a little war going on there and there's no such thing as bad publicity. They've got their genned-up controversy going.
So second, you could point out to your friend that their instinctive reaction is what the show *wants* to evoke and they're falling in line with the script. But that might offend them, if they like to think that they're a cut above the kind of simpletons who are so easily manipulated.
I think it is actually useful for even hairstylists to understand evolution because it helps explain so much of human nature. e.g. why do people usually care so much more about themselves than about others? Because that's the best strategy for natural selection.
As others have noted, evolution offers easy explanations for a lot of true things about human nature, and for a lot more *false* things about human nature. Trying to make rigorous use of evolutionary biology to understand human behavior is very hard work, not something the average hair stylist is going to do, and really not something the average scientist is going to do.
Almost everyone will get better results by watching human behavior and saying "huh, that's how humans behave, go figure", than by contemplating evolutionary biology and trying to predict how humans will behave.
Then you read the thousands of "just so" explanations of how such-and-such behavior that doesn't work with that theory at all can be explained by...____________.
People do things that aren't well explained by selfishness all the time. Then you talk about group selfishness, or family selfishness, or gay uncles, or whatever people have to make up whole cloth to explain what natural selection struggles to explain.
In this sea of disagreement, do you really think this hairstylist with an average or less IQ is going to make good decisions about which sub-theories to believe and act in life accordingly? Or perhaps, she's going to end up more confused and wrong somewhere along the line than if she just didn't learn about evolution in the first place? Seems like a coin toss to me.
Ah now, bloom, how many times in reality do you think to yourself "This is natural selection in peak operation" rather than "what a selfish so-and-so" when somebody acts to benefit themselves rather than you? Even if we accept evolution and understand it, in practice we don't (unless we're enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists) attribute such explanations to instances of selfishness, malice, ill-will, greed, etc. especially involving ourselves on the receiving end of such.
My mood and emotional response to an obnoxious or evil person I encounter is inevitably better when I remember that they're just selfish meat robots like I am, and that anger is a choice. I rarely encounter those people, but when I do, I still *usually* indulge in base disgust. But when I remember my limited philosophical training and remind myself of their selfish humanity, my day is better for it. Don't know if it makes a practical difference in the world but it sure makes a difference for my mood. This kind of response to obnoxious behavior doesn't require a total recalibration towards internalizing evolutionary psychology. It just takes a little mindfulness.
Short answer is that I don't think it's meaningful when a person has an opinion on a topic that has no bearing on their life. Until they become a biologist, not believing in evolution is fine.
If you don't have the right background and have dedicated the time, 'believing' in evolution is primarily an exercise in trusting authorities. This is absolutely fine, in my opinion, since as you say there're no real-world consequences for anyone involved. So, I'd say what we have here is two people trusting authorities in different way on a topic with no consequences. Phrased that way, it's hard to get too worked up about someone being 'incorrect.' I'm sure I have all kinds of incorrect views about how ports work, but ports have no bearing on my life so it's fine.
If you want to say something like "well this is bad because it's incorrect and we need a populace that has correct views," then I would say that the way you get that on net is for people to trust scientific authorities more. Expecting people to put in the time to understand evolution (or nuclear power, or machine learning, or programming, etc.) at the level where the empirical truths become salient is unrealistic. I 100% believe that "trusting authority" is epistemically inferior to "figuring it out for one's self," but it's the only scalable heuristic we have.
I think you're badly underestimating how much basic-to-middling understanding of science society has nicely managed to make accessible to nonspecialists.
I do have a science background, but sometimes I have conversations on such topics with people who don't, and when they have a bit of interest, you can sense that it's not just that they've learned to trust the right authorities, but actually gained a bit of actual familiarity with how it works.
Real problems usually appear only when people have prior ideological commitments that block that understanding. In the case of evolution, any kind of ideology that holds the human species as intrinsically above the rest of the biosphere would easily do that.
Why does evolution threaten the privileged position of humans? That we evolved to dominate the planet does make us special. That we evolved so I can type this message to be read across the world instantly makes us special. Anyone trying to claim humans aren't special due to evolution isn't really paying attention to what we have evolved into.
And this fits into theistic beliefs: evolution is the mechanism by which divine agency (or possibly diabolical agency if there's any material dualists left out there) promoted humanity above the rest of the biosphere, a statement that cannot actually be disproven.
If you're the kind of person who thinks of humans as above or separated from the animals, I can see how the idea that our ancestors were once ocean scum and weird little ratty things and monkey-creatures to be upsetting. Also, evolution only supports out planet domination Right Now, under these conditions. If our evolved behaviors and tech lead us to destroy ourselves, well then we lose. There's no security in evolution.
I don't think I'm underestimating the level of public knowledge of science, but I absolutely could be. But even though there are enthusiastic amateurs, and I'm happy that they're there, I think the bulk of scientific opinion is of the form "it's what the authorities I trust say." My main point is that, if someone has a divergent view of a scientific topic, your prior should be that it stems from a difference of respected authorities, and probably not that it's an empirically formed choice, and then proceed from there.
It sounds like that prior may not hold in at least some of your conversations, which in my book would be a point in favor for your social circle.
Sacred cows are dangerous. Recognizing truth, unblinded by dogmatism is important in many arenas. But the sacred cows aren't all religious. We all have cognitive biases to one extent or another that we can try to overcome. Some sacred dogmas are probably even *more* common among those who are not religious. One example, that actually pertains to denial of evolution is the dogmatic denial of the implication of evolution on humans, discussed by David Friedman in a number of pieces, including here: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/who-is-against-evolution.
Ultimately though, while truth is important in many areas, and dogmatic falsehood is dangerous in many areas, not all truths are of equal import.
If someone doesn't believe in vaccines, that can have much more impact than them believing the wrong thing about Shakespearian authorship questions.
Checking off the right box about evolution doesn't seem like the most weighty truth in and of itself; the vast majority of people probably never make any decisions that are directly a function of it.
As Friedman points out, the impactful science denial / dogmatism regarding evolution is mostly made by people who would check the correct box.
Furthermore, the weight of the impact of a wrong belief that someone holds need not affect how much you value them personally.
We all have our biases, and few people even make much of an effort at all to correct them and to seek truths, even very inconvenient ones.
So the typical person who believes something false is probably not that atypical in their epistemology. And if the false things they believe are particularly weighty, e.g. anti-vax, that's probably mostly because like most people they are greatly influenced by the beliefs of those around them, and the particular false beliefs of those around them happen to be anti-vax.
Taken in isolation it is fine, but if many people have wrong beliefs that would be a larger problem for society. F.ex if too many people don't believe in evolution, that would pose a problem for those who wants to get funding for biology studies (and possibly much worse, as history tells us). Therefore, I believe cultivating and expecting educated beliefs in the general public is important.
If neither of you have any technical education, then you don't really understand why evolution is considered correct - this is entirely non obvious and took even scientists many years, experiments and arguments to believe, and it's still very much a matter of debate as to how precisely to define evolution and to what extent is it true and when is false etc.
All this is to say that there is no way that believing in evolution or not is a question about "scientific smartness" for either you or the reality show person. It is at best a question about "political smartness", I.e., which of the self-purported authorities on evolution to believe and at worst, a question about signalling affiliation to various groups.
More personally, what matters to me usually in discussions with other people is not what they believe necessarily, but why they believe it and how they hold the belief - is it something they can explicate reasons for and change their mind about?
I agree that in my context it's a question of "political smartness."
As for what personally matters to you in discussion - I think that's the direction I was heading towards, in bringing up "why does it matter in this context?" I don't care about the TV person, I was trying to start a conversation with my friend to see what the reasoning was behind the knee-jerk reaction. Though perhaps watching reality TV isn't the best situation to try this... I'm generally trying to get better at turning to the "why" of people's beliefs in conversation, and in retrospect that moment was a failure on my part to define what exactly I'm asking about, a vague attempt to get into a deeper conversation but without the conversational experience to make it work.
Also, taking in Kristian's comment below - I don't think your standards are too demanding, in fact saying "I don't understand x" does seem more appropriate to me than "I don't believe x".
It's always hard to try and get people to introspect about beliefs held for political reasons - as with your friend, where I use political in a broader term than just relating to the government. I don't know a good way of doing it with most people and I try and cultivate friendships with the few people who can in fact reason well about their in-tribe beliefs.
The most frustrating conversations I have had always fall into this category - trying to get people to question or reason about beliefs around which they build their identity and I wish I knew how to do it better.
One can believe in evolution without understanding why it is considered true today in detail. Otherwise one could say that Charles Darwin couldn’t have believed in evolution because he didn’t know the up to date version of it.
Adapting your very demanding standards would only justify one to say that one doesn’t understand evolution, not to say that one doesn’t believe it.
I don't think it's possible to "believe" in evolution at all; it'd be like "believing" in rocks, or gravity. I don't need to believe in rocks, I know they're there (yes yes I could be a brain in a jar etc., but you know what I mean).
And here was me thinking "believing in" something was confined to religion only, that there is no "believing in" with science, there is just acceptance of facts 😁
But that is part of the wider debate around Science versus Religion. EMB could try asking their friend why they think a TV show is comfortable with holding up (a subset of) Christians to mockery, even mild mockery, is okay today? Because mores have changed to the point where it's okay to do so - 'wow what a dumbass' about non-acceptance of evolution is not an opinion that will get you in trouble. So the influence of Christianity has waned enough for society to be able to do so, and that is reflected in your friend's attitude.
There's a whole set of unquestioned assumptions in the background here, and I think it could be that the friend got defensive because "what does it matter what the 'correct' opinion on this is?" calls into question the whole 'right-thinking people believe X and say Y' that current culture is based upon. The right sort of person has certain values, one of which is that religion is anti-science, this is very important, and religious people who deny or do not accept scientific dogma are stupid, and this is very important to say as well. Because otherwise you could be mistaken for one of the people who are not on the right side, and that spreads out to "so you're a racist? a homophobe? a transphobe?" and all the rest of it.
The friend feels it is important to know and to signal that you know the 'right' beliefs to have, because there's a whole emanation of a penumbra of other beliefs associated with that, where 'evolution - yes or no?' is a proxy to indicate that you hold the right values.
> And here was me thinking "believing in" something was confined to religion only, that there is no "believing in" with science, there is just acceptance of facts
I actually agree with you -- I think that "believing" in evolution is kind of like "believing" in rocks (as I'd said in my comment above). I suppose someone out there does take the existence of rocks on faith, but such people are outliers.
Though of course it's possible to have a surface-level understanding of evolution, or gravity, or indeed rocks; and be reasonably convinced that they exist; without knowing all the details. For example, I couldn't tell the difference between igneous and metamorphic rocks at a glance; nor do I know the exact processes by which they are formed; and yet, I am still reasonably sure that rocks exist regardless of whether I have faith in them or not.
I considered leaving out the Christian part of the person's description, but I'm glad I didn't, because I appreciate your comments here.
It's interesting to observe just how important displaying certain ('right') beliefs can be - I didn't in any way prompt my friend's "what an idiot" comment, and I find it curious especially since we've known each other since childhood and I'd expect there to be less pressure to perform the 'right' way in the context of our long-lasting friendship.
(Though as you mentioned in your other comment - she was prompted, not by me but by the show-runners that need reactions of that sort)
Yep, my point is exactly that the question of what to believe is, for most people (non-specialists) not a scientific question but a political question.
In Darwin's case, he did have enough evidence (collected over two decades) to provisionally believe that his version of evolution was more correct than whatever was believed before him so that for him, it was certainly a scientific question.
Right, and it is possible to read Darwin’s publications or some equivalent and understand the reasoning even if one doesn’t have decades of experience in field biology. And it is perfectly possible for a non specialist to do that.
The other question is, is it legitimate for evolution to be a political question.
Unless you are a scientist you don't need to understand any details of evolution. The basics, based on a very strong scientific consensus, are taught to anyone who goes to school.
Exactly my point. The people denying evolution are usually really denying that the school system is a valid arbiter of truth - it's not at all based on the specific question of evolution.
Is this the case? Most of them seem to me to be interested specifically in the question of evolution.
Maybe recently with transgender issues and so forth, there are more people who reject the school system as such and lump these things together, but there are decades of legal cases that are specifically about teaching evolution or the validity of teaching something as an alternative (creationism or intelligent design).
What is taught in school probably omit important detail, and is wrong at some level due to simplification (I'm not a biologist so I wouldn't know what!). But as a basic introduction to the concept, and as for what someone who is not a scientist should know, I think it is perfectly fine?
It really depends on what you mean by an explanation. To me, a good explanation should somehow increase your agency - perhaps it simply lets you predict what will happen in more novel situations or perhaps it lets you build something you couldn't have before. Otherwise, the explanation is merely narrative. I personally find it hard to use a school level explanation of evolution to really do anything, except to recite it back, which is why I call it a narrative.
The trouble with narratives is that there is no good way of deciding between two differing narratives. If you learn something in school, and your church tells you something different, how do you know which one to believe?
FWIW, I think that the school-level explanation that I was taught (IIRC, seeing as I'm pretty old) was reasonably predictive. It was basically "change in allele frequency over time due to selective pressure", which is enough to explain e.g. Australia and antibiotic resistance. It's not "predictive" in the sense of "you can stage an experiment to observe it in real time", since high schoolers don't have those kinds of resources; but the same applies to most theories, such as gravity or electromagnetism or quantum physics etc.
I think the school level explanation does not need to be predictive - that again is for scientists. It only needs to give information about (what scientists believe about) how the world works. This is good in itself, and an educated population will f.ex. be less likely to buy in to bunk and support demagoges as well as more likely to support proper science. Education doesn't need to be directly useful in the individual case.
I believe disbelief in evolution is usually taken to indicate either troubles in general reasoning or a blind spot in everything related to religion (or both), which are both bad far beyond the specific question.
Is this really true, though? I'd wager that, for most people, there's no reasoning involved in forming their views of evolution, any more than reason informs their understanding of the structure of the atom.
One level up, someone may also have learned a few paradoxes or striking bits of evidence for evolution, but still can't demonstrate having thought about it.
With that in mind, under those circumstances, believing in evolution mainly shows that such a person has learned to accept a specific set of authorities.
"Most people" aren't as smart as you or I perhaps, but they're not as dumb as the dumbest person you can possibly imagine.
I think there's a spectrum of levels of engagement with reason, in the middle ground between "I believe evolution because authority figures tell me to" and "I believe evolution because I am an evolutionary biologist and have personally double-checked all the maths behind it".
What those intermediate levels of reason look like is a sort of engagement where you think about the idea a little bit, prod it, come up with "but how come..." questions for your teacher, and eventually are convinced that it sounds kinda reasonable even if some of the details seem a bit hand-wavey. In this sense, reason informs their views because they've thought about it for long enough to convince themselves that it basically sounds reasonable.
Evolution and the whole sort of standard model of the history of the universe stands up to a lot more of this sort of casual teenage-brain prodding than the "six thousand year old Earth" model does.
I agree with all of this*, and tried to gesture toward the gradient you describe, towards those "intermediate levels of reason", by highlighting the "one level up from no thinking" scenario, but you've put it better here.
My main goal with this line of commentary is to discredit the idea that one's stance on evolution is a very good gauge of reasoning ability.** I disagree strongly with intelligent design proponent, William Dembski, but I think his reasoning abilities are probably superior to mine along many axes. Conversely, I talk to a lot of people that believe in evolution, but have very poor reasoning skills.
* And regret if my comment implied I was exempting myself from "most people".
** I'm also generally interested in the often-underappreciated social dimensions of knowledge, but that's neither here nor there.
I believe that people who have used some reasoning to come to the conclusion (even if mainly using the evidence provided, which is, of course, meta-problematic due to potential cherry-picking) tend to believe that the others did, too — or, at least, that those who disagree did not. And if you believe that you have used reasoning and someone else haven't, everything else is downstream.
Also, since no one can be an expert in everything, choosing authorities is an important part of arriving to right conclusions in practice, even though in theory argument screens off authority.
I don't think this addresses what I'm saying, which is that for most people, the subject of evolution does not even _engage_ reasoning faculties. For that matter, neither does the process of choosing authorities.
Yes, that's a sad part of reality, but "reversed stupidity is not intelligence", choosing wrong authorities does generally turn out to be a relatively reliable red flag.
Strong agree. You can see this in action when a novel topic comes up (covid vaccines?) and major political divisions get stamped on a topic. Democrats were against the covid vaccines when they were a Trump thing, but became very positive after Biden's election. Republicans do the same thing. Cultural attachments seem to be a much bigger part of what we individually and collectively believe than reason, at the object level all the way up to the meta-level of picking who to listen to.
Suppose you are presented with evidence of “nonhuman vehicles”, ie UFO’s. How does this evidence change your prior beliefs about the difficulty of aligning an AGI?
If the "nonhuman vehicles" are UFOs from aliens, that should dramatically increase the odds that AGI can be effectively aligned, on the basis that AGI seems to be easier than interstellar travel, so I'd expect p(noAGI | interstellar|) and p(unalignedAGI | interstellar) to be low, making p(alignedAGI | interstellar) high.
Now I'm very skeptical that UFO reports are good evidence of interstellar travel so the existing data doesn't nudge my priors by much, but if it were to be confirmed that would cause me to update. Similarly, I think discovering technologically advanced aliens through another mechanism would similarly cause me to update in favor of AI alignment being possible.
Wouldn't unaligned AIs count as "aliens" in this context? The existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft says little about the nature of those spacecraft's operators, so should make little change in your priors re AI alignment. Rather, those priors should guide your priors regarding the organic and/or benevolent nature of the aliens.
That's a super interesting question that I'll have to think about. I have a vague sense that existing UFO evidence seems too incompetent for an advanced AI, but I guess "this behavior makes no sense" isn't strong evidence in favor of an unaligned AI.
That said I'm skeptical about the evidence so I'm having a hard time thinking carefully about what a world in which hit's true looks like.
High chance aliens don't let us create a paperclip maximizer, and some chance they stop us by means short of our extermination. I think there is a higher chance we achieve alignment because if we fail the first time the aliens might cause us to get additional chances.
But also, this assumes that there actually are aliens meaningfully close enough to us to do anything in response. If the laws of physics don't offer a usable Faster Than Light travel, they're going to be operating with potentially decades of light speed lag to observe and respond. Many types of hostile paperclipper could at least distribute backup copies over Earth in under five years.
Say aliens find out that any civ just a bit more advanced than humans are now could accidently create an AI that goes foom and becomes a paperclip maximizer that is a threat to the aliens. As soon as they could these aliens would send out ships to monitor every planet that had life on it and have some automatic program to stop the paperclip maximizer from being created.
But that automatic program could just as easily be a simple asteroid bombardment to remove the problem as it is a complicated political solution.
I submit that the correct reference class here (from the aliens perspective) is discovering invasive fire ant mound in the back of the garden.
Clearing out a matter-consuming paperclipper infestation is best done with predjudice, and ensuring that you did not leave enough traces for the infestation to recur. Keeping humans alive through that process is a tertiary concern at best, they may very well reason that humans are the root cause of the problem and cross them out deliberately.
Were I the alien evaluating earth for papperclipper risk and hazard, I think there is a decent chance I would watch for an active maximizer showing up, and if I need to stop it, I'm likely to simply obliterate a wide radius around where it's been detected.
An Earth that needs to have cities or countries rail-gunned from orbit has important ways already failed the expected tests of being part of the galactic community. If there's any recurrence of a true threat to the extrasolar nations, better to wreck the whole planet to be sure it doesn't get out.
Any chance of something like,: “alignment is enforced over long timeframes by the laws of physics, and the more misaligned an entity is, the shorter its lifespan”?
I think this would require a multiverse and anthropic bias such as in universes where making a paperclip maximizer is easy, relatively few civilizations such as our get time to arise.
If an alien in a flying vehicle was able to travel to another planet, possibly another solar system, then they are at least as smart as we are and probably a lot smarter. If you believe we are close to AGI, they probably have it already.
I think it at least tells us that AGI may not lead immediately to extinction. That probably simplifies alignment, but I don't really work on alignment so I don't know.
We've been presented with plenty of evidence of nonhuman vehicles for decades. It just hasn't been particularly good evidence.
Are we talking here about evidence that simultaneously would unambiguously show that the vehicles are nonhuman but also is insufficient to tell whether they are piloted by a species that has achieved AGI / species that hasn't achieved AGI / an AGI that has junked its parent species?
Ok, say it’s a vehicle stored in a hanger by Lockheed Martin. Suppose congressional testimony by multiple defense department officials confirm was retrieved several decades ago, and although we know how to fly it, we have no understanding of how its drive system or its control system works. It can outperform our best fighter jets in terms of speed and maneuverability. It doesn’t even seem to use fuel or propellant. The DoD officials say they were told it is some intelligent species not from earth, recovered from the Roswell crash site. Nobody with firsthand knowledge of how it was retried is alive.
Suppose all the same stuff except that it's about a fish which turned into Jack Kennedy.
It would take you a while to come around from "uhuh, and Epstein killed himself" to, "holy shit, JFK was actually a fish!"
The fact that we are all primed to accept one of those two as not only super likely but even kinda sorta *expected* is due to the books we've read and the culture we're in.
Nada Mas.
That said, I am a part of this culture too and am ashamed to say that I too might eventually be taken in by it.
But BOY would it take a lot more than some suits speechifying in Congress!
This scenario pretty much completely nixes the "grabby aliens" scenario - the idea that alien civilizations and/or paperclip maximizers will expand at high speeds, so our first sign of alien life will be when a space probe starts turning the solar system into a paperclip factory. This scenario indicates that we've been in travel range of at least one alien species for about 80 years (Roswell was in 1947) and yet nobody else has shown up since.
That indicates that either it's possible to invent this alien space magic without needing an AI to invent it for you, or that the local aliens have AGI that didn't turn their entire light cone into paperclips, and either one is promising for us trying to do the same.
I think this is reasonable; however, I predict that this scenario will never come to pass, since aliens effectively do not exist. That is to say, they surely exist somewhere, but too far away for their light to reach us. Life, especially intelligent life, is just that rare.
Every parent I know uses a smartphone or a tablet as an off switch for their children. For context, I'm thinking about kids aged 0-5 here. Most of the time the parents just slap on a kid's video on Youtube. Sometimes it's apps and games to play instead.
Every parent (entirely unprompted by us) goes through the same conversation, where they assure us with a slight edge to their voices that we'll have to do the same and we'll find we don't have a choice. Since I'm never the one to say, "Urgh, I would never let *my* kid become a screen zombie," I have to assume they said it to themselves and are now pre-emptively justifying their choices to us.
Thing is, I don't necessarily condemn the practice outright, and I absolutely see the tactical value of having an off switch for your child when you need a break.
My instinct is to look at the detail of what's actually happening on the smartphone, and take each factor on its own merits:
- the child is learning patterns like "swipe up on screen" before it learns patterns like "turn page of book", which to me feel more "natural".
---> I can't see a problem with this, because I know it eventually will learn both sets of patterns, and I can't see that the order of learning matters at all.
- the sensorium offered by the smartphone is limited to a small screen, tinny audio, and the feeling of fingertips on plastic. There is no broader or deeper stimulus, nothing's ever in your peripheral vision, and a child raised this way will be what Bret Victor calls "touch blind".
---> I can see the point, but it only really holds if the child is never made to do anything else. I don't see "finger on a screen" as inherently bad, so I don't see that the smartphone does any harm if provided as an addition to an already stimulating environment.
- the child could become superstimulated and unable to find mundane real-world things interesting.
---> I don't know what to think about this.
---> But I notice that this is the exact opposite of the school of thought that says I should be giving the kid as much stimulation as possible to encourage its neural connections to form.
- I can put educational apps on the device and the child will (hopefully) wind up associating learning with leisure time, as well as (debateably) learning various subjects relatively well before it gets to school. Desiring the lure of the smartphone, it will end up begging me for access to these things.
---> Can anyone see a downside to this?
- the child will be exposed to media that I don't control, and may not understand or approve of. At best my child learns to speak in Americanisms that will annoy me, at worst it imbibes memes and indoctrination from my political outgroup.
---> My current thinking is I could just disable Internet access and fill the device with media from my own childhood.
- the foundation may be laid for the child to be exposed to social media at a young age.
---> I am firmly against social media and would lump it in with smoking and gambling as things I very much don't want my children to get involved in.
---> However, if the device cannot access the Internet, I think I should be safe on this one. At least I might have bought myself a few years until I can work out how to address the subject down the line.
What have I missed? Does anyone have any thoughts?
I have a 4.5-year-old boy and a 6-month-old girl; my husband and I work full-time, the kids go to daycare but are home with us evenings and weekends (grandparents are in a different state, babysitters are very much an occasional presence). I'm with you in camp "while it would be better to spend time doing other things, screen time not going to instantly turn their brains to mush." We also effectively don't watch TV ourselves.
What works for us:
- For TV for the older kid, we set a limit of e.g. "three 7-minute episodes a day". (When I was a kid, cartoons were scheduled on the TV, so this was externally exposed; now we have to make up the limits ourselves.) We occasionally have minor skirmishes about this, mostly caused by miscommunication i.e. "I thought I had more cartoons left than I actually did."
- For the tablet, ours is barely functional so we haven't used it as much, but the kid occasionally requests and is allowed, say, 15min (on a timer) of Starfall or Khan Academy Kids. The educational case doesn't seem very strong, although it might have been stronger if we did more of this in preference to the cartoons. The down side is that it requires more active involvement at least initially, to help teach the finger on a screen movements, whereas TV doesn't require much upfront investment.
- For the phone, we didn't have a ton of luck with educational apps; I think it's hard to design good apps with that kind of screen real estate (especially because kids are kind of clumsy so the buttons need to be large). We do use a jigsaw puzzle app; it might have set him back in the complexity of jigsaw puzzles that he will attempt on his own, but, I don't hugely care about this as a metric (and also that might be part of a general trend where he wants to play with physical toys *with someone*, which is great, but doesn't cause dinner to get cooked).
- We recently discovered audio books as a decent "off switch." We mostly use them for long car rides where everyone listens, but sometimes just for the kid (with headphones). (My childhood had crowded (and loud) public transit, so being understimulated during travel time wasn't really a problem to be solved.)
Some other things we've found:
- I find it difficult to reduce the amount of screen time, and I don't think it's easy to do it only some days a week; this is part of kids thriving on routines. I think this might be a large part of why some people advocate "zero screen time", while others find it "unavoidable."
- When my screen-limited children come into a house that keeps a TV running in the background, they are mesmerized by the screen (as opposed to the denizens of the house, who are mostly able to ignore it). The 4.5-year-old seems to have grown out of it, at least at houses where he isn't otherwise shy. (The 6-month old is very much attracted to the moving lights.) When this happened at the house of a friend with older kids, it prompted an unsolicited announcement that we won't have much of a choice about screen time.
- Eventually the two kids will presumably develop different opinions about how to spend their screen time; I imagine it's no worse than other kinds of sharing.
- I don't have a great plan for what happens when social media becomes relevant, although that should be a ways past the 0-5 range. In my case, AIM was how I learned touch-typing, and ICQ was how I learned touch-typing in Russian, so it had some advantages :)
You might be interested in the TechnoSapiens substack which goes into the best evidence/research we have on the impacts of technology use, especially focusing on teens and children:
> we'll have to do the same and we'll find we don't have a choice
I'm old enough to remember a time before smartphones were widely available. Parents did fine, including my own parents. I don't know which option is better but saying that it's unavoidable is certainly laughable.
Yes and no: it's harder to not use the tool that everyone else in your social circle is using. Similarly to how many people successfully don't use social media (I'm one of them), but many people find that, because their friends coordinate via Facebook, they have to maintain at least some sort of Facebook presence (this, occasionally, is also me, though I'm lucky to have friends who mostly remember my Luddite tendencies on this front).
They'll get ADHD if you let them outside or leave them inside with a smart-phone either way. Most people are in some way maladapted to the world, whether through gluten intolerance that gives them immense depression, or hyperactivity that makes shuffling through math problems harder than the math itself. The solution is to rework society from its foundation to match how you most want to raise your children.
We’ve got three kids, zero iPads (except the ones the school gives them - thanks a lot, School) and zero video game systems. They watch plenty of TV though.
Our plan is to keep it like this, and add in social media as verboten when they get older (our oldest is seven). Like you, we keep hearing that none of this is possible, but it clearly is - we are very average parents, not a couple of type A Tiger Moms fanatics or anything.
If you want to do it, I’d keep in mind two things: (1) negotiating a low amount of screen time is a fool’s game. You’ve already lost if you do that. If you allow “playing a Switch” as a reward or “no more than a half hour on the PlayStation after homework is done” it will likely become a thing that the kids ask for constantly and think about constantly. You might not be able to withstand that pressure. (2) having more kids is a big help. My kids are 7, 5 and 3, and they play a million games together. They don’t get all that bored.
I also recommend not allowing devices. One thing I’ve noticed with my kids’ friends is that when kids get obsessed with video games it’s kind of over. It becomes their reason to do anything and most other activities pale in comparison. That doesn’t happen to every kid at all - girls seem to never get like that, for example - but it happens to a lot of them. I have three boys, so….
Anyway, if I can do it, it is definitely doable. Maybe I’ll buckle under pressure when they’re teenagers but I doubt it.
Much as I hate social media, I would worry that a "no social media" rule would wind up as a "you're not allowed to have friends" rule in practice. Nobody at school will want to be friends with that one weird kid whose parents don't let them use the tool that all other kids use to keep in touch.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but: I don't think it's ever reasonable. Every adult who is "on" social media seems to hate it, obsess over it, lose hours a day to it, and get nothing at all in return. It must be worse for children. Our intention is to not allow it at all.
I've been told by parents with older kids that it's impossible to not allow them phones and social media because it's the way kids connect now - basically that they won't be able to maintain friendships without these things. If so, then yeah, we've lost, but we were told that it was impossible to keep them off of video games and iPads too, and that ended up incorrect.
This isn't a helpful response, because I really have no idea. Social media is in the future for us. I'll say, though, that with three boys I'm much less worried about social media than I am with video games and YouTube. I just don't seem them really caring that much about Instagram or whatever.
You only know me though social media (I think ACX counts as social media), but I spend a lot of time here and on FB, and I don't hate it. The folks here and my FB friends are a pretty decent bunch.
They probably won't care that much about Instagram or Snapchat or Tiktok as such; they'll care about meeting girls, and girls are a hell of a lot less likely to get with the weird kid whose mom has puritanical, arcane beliefs about recreation and socializing. If they're normal kids besides, they'll probably be fine, but just know you are introducing a social hurdle they will need to cross all by themselves.
Oh, and most kids are fine with social media. I do fully share your opinion about how terrible it is, but it seems that only the severe outliers have real problems originating with social media.
My naive conclusion was, like the parents you mention, that flat banning social isn't enough. You also need to assemble around you a village full of other parents who ban it as well. My problem is, I have no idea how to do that. I do believe enough parents agree with the sentiment that the numbers are there to do it though.
EDIT: at some point I should put into words what I see the dangers of social media actually are, and maybe start a thread here to get people's input on it.
>Apart from those, though, the mother-related social media. I'm mercifully not directly exposed to it, just through my wife, but it still seems like a horror show, full of mothers who are perfectly ready to ream each other's maternity choices at the slightest provocation. (Ream in a passive-aggressive manner, that is - "Oh, your family's screen time is hour per day? Our little ones never look at screens.”)
>Indeed, the opposition to any screentime reflects a curious tendency to always advocate for childcare solutions that make one’s life more difficult. Some just plain seem also convinced that if you use anything that a rural peasant from the 1700s wouldn't be using and which might make your life easier (formula! birth at hospital! screens! daycare!) then you might as well throw your kids to the wolves already.
The modern parenthood (chiefly motherhood) discourse, at least in its more fervent forms, always seems to fall on the side that you are supposed to "play the parenthood in the hard mode". Screens are seen as a cheat code, something that can't be beneficial to kids simply because it is "too easy".
You absolutely can limit or eliminate screen time for 0-5 year olds. We have two children in that age range. The oldest now has a movie on Sunday afternoon, sometimes along with a couple of reasonably educational episodes, but virtually nothing else. He gets very grumpy after watching TV and life goes much more smoothly if it's limited to a specific time and specific duration.
The younger loses interest. He'll watch the movie for about 15 minutes and then gets up to go play.
As for smartphones etc, every now and again (around every few months) I'll show the older a video of particular interest, usually a live rocket launch. He's losing interest in those now anyway.
It does mean we lack the off-switch you describe, which requires more direct parenting, and that can sometimes be a pain. But for us screen time only delays and worsens the misbehaviour. It doesn't help in the long run.
This is similar to my experience. I have a 2 year old. My wife and I didn't watch tv with him and tried really hard not to use our phones in front of him unless it was a specific task - FaceTiming with grandparents, looking up direction, looking at a recipe, listening to a song together. The biggest "mindless" use we do with him is look at photos together.
When he was about 1 we were on a 4 hour flight. He was just at the age of walking and wanting to be mobile all the time. We tried using the TVs on the plane to distract him/calm him down. He would watch for maybe 30 seconds then start touching the screen which was much more fun. He is now at the age he wants to do everything his dad does. That includes watching sports which he will talk about so excitedly then only spend maybe 10 minutes watching before he tells me to turn it off.
Kids mimic what their parents do and want to do what parents are doing. If parents are using TV/phones as a way to "shut off" for themselves the kids will mimic that. The tool (TV/phone/ipad) isn't the issue - its the lesson that parents teach about using the tool.
Totally agree on your last point. Trying/Hoping that we can get a 2 year old to just sit quietly at a restaurant or something is just a losing proposition. We either have to do something different (outdoor eating like a winery/brewery or food trucks are great!) or be prepared to be very present and active with him. And honestly, my wife and I always feel much better after devoting a bit more effort than we wanted to engaging with the two year old.
I have regular contact with two two-year olds, one gets regular screentime and the other has seemingly never watched a screen in their life. They both seem equally bright, equally happy, and equally competent at activities and play. It’s just that the parents of one could afford a nanny to give them some freedom and alone time and the other had to resort to the screen. It doesn’t appear to have had any more effect than that.
This is true but goes both ways. What if screen time lets kids learn important skills that give them important advantages in the future? Plausible if the content they watch is educational? I see nobody arguing this, is it entirely unplausible? I don't have kids myself - so no skin in this game (yet).
We could do a double blind study with two million two-year olds to test the same thing but psychology studies don’t replicate anyway. My way is wrong but faster.
Your comment reveals an assumption that seems ubiquitous in these conversations, but typically goes unmentioned, and that I find curious: that parents and caregivers are supposed to play with their children. Not that this is necessarily bad. I don't have kids myself yet, but I don't recall playing with my parents much when I was a child, aside from a game or something every now and then. I would usually play by myself, or with my sister, or with other kids. I would bug my parents when I was bored, but as I recall they would usually try to get me to do something else, not play with me. And if they took me to a playground, they would hang out on the periphery. Now I see parents getting on the equipment with their children. So why do parents play with their kids so much nowadays? Or am I misremembering my own childhood? I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of any parent on here.
I rarely played with my three kids but when I did it (Innebandy / Unihoc worked fine and board games too) we had a good time together. Most of the time they had each other and their respective playmates and every one of them would sometimes play for himself, so that seemed groovy.
It should be rare for a parent to be a child's *primary* playmate, but there's definitely a role for parent-child playing. In particular, there' lots of forms of play that children will find enjoyable once they learn the basics but incredibly frustrating to try and learn without any help.
If you want Alice and Bobby to play checkers with each other while you take care of the housework, that starts with you playing checkers with whichever of the two is older. And your part won't entirely stop until the youngest has outgrown checkers. You are passably familiar with chess, I hope.
There was about a year, roughly ages 2.5-3.5, when my son learned that he liked playing *with others* , and he'd enjoy physical toys *with* someone. (This is also the age when kids learn turn-based games.) Which was great, I enjoy playing with him (and My First Carcassone is not a terrible board game), but sometimes I need to make dinner and dad isn't home! TV somehow works without needing the parent to be physically present on the same couch and actively engaged. This might be easier with his younger sister, since she'll have more relatives to be potentially available to entertain her.
Kids cry about a lot of things, that doesn't mean a parent has to fix it. It may inconvenience the parents, but that's part of the gig. We didn't take our kids out to eat much, or to other places where we felt the need to keep them quiet.
If a parent always finds a way to soothe their kid, the kid will grow up *needing* to be soothed and struggle to deal with adversity. Self-soothing is an important skill for kids and adults.
Sometimes a parent needs a break and can't relax with a child who needs constant attention. This is a very hard job. Calling it "inconveniencing the parents" is not respecting the problem. If you could handle it better than others, if your kids were better behaved, congratulations.
I very much respect the problem. Convincing kids that they can get constant attention/entertainment is making it worse for parents. Kids can and do learn to need less constant attention, but that growth is stymied by always available screen time. It takes a few years of training when kids are at their most difficult (roughly 2 years old), and was a major issue for my wife and I. My reason for responding here at all is to say that it's not only possible, but long term rewarding. But it takes effort because it's not easy.
My parents raised me without turning on a TV in my presence upto the age of 6 or 7. I think this was a really good parenting choice by them, looking at my life in hindsight.
Scott, what do you think about the state of magic mushrooms in California? Recently there was an attempt to decriminalize, but Newsom vetoed it. His argument was that we need regulation in place before legalization can take place.
Do you have any thoughts on what good regulations would look like? And if legalized, would you wait and see before making use of magic mushrooms in your own practice, or would you pick up the tool?
Nice. But a bizarre near universal misunderstanding: Arabs are Semites. The Hamas is not anti-semitic - they 'just' really hate Israel resp. the Jews there. Antizionists/ anti-Israel/ even jewphobia seems to be a word.
I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding. Antisemitism means anti-Jewish pretty universally. Word formation is just not the most logical process, hence endless lists of mildly amusing observations like "we drive on a parkway but park on a driveway".
Anti-x means against x. Semites are Jews and Arabs - those guys with the big noses, ya know. But, you are right, of course: "Antisemitism means anti-Jewish pretty universally." And it is ok to use it for the special attitudes towards Jews in much of Europe much of the time till 1945. (Even though Hitler hold no grudge against Arabs). - Just when one talks about one Semite going against another (who is actually less of a Semite in most cases) using the word is ... a fail ... . Plus: it heavily disturbs the thought process! The reasons of Palestinians to hate Israelis are very, very different from Hitler's reasons. It is not even their religious "Jewishness" - which was no matter for Hitler either, as he had Catholic nuns sent to the death camps, if their "blood" was "Jewish". Edith Stein.
Anti-Israel. Shorter. Much clearer. Unambiguous. Concise. Correct. Helpful (one does not need to think too hard, why Palestinians might hate Israel). btw: me very much pro-Israel. And thus shockingly (to myself) strongly not against very radical retaliation.
Nonsense. "Antisemitic" was a term invented by Wilhelm Marr, a man who hated Jews and wanted a fancy word to describe it. Whether "Semitic" on its own is a reasonable race classifier for Jews, Arabs, perhaps others is wholly beside the point. "Antisemitic" was invented to mean Jew hatred, and has been nearly always used to mean Jew hatred. It's fully unambiguous.
Thank you for the info. Though actually Moritz Steinschneider coined "antisemitisch" 19 years before Marr declared himself an "Antisemit" in 1879 - while Leon Pinsker prefered in 1882: Judophobie. As my co-commenters pointed out, the meaning of a word depends neither on the literal meaning of its parts nor its etymology. The attitude "anti-semitism" that Wilhelm Marr shared with so many others in Europe/US (to very varying degrees) is fundamentally different from the anti-Israelism so many Arab neighbors of Israel feel. I feel not much need in this circle to spell the long list out. - Just a "fun"-talk I got from an anti-semite in Russia (oh, multitudes of them there): "No one expected those Jews to turn into such first-class fighters in Israel. Respect. Glad, they finally have a country of their own, I wished all of them would be there and Russia cleansed of them. Good luck to them wiping out those dirty Arabs!" A pro-Israel anti-semite. If two phenomena have different causes and different consequences, the smart move is to use different words for them.
"Anti-semite" is an unfortunate term. For practical purposes, it means hating Jews, or at least wanting to exclude Jews.
However, "Semite" includes Arabs, so the term produces a semantic tic, that needs to be opposed again and again.
Alternatives: Anti-Judaism (which is also the title of an impressive book which examines what anti-semites think from their own words and Judenhass, which which is German for the hatred of Jews.
Few months back, I got many interesting responses when I asked those who did believe Russia will easily overrun Ukraine why they thought that.
So, another attempt, this time addressed to those who thought current Ukrainian offensive will be taking ground faster than it in fact does. Why did you thought that?
After all, everyone paying attention knows it generally takes superior forces to do a successful offensive against prepared enemy position, and Ukraine obviously does not have clearly superior foreces, at least not in the quantitative sense. When airpower is taken into account, Russia probably still has overall superiority in the overall “military useful machines” category, while after Russian mobilization, number of troops is firmly in “too close to call” territory.
Theoretically this might have been compensated in hard to observe “quality of soldiers” category, but before the offensive started, we’ve seen roughly zero signs (like e.g. mass surrenders) that gap in “quality” is so large it would enable quick Ukrainian breakthrough.
From my layman's perspective, modern warfare heavily favored the attacker. The U.S. had no problem blowing through Iraq's military and taking over the country in a month. In contrast, the U.S. failed to hold Khe Sanh, almost lost Hue, etc. Since World War I, tools for defending were getting weaker and weaker - it became easier than ever to spot an enemy and drop a precision munition on them. Or just bypassing the enemy and attacking their interior directly. The only thing that mattered was striking first, a prerogative usually held by the attacker.
The only times that a defender won were after they had first absorbed the attack - e.g., the British in the Falklands War. Argentina takes the island, goes on defense, the UK attacks and wins. Relative defender always loses. Relative attacker always wins.
[An exception is for civil wars, which are typically quite different than state-on-state conflicts.]
Thus, I made two wrong predictions about Ukraine! I predicted that Russia would quickly overwhelm the Ukrainians, because attackers always win. And I predicted that Ukraine would quickly overwhelm the Russians, because once defenders switch from defense to attack, attackers always win.
I can't think of another example in my lifetime where a large army tried and failed to take territory. It seems that war has changed.
Modern warfare heavily favors whoever has air superiority, who will then use this favor to go on the offensive and force a more decisive victory than defense alone can manage. The persistent and baffling failure of the Russian Air Force to secure air superiority over Ukraine is one of the most important and underrated aspects of the present war in Ukraine. A mechanized war between peer- or near-peer competitors in which neither side(*) was able to achieve air superiority in short order, is something that hasn't happened since 1973, or possibly 1943. So you're not going to be able to look for historical precedent in any other aspect of this war.
(*) It's not at all baffling that Ukraine hasn't been able to secure air superiority even with Russia's failure; they simply don't have the planes.
> So, another attempt, this time addressed to those who thought current Ukrainian offensive will be taking ground faster than it in fact does. Why did you thought that?
Because I don't really know much about the situation, and I get all my information from journalists, who it turns out don't really know much about the situation either. I try to be skeptical but thanks to Gell-Mann Amnesia I just can't seem to resist over-updating when I read some new piece of analysis written by someone with just three percent more clue than I.
My impression is that in the early stages of the invasion Russia was largely in what might be called "pussyfoot mode", not going at it hammer and tongs, in the expectation or hope that people in Eastern Ukraine (a majority being ethnic Russian I believe) wouldn't resist their advance too much and might even welcome them.
Obviously that didn't work out, as it rarely does because it gives one's adversaries and their supporters in other countries time to build up supplies and train, and gain experience in combatting the half-hearted invasion.
But even if the Russians had launched an invasion in full blitzkrieg mode, the example of their attempted invasion of Finland (much smaller than Ukraine) early in WW2 would make one wonder if a rapid victory was assured. It didn't help that before WW2 Stalin had wiped out most of the competent Russian army officers, and the Finland campaign gave Russia quite a bloody nose and the intended occupation of the entire country mostly failed although they were able to pinch a few scraps of border territory here and there.
I know this is not your main point, but "ethnic Russian" in this context is meaningless category. There are many self-identified Ukrainians who speak Russian as their mother tongue, which does not mean they are "ethnic Russians" any more than Americans are English because they speak English.
I am sure there are also citizens of Ukraine who think about themselves as Russian, but they are evidently far fewer than Russian-speaking Ukrainians, at least on territories that weren't occupied by Russia before 2022.
Also not all ethnic Russians support the war, of course.
I didn't expect Ukraine to quickly overrun, but I did expect them to do about 20% better than they did. My main surprise has been how capable the Russian military has been at patching up its worst dysfunctions, I would have expected it to stay poorly managed for longer given corruption at the top and Ukrainian hits on their command structure.
Not really an answer, but my outside view here is that
1) people underestimated how much "attacking is hard" holds in the current technological/doctrinal situation
2) No one involved in the commentariat had any experience even vaguely comparable to breaking through history's greatest minefield without air superiority
Do we actually know the Soviets were better about this? Did we ever see the Soviets (post WWII) engage in a fight with as near a peer as Ukraine is? I do not claim to know at all, but I think that given what we've seen, we shouldn't totally discount that the Soviets military upkeep might have been more similar to the current Russian status than we would have believed, once once it was into the 60's/70's.
Again, to be clear, I'm not claiming that it for sure _was_. I have absolutely no information or expertise to make that judgement. I'm just saying that we were shocked at the state of the Russian military, which should lead us to be slightly more skeptical of our information in that realm more broadly, which should probably extend to our understanding of Soviet military readiness as well.
I agree, particularly since the failure of the Russian army appears to be largely caused by the extreme corruption across all levels of their society, which goes back at least into the 1970s.
The alternative universe this guy wants exists here on Earth. Here in the United States even. They're called the Amish.
They have completely rejected all of the things that he rejects, and they cling to the things he embraces. For completeness, which of the following do they not possess? "[A] strong preference for local governance, grass-roots democracy, an aversion to top-down control, an accepted diversity of regional and local folkways and traditions, a general mythic ideal of spirited individualism and energetic self-reliance, a countervailing tradition of tight-knit family life and exceptionally widespread participation in a proliferation of thick religious, community, and civic associations and affiliations, "Protestant work ethic", an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues, an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership as central to republican self-governance and the national character; political realism and a conservative aversion to too rapid and radical of change."
I'll present some of the following as binaries, but if there's something I haven't considered, let me know: Once you stop growing your own food and start buying it from strangers, there's a risk they'll negligently poison you. You can either accept the risk or employ food inspectors. The food inspectors can either make up rules on the fly, or publish rules of what qualifies as safe and how they determine safety. Those rules can be based on instinct, random chance, religion, or maybe science. If you pick science, you're well on your way to reconstructing the professional managerial class.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but the PMC seems like an unavoidable outcome of any sufficiently advanced, sufficiently risk-averse state. The alternatives that I can see are a) accept the PMC, b) accept the risks, c) accept Amish Jesus as your lord and savior.
I think power structures have some need to have compatible mechanisms of control for peace to exist. Like, if you teleported a 15th century king to modern day america and both parties wanted peace, neither the king could offer a daughter to be wed to biden or likely an embassy staffed by Americans watching over some serfs.
When america withdraws from world police status, both america and china will probably drift apart culturally as there's a giant ocean in between them. And in general allot of the world will stop pretending to be european style nation states for the uns approval.
Three paragraphs in and the name James Burnham is rattling around my head. With every paragraph that rattling grows louder and louder, joined by the name José Ortega y Gasset.
I'm not being snarky (well, not that much). What little I've read so far sounds like someone just got done reading "The Managerial Revolution" (which they cite directly) and "The Revolt of the Public" and decided to smash them together into a grand thesis of world events. What else is here doesn't seem to be very novel and the rhetoric is pretty over-heated. I doubt I'll read the entire thing, partly due to length and partly cause I get the feeling that I would get a lot more benefit by just reading those two books again.
I'm not mad at you, I'm just unclear why you chose that as a response. As you now say, he does say clearly he isn't saying the USA is exactly the same as China is today and the title of the piece should be a hint that it's not just a disclaimer - the entire theory is that the two societies are different but converging. If they were already the same then they couldn't converge.
By contrast, the smith-god Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala tries to make himself a wife of gold and silver, but it ends up lifeless and he the subject of ridicule.
It’s definitely not upstream of Greek influence by the time Lönnrot codified the Kalevala; I have no idea how old the underlying songs are but my guess is they’re probably not. In the reverse direction, I believe Robert Graves opined that the “crashing rocks” in Greek myth may have been inspired by icebergs off Finland. Could be taken as good evidence of cross-pollination.
Ilmari(nen) is believed to have taken on the qualities of a smith through the Proto-Finnic contact with iron-working cultures, such as the Indo-European Balts[n 1] or speakers of Common Germanic.[9]
It's conceivable that iron smithing mythology spreads at the same rate as iron smithing technology, on the grounds that teaching the technology takes time so there's plenty of opportunity to pass on stories.
They're still made of gold and are 'like' real young women, not real young women. But to really know we'd have to have someone who understands the Greek.
In them is mind, intelligence (nous) in their phren, gut or heart where the emotions etc are felt. They have speech and strength and they know thoroughly the works of the immortal gods.
Ultra strongly disagree this is no different from God or a god creating man, the emphasis is so strongly on Hephaestus as a smith and artificer. He doesn’t say "let there be 20 magic tripods with wheels and ears" and behold there are 20 etc etc, he has to make them one at a time and part by part. They are artificial and intelligent.
> Ultra strongly disagree this is no different from God or a god creating man, the emphasis is so strongly on Hephaestus as a smith and artificer. He doesn’t say "let there be 20 magic tripods with wheels and ears" and behold there are 20 etc etc, he has to make them one at a time and part by part.
Again, what's the difference supposed to be from Prometheus making men out of clay?
Being made of gold isn't a difference either; in a different Greek creation myth (not involving Prometheus), humans are originally made from gold, which is where we get the term "golden age".
This isn't some big mystery; there's nothing surprising about a god endowing a creation with behavior. They do it all the time. It doesn't become a new concept when each different god does it. The faculty by which Hephaestus can endow statues with behavior is identical to the faculty by which every other god can endow various things with behavior. Aphrodite does it to a (stone) statue too.
(Also, in my first comment I assumed the women were created by Hephaestus, but the cited passage doesn't say that. It's safe to assume that the cyclopes who work for Hephaestus are not considered to have been created by him. The women are more likely to be creations, but there probably isn't a direct statement to that effect available.)
He's a smith. As far as affinity to a particular metal, he has a standard epithet labeling him a bronze-smith, but he does not appear to have any titles related to gold.
If memory serves, the net he uses to catch Ares and Aphrodite is gold, so he's capable of working it, as you would expect from the only divine smith. But calling him a goldsmith is a little off.
He has just made golden wheels for the tripods and reminisced about 9 years making bracelets and necklaces (material unspecified, but what is most likely?) for Thetis and Eurynome, and he is about to make a shield portraying gods, a field, a vineyard, some cattle and some daggers in gold, and a gold-crested helmet. He is a metal smith who is very comfortable working with gold.
I wonder whether polytheistic mythologies might provide a useful model for predicting the different kinds of AIs that eventually develop. Humans over centuries converged on a number of broad, distinct forms and domains of higher intelligence; might not this model how human-created intelligence may diverge? We may have an Aphrodite Bot for artificial romance, an Apollo Bot for abstract thought, and a Hermes Bot for communication and translation. They'll develop their own goals and compete against each other.
It seems a lot more lilely than a single all-powerful monster.
Yes. It's a strikingly sophisticated way of demonstrating his skill though, as opposed to making them very beautiful or very powerful, especially in a society which doesn't even have basic clockwork
The tripods are actually called automata and seem to represent an IT system - presumably the point of the ears is that they wheel themselves to the assemblies of the gods, hear what is said and report back to Hephaestus
Well, his wife (Aphrodite) was always cheating on him with Chad...um, Ares.
Arguably it's the first poly relationship in Western lit too, complete with the girl having the upper hand. (The opposite you see with Zeus's #metoo behavior, again accurate!)
(I'm being a bit snide, but I do think these myths persist because they do reflect human behavior to some degree.)
One of my favorite tellings of their engagement was, after all the other unmarried gods had offered Aphrodite riches and power and glory, Hera nudged her son Hephaestus forward with a whispered "remember, fool, say exactly what I told you". And while blushing and looking away from her beauty, he managed to stammer out "I would make a good husband for a girl like you. I work late." And she smiled and kissed him.
I have a few questions about personality classifications in psychology.
I really like the Myers-Briggs system. It seems to me intuitive, clearly defined, easily understood and easily applied to classify people I know. Apparently though, it lacks evidential support compared to the Big Five system. And that system I find completely useless and infuriating as a layman and a philosopher. I can barely tell the difference between the five different dimensions, I find the dimensions and their relationships with each other vaguely defined (from what I've seen on the internet), and I find the tests I've seen on the internet to have inferior and vaguer questions than the Myers Briggs tests. I'm probably lacking understanding of it though, so I have three questions.
1. How exactly do you "evidentially" test personality systems? What does it even mean for a system to be supported by evidence? Evidence for doing what exactly? And how is it measured?
2. Do the dimensions of the Big Five have precise definitions? What are they? All I can find is very vague and rambling descriptions.
3. What exactly is wrong with the Myers Briggs system?
What, no love for the Enneagram? Developed (whether or not he invented it seems to be debatable) by Gurdjieff, and crazily popular in the 80s-90s as part of Christian counselling (the Jesuits went all-in on it; honestly, if you were anywhere near Charismatic groups, it was part and parcel of the entire thing), it's a system I dislike partly because of the religious zeal people demonstrate for it. It's an okay system of personality, but I'd put all of them (yes, including the Big Five or OCEAN or whatever name it goes by) in with astrology: fun to mess around with to find what characteristics you demonstrate under the system, but don't take it seriously as a description of personality, much less a prescription for behaviour.
"The Enneagram has also received criticism from religious perspectives. In 2000, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine produced a draft report on the origins of the Enneagram to aid bishops in their evaluation of its use in their dioceses. The report identified aspects of the intersection between the Enneagram and Roman Catholicism which, in their opinion, warranted scrutiny with potential areas of concern, stating, "While the enneagram system shares little with traditional Christian doctrine or spirituality, it also shares little with the methods and criteria of modern science ... The burden of proof is on proponents of the enneagram to furnish scientific evidence for their claims." Partly in response to Jesuits and members of other religious orders teaching a Christian understanding of the Enneagram of Personality, a 2003 Vatican document called Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life. A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age' said that the Enneagram "when used as a means of spiritual growth introduces an ambiguity in the doctrine and the life of the Christian faith".
"Our approach is to take the overall concepts of many Enneagram teachers and then filter them through the lens of the gospel.
The Enneagram is not like other personality systems, like Myers-Briggs or Strengthsfinder, that have one source you go to for training. The Enneagram is a communal tool, which means contemporary Enneagram teachers do not necessarily follow previous teachers' ideas, beliefs, or practices. On the contrary, you will find that each Enneagram teacher presents the Enneagram according to their worldview, often adding, subtracting, or redefining concepts contained in the Enneagram.
In our presentation of the Enneagram, we removed or redefined all aspects that do not align with a Biblical worldview. We direct people to spiritual disciplines, not unbiblical spiritual practices. As laid out in our mission statement at Your Enneagram Coach, our goal seeks to focus people's attention upon the person and work of Jesus Christ. In fact, our mission statement does not even include the word "Enneagram" since our primary purpose and focus is to point people back to Christ by helping them know who they are and whose they are in Christ."
I think the Enneagram positions itself a bit differently than MB or Big Five. These systems aim to map personality as clusters of traits. Sets of traits that go together make for one dimension, where MB has four, Big Five has (duh) five, and some variants may have more.
At some point I did some Enneagram courses (in Europe, not Christian based; maybe it's in the US that it became strongly associated with Christianity?). As far as I remember, the purported point of the system was not to cluster surface traits. The basic hypothesis is that one's character develops as a defense mechanism to paper over one's earliest psychic "wounds", and what it really aims to make is a map of those early wounds. So for each of the 9 types, the actual personalities that come out can be quite varied, and sometimes apparently opposed, but they are marked by the same hidden weak points, and therefor similar in how they need to become aware of what they are papering over, learn to integrate it, and ideally be able to loosen or give up the associated defense mechanisms.
To give a simple example, various enneatypes can be conflict avoidant (at least 3, 9, 5, and some cases of 6 and 7), but they will be doing that through different inner dynamics, and their path to reintegration varies accordingly.
Which naturally gives rise to more advanced theories where the 9 types are further subdivided, ex. into 3 subtypes.
What I found oddly dogmatic about the Enneagram community is how tightly they hold to the number 9. As far as I can tell there is nothing in the theoretical structure of the whole thing that could not accommodate the discovery of new, less-common types.
An interesting angle from the Enneagram is that, instead just observing how a person usually is, it also includes how the person behaves under stress and when times are unusually good.
Given that the context of these tests is primarily designed to assist with organisational team building and performance coaching, I think their value is very limited in dealing with the true complexity of people outside of a structured work environment.
If you're looking to understand the relationships around you that are not connected with the workplace then I don't think these are useful tools.
There's way more complexity in Astrology if you take a closer look. With the combinations of cardinality, fixedness and mutability with the four elements, it actually provides more nuanced possibilities for understanding people's behaviours and characteristics. The fact that it's all nonsense is a strong hint that perhaps human classification is a little tricky, never mind the geographical and cultural differences that are highly influential factors in the development of personality.
To say someone is typically Italian or German or <insert cultural group> probably conveys a much stronger idea of how someone might approach the world.
This too breaks down very quickly as do all stereotypes once you remove the filter if how you see someone.
I'd push back on some of the other comments here: I used to fall into the camp of Myers Briggs being 'no more than a horoscope for HR people', but have now changed my views quite a bit.
If you present it as a 5 point scale, so something like E - e - X - i - I as strongly extroverted through to strongly introverted, then it is essentially very similar to the big 5, and gives some really granular outcomes.
Now, there are also some big criticisms of the big 5 - personally I think you have to torture the data somewhat and squint to get a 5 way factorisation out of the data. In fact, linguistic analysis points to there really being 2 or 3 main factors of personality (a big one, and a smaller one) and then some residuals. This article (from Andrew, who often comments here) is a good primer: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/primary-factor-of-personality-part
If you buy into the superordinate factors alpha and beta, then they look something like:
Alpha: a mix of agreeable, conscientious, non-neurotic
Beta: extraverted and open (and intellect)
The 'general factor of personality' broadly matches alpha above, and is the most reliably obtained cross-cultural, cross-contextual factor. The GFP is also positively correlated with all of the big 5 (except neuroticism, which is 'bad') and also IQ. Different people interpret it in different ways, but in my view it is something like 'pro-social' (treating people well, good domesticated human theory of mind, getting on with the rest of society).
I'm less clear on beta, the GFP kind of sits above them so both fit into it, but whereas you can think of Alpha as being the part of human personality that was necessary for us to be social animals (the 'good eggs' in a society), 'Beta' is more individualistic, driven, ambitious, impactful etc.
But yeah, really would recommend Andrew' substack on this.
I came here to pretty much those same arguments: that to the extent Big 5 carves reality at the joints, four of the five axes are very similar to the MTBI axes so it's hard to make a good case that MTBI is nonsense while Big 5 is real and scientific. And that Big 5 originates with highly subjective linguistic analysis that isn't particularly more scientific than MTBI's much-derided origins in Jungian "cognitive styles" theory.
In particular the main difference I see between BIg 5 and MTBI is that MTBI makes an effort to orient the axes in value-neutral terms, while most of the Big 5 traits have substantially more positive or negative connotations to one side or the other of the trait axis.
I appreciate the link to Andrew's post on more-objective linguistic analytical efforts to analyze what's going on underneath Big 5. Thank you for sharing that.
Each one's based on six subscales, which are also listed there. They even have the correlations with the Big 5.
3. Most of the research is done by the organization that makes it (the CAPT), so it's not independently validated. That and apparently the factors are all correlated.
There's actually a pretty good correspondence with Extraversion being the same, high Conscientiousness being J (and low being P), high Agreeableness being F (and low being T), and high Openness being N (and low being S), and the MBTI just drops Neuroticism to be more salable. Thing is a lot of people are in the middle and are going to get inconsistent MBTI results--if you have average Conscientiousness you'll sometimes test as INTP and sometimes as INTJ.
The advantage for marketing purposes is that 2^4=16, so you can write a book with a few pages on types. For high, intermediate, and low for 5 factors you have 243 types, which is way too many for anyone to talk about. (There was an attempt at a big 5 SLOAN acronym you might have seen around the web if you're into this stuff, which ignores the middle and has a more manageable 32.)
The underlying Jungian system with the cognitive functions (there are introverted and extroverted variants of feeling, thinking, sensation, and intuition, which don't mean what the colloquial versions of the words mean) is even less well validated, and theoretically the J/P axis represents which of the two higher-ranking functions is dominant and/or extroverted, which has no validity.
But if you see it as a dichotomized Big 5 minus neuroticism, it's not useless.
Regarding the definitions, admittedly that wikipedia page (which I didn't check previously, since WP is often woeful) is actually much clearer than other descriptions I've seen (I forget exactly where). Moreover, the Myers-Briggs definitions are probably equally vague or worse, admittedly. I think I've developed my own understanding of the latter to some extent, in part from a kind of parlour game I've been playing with my sister for years where we classify people we know, celebrities and fictional characters according to the MBTI.
Thanks for describing the correspondence between the two systems, that helps a lot. I find Openness the most annoying, since it seems to lump several unlike things together: being adventurous and being imaginitative are not only different, they seem to me to be largely opposites. And being open-minded is different again. One is about experiences, one is about ideas, and one is about personal perspectives and social changes. Wheras I see iNtuition in the MBTI as just about preferring systems of ideas to concrete experiences, which is clear and straightforward. Maybe that's not how it's actually defined though?
You can go to Personality Database and see crowdsourced MBTIs for everything from anime characters to chemical elements. You can even see what percentage voted for every preference.
1. How exactly do you "evidentially" test personality systems? What does it even mean for a system to be supported by evidence? Evidence for doing what exactly? And how is it measured?
Two main types of evaluation: reliability = test/retest consistency (if someone do the test another time, are they going or not to get very similar results) and validity, = correlation of the results of the tests to either other well established tests that measure similar things, or measurement of real world outcomes.
2. Do the dimensions of the Big Five have precise definitions? What are they? All I can find is very vague and rambling descriptions.
The big five dimensions are a sort of empirical derived summary of many descriptors, hence their kind of fuzzy definitions. But I feel that the definition are reasonably clear. For example neuroticism is the tendency to negative emotions, introversion is a commonly used term, etc. You would have like very precise a priori definitions I guess, and not empirically derived dimensions?
3. What exactly is wrong with the Myers Briggs system?
Relatively low reliability, at least for one of the dimension, relatively low demonstrated validity.
A major problem is the use of dichotomous types , as personality variation has a bell shaped distribution, with most people in the middle.
First, I definitely see the point about the dichotomous vs bell shaped method. Although from an everyday perspective, the simplified ease of classifying people is surely an advantage for the Myers-Briggs, right? Just because the finely graded system is more useful in a technical context, doesn't imply it's more useful across all parts of society. Yet a lot of people, on ACX and elsewhere, seem to make that assumption.
Second, regarding test-retest reliability, all I can say is that that doesn't fit my experience at all. I consistently get the same result on every Myers-Briggs test (INTP). Meanwhile, I've just in the last week taken multiple Big Five tests and gotten wildly different results. I think I blame this on the questions: the Myers-Briggs ones tend to be much more precise questions that I can easily answer, while the Big Five ones are extremely vague and depending on how I interpret them could give opposite answers. "Believe in the importance of art": to the world or to me personally? Art as in stories (and the like) in general or as in a few specific pieces of "high art"? Visual art or music or fiction? "Love to help others": with physical or practical things=strongly disagree, with talking through problems=strongly agree.
You can game any personality test to be what you want. They're not attempting to hide the connection between the test item "I like being among a lot of other people" and the conclusion "testee likes being among a lot of other people".
But most people are a continuum. If we can accept a gender continuum then we can probably accept that introversion and extraversion are a continuum and most people are inbetween.
That something is on a continuum does not imply that the categories don't make sense? On MB I've been consistently either INTP or ENTP, because my extroversion/introversion is always around the middle, while the other three are generally towards the extremes. That doesn't make the test useless?
(Also I would like to know what % of people on here come out NT compared to the general population, my guess would be it is much higher)
There are a few problems with the Myers Briggs system compared to the Big Five:
- Test-retest reliability is low. So when you test the same individual twice, you likely get two different results. The Big Five are much more stable, and are also relatively stable over time.
- The emphasis of Myers-Briggs is on binary categories. So you may be introvert or extrovert. But if you look on the actual test scores, people are on a unimodal spectrum, with most of them in the middle. It's much more adequate to say "on a spectrum from -1 (introvert) to 1 (extrovert), you are at 0.1" than to say "you are extrovert". That's exactly how the Big Five are used.
- To get as much information as possible out of different dimension, you want them to be as independent as possible. So you want that dimension 1 is very little correlated to dimension 2, and so on. The Big Five are better in this aspect than Myers-Brigg.
For your point 2, perhaps it best to just look at the defining questions for the Big Five that are asked in questionnaires. Alternatively, each of the Big Five has some cubcategories, and these have much clearer descriptions. For example, for Introversion/Extraversion these are Friendliness, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Excitement-Seeking and Cheerfulness. Here are some descriptions: https://bigfive-test.com/
I'm not sure about your first point. I've often heard it repeated, but comparing two recent meta-analyses for retest reliability of MTBI and Big 5 respecively, they seem very similar. Big 5 trait scores have an overall average retest correlation of 0.816, while MTBI trait scores have an overall average retest correlation of 0.815.
I haven't done a fine-grained comparison of the two articles. So far, I've spotted two major differences. The Big 5 article limited analysis to studies with a relatively short retest interval (two months or less) specifically to limit effects from personality shifts over time (noting in the discussion that longer retest intervals show a significantly lower correlation between test and retest scores), while the MTBI article included studies with retest intervals of up to three years. And the Big 5 article contained some discussion of trying to account for publication bias, while if the MTBI article did, I missed it.
I suspect the meme that MTBI is substantially less reliably on retest than Big 5 is partly the result of apples-to-oranges comparisons (comparing the frequency of getting exactly the same overall MTBI type to the correlation of individual Big 5 factor scores, which can a persuasive argument against the significance of overall MTBI types, but isn't a strong argument for MTBI axes being less valid than Big 5 factors), and partly the result of noise (and perhaps cherry-picking) from comparing individual studies' topline numbers instead of looking at broader meta-analyses.
Interesting, thanks! I had heard the point several times, but never questioned it.
I skimmed the MBTI article, but I am still not sure what the underlying studies actually did: did they correlate numerical scores for each dimension between -1 and 1, or did they correlate the types, i.e., values which are either -1 or 1, but nothing in between? Or both? The MBTI description in the article (which contains the claim that all dimensions are bimodal, which is a bit suspicious) seems to suggest the latter option. This is also the form in which MBTI results are usually presented. But the Big Five analysis almost certainly uses the first option. Then the scores for MBTI and for Big Five would be on completely different things, so it would again be comparing apples with oranges.
But I have no background in these tests, so I may well be interpreting things wrong.
I looked for the same thing myself and also came up dry. I've taken "official" MTBI tests a couple times, and they come back with numerical scores for each dimension in addition to the top-line MTBI type, so I could see it being done either way. I'd definitely want a reliability analysis to be done with numerical scores for the purpose of comparing with Big 5, but I have no idea if they did it that way or not.
Not going to speak about the specifics, but one thing to consider is that why you want a personality test. A lot of personality seems to come down to the narrativiziation you have about yourself (I am generally conscientious or curious or flaky or...) and so, perhaps something that you personally find legible will be more useful than something "scientifically accurate", whatever that means.
Yes, I think that this a great point. The big five have been developped to produce a reasonably accurate description of people's personality with only five numbers. And the system works well for that. But If you want to use a personality description without being especially concerned that it matches the real world very well, plenty of other systems can be better.
What is the psychology of the Westerners who support Hamas?
Surely they cannot be ignorant of the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians and the video of the German woman whose body was mutilated by Hamas got some approving comments by some Westerners. While some contrarianism might explain it, the Democratic Socialists of America and the "Squad" have declared their support for Hamas.
What kind of psychology would produce such moral decisions?
The kind of psychology that doesn't want to admit to having been horribly wrong last week, and would rather believe something horribly contrived or contorted than that. You know, like most normal humans.
Until last week, Hamas had rarely killed Israeli civilians, A: in sufficient numbers as to be worth plastering all over CNN and B: in a way that clearly indicated specific targeting of civilians by Hamas high command rather than e.g. Hamas rockets being inaccurate or individual Hamas militants going off-script. And Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians had been sufficiently unpleasant and hurtful, sometimes gratuitously so, that it wasn't wholly unreasonable to judge that the Israelis were the baddies and the Palestinians were just defending themselves the best they could. I mean, I think that was the wrong call, but it's not "Hitler was the good guy" levels of wrong, it's more like siding with Argentina in the Falklands war.
So you decide that the Israelis are the baddies, and you protest the Israelis and their alleged oppression of the Palestinian people, and you make that activism part of your public and private identity. And then Hamas goes and does something truly atrocious. Now what? Admit you were wrong? Inconceivable!
I'm not sure I buy that the only morally acceptable way to oppose settler-colonialism is to attack the leadership or military of the settler-colonizers.
I would certainly prefer that Hamas would have attacked the Knesset, or a military outcropping, as people might be more sympathetic to their cause if they did that, but I don't think I get to dictate how a colonized people go about their attempt at decolonizing.
Although, if they had gone after the Knesset, I guess it is possible that Hamas would have ended up just as condemned. I don't think many people are sympathetic to the Puerto Rican nationalists who attacked the US capitol in 1954, or the rioters who attacked the capitol on January 6th. Frankly, I think most people have a bit of a status quo bias and have trouble sympathizing with anyone who uses violence for political ends.
In general, I always think killing civilians is a ugly, brutal act, whether it's done by colonized people, colonizers or the most powerful military in the world.
However, whenever violence gets involved, it seems like no one is actually committed to keeping alive the civilians of the "other side." Basically every country that has had a conflict in the last 70 years has the blood of civilians on their hands. No nation has shown itself to be an outstanding moral paragon.
If Hamas manages to secure control of a defined territory, and stop the settler-colonialists from seizing more of their land, they can rewrite history to justify their ugly and brutal acts the same way every modern nation always has. They'll remember it as a long-term, slow motion war of independence, and that's how every Palestinian child will learn it in school.
If Israel ever decides to transform their slow-motion smothering of the Palestinians into all out warfare, and wipes them all out or turns the vast majority into refugees, then every Israeli school child will learn the version of history where it was all 100% justified and Israel never did anything wrong.
Even if the United States and other key Israeli allies wanted to condemn Israel, they couldn't because of the rank hypocrisy of one settler-colonialist power trying to condemn the in-progress settler-colonialism of another country. Israel is either going to end up as Liberia, or the United States, and only time will tell which it will be.
This equivocates between deliberately killing civilians as a matter of policy, and killing civilians incidentally / as collateral damage.
Which is kind of the long-term cultural result of "sophisticated" arguments that collateral damage is just as bad as killing civilians on purpose, the purpose of which originally was to criticize collateral damage by comparing it to deliberate action - an attitude that, since collateral damage is "fine", deliberately targeting civilians is "fine" too. The "sophisticated" arguments just lead to ... this. An implication that it's fine to kill civilians, carefully avoiding stating it outright.
If you find yourself having to define people just trying to live their lives as "soldiers" to justify your beliefs, you should probably pause and ask yourself:
Israel is not a colony; Israel is where Jews are from. Moreover, Jews who were in the European diaspora are a minority even among Jews in Israel. They are outnumbered by refugees from the Soviet Union and MENA, and their descendants.
MENA nations have been more effective than the Nazis at eliminating their Jewish populations, some of which were a thousand years older than Islam. The Nazis only managed to kill two thirds of all the Jews in Europe; outside Israel, the MENA Jewish population has fallen by 99.4% since the 1940s.
There is nowhere else for Jews to go. And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too.
"And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too."
Yes, as Hamas's official statements and Saturday's massacres of unarmed civilians make clear, Hamas cannot be negotiated with (or even, apparently, deterred). Netanyahu's statement "Every Hamas member is a dead man" seems like the brightest ray of hope in this appalling situation. I wish Israel the best of luck in killing Hamas members and putting a permanent end to their threat of further attacks.
1) that Britain and France made Israel as a colony to keep the Arabs down in 1917-1920
2) That Germany/Europe made Israel as an apology for the Holocaust in 1947-48
Both of which are nonsensical in the face of the fact that the Soviet Union hated and opposed everyone I just mentioned. Moreover, the Soviet Union prevented their Jews from leaving from fairly early on until the end of the Cold War. Those post-Soviet Jews remain an insular and disparate group within Israel from the rest of Ashki Jews. Even though they are ethnically slightly closer to Ashki Jews than Sephardic Jews (who were by an large ethnically cleansed from MENA), there are notable cultural differences. So to believe that Israel is some colonial project, to account for all the Jews in it you need to imagine that the West and the East and MENA all sat down together and agreed on ... anything, which is absurd on the face of it.
> Israel is not a colony; Israel is where Jews are from.
Right, and Liberia was not a colony. Africa is where African Americans were from.
And if genetic testing eventually reveals that Europeans are descended from ancient precursors to the Native Americans in North America, every atrocity that Europeans committed against the Native Americans will have been 100% justified as taking back their ancestral homeland.
> There is nowhere else for Jews to go. And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too.
There's almost as many Jews in America as in Israel, and many European countries have sizable Jewish populations. There's plenty of places for Jews to go these days.
And as far as Hamas' antisemitic rhetoric goes, would you stop supporting Native Americans if it turned out that at some point they had rhetoric supporting not just expelling the White invaders from their lands, but taking the fight around the world and killing all White Europeans? Because I would see that as an understandable rhetorical overreaction contrasted against actual genocidal policies being carried out against them.
Hamas's antisemitic rhetoric is a pretty distant secondary concern to their antisemitic actions.
As for "well Jews can just go to Europe and America", that is a proposal of ethnic cleansing. When you claim Israel is ethnically cleansing Arabs (they're not, Arab population growth rate is proportional to how far they live from Israeli hospitals) and then turn around and suggest ethnically cleansing Jews, it tells people everything they need to know about your sincerity.
They're Rousseauists who believe that humans are inherently good, and hence anybody who commits evil must have been badly oppressed in order to warp their inherent goodness so much. Therefore the Hamas terrorists aren't really to blame for their actions, which are instead the result of Israeli oppression, the Israelis are the real bad guys, and if hundreds of Israeli women get gang-raped to death, that's simply the just consequence of oppressing the poor Palestinians so much.
The same logic applies for crimes in the West, BTW, which is why Westerners who support Hamas are disproportionately likely to, e.g., show more sympathy for looters than for the shopkeepers whose livelihoods are being ruined. The very fact that the looters are looting and the shopkeepers aren't shows that the looters are the real oppressed victims in this scenario.
When you slice the top off like that then your argument is easy to make. If you actually dig into all the dimensions of the conflict and the various escalations and atrocities committed by both sides it's nothing like as simple as you suggest.
'They're Rousseauists who believe that humans are inherently good, and hence anybody who commits evil must have been badly oppressed in order to warp their inherent goodness so much. '
Why does this not apply to the Israelis who are 'the bad guys'?
Once again, it's not their land and it never was. This has been explained to you multiple times.
Palestinians are Arabs, and Arabs are native to Arabia. Complaining about having their land violently taken and calling Israelies "colonisers" has got to be one of the biggest ironies in history.
Ultimately everyone came from somewhere -- I think from some place in Africa where the first homo sapiens evolved (so the people who still live there are an exception). So the question is how many years until you consider the people being somewhere "at home": 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years?
Intuitively, I would say that the next generation that gets *born* at the new place, is there "at home". Which of course has some weird consequences... I am not really suggesting that we leave the children there but expel their parents...
It's more like: if everyone who currently lives was born in the new place, then I'd say that for all practical purposes, it is their home. The blame is on their ancestors, but not on them. If all currently living adults came from somewhere else, then I think they should consider leaving (and taking their babies with them, of course), if they are not welcome. The situations in between are controversial, and I do not have a good answer.
But if you go more than thousand years back... then probably 90% of people currently living in Europe are "colonizers". Add another zero or two, and it's everyone outside of some parts of Africa.
If we arranged nations on a timescale, based on how recently they have arrived at their current territory, who else would be at a similar place as Palestinians, and how do you suggest they should be treated?
For starters, Israel has done equally horrific things. Have you seen the video of the Israeli man describing how he went into a classroom and shot dozens of children in Palestine during the Nakba? In fact, just google any concatenation of the words "Israeli, shooting, nakba, palestine, laughing" and you will come across dozens of these horrific acts by Israelis.
You are basically having amnesia about the past and suffering from recency bias.
Note: i am not saying one should support hamas, im just explaining why you cant seem to even fathom how there could be any amount of support for them. Some people choose to remember history.
In the comments to that video several commenters point out that the video is mistranslated--the word for "classroom" in Hebrew (כיתה) is the same as the word for "squad". (I can confirm that is the word he uses in context, and doesn't give any other information that would say which use of the word he is using.)
I disagree. While I agree that the action of gunning down a squad of enemy soldiers who have surrendered is morally reprehensible, and that the man's reaction to remembering it is disturbing and I think it makes him a bad person, there is still a world of difference between that and gunning down a classroom of children. So while it doesn't make him look (or be) good, I think it certainly does make him look much better.
You brought this video as proof that Israel has done horrific things, such as someone who "went into a classroom and shot dozens of children in Palestine". The video doesn't show that at all. Dismissing that fact by saying that there isn't much difference is failing to make an update on new information.
I just followed your link and in the comments it says "According to Benny Morris (a New Wave historian), just about 800 Arab civilians were murdered over a 10-month-war"
That's fewer civilians than Hamas just killed in a single day!
>“Today is devastating for all those seeking a lasting peace and respect for human rights,” AOC said in a statement. “I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms. No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.
>Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), in part of her statement, also condemned “the horrific acts … against children, women, the elderly, and the unarmed people who are being slaughtered and taken hostage by Hamas” while calling for de-escalation.
The article also links to Cori Bush statement using similar rhetoric.
Whatever way one spins it, those are in fact not declarations of support for Hamas. The plain reading of the text in no way supports the idea that they're declaring support for Hamas.
Of course, as the article notes, the conservatives are condemning them for calling for ceasefire and also criticizing Israel, but that shows that what is called "support for Hamas" is in fact here *insufficiently strong condemnation of Hamas*, ie. also noting the other factors of this conflict. Of course confusing "a condemnation of X but not in the words I would prefer" to be "support for X" is one of the most common rhetorical tactics/errors in whatever online debates there are, but clarity is still needed here.
The DSA explicitly refused to condemn Hamas by saying all the fault for the attack lies with Israel.
Of the DSA-aligned members of congress, only one (who is not a member of The Squad) terminated their relationship with the DSA. Tlalib also explicitly refused to condemn Hamas when confronted about her position.
Silence = Consent, is the slogan I believe was popular on the left until last week.
Again, you are conflating "condemnation of X but not in the words I would prefer" with "support". The statements in the article literally condemn Hamas. Apart from them, your sole example of people "supporting Hamas" is "German woman whose body was mutilated by Hamas got some approving comments by some Westerners." That, indeed, does count quite clearly as supporting Hamas, but is also very clearly something the Squad does *not* do here.
Again: what is your definition for supporting Hamas?
Supporting Hamas is providing praise or the ability for them to carry out actions otherwise constrained. In this case, trying to force Israel into a ceasefire allows Hamas to get away with their actions. It provides the political cover for their freedom of action.
You might call it the wrong course of action, something you don't support yourself (calling for ceasefire in any conflict is pretty standard diplomatic fare in whatever conflicts there are), but still, if (say) AOC's statement it "I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms", then conflating it with "I support Hamas" or the approving comments for body mutilation is just plain misleading, at the very least.
"I condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the strongest possible terms but must demand that Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire while Russian troop are within artillery range of Kiev" has the same ring.
It is obviously trying to freeze the situation in a way favorable to one side.
Not a lot of people, but there were minority celebrations and support demonstrations for Hamas in most big cities in the west. And that was before Israel had responded to the massacres, so it wasn't protesting the Israeli response.
My personal view is that I agree with Netanyahu that Hamas members should be killed, but I hope that deaths amongst peaceful civilian Gazans can be minimized as much as is reasonably feasible.
You are falling into the very trap that you accuse others of.
You name one of the atrocities of Hamas and conclude that Hamas is evil and everyone must oppose them. Hamas supporters do the same: they point to one of the atrocities of Israel (like killing innocents, threatening family members of opponent fighters) and conclude that Israel is evil and everyone must oppose them. I think that this is EXACTLY the line of thought that brings some people to support Hamas.
I don't think that both sides are commensurate, and I think it is possible to compare them. But it's a lot more thorny than just looking at one massacre and arguing "the other side is evil". Both have done lots of massacres, and both sides give enough opportunity for losing the reputation game if it is played one-sided.
The Hamas Charter literally calls for the extermination of Jews everywhere in the world. I continually find it mind boggling that anyone considers them anything but evil.
I think Hamas has unquestionably crossed a line this weekend. Someone can uncomfortably turn aside from rocket attacks and suicide bombings. But the footage that’s been circulated online is so savage and visceral that it completely changes the moral situation. At least in the eyes of western audiences.
For you and me that crosses a line, yes, but apparently not for everyone in the west. The were pro-Hamas celebrations in Berlin until the police stopped them.
It's a little more nuanced than that, but generally the far left thinks it's a settler colonial state, like Contemplative Mood says. (Of course, they don't get quite as annoyed when one non-European country colonizes another; bring up Japanese colonialism and they'll just give you the stink-eye.) And the far right, well, they get all the literature from the Nazis and so on, plus there are a lot of left-wing Jews in Western Civ (paging Michelle Goldberg...). There's also the criticism that Jews support open borders for Western countries but not for Israel. This one actually has some weight to it IMHO, and is one of the reasons I don't support open borders.
Basically I think the little tribal circuits in our brains classify the Israelis as 'enemy' in the case of both the far left and right for the reasons above.
Leftist Jews support open borders for Israel, Orthodox Jews don't for the USA.
But the big vaguely-liberal mass in the center actually does hold that position. Stephen Miller and Noam Chomsky are consistent; Chuck Schumer not so much.
We didn't fight a world war to stop Japanese colonialism? WTF? The west fought a world war against them because it was unwilling to allow Japan to the colonialism table, they knew this, and then attacked the west over it. No one cared about their "colonialism", they cared about protecting their own colonial interests.
The West was steadily shifting to a new banking and corporate lead colonial model that desired less control over the colonized. This didn't mesh with the Japanese model.
I don't think so. The Japanese takeover of Formosa was accepted as within international norms, the takeover of Korea was outside accepted norms but faced no real opposition from the west. Manchuria was way outside norms, but if the Japanese Empire had not attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Burma and Hawaii they might have kept their expanded territory for years.
The conquests of Formosa and Korea took place at the time when "we take what we can" was still the norm among Western countries. The Manchurian invasion led to eventual (if slow) condemnation from League and Japanese withdrawal, ie. not that different from League response to Italian invasion of Abyssinia (which involved some weak sanctions, but nothing that would have fundamentally altered the situation). In general, the Japanese invasion of China also set the eventual stage for the American-Japanese clash.
The US generally supports Islamists in Syria (which is what most of the rebels are), because the US wants to topple Assad. So what kind of psychology promotes that morality? Real politic I suppose.
Ewww... "Real politic I suppose" Unfortunately, yeah. Seems likely to end as well as the support of the Taliban (against the USSR at the time, IIRC). For an even worse case: At one point the US sided with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (against Vietnam, IIRC).
The Hard Left views Israel as a settler-colonial state. Like Apartheid South Africa and like Apartheid South Africa they believe it needs to be abolished and control returned to the native population. Nevermind that the situation is more nuanced, that a very large contingent of Israelis are descended from brown-skinned Middle Eastern Jews, and that most Israelis have nowhere else to go. Nuance is not a part of their ideology in any way and violence is always morally correct when inflicted by the ‘oppressed.’ It’s a crazy mix.
That's a pretty unfair strawman characterization of the stance you're describing. The more reasonable take is that it's a setter-colonial / apartheid state but that obviously abolishing the state and transplanting the residents is impossible.
South Africa changed its rules to allow blacks to vote. Israel already has voting rights for Israeli Arabs, and indeed parties that represent them in the Knesset.
Palestinians can't vote for any representative in the Knesset though, although their state is occupied by Israel and despite that Israelian settlers within the West Bank can vote for the Knesset.
OF course Palestinians don't vote for the Knesset like Israeli Arabs: the latter are Israeli nationals, the former aren't. Nor is HAMAS fighting for their people to be Israeli citizens with the right to vote in such elections. Rather, they want to erase the whole country of Israel and have a united Palestine "from the river to the sea".
The "strawman" in this case is accurate in my experience. I've actually heard far-left activists saying the only thing wrong with Hamas is that they don't hate Israel enough.
Forget their treatment of women and gays and religious minorities and forget consistency of the left with their own stated views on these things. Forget, too, the fact that the entire Arab and Islamic world is a series of settler-colonial states (much like the west, but without the west's eventual realisation that there's something wrong with that).
You can't reason with these people. Believe me, I tried, ten years ago as a very left-wing university student. It was one of the first things that made me aware of just how foundational rejection of logical and moral consitency is to left-wing thinking. I felt like I was interacting with the very personifaction of Orwell's doublethink.
If your claim is "there are some fucking-weird anti-Israel people out there" then I totally agree. There are also some fucking-weird pro-Israel people out there (that was what I ran into in college). But I disagree with characterizing these as widely-held leftist stances (they're just not) and among leftists, in my experience, you'll find a healthy range of other stances, not to mention both kinds of extremely-weird Israel takes. You'll also find both kinds of weird Israel takes all over the rest of the political spectrum.
Fair point. I think this is probably a lot less pronounced within the US, but my impression is that there is, among large segments of the global left, a fanaticallly unhinged and hateful fixation on Israel that is unequalled for any other country. My Australian university had only one political club dedicated to a specific issue and that was a pro-Palistinian one. At a time when ISIS was rising and Islamist atrocities against women and minorities were in the news daily, I struggled to make sense of where the clubs standing against Iran and Saudi Arabia were. Also, the UN Human Rights Council has I believe officially condemned only one country ever, and that's Israel, and they've done so 20 or 50 times or something ridiculous. When there are clearly numerous other countries committing unspeakably worse atrocities on a daily basis.
It seems to me fair to say there is something unique about anti-Israel leftism.
In college I met some people like that, who had a sort of reflexive hatred of Israel as well. I wasn't quite that far but definitely got a bit of myself, and I think I do know where it comes from. Thing is, if I didn't know why I got that reflexive, from the outside it would look like anti-semitism, but I think it's actually more like "textbook reactionaryism".
The reaction is against the pro-Israel camps: people you meet in daily life as well as the general attitude held about Israel in the liberal media / political landscape. An example: I had an acquaintance at college that I ended up chatting to at a coffee shop while we were working. I had no idea she was Jewish or pro-Israel in the slightest. Somehow some Israel-related news came up and I, not expecting any strange response, expressed skepticism that Israel was correct --- and she absolutely transformed in front of me, and blew up at me, and stopped being remotely interested in reason and replaced it with "whose-side-are-you-on"-isms.
Of course, her position was defensive! Obviously Jews really are persecuted, but more relevantly, in her (twenty-ish-year-old-life), people revealing their skepticism of Israel were her enemies. Probably some of them literally, like "thought you were my friend and then turned out to be virulently anti-semitic" enemies. Probably in her bubble, people criticized Israel because they were believed to be intent on destroying her people and dismantling their identity.
Yet it only takes a few experiences like this for a confused outsider to reflexively take the other side. Reaction, IMO, is in reaction to "the world not making any sense". Why do people blow up when I say this when I'm not anti-semitic in the slightest and just trying to be fair? Why is criticism of Israel conspicuously absent from the discourse, and why are critics of Israel condemned in ways that seem like tremendous over-reactions to what they said? Over time I find myself assuming that the people who are acting irrationally are wrong, even if I don't exactly know how or why, because of course they are.
And in a way they are wrong, or at least not rational, because they're acting defensively. There's a bunch of inter-generational baggage that I can't perceive and isn't really logical: it's the specter of the last generation's trauma in dealing with the status of jews and Israel, which is itself a specter of the generation before, etc, and you don't have to go very far back for the trauma to be *really, really bad*.
Point is, when people act confusingly in defense of Israel, then people are triggered to act confusingly in attack of Israel, which makes more people act confusingly in defense of Israel, etc, etc. And to break the cycle for starters we have to understand that these people are confused, and they are in a way isolated groups of reactionary incidents. Anti-Israel is no more the stance of far-leftism than pro-Israel is the stance of party-line democrats. Neither platform cares *per se*. But the discourse isn't free and nobody feels safe and so everyone ends up believing "the other side on this issue is large, organized, and insane" so they entrench in their own position.
I'm chiming into this thread not because I'm especially pro- or anti-Israel but because I see what's happening and I hate it because it just perpetuates the problem. Everybody thinks they know what everybody else thinks, can't figure out why, and so *fucking hates them* for it, and it's sickening.
Uh, no, it's more like: western leftists shouldn't ally with groups that are literally as far as it is logically possible to be from every one of their stated social positions, for no other reason than "at least they hate the same people we do" (Jews and Christians). I was talking to the Western left, not the Palestinians.
What I would say to Islamist Palestinians is: "if you don't support the basic rights of Christians, atheists and animists to not be killed for existing, and don't support equality for women...why the *fuck* should I support equality for you?"
Non-Islamist Palestinians (I'd be curious to know how many there are) I will listen to.
There are multiple groups within Gaza, and not all are Islamist. For example, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which are secular Marxist-Leninist organizations, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is socialist.
All of these groups proudly participated in the recent massacre of Israelis.
General opposition to the existence of Israel isn't the same as "abolish it in the stupidest possible way".
No doubt there are some loons out there who believe what you've said. But what you've done is found the stupidest possible take in the group, claimed it's held by a much vaster group of people than hold it, and then condemned them all for it ("Nuance is not a part of their ideology in any way and violence is always morally correct when inflicted by the ‘oppressed.'"). It is very disingenuous and frustrating.
I reject the notion that there is a non-stupid way to abolish the State of Israel. This isn’t like when the state of East Germany was abolished and a bunch of well-organised practical West German civil servants came in the following Monday to start winding things up. This would be the epitome of cruelty and chaos, all to fulfil a theological dogma that some states are good and others don’t deserve to exist, that has no valid moral or practical basis to exist in the real world.
The non-stupid way would be something like South Africa where there was an apartheid and now there's not. Anyway, I'm not over here telling you what ought to happen to Israel. I don't really know. Probably not being so theocratic would be a big start. But really I'm just replying to remind you that you're ignorant about what other people think about it, why they think it, and what their underlying ideology is.
So I assume you also want all Arabs sent back to Arabia. After all, I'm *sure* your anti-colonialism isn't only focused on those of the "wrong" religion and ethnicity...
"the original IDF was comprised of terrorist Jewish militias who massacred civilians gang raped women and expelled Palestinians from their homes."
Thankfully, the original exapnsion of the Islamic world certainly involved *nothing* like that...
But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims? There must be additional elements.
I have noted that some Westerners seem to think IDF weight of total firepower somehow means they can dictate the situation perfectly (a military absurdity) but even that is not enough to explain the moral reasoning.
"But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims?"
Literally everyone that believes in axes of oppression and the Progressive stack? Were you not around for "je ne suis Charlie pas?" Muslims *by definition* are victims *as a class.* Just because some individual Muslims might be machine-gunning down some particular Jews in a deli doesn't change their *class* relations. Those bullet-ridden corpses are oppressing those celebrating gunmen, because class is the only relevant framing device.
It’s a team thing. You are biased toward your team. I haven’t read their statements but I’d expect they see atrocities as a few bad players in an overall good cause.
> But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims?
Leftists would. Because Israelis are richer, more successful, happier, and better looking, which makes them oppressors.
Maybe I'm over-generalising from the few kids at school I knew who became hard-leftists, but it seems to be a psychological thing for them. They were losers at school, always bottom of the barrel socially, and they turn the chip on their shoulder into a massive political overgeneralisation. They map every "loser" in the world onto themselves, and every "winner" in the world onto the people they hate, and they reflexively support losers everywhere regardless of the actual facts of the situation.
Definitely over-generalizing, since it sounds like you don't know anything about typical leftist stances on the subject (and I hope you're not confusing those with liberal stances, which are wildly different). I don't identify as a leftist per-se but if I want to know what leftists think I'd go read some ideological reporting, e.g. https://jacobin.com/2023/10/israel-palestine-violence-hamas-airstrikes-gaza-oppression on the subject of this week's news. As it happens, their condemnation of Israel has nothing to do with a map of winners and losers and has everything to do with a long history of unanswered oppressions.
As far as I can tell the basic ideological ideas behind this stance are (a) oppression and apartheid are wrong no matter who's doing it and (b) religious ethnostates are fucking weird and creepy and it's mind-boggling that the US supports one. The preferred "way out", were it possible, would be liberalizing and democratizing the whole region so that it's not creepy and medieval. Of course that's a tall order, but it's especially tall when all of the relevant parties believe in religious/ethnic warfare and segregation even though, like, liberalism happened hundreds of years ago and everybody knows egalitarianism and tolerance are supposed to be good things.
I dunno: Gaza is much more creepy, medieval, and more of a religious ethnostate than Israel is. Heck, Saudi Arabia definitely is! Israel has Arabs on the supreme court, in their legislature, they have the right to vote...How many of Israels neighbors even have any Jewish citizens left, much less in positions of political power?
Honestly I can't think of a middle east nation that is *less* of a religious ethnostate, or less creepy and medieval.
Yeah, that wasn't nice. But you forget to mention that those "conquests" were in response to the palestinians and their arab allies repeatedly aggressing and trying to genocide the jews. This stuff is all pretty complicated.
Among the many problems with that statement is the bit where the West Bank (where most of the Palestinians live) is an order of magnitude larger than Queens.
Gaza is about the size of Queens, but it's also about the population of Queens, so meh.
> No, Israel is an oppressor because it conquered most Palestinian land by force and ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population onto a tiny strip of land smaller than Queens
Sure, and that wasn't nice, but so were a lot of other things that happened in history that the same people don't bother to cry about.
The closest analogue (in terms of what happened and the era in which it happened) to the plight of the Palestinians was the plight of Germans in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad) post WW2. It sucks, and it was wrong, but it was 80 years ago and overall a minor outrage in the context of everything else going on in the 1940s and everyone has moved the fuck on.
Might doesn't make right, but might makes reality. Israel fought a war with the Palestinians over the country. They won, it happens, and has been happening for 20,000 years. They were also fairly gracious winners to the Palestinians and Muslims who remained in their country. Much more so than there was at all likely to be if things had worked out otherwise.
In exchange, the coreligionists of the losers basically refused to assist their compatriots, and then conducted several additional aggressive wars against Israel, which Israel also won relatively graciously.
In exchange for this all they have reaped is a never-ending series of terrorist attacks and an environment where tons of people they take care of economically want them destroyed.
Ask yourself do we need more Israel in the world, or more Gaza strip? Israel is a functional representative state with a thriving economy that exports a lot of technology and economic good to the world. It is part of the global solution and global human flourishing.
The Gaza strip is a pity of misery that only produces terrorism. You could move the population into Egypt after culling the terrorists of the Gaza Strip, it would change the population of Egypt like 2%, and likely change little about life there (which isn't great).
Meanwhile you would end at least this one festering sore of never ending conflict.
All they had to do was not try to kill Israelis. Israel even gave 18,000 Gazans work permits over the past year to ease the unemployment problem there.
Israel provides the electricity, the fuel, the medicine, and the food Gaza relies upon. The fact it has no economy is the fault of the people actually governing Gaza who is Hamas.
I've found an fascinating topic: People who voluntarily fought on both sides of a war. If we limit ourselves to a strict definition of volunteers (e.g. no PoWs or drafted deserters) and define "side" strictly as sovereign military organizations (e.g. someone who fought for the Finns against the Allies and then against the Axis once the fins switched sides in ww2 doesn't count), I can only find one example (though I'm sure there's more):
The Swede Patrik Gustaf Bergin joined the Danish as a volunteer during the First Schleswig War in 1849. He participated in the Battle of Fredericia but was discharged during the armistice. Then he surprisingly joined the Schleswig-Holstein side during 1850 and fought against the Danes. His stated reason was that he was appealed by how the Danish army treated the civilian Germans, but it's also speculated that he was motivated by pride from his own perceived mistreatment by the Danish Army. He was lambasted for this in the Swedish press, since Sweden was formally neutral but informally on the Danish side. He was wounded during the Battle of Isted and died a few days later.
Gustav Bergin was probably just confused. Per Lord Palmerston, only three people ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, one of who was dead, one insane, and one (himself) who had forgotten it.
He was an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the Waffen-SS during World War II, and while in the SS Das Reich division took part in the Russian campaign. After the war he spent a while working for Mossad, among various other ventures, and then some years as a potato farmer in the Republic of Ireland.
Although the Wikipedia article doesn't mention it, I vaguely recall reading that he was also one of the first people ever to fly in a helicopter, one of the first practical models, during an operation to try and rescue Mussolini late in WW2. Possibly that caper was the inspiration for the helicopter appearance in Alistair MacLean's novel (later filmed) Where Eagles Dare.
Fair enough. I just thought that an ex-SS guy being hired by Mossad of all people was quite ironic from a "changing horses in mid stream" perspective! :-)
But I've thought of another candidate, further back in time: Sir William Stanley. I think you'll approve of this one!
Quoting from the article, in a section discussing the Wars of the Roses:
"Having been loyal to Richard, Stanley nevertheless changed sides in 1485, and suddenly supported the Lancastrian Henry Tudor's bid for the throne. Stanley is best known for his action at the Battle of Bosworth, where he decisively attacked the Yorkists under Richard, helping to secure Henry VII's victory."
Germany is too disintegrated at this point and the situation too much like a civil war for it to be a central example IMO. Still a fascinating event though.
The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Spanish: Batallón de San Patricio), later reorganized as the Foreign Legion of Patricios, was a Mexican Army unit which fought against the United States in the Mexican–American War.
Mostly Irish, with some other European immigrants as well. They were deserters from the US army.
This is somewhat well known in Ireland, seems to be big in Mexico where there’s are monuments and a fairly big plaza (plaza batallón san patricio) in Mexico City.
Maybe we can rule that mercenaries doesn't count? Even if they are also interesting in their own way.
Also, most of those you linked fought on many sides but not during the same single war? (If we consider the 100 year war as a series of smaller conflicts?)
My favourite example is also the only one I'm aware of where a *group* of people realised they were the bad guys, and switched sides: Some of the Polish legions sent by Napoleon to crush the Haitian revolution realised they were fighting directly against the ideals which they were claiming to uphold, and switched to supporting the rebels.
How about the Kadyrovites switching from Chechen separatism to Russia?
From civil wars there are probably countless of examples from civil wars of government soldiers or units defecting to rebels (though likely ones who sympathize with the rebels from the start of the civil war, so they may avoid harming the rebels even before they have a chance to defect), and occasional examples of the reverse.
I missed the 'gay younger brothers' post when it was fresh and comments were happening, so posting my question here:
How much will decreasing family sizes, as in children per women / number of siblings per child decrease the proportion of gay people in a population?
I'm struggling to understand exactly what the statistics are saying here, but taking the Dutch meta-study at face value as correct, how would one go about calculating this figure? In countries like the Netherlands or Canada, one can probably (?) assume that at adulthood a significant majority of gay people are 'out' already, so additional social acceptance probably (?) would only be a minor mitigating factor.
In the comments, Scott claimed that Blanchard's numbers suggest the FBOE could explain around 1/7th of all gay men. Since we aren't dropping to a strict one child per mom, the proportion should decrease by less than that. But Blanchard was specifically focused on older brothers, so if older sisters have a smaller but still relevant effect then the real number could be higher but certainly less than double.
You'd have to calculate the odds of having gay children when one or two are born to the same parents compared to when three or four are born to the same parents. If you assume that all families have four children now and in the future all families will have one child, and the odds of being gay go up with each child from the same parents, and the birth order effects are real, there will be fewer gay people. But I suspect that for this to have any meaningful effect, the birth order effect has to be duly large that there can't be any doubt of it existing in the first place. Given that it is very much doubted, I assume that social factors are likely to overshadow it completely.
Also, if you want to discuss an earlier ACX post in the future, I would suggest doing it by commenting on the original post regardless of how old it is and then posting a link in the open thread asking for input. On SSC, a long tail of comment activity used to be normal and there was no notion of having to comment when a post was 'fresh'. There are no doubt many people who only read the post days, weeks or months after it's first posted, and it doesn't benefit the conversation if they decide to take their comments elsewhere, under the assumption that the discussion is 'dead'.
Will the Hamas attacks help or hurt Netanyahu politically?
The lack of preparedness for the Yom-Kippur War ended the dominance of the lAbour party in 73, and Israel found itself caught equally unprepared this time.
On the other hand Netanyahu is a shrewd politician and has done a great job painting himself as the only person who can keep Israel safe, does such a attack bolster his support when safety seems much more critical.
I expect this will end Bibi politically. If it was just another round of rockets it might have helped him. This was a colossal failure of government on every level. Even 1973 wasn't this bad.
Nearly half as many civilians died in the first few hours in 2023 as Israeli soldiers died in the entire Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria never penetrated into the core of Israel, the fighting was in the Golan and the Sinai. Saturday was the single worst day in Israeli history; proportionally, the likely death toll alone was at least ten 9/11s. And then there's the rapes and the hostages.
For the duration of the emergency, Bibi is safe. But when the dust settles, they're coming for his head. He'll be lucky to stay out of jail.
No idea, but there have been reports today that Egypt warned Israel of an attack and that this warning wasn't acted upon. Is that true? Who knows. Will it hurt Netanyahu? Who knows. But it shows there are avenues for Netanyahu's detractors to hurt him politically. I also read criticisms that his Judicial fight resulted in Air Force reservists claiming they would never go back on active duty. Again I have no idea if this is true (I dont follow Israeli news outside of what bubbles up onto mainstream US media), but if he becomes a military liability then maybe he will be pushed out.
I'm in a similar situation to Shaked - most of my bubble hates him and blames him, but it's in that order. Not sure how people who don't hate him react.
I think I'd wager that he loses some amount of support, because - outside view - that's what normally happens when massive failure like this occurs.
But there's also the "rally around the flag" effect, and Netanyahu is smart, so... who knows?
I don't hate him. I campaigned for him against Perez nearly 30 years ago.
But וישמן ישורון ויבעט ("Jeshurun grew fat and kicked") and Bibi got all googly eyed over his own מזרח התיכון החדש ("New Middle East" aka Economics > Values) and what happened, happened.
*Should* he resign? Immediately.
Who should take over? Anybody.
Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza to stay out of jail. Bibi may be getting the nation mir....
you know what? Until it is likely to matter I would rather not publish negative words. I hope that he has the wisdom and heart to do what is right. That is all.
I have a place in the unwritten history of Israeli PR (or perhaps it is written) but being as I am unwilling to accept the structural or financial control of an organization I guess there's little I can do.
Anyone interested in having me on a podcast or show is invited to get in touch via my YouTube channel. I may have things to say that you would like people to hear.
Who's to say it was a failure, or at least (as we don't yet know the outcome) a failure to anticipate? It seems unlikely, verging on inconceivable, that the Israelis with their sophisticated security services and, no doubt, hordes of informers among Palestinians, weren't fully aware of the impending attack and its scale.
Given that the population of the Gaza Strip is increasing by 2% per annum (at which rate it will double in under 20 years) perhaps the Israelis decided to let things come to a head so they would have just cause (by some standards) to expel a fair proportion of Gaza inhabitants and absorb the whole area into Israel.
It wouldn't be the first time in history that a crafty and ruthless leadership has deliberately let a rebellion foment and break out, as a supposed justification for some decisive action to restore a better peace in future:
"Contemporary chronicles vividly record the savagery of the campaign, the huge scale of the destruction and the widespread famine caused by looting, burning and slaughtering. ... Records from the Domesday Book of 1086 suggest that as much as 75% of the population [of Northern England] could have died or never returned. "
The key difference though is that no-one contemporary knew what was going on in the first millennium. The extent to which everyone is watching is evident right now.
Also, not a great fan of historical determinism...
My instinct is to blame Ehud Barak, Yair Lapid, and the odious people who refused to do their military service due to their opposition to the judicial reforms BUT I don't follow Israeli politics closely enough to have a truly informed opinion. I'm just a curious outsider.
Given that the base of Bibi's power is currently being propped up by an entire community that refuses to do military service, this probably isn't a wise gamble for him to take.
Hard to say. Everyone I know is furious at him for the most colossal failure in Israeli history (it's not just an intelligence failure, it's also a policy failure - 70% of the troops that were supposed to be around Gaza were in the West bank to protect Ben Gvir's settler friends).
But then everyone I know already hated him anyway. Hard to know what his supporters (or even swing voters like some of my cousins) are going to think.
What are people's prognoses for how the current dramatically heightened phase of the Israel-Palestine conflict will end? IDF is bound to conduct a large ground operation in Gaza, what will happen there?
There's a quandary that rarely gets any airtime in this conflict. It's the Orwellian notion of the ever shifting war between the three main territories, Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia.
The necessity to maintain the feat of an imminent enemy was crucial to enabling the degree of internal controls that each government needed.
If the plan is to remove the Hamas threat entirely then the absence of a visible agressor risks exposing the severity of the internal divisions within Israel to the point of Civil War.
The relationship between the religious and secular communities is already highly strained. A common enemy is perhaps the only thing to prevent a complete fracturing of Israeli society.
Israel is in a fury and has mobilized 300k reservists, bringing their active force to 470k. That's 5% of the Israeli population and 70% of their available combat power. There's no half measures coming down the pipe.
If you try and reverse-engineer a strategy from the desired outcomes, you won't be able to predict anything. Israel has no path to their outcomes, but has an overwhelming necessity to act. Israel's war goals are the simplest part of this equation:
1. Get the hostages back
2. Destroy Hamas
3. Prevent this from happening again
but the long term problem for them is that none of those are directly achievable with bombs or boots. Israel can degrade Hamas's capabilities by continuing to blow up weapons caches and command centers, but not destroy every last member. Israel may get some of the hostages back, but almost certainly Hamas will be able to keep some or even most away. Israel has spent nearly two decades since Hamas threw Fatah out of Gaza in a coup trying to prevent this from happening, and failed.
Does Israel have the material capability to fight like someone brought Curtis LeMay back from the dead? Sure. Do they have the will or political cover? Almost certainly not. And that's the only way to achieve any of those wars goals with raw military power.
But they have the opposite consideration in the short term: Israel is literally and figuratively up in arms. Hamas has gleefully published videos of murder, torture, and evidence of rape of civilians and military alike. Of those videos, the ones in Gaza show the Gazan population celebrating these acts. Seeing those videos has exactly the effect you'd think it would have on Israeli sympathy for Arab civilians. Knowing that on top of that Hamas has 130 hostages puts a certain urgency on Israel's response. Although so far Israel has continued to practice roof knocking and other collateral-mitigation techniques unique to the IDF, for the first time I wonder if they'll be able to continue to.
Nobody knows how far Israel will go to get the hostages back or to punish Hamas. Nobody has ever hurt Israel this bad, either. The civilian toll in the first few hours of 2023 was at least 1/3 to 1/2 as high as the entire military toll of the weeks of 1973. Or, to think about it another way, including Israeli Arabs, Israel's population is 9.3M. If the deaths from the initial Hamas attack are only 1k victims, that would be about 1/9k of Israel's population. 9/11 had about 3k victims, slightly more than 1/100k of America's 2001 population (285M). So to imagine how Israel's feeling right now, imagine multiplying 9/11 by at least 10.
My intuition is that 1,000 dead in a localized attack is 1,000 dead. Can someone help me understand why relative numbers matter? Is it about the reduction in available resources? Do citizens of smaller countries feel grief in proportion to relative population loss? Is the 9/11 attack best compared to the population is the US? New York State? City? Manhattan?
It is at least in part about how many of the survivors are directly affected by the deaths, e.g. because they were friends or family members. And, pragmatically, about whether the defined group can e.g. determine their own foreign policy in a way that Israel can and Manhattan can't.
Israel is determining its foreign policy at a time when 1-2% of Jewish Israelis are grieving over a dead friend or family member, and probably most Israelis personally know someone who is grieving. That didn't come close to happening in the United States after 9/11. And in a country that was kind of on the edge regarding the whole Palestinian question, that can make a difference.
John explained it well. Many Israeli know one of the victims. Most Jews know someone who knows a victim. Nearly every Jew knows someone who is now in uniform who wasn't a week ago. This is the biggest reason for Israel's overwhelming necessity to act; this feels existential to Israel because it has touched everyone.
I'd further add that war and conflict are not merely a numbers game. 1000 civilians dead in an atrocity are not the same as 1000 terrorists dead in combat, or even 1000 civilians dead in collateral damage. You should care about all of those, but in different ways and amounts.
And in 9/11, with a few exceptions, the victims just vanished. America had taken a horrific hit but it quickly became clear that none more were coming. In the Simchat Torah attacks, there has been a steady drumbeat of disturbing video of the initial atrocities and the ongoing hostage crisis. Hamas's glee over their barbarism, and the celebrations of it around the world, have reinforced the feeling for every Israeli - frankly, every Jew - that this is coming for them personally. This has magnified both the grief and the resolve that this atrocity has caused.
>but the long term problem for them is that none of those are directly achievable with bombs or boots.
Sure they are. Kill everyone.
Dead people don't retaliate, nor have children who retaliate. Not that this is a good course of action, but when people say "force can't achieve X", most often what they mean is "I am not willing to use very much force". Force can achieve pretty much anything, it is often the only thing that can certain objectives (like say wanting actual safety from Palestinian terrorism).
> Dead people don't retaliate, nor have children who retaliate.
Dead people are pretty well known for their children's propensity to retaliate.
That's not a problem if the plan is "kill everyone", but in that case the reason the children won't retaliate is that dead people don't retaliate, not that dead people don't have children who retaliate.
It is just the reality of the world. It is all a game of of violence chicken, and people shouldn't be surprised if the side driving the tank just smashes through the Volvo careening right at it eventually.
"They never had any, they were perfectly content massacring and gang raping them and expelling them from their homes in the Nakba for the crime of living on the land they wanted for themselves."
And the Germans in WWII were slaughtering Jews. That has limited relevance to the opinions and behavior of 25 yo Germans today.
Israel has had the means to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians for decades. Now they have the motivation. You'd better hope they have more morals than you do.
The best predictor of Arab population growth is the distance to Israeli hospitals. Israeli Arabs, followed by the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the rest of MENA.
You lie and lie. Seeing what you cheer for has hardened the world's resolve.
From a foreign policy perspective, It would be clever of Netanyahu not to retaliate with extreme bloodlust. Reasons: 1) Israel right now has considerable sympathy, but it could backfire if their response is even harsher than what they have got in terms of cold blooded killing; 2) related: a very harsh response will make it more difficult for the Saudis to recognize Israel in the foreseeable future; 3) if they react so hard that Gaza becomes wholly impossible to live in, the Israeli government will have to administer the place themselves, which is much more demanding than letting some Palestinian authority maintain control. From a domestic policy perspective, however, extreme revenge might be more rational, as Netanyahu must somehow compensate (in the eyes of Israelis) for the blunder of not foreseeing the Hamas outbreak. Hard to say if these two rationalities can be combined. Depends on political talent, perhaps also on luck.
From a foreign policy perspective, I don't understand the whole thing. What were the military objectives of the Hamas? They presented themselves as brainless and heartless barbarians quite well, but what for? I thought this might have been a distractive attack but I don't see the real thing yet.
About Pearl Harbour, there was a story about USA letting it happen. Strategically, something like that would make sense now for Israel. I'm all with them.
80% chance things go back to status quo ante (60% that happens within the year, 20% it takes longer than that), 5% change something goes wronger for Israel, sufficient to force a significant change in a pro-Palestine direction, 10% chance Israel looks at what's happening in Azerbaijan and decides to engage in some ethnic cleansing to try to resolve the situation, while claiming its just completing a 'population exchange', 5% chance something even weirder happens.
Israel will delay its full-scale ground invasion for a while so it can plan it out and prepare properly. The extra time will also let air/artillery strikes and the total blockade "soften up" the Gazans.
By the time it ends, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 times as many Palestinians are dead as Israelis. Hamas might still consider the result a victory.
My (unfortunate) guess it that all the incentives that all parties had to continue the status quo as it was, are still in place. So after a few months of terrible, tragic violence, we'll return to roughly where we were. Very likely, the deals with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will be delayed, which is what Hamas wants.
In other words, a few months, then "back to normal".
The one thing that might make my prediction fail is if the Israeli people show enough determination to have something *really* different happen, enough so that it's in Netanyahu's interest to have a real change happen. (Or even better, to oust Netanyahu.)
Hamas’ entire plan is to drag the IDF into Gaza where Israel’s advantage in materiel counts for nothing. Instead there’ll be violent street-to-street fighting. This is precisely why Hamas took hostages to shame them into invading.
If it works then we’ll have a period of high intensity fighting then a period of low intensity insurgency and then Israel will be forced by its losses and by global humanitarian pressure to pull out of Gaza and resume service as usual.
Hama will likely have lost ten times the population that Israel has but it will have cost Israel a lot of blood and treasure and exhausted any goodwill with the Arab states for a generation at least.
Will Israel defeat Hamas meanwhile? No. Its leadership is safe in Qatar and it will be able to replenish its numbers in a few years time due to its high popularity with the Palestinian people.
"Hamas’ entire plan is to drag the IDF into Gaza where Israel’s advantage in materiel counts for nothing. Instead there’ll be violent street-to-street fighting. "
Material advantage actually counts for quite a bit in street-to-street fighting. Yes, it's the least-unfavorable place for Hamas to fight, but they don't have the resources to win even there; if Israel wants Gaza back under IDF control, it will be. Possibly with a few thousand IDF dead, but Hamas just did the thing that makes that thinkable in Israel.
Gaza under control of Israel is not what Israel wants. It doesn’t want to indefinitely rule over 2 million souls who hate their guts. The entire situation has ‘quagmire’ all over it.
Hamas might play the long game. Here is one way to interpret their long-term strategy: The attack is likely to further the get-rid-of-the Palestinians sentiment in Israeli society. In the longer run, this may lead to more liberal- minded Israelis leaving the country (or more generally to increase out-migration), helping to skew the population gradually more toward only extreme hardliners remaining - assumed to be even more brutal toward Palestinians. At some point, Hamas may hope that this will lead to international goodwill and support for Israel declining. Setting the stage, decades from now, for a war to end Israel. The strategy is often labelled "crisis maximizing" and it seldom works, but sometimes it does. (I am not taking sides here, only spelling out how all parties, including Hamas, may be assumed to act rational, given the cards and the positions fate has dealt them.)
“Crisis Maximising” is essentially what Serbia did prior to WW1 and it led to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. At the cost of starting a world war of course.
Qatar is a US protectorate. Israel isn’t going to try anything like that and upset its largest benefactor. And that’s assuming a Saudi or Qatari SAM wouldn’t be able to shoot them down.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians as an end goal, why did it warn everyone in North Gaza to evacuate before soldiers move in and things get even more dangerous for civilians? Why do they warn civilians in buildings they are about to bomb in advance?
If Hamas is trying to free Palestinians, then why have they ordered them to stay put and not evacuate, even though they know North Gaza is about to become a warzone? Wouldn't that just help their enemies "end goal" of killing Palestinian civilians? Why are they helping Israel to do that?
I'm so tired of this line to be honest. If you're going to give cookies to civilian-genociders because they performatively declare "pls move", give some to Hamas too, it did the same thing before bombing Ashkelon [1].
Everyone from Assad to ISIS loves to "warn" civilians before attacks, it's a very affordable package of free PR. Those stunts have dubious effects in terms of net total of civilians "saved".
If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
In contrast, if you're targeting military installations, then warning civilians is the best way to deal with a human shield problem, without giving in to the human shield tactic.
What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
> If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
How so ?
1- I want to bomb the city of Tel Aviv
2- I say "I WILL BOMB TEL AVIV, EVERYBODY WHO DOESNT WANT TO DIE MOVE"
3- People of Tel Aviv
4- I bomb Tel Aviv
This sounds like a scenario where I both target "Civilians" and still let them escape, but really I'm just targeting the **Civilian Infrastructure**, not civilians per se.
> What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
What military target in Gaza was/is the IDF targeting ?
It seems to me by the sheer number of Hamas videos online showing IDF in pools of blood that they had plenty of military targets. I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
>>I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
They shot up a concert and killed 260 people. Maybe you have some kind of theory on the military value of EDM that I'm unaware of, but I don't see how that can be explained as anything other than "deliberately targeting civilians."
The military targets were on the border. They had to go through the military targets to get to the civilian ones.
Consider Be'eri - a kibbutz near the border. It had 1,000 civilian residents. Hamas killed 100 of them and abducted many more. What military target was Hamas aiming for in Be'eri?
When Hamas took civilian hostages, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that? When Hamas shot unarmed people at point blank range, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that?
Finally, if Hamas wanted to kill more civilians, what would they have done differently? They already went house-to-house, shooting at every unarmed person they saw. If they wanted to kill more civilians they would...?
Yes, very true. And, by warning the Gazan civilians and allowing them to evacuate, the Israelis are _accepting_ the risk that some Hamas members will hide themselves amongst the evacuating civilians, and will not be killed in north Gaza.
It'd be pretty easy to test this hypothesis. Just have Hamas move their military equipment away from Palestinian population centers.
If Israel strikes the population centers, there's your answer. If Israel strikes the Hamas bases - having been moved away from innocent civilians - and leaves the population centers alone, wouldn't that disprove this argument?
No such thought experiment is needed ZACH considering the nearly endless on video examples of Israelis deliberately targeting, and successfully murdering Palestinian civilians, one recent example being the 2018 march at the border.
We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians.
To prove the contrast, I can show you a list of Israeli military locations. I can show you how far they are from civilian centers. For example, the IDF headquarters is located at Hakirya, IDF and MOD HQ 6473424.
Can you do the same for Hamas? Where's their headquarters?
"We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians. "
It was universally observed by basically every observer, NGO, government what have you that Israels claims any of those protestors were violent was complete nonsense. You are essentially saying Israel can call any protestors violent on the pretext that maybe Hamas is among them even without showing a shred of actual proof. It was merely a targeted massacre. I think if you are willing to deny that there is literally no level of evidence that would convince you, you're going to just continue to deny reality and produce contrived thought experiments because there is no case where you will admit what every observer has admitted and what all the evidence shows and it gets me to thinking that there is no right answer for you that doesn't involve Jews being justified in killing whichever Palestinians they feel fit to, and no instance whatsoever where Palestinians have the right to even PEACEFULLY PROTEST without being butchered. I can't see you as anything but a genocide apologist.
An Israeli official did recommend that Gazan's use that border crossing to leave Gaza, but rescinded that advice on last Tuesday because Egypt closed the border crossing that day. Israel bombed the Gaza side of the crossing to keep supplies from entering Gaza until the hostages are released.
I'm sure Israel would love for the people of Gaza to leave and go to Egypt, but Egypt doesn't want them and won't let them in.
Those who answered (2) (Tego, Godshatter, Viliam, Moon Moth): Did you learn this usage from your parents as a child (or in language class, for non-native speakers)? Did you learn using gendered pronouns first, then picked up this usage from peers? Did you make a conscious choice to use (2)?
Not a conscious choice (when talking vaguely about people the listener doesn't know), it's just my default. No idea where I picked it up; I don't know how I'd find out whether I got it from family or peers, as I don't have any large samples of younger-me's writing.
My siblings seem to speak the same way, but I'd guess my parents would default to gendered language more? (It would be kind of hard to contrive the right conversation, and I don't trust them to give a correct answer if asked directly.)
I grew up mostly in the Southwestern US, went to Catholic schools, and come from a very socially conservative family (pretty much all the adults I know were strongly opposed to gay marriage when that was a thing, for example).
Seeing the other replies has made me curious enough that I'd be interested in seeing this on a community survey someday.
I am a native who largely uses non-gendered language, and honestly it's because I grew up in the Bay Area. Kind of learned from parents and kind of from peers. As I look very nonbinary (to people who notice that sort of thing) I am very aware of pronoun use and will change depending on who I'm talking too. If someone refers to me automatically matching my sex, I'll be more likely to use typically gendered language about/around them. If they are clearly aware that I Look Like I Have A Gender I'll use more gender neutral or oddly gendered language with them. the gender neutral feels more natural though.
Not a native English speaker. It depends. In my language, the word "child" feels perfectly natural, though "sibling" and "parent" feel formal, because naturally one would say "brother" or "sister", "mother" or "father". Not sure why. Maybe others would disagree with me. There is no singular "they" or any other gender-neutral pronoun, "he or she" is the most politically correct you can get. Actually, all words for humans (and animals) are gendered; you can't really say e.g. "teachers" in a fully neutral way; you basically say "male-teachers and female-teachers" if you want to signal wokeness, and everyone else understands that the "male-teachers" can also be used for a teacher of unspecified gender. (I think a few English words are like this, too, e.g. "waiter" and "waitress".)
Then again I also speak a little Hungarian, which doesn't even have separate words for "he" and "she". So I don't really perceive gender-neutral speech as something *unnatural*, but rather as "some languages have it, some don't".
At school, I was taught to use the gendered English. I found the non-gendered English later on internet, I tried it (a conscious choice), and after a while it started making sense intuitively. Because I am not a native English speaker, I don't have strong feelings either way.
> In my language, the word "child" feels perfectly natural, though "sibling" and "parent" feel formal, because naturally one would say "brother" or "sister", "mother" or "father".
I do (2) when talking about people who're not close to me and are only relevant to the conversation in the context of their role. "I talked to the sales assistant and they said they couldn't accept returns after 30 days". I might equally use a gendered pronoun in this case, which I don't really do with any particular intent but which I think reduces the implied interpersonal distance a bit.
I do (3) where appropriate. (1) is niche but I'd use it for anonymity ("We've had a complaint from a member of the team who says they find your communication style can be quite abrasive").
For context, I'm an upper-middle class British English speaking millennial, with a home counties accent.
I usually have the first reason, with the addition that it's not just their gender, it's their relationship to me. I give enough anecdotes people could probably find me if they wanted to, but no reason to make it easier; if my sister does something that makes a point but isn't inherently tied to being female, I go with "my relative" or "someone I know".
I suppose different people have different intuitions about the defaults. Should you specify gender by default, and only omit it when you have a specific reason to do so? Or should you omit the gender by default, and only specify it when you have a specific reason to do so? Either way, the person who uses the opposite default will wonder whether you are hinting at something or you just speak weirdly.
Now that I think about it, I probably use the gendered default when I talk, and the non-gendered default when I write. So I guess I perceive the non-gendered way as formal, and the gendered way as informal.
"My child" is completely normal; you could say "my son" or "my daughter" but there is no reason to read anything into the "child" phrasing. (Well, there might be, but this is determined by context.)
"My sibling" is the opposite; there is no natural use of the word "sibling" and anyone who does use it is attempting to make an ideological point, and doing so in a very marked and awkward way.
"My parent" is in between those extremes. It's kind of weird. In the plural, "my parents" is completely normal (contrast "sibling", where you still wouldn't use that word - the expected collective reference would be the much longer phrase "my brothers and sisters", or more conveniently (and less specifically) "my family"), but I would expect a reference to just one of them to use one of many synonymous terms specifically referring to the mother or father.
My family might be weird then! I agree that nobody uses the singular “sibling,” to talk about a specific person, but we frequently use the plural “siblings.”
Using "they" for a hypothetical person who might equally well be of either sex, as Nolan did, is quite different to using it for an individual person whose sex is known to you.
The latter is awkward (at least in pre-2016 English). I can't say I'd never use it, but if I did then I'd definitely be drawing attention to the fact that I'm deliberately keeping the person's sex a mystery.
There's also the construction where you deliberately avoid using any pronouns at all, which is what I'll do if I'm forced to talk about someone whose self-identified "gender" does not match their actual sex.
Native speaker. I use non-gendered language by default when talking about people who the listener doesn't care about (i.e. someone they don't know and probably never will know).
So "I talked to the cashier at Walmart today and they said that their store recently got new products." sounds normal to me. And if I'm talking to an acquaintance who will never meet my sister, I might say "I have a sibling who has this problem, and they tried that solution.", that also sounds fine to me. (Though either could be replaced with gendered language just fine.)
However, if I'm talking about someone the listener knows or who I expect the listener to know in the future, I default to gendered language. "Remember Alex from high school? She recently got a new job." or "You should meet Jamie, you'd get along with him great." In this case, using gender-neutral language would indicate that they're non-binary (or I'm being mysterious for some reason), and I would expect that people I'm talking to would intuitively grasp the difference.
I'm also a native speaker. I only use non-gendered language for non-binary people, or when I don't know the person's gender. Using non-gendered language for a person of known gender sounds odd to me, even when gender is irrelevant. Maybe it's a generational difference (I'm fortyish.)
I grew up during the Cold War, which pitted the self-described democratic west against the totalitarian Soviet Union. The idea that the United States should abandon liberal democracy was well outside the Overton window. That is no longer true.
The people currently talking about “Red Caesar” don't strike me as people who have any chance of <em>becoming</em> becoming “Red Caesar.” What they are doing is laying the intellectual groundwork for someone else to overthrow democracy. I don't expect them to succeed, but of course a common forecasting error is to think that the future will be like the past. A discontinuity like the overthrow of a political system that has endured for more that two centuries is hard to predict.
"Filled with" is a gross exaggeration of what anybody serious is claiming. The officer corps, in particular, is not even close to dominated by far-right extremists. The enlisted ranks are about 50% Black, Hispanic, and Asian, which are not demographics known for their far-right extremism, and the half who are white(ish) are still not all or even mostly far-right extremists.
There's no way the current US Army signs on with either a right-wing or a left-wing coup or Caesarification. Unless they're simultaneously presented with both a right and left-wing coup and there is no loyalist faction to support, I suppose.
Resistance against *what*? Was the noise pollution from that rave really *that* bad? I mean, I get the temptation to go postal on a bunch of annoying hippies playing bad music at ludicrous volume, but no. Just no.
Seriously, if you ever do find yourself in a position where you have the right to armed resistance (and haven't voided it by your own actions), that right is not transferrable. You don't get to gun down people adjacent to your oppressors just because they're easier targets. And "stray bullets" and "collateral damage" only go so far as an excuse.
Yeah, I would like to apply this standard generally to IDF mission design ("mowing the lawn" in Gaza, etc.) and a host of other measures by the Israeli state - like punitive home demolitions and all the nonsense the settlers get away with - which aren't exactly surgically precise self-defence against militants.
To be clear, I don't intend to stop applying this standard to Hamas just because people don't apply it to Israel. But I would still like to see it applied to Israel and other state actors at least as scrupulously as it is applied to resistance fighters with few clean options, poorly-centralised leadership, and necessarily lousy troop discipline.
There is a moral bias against underdog asymmetrical warfare in the West, for obvious and not especially respectable reasons.
Mate, I'm saying this as a citizen of a country which regularly gets excoriated as anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian whenever some Israeli newspaper gets its knickers in a twist:
Cool it. You're not starting a discussion, you're coat-trailing and despite my commitment to free speech, it won't take much to unleash my inner Saruman and report you for being a [epithet redacted].
I literally don't understand comments like these. Obviously attacking Israel like this was going to prompt a massive response. Is a sense of a moral high ground worth the casualties that a war with a much stronger opponent will bring?
And given the celebrations by palestinians and their allies around the world, it doesn't seem like anyone of the palestine side is consdiering any of this to be an "error".
Oh, so if Israel manage to kill and ethnically cleanse all the palestinians who havea problem with Israel, then they get to call it "their" land and you stop complaining?
If it's about how Palestinians are being treated, fine, but stop with all this "stolen land" nonsense. Almost everwhere occupied by arabs and muslims today was "stolen" and no arab or muslims has ever pretended to feel bad about this.
I wouldn't call the current attack by Palestinians on civilian targets when they clearly could have only chosen military targets to be a "mistake", except that doing extra to enrage Israelis could be viewed as a mistake.
It isn't some little error being unfairly magnified.
The Japanese and Germans did bad things to my ancestors in the 1940s as well. I hold no grudge against modern Japan or Germany. The Palestinians really could learn from the rest of us.
Right, it seems entirely reasonable to blame Egypt and Jordan for not letting these people in.
My preferred peace plan is that the Gaza Strip and West Bank simply get emptied out. No humans to set foot there for a hundred years. Israeli settlers can go to Israel, Arabs can go to Jordan/Egypt/Syria/Lebanon/Saudi Arabia/UAE/Iraq/whatever, and the whole thing becomes a UN-administered Forbidden Zone, filled with landmines that will explode if they detect anything that weighs more than a fox and less than a camel.
And people don't take well to random deadly attacks. Both sides are made of human beings, both sides are in a situation where they didn't create the history, both sides are almost entirely composed of people who don't have much political effect, and both sides are influenced third parties who want to amp up the violence.
What response did Hamas expect from their attack? That Israel would be intimidated and hide in a shell? Had Israel instead attacked Gaza in a similar fashion, what would be the expected response?
The only rational response to an attack of this nature is to declare war on those responsible and attempt to ensure nothing like it will happen again. In effect, Hamas deserves most of the blame for the slaughter of the children, as the instigators of the violence.
I'm not a fan of Israel responding with vengeance against the population. I mean I definitely favor it over nothing but I really think we have a teaching moment here.
We're all human beings, equal and similar human beings.
I believe that this matter can be reasoned out.
If not then I guess we must return to sticks, but I would like to have a try!
You probably know the word hasbara....
uh oh, was about to drop my credentials and the battery is on 1%.
Gotta send. Suffice to say I will happily join the conversation with any pro-Palestinian or Muslim show, so long as I have the same exact freedom to speak as the host.
There are many other reports of these rapes, but those first two Hamas proudly broadcasted for all to see.
All of these victims were civilians going about this lives. Some of them weren't even Israeli. If you can't see the atrocity of these acts then you are sick and beyond saving.
Look, if I could wave a magic wand to just kill all the members of Hamas while leaving innocent peaceful civilians unharmed I'd do it. I have no such wand, and neither does the IDF. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor started a chain of events ending in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including incinerating Japanese civilians, Hamas's sneak attack on Israel, starting with their massacre at the music festival, is being repaid. If the Israelis are able to be selective, great. But war does not allow fine-grained selectivity. I wish the Israelis the best of luck in ensuring that no such attack ever happens again, by whatever means they need to use to ensure this.
At the risk of engaging this crap, “the right of armed resistance” doesn’t include targeting civilians, right?
Everyone agrees that if Hamas attacks IDF soldiers - or if the Nazis attack US soldiers during WW2 - that’s not terrorism or a war crime, that’s war, even though it’s an awful thing and Hamas should be wiped out like the Nazis. But Hamas is kidnapping and raping civilians.
Yeah I don't care - my question is if you care about the people of Gaza, in what possible way does/could this attack lead to improved outcomes for them? It's irrelevant how much Israeli people "deserve" to be killed - the only thing Hamas can control is their own actions, so how do their actions (and all of the consequences over which they have no control) lead to better outcomes for the people of Gaza?
Have seen a lot of comments questioning the authenticity of the crimes reported on October 7th.
Someone did a deep dive on most of the videos and pictures uploaded to X (Twitter) to see what was likely true or false- it also speculates on the fate of Shani Louk (the girl who's body was apparently seen in the back of a truck with two broken legs). Have a look and see what you think!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qpk2asgZzGitpLSq1B0h4LGpcRizGUER/mobilebasic
It does not discuss the allegation of beheaded babies, which seems to be a point of contention. The original claim, that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded- has not explicitly been verified. That said, it does appear that some babies were beheaded, though it is not clear whether they were from the kibbutz being discussed at the time, nor whether the beheading was after death or not:
https://themedialine.org/top-stories/evidence-on-display-at-israels-forensic-pathology-center-confirms-hamas-atrocities/
OC ACXLW Irvine Campus Market place! Year in AI report and AI safety is not Platonism 10/21/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kLi3HD4tzZsbfE7mQNdd64fzgroNydH5RefAqq6-W3s/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 46th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter. Change in venue this week!
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: Irvine campus marketplace
https://maps.app.goo.gl/f2k2VRouufhx6GAdA
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Oct 21, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters:
1) Year In AI Summary Report
REPORT: The State of AI
https://youtu.be/-u3lKoUgtWI?si=Nkcar5TuNQochxjn
Powerpoint and text summary
https://www.stateof.ai/
State of AI Report 2023
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implications for the future. The Report is produced by AI investors Nathan Benaich and the Air Street Capital team.
2) We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned
Audio:
We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned-the-bitter-lesson
I'm pro-Israel but would like to donate to the relief efforts in Gaza. What would be a good charity to donate to?
Not the answer you're looking for, but while from an Effective Altruism perspective, I think that donations to relief in Gaza would be much more impactful than donations to relief in Israel, I don't know that there is any way to guarantee resources in Gaza going to their desired recipients in Gaza, rather than to Hamas et al. Just today, for example, UNRWA tweeted (and deleted) a statement that a group of people purporting to be from the Hamas controlled ministry of health stole fuel and medical supplies from them.
Good to know, thanks!
Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
https://x.com/israel/status/1713074806722015495?s=46&t=mdziosEggeNXPN3I6HSBeA
DEBUNKING ISRAELI GOVERNMENT FABRICATIONS THAT EVEN THE USA GOVERNMENT HAD TO REBUT!
1) - BREAKING: New footage has emerged putting paid to the 'Hamas desert rave massacre' propaganda.
It sucks when a music festival happens to be in the middle of IDF and Hamas fighting.
https://t.me/c/1333086089/180954
[As can clearly be seen and heard in the footage: uniformed, armed 'Israeli' interlopers are exchanging fire with the Hamas fighters.
Any ravers that got ironed out clearly were caught in the crossfire.
I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
🔴 @Cultures_of_Resistance]
2)The burned baby
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Considering the fabrication of the 40 beheaded babies that even the Biden government was forced to retract, the image is highly suspect.
3) The beheaded baby story was a complete Israeli lie that reached the HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415116363169884
Biden actually confirmed having seen evidence for it! Then had to retract
after evidence mounted it was a fabrication
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415904791712095
4) The scantily clad EMD chick was literally just in rave-wear, she wasn't stripped and raped by Hamas and is apparently still alive.
5) Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
https://x.com/israel/status/1713074806722015495?s=46&t=mdziosEggeNXPN3I6HSBeA
When Israel feels the need to fabricate THIS MUCH, I think we all know who the real victims are.
>I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
When have muslims at any point is history ever voluntarily relinquished conquered territory?
Please stop spamming.
The puppy picture was a shitpost by Stellar Man @stellarman22, look it up. He took the original from what had been posted by the Israeli government and substituted a puppy. He didn't think it would be taken seriously, but unfortunately you are tangible proof that half the people are below average intelligence.
I wouldn't personally bother engaging with those who deny atrocities taking place, while also gleefully celebrating them. Remember that you can flag such spam comments for moderation.
Fair enough but:
It morphologicaly doesn't look like a burnt child at all.
"All these things tell me that this is not even partially AI-generated," Farid said. He could not say what the photo shows or when it was taken. "I don't know what it is. It doesn't look like a person. You need a coroner to tell you that."
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/expert-debunks-ai-tools-claim-that-israels-photo-is-fake
Well wahddya know, no evidence whatsoever for the beheading/burning Jewish infants story!
The fact that Israelis felt the need to fabricate that story, the fact that it spread to the highest levels of government and was spread in mainstream media really raises some eyebrows. I suppose the endless parade of videos of Israelis happily cheering on a massacre of Gazans tells us nothing about what they intend.
Do we have a source for the false claim that Hamas was beheading babies? It could have been an Israeli (the government?), though I don't think they needed to exaggerate the horror.
It could have been someone at a distance who wanted to spread confusion, or someone who misheard something, or someone who thought it was "emotionally true" and thought literal truth didn't matter.
From CNN
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415116363169884
Biden actually confirmed having seen evidence for it! Then had to retract
after evidence mounted it was a fabrication
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415904791712095
It's the government, not merely some right wing Israeli rag, even President Biden had to retract after having believed their lies.
If you want to see pictures of targeted, murdered children, Israelis have does so to Palestinians in spades, now and in the past 75 years. It's how you get land. Strike terror into the hearts of parents by gleefully showing them their kids you just murdered.
Israeli leaders (and the population) have ALWAYS been genocidal.
https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1713606941920948488?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-10-11-23/h_a63b0fd57f2df717147ea8e26a2f758c
Yes, Netanyahu spokesman. I don't think this completely discredits Israel, and it would have been easier for me if I'd heard about it from someone more coherent and less malevolent.
https://news.sky.com/story/its-important-to-separate-the-facts-from-speculation-what-we-actually-know-about-the-viral-report-of-beheaded-babies-in-israel-12982329
An Israeli reporter said a soldier told her babies were beheaded, and the Israeli government picked it up. There's no evidence one way or the other.
Hi Nancy,
The original claim, from an Israeli news report, stated that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded. This then turned into "40 babies were beheaded" over time.
The truth of the matter is difficult to ascertain, but there have been some additional reports suggesting at least some babies were beheaded: https://themedialine.org/top-stories/evidence-on-display-at-israels-forensic-pathology-center-confirms-hamas-atrocities/
Though, some may argue it comes from an Israeli source. Due to the bizarreness of the claim, and the cost of being found to be lying about such things- would guess there's a greater than 50% chance it actually happened.
Furthermore, a rationalist type did a deep dive on all the claims here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qpk2asgZzGitpLSq1B0h4LGpcRizGUER/mobilebasic
Hope this helps!
Adding for clarity so that nobody confuses "technically, there's no evidence any infants were *beheaded*" for "there's no evidence infants were killed." One of the photos (blurred) would appear to qualify as evidence of burning (desc: "A since-blurred photo released by the Prime Minister’s Office on October 12, 2023, showing the charred corpse of a baby who was murdered by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7").
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-office-releases-horrifying-images-of-infants-murdered-by-hamas/
That charred corpse photo is literally AI on a photo of a dog. This is getting pathetic.
I think one potential silver lining for Palestinians is, when the dust clears, it will forever be said of the people who were brutally oppressed for thousands of years, "these are the atrocities, the crimes, the injustices, the lies they committed the moment they were handed power over others. An exemplar of utterly depraved evil, they were a darkness unto nations"
And it will be true, because it is true now.
Do you have an unblurred copy of it? As awful as that would be to look at, it would be good to have the evidence you're basing that claim on.
Edit: Never mind, found an article that appears to have them unredacted. And the burnt infant ones do not appear to be AI on a photo of a dog. Link below if anyone has a strong stomach and is trying to parse claims here.
https://www.livemint.com/news/world/babies-murdered-burned-by-hamas-monsters-israel-shares-photos-amid-war-11697128208963.html
THAT CHARRED CORPSE IMAGE IS LITERALLY AI OF A DOG IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED. Can't comment myself on the other photo of the child on a plastic sheet but even that would have to be verified at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if its a Palestinian child as there are no shortage of images of Palestinian children and infants murdered by Israelis laid on plastic sheets. And it hilariously has been the case that media shared images of Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism and portrayed them as Israelis to garner sympathy. Even social media influencers/entertainers like Jaime Lee Curtis and Justin Bieber have done this.
Look, I appreciate the authoritative gravitas of all-caps as much as the next man on the internet, but some evidence that goes beyond "IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED" would be appreciated here.
https://t.me/keith_woods/4527
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Another indicator is the distorted fingers of the surgeon typical for AI.
Look additionally at the photo shared here
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1713526867620204977
It's been debunked, no burned babies.
oh WOW another example of fake news
This may be the craziest tweet I’ve ever seen from a government: https://x.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1713588262420267068?s=46&t=gSZ7SVs_SpVQs3yqlf1zPw
This can't be chalked up to mere disinformation from some Israeli magazine because this is literally a fabrication FROM THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNT.
If you are anonymous this is not for you
If you are not anonymous, it is.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/ezra
Ezra sounds like quite a character! I am reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MlzYEcCT4 . ( "I Am Free" from "Zorba the Greek" )
I started playing the video but this is isn't a great moment to listen to it. I absolutely loved the first words. Pure Tao.
Inshallah I will hear more when the time is right.
Also you may find it of interest that around 2004 Theodore Bikel was one of the VIPs at a Yiddish Comedy show my father performed together with his identical twin. My dad is still very proud that Bikel was there and apparently really loved it. (If you can't trust the showman to quote his own reviews, who cannyou trust 😂. I'm kidding, I believe my dad. It's also possible, I'm now recalling that Theodore Bikel may have attended 2 of the 3 shows, which makes for a more trustworthy endorsement. Oh and Elie Weisel was there too.)
Many Thanks!
It is rare to meet people who are genuinely extraordinary in some way.
I have had the divine good fortune to have interacted in meaningful ways with a great many people and while of course every person is special because he or she is a unique individual, a very small number of people are TRULY unique in some astonishing way. Fools can't get past "person x on bad team!" and miss out on the glorious show of life on earth.
I hope you have signed up for my page. I don't know how much you know about me but hopefully things will soon get hectic.
War is here, and I can not leave it to be prosecuted by the individuals and classes of people who are running it.
They are all, at best, misguided.
After using Manifold for a couple weeks, I think "prediction market" should be replaced with "poll of ten nerds". And that's if you make a market about AI. If you make a market about anything else, good luck getting even one trader.
How can the world deal with Hamas?
We are a few hours away from a likely ground incursion / invasion of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into Northern Gaza. For the past week I've been trying to figure out a more reasonable way that the world can deal with Hamas, as an alternative to what the Israeli government is considering doing. I am having trouble coming up with a rational option aside from status quo (leave the group as is) or Israel's option (eliminate no matter the cost).
What other option exists to deal with a group with the following fact sheet (and please correct anything that is factually wrong in the statements below):
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
The leaders of Hamas and their families live in relative luxury while the average Gazan lives near the poverty line.
They promote radicalized education in Gaza, half of which are under the age of 19.
They use humanitarian aid for war (for example, digging up water pipes and turning them into missiles).
They strategically place their military operations near school, hospitals, residences, and commercial areas.
They convince Gazans to stay in urban areas and not to head to places IDF is advising them to go to in order not to get bombed.
They recruit minors to their cause and send them in paragliders to murder people (and be murdered by IDF)
They have the sympathy of many, EVEN IN ISRAEL, because of the civilian death toll every time there is an IDF operation.
I really don't know what can be done that is better than either option presented above.
Isreal is in a no-win situation now, but that's because they spent the last 15 years repeatedly destroying any possibility of peace, colonizing the West Bank despite repeated appeals to stop and radicalizing the Gazans through oppression.
As the Economist recently wrote,
> A second error was the divide-and-rule policy towards the Palestinians of Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 12 of the past 14 years. He has long sought to undermine the PA, which still runs parts of the West Bank. He has refused to resume peace negotiations since half-hearted talks broke down in 2014. He has frozen transfers of the tax revenues Israel collects on the pa’s behalf. At the same time, he has treated Hamas like a legitimate power in Gaza. In 2011, for instance, he approved a deal to swap 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier the militants had captured in 2006. The exchange, naturally, raised Hamas’s standing among Palestinians.
> For Mr Netanyahu, the logic was clear. The PA is committed to negotiating a two-state solution with Israel, which is anathema to the prime minister’s right-wing supporters. Undermining the PA and boosting its militant rival would help him to claim that Israel has no “partner for peace”. But Palestinians drew a different, if predictable lesson: that the only way to extract concessions from Israel is through force.
Wait, your argument is seriously that Israel traded prisoners to save a hostage, which made the hostage-takers appear better to the Gazan public, thereby making the massacre of Israelis their own fault?
That’s the best excuse for the intentional massacre of civilians that you could come up with? Really? At least put in a little effort next time.
> radicalizing the Gazans through oppression
Are you referring to when the Israel declared the First Intifada on Palestine simply for existing, and then did everything in their power to kill as many of their civilians as possible? Oh wait, that was Palestine.
Or maybe you’re referring to when the Israel declared the Second Intifada on Palestine for refusing peace talks even after being granted many concessions? Oh wait, it was Palestine who was granted concessions,
Or perhaps you’re referring to the 1948 war, when Israel attacked and attempted to conquer all its surrounding Muslim neighbors?
Or maybe the 1973 war where Israel attacked its Muslim neighbors on a Muslim holiday and tried to kill them simply for existing?
Oh, wait...
I think he's referring to the clause in the Israeli constitution which explicitly rejects the notion of peaceful co-existence and commits to a worldwide genocide against Muslims.
Wait, no...
Pro-Israelis operate on a special kind of memory that goes back to exactly the date best optimized to best show Israel as victim and not a single day before or after.
> 1948
So you don't go back to 1890s-1917 when a bunch of people who haven't been to a land in 2000 years demand it from its latest colonizer, or to 1928-1947 when they form gangs and militias and practice terrorism on both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians alike, or even to a few days after the declaration of war when those same gangs, now the proud IDF, were killing children and kniving pregnant women in Der Yassin.
No, exactly the moment the Arabs declared war on Israel. Why did Arabs declare the war ? What was "Israel" (which didn't exist yet) doing then and what did it do in response ? None of your concern, you have the date to the millisecond and - by God - you're going to go back to it and remind everyone how Israel, the pRoMiSEd LaNd, is the real victim here.
> 1973
Another banger. 6% of Egypt's land in the form of the Sinai peninsula. The Golan Heights. The West Bank. Gaza. Some Lebnanese territories on the side. All taken by force in true Thug tradition, the proud tradition of Israel. But no, that's the wrong date right ? 1967, yuck, you don't like that number. Your date is 1973, when the land's owners decide they maybe don't want a bunch of US-armed thugs on their property, that's the right date you want to go back to. Poor thugs, they were just frolicking in peace in the land they stole and the aggressive meany Arabs came knocking.
And on and on and on and on. Tiring. Exhausting. Energy-draining.
Everyone prefers to go to the dates that support their position. You, for example, do not go back to the Jerusalem anti-Jewish riot of 1920 or the 1929 Palestine riots and the Hebron massacre of Jews. For a detailed and not particularly biased account of the long intercommunal conflict in mandatory Palestine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercommunal_conflict_in_Mandatory_Palestine
Thank you for the free education. I knew about the 1929 riots, but the 1920 riots were new to me.
I don't see this as evidence against me, I'm not playing the eye-for-an-eye stupid game sincerely. I was just showing SunSphere how it's an unwinnable game and that I can always beat him/her at it by simply picking an earlier (or later) date. Besides a few politicians that I want to see imprisoned for life or executed, I believe most Israelis were born innocent, so they deserve to live no matter the crimes of their ancestors.
After all, as Pro-Israeli people are so very quick to point out on every occasion, if fairness means the sons should bear the sins of the fathers, then most Arabs should be killed too. I see this as a very valid argument, I despise the colonizing Arabs and I hate their pathetic religion, but it's all too likely at least one counts among my ancestors, and I don't understand why would I or any living Arab be responsible for the Caliphate.
I demand only that one doesn't cheer for evil in their lifetime. Anything else is optional.
I think you're bringing reason to an emotion-fight.
there is not really any need to shy away from 1948, Tom Suarez details jewish massacres of arabs in State of Terror. Deir Yassin was but one example. Jewish militias quite literally attempted a genocide right after the Holocaust. In fact that was used to shove off scrutiny!
I saw an Israeli legislator calling for a second Nakba, so I looked up what was the Nakba, and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate. After displacing (more like ethnically cleansing when you look up the details) almost a million Palestinians, it's no wonder that at least some of them will never accept Israel, and honestly, the time for founding countries in this way should have expired with the end of the 19th century: I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II.
Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave, but that will likely not happen. Since Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo the country, all it takes is America cutting ties to make it wind down, and this could happen in a few decades if a sufficiently left wing administration comes around.
And why not? Countries can just end, as the Soviet Union showed.
It’s hard to take these arguments as anything but an attempt to convince uninterested parties to join a side considering how precisely the context is being tailored. The nakba was the direct consequence of the Palestinian Arabs and surrounding countries waging on Israel whose declared purpose was genocide.
The Israeli claims are as follows:
1. Indigenous homeland
2. Needed as refuge from anti semitism
3. Prior to the British was insignificant, sparely populated part of southern Syria with no nations tied to that specific area
4. The zionists bought all their land legally and established new cities
5. All land gained was in defensive wars and land taken is necessary for defense
6. Were always prepared to live in peace with neighbors
No doubt you know the Palestinian side.
It should be noted that this conflict is among the smallest and least deadly in the ME and hating Israel has become a something of a holy cow for many groups.
Palestinians rejected the Peel Commission plan and the UN resolution 181 plan and went to war. This followed decades of Palestinian massacres of Jews. There were many refugee crises at the time in Europe and the decolonizing empires, and as happened in all those cases, Israel didn’t let the refugees return. The nakba is only special because the Arab countries they fled to have never given them citizenship.
Most Israeli Jews are descendants of Mizrahi refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Most Israeli Ashkenazim descend from refugees from eastern Europe. Where should they “go back” to?
That analogy does not seem very salient. Yes the Soviet Union, the nation-state, ended; that did not also result in the Russian people departing the land of their collective origins.
To the degree that the reestablishment of a Jewish nation in its current location was illegitimate because it required forcibly dispossessing another people, then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago. (Actually repeatedly, but in every instance it was long ago.)
And World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
> then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago
Take it with the Romans. What do Arabs got to do with this ?
And did the Judean people just stumble into this empty land, or did they also take it from those living there ?
And are the Eruropean immigrants who founded Israel those same "Judeans" from 2000 years ago ? Can they trace their roots all the way back ? Do they speak the same language or did they have to invent a new one ?
> World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
What should be the cutoff ? Why is Russia in the wrong for trying to take back what was once theirs in 2022, just like Israel ? If Arabs tried to take back Spain, why would they be wrong ?
Jewish immigrants purchased land and developed it. Palestinians massacred them a few times and rejected any peace plan that created a Jewish state (look up the peel commission plan, which offered Palestinians 90% of the territory, with a Jewish state on Jewish owned land on the coast and in the north). Somehow Palestinians have convinced themselves and the Arab world that they had the right to deny Jews a state on Jewish owned land. They’ve started multiple wars and have rejected a half dozen peace deals between 1937-2008.
World War II being the cutoff would be because it would be good to say that was the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it. If at least the civilized portion of the world can't get "CONQUEST BAD" into its head after that, then things are looking pretty bad.
The cycle has to end at some point, and it can't end with a regime established like that staking a claim to civilization. Israel is definitely gambling hard on its founding atrocity receding in the distance with the passage of time, but I don't know if they can get away with that given that it happened within modernity. They should be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
Listen to Netanyahu:
> The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is straight from the Bronze Age, Israel is no civilization.
Ah yes, Israel’s “founding atrocity” of trying to genocide all the Muslim countries around it, simply for existing.
Oh, wait, nope - that was the Muslims, who tried to genocide the one Jewish country in the region simply for existing.
And no, annexing some land from your enemies after winning a defensive war against them is not an “atrocity,” and is perfectly justified.
> simply for existing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks
> Muslims
I'm dying to bring you the news that Israel is a colonizer hated by everybody who reads history all the way to before your magic number 1948, inlcuding this ex-Muslim who hates Islam to his deep bones. I'm just no sure you will handle the news well.
Why don’t you read about what happened in 1921 and 1929 and 1937
"the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it" -- so then your definition of civilization excludes Russia, and China, and India....that's a helluva lot of the world's people who you're declaring to be not civilized.
Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"), and France (google the Algerian War). Iran and Iraq are definitely excluded given the mutually-genocidal war they fought during the 1980s.
Also, Afghanistan and Iraq would like a word regarding the US and its allies in the wake of 9/11. [Osama Bin laden and his lieutenants probably would too but they can't because they were all hunted down and assassinated.]
Etc, etc. My point of course is not to defend or in any way re-litigate any of the above events. Rather it is that the real world of real-life nations and cultures is way too complex to decide that Israel is some sort of glaring post-WW II outlier.
<i>Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"),</i>
The majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted, and still want, to remain part of the UK. The "conquering rampage" people here are the IRA, albeit they lack the competence to pull it off.
"and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate." How so? AFAIK, the founding of Israel followed the plan laid out by the United Nations. Palestinians didn't like it, started a guerilla war, got aid from neighboring Arab states, lost anyway, got expelled. Sucks to be them, for sure, but when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky. The second wave came after the Yom-Kippur war: Arab countries gang up on Israel, get their butt kicked, more Palestinians get displaced. Sucks to be them, for sure, but...
"I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II." Plenty of people got displaced right after WWII. Most of their descendants don't commit massacres of civilians in retribution anymore.
"Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave". First off, leave to where exactly? Second, it would be the ethical thing to abandon the only country approaching a liberal democracy in the whole Middle East, with civil rights, an advanced industry, a thriving academic and cultural scene, and leave it for Palestinians to turn it into a fundamentalist Muslim s******e? Does not compute.
Arabs weren't consulted so it wasn't fair to tell them to give up land for Jews. I don't think you or anyone reading this would accept giving up land without even being consulted.
Palestinians didn't like it and this is why Irgun and Lehi felt the need to depopulate Palestinian town after down, one massacre and gang rape after the next, just a merry band of murdering looters. Palestinians didn't start it, Jews did.
The first episode of large scale violence in the conflict was when Palestinians massacred Jews in 1921.
Palestinians rejected the peel commission plan which offered them a state on 90% of the territory because they couldn’t accept its parallel creation of a Jewish state on Jewish owned territory.
When did arabs ever get permission for their conquests?
> when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky.
A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
I personally am a "Do the fair and moral thing no matter what your enemy did" kind of guy, but it's curious that even by your macho logic the Israeli complaints about bombardments are just pointless pussifications.
> liberal democracy
The meaning of "liberal" flew right past your head and into the stratosphere. The UN-designated Apartheid, the Nelson-Mandela-designated Apartheid, is a "Liberal Democracy" now. Strange and ugly times.
> A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
Sure, but “fuck around and find out” has to go both ways. If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th on the basis of “well it was just a matter of time, it was inevitable this was going to happen” then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack and pretend to be a victim.
> If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th
I don't support any massacres, and those who did the massacres on the 7th are not just any ordinary Palestinians, they are Hamas.
> then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack
Well, ignoring for the moment that situation is not symmetric because the land is rightfully the Palestinians', yes. What I'm saying in your parent comment is actually a reductio ad absurdum of FluffyBuffalo "Suks to be lozer, Go Go Israel" Logic. If it suks to be a lozer, then Israel must suck it up and stop "crying" (as you so classily put it) over its dead victims, after all, they are a loser of the intelligence wars and Hamas successfully bamboozled them.
Me ? I'm actually crying over every innocent soul, not just so who just so happen to be called "Palestinian"|"Israeli"|blah blah. As a general rule, Life is sacred. Life is wonderful. And Life is rare. I'm generally against those ruining or ending lives.
> followed the plan laid out by the United Nations
So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
> leave to where exactly
Europe.
> liberal democracy
All a sham when it got started that way. A legitimate liberal democracy is a bottom up affair, you can't establish one through conquest.
>So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Arabs are neither native to the levant, or an actual majority of countries in which they're the predominant ethnic group. This "native rights" crap is entirely opportunistic.
>Europe.
A large majority of israelis do not have majority european ancestry
> If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Is this a joke? Are you so dense as to not see the irony dripping off of this statement?
You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, native to Israel, from the Middle East!
Or is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? I guess 75 years isn’t enough for you, is it 100? 500?
> native to Israel
Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas. At best, they're a third/fourth generation immigrant, merely with a firehose of US taxes protecting the unnatural situation that made them be there.
> You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews
They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
> is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? [...] is it 100? 500?
It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
> Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas.
So “Palestinians” are not native either then, got it. “The Palestinian people” as a concept was only invented in the 1960s, and the vast majority of them were colonizers sent by surrounding Muslim countries to fight and kill the Jewish minority that has been present in the area of today’s Israel for centuries.
> They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
No, I’m not talking about what “they” said, I’m talking about what you specially just said above - that they should all be ethnically cleansed and sent to Europe.
> It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
Interesting! So “Native Americans” are not really native then? And any ethnic minorities in any region of the world are not native either? If the majority of a region is racist against you, you’re not a native?
I’m glad to see you making your racist hatred so loud and clear.
>Europe
Half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi or Sephardic: they're not from Europe. They were either living in Palestine at the time Israel was created, or they were expelled by the neighboring Arab countries in the 40s and 50s and came to Israel as refugees. How would making them refugees again be just?
> Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
I imagine that it is quite difficult for a Palestinian to found a party opposed to Hamas and survive until the election day. Democracy is not just about organizing elections, but also about not murdering your competitors, including the new ones who do not have a great power base yet.
So, the question is, how many Palestinians would support the effort to overthrow Hamas, if they were realistically offered an option better than "we will verbally appreciate your help today, and then leave you alone and let the remaining members of Hamas murder you and your family".
In my opinion, Israel should take more responsibility for the situation they significantly contributed to. You can't just create a huge mess, then step back and say "now it's not *my* mess anymore". You have successfully collapsed a system that existed previously, and it is nontrivial to build a new one -- when a system collapses, the most likely outcome is a rule of thugs, which is exactly what happened. It is difficult to get out of that situation, because that would require coordination on a large scale... while there are already coordinated thugs who murder everyone the see (or only suspect of) coordinating against them. While everyone is in a kind of war-or-not-war situation with strangers who took their homes and are probably preparing to take more in future (which would make everyone who advocated for peace with them look like a complete moron).
If I was in charge of Israel, my strategy would probably be to produce lots of propaganda in Arabic to communicate to the Palestinians, and at the same time declare entire Hamas to be outlaws that will be killed on sight (though actually I would prefer to take them in prisons). If you have technological and financial superiority, how hard it is to install thousands of megaphones that will scream in Arabic "the leaders of Hamas are taking all your money, and then they send your kids to die, and you know it, and your neighbors also know it, you are just afraid to say it" all day long? What is Hamas going to do about it? If they try to destroy the megaphones, they just expose themselves to your snipers. Also, if you give people food, randomly selected packages should contain propaganda leaflets in Arabic.
And by "propaganda" I mean stuff that is somehow useful for the receiver. (For example, an important part of South Korean propaganda is weather forecast. Because the stupid regime in North Korea can't even predict the weather, so North Korean soldiers start listening to enemy broadcast first because they want to hear the weather forecast... and then they get curious and listen some more.) You say that education in Palestine is completely fucked up? That's a perfect opportunity. Make leaflets that have interesting or educational stories on one side, and propaganda on the other side. If people could do samizdats during communist regime, how easy it would be for the Israeli government to print one subversive newspaper and distribute it among the Palestinians?
The question is, is anyone in power actually trying? Or is it perhaps more convenient to have a permanent crisis that serves as an excuse for all political problems, and provides a motivation to support our leaders in these hard times?
As unpalatable as it may seem right now, experience from other successful peace processes dictates that Israel will have to talk to them eventually - as it has in 2005, 2008, and 2014. Your facts are mostly factual, but they present Hamas as if operating in a vacuum - the list omits its rivalry with Fatah and Israel's own actions.
I don't think 'elimination whatever the cost' is especially farsighted. Perhaps Hamas might cease to exist - its tunnels ripped up, its rocket stockpiles destroyed, its principals assassinated - but that 'whatever the cost' is going to leave enough people orphaned, bereft, and ready to dedicate their lives to revenge that something very Hamas-like will reform fairly quickly.
Iraq eliminated ISIS and so far so good. The battle of Mosul destroyed the city and killed 10,000 civilians.
I mean, it’s not like there’s much more room for the Palestinians to go in terms of radicalization. When you, unprovoked, intentionally massacre as many civilians as possible, including rape, torture, and the burning of babies, you’re basically as low as you can possibly go on the “human” scale, to the point where you’re essentially just an animal. Letting these terrorist massacres go unpunished for the sake of appearing better to the terrorist-supporting population doesn’t seem to have been very effective for Israel for the past 15+ years.
That 'unprovoked' is doing plenty of work. I won't be baited into recounting all the things Israelis have done to Palestinians - babies and otherwise - over the years, or into speculating where that fits on your 'human' scale. I suspect you know perfectly well.
At some point, all those things, on both sides, will have to be forgotten (or at least set aside) for the sake of peace, as with the IRA, the ETA, the ANC, the Felquistes, and plenty others.
I’m curious, please name even just the top 3 things Israel has done that compares in any way to the barbarity we’ve just witnessed from the Palestinians.
Well its kind of not a fair question because like all Zionists you DID kinda just make up the burning babies, raping women "fact"! The widely circulated pic of the scantily clad woman in rave wear was not a woman stripped by Hamas but a woman wearing...rave wear. And she is alive, apparently at a hospital and a German Israeli citizen, not merely a tourist. Of course we can point to Israeli rape of Palestinian minors in jail and the gang rapes in 48 and 67.
Because that's how Israel was founded. Massacres, gang rapes, threats of annihilation forcing Palestinians to flee, simply for existing on land Jewish terrorist groups wanted. They would form the first IDF and they have not changed their genocidal efforts since.
At this point this is conspiracy theorizing.
There’s video of Shani at the rave minutes before the massacre. That’s not what she was wearing.
There’s pictures and video of the atrocities. Much of it posted by Hamas. And pictures of the condition of the corpses.
There's no evidence Shani Louk, the German raver, is alive. She was last seen with her limbs broken, unconscious. Hamas sources reached out to the mom that she's just injured, and of course the mom is wishful thinking, but no voice or physical evidence was given. They're likely just going to eventually blaim her death on Israel's bombing. $100 on it. Also there are many eyewitnesses testifying to the rapes.
"The world" beyond the middle east shouldn't be doing anything involving israel or palestine.
> Gazans live in poverty because of Israel
The fact that no Muslim country without oil has ever been even moderately prosperous disagrees with you. The only way I can see this being true is if by “because of Israel” you mean “because Israel is not providing them the free welfare handouts that they are entitled to, cuz something something brown people.”
> Israeli settlers were inspiring potential hatred among those sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza
So you support the Russian invasion of Ukraine then, right? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious.) Ukraine was Russian land just 30 years ago, and Russia claims that ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are oppressed and live in an apartheid state.
If you don’t support Russia, though, I don’t see how you can possibly be consistent with your belief in this particular case that anyone whose ancestors have ever lived in an area have eternal control over that area and are free to slaughter the people who currently live there.
> Gazans seem willing to do things that result in certain death because their lives are so miserable as to be barely worth living.
That tends to happen when you repeatedly reject the large concessions Israel offers for peace, elect a genocidal terrorist organization as your leader, and immediately declare an intifada. They haven’t been occupied for 15+ years, Israel is not responsible for babysitting them. Perhaps they shouldn’t widely support a government that spends their international aid money on guns, rockets, and bombs, and uses them as human shields.
> they have no hope of any change - non-violence hasn’t worked either
Oh, right, that... 2 day long period without a Palestinian rocket being fired. Really tried that. And rejecting all of the vast sacrifices Israel agreed to during negotiations, instead demanding the complete ethnic cleansing of all Jews “from the river to the sea” - they really had no choice but to “roll the dice” and slaughter 1300 people.
Can you do a more in-depth blog post on the axis I and axis II divide? I know the 5th edition of DSM seems to switch the approach, but does it? It makes no difference what the chapter is called as long as the overall approach is not much different in practice.
Israel's One Real Mistake Isn't What You Thought It Was
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/the-only-mistake
You shouldn't link to your substack more than once per open thread - people have been warned for posting less frequently than that. It would be one thing if this were a specific article adressing something someone says, but it's just unsolicited self-promotion.
I don't think we need five links to your substack in one Open Thread. Especially not one with a clickbait title and no additional commentary or value added by posting it here
Hey all, I must admit I'm not a reader of ACX or interested in much of the subject matter, but I'm a bit desperate for advice, so apologies for being selfish.
I'm currently working as an "AI" software engineer for $XB B2B startup. I'm super burned out, but not in the way a vacation or therapy appointment could fix (or maybe I haven't found the right therapist). I just really don't care about the company or even software as a craft anymore. I feel like I'm wasting my time away doing something I actively hate every day. The internal torture is extremely bad and I only manage to keep it at bay by constantly reminding myself of how privileged I am.
I have considered starting something myself or even quitting with no plan, but there is a glaring issue. I have pretty severe ADHD and I'm afraid I will never be able to stick to something past the hyper-fixation phase. For example, a few years ago I was extremely into growing psychedelic mushrooms. Didn't care about consuming them at all, just wanted to reach the highest level of cultivation. It got to the point where I was reading several papers a day on the subject and purchasing thousands of dollars of lab equipment. Then, the interest just evaporated. Haven't touched the equipment since. The same thing has happened for the potential tech startup ideas I had. It's also difficult to explore new ideas after work because I'm constantly stressed about getting fired.
I did talk about this with my friends and family, but for the most part they all say something along the lines of: "Duh, everyone doesn't like working. Just work harder, pick up a hobby or side-project, and retire early."
What else can I do here? Plan B is I ask my psychiatrist to get me back on stimulants and try to autopilot through work.
I also have this exact problem. I can’t do anything if I’m not deeply obsessed with it. How did you get through college? I’m in college and am basically (literally) failing out. Half my thoughts are about a girl I haven’t talked to in years, and I keep spending hours writing her several hundred word notes about technical topics she has no interest in even though she’s probably blocked me on all platforms. I’ve been doing that same thing for years. I don’t know how to stop. It takes immense effort to read single sentences from an intro textbook, and even then my mind won’t absorb any information, but none to spend entire days relistening to Joscha Bach’s lectures or thinking about the anthropic principle. It’s weird. My psychiatrist said stimulants aren’t right for me while I broke down crying about how my mind is always in four places at once and I can’t get it to operate like normal. She said something about exacerbating OCD symptoms, but I expect this is moral high ground behavior to avoid giving me the legal right to put an adderall factory in my house. How do I rewrite my brain’s code? I promise to do anything anyone says as long as it avoids the dangers from typical mind fallacy. People keep calling my crazy, but I promise I’ll act normal if I can solve this problem.
If you have enough savings to get by for several months and think you could get an SWE job again if necessary, why not quit and take time to relax and then decide what to do?
Hi! Your problems sound familiar (though I don't think I had it nearly so bad) so maybe what helped me can help you a bit too.
- If you have been a software engineer for a good while and have been reasonably prudent with your money, you probably have a lot of slack there that you might not be aware of. Try to find a way to take some (unpaid) extended leave -- for a few months, maybe. This might have to mean quitting your job (it did for me) but if you are good at your job, even if you are *currently* not feeling like you are doing well, you can almost certainly find a new one before money becomes an issue. Taking some extended time off, while scary, may help you to get out of an emotional rut.
- If the hyperfixation -> evaporating interest thing is as big a problem as you are saying, it might be worth getting some therapy/professional advice on how to manage it. If it's manageable, it doesn't need to be completely fixed (plenty of successful people have this sort of thing going on with their hobbies, where it's not as big a deal so long as you don't spend too much money), but you probably want to figure out how to manage it rather that just accept it as a given.
- I can't speak to prescription stimulants as I've never been on them. I do self medicate with coffee when necessary, though. If they've been helpful in the past, they may be worth a try, but you probably still need to deal with the emotional baggage rather than just trying to tough it out.
- Can you do some introspection and figure out what you need to enjoy your work / do your best work? Presumably you got into the field because you liked it and were good at it -- what changed? You might seek out a role that lets you play to your strengths rather than fighting with your weaknesses.
Welcome! I never had an official diagnosis, but I think that's the Catch-22 aspect of this thing: if you have ADHD and it requires nontrivial effort to find a specialist, then... Unfortunately, I hate the taste of coffee, and I do not have a reliable provider of cocaine.
I spent yesterday learning the technical details of 8086 and 80286 processors, so that I could reverse-engineer an old computer game. So far I have successfully disassembled only the first seven bytes, but I am proud that after reading the 5000-page official manual from Intel, I finally understand how ModR/M works.
> Duh, everyone doesn't like working.
That's not really true. In my bubble, most teachers love their jobs (though they complain about the salaries a lot). Most people *in IT* hate their jobs. And even that is not universal. I think surveys show that data scientists are on average happier than the ordinary IT folks.
In my experience (not sure how much of it would apply to other people), what really helps me are good relations at the workplace, and having enough time to talk. I have a a problem to focus on my work alone, but I enjoy talking about the work with my colleagues, assuming that they are friendly. I strongly suspect that "pair programming" was invented by someone with ADHD. (The problem is, it requires two nice people. Otherwise it becomes torture.) Unfortunately, the modern trend seems to be that although everyone is sitting in one huge open space, everyone is supposed to work on something different. Also, open spaces are themselves a paradox: they bring people together physically, but they actually *discourage* communication, because there is no privacy, and if you talk too much, you disturb other people.
It also helps if you have clear specifications and a lot of autonomy. This allows you to bring your bursts of hyperactivity to your job. Some days you accomplish little, other days you accomplish a lot, on average it is okay. Problem is, when the burst of hyperactivity is interrupted by one of the many meetings, or by figuring out many missing details in the specification. Again, unfortunately, the trend is towards "agile" development (which in practice is often the opposite of what its authors intended), and micromanagement.
It is difficult to delve deep in the details, when again the trend is the opposite, and your responsibilities keep expanding. It is no longer okay to be a specialist; you are supposed to be a "full-stack" developer (i.e. know a little bit of everything, rather than deeply understand something), and a tester, and a "dev-ops", and a "dev-sec-ops", and an on-call customer support, and a network administrator if you work with cloud. (The only jobs in the company you are allowed not to do are the accountant and the janitor.) Or to be more precise, it is okay to be a specialist, but only if you do it on top of all the things that I have already mentioned.
In other words, large parts of the IT industry have reshaped themselves in the recent decades, to be a more hostile environment for people with ADHD, who are over-represented in these jobs today, but perhaps the industry it trying to get rid of them in long term. In my generation, people joined IT often as a result of some autistic or hyper-active interest in computers in their childhood; the "normal" people did not know what computers are or why they should be interested in them. The next generation already knows computers from their childhood, and most of them join IT simply because that is where the money is, not because they care about computers intrinsically. As a consequence, it all goes downhill for people like us. Though you can still find a niche that the normies haven't yet noticed in masse, such as data science or crypto-something.
> Just work harder
Similarly, the depressed people get told to "just smile". The folk psychotherapy can be generalized to "just magically make your problem go away".
> pick up a hobby or side-project
Unless the hobby or the side project brings you a lot of money (in which case it de facto becomes your new job), I don't see how this is supposed to help with the problems you currently have at your job.
> retire early
Heh, I'd be very happy to, I just don't have the money this requires. What a useful advice, all this!
As someone with ADHD as well, stimulants help a bit. The inherent work environment is also important.
I'm lucky that as part of my job, I have managed to rotate through a number of roles and worked in different shifts (office, temporary site based, site based 12 hour days during maintenance downtime) and this has helped me internalise that disengagement with work is not entirely a me problem.
Some ways to notice that your work isn't set up for *anyone* to succeed - if you're in an office, observe if your coworkers or managers seem checked out, too. If you're remote, that's harder, but try phone calls and video calls to gauge. At the end of one on one meetings, see if you can sneak in a quick "how's it going for you" and gauge how your coworkers feel.
While it's useful to speak with friends and family, you actually wanna speak with your coworkers to figure out if it's something wrong with the team or the org.
I feel like one of the signs that a workplace might not be a sustainable is coworker relations either being abnormally close or distant. In a healthy workplace, you should be able to have a friendly conversation, e.g chat about what you did on the weekend or on holiday. If you're too close, it probably means that no one at this place has a life outside of work, which is also scary if you want to have a life outside of work.
If when you book leave, you feel like you can't even tell your boss what you're booking leave for without it being a Whole Thing, it's the social aspect - leave the team or the company.
If everyone is civil but sort of checked out, that probably means your company doesn't know what they're doing (or the people in charge isn't communicating with you guys). People who can put in a crazy amount of work tend to only do that when there's also a clear mission and a clear way their work segues into the mission. If you find yourself looking at your tasks and not understanding why you're doing this, try to figure out the context, and if the company can't give you the context, start looking for new job (they don't know what they're doing or they're doing some weird power play of keeping you in the dark about what exactly you're working on. The latter is a pattern in companies doing something shady. If it was just normal confidentiality, you'd just be asked to sign something and not tell anyone. You always need to understand how your tasks fit in the big picture).
Good luck! I've been struggling for about a year, but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My work had this big restructure and massively changed role descriptions and reporting lines. Nothing was clear for months, and work happened in terrible ad-hoc ways because half the time no one know who was supposed to be doing what and I often got told about things way too late. But the dust is finally settling enough that it's improving somewhat.
Funnily enough, it was the on paper worst work schedule (13 hour days, 6 day workweek, living away from home) that made me realise what I was missing during my normal role. Mostly clarity of purpose and mentoring.
If stimulants clearly help you, then go back to taking them. And what about hiring not a therapist but a coach? (Most are psychotherapists who have elected to help people who are doing OK in life reach goals, rather than helping people in trouble get it together).
That ADHD does sound like something that calls for psychiatric treatment. Other than that, you could pick up meditation for a bit to maybe learn to stabilize your attention a little.
I have just learned of "Miyake Events" which are giant solar storms that would likely do very substantial damage to nearly all modern electronics including things like communication networks and the power grid. The best estimate available now is that one happens roughly once every 1000 years. If there is a 10% chance of this happening in the next 100 years I am contemplating whether this is actually a greater threat to humanity than global warming is.
Would running electric lines underground protect the grid from storms like this? Having all our satellites fried would still suck but isn't going to kill nearly as many people as losing electricity across half the planet
If they are buried deep enough, sure. But burying high-tension lines (“tension” is an old-fashion word for voltage in English; in many languages it’s still used this way) is not feasible.
No problem. We'll just back our electric pickup trucks up to the house, and we'll be back in business. And we can recharge our smart phones in the seventeen USB ports in the trucks. But if the electric storm lasts more than a few hours, we'll probably be S.O.L.
If the grid gets fried we’d be looking at blackouts lasting months.
That could have a chilling affect on social media. Thousands of narcissists could lose their livelihood.
I agree this is a major threat. I’m not sure there is anything we can do about it, nor that current infrastructure isn’t mostly adapted to this either. The best we can do conditional on events of such magnitude that we *can’t* predict being possible is back up human knowledge girding the Information Age, while providing everyone with accessible manuals detailing agricultural best practices and how to prepare for winter. Anyone interested in talking more (and hopefully starting something), please email me at ishaan [at] koratkar [dot] com.
My dream is to print a version of the King James Bible mass distributed to every church that contains all the information needed to self-sustain a human colony - or something of that scale (curious if something like that already exists). While I think civilization level collapses are highly unlikely, I don’t know how to have a confident measure this kind of risk.
On a lighter note, the SBF trial is underway and the courtroom sketches of Caroline Ellison are absolutely hilarious (couldn't find them collated in one place outside a paywall) : https://www.google.com/search?q=courtroom+sketch+caroline+ellison&sca_esv=572772429&tbm=isch&sxsrf=AM9HkKkot93rF8KoozN5kxIEBgnfeuQFpg:1697088933825&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiy5rX45O-BAxXbbfUHHXCSCVoQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&cshid=1697089050045177&biw=2048&bih=1033&dpr=1.25
In the most flattering pictures, she's Daria.
In the least flattering pictures, she's Gollum wearing a long brown wig.
This almost looks like a joke. The first picture has SBF looking great, much better than he actually looks with incredible coloring and shading, whereas Caroline has a giant forehead, mostly the same tone for the whole face, and no whites around her eyes. Her eyes and mouth look like they ran out of time and got the intern to draw them on with pen.
That sketch artist seems to be ... not great? I thought the sketches of SBF were poor, because comparing how he looked going into the court and what the artist produced didn't line up well.
But poor Caroline. This is "Hunchback of Notre Dame" facial features:
https://universalmonstersblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/hunchback-of-notre-dame-lon-chaney.jpg
What interesting differences have you noticed between the way the media covers the war in Ukraine vs wars in the Middle East?
One thing I just noticed is the grim obsession with "death toll". I've been reading articles on the Ukraine War for a year and a half, and the words "death toll" rarely come up; occasionally you'll see it in the context of one particular strike, but never in the context of a trying to keep a running count of deaths in the entire war. But now we're back to wars in Israel, and all of a sudden we're back to having the words "the death toll has reached..." in every article like it's a bridge collapse or an earthquake. Why is it so? It can't just be a lack of reliable numbers, because the numbers are pretty darn unreliable in the Middle East too (especially on the Palestinian side where they can be presumed to be entirely made up).
I suspect it's because large death counts during a hot war aren't surprising or eyebrow raising (the more interesting matter is the fact of the war itself), whereas terrorists inflicting 1k+ casualties is a pretty rare event, the numbers being central to its noteworthiness.
Nobody is reporting reliable casualty figures from Ukraine. Both sides classify their own number of military dead and exaggerate the other side's. The Ukrainians are probably being honest about the number of civilian dead on their own territory, but most of the civilian casualties occurred in places the Russian army occupied and they aren't talking. Sometimes when the Ukrainians manage to retake territory they find things like e.g. Bucha, and that gets talked about a lot. But most days, there's nothing but educated guesses to talk about.
As an educated guess, not quite half a million people have died in the Ukraine war, roughly half of them Russian soldiers.
Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
>Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
Any reason to think their figures are especially truthful/untruthful?
Israel is a reasonable approximate of a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies tend to be moderate in their dishonesty about vital statistics because their institutions and political cultures aren't really set up to sustain brazenly making up the numbers out of whole cloth.
Where liberal democracies put out bullshit numbers, it's usually in the nature of sloppy methodologies and misleading framings, not the kinds of outright fabrication that authoritarian polities often indulge in.
Yeah, actual deaths are pretty reliably reported almost everywhere. I've seen studies of early postwar Iraq, in the middle of a major insurgency, that indicate the Iraqi coroners and bureaucrats were playing it pretty straight.
In particular, if you report deaths, your own people demand that you report the *names* of the dead, so they can e.g. see if their friends and family survived the catastrophe du jour. If you report someone dead who isn't dead (or wasting away in your oubliette), that's going to fail when they show up alive and talking to a reporter. If you don't report as dead someone who is dead, their families are going to complain that not-officially-dead Bob disappeared three months ago and why haven't you found him yet, are you even looking? If this happens too often, you start to look like a failed state that can't keep track of its own people. You can maybe get away with reporting the deaths of people who never really existed, but sooner or later some reporter looking for a human-interest story is going to try looking up the family of one of those fictional dead, and really creating specific fictional people is hard work.
Why do muslims around the world feel so categorically different about Xinjiang than they do about Palestine? Sure, there's a lot of differences, but if Israel explicitly annexed Gaza and then treated the people of Gaza the way the people of Xinjiang are being treated e.g. 'reeducation camps', destroying mosques, would people be okay with that? It seems like they would be much less happy about it than the current status quo, despite such a state of affairs being much more similar to the Xinjiang situation that they basically are okay with.
partly because China isn't jewish (and doesn't contain any muslim holy sites), and partly because polarizing their people against Israel was a useful way for Arab dictators to maintain power and legitimacy for many years and war propaganda has taken a life of its own.
Somewhat ironically, Palestine (along with many Muslim countries) is one of the regions that actually expressed support for China's actions in Xinjiang. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps#Reactions_by_countries)
Of all the reasons given so far, the race angle seems to fit best.
Helplessness because China is too strong: then at least there'd be some emotional response. Hasn't the US gotten a lot of hate for being perceived as an enemy of Muslims?
No PR department: Uighur activists seem to have done a good enough job garnering some outrage in the West.
It's Western propaganda: What about the Rohingya?
Arab/Middle Eastern Muslims just don't seem all that interested in the problems of Asian Muslims and vice versa.
`Helplessness because China is too strong' seems sufficient. As John Schilling says, caring deeply about something where you can't do a thing is depressing, and people instinctively shy away from it. What are they going to do? China can't be shamed, the great firewall will keep external propaganda attempts out, and they have no ability to project power into Xinjiang.
The crackdown on Uighurs was initiated after a series of terrorist attacks and riots in the 90s to the mid 2010s. China wasn't so powerful then and terror attacks were demonstrably possible, yet Arab Muslims seem to have been largely disinterested back then as well.
Second, it doesn't explain anger against the US, a stronger and more influential country than China. Have we forgotten 9/11 already?
Third, Myanmar is definitely not powerful and they've been giving a good go at genociding the mostly Muslim Rohingya for the better part of a decade now.
Middle Eastern Muslim disinterest in East/Southeast Asian Muslim affairs appears constant regardless of the strength of the adversary.
Most likely because China is too strong / there's nothing the Muslim world can do about Xinjiang.
By and large they do not believe it. Muslim countries see it as western propaganda. Quite a few Muslim countries sent a letter to the UN condoning the Chinese actions in response to a letter from western countries condemning it.
The Uyghurs are noticeably East Asian racially while the Palestinians are Arabs.
Hamas has a great public relations department, the Xinjiang Muslims lack one entirely. That's all there is to it.
No. Bad publicity is a thing after all.
Because there's nothing they can do about Xinjiang. The Muslim world can't project power into China, and China isn't going to care about anybody's silly protests or UN resolutions or whatever. It's really depressing to care about something you know you can't do anything about, so most people care about something else instead.
Israel, the Muslim world thinks it can do something about. Israel can be shamed, or the West can be shamed into restraining Israel, and if necessary Israelis can be killed in significant numbers so that at least there's vengeance on the table.
Sounds like an excellent argument for Israel to destroy the possibility of palestians doing anything then, if the alternative is allowing the risk of defeat and being punished for doing so anyway
Speculation:
a) Palestine initially caught the public interest and has remained the center of attention, because people don't measure their causes by utility but by "what everyone else in my in-group cares about".
b) Israel is, aside from the enormous problem of the Palestinians (and John Wilkes Booth), an open liberal democracy which generally allows reporters to do reporting. China is not. If Israel clamped down the way China did, we'd see a lot less Palestinian suffering.
c) Israel is much closer to the Muslim heartland, and by "closer" I mean "on top of" and "underneath". From what I can tell, the inciting incident was something at Al Aqsa mosque, which may be built in literally the same place as the Second Temple. (Historians differ.)
d) Israel is smaller and weaker than China, and could plausibly be defeated in a war. I doubt this is conscious, but it seems like a normal human instinct.
e) In a particular sense, anti-Semitism. I'm not being picky for the pedantic reason, but because my understanding is that Jewish/Muslim relations were generally better than Jewish/Christian relations, up until the founding of Israel (or maybe a bit before, when there was informal settling going on). So while there is a lot of of anti-Semitism, and my understanding is that historically it was a response not a cause, at this point in time has become an ongoing cause: there's a self-sustaining feedback loop of hate and prejudice.
Afaik there’s no credible case that Al Aqsa isn’t on the Temple Mount
I was just being pedantic, and talking about a difference of hundreds of feet. :-) And depending on what one considers "Al Aqsa" - is it the central mosque itself, or the entire grounds? And the same goes for what one considers "the Temple".
On the last point, I think there's also a broader sense in which jews are also viewed as being 'white' (despite less than a third of israelis having majority ashkenazi ancestry) which plays into this. "Colonialism" is a term basically only ever used to describe conquest by Europeans, and also Israelis, and Israelis are very much viewed as European colonizers. If it were Turkic muslims doing this to arab muslims and treating them just as badly, there's no chance in hell is would be called 'colonialism' and I can't imagine a half as many people would care. Of course, they would be much less likely to be supported by the US, which complicates things.
Doesn't that prove the point - there is an inescapable racial and religious aspect to anti-zionism
I have another bit of speculation: If some people who aren't allied to the West are angry at some other people who aren't allied to the West, Western media doesn't pick it up.
Sure, but it's not remotely clear that's what Gazan Palestinians what. I don't think it's what they ever wanted, but certainly not today. Hamas and a majority of surveyed Gazans want Israel to be ethnically cleansed of jews, 'from the river to the sea'. You can say this results precisely from Israel's treatment of them, but the problem to begin with was never just 'jews are taking our land'. They never wanted jews moving to palestine in the first place.
It's also very striking that pro-palestinian muslims/leftists around the world talk about israeli 'apartheid' in terms of discrimination against arabs, but the rest of arab world does not give full rights or unlimited asylum to palestianians. Obviously palestinians want to live in what they feel is "their" land, but I surely if a rich arab gulf state allowed as many Palestinians to live there as want to and gave them full citizenship, vast swathes would have already left, but even arabs don't give equality to arab palestinians.
Palestinian refugees have made Lebanon ungovernable, and almost did the same thing to Jordan before getting kicked out.
To try to channel Machiavelli, I suspect that the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are most concerned with staying in power. (Iran and the Taliban might be an exception, but they're neither neighboring nor Arab.) And to that end I think they want to both avoid a war with Israel, and keep their population's hostility directed away from themselves and toward a convenient scapegoat. So they're fine with the situation as is.
It wasn't a "refugee crisis" like in Europe or the southern US. It was importing a large number of very passionate people into countries with lower population. When Jordan annexed the West Bank, it tripled their population. And Jordan granted citizenship to all of them, too. But no one else seemed to like that solution, not the Palestinians and not the rest of the world.
It's not the mere existence of the refugees, it's what they do. If it were merely a matter of feeding and taking care of them, that could be blamed on Israel. But when they start literally waging war on the country they came from, using your country as a base, that's on them. They are human, they have agency, and they have moral responsibility for the choices they make.
The fact that Arab Israelis accept full citizenship means that Gazans might have accepted full Israeli citizenship in 1948, if it had been offered, and their grandchildren would probably still be OK with it. But that didn't happen, and what did happen over the next seventy-five years has created a present reality where the Gazans are exceedingly unlikely to accept Israeli citizenship.
Unless it comes with enough other Palestinian-Israeli citizens that they can vote to rename the country "Palestine" and kick the Jews off the island.
I do think a large majority of Palestinians would (initially) accept citizenship with equal rights in Israel. The problems are
- the minority who wouldn't accept it and would continue terrorism, and who could now freely come and go in Israel, would be more than enough to spoil it.
- Unlike the Native Americans, Australians etc., there are about as many Arabs in Israel/Palestine as Jews, more if Palestinians in neighboring countries return, meaning that control of the government would be contested, or dominated by Arabs. Given all the historical enmity, conflicts would likely escalate until they tear apart the state, and lead to a civil war.
Nobody but the Arabs care whose fault it was that bad stuff happened 75 years ago. The rest of us care about the bad stuff that happened last weekend. To the extent that we care whose fault it is, the dead ravers and the decapitated babies and all that, is 100% Hamas's fault (and any co-conspirators they might have had).
The more useful question is what can be done about any of this? The bad stuff that happened 75 years ago, nothing can be done about. The vctims and the perpetrators are dead. The bad stuff that happened this weekend, there may be things we can do about that. But it doesn't matter for that purpose what happened 75 years ago or whose fault it is, it matters what the situation is today.
The situation today is, the Gazans aren't going to accept egalitarian citizenship in Israel, and nobody is going to offer citizenship to more than a small fraction of the Gazans. That sucks. It sucks no matter whose fault it is. Now, what solutions are compatible with that sucky reality?
Palestinians are in a very different position from a typical "indigenous people," for several reasons. They share an ethnicity the citizens of several large, strong, well-armed states that surround Israel, and these states have a history of supporting them in wars against the "civilized" colonizer. That ethnicity also sees itself as "civilized" in the full sense (i.e. literate, urbanized, and otherwise different from surrounding "barbarians" in ways that facilitate and justify imperial expansion).
But just as importantly, it is not remotely true that "basically every indigenous group on Earth accepts this arrangement." It would be more accurate to say that basically every indigenous group fights back against attempts to colonize its traditional territories. In many cases, such groups have been unsuccessful because of their technological or strategic disadvantages; the arrangements that you describe are then put in place to deal with the surviving members of a group that has failed in its attempts at armed resistance.
>Do you have a citation for your first claim?
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1608029687-hamas-renews-call-to-free-palestine-from-river-to-sea
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/510?disposition=inline
> but the fact that we didn’t does not excuse Nazi actions or make the US responsible for the Holocaust in even the slightest way.
My point was that the people complaining about unequal treatment do not support equal treatment themselves and by and large do not want to take in palestinians or give them equal rights.
>Just personally I’d be happy to give US citizenship to every Palestinian.
That would make the US a much, much worse place. When even other arab muslims don't want these people, you know that they're no good.
But arab countries most vocal about the opposition to israel are the ones who should be taking them, instead of people of the other side of the world who are culturally, linguistically and religiously very different to these people, and the US has a large number of jews and homosexuals, so bringing in a bunch of homophobic anti-semites would not be very fair to them.
>Though Israel ought to pay for all the lost Palestinian land and property,
When did muslims ever pay anyone for their conquests? Arabs are even indigenous to the levant for crying out loud, and you're acting like all these people "own" this land by virtue of being its original inhabitants or something. They're just the (second) latest in a very long line of occupants, and so if we're being consistent here, Israelis should be able to "own" this land if they just hang onto it long enough.
But again, it's not clear palestinians would accept this arrangement and it's very clear israel would never pay for it to happen
>But in general people have more of a claim to equal treatment in their home country than they do as refugees.
The point is more about how people outside of palestine talk about things, as if there's something unique at israel not wanting these people to have full rights, when its a universal for the reigion.
>Also the polls in your links seem all over the place so I’m not sure how reliable they are. But figure A.1 at least shows that a large majority of Palestinians supported a two-state solution in 2014-15
No, A.1 does not show a majority support for a two-state solution. It says 52% probably or definitely reject it.
A.2 shows a slight majority for Gazans in 2014...but we're not talking about 2014
Also...this is all irrelevant. Look at figures A.7 and A.8
A majority of palestianians think that a two-state solution would at best be a stepping stone towards full 'liberation' of palestine
Looks like AI in business is the hot new topic, at least if the Microsoft Ignite seminar (workshops? event? I don't know what exactly to call it) is any example.
This bit made me both twitch and go "hmmm".
There's an unmerciful amount of guff on the session descriptions, as you'd expect (I don't want to be engaged with whatever you're selling to spy on employees) and this jewel of prose leaves me as it found me, but I think the straws in the wind as to what big businesses hope to achieve with AI are to be seen there, and also why it's naive to call for slowdowns or pauses or halts. There's money to be made, Chuck! Big money! And you expect me to leave all those dollar bills lying on the sidewalk?
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/d3a944cd-d6e9-4dd8-a98f-112709c59ccd?source=sessions
"Adopting “decision intelligence” powered by AI will lead to exponential growth, but People, Process and Culture are the impediment that needs to be addressed with an impactful AI strategy. Hear how you can operationalize and embed AI organically in enterprise with focus on value stream mapping, to harness AI driven insights in business processes, to drive agility."
People are impediments to AI. So inconvenient, we fleshbags, aren't we? Seems more and more like 'AI was not made for man, but man was made for the AI' is the likely future, and not "it'll free us all up to be cultured gentlepersons of leisure, rich fat and happy, while AI does all the work and pulls magical post-scarcity rabbits out of the cosmic hat".
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/home
I'm registered for online access to two days of the hoo-ha, so maybe I'll learn something applicable to work (very unlikely) or at least how to properly grovel before our new AI overlords.
EDIT: Look at the digital swag I can get! God bless Microsoft, they've never been cool and they'll never be cool and they may have more brains than an illithid banqueting hall but they're *hopeless* at design 😁
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/social-swag
Hey guys, I have a humble request for any practical advice you could offer to aid me in overcoming a counterproductive humility.
I know that sounds like a joke so I made a post explaining it.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-goodness
It sounds like you need tantric spirituality, to override this kind of absolutism. Though I don't understand why that particular passage is causing you trouble. What is the thing you're currently not doing that you wish you were doing (or that you currently do, but it causes you immense guilt)?
Boy, I appreciate your instructive response so I've been spending 20 minutes here attempting to pen a response....
And that's kind of the thing. I tend towards the impractical, in part because the math that was so deeply inculcated into me was in fact pretty good (most people due in fact benefit more from being good to people than they lose from it) but as you noticed it wa taught to me with a religious absolutism that is of course false and is reducio-ad-hitlerum, in the sense that you end up bringing about your own extermination for the sake of others.
I'm tempted to quite you thrice daily prayers for just this degree of self abnegation and then more about my own precious personal history (that sarcasm is a good natured self-ribbing, I'm keeping that) but you asked a soecific question.
Guilt I can't speak to because I no longer have the kind of guilt that I used to have at all. Presumably what most people mean by "guilt" I have as well but I felt guilty over being even the slightest bit morally imperfect so once I conquered that it went away for good. Praise Allah.
I'll take a sentence to clarify how I conquered it.
Well, after 19 years of failed attempts I finally did achieve moral perfection as I understood it. I refused to engage in any self-centered pleasure so long as anyone was suffering and there was a chance that if I were less attatched to the comforts of a mattress, socializing or food (other than bread and water) that I would be able to help them.
Yeah, it led to rescuing a hostage in Chechnya, improving the lives and longevities of people who were presumed to be on their deathbeds, and some other interesting stuff.
Anyway, that's more than a sentence but the point is that if anything in your final parentheses applies, I don't know it as guilt because what I knew as guilt I conquered by having absolutely nothing at all that I felt it was possible to feel guilty about.
Wild, ey? 😂
Anyway, in case anyone misreads this as me saying that either I actually *was* perfect (by standards other than my own, which I just spelled out) or that I am currently perfect (by the afore-spelled standards) I'm not saying either.
So, what am I not doing that I wish I were doing?
Okay.
I think I tend to focus on the "cognitive" aspects rather than the behavioral bevause of course if you have a strong enough WHY, you might find the HOW.
But it is correct to begin eith the end in mind.
There's plenty I wish I were doing that is attributable easily enough to "the symptoms of adhd" (in quotes because I disapprove of how this mindset is pathologized) but in this case I'm probably referring to things that I'm already doing and am driven to do but which I feel I am not doing well (or perhaps at all) because of how I was raised.
The girl thing I mentioned in comically stark terms is true. But that's too complicated a subject, too interesting a subject and too low down on my list of concerns right now.
How's this.
I don't know whether I want to have a relationship or publicity or all of the other things that people raised normally go for, but I do know that I don't want to be at the mercy of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through having zero money.
It's likely that I should also want wealth, not all normal people prefer, but, while I'm working very hard on preferring wealth to non-wealth (so that at least my own personal distaste for it won't be a factor getting in the way) I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing.
In fact, because I regard money making as "wrong" I think and speak of it that way. I am, in theory, perfectly willing to make and have money but I have a hard time thinking of it as the right thing to do.
That's not useful.
Particularly because on a moment to moment basis, I really prefer standard issue goodness, hell, I still prefer even perfectionist utopian goodness!
I'm just mad at the fact that it doesn't pay its debts so I changed my philosophical opposition to making money. And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it but that's just the traditional Jewish talmudistic theorizing about right and wrong in the harshest of theoretical terms, and not very useful.
Not only does it do nothing practical to have "decided" this but I've known myself for 47 years and I'm pretty sure that I would not even be remotely prepared to take that opportunity if it presented itself, or even a far far easier one.
I despise the moralizing of the present day because I'm saturated with it and don't need any more of it.
But the unfortunate fact is that pretty much all the moralizers are benefiting from saying the right thing even if they never do it, while I incur the opposite of benefit by opposing all these publicly stated moral "shoulds", while in real life still dancing pretty damn close to the side of angels.
I don't know precisely what I want to be *doing*, but I know that I want to *have* money.
And because my brain type is "Naturally Taoist" (i e. "Severe ADHD") the normal ways of making money are not available to me. At least not in any way that I can remotely imagine (I have already tried every last way that I can imagine).
So getting rich quickly seems a whole lot more likely than doing it slowly. That doesn't make it necessarily likely, but more likely than slowly and more likely than some might think.
Perhaps this bit of apologetics I posted a few days ago (for deciding that for two days I would not doubt the righteousness of making money and would therefore try to do so) will provide a viewer other than myself with a clear insight into what I wish I were doing but am somehow held back from.
Thank you for reading and watching.
https://youtu.be/x0-RG4QCLs8?feature=shared
" I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing."
Yeah, I think St Francis de Sales might have something here for you:
"WHEN God created the world He commanded each tree to bear fruit after its kind; and even so He bids Christians,—the living trees of His Church,—to bring forth fruits of devotion, each one according to his kind and vocation. A different exercise of devotion is required of each—the noble, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the maiden and the wife; and furthermore such practice must be modified according to the strength, the calling, and the duties of each individual. I ask you, my child, would it be fitting that a Bishop should seek to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? And if the father of a family were as regardless in making provision for the future as a Capucin, if the artisan spent the day in church like a Religious, if the Religious involved himself in all manner of business on his neighbour’s behalf as a Bishop is called upon to do, would not such a devotion be ridiculous, ill-regulated, and intolerable? Nevertheless such a mistake is often made, and the world, which cannot or will not discriminate between real devotion and the indiscretion of those who fancy themselves devout, grumbles and finds fault with devotion, which is really nowise concerned in these errors. No indeed, my child, the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything; and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of any one is, you may be sure, a spurious devotion.
...Of course a purely contemplative devotion, such as is specially proper to the religious and monastic life, cannot be practised in these outer vocations, but there are various other kinds of devotion well-suited to lead those whose calling is secular, along the paths of perfection. The Old Testament furnishes us examples in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca and Judith; and in the New Testament we read of St. Joseph, Lydia and Crispus, who led a perfectly devout life in their trades:—we have S. Anne, Martha, S. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla, as examples of household devotion, Cornelius, S. Sebastian, and S. Maurice among soldiers;—Constantine, S. Helena, S. Louis, the Blessed Amadaeus, and S. Edward on the throne. And we even find instances of some who fell away in solitude,—usually so helpful to perfection,—some who had led a higher life in the world, which seems so antagonistic to it. S. Gregory dwells on how Lot, who had kept himself pure in the city, fell in his mountain solitude."
It has to do with your station in life. Wanting to make money is not wrong, and indeed those who say "but I need expensive clothes etc. for my job and my position" may well be right. In that case, if you need to wear a good suit, then buy a good suit, and earn the money to be able to buy a good suit. That's not wrong.
"And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it"
That *is* wrong but you seem to realise that. There are limits to what we should do in the pursuit of our ends. If you're starving, it's not a crime or sin to steal food, but it is a crime and sin if you're doing it because you calculate "by stealing one loaf of bread per week I can save $X" when you can perfectly well afford to pay for the bread.
And maybe exercising gentleness towards yourself, neither exaggerating all your faults or excusing them or angrily declaring you have none:
"ONE important direction in which to exercise gentleness, is with respect to ourselves, never growing irritated with one’s self or one’s imperfections; for although it is but reasonable that we should be displeased and grieved at our own faults, yet ought we to guard against a bitter, angry, or peevish feeling about them. Many people fall into the error of being angry because they have been angry, vexed because they have given way to vexation, thus keeping up a chronic state of irritation, which adds to the evil of what is past, and prepares the way for a fresh fall on the first occasion. Moreover, all this anger and irritation against one’s self fosters pride, and springs entirely from self-love, which is disturbed and fretted by its own imperfection. What we want is a quiet, steady, firm displeasure at our own faults. A judge gives sentence more effectually speaking deliberately and calmly than if he be impetuous and passionate (for in the latter case he punishes not so much the actual faults before him, but what they appear to him to be); and so we can chasten ourselves far better by a quiet stedfast repentance, than by eager hasty ways of penitence, which, in fact, are proportioned not by the weight of our faults, but according to our feelings and inclinations. Thus one man who specially aims at purity will be intensely vexed with himself at some very trifling fault against it, while he looks upon some gross slander of which he has been guilty as a mere laughing matter. On the other hand, another will torment himself painfully over some slight exaggeration, while he altogether overlooks some serious offence against purity; and so on with other things. All this arises solely because men do not judge themselves by the light of reason, but under the influence of passion."
I'm not trying to scold here, but you do seem to write under the influence of passion. A little more balance in looking at yourself, and letting go a little of resentment (which is hard! but the past is over, it can't be changed now. I struggle with this a lot myself) and accepting that however it was, it's not possible to alter it now, just how you deal with it and regard it.
Have you been in a psych ward? You sound crazy in an interesting way. No offense meant: I've been in psych wards 3 times myself, and I don't think it's ever gonna happen again, but still.
As to making money and just being more selfish generally... Yeah, tantra would help you to integrate impulses that you currently regard as wrong. There are tantric rituals that involve offering meat and shit and semen to statues of the Buddha to get over submission to the sacred.
I invented a little tantric ritual myself: down a bottle of wine, then go to mass/synagogue. But perhaps that doesn't work so well for you, since ethics is the thing tormenting you, not so much religion.
I did write an essay about how altruistic one should be that you might find helpful:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-trolley-problem-is-all-too-real
I'm gonna watch your video later.
Don't think I've ever been in a psych ward. Ar least not as a patient. I may be crazy but probably not in a way that is a physical danger to myself or others. At least not others who don't have it coming 😄.
Naw, I'm just one of those people widely considered either a genius or a madman depending upon whether they've got institutional backing at the time.
E.G. I've never succeeded at selling myself (which probably would be the shortest answer for what I want to be able to do like a normal person) so I've rarely ever successfully arranged a speaking engagement for myself (I just feel so slimy doing it that those few times that I do go ahead with it, I come across pretty bad) but whenever I'm willing to set aside the purity of my principles and risk speaking under the aegis of an institution (through their sellimg me to the venue and setting it all up) I tend to be regarded as so loftily that my ingrained humility can't stand it.
Anyway, I don't put much stock in labeling so I take no more offense in being called Mad than I take pleasure in being called Great, because I know that from many shiploads full of evidence that the label is no more than an indication of whether, well, whether I'm assumed by that individual to be powerful or not 🤷♂️.
That's not a critique of your query. Presumably most people who act as freely as I do despite lacking those things their society happens to regard as preconditions for such freedom (see: "fuck you money") are regarded as mad and, generally, regard themselves as fundamentally faulty as well.
I've had the good fortune to be me so I, well, I dunno, I think I'm pretty great...mainly because when I receive a novel criticism I tend to consider it, so I think I've ended up pretty okay.
Anyway, I have no problems with psych wards or with people who have been in them. Among the gazillion things I'd want to try in fact would BE getting committed to a psych ward to see what the experience would be like. Besides, while I doubt the value judgements of popular notions of psychiatry/psychology, I adsume the professionals are actually pretty good. Hell, for all a psych ward is just what I need! 😂
I doubt it. I'm just sayin' that I lack fundamental biases about such things.
Good catch on the importance of desecrating the sacred and also that my issue isn't the sanctity of the Moral Preachers (be they things or people) but the fundamental, deep level coding that makes me *enjoy* sklavenmoral over, I don't know, something at least a *little* closer to Conan's morals.
Religion I've got covered. Hell, I'm a religious *authority* and it doesn't stop me from speaking and acting freely and openly in defiance of what pretty much all other Orthodox Rabbis believe to be right. (That's one of the benefits of not having to doubt your own righteousness right there.)
What I feel I *ought* to be doing is to gollow Maimonides' Aristotlean ethics about getting your traits to hover comfortably on the path of the golden mean, so that you have equal capacity to go to the right or the left as the situation demands.
For example, Maimonides tells the stingy guy to make a conscious effort to override his automatic impulses and to repeatedly spend money like a wastrel until he's gotten over whatever a-rational emotional thing was making him stingy (this assumes of course that he isn't stingy for a good reason).
And the opposite for the spendthrift.
I actually did a teeny bit of this. I went out rabbit hunting. (It's more interesting than that but unless you've got a publisher for us that'll do.)
Im this instance, huh, well I ought to at the very least, consciously stop myself from caring about whether a word I said (or didn't say) might have hurt someone's feelings (or helped them - in the case of things I say or do entirely for someone else's sake).
It's interesting. I don't mind if I come across as rude so long as the misunderstanding belongs to the other party.
What bothers me is when I'm being short with someone (or otherwise not saintly) because I *want* to be (because how long can I be expected to stand frozen listening to some bore simply because it makes her/him feel good, or whatever).
And because *that* isn't proactively doable I think I ought to go out and proactively hurt people's feelings and thus get over whatever was keeping my conscience saintly.
A few times I've done this by passing beggars (who are common in manhattan) without making eye contact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certain I've hurt people lots more then not making eye contact with them and apologizing for not giving them money. But, like I said before, not for small selfish benefit like just being ignoring someone because who gives a shit about this strangers feelings anyway.
Cereal killing would probably qualify as a maimonidean remedy but I don't know where to find cereal.
In any case, the error in my wiring is the feeling that it's better to be regarded as bad while secretly knowing you are good, than to be good while secretly knowing you are bad.
The logic that my mind offers me as an excuse for keeping at this is that my conscience is more or less clean and thus keeps me from having to lie too much, or whatever.
Besides, my deepest desire - and the only way that I (currently) would feel *comfortable* having money, acclaim, power, and a harem - IS to bring about a moral revolution on Earth.
Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life.
So, because I believe in trying things that could be correct despite their being against my inclination.
Hmmmm.....I guess I could call customer service lines and make fun of their names? Or be an asshole troll to get a rise out of people and just laugh about it...
But I'd really prefer it if someone just gave me a few hundred dollars so that I could cover the inevitable expenses that arise from being a somewhat overly nice guy who's uncomfortable with making money even in the limited fields that his adhd allows.
"Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life."
What do you think not-caring could bring? "I don't give a shit about your granny losing her life-savings and being cast out in the snow, I sold her that shitty mortgage and made a bundle of commission on it"?
Do you know what you want? Because you don't seem to be making things clear, here. Other than "I want a moral revolution where we do away with slave morality and everyone behaves like a Cimmerian barbarian" which, uh, you might not like as much as you think you would (how else would you characterise what Hamas is doing?)
"a *little* closer to Conan's morals"
Are you entirely sure you know what Conan's morals are? Because for a barbarian, he had a lot of moral delicacy (e.g. in many of the stories there's a sexy hot and helpless wench who is throwing herself on his... mercy and he could, if he wished, take full advantage. But he doesn't. Conan suffers from sklavenmorality himself, it would seem). The part I like best is this from "The Tower of the Elephant":
"Tears rolled from the sightless eyes, and Conan's gaze strayed to the limbs stretched on the marble couch. And he knew the monster would not rise to attack him. He knew the marks of the rack, and the searing brand of the flame, and tough-souled as he was, he stood aghast at the ruined deformities which his reason told him had once been limbs as comely as his own. And suddenly all fear and repulsion went from him, to be replaced by a great pity. What this monster was, Conan could not know, but the evidences of its sufferings were so terrible and pathetic that a strange aching sadness came over the Cimmerian, he knew not why. He only felt that he was looking upon a cosmic tragedy, and he shrank with shame, as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him."
I understand Maimonides' advice, and indeed there's a tradition in Western thought that virtue lies in moderation, in the middle way. But I think you over-correct and don't get the idea there of *balance*; going out and ignoring beggars isn't auto-correction, it's tipping the scale in the pan the opposite way. You're only doing what others do every day, and acting against those who cannot harm you and are the ones suffering these small humiliations all the time. The real way to overcome wanting to be thought well of, even/especially by yourself ('look how patient and saintly I am being, listening to this bore!') is to risk something; offend someone whose good opinion you *do* want or who can get back at you in some way, be it telling everyone you are a jerk, or hurting you in our pocket, or some other way. That will break wanting to be well thought of by your own self-esteem much faster than scorning those who are already despised.
D-baby, I wrote you back a letter that would have delighted you to read and eould have delighted me to have delighted you.
Alas but that my phone turned off as I was selecting the final word and the entire comment was lost.
As I am certain that the Divine wished YOU to have been delighted, I can only assume that the message was to ME to put down the phone and stop writing.
Or at least to keep my phone charged, but the first one sounds more correct.
Have a Good Shabbos, YDYDY
Having watched your video, and reading this comment, all I can say is that I've been there, I once thought I was both the Messiah and the Antichrist. I think you need to go to a psychiatrist and tell him exactly what you think is gonna happen on 10/12/2024 (it seems you actually have a very clear idea of what that is that you're not sharing).
Or hell, lay it on me, because I'm curious to know. But yeah, I know it's probably impossible to get through to you right now, but it would be a lack of compassion not to insist on you talking to a psychiatrist, and just speak your truth to him, such as it is at this moment.
Eh? I think the distance of text is making you read me incorrectly. I don't think anything is going to happen on that day unless we make it happen.
I speak in a variety of flavors, which obviously makes it *really* hard to come across as anything but nuts I suppose. But that's a practical question.
Do you think I actually believe something that is irrational? If so I would like to be corrected, but I don't think that's so.
As for being the messiah and/or antichrist. They both sound like a lot of fun so if you can put in a good word for me with either hod or the devil I'd be much obliged, but I'm pretty certain that I do not have anything even remotely approximating certitude about either.
I appreciate the suggestion and, in general, would *love* to speak to a good shrink, but not because I have any delusions.
Though of course a delusional person *would* say that, wouldn't he 😂.
So, f'realz, other than cognitive or emotional stuff, in which bwe're in agreement that I would like to speak to a good shrink but just don't have the money for it, what gave you the impression that I believed in something crazy?
If it's the certitude in my, "Final Chance" video, rest assured I have no certitudes. I didn't bother to qualify or explain every (or even any)thing because what I was conveying can't be conveyed that way.
I am, after all, an Orthodox Rabbi. We have over 3,000 years worth of concepts, and ways of speaking that don't translate.
If you are still of the opinion that I think something definitive that is definitively and demonstrably false please tell me.
Otherwise, well, you already know that I don't know how to accurately convey the fact that I believe that my words are highly worthy of consideration, but if I did know how to convey that I would.
Besides, I thought I linked to the video about money? Did I mention that date in that video, or did you watch "Final Chance For A Fresh Start"?
It is not for no reason that Justice is held to be the chief of the virtues - it is the one that allows us to apply all the others in their correct place and measure.
The message of the Sermon on the Mount quote you give seems quite simple to me, and it is eminently *good* advice: when you do something praiseworthy, do it for its own sake, rather than to be praised. It's difficult to see how you get from that to martyrdom, and self-sacrifice, other than through a lot of missing context relating to your upbringing (which, to be fair, you hint at).
Since you asked for practical advice, here's some that works regardless of whether you believe in any higher power or not: the development and exercise of personal virtue is something that is ultimately subject to your personal control and judgement. You can neither shirk the responsibility, nor deceive yourself as to your true motives, and it is best not to try.
(If you do believe in a higher power, you might also note that this higher power knows the depths of your soul at least as well as you do, so you should take extra care to avoid trying to deceive yourself. You can't deceive God.)
The essential equality of all humans (taken as an axiom) implies you are no more important than anyone else, but - equally - nobody else is more important than you. Therefore, to ask whether some other man deserves "access to a woman's womb" more than you do - as you do elsewhere - is asking the wrong sort of question. No man, fundamentally, "deserves access" - the woman ought to have something to say about it, after all (also being equal), and if she chose you as the father of her children, then that's that.
Going beyond that particular example, nobody has the right to demand your self-sacrifice, because that would imply they are more important than you are - a proposition that requires demonstration to *your* satisfaction. That doesn't, however, imply that you cannot freely give of your own, if you choose to. To do so or not is ultimately a choice you must make, based on what sort of person you would like to see yourself as being - and that's where the virtue of Justice comes in. There's a difference between being generous or humble, and being a doormat, and being Just is how you know the difference.
Boy o' boy.
I take it none of y'all were raised by a young mother for whom the central event in her life was her mother failing to rescue her young niece as she was murdered before her eyes in Auschwitz, ey?
Methinks you misunderstood all that boy girl thing before. But thank you for informing me that rape is wrong. lol.
Here be da ting (sorry, I live in a Jamaican neighborhood and the accent slips out every so often. just lightening the mood!) ---
In case none of you have visited America circa 2023, Jews have a thing about guilt. About "not doing enough". And about the sanctity of victimhood.
This is ancient shit.
But for the meme to be sticky it requires a social mechanism that will ensure events which leave an indelible impression every few generation.
The Holocaust was a relatively recent version of such an event. (Perhaps you won't fail to notice an even *more* recent one.)
In the particular mini story in which I am one of the main characters, a young woman named Dvori who was around 20 years old saved the lives of her younger sister and cousin whom Josef Mengele had sent to the gas chambers.
In fact, the whole reason she was able to survive hell on earth was due to the viktorfrankl'esque "meaning" she got from her mission of continuing to save these two girls in their young teens. If we're going to be clinical about something which really seems pretty intuitive.
Well, one day she failed to give her own life for her nieces so her niece was murdered while shrieking for her aunt to save her, and for the rest of her life Dvori was, well, done.
THAT is the foundation upon which my mother's psyche was forged.
So, (said, in a jewish friendly kibbitziy way) Fuck You for your kindly moral explanation about to whom fall the rights to reproduction. What you fail to realize is that for true and proper kikes, raised right, each Jew has the moral obligation to rescue everyone else even from their own mistakes.
Sure you may have a life to spend that you're game to spend as my spouse but what in the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
My responsibility is to protect you EVEN FROM YOURSELF.
And *most especially* FROM ME.
So you may want to marry me but unless I can determine with absolute certitude that you are best off with me rather than with yankel or shmendrick or zisha leah, I'm MAMESH A NAZI if I marry you just because you're "willing".
Boy, shkutzim and yidden on the margins really don't know what they're missing!
________________________________
TONE: Sans vocal inflections and facial expressions there is some small room for massively misunderstanding a playful comment as a hateful or otherwise ill-humored and large room for assiming that someone somewhere may misunderstand the comment and that therefore certain public responses are required.... and all of the horrifying game theory that goes on under the hood every time we engage in this two generation old experiment of communicating as strangers, to strangers, before strangers, forever.
I had suggested to Elon Musk that tweets be color code for mood. It seems like if someone says, "I'm gonna kill you", it would be helpful for clarifying humorous intent if it came in a playful pink and comic sans. (The same does not apply for ransom notes.)
Nothing I wrote was comical in the "not true" sense. But nothing I wrote was in anger, desperation or sadness either. I am a happy and playful chap who is also Dead Fuckin Serious.
Yeah, I already got the impression you have Mommy Issues.
Leaving all that aside, and there's a huge heap of weight there, on a strictly religious basis what you are talking about in part is what is called "scrupulosity" and part of the treatment is to abandon your own attempts to judge your own case and surrender to the guidance of a spiritual director (whose job mainly will be to say "no you did not commit the unforgiveable sin and no you are not going to burn in hell for all eternity just because you think you only said four hail marys instead of five for your penance after your last confession, now trust and believe me because you are under obedience to do so and stop obsessively praying the rosary to 'make up' for the omission which you may not even have omitted').
That, I can already tell, is not gonna work in your case because you have *massively* over-corrected for being told what to do all your life by going to the opposite extreme of "fudge you nobody can tell me nothing and i know best of all even better than you guys who claim to be the experts", you hugely believe in your own intelligence, and an Authority Figure setting up to tell you how to handle your conscience is going to trigger *all* the fire alarms.
But it's how it works - therapy would probably be the next best thing. Psychology has commandeered the term for itself, but it is religious in origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
"Treatment is similar to that for other forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of behavior therapy, is widely used for OCD in general and may be promising for scrupulosity in particular. ERP is based on the idea that deliberate repeated exposure to obsessional stimuli lessens anxiety, and that avoiding rituals lowers the urge to behave compulsively."
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/scrupulosity-the-occupational-hazard-of-the-catholic-moral-life
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/12-ways-to-overcome-a-scrupulous-conscience
"Resolve to accept the judgments of your confessor or therapist over your own distorted standards. This is not a vow of obedience; it is simply a practical tool and can be stopped at any time. But relying on reliable people who model a healthy conscience can assist us to emulate a right moral measure for judging between sin, temptation and pathology."
https://sanctuarymentalhealth.org/2021/01/22/scrupulosity-in-the-confessional/
Some of it, it sounds like you are self-applying (e.g. using Maimonides' advice). But maybe an outside view would be helpful as to when you're going off the rails over-correcting.
I'm sorry. I seem to have mistakenly assumed you wanted a serious reply.
Your response was cool. It didn't reply to what I meant but I can totally see how one could have read me as being the sort of person to whom your reply was an accurate one.
Once a piece of writing is shared its truth is in the eyes of the beholder.
So it was a good response to article! Just not to the way my article intended to be.
But like I said in the PostScript, my response should be read as two guys joshing while high. Spilling truths, but in a spirit of love rather than the usual internet, uh, less than love I guess.
Wading into the deep waters here, but what the hell, I'm a fool so let me rush in while my guardian angel covers its eyes and goes "Eight billion humans and I have to get *this* one".
The bit about not blowing your own trumpet is held to mean - well, a couple of things. Be sincere in doing good, that is, don't do it just for praise (the ur-example here for me is - thank you AOC for a stellar photo-op - things like the Met Gala. Themed ball every year where it's a big charity bash for the deep-pocketed, the famous, and those who would like to think they're at least one of those. It's Conspicuous Showing-Off, all the money that the (likely borrowed) gowns and jewellery and everything to hold the do costs could more easily be given directly to whatever the point of this do is (keep an elite cultural organisation going?)
(If you are now going "But Deiseach didn't you hop on the Judas criticism about him saying that in regard to the expensive oinment?", ahem I am clearing my throat here VERY LOUDLY and unfortunately can't hear you).
This pearl of obliviousness has been criticised and defended so I'm not going to thrash it out again, but you get what we're saying, right? About Conspicuously Showing Off Your Virtue?
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-09-14/met-gala-2021-aoc-tax-the-rich-dress
So number one is Sincerity. Closely related to it is probably (I hope) what your mom was going for, "and what makes you think you're so great anyway, huh?" If you hang your self-image off a peg of being *so* good and *so* virtuous and *so* generous, then what is the charity about in reality - the people for whom you are doing it, or yourself?
You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags and even the heavens are not pure in His sight, so who do you think you're fooling? You give things to, or do things for, people you care about or like or who share your values? Even the pagans do that, what is so great about you doing it, then? That's number two, Honesty.
And now comes number three, which I can't put a pithy title on. "Be kind to yourself". Do the giving or deeds in privacy, anonymously. Take the pressure off yourself to do more, be more, give more. We've had some mention previously of how EA types are prone to scrupulousness and will worry themselves into a tizzy about "but I *could* live on 10% of what I earn and give all the rest away" or "Am I doing enough, aren't there more expenses I could cut down on so as to have more money to give away, do I really need to eat more than three times a week?"
Shhhh. You are not St. Francis of Assisi wedded to the Lady Poverty. Nobody is watching with beady, judgemental eyes as to "did you hold back a single penny from giving?". Give what you can. Don't put pressure on yourself to be Public Virtue All The Time.
Ehhhh - I was going somewhere with this, lemme think. Ah, yes! Humility! Now what is humility, and what is the wrong kind of humility, and what is the right kind of humility? I'm going to be quoting heavily here from smarter people than me.
C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters":
"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love — a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours."
Chesterton (too many to quote, but here's a chunk from "Heretics"):
"It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything — even pride.
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."
(1/2, because Substack thinks I'm too verbose)
One minor point, rather peripheral to the bulk of the discussion, re:
"You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags"
If one wants pro-social actions to continue, it is prudent to de-emphasize likening them to rags. I, personally, do not aspire to righteousness ("neither pure, nor wise, nor good"), but rather to intelligent selfishness and I donate blood. My blood bank (the Red Cross) thanks me. That is sufficent motivation for me. If, instead, they were to liken my donations to rags, I would stop.
Verbose but interesting. I'm halfway through this comment thus far and it really is interesting but (thus far) continues to point to potentially suicidal virtues.
I have achieved the mentioned ideals. All of them. And found that as deeply and truly satisfying they have been, they were so very non-selfish as to provide the precise benefits that thukdam provides - truly divine bliss.... briefly.
The talmud tells a story, a parable really but the best parables (think Old Testament stuff) don't introduce themselves with a disclaimer.
In brief, the rabbis capture the evil inclination and debate whether to execute it or not. As they debate they discover that since the evil inclination has been in custody creatures haven't been fucking.
The story continues but I'm not a storyteller. The point of this segment is plain enough. All's fair in live and war.
After all, every man who gained access to a woman's womb did so despite the fact that this meant some other guy would be bereft of that access. Generally speaking he also failed to spend to have spent years in fasting, meditation and unbiased analysis to determine whether in fact his sperm and company was rhe best this woman could do.
Absolute Pacifists werr weeded out of the gene pool long, long, long ago. And whenever some mutational accident or particularly virulent meme should produce another, nature makes quick shrift of him.
Ditto for doing the nasty, getting a family, and making babies.
All's fair in live and war...
It's possible that ¡Jeb! Bush is an alien (from north of the stratospheric border) and it's possible that some dude named Joshua who really really didn't seem to enjoy his crucifixion 1990 years ago is actually ¡Alive! but odds are pretty equally naaah.
Jesus is dead. And his f'n mother killed him.
Every Jewish Woman should be legally required to read 2 books before she gets custody if her first born: Portnoy's Complaint and The Christian Bible.
Sure, the world 50 years later would have less comedy and tear-jerking tales of righteous sufferers but....well, no buts. I don't care. We're over 2,000 years behind schedule for Jewish men to oppose one or both of their mutilating circumcisions.
Dad cutting off part of a baby's penis on the newborn's 8th day of life is Quite The Thing.
Mom spending the rest of her interminable existence circumcising her child's heart however is even worse.
Booyah.
I think part of the problem here is that humility has been tangled up with selfishness which is a different problem; humility and pride are the pairing. Selfishness and charity are that pairing.
'Should you fuck this woman and have a baby?' is not a problem of humility.
The wrong kind of humility is "always think you are terrible" and "never make a target of yourself" and I *think* that may be what is driving your mother in part; the lesson of Jews in Europe was to emulate Uriah Heep and always be so very 'umble before your betters because prominent Jews tended to make very good targets when the wind changed. So there's the ancestral fear there of standing out, like a nail to be hammered flat. But this is just me speculating.
Ah, if ONLY it was the fat targets who caught the stake.
Nay, t'was the religious. The most humble and righteous.
And you're right not to get caught up in the word humility. When a man puts his penis inside of a fertile woman's netheregions he is saying "I want this. Me! "
He is not pondering "Am I absolutely confident that this is what's best for her? Or that I should be the one to get this poontang, company, and baby rather than that any of my brothers should get to?"
Believe me D, the religion of Mary and golden boy can be found in their original pristine condition to this day.
But only smong people who know nothing about them.
Pretty remarkable stuff actually.
(2/2)
The wrong sort of humility is that exemplified by Dickens' Uriah Heep, who comes from a low station in life and poverty, and has been ground down by society that he *ought* to be humble, because the likes of him are worthless. So he weaponises humility, and takes his natural resentment and melds it with spite and makes a horrible mockery of what a 'humble' person should be, in order to dig the knife in between the ribs of the proud and the superior.
"‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’
‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful 'umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of 'umbleness — not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be 'umble to this person, and 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being 'umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being 'umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be 'umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be 'umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what 'umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate 'umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the 'umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very 'umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’
And he said all this — I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight — that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression."
This is tied in with pride, as there is the wrong sort of pride and the right sort of pride. We all know the wrong sort - and indeed folk on here are fond of quoting the pet example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the vain, cocksure know-it-all who has opinions on everything and thinks they're an instant expert on something they only heard of five minutes ago.
(Damn it, stop holding that mirror up to me!)
Ahem. Well, yes, there's the right kind of pride, too: self-respect, self-esteem. Knowing your true worth. And that is where the balance, or indeed dance, between Humility and Pride comes in - virtue lies in the median way, in between the extremes of Uriah Heep's poisoned and venomous fake humility, and the Luciferian pride.
St Thomas Aquinas on Humility:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3161.htm
"Reply to Objection 1. Humility is not set before justice, but before that justice which is coupled with pride, and is no longer a virtue; even so, on the other hand, sin is pardoned through humility: for it is said of the publican (Luke 18:14) that through the merit of his humility "he went down into his house justified." Hence Chrysostom says [De incompr. Nat. Dei, Hom. v]: "Bring me a pair of two-horse chariots: in the one harness pride with justice, in the other sin with humility: and you will see that sin outrunning justice wins not by its own strength, but by that of humility: while you will see the other pair beaten, not by the weakness of justice, but by the weight and size of pride."
And Pride:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3162.htm
"Reply to Objection 1. Pride [superbia] may be understood in two ways. First, as overpassing [supergreditur] the rule of reason, and in this sense we say that it is a sin. Secondly, it may simply denominate "super-abundance"; in which sense any super-abundant thing may be called pride: and it is thus that God promises pride as significant of super-abundant good. Hence a gloss of Jerome on the same passage (Isaiah 61:6) says that "there is a good and an evil pride"; or "a sinful pride which God resists, and a pride that denotes the glory which He bestows."
It may also be replied that pride there signifies abundance of those things in which men may take pride."
And then there is the Litany of Humility by Cardinal Merry del Val:
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/litany-of-humility-245
There is a certain line of argument employed by Pro-Israeli commenters (elsewhere, not ACX) that goes something like this :
1- Nothing ever excuses the rape and murder of civilians that Hamas did
2- Therefore, we can't really blame the IDF when it bombs Gaza
Which stares Contradiction in the face and then gives him a kiss.
(If **Nothing** can ever justify what Hamas did, not even the amount of murder or rape or pillage which happened to Palestinians from 1948 till October 7th 2023, then, surely, the comparatively tiny amount of murder and rape and pillage that Hamas did in that one day can't ever justify the murder and rape and pillage that the IDF has started in October 8th and that the ground forces amassing on Gaza's perimeter is no doubt planning to finish ?)
Other than
[Implied] 3- Israelis/Jews and Arabs/Muslims should play by different rulebooks because the lives/dignity of the former exceeds those of the latter
, what other implied premises can one append to (1) and (2) to make the argument not contradictory-ish ?
My attempt at this looks something like :
[Implied] 3- Rape and Murder and Pillage are worse when they're done by non-state actors than when they're done by state actors
[3's Justification, good faith] 3-a Because state actors are often better trained, more restrained, and with lots of things to lose if they got too far in the Rape and Murder and Pillage
[3's Justification, bad faith] 3-b Because I have been brain washed into thinking so, there are no meaningful difference in the Rape and Murder and Pillage done by both kinds of actors
[Implied] 4- Hamas is a Jihadi non-state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with icky Muslim rhetoric and commits it using icky-looking middle eastern men with overgrown beards
[Implied] 5- Israel is a state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with sob stories about the Holocaust, and commits it with an army containing sexy models/conscripts posing on instagram and tiktok
[Implied] 6- Therefore, Israel's RMP is not "really" true RMP, or maybe a less intense style of RMP than the brutal style practiced by Hamas. The RMP mentioned in (1) references only the brutal kind, not the lite kind practiced by Israel.
In other words, a Motte-And-Bailey. (1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so.
I don't think anyone on the Israeli side claims rape is justified. I don't know if Hamas does.
The obvious difference between the two cases is that the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians. The Hamas fighters were deliberately killing civilians, as shown in their videos as well as in the instructions their leaders were carrying.
The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could. If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege. I don't know how much water is produced by wells in Gaza but it doesn't feed itself.
> the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians
And the mere claiming of something is enough ? Can every tyrant and aggressor now expect cookies for claiming what their actions are loudly and resoundingly contradict ?
> The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could.
Watching the videos of IDF's jets bombing Gaza, I can say the exact same sentence minus the "capture" part.
> If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege
What is it exactly what they're doing now ?
If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
You gave a list of possible justifications for distinguishing the Palestinian raid from the Israeli response, a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
You could argue that the Israelis are lying, that they are deliberately targeting innocents, as your response to my "claim" is presumably intended to imply, but then you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill, which is evidence that they are not lying. You could argue that earlier acts by Israeli terrorists just before or during the 1948 war were the moral equivalent of the raid, which might be true, but you were specifically talking about the IDF in Gaza.
Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
> If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
No. Why would I do that ? After all, most Israelis are still alive, that doesn't prevent people from saying Hamas wants to genocide them.
I'm willing to concede I'm mistaken when I see the breakdown of Israeli bombing victims, how many Hamas vs. Non-Hamas. If the majority or even 40% were Hamas, I'm willing to concede you're right and that the IDF is trying to kill Hamas more than it's trying to kill Palestinian civilians.
Failing that, access to internal communications and plans where air raids that could have killed more Palestinian civilians were discussed and cancelled will convince me.
> a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
I argue that this difference is illusory and performative, and - furthermore - so easy to fake if you have substantial media control and PR department like the Israeli state has.
Unless you can read minds, "Choosing to do X" and "Totally not choosing X, just willing to let it happen in pursuit of Y" are indistinguishable.
> you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill
Sorry if I didn't, I responded to it so many times in other threads with other people (not saying its your fault).
My short answer is this : They're killing as many as their benefactors will let them. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, their oil comes from outside, their tech industry depend on the outside, and of course the jet fighters they kill civilians with are mostly a generous gift from US taxpayers.
Vast majorities of those people that Israel depend on are against murder of Palestinians. Therefore, they can't go too far in their murder of the Palestinians.
This is quite different than saying "Israel doesn't want to kill civilians", the "want" here implies an internal motive, a motive which I claim to be non-existent. It's entirely external, Israel is killing the maximum amount of Palestinians that will not result in their demise.
> Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
Noted. Tell me what you think is a bad argument in my comments, and I will either trace it back to the premises that I believe justifies it or retract it.
Hamas can't kill all the Israelis, so the fact they don't isn't evidence that they don't want to. The Israelis could kill all the Gazans.
You really don't want to understand arguments, even obvious ones, when they are inconsistent with your rhetoric.
> The Israelis could kill all the Gazans.
No they can't, because if they did the Arabs around them would be justified in killing them all, and even if they don't have the military power to do that now (which is wrong, they do), history will never forget the 2.2 million Gazan genocided and it will always be a card the Arabs could pull out to carry out the same on Israelis at some point in the future. American support doesn't last forever after all.
"(1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so. "
First of all, you have completely failed to demonstrate that the IDF is engaging in any sort of rape or pillaging, so that fails.
But the most obvious, so obvious that it's the first argument a toddler would have come up with but for some reason you neglected to mention it involves the concept of aggression.
After all, kidnapping and caging is wrong, but it's a very common punishment, so lol people are such hippo crates, amirite?
> First of all, you have completely failed to demonstrate that the IDF is engaging in any sort of rape or pillaging, so that fails.
See downthread, and Murder alone is enough for this to work anyway.
> for some reason you neglected to mention it involves the concept of aggression.
Aggression is a tricky thing to define when you have a tit-for-tat downspiral. After all, I can always find the latest incident from among the hundreds where the IDF killed children, killed War Press, stripped Civilians naked, or took homes by force without provocation, and then claim that Hamas' attack was punishing the IDF for all of that. (what's that ? Hamas' attack was not on the IDF ? well that's (1) not completely true, some of it was on IDF positions (2) IDF's attack is also not on Hamas, but on the entirety of Gaza)
Anyway, the Pro-Israeli line of argument is claiming that NOTHING ever justifies murder of innocents. Nothing. Nil. None. Null. That's their words, not mine. If they believe in their words, the Israeli attack is never justified no matter what Hamas did. If they actually don't and some murder of innocents is actually justified after all, then Hamas' attack is not apriori wrong.
You are not distinguishing between deliberately killing innocents, which Hamas was doing, and killing innocents in the process of fighting non-innocents, which is what Israel claims it is doing and defends doing.
> Hamas was doing
> what Israel claims it is doing
Why do you believe Israel's claims on face value without checking or skepticism, but don't believe Hamas' claims and actually look at what they do in practice ?
Has Hamas claimed that the raid did not deliberately target civilians? I thought they were the ones who put up videos showing them doing so.
I believe the Israeli claim because they could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill and the obvious explanation is that they are trying to kill the ones that attack them and killing others in the process.
If Israel could get a fairy to grant its wishes, Palestinians in the Gaza strip would stop launching rockets at Israeli civilians, and everyone would live peacefully and the walls could be torn down.
If Hamas could get a fairy to grant its wishes... well, you saw on Saturday what Israel would look like then.
Israel routinely grants Palestinians from Gaza access to Israel to get medical treatment.
The Palestinians routinely pay generous benefits to terrorists who kill Israelis (or to their families, if they become "martyrs").
Hamas intentionally targets Israeli civilians.
Israel has, in its retributive strikes, tried to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, even when Hamas hides in civilian structures, and achieved a good accuracy. (No guarantee what happens in the next days - odds are good that the gloves come off now.)
Israel warned Palestinian civilians of incoming strikes against Hamas, and told them to flee.
Hamas told Palestinian civilians to stay put and live or die in their homes.
One side is trying to protect its citizens. The other side is trying to kill them at any cost.
Any attempts to construct a moral equivalence between these two parties reeks of either bad faith or complete ignorance.
It seems to me that Israel's response to the terrorist provocation should remain focused on the terrorists -- and safe passage to Egypt or Jordan and humanitarian aid should be made available to all non-combatant Palestinians.
It seems the terrorists need to be purged from Palestinian settlements, before discussions about Palestinian rights can resume. To discuss the place of Palestinians alongside, if not within, Israeli society, to have such talks as a response to acts of terrorism would be foolish and counterproductive.
Israel has repeatedly pushed for Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries to accept palestinian refugees. They're pretty deadset against it, for understandable reasons.
When I returned to university as a middle-aged student, our lecturer told us that Palestinians were the Philistines of the Old Testament, the Sea Peoples.
But the barbarity and criminality of Hamas's assault renders any discussion about "the Palestinian condition" moot. The topic shouldn't come up until the last Hamas fighter is eradicated.
The Egyptians aren't taking any Gazans. They've closed the border. Nobody's asked the Jordanians, but that's because everybody knows they won't take them anyhow - they've already got more Palestinians than they want.
A lot of the comparisons you're making are invalidated by the fact that Israel is a state, and Hamas is not. Palestinians are not Hamas citizens (and it's dehumanizing to imply they are). Likewise, the people providing medical treatment to Palestinians are not the IDF. I'm certain many members of the IDF would wish for the same thing with their fairy, and likewise most Palestinians would likely use their fairy for peace (a plurality are children, after all).
The reason why you can't construct a "a moral equivalence" between the two is because we hold [states containing whole groups of people] and [extremist groups] to different moral standards. (Also relevant to the judgement: the US government,
the country of the plurality of posters here, is funding and providing weapons to one of these groups, and not the other)
Also:
>The Palestinians routinely pay generous benefits to terrorists who kill Israelis (or to their families, if they become "martyrs").
The IDF are ALL paid generous benefits by Israel. They kill Palestinians.
>Israel is a state, and Hamas is not
Hamas has directly governed the Gaza Strip ever since it took control from the PLA in 2007. They rule Gaza. In what relevant sense are they "not a state" that would mean they can't be compared to the actions of the Israeli government?
Honestly, even if Hamas is not a government I don't see how that's relevant. FluffyBuffalo has claimed that Hamas as an organization intentionally targets civilians, deliberately puts Palestinian civilians in danger, and pays people to kill civilians. Israel attempts to minimize civilian deaths. What does it matter then if one is a state and one isn't? You say we hold states to different standards than extremist groups: why should we do that? I certianly don't. Imagine if someone said "The MS-13 gang is evil because they murder people for money, and the police are good because they're trying to stop the murderers and have rules to try to minimize killing innocents" and then someone else replied "That comparison is invalidated because the police are an agency of the state, and MS-13 is a criminal gang." It invalidates nothing: MS-13 is still evil, and the cops still ain't.
I might be off-base about Hamas being a state, but everyone seems to make a clear distinction between "Hamas" and "Palestine", which leads me to conclude they are not. (Certainly they are not recognized as one). If what you say is true in an uncomplicated way, they are much more state-like than I thought, though.
But your example is exactly what I was trying to highlight. Because even if the *cops* are trying to "minimize civilian casualties", people still gets *justifiably* angry when the cops kill (unarmed) civilians. A lot of people assert that the cops *aren't* good for that reason. It doesn't matter how evil MS-13 is, it doesn't justify the police acting like an armed gang. They're held to a different standard.
And once again, the US governments fund cops with like 30% of local budgets, they don't give money to MS-13.
(Also, to be clear, this discussion not about whether Hamas is good; afaict no one here has asserted that. The topic is specifically "what amount of the IDF's morally negative actions can we excuse (in some cases retroactively) based on Hamas's recent attacks" (and some degree of vice versa).
You may need a 101 on how we got to this point:
In the 1960s Israel took the territory that is now the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and took the West Bank from Jordan. These territories had a lot of Palestinians in them, and an organization known as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formed. Their goal was to replace Israel with a Palestinian state, and until 1993 they advocated armed struggle against Israel to accomplish this. The PLO is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people.
The PLO and Israel were enemies until the Oslo Accords in1990s. This was a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians in which Israel agreed that the Palestinians should be able to rule themselves. The core idea was that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the PLO would form a new Palestinian government known as the Palestinian Authority (PA) which would control those areas, with the exception of Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements inside Palestinian territory.
Actually withdrawing ended up pretty complicated, especially with the settlements issue, but in 2005 Israel forcefully dismantled all Israeli settlements inside the Gaza Strip and withdrew all military from the Strip. They handed control of the Gaza Strip completely over to the PA.
In 2006 the PA held elections, and Hamas won a majority of seats as a political party. This eventually led to a Palestinian civil war, where Hamas fought against the other prominent PA party, Fatah. After the Battle of Gaza Hamas took direct control of the Gaza Strip and formed their own rival PA government. They also dedicated themselves to the destruction of Israel.
Israel, not trusting Hamas not to send terrorists out of Gaza into Israel (because they had already done that quite a bit) closed off Gaza's borders into Israel. Egypt did the same, because they also don't like Hamas. Neither Israel or Egypt recognized Hamas as the legitimate rulers of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority (the internationally recognized Palestinian state) supports the blockade of the Gaza Strip until the PA can regain power there. Currently the PA rules over the West Bank.
And that's been the situation ever since. There have been two direct wars between Israel and Hamas since, and a lot of Hamas rocket attacks. To say the least.
If you support the Palestinian people, then you should hope that Israels wipes Hamas out and restores power to the Palestinian Authority. Until then, everyone in the Gaza strip is a Hamas hostage.
"You may need a 101 on how we got to this point:
In the 1960s Israel took the territory that is now the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and took the West Bank from Jordan. "
Wow.
Isn't it great how you can determine the slope of a line by picking the starting point?
That was... incredibly concise and useful. Such condensed descriptions of the history of the Israel/Palestine... situation, for lack of a better term, haven't exactly been easy to come across, all the information I've seen is fragmented and partisan. I'm sure there's infinitely more context, since foreign relations are a fractal unto themselves, but I appreciate this, thank you.
It seems like there's some legitimacy to my previous arguments (Hamas *isn't* recognized as legitimate, and the US still funds/arms Irael), but they are definitely much more state-like than I thought, to the point it invalidates a lot of my objections.
According to the leftists who support things like the Palestinian cause, nothing ever justifies genocidal racial hatred, but Hamas is a genocidally racially hateful organization with the explicit goal of destroying jews. Oops, guess you better stop supporting Hamas now.
Never supported Hamas to begin with, next time try asking before posting condescending gotchas.
Is that relevant? We're talking about "pro-israel commenters", not any given individual. I don't think I've seen any "pro-palestine commenters" over the past week who have said anything remotely negative about Hamas.
The comment I'm replying to says "you" in the last sentence, who he/she means other than me ?
Yes, unfortunately, Jihadi and Muslim rhetoric loves to hijack Pro-Palestine discourse. That's just an effect of being the majority in the Middle East. If you're bringing that up as an implied answer to my original question along the lines of "Sometimes people just support one kind of murder and not the other for no reason", I guess that's okay but I'm typically looking for deeper reasons.
If you have something to back this up other than the fallacious "Well you pointed out that the IDF commits the same kind of crimes so that means you're defending the crimes", I'm all metaphorical ears.
The entire point is that anyone who supports one but denounces the other and states war crimes as the reason why is, knowingly or unknowingly, being a hypocrite.
Pointing out war crimes by the other side doesn't in and of itself constitute support for the opposing side, saying that Stalin committed war crimes in Germany doesn't mean I support Hitler (unless I said so myself explicitly or implicitly), just that that anyone who supports Stalin and says that this is because Hitler committed war crimes in the invasion of the USSR is contradicting themselves.
How about you specifically accuse the IDF of engaging in rape as a tactic starting October 8?
But kudos for being upfront that you hate Israel.
> How about you specifically accuse the IDF of engaging in rape as a tactic starting October 8?
If this is a statement that is phrased like a question, it's wrong. I didn't accuse the IDF of rape because there is no ground invasion yet and jet fighters can't rape, only murder.
I clarified in another reply that rape and pillage is expected, not yet actual. It's expected for a good reason.
> But kudos for being upfront that you hate Israel.
Thank you, it doesn't take a lot of effort from me. I lean Anarchist so I technically hate all states, monstrosities like Israel and North Korea stand out.
May I point out that parsing sophisticated logical arguments regarding this matter posted by someone who proclaims hatred for Israel in the screen name seems to be a foolish errand.
Silly me, I thought Logic is about having conclusions that follow from premises. Turns out it just means loving Israel. The bastards at Merriam Webster lied to me all along.
If we are discussing technicalities, then:
* logic is about having conclusions that follow from premises;
* rationality is about updating on all available evidence.
This blog happens to be rationality-friendly.
Right, so you mean to say that the numerical-named commenter I'm replying to just means
>"Don't bother with sophisticated logic with a guy whose online name is a piece of evidence that he hates Israel."
?
I still don't see how is that a relevant update, me hating Israel is just a piece of evidence that you shouldn't bother with me in any discussion that requires the participants to love Israel, and that's not the kind of dicussion we're having (or is it ?).
The strongest steelman I can find for 1123581321's drive-by comment is "This guy hates Israel, hate is a powerful emotion which clouds judgement, don't expect good judgement", which is very fair and true, but plenty of people who hate Hamas are also discussing the conflict and nobody ever said to them "Nobody takes you seriously because hate is a powerful emotion which clouds judgement". I don't think there is a decent human being who doesn't hate seeing women raped and children being killed, so we just have to tolerate each other's hate-clouded judgement if we want to have any discussion that is not an echo chamber.
Look, "HatesIsrael" => IDF = Hamas has P=0.95, give-or-take. Your writing hundreds of words to - amazingly - arrive at the same conclusion is a waste of space.
I'm pretty sure you can't attach probabilities to logical implications like that, but I get what you mean, yes. And yes it happens to be right, I think the IDF is exactly like Hamas, worse in fact, because it's superiorly armed.
Still, it struck me as incredibly childish of you that, having decided you're not going to have a discussion with me, you also urge other commenters to not have a discussion with me. Lazy, right ? Maybe just not all people share your unhealthy tendency to be offended on behalf of Israel, let them decide for themselves who to discuss.
"Silly me" - debatable.
"I thought Logic is about having conclusions that follow from premises." - "HatesIsrael" is a premise.
"Turns out it just means loving Israel." - Not from the above premise it doesn't.
"The bastards at Merriam Webster lied to me all along." - So sorry! Don't cry, it's not personal.
Sarcasm is fun and any two can play. Foolish errand nonetheless.
You sound awefully offended at such a casual comment and I honestly don't think you're even being particularly good at sarcasm, just very forced and childish. I'm very sleep deprived now to reply courteously.
Peace and Love to you and your family. https://www.reddit.com/r/torrents/comments/r5hons/may_you_do_good_and_not_evil_may_you_find/
If you take for granted that the IDF has done and will do acts indistinguishable from what Hamas recently did, then you shouldn't be surprised when the pro-Israel commenters seem nonsensical and inscrutable to you.
TL;DR it's the non-utilitarian answer to the trolley problem. Even if the IDF invasion results in [bad thing], pro-Israel commenters will claim the IDF isn't "doing" [bad thing], whereas Hamas is *actively* doing it. Only the *active* doing is unjustifiable, so there's no comparison.
Anyone making the syllogism you describe will definitely disagree with the premise that the IDF will be raping and/or pillaging anyone, and presenting them with evidence otherwise would help change their minds. [We may have to distinguish between IDF soldiers illegally committing war-crimes vs the IDF as an institution ordering and/or encouraging war-crimes, see next paragraph]
As for the murder (which everyone agrees the IDF will kill people), they'll draw a moral distinction between killing-civilians as a mission goal, and civilian casualties as an unavoidable side-effect of a mission which is designed to kill as few people as possible while still pursuing some generally-agreeable goal. If you convince people that IDF's missions are not designed to minimize civilian casualties, that's likely to change some minds. One could object "from a utilitarian perspective there's no difference between inevitable deaths and intentional killing," and again I'd point out that assuming your interlocutors are [utilitarians] is obviously going to make their arguments seem inscrutable
>disagree with the premise that the IDF will be raping and/or pillaging anyone
Yes, because it's not true (yet), I clarify in a comment further down thread that it's an expected outcome based on previous behaviour, not an actual one. Sorry I didn't make this clear enough in the original.
>We may have to distinguish between IDF soldiers illegally committing war-crimes vs the IDF as an institution ordering and/or encouraging war-crimes
This is essentially the "Icky-vs-Sexy" distinction I draw above. People don't define crimes by actual objective metrics like, I don't know, # of people killed per unit time. They define it by heuristics and foggy markers, things like
> a "respectable" institution with lots of paperwork and a PR division can't commit murder, only a religious loony with smelly clothes and foreign language can. Therefore, when Hamas kills children its terrorism, but when Israel does it it's "Retaliation".
Apart from any moral points one might make about this way of defining war crimes, consider that it's unsustainable. An organization can simply embed and implicitly encourage war crimes into its institutional culture and tacit knowledge, without ever formally endorsing it in written materials or other documentation that can be used against it. In this world, everybody is committing war crimes all the time, or at least is allowed to do so and will face no repercussions should they choose doing so, but because everybody has a little card on them that says "Belongs to ${INSTITUTION}", and because this institution never ever formally endorsed war crimes, it's still totally okay from the Icky-vs-Sexy viewpoint. This is essentially a variant of "No True Scotsman", the IDF says it doesn't endorse war crimes, so no true IDF member will ever commit war crimes.
>If you convince people that IDF's missions are not designed to minimize civilian casualties
Interesting prespective. How one might go about that ? After all, "minimize" is Optimization Theory jargon. To prove or at least convince people that you have "minimized" or "maximized" something, you at least need a bunch of worse alternatives that you can display so that people realize all those bad options were available to you and yet you searched and searched until you found a better one. What are the worse alternatives to the IDF's actions ?
I also think you're misplacing the burden of proof here. Intutively, the killer and their defense are the ones who should prove self-defense/manslaughter, the prosecutor only needs to prove they killed someone. Applying those same standards to states, it's the IDF (or its various defenders online) who need to prove that the IDF doesn't really engage in willful murder, the IDF's attackers need only prove that they do kill, which is a job already done.
I see your point about the whole icky-vs-sexy thing, but I think you're ignoring the issue of rates.
How does the IDF compare to other similar forces, in terms of the number of crimes committed per soldier? This seems like an obviously relevant question, but it doesn't figure into your argument at all.
To be clear, someone overseeing the IDF should be having sleepless nights over every single incident. But as lay observers, we can just check the rate and if the rate is low enough we can assume that the afrementiones overseers are taking their job seriously (as opposed to implicitly encouraging rape and murder, as you say).
Again, if you have statistics showing that the rate of criminal behavior in soldiers is inordinately high at the IDF, you should share it. I've never seen such data. My impression is that the rate is in line with any modern military engaged in comparable types of combat, indicating that it can't be lowered by any well-tested method.
Seems to me that the explanation of the whole mess is that our species is violent, greedy and cruel, and that having been on the receiving end of great violence and cruelty does not teach members of our species not to deal out the same to others.
Are we still sure it's a good idea to align AI with our values and needs? And if so, just as a thought experiment, let's say we had to choose whether to have a committee of Israelis or a committee of Palestinians draw up the statement of values and rules the AI was to be aligned with. See any problems there?
Or are we safer just letting all those great California tech bros write the new Ten Commandments? You know, something like this:
(1) Microdosing's worth trying.
(2)Look casual
(3) People with tech smarts don't exactly have more rights than other people but they sort of do
(4) Don't upset the wokies, lots of them come from money & are good customers.
(5) Don't shy away from spiritual materialism. Try to get as much fucking benefit as you can from meditation: improved productivity, creativity, confidence with women, spiritually-enhanced orgasms, visions that make a good story.
(6) Remember that tech smarts are the only valid kind of smarts. Literary smarts are a waste because we have GPT4 to write poetry and shit for us now. In fact here's a sample one:
In Silicon Valley, where palm trees sway,
Tech bros hustle, night and day.
Casual in hoodie, sneakers so neat,
Walking the future with untapped beat.
Laptops in coffee shops, codes on the go,
Innovation's rhythm, a constant flow.
With every startup, dreams grow large,
Tech bros steering, the future's barge.
They laugh, they code, they dare to dream,
In a world where bytes over matter seem.
With VR glasses and AI's hum,
They whisper, "Behold, the future has come."
So raise a toast to these men so cool,
Riding tech's wave, breaking every rule.
For in their hands, a digital gem,
The future's story, tech bros at the helm.
(7) . . .
I suspect "align AI with our values and needs" is more often than not is automatically translated into"align AI with my values and needs", and since "I" am good, it's desirable to do this.
Is there ever an excuse for rape? Is there ever any rational reason to ever consider rape justifiable?
The line of when killing becomes murder is a grey area, especially during wartime. This is not the case for rape; that's one of the reasons rape is treated much more severely than other assaults.
The case for rape is the exact same case for doing airstrikes in the night vs. in the morning, or using napalm and white phosphorus vs. using traditional ammo of the equivalent TNT : Terror.
Psychological Warfare, plus (in the case of rape) the bonus of motivating your all-male force.
I don't need to say that I don't condone this or anyone who does, but it's not meaningless cave man swinging. There is a tactical logic behind it, however horrible, and as demonstrated by the airstrike and nuclear example, state actors do it all the time.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
In times past, I imagine it was a carrot to entice young men to put their lives at grave risk for the cause and/or the tribe, maybe even its survival. It's only difficult to envision a rational reason for it within the moral constraints and causes held by the post WW2 West.
"1- Nothing ever excuses the rape and murder of civilians that Hamas did
2- Therefore, we can't really blame the IDF when it bombs Gaza"
Stares strawman in the face and then gives him a kiss.
It takes a lot of ingroup bias to ignore the difference between civilians as collateral damage and civilians as the direct objective.
How do you know if it's a strawman ? I saw it repeated with the exact same structure under dozens, possibly 100+, of videos. I can actually bother to take some screenshots and post them if "Strawman" is an actual objection people have and not just a word they say to deflect an uncomfortable equivalence that they don't like.
> civilians as collateral damage
Collateral to what ? How many times did you actually bother to look at the justifications Israel publish after a raid ? (spoiler : there is none, that's not a thing they do.)
Without a stated goal, let alone published statistics about how often it's achieved, how do you know if the casualties are actually "collateral" ?
Not so charitably: Your post was designed to be a monologue to dress up "actually hamas and israel are the same" in fancy rationalist speak. You used a vague unspecified weakman so that you could feign ignorance and insist that you see such arguments everywhere (conveniently not here, but you totally promise they are everywhere not here), allowing you to brush off the obvious objection to your premise, namely that the the IDF deliberately kills civilians for its own sake.
Charitably: Those who believe civilian deaths caused by the IDF are less bad than civilian deaths caused by Hamas believe the IDF's claims that their, say, airstrikes are intended to degrade Hamas' capabilities and civilian deaths are collateral damage that the IDF takes reasonable steps to minimize, eg by roof knocking. Clearly you don't share the same premise, so you come to different conclusions, eg Israel is as bad or worse than Hamas vs Israel is better than Hamas.
>Your post was designed to be a monologue to dress up "actually hamas and israel are the same" in fancy rationalist speak.
How is it a "monologue" different from any other post in the open thread ? and why would I need to "dress up" a claim such as "Hamas and the IDF are basically the same thing" in fancy rationalist speak when it's a straightforward belief of mine and I'm not shy to say it and defend it in very simple language ? I don't even "design" my posts like its some sort of mini skirt, I literally just bring up Substack's god aweful UI and start writing right away on the spot, until the sluggish cursor enrages me so much that I copy what I wrote and continue writing in a text editor on the side.
Whatever fancy shmancy rationalist speak you detected is simply the lingo that rubbed off me from years of reading the blog and its associated literature, the vast majority of people here including you talk like that without realizing it, it's called code-switching and you do it every single time you interact with a group that have a distinctive way of speech. I'm no more fancy-shmancing my argument than Scott is when talks about Cooperation and Altruism in terms of Multi-Polar Traps and Prisoner's Dilemma.
> vague
> unspecified
> conveniently not here
I mean, my bad I didn't take the screenshots when the comments were right in front of me. Still ready to search for a couple and present them here though if you promise you won't dismiss them with "Anecdata!" once I do turn them up after sleep and work.
I have to say I rolled my eyes pretty hard at "Weakman". First, it was a strawman, now it's a weakman. Will you just keep speedrunning every word in the rationalist lingo invented to describe a bad summary of an argument before actually engaging with the argument ?
>namely that the the IDF deliberately kills civilians for its own sake
This was a typo, no doubt. I 100% agree with your typo though.
> believe the IDF's claims that their, say, airstrikes are intended to degrade Hamas' capabilities and civilian deaths are collateral damage that the IDF takes reasonable steps to minimize
Completely blindly, I might add. Were you ever shown what "Capabilities" the airstrikes are degrading ? how many times did Israel show an exploded weapons stash or a dead jihadi leader under the rubble ? Declassified verifiable intelligence that shows the objectives they achieved by bombing the building ?
So maybe every war crime can be "Trust Me Bro"-ed into looking like a military operation after all. Maybe USA's invasion of Iraq was about the WMDs after all then. Maybe Hamas' rape is intended to degrade Israel's military capabilities just like the IDF's bombings, who knows.
>roof knocking
Ah yes, the humane practice of advertising you're going to destroy's someone's entire residential building and (s)he better race to homelessness now. That does change calculations a considerable amount, now bombing civilians doesn't look bad anymore.
I'm eagerly awaiting the youtube comments you'll hold up as opinions worth being contemplated Very Seriously.
Also, I did earnestly answer your original question in the second paragraph, as well as in the last bit of the second sentence in the first paragraph.
Alright, here you go[1][2][3]. Both the video (so you can ctrl-f yourself and make sure I'm not making it up) and the plain text if you don't want to follow links, also the screenshots.
> youtube comments you'll hold up as opinions worth being contemplated Very Seriously
I think it's funny you keep oscillating between dismissing and making fun of me for thinking that those opinions are worth discussing, because they are "weakmen" and "strawmen", and then actually defending the opinions as obviously correct and a nothingburger because "IDF != Hamas".
> Also, I did earnestly answer your original question
Alright, thank you for that. May you have peace and love for you and your family. Be safe.
[1] > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzKBiOlgTk (Title : Israel Cuts Off Power, Food, Fuel To Gaza | Hamas Targets Ben Gurion Airport | 57 IDF Troops Killed)
> Majority of the dead are from a music festival in Israel. Which are all civilians. With that Israel should never put ceasefire in its options
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/19VAmdzF_nISB_mZyHBXLKIbfNwDfb1Xx/view?usp=sharing
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2] > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53VbwHnadY (Title : Israel Bombs Gaza With 4,000 Tons of Explosives, Nato Shown Hamas Attack Video, US Aid Unconditional)
> Could not care less about Gaza suffering. Hamas brutality murdered innocent Jews, so people of Gaza, this is your payback.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ksn-gCdzt7EJdBtirOttvse8NL8rsbrP/view?usp=sharing
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[3] > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8RC1_Qc7dQ (Title : Israel Will Target Hamas "All The Way Up to" Top Leader Sinwar, Army Waiting For Gaza Invasion Nod)
> This is what the people in Gaza chose Hamas and as long as the people do not overthrow Hamas the people are guilty of all the crimes of Hamas-And of course it hurts to see children and residents hurt, but Israel has no choice, and if the Arabs were in Israel's place, they would have erased the Jews a long time ago. It's good that Jews are strong, it's just a shame that they are too merciful and considerate of the ungrateful Palestinians.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KQFb-GvKW0lgci06lof9BBScvpsJ62rn/view
You know what, there is a certain irony here that my full name is "Learns Hebrew, Hates Israel", and you still managed to hyper-focus on the "Hates Israel" part and present it as evidence that I'm somehow some Jew hating PR official who just got the bank transfer from Hamas' leadership this morning. Completely skipping the part where I learn the language of the people I supposedly hate so I know their prespective without translation.
I get it though, Hamas is horrible, and Islam is horrible. I should know, considering I'm a closeted atheist deceiving my closest family. They have managed to poisen this entire well, nailing the incredible feat of making baby killers look good. 9 possible worlds out of 10, I would have behaved like you if I were in your position.
I'm not sure that people object to the same kinds of atrocities on the Hamas side and on the IDF side? I thought the objections were to rape, murder, and pillage done by the Hamas, and to carpet bombing and turning off food, water, and electricity supplies on the other. I don't want to get into a discussion of which of these is worse, but the latter isn't "rape" or "pillage" (murder I'll grant is being dished out freely by both sides, presumably more effectively by Israel since it's the dominant military presence in the area). I don't think it's necessarily motte-and-bailey to perceive the atrocities as belonging to different categories, and then to end up with different emotional responses to them.
Correct. I should clarify that the "Rape and Pillage" part is expected from the ground invasion brewing now, not actual. The expectation is based on previous behaviour by both IDF and settlers.
Regardless, I think "Rape" and "Pillage" could both be removed from the post and it will still present roughly the same dilemma.
>I don't think it's necessarily motte-and-bailey to perceive the atrocities as belonging to different categories
Murder is a common subset of both clusters of atrocities, so if it's being perceived differently depending on whether it's done by knives and AKs or by air munitions dropped from above, that requires an explanation like the one I gave above.
The strawman you present is not really defensible, but obviously the difference between Israel and Hamas is that Israel does not want to hurt any civilians and tries its best not to, while Hamas just wants to kill as many jews as it can (I don't think this is a controversial statement given their actions in the last few days). Yes unfortunately Hamas houses all their assets in residential areas so it is impossible for Israel to fight Hamas without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Israel is to just let Hamas do whatever it wants.
>The strawman
A strawman is a position that no one holds, I can point to literally dozens upon dozens of comments on the war's youtube material (of which I have seen 100+) that have the exact same structure I presented above. That's how I thought of the comment to begin with, it would be a strange hobby to think up fake things Pro-Israeli commenters didn't say and go write them.
>Israel does not want to hurt any civilians
That's a very convenient claim and I'm sure it's responsible for many a comfortable nights for Pro-Israeli commenters, but what's the evidence ? What's to prevent me from saying that Russia does not want to hurt any civilians and that any civilian casulaties in Ukraine is simply the minimum-cost solution to war objectives ?
You're making a claim over the space of all possible airstrikes, but you're not - as far as I know - an IDF insider with access to the all the planning and classified docs that went into planning airstrikes. For all you know, Israeli airstrikes is actually the maximum-cost solution, how would you know ? You don't, you just want it to be true.
>unfortunately Hamas houses all their assets in residential areas so it is impossible for Israel to fight Hamas without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Israel is to just let Hamas do whatever it wants.
Well, ok.
>>>unfortunately Israel considers all of its populaton to be soldiers, so it is impossible for Hamas to fight Israel without civilian casualties, but the only alternative for Hamas is to just let Israel do whatever it wants.
Same picture ?
(I'm against Hamas btw if that is not already blindingly obvious, but I also happen to be against murder so I'm against Israel as well.)
Well why would Israel warn civilians before strikes if they wanted to kill civilians? Also what possible reason would they have to deliberately kill civilians? As I pointed out, if that was their goal they would have no difficulty accomplishing it. Clearly the number of civilian casualties is quite low in Gaza considering the number of strikes.
I don't think there is any question that Russia is primarily avoiding civilian targets. Probably not entirely, but they are using a lot of unguided munitions and a lot of those are just very inaccurate. Many of the civilian targets hit are near military targets. Of course they are not take the extreme measures to prevent civilian casualties that Israel is taking. But they could certainly kill many more civilians if they wanted to waste their munitions doing that.
I don't understand this "unfortunately Israel considers all of its population to be soldiers". That's just false- and also irrelevant because most of its population is not in fact soldiers regardless of what "Israel" considers them to be. It's well documented that Hamas houses its weapons and personnel in residential buildings including school and hospitals. Are you saying that is not true?
>Well why would Israel warn civilians before strikes if they wanted to kill civilians?
Performative Mercy.
Even if true, "leave your home now and live homeless for the next 5-10 years" is a humiliation worse than death. Especially when "home" is the entirety of the city that have all of its exits and entries blockaded and bombarded, and not just a single residential building.
>Also what possible reason would they have to deliberately kill civilians?
Because they are war criminals ? This is a strange reply, why did Hamas kill whoever they killed ? What possible reason ? whatever the answer to this is the answer to that.
I'm not required to know someone's Maslow-Hierarchy collection of motives for comitting a war crime to accuse them of a war crime, I'm simply required to present evidence.
>Clearly the number of civilian casualties is quite low in Gaza considering the number of strikes.
How high should it be to convince you that killing civilians is the goal all along ?
>I don't understand this "unfortunately Israel considers all of its population to be soldiers".
I'm alluding to the reserve policy of the IDF[1], in which every Jewish male below the ages of {40,45,49} (depending on rank and role) and all females below 38 are eligible for potentially being recalled, and those ages were even higher in the past. Okay, that's not "all of its population", I was wrong about that because I was going on outdated hearsay I remember hearing, but that's as close as you can get in any single country to a military that considers the vast majority of its civilians to simply be off duty members. And I haven't talked about out-of-uniform-yet-armed settlers yet.
>Are you saying that is not true?
No I'm not saying that, I'm saying that if you accept this as a valid justification for bombing said residential buildings, killing civilians because they are hiding the military, why don't you accept killing reservists ? It achieves the same objective, killing civilians hiding the military. So if Hamas was running around killing every male and female eligible for reserve duty, would that be acceptable according to you ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_duty_(Israel)
I think a common thread, both to the ground invasion vs. air strikes, and to the knives vs. air munitions, is something like "how much of the work is you vs. technology". It is easier to be the person killing someone at the touch of a button vs. with a knife; might it be easier to condone the killing, too? I agree that the corpses are equally dead either way, but that's a consequentialist / utilitarian moral calculus that many people don't use (and perhaps actively repudiate).
Maybe there's a deontological angle about what you're willing to do with your own hands.
What's so horrible about what I said ?
I have to say I'm fascinated by people who think not supplying your war enemy with food and electricity is some kind of war crime!
Have they no knowledge of wars or history?
Do they not think this is a real war?
Correct, they don't think this is a real war.
>Have they no knowledge of wars or history?
>Do they not think this is a real war?
I mean, both of those 2 questions are rhetorical red herrings, I can imagine possible worlds where both the yes answer and the no answer to both are consistent with either approving or disapproving of starving Gaza.
The real question is this :
> When you're in a war, how many non-combatants is fair game, and exactly how much fair-game they are ?
Which can't be resolved with a yes or no in the abstract, seperate from any facts or additional assumptions or common biases (e.g. are women and kids seperate from men ?). I will just remind you of one thing, before you finalize any particular answer, pick a different war (that matters to you) and apply it, seeing where it gets you. I assume the majority of people here are USA Americans, so lets simplify this idea to the catchy name "The 9/11 Test" : before adopting an answer to the above question, ask yourself whether it would have justified 9/11, and see if you still like it.
So if combatants establish themselves well enough within a mass of civilians to the point of being barely distinguishable, they're allowed to kill as many people as they like with impunity?
Definitely not with impunity, boots-on-the-ground can always distinguish between, no ? The combatants engage in... combat, the non-combatants don't. And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.
I'm not saying that it's never right to kill civilians by the way, war was never pretty. I'm just saying it's weighty question with a blackhole-worth of moral gravity and consequences, and simplistic appeals to "Isn't this a REAL war" are striclty worse than honestly facing the question and making a call.
<i>And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.</i>
If the civilian mass are deliberately shielding terrorists, it's perfectly legimitate to treat them as military targets.
Depending on how far the stretchy definition of "Terrorists" can mop along, this will justify (e.g.) the US bombing of Vietnamese civilians (both North and South) because they shield/arm/feed the Viet Cong.
"boots-on-the-ground can always distinguish between, no ?"
AHAHAHAHAHAHA! No.
>Definitely not with impunity, boots-on-the-ground can always distinguish between, no ?
Sure, only after making themselves significantly more vulnerable in the process. Compare carpet bombing vs individual soldier making direct visual assessment of potential enemy. Doesn't mean carpet bombing is okay, but you shouldn't expect a military to take on maximum possible risk to their soldiers to minimise the risk to enemy civilians.
>And let's not forget that, if the civilian mass doesn't hate your guts (because you were oppressive and/or tyrannical to them) they would not shield terrorists.
Well they're often not going to have much choice either way, but in any case palestianians firecely opposed the presence of jews in palestine from day one, long before any 'oppression' took place. That's the kind of attitude that is never acceptable for say Europeans to have towards a potential immigrant group as far as pro-palestine people are concerned, so maybe a bit of bombing is suitable punishment for being xenophobic bigots.
> you shouldn't expect a military to take on maximum possible risk to their soldiers to minimise the risk to enemy civilians.
I should expect at least that people don't cheer it up and claim that the military is the good guys here. All while claiming that they're better than terrorists.
> so maybe a bit of bombing is suitable punishment for being xenophobic bigots.
It's remarkable you're writing this under the thread where I wrote
>>> ask yourself whether it would have justified 9/11
You didn't ask yourself this before writing this, did you ?
The Red Cross states:
"Sieges inevitably involve frictions with a variety of norms of international humanitarian law (IHL) when civilians are within the besieged area. While the most apparent restriction of siege warfare is provided by the prohibition against starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, under the prevailing restrictive interpretation of this prohibition sieges are considered lawful as long as their purpose is to achieve a military objective and not to starve the civilian population. Moreover, while humanitarian relief operations might prevent or alleviate the suffering of civilians within a besieged area, controversy surrounds the question of whether and under what circumstances the besieging party might withhold consent to such operations."
I'm not asking about a siege!
I'm only talking about Israel no longer supplying electricity and food to Gaza.
That is explicitly what it means to lay siege - to deny all traffic into and out of an area, often including food - and in a historical context, often with starvation as the *primary goal* (or starvation-induced surrender, to be more precise).
Not quite. In a siege the besieger doesn't just not supply food to the besieged, he doesn't let anyone else supply it either. Israel may be doing that, but all the post you replied to said was "Israel no longer supplying electricity and food to Gaza."
>sieges are considered lawful as long as their purpose is to achieve a military objective and not to starve the civilian population.
Well, pardon my international-law-legalese, but this is quite literally nonsense. Starving a civilian population **IS** a military objective : it wins you the entire goddamn war. So this entire section just simplifies to "sieges are okay as long as you can construe their success to win you wars, which is always because they does win you wars, so sieges are actually always okay."
Causing an enemy to surrender is *also* a military objective, one that wins you the entire blessed war. Historically, sieges have been much more likely to end with the enemy surrendering than with the enemy's civilian population starving to death. You cannot conclude from the simple existence of a siege that it is unlawfully seeking the second, less common outcome.
Generally sieges are permissible under the laws of war. Just within the last few weeks Azerbaijan completed its siege of Nagorno-Karabakh
I don't dispute this. I'm simply amazed that a grown up saw it fit to write some legalese that amounts to "Sieges are not okay except when they are which is always", and another grown up (or a committe thereof) have reviewed this and saw it fit to be published.
Anyway, Legalism is morally bankrupt. The holocaust was legal when it happened. The question I posted is intended to be something that every thinking moral being resolves for himself under his own circumstances and available information, Law reflects only one person's flawed attempt at doing so once and for all, and it's predictably wrong.
> When you're in a war, how many non-combatants is fair game, and exactly how much fair-game they are ?
I would say that in a war those things are entirely contingent on how well it’s going for you and what your other choices might be.. In other words in a war this is not a moral dilemma. It is a strategic one.
In this case the siege is explicitly conditioned on the enemy committing war crimes and would end any time if they agreed to stop and release their hostages (which the Israelis are unlikely to be able to save otherwise), which makes it on the sympathetic end.
You see, if you're going to say this is a war, then Hamas are enemy combatants and an enemy army. Then the rules of war apply. Such as not targeting civilian population.
If you're going to say they're terrorists, then you can't call this a war and fight it like they are soldiers.
See Margaret Thatcher and the IRA; she insisted they were not an army fighting a war but terrorists, thus to be treated under civil and criminal law for offences committed. It was an important tactic to shape public opinion and perception of what was going on in Northern Ireland. The IRA insisted it was the legitimate successor to the revolutionary army that won independence in the Republic, and was fighting a war against an army of occupation. She denied them that.
If Israel declares itself to be at war, then it's a war. They can't prosecute Hamas for terrorist activities etc.
> If Israel declares itself to be at war, then it's a war. They can't prosecute Hamas for terrorist activities etc.
Not sure how this matters in practice. If it's a war, than all those terrorist activities (targeting civilians, having their combatants fight in civilian clothes, etc.) are war crimes. Why couldn't they prosecute that?
Israel officially declared war on Sunday:
https://www.voanews.com/a/israel-officially-declares-war-on-hamas-after-surprise-attack-/7301836.html
The problem is that we allow Hamas to occupy a position outside the usual rules. It's not a country, but it controls its own territory outside the laws of other countries. It's not an army, but it's powerful enough that nothing a state has other than an army can fight it.
This isn't historically unique; a lot of third world insurgencies fall into the same position. Depending on how sympathetic one is to which side, one could also draw comparisons to the various WW2 resistance movements or the various drug cartels. The difference is that Israel has a first world-level military and the entire thing is done under worldwide media coverage.
> Such as not targeting civilian population.
Culture has a weird rhetoric/optics around this. Ground troops killing civilians door by door looks wrong, but bombing raids where always about killing civilians. Dresden, the fire bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Real war is all about targeting civilian population.
> You see, if you're going to say this is a war, then Hamas are enemy combatants and an enemy army.
Meh, it can be both. They can have some people be a government (justice, police, proper army, etc.) and some other be a terrorist wing. You can draw your org chart whatever you like.
"Dresden, the fire bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Real war is all about targeting civilian population."
"They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things."
I think you're wrong about this.
The Hague convention (1899 and 1907) made it clear that attacking military target is allowed, and attacking civilian targets is not.
They even had rules for bombardments (aerial bombardments did not exist back then, as far as I can recall the rules stated: by artillery or any other means). Bombardment of built areas was only allowed if they were sheltering troops.
And yet those rules didn’t radically change the way war had been fought.
Wikipedia says: “the code was widely regarded as the best summary of the first customary law and customs of war the 19th century.”
In the 19th century, war was definitely not about targeting the civilian population.
Bombardment of cities was very controversial before WW2.
When the Germans bombed Guernica during the spanish civil war, it was widely seen as an attack on civilians and a violation of the laws of war, and there was a lot of international outrage. That is the context for Picasso’s painting, “Guernica”.
Even during WW2, both sides tended to either conceal their attacks on the population, or frame them as retaliation for equivalent enemy acts.
The UK and Germany blamed each other for starting the bombardment of cities. From the British perspective, it was in retaliation for the Blitz. From the German perspective, the Blitz had been in retaliation for earlier British bombardments in Germany (which the Brits had considered legal attacks on military targets, but the Germans had seen as attacks on civilians).
We have a weird false memory syndrome that killing civilians (from the air or otherwise) was normal up to WW2. I think it’s the other way around - it was shocking and controversial before WW2, it was normalized by WW2, and the generations that followed found it easier to accept because of WW2.
William Leahy, one of the four US five star admirals in WW2, wrote of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
Nowadays I do not think it is acceptable to purposefully bomb civilians, nor is it believed that bombing civilian populations in the past was an effective tactic.
As far as Israel goes, I see no reason to believe they are targeting civilians, nor do I see what they would have to gain from doing that. Certainly the Palestinian death tolls are low for the number of bombs Israel has dropped. If their intent was to bomb Palestinian civilians they could kill tens to hundreds of thousands in short order, although of course they would be cut off from military support.
>Dresden, the fire bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Real war is all about targeting civilian population.
Those are all very controversial actions that have led to much historical debate about their justification, though.
They were controversial at the time. The stated policy of both sides at the beginning of the war was to attack factories, rail lines, troops, etc. with civilian casualties a regrettable side effect.
They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things.
Almost all WW2 bombing raids, axis and allies both, targeted the suburbs of cities too. They didn't want the enemy's people going to work the next day and supporting the war effort.
In the west, doing the same door to door with infantry pretty taboo, though. Soldiers gunning down civilians door to door? Taboo. Soldiers setting homes on fire? Taboo. Artillery bombing and burning those same neighborhoods? Just how war is.
The other moral justification for Dresden and Hiroshima is "they started it". It was Germany who pioneered the use of indiscriminate bombing of civilians in WW2, and there's a definite moral case to be made that it's the combatant who first crosses a particular moral line to blame when the enemy inevitably crosses that line too.
Nowadays we would say that indiscriminately bombing cities isn't acceptable. But if Russia were to start nuking our cities then I can't argue that nuking Russian cities isn't an acceptable response.
>They're only controversial now that the allies won and people can afford to ponder if they could have won without doing those things.
That is a very legalistic view. Would you argue that a severe crime such as murder is morally acceptable when the murderer is powerful enough to evade legal prosecution?
> Almost all WW2 bombing raids, axis and allies both, targeted the suburbs of cities too. They didn't want the enemy's people going to work the next day and supporting the war effort.
The allies didn't have a uniform stance on this. The British, having directly suffered from German terror bombings, were more open about and accepting of killing German civilians almost indiscriminately. They flew the nighttime raids with low-precision carpet bombing of cities. The Americans, meanwhile, found it more politically acceptable to focus on industrial capacity, with slightly-higher-precision daytime attacks.
In any case, America's own, official Strategic Bombing Survey of WW2 found mixed success from Allied bombing against industry and could ultimately not separate its effect from the general collapse of Nazi Germany. As for Japan, the report even argued that the atomic bombings had no decisive part in their surrender.
>Artillery bombing and burning those same neighborhoods? Just how war is.
That is not at all how the public sees it. Indiscriminate bombing of enemy civilians has been highly unpopular at least since the US-Vietnam war. Just look at today's Russian-Ukrainian war, how air strikes and other crimes against Ukrainian civilians unite the West against Russia.
But they never led to aguments that the other side is justified to retaliate in kind.
I’m pretty sure that civilians considered not to be combatants. Therefore blockades and cutting off supplies are war crimes
They are not. See above.
Worse than being a crime, it's also a mistake. Punishing the civilian population in order to, presumably, undermine their will to support their government in waging war has a long and fruitless history dating back all the way to the interwar period between WW1 and WW2. See more details here from the always excellent Bret Devereaux:
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
The Allied blockade of Germany during WW1 was a major factor in Germany's eventual defeat.
Yes but that blockade was about materials directly required for the war effort, such as rubber and fuel. It had little effect on the food situation in Germany, although it was certainly intended:
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/naval_blockade_of_germany
>Did the blockade win the war? It is a paradox that the blockade was practically total by 1918, yet food supply in Germany was better than the previous year. Contrary to common assumption, civilian morale played no part in the decision of the German high command to end the war
>The shortages of key industrial raw materials and oil, partly caused by the blockade and partly by the Central Powers’ declining ability to pay for imports, but mostly by their enemies’ ownership of the resources, were more decisive in shifting the military balance than food shortages.
Whether you define the conflict as a war between states, with combattants as per international law, or defense against terrorists that have the protection of neither national nor international law, your goal is to stop the attacks. If your military strategy to achieve that is to kill the whole population through starvation or other means, it's a crime, and if that crime doesn't even measurably promote that goal, then that strategy has no redeeming qualities left.
Well, if the entire population of the Gaza Strip dies of starvation in the next month then I'll condemn it then, not while it remains an unlikely hypothetical.
Israel does not currently control the Egypt-Gaza border so there is definitely not a total blockade.
> Do they not think this is a real war?
There is probably a formal definition of "war" written somewhere, but I suspect that according to that definition, Russia and Ukraine are currently *not* at war (because of some technicality), the Cold War also technically wasn't a war, etc.
Not every violent conflict is a war. The 9/11 hijackers were not at war with USA according to the definition. Terrorist attacks or assassinations are not a war (though a war may be declared in response to them). Minorities living on someone else's territory are not necessarily at war, even when there are hostilities (e.g. Turkey is not at war with Kurds, USA is not at war with BLM). War on drugs is not an actual war.
The central example of a war is two armies clashing on the battlefield until one side gives up, or the other side successfully marches to their capital, and then the war is over. Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know, this is currently *not* happening in Israel/Palestine.
Also, wars are limited in scope. There are rules how to handle enemy civilians, prisoners, etc. Ignoring those rules is called "war crimes". It is called so even if the other side did it first. (Except when the rules say specifically that when the other side does X, you are allowed to do Y in turn.) It's not like any kind of behavior can be excused by saying "but we are at war with them", or "but we are *informally* in war with them".
some people think arguments are bullets, not intended to be right but just to win. Spray as many as you can, and hope some connect
I'm not a fan of banning. Especially not without an attempt to rectify the problem through conversation first. So, MK, if what Viliam says is true (I assume it is, I myself haven't read more than 3 of your comments) then to admit that's obnoxious behavior which shouldn't be done or tolerated.
From the few comments of yours that I read I have an additional concern.
I think it's only right that in conversations such as these people who are long time readers of SSC, and therefore in some sense part of the community, he granted the benefit of the doubt whereas people who comment here because it exists he asked to leave.
I don't know you or how long you've been reading but your comments are so single-dimensional and monomaniacal that it raises the question whether you have a handle on how people here speak and think.
For one, we tend not to be monomaniacal. There was some goofball here who used to troll each and every comment section with his demand that Scott retract some supposed misunderstanding of Karl Marx.
Once people caught on to the fact that his mind and intentions really were THAT blinkered, everyone agreed that he should go away - absolutely regardless of whether his point regarding Marx was right or wrong.
So please MK, if you are here to write against Israel but not a general appreciator of this blog or its commentators then I would ask you to find a different venue. I think you can understand that nobody wants to be used like that.
I wish you well in your life and I wish for a resolution to all of the many many imperfections in the lives of all people.
---------------------------------
Lest I be accused of a willingness to critique your local output on account of not sharing your sense of the gravity of this situation or of being too ignorant about it to have an opinion let me tell you that is not the case. I haven't said much about it here because my interests herein are broader than the contexts in which they have thus far been raised.
More importantly my analysis, sentiments and desired next steps are too nuanced and conditional to be expressed in clear and unambiguous words at all.
For starters, I am deeply religious, irreligious, and anti-religious.
There are certain terms, motifs and concepts for which I have no jargon but religious/mystical jargon - despite my not believing in the things that nearly everone who uses these terms claims to literally believe.*
So, for anyone capable of not getting caught up in the terminology (unfortunately I have no other) I was the tool by which a video and a post were produced yesterday. To be perfectly accurate, the post came from pre-standing conceptions within me but the instructions to read what I read in the video came from beyond me. I did not even fully realize the words I was going to say until I said them. And other than the words spoken in English, I did not compose them.
Whether to agree, disagree, or disregard, thinking that one understood either the video or post fully is an absolutely sure sign of having misunderstood them fully.
On that account, I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone watch or read either of them** but anyone who believes they may have something to gain by experiencing the words that flowed through me yesterday regarding the situation these are the two locations where you would find them.
The video is entitled “Emes” and is almost entirely an overly deliberate maggidic enunciation of a Biblical passage*** and the Substack article is entitled, “A Point” **** because it was the least assuming title I had for a piece which ultimately speaks to the entirety of the Civilizational Experiment, from the moment that metaphorical Eve enticed Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge until The Big Goodbye. *****
________________________________
* The fight between the religious weltanschauung and the rational one is largely a matter of misunderstood semantics.
Religion in fact has tended to pull humankind towards science.
Religions are the story into which people fit their emotions. And when millions of people share a common narrative they tend to get inspired at the same time. That’s an awesome power.
Remember how Thiel said that Trump’s followers take him Seriously But Not Literally? That’s what a lot of religion is.
Obviously nearly no one on earth believes in an afterlife. When you see them doing everything ^^not to die^^ and wailing with pity for their dead relatives you know that they don’t take ^^literally^^ their claims to certitude in an afterlife.
What they do is take it SERIOUSLY.
They can sense, as can you and I, that every moment of life has a greater meaning than we can justify by the facts as we know them.
Religious People see the reverence that we have for the living moment just as nakedly as we can see their doubts about heaven.
So they know that when we say that we are but dust in the wind that accidentally came together in an unimportant manner yadda yadda we are being literal – but not serious.
After all, we too experience moments of pure joy – or at least we (like them) know those moments exist, are “real” on some sense we can’t put into words or measure and want them.
I really don’t think there is much debate anout the facts as there is about misunderstanding each others’ terms.
When it comes down to it we are all rather religious and we are all rather rational.
** Here is a more easily accessible and enjoyable video about the religion of the Jews of medieval Kaifeng, China
https://youtu.be/UqzNd3rX0CA?feature=shared
*** https://youtu.be/8JKwC6Mvkns?feature=shared
**** https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
***** Should you find my output meaningful or believe that they may be meaningful to others within your network please share them.
I am not constituted with an effective capacity to sell myself so I generally refrain from promoting my own output. But if you want this to have a broader audience, please understand that it is, very deliberately, out of my hands. You're in the driver's seat on this one.
I am willing and eager to participate in public conversations or podcasts as well (in 2000-2001 I was likely the most broadly heard public speaker on matters Israel related om 3 continents) so long as it is understood that I won't participate as a foil for whomever owns the mic but intend to speak as freely and comfortably as if the platform were my own.
I mention this because my willingness to participate publicly has no limits. It goes without saying that most hosts would be glad for me to speak as fully and freely, but my invitation to invite me on to a platform extends to anywhere there is a serious audience. If an exterminationist has a sizeable audience and can guarantee me the freedom to speak without censorship then I am willing to join him too. That's why my Nachmanidean precondition is spelled out up front.
Since you've accidentally promoted this to a top-level topic and no one else has said otherwise: I am a fan of banning (under Scott's extremely generous terms). I come here to read and learn interesting things, and to read discussions that carefully take apart an argument in a way that asymptotically approaches truth in a novel way. Others come here for the same. It is therefore a waste of everyone's time to clutter the feed with the same unsubstantiated vitriol/soapboxing that one could get by scrolling through the comment section of a New York Times article posted on reddit (or other low-signal high-noise content). If you show a repeated pattern of not being able to stop yourself from posting that, the correct action is to have that privilege revoked.
Pick2(True, Kind, Necessary) is an *extremely* generous policy (and Scott's bar for each is low), and if a comment can't claim at least two of furthering truth, being civil, or constructively furthering the discussion, it's at odds with the goals of the community.
+1. Especially on something like this, where people go kind of nuts.
I ain't taking issue with either Scott's right to ban at will, nor with the righteousness of his criteria, nor with removing the hekler's veto by any means necessary.
My comments may have typos or other such imperfections attributable to technical matters, but my meanings are quite precise and worth a somewhat more reverent reading.
MarxBro's monomania stretched across the comments sections of several posts, including many that were supposed to be limited to a specific topic. Marty Khan has not done this.
Yah, like I said, I am not aware of his involvement and therefore advocate giving him the benefit of the doubt.
You made this a top level comment, perhaps accidentally. Anyway, it is is a really bad idea imho. Discussions with people making bannable offenses is a waste of time, at least at this forum. You have to be pretty darn obnoxious to get banned here. I am speaking in general of course, not having read the conversation you are referring to.
"My bad" as we used to day in the 30s. My comment was originally intended to be posted in response to the comment by Viliam, two comments below. As I ended up noting there, I chose not to undo the error on account of the above comment coming to encompass additional things.
Given how rapidly Substack collapses under the weight of too many comments, bans are arguably underapplied.
Also it would help if Substack's mute function fully worked. (It does not mute a user, it only stops notifications of that user having posted a reply.) That flaw was already depressing my activity level here and on Substack generally, even before 10/7.
(* I do realize of course that Scott in managing his blog and its forums is stuck with Substack's specific flaws...so this is really just unhelpful bitching and I might as well quit bringing it up.)
I propose banning Marty Khan. Not for the content of his comments, but for the fact that he is copying essentially the same text over and over again, dozens of times.
I don't want to participate in discussions were you "win" by posting more copies of your argument, and where any reasonable argument is lost in the sea of repeated text.
Also for the content of his comments. He tries to be maximally cruel and inflammatory.
I looked over all his comments, and they don't seem to be literally copy-pasted. (Maybe he deleted or edited some, though). He has also engaged in another thread on this post about ADHD, without mentioning anything about the controversial subject. And at one point during the controversial conversation he said he changed his mind after consulting with someone else, so I think there's hope. Personally, I have a visceral dislike for echo chambers, no matter how much I agree with the noise that's being echoed. I do wish he was doing a better job of arguing his position (or more precisely, I think there may be a defensible position on that side that he occasionally approximates).
That aside, I think I get what you're saying. He's not making attempts to understand other people or modify his own position based on new information. He uses several types of fallacies that have wrecked the Internet. In various comments he gets close enough to both "untrue" and "unkind" that I'm not sure that he sees where the line is, on this subject.
Well, if dozens of people are making more or less the same arguments as each other, I don't think it is reasonable to expect someone write out a unique response each time, especially if almost nobody else is arguing against these dominant positions
>I don't think it is reasonable to expect someone write out a unique response each time<
If you don't have a unique response, I don't think it's reasonable to respond at all. Can people no longer read his first one?
People should be replying to his first one then, not creating one hundred variations on the original pro-israel comment he was replying to.
"not creating one hundred variations" I think that this happens on a broad range of topics (though this one, understandably, provokes both more vehemence and more verbosity than most). I don't think that this has a reasonable _social_ solution. It just takes too long to read through a full comments section and notice potential duplicates of the comment one is about to make.
I think that we might be at a point where a _technological_ solution might be feasible or becoming feasible. LLMs have gotten to the point where they are reasonably decent at summarizing. Perhaps we could have a process that looks at a new comment, looks at the existing comments, and tells the new commenter "Your comment looks quite similar to this comment, here. Perhaps you would want to just add an "Agreed" comment below it, or make some refinement to the existing comment?".
( It would also be nice to dynamically construct a table of contents for a comment section. Perhaps that is also becoming feasible? )
Maybe his opinion isn't what they're here for.
So we need to ban people in order to create an echo chamber?
One guy repeating himself ad nauseam is functionally an echo chamber. That's what literal echoes do.
I responded to your comment but it appeared as a standalone comment. I started edit/copy/delete/pasting it from its present location (within my android browser directly above your comment, presumably for reasons of reverse chronology) but as it is quite lengthy and the majority of it goes beyond the scope of the subject of banning MK I'm leaving it where it is (slightly out of place) so as not to push the shorter responses to your comment beyond the point of sight.
Be great, YDYDY
I feel that it wok
> I responded to your comment but it appeared as a standalone comment.
I think that happens when you click the Reply link in an e-mail. (Long known bug, probably not going to be fixed soon.)
🙏
I'm sympathetic to the point he's made, somewhere within that tempest, about being the only pro-Palestinian on the ward. Ctrl-f says he's tossed out about 50 comments as of this writing; the runners up seem to be just shy of 30 apiece. He's an outlier, but not to an egregious extent.
> about being the only pro-Palestinian on the ward.
But he is not, actually.
Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?
I mean, I didn't want to argue the object level here, but maybe there is a good reason why even people whose sympathies are generally on the side of the underdog, change their minds when the underdog starts just randomly killing and raping civilians and celebrating this as a big success. I understand that in asymmetric warfare, you will ambush the enemy soldiers instead of facing them head on, you will assassinate the important enemy figures or the collaborants on your side, and you will avoid the enemy army and attack the infrastructure behind them. I even understand the inevitable collateral damage. But none of that explains why it is necessary to rape and kill civilians directly. (Frankly, that doesn't even feel like underdog behavior to me; it's rather something I would associate with the victorious march of the Red Army.)
> he's tossed out about 50 comments as of this writing; the runners up seem to be just shy of 30 apiece
Yeah, but see how repetitive his comments are. The 50 comments are mostly a copy-paste of the same 2 or 3 templates. My number of comments is also growing gradually, but each of them has a different content.
"Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?"
No, in my view they should not. Unlike Scott and many of his readers, I'm not a free speech absolutist. But if you mean to ban MK for the content, rather than his alleged spamming, then that's a different kettle of fish.
I don't want to do object level here either, and I don't think we disagree much, anyway. The act was vile. I would say, however, that my underdog sympathies never resided with Hamas per se (I'm old enough to remember the spate of suicide bombings of the Second Intifada) but instead with the Palestinian people, their sense of injustice about their displacement by Israel, and their quest for a state of their own. These attacks haven't altered that sentiment overall.
And yes, I remain angry that no one has given this much of a damn about Israel's own actions - spread over time, wrapped in the tissue paper of legal frameworks which often turn 'civilian' into 'militant' on flimsy premises, sanitised by securocratic mission-speak, obscured by detention facilities which deny investigators and reporters - but in the aggregate no less awful. It just seems like poor decorum to harp on it at the moment.
> But if you mean to ban MK for the content, rather than his alleged spamming, then that's a different kettle of fish.
My problem is the repetition. There the story could end, in my opinion, but...
He claims that repetition is okay, because his opinion is underrepresented in the debate (literally that he is the only one representing it here). And a few people seem to agree.
My reply to that is that maybe some opinions are underrepresented for a good reason (e.g. because they are just plainly wrong), therefore underrepresentation of an opinion is not necessarily a mistake that needs to be fixed.
Anyway, my problem is the repetition, not the content. And I do not accept the excuse (that it is okay to spam your comment all over the thread, if you offer a unique perspective), because (1) I want to discourage "winning the debate by posting more comments that all your opponents combined" as a strategy; plus the perspective is (2) actually not unique, and (3) wrong. But being wrong is not a problem as such. It's the repetition.
>Also, sometimes people are in a minority for a good reason. If someone came here to argue that the Earth is flat, should they also be allowed to post 50 copies of their comments, to make the comment section fair and balanced?
If dozens or hundreds of people were making similar, fairly dogmatic claims about the earth not being flat, then yes, such a response would be justified. If you don't want this, then the initial round earth arguments should be concentrated into a few comment threads
>Yeah, but see how repetitive his comments are. The 50 comments are mostly a copy-paste of the same 2 or 3 templates.
If an argument is correct, being repeated doesn't make it lose it's correctness. And the Israel/Palestine conflict is a topic on which any discussion really boil down to a very few basic first principles, so any continued arguing ends up repeating these.
If an argument is correct, saying it once and letting it stand doesn't make it lose its correctness. People who constantly repeat themselves in the same conversation don't believe in correctness, only in the last word. Which means they're very likely to be incorrect.
This isn't relevant to the original topic, but is relevant to your response to Boinu. If this isn't the place for what I'm about to say, just let me know.
The brutality is "necessary" (i.e. strategically useful) because it gets Hamas closer to its win-condition. Hamas wins (or at least, might win) if the world splits into two camps - one pro-Israel and one pro-Hamas - and those two camps fight a total war rivaled only by World War II. It's hard to imagine any other scenario where Hamas achieves its goals.
In order to do that, Hamas needs people to be extremely polarized. A legitimate middle is going to take their allies away, and they need allies. Maybe Israel does too, but Hamas will lose the 1 v 1. So Hamas really needs allies. Thus they have to make this conflict a pure binary. Brutality polarizes people very heavily - I know I'm more pro-Israel than I was a week ago.
Additionally, Hamas needs this polarized conflict to be existential. Either all Jews die, or all Muslims die. The war cannot end without total victory. Premature peace prevents Hamas from achieving its win condition and makes it harder to pull this off in the future.
Finally, Hamas wants to provoke severe reprisals against its own people. The reprisals will degrade the moral legitimacy of Israel. No one is going to sign up to fight Israel because they think Tel Aviv has bad architecture. Hamas needs something to galvanize its side against Israel - dead Palestinian children will do that. So too will violence at Al-Aqsa, etc. Something that they can use to make people more polarized and conflict more existential, so that they more brutality and more reprisals and the cycle repeats.
It's the same strategy used by the FLN in Algeria. Osama bin Laden used it too. It's almost a hallmark of asymmetric religious conflict in the Middle East.
Yeah, and those goals are sufficiently alien to humanist values that I think people here should be united against them.
Hamas appears hell bent on a total PR disaster with their present foray into Israel. I am genuinely puzzled by the inept handling of the “story” that emerges from their apparently gleeful killing of civilians even including babies, and if the rumors are true also including totally unnecessary beheadings of some victims. Does Hamas really not understand that such lack of restraint makes them appear, in the eyes of Western audiences, as totally unfit to run a country?
For comparison, the Algerian resistance to France (in the days when Algeria was a part of France) placed home-made bombs in French restaurants in Algeria, similarly blowing up women and children. The difference from Hamas consists of how this blowing-up-of-innocents was presented to a Western audience.
When asked by journalists how the Algerian resistance could justify targeting civilians, the capable spokesperson said something along these lines (quoting from memory): “Waging war is expensive. We do not have access to French high-tech military technology. If the French would kindly let is borrow modern fighter planes, rocket launchers and submachine guns from their arsenals, I can promise that we would stop to use home-made bombs. However, at the moment this is the only type of weapons we can afford and have access to”.
My point in this context is that the Algerian resistance presented killing of civilians and children as an unfortunate effect of their lack of more sophisticated weapons - it was not due to wild-eyed, unhinged bloodlust when finally having the enemy at their mercy. It was a cold, calculated thing which they regretted but had to do due to lack of other weapons.
This is a type of cold reasoning when killing innocents that calms Western audiences. Because it signifies to them that the leaders of the resistance can probably be trusted to show self-restraint, if and when they should be given control of the country – i.e., that whey will not go on a wild blood purge killing all “pied noirs” (i.e. French) living in Algeria, the day the resistance might eventually win the war.
But Hamas and its warriors apparently do not understand this. Their chaotic killing spree is one thing. The fact that they seem to be proud of it, is what does the real damage to their cause. Because it suggests that if they should ever win the war, it will initiate a period of beheadings, murder and mayhem reminiscent of how ISIS behaved in Iraq – heads on pikes, total lack of self-restraint once you have won. Not the type of people you can trust to hand over a government to.
My question is if this is a case of what George Tsebelis called the “nested games” problem. Within a Gaza-type culture, perhaps gleefully raping women, beheading husbands and killing babies is interpreted as a signal of strength (I am guessing here). Hence such behavior causes no image/reputation problem. But if so, this Gaza-game is “nested” within a broader, global game for how these actions are to be interpreted. And for a global audience, the glee-part of the killings does not signal strength – instead, it signals lack of self-restraint when in a position of power. And people who cannot be trusted to show self-restraint when in a position to kill civilian non-combatants, and (even worse) indicate that they enjoy the killing and humiliating of such victims, are not people it is easy to do deals with.
A person who understood this, was Yasser Arafat. During 9/11, he went on TV symbolically donating blood to Americans – because he understood that the glee that many ordinary Arabs showed when seeing the footage of the twin towers going down, was totally counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Since it indicated to US citizens that ordinary Arabs hated them and would show no restraint if they ever got the upper hand in dealings with them, or in they protected state (Israel).
Similarly, the lack of emotional restraint when Hamas went on its killing spree will signal to Israel and its allies that it is simply too dangerous to let unhinged Hamas-people ever acquire power. In short: Hamas is shooting itself in the foot again and again during this conflict. Are they totally devoid of a competent PR strategy vis a vis a Western audience? Apparently so. Or is it something I am missing? Since the leadership of Hamas, like any leadership, is likely to be composed of clever people – simply because it requires intelligence to rise to the top of any political movement. Why are they none the less so inept in presenting an image as something else that emotionally driven, indiscriminate killers? It really is puzzling and I have no good answer. Comments are welcome.
.
I think this is underestimating the degree that terrorists actually do believe in fanatically killing all their enemies indiscriminately as a good thing to be proud of. This works for them PR wise when they use human shields (they're proud of their fanaticism, the west is outrages by the inevitable civilian deaths), but not so much when they actually succeed in the indiscriminate murder sprees part.
Arafat's superior PR, you'll note, did not meaningfully improve the situation of Palestinians.
You'll also note that all those specific highly publicized examples of Hamas's disastrous-for-PR brutality turn out to be, upon closer inspection, a mix of completely misinterpreted and completely made up. (I feel it safe to encourage everyone to just disregard any information more specific than "Hamas violently invaded Israel and killed a bunch of people" at this point as emotionally charged propaganda with only spurious basis in reality.)
To get this out of the way - I think getting the world's attention constitutes a PR win in itself, because it means someone will be doing closer inspection, rather than getting all the info from your enemies' PR machine.
But I'm not really writing this to disagree with you on object level. I'm writing to say how completely alien to me is your assumption that any of this matters. You seem to be taking some things (if not "moral behavior matters", than at least "PR matters") as deontological axioms, when the question you should first be asking is - what reason do the people in question have to believe that those assumptions are true?
The answer, I believe, is none. No matter how careful Hamas is, or Palestinians at large are, about not inflicting unnecessary damage, they'll be inhuman monsters. No matter how politely they state their case, their situation does not improve. You simply can't expect people to follow rules if there's no benefit in following them.
Which is to say, I'm here to make a general point that any morality not grounded in consequentialist reasoning eventually breaks apart precisely like this. (And express my outrage at people who are outraged at others not following some arbitrary rules.) The whole question of ethics is inseparable from the question of everyone's coordination around a shared benefit. Leave someone out of the arrangement - and this is what you get, just... what else were you expecting?
> Arafat's superior PR, you'll note, did not meaningfully improve the situation of Palestinians.
This is flat-out false. Conditions in the west bank under Arafat are better than in Gaza under Hamas, and the West Bank under Abbas (who is much more moderate than Arafat) has it considerably better than that. Things are a long way from perfect for all of them, but on a comparative basis the gaps are clear.
(Oh wait, you think all the self-posted Hamas videos are Israeli propaganda. Nevermind, shouldn't have tried rational argument with you).
I'll use the term anticolonial without saying that Israel-Palestine is an anti-colonial war.
In anticolonial conflicts, the idea is pretty straightforward. Stop foreign support for the colonists, then win the 1 v 1. Algeria beats the Pied-Noirs. The Vietcong beat the ARVN. The Taliban beat the government of Afghanistan. Etc.
Hamas cannot win the 1 v 1. It will never win without significant foreign aid. Israel can win the 1 v 1 without foreign assistance.
So while Hamas would like to sap foreign support for Israel, this is not nearly enough. What it really needs is to get every Arab country on board with a massive fight against Israel. Hamas cannot win alone. But it has hundreds of millions of ethnic and religious counterparts who could join the fight.
Hamas is playing to them. So too does the propaganda. I watched a TikTok of a guy explaining that if just 5 men from each mosque would sign up to fight, they'd have 5 million men (assuming 1 million mosques worldwide) and such a force could take out Israel without even fighting. I'm not saying that's realistic, but that's the kind of thought process: 'We can win if we just show up'.
The brutality doesn't play with Western audiences (or anyone with an ounce of moral fiber), but Hamas needs more than just to cut off Western support for Israel. Hamas needs to build a broad Arab jihad against Israel.
That's why the attack happened after peace deals were announced. Those peace deals shred any hope Hamas has for victory.
I think Hamas understands all of this perfectly well, certainly better than you or me. Boinu's "prevailing explanation" is sound. Hamas wants to get the Arab world back on its side by killing the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab countries. They have been successful. Saudi Arabia has not condemned the attack, and Israel is in no mood to offer even the token concessions to Palestinians that Saudi Arabia would probably ask for in return for recognition.
The other thing is that they also successfully attacked soldiers. They could have limited themselves to attacking soldiers.
>Does Hamas really not understand that such lack of restraint makes them appear, in the eyes of Western audiences, as totally unfit to run a country?
You know that bit where, before Donald Trump took office, lots of his followers believed that America's foreign policy was going to be Full of Win. Mexico was going to pay us to build a wall, North Korea was going to "denuclearize". ditto Iran, the namby-pamby wimps of NATO were going to man up and take care of their own defense, and the trade agreements and all the rest? All because The Donald was going to Speak Forcefully and wave his little stick, Lay Down the Law and Not Take Any Guff? And then what actually happened is, the rest of the world (correctly) saw that we had elected a guy totally unfit to run a country?
Americans aren't the only people stupid enough to believe that. Lots of people, possibly most people, believe that their nation or quasi-nation would have everything they believe it deserves, if only their wimpy leaders would man up and Lay Down the Law and Not Take Any Guff. They're strong enough, and they're ruthless enough, they just need to show it.
Hamas obviously, even to the Palestinians, can't match Israel in strength alone, so their version of this is going to have to lean extra-heavy on the "ruthless" part. Trump and his supporters could imagine bloodless victories achieved by displays of force and resolve; Hamas is going to have to get its hands dirty. But if they are ruthless enough, they can apply their modest strength in ways the weak and cowardly Israelis will not be willing to endure. Anything else would be inconceivable. Right?
Or maybe it won't turn out that way. But it's not at all surprising that Hamas believes it will.
To be fair, people opposed to Trump were almost equally as stupid for the opposite belief that Trump becoming president meant catastrophe, because in both cases they're based on the false belief that the president "runs the country" in the first place.
Sure, but as I parenthetically mention tangentially here, the Ruling Class goes nuts on populist leaders who are raised above themselves via the love and poeer of the masses.
I didn't mention the Hitlerian example as his name in the context of Bibi-harassers would likely have rendered invisible every other word on the page for all but the most rational stoics but it's a good example of the reason BOTH why the reigning elite do everything they can to degrade any and every populist who doesn't openly state that he will defer to their will AND why the fuck They Should Not Do That!
Anyway, the aforepromised post.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
The prevailing explanation seems to incorporate two reasons. First is an attempt to provoke an even worse (in terms of civilian deaths) Israeli response, which in Western eyes will partly offset the horrors of the initial assault, and make advances in Arab-Israeli rapprochement politically difficult for Arab leaders. Second is simple lashing out against the enemy, punishing him for the slow, aggregating drip of his own killings and abuse, and being seen (in contrast with the Palestinian Authority) as the ones doing something, anything other than nothing, by the seething, suffocating street.
I think the prevailing explanation is sound. I have no better ideas. The second half is undeniably barbaric, as is all violent collective punishment. Israeli civilians (even specifically the ones who support pro-settlement/annexation policies) do not deserve to be massacred because Israeli leaders are choking the life out of the prospect of a Palestinian state; any more than Gazan civilians (even specifically the civilians celebrating the murders) deserve to die from bombardment and power/water denial because of what Hamas did. It's also, on balance, counter-productive. But I suspect it's kind of tough to remain a cold-blooded rationalist for very long in Gaza.
Fair points.
You are probably right that someting-anything-happening, might be preferable to Hamas that nothing happening (Stillstand). Where there is movement- even initially in the wrong direction - there are possibilities. Your enemy might make a fatal mistake. Or some weird cause-and-effect sequence takes place that no-one could foresee. With Stillstand, there is less chance of that. (Granted, there is then also less risk that things will get even worse for you.)
Lenin liked Napoleon's general advice in battle: "on s'engage et puis on voit", loosely translated as "we do something, and see what happens". Hamas might have a similar philosophy. (It is not that bad as a general philosophy of life, actually.)
A follow-up: To provoke your enemy into making a fatal mistake, it might be a good idea to do something so beyond the pale that your enemy forgets to think, and instead acts on raw emotion. Killing innocent babies and beheading parents might work in this regard. Hopefully, the Israelis do not forget to think with their heads before they decide how hard to retaliate.
...Just as they were able to control their emotions back in 1991, when Saddam launched rockets in their direction (quite likely in the hope that they would pay back with similar coin, or more):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_rocket_attacks_on_Israel
Yes, I remember this. Similar strategic concept, too.
Worth remembering that successful American diplomatic pressure was perhaps the greatest factor back then - and judging by Jake Sullivan's frantic efforts to restrain the Israelis presently, it might be so again.
The message to Israel seems pretty clear: If Israel continues doing oppress Palestinians, Hamas will impose a cost on Israel. The message to the Palestinians seems pretty clear as well: We are standing up for you.
Messaging to the rest of the world? Either they are incompetent at this, or they don't care. Rising to the top of a political movement requires an understanding of the political environment and a desire to rise to the top. These don't necessarily translate into an understanding of how to message to the Western world or a desire to do so.
There is no message to Israel. Hamas has never even been willing to negotiate with Israel, their only demand has always been "leave the entire country or we'll kill you if you don't." If there was an intention to get Israel to "stop oppressing palestinians", they would have tried to make that a demand at some point. They *like* Israel oppressing palestinians: It helps them stay in power.
> The message to Israel seems pretty clear: If Israel continues doing oppress Palestinians, Hamas will impose a cost on Israel
It doesn't really work as messaging though, because it also makes it clear that *not* oppressing Palestinians would have an even worse cost. Hamas's behaviour has gone way beyond the point where they can pretend that they'll cut it out in exchange for some reasonable concessions like the IRA or even the PLO, they're clearly just interested in killing as many Jews as they possibly can, in as horrendous a way as they can possibly think of.
There's only two realistic options for Israel at this point -- either oppress the Gazans even harder to ensure that not so much as a spitball can leave the Gaza Strip ever again, or wipe the Gazans out completely once and for all.
Interesting. They certainly couldn’t have planned for the festival. Now imagine if only they could refrain from mowing down everyone in sight and stuck to attacking soldiers and armed guards. The PR opportunity was so there.
They very carefully planned for the festival. They'd havked the manager's facebook account ahead of time to get the location, and they ambushed it carefully (starting off by cutting off both exit roads and then moving in to massacre everyone). It was carefully planned, not a lucky break.
I don’t know what’s worse… “oh a party, let’s kill everyone” or carefully planning same.
In American law, at least, premeditation is considered to make a crime worse.
Yes. However there’s something terrifying about the concept of random slaughter. It completely robs one of any agency. Like, if they target X, and I’m not-X, I can avoid being killed. Random “senseless” (hate this word) killing makes everyone feel terrorized. Which is I guess the point of terror.
Sounds like 9/11 except for the hostages.
I mean, al-Jazeera English exists. Here's a brief, early interview of a Hamas spokesman with the key question ('why attack civilians?') asked one minute in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYP4gJpQ9E4 . At the fourth minute, he briefly grazes against the Algerian response ('give us better weapons, then', paraphrased) before circling back to his attempt to redefine civilians.
Thanks for the link.
has substack (on pc) been unbearably slow recently for anyone else?
I'm noticing it now, definitely. I wonder if it's just here, or are people seeing it on other Substack pages? Either the entire kit and kaboodle is collapsing for some reason, or we on here broke Substack because if we want to write entire essays on something, we're supposed to spin up our own Substack (and preferably get subscribers for that sweet sweet revenue flow for ourselves and for them) rather than in the comments in reply to a post 😁
Yes. If any other web page loaded and scrolled so slowly, I would definitely just close the tab and never return again.
I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect it is something like reloading all comments in constant time intervals, ignoring the fact that with so many comments, as soon as they are loaded, the interval is over, and you start loading again. So a possible quick fix could be to increase the interval to 10x or 100x of what it is now.. Assuming that Substack has some technical people capable of doing this, or that anyone is paying attention at all.
Like, as I was writing this comment, the edit box froze several times and I had to wait a few seconds just to be able to type another letter. So a better fix would be to just stop reloading while a comment is being written -- but that would probably be too much work.
I have originally applauded when Scott switched to Substack, but I didn't expect such technical incompetence. Or ignorance -- maybe the focus of their business are spammers who write a new article each day, with 5 comments most, and they don't care about anyone else. It is infuriating to know that problems like this simply won't get fixed. You probably just need one line somewhere, like "if more than X comments, increase the reloading interval to Y". Not expecting that to happen during 2023 (90% probability).
I'm quite sure the problem isn't as simple a single line "reload interval". I suspect it's more to do with some abomination of hierarchical React components doing something incredibly inefficient.
In fact, I opened up the profiler and looked at the call stack / flame graphs, and it's nearly 100 calls deep into some recursive function. Unfortunately it's all minified, so it's hard to go deeper and shame them to the degree they deserve, but man, that is hideous. Oh and I guess the layout recompute takes a while, too.
I noticed an improvement when I got a new pc. My theory is that substack isn't designed for posts with lots of comments.
"My theory is that substack isn't designed for posts with lots of comments."
Substack definitely did not expect the ACX Inquisition 😈
Yes.
Is everyone else also suddenly able to “Like” comments using the app?
Yep. Have to rein that in a bit now.
Somehow I stumbled into a fix for the annoying pop-ups promoting "iCloud" that arrived with Apple's latest update, Sonoma 14.0.
The pop-ups insist one updates his/her signature on the lawyerly gobbley-gook that gives them the right to give away our personal data and thank them for it. I don't use iCloud.
It turns out I was signed in to iCloud, and didn't know. When a button reading 'sign out" showed up on the screen, I clicked. Voila, no more fascist pop-ups. The problem wasn't that I wasn't signing in, but that I was signed in to begin with.
Does anyone have good book/article/blog recommendations for thinking better from first principles in engineering, design, and/or entrepreneurship?
Does anyone have good book/article/blog recommendations for opportunities in robotics?
Has anyone else been following the Twitter scuffle around SBF's argument that Shakespeare is unlikely to have been one of history's top writers, just based on the fact that there were very few writers around in the 16th century.
In Bayesian terms, something like:
P(exceptionally acclaimed writers posses exceptional writing talent | exceptionally acclaimed writers were disproportionally born a long time ago) << P(writing acclaim depends more on historical prestige than talent | exceptionally acclaimed writers were disproportionally born a long time ago)
I've seen a lot of back lash to the argument, but it seems likely true to me.
Has anyone experienced a deep appreciation of Shakespeare, above what you experience (at the risk of sounding like a philistine) one of HBO's prestige dramas, in terms of the depth of the characters, subtleties of the plot, use of themes etc.? If so, are you confident that appreciation isn't tied to anything like sophistication signalling, group think, or anything like that?
One more angle: Even if the best writers are working today, we might not identify the best of them immediately. They would need some time (50 years? 100 years?) to build their reputations.
Is there a "low-hanging fruit" effect in literature? Art is less bounded than Science, but I think there might be.
Statistically speaking, the chances of SBF being born, with that precise set of characteristics, at that precise time, to those precise circumstances, are miniscule. Therefore SBF doesn't really exist.
The argument on its own doesn’t make sense. There were fewer playwrights in the centuries before Shakespeare and more in the centuries after, as literacy increases. So what is that Bayesian formula proving? Also it probably underestimates how many plays were written in that era, most never performed again. You see Shakespeare being performed in the years and then centuries after his death, Samuel Pepys goes to the theatre a lot in the late 1600s and sees a lot of Shakespeare (not all of which he likes). That’s about 50 years later. Most Elizabethan contemporaries are forgotten by then, although he does also see Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.
Shakespeare is both popular and often preeminent in most eras since his death, and survives across totally different moral systems than the one he is born in, he seems to be timeless really. The Victorians flocked to Shakespeare though king Lear is not the kind of thing they generally liked, nothing schmaltzy there. (Although it was bowdlerised )
You see him become more famous as the years pass. You see other playwrights disappear.
For instance, George Bernard Shaw, one of the most dominant playwrights of the late 19C and early 20C did not like Shakespeare. And here we are a century later not really going to the plays of Bernard Shaw anymore. He’s probably only really known because he wrote the play that My Fair Lady is based on, and that’s itself a dated reference.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t some bardolatry going on, Shakespeare has some weak plays, Pepys didn’t like them all.
Not everything was timeless. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but it always struck me as odd, and dated, when Juliet's mother was admonishing the 12-year-old Juliet that some women her age were already mothers, so get started dating already!
Doubtless there are others, not counting royalty itself which is kind of out of fashion these days.
Others have made some good points, but it is also worth pointing out that Shakespeare's position comes from being the most famous and prestigious poet of poetry's last and greatest hurrah before prose and the novel took over. Shakespeare managed to be the most successful in an age of great wordsmiths: Donne, Milton, Marlowe, Johnson, etc. No time since compares, even with the larger population.
I think Shakespeare as we know him was invented in the 19th Century.
It was in the 19th century that it was decided that Shakespeare was High Art. But they picked Shakespeare for that honor over other playwrights and authors because he had been popular for centuries.
First , who is “they”? If you are arguing that it was an elitist imposition that I don’t think you understand the audience for Shakespeare in the 19th century very well at all, at least the American one.
Secondly, he had not really been popular for centuries. For quite a long period after his death, he fell into complete oblivion. Some of his plays started getting performed again in the 18th century but they were heavily rewritten. They bore very little resemblance to the originals.
Another point: name me another playwright who has had so many of his Works turned into opera.
He was really good at something and then he got lucky. Not an unusual combination for famous people.
His plays were performed all the time in the generations after his death . That’s clear from Samuel Pepys diaries in the late 17C - to generations later. Voltaire in his book on travel in England discussed the Shakespeare plays he had seen and was somewhat dismissive. This was late 18C.
Shakespeare does get edited (bowdlerised - where the phrase comes from) in the Victorian age but they were fairly squeamish. No obscurity there.
>William Davenant also wrote Macbeth, a Tragedy, with all the alterations, amendments, additions and new songs in 1674. He aimed to refine the tragedy to suit the tastes of Restoration audiences. He significantly expanded the role of Lady Macduff to create a balance between the Macduff's, who were supposed to be virtuous, and the murderous Macbeths. He cut most of the minor characters (most notably the Porter) and introduced music, dancing and spectacle. Davenant's adaptation replaced Shakespeare's Macbeth for 80 years!
This is why actors will never utter the name Macbeth in the theater; it’s very bad luck. Macbeth was a popular rewrite and the supernatural theme of the three witches much capitalized on. The play was presented with lavish pyrotechnics and effects, leading to unfortunate accidents among the players. Actors will only refer to him as the Scottish king when in a theater, for fear of summoning up evil spirits.
Bowderlising is quite a different issue, akin to censorship in the interests of “squeamishness” and unrelated to the wholesale rewriting of his plays. I can remember my mother filling in the dirty bits to the heavily edited middle school versions of his plays I was vested with.
Anyway, I consider it an entirely different topic
>The Tempest or the Enchanted Isle is an adaptation of The Tempest which was put together in 1667 by William Davenant and John Dryden. They cut two thirds of Shakespeare's original text and added new characters to achieve symmetry in the play: Miranda gained a sister, Dorinda, Ferdinand a rival, Hippoloto, Caliban a sister, Sycorax, and Ariel a companion named Milcha. This replaced Shakespeare's version until well into the 18th century. When Samuel Pepys saw it in 1667, he wrote in his diary, “No great wit; but yet good, above ordinary plays.”
What Voltaire might have seen I cannot say, but it would have been along these lines.
Shakespeare, as we know it,was reinvented in the 19th century.
EDIT: Shakespeare had been dead for 51 years when this revival of The Tempest premiered.
Who is Neil Simon? (Bonus points)
I am confident that my appreciation of Shakespeare is not tied to sophistication signaling. Here are 3 pieces of evidence supporting that: (1) I never talk about Shakespeare. I don’t think I have said or written one goddam word about him in the last 15 years. (2) There are many famous writers from the past that I have been unable to enjoy: Spencer, Melville & Wordsworth, for example — and I have always admitted to myself that I did not. I usually feel, regarding these writers, that I’m missing a great experience, but I do not feel any impulse to lie to myself or other people about the fact that these writers bore the hell out of me. (3) There are also plenty of other sophisticated things that I am unable to appreciate. I do not lie to myself or other people about being unable to taste the difference between cheap supermarket wine and really good wine; or being unable to enjoy jazz or symphonies at *all*.
I do not think that Shakespeare lovers believe that he was particularly gifted at constructing plots or inventing brand new fascinating characters. He used plots that were already around, and the characters were often already set by the plot. Shakespeare’s magic is his language. Much of it is mind-meltingly rich, imaginative and intense, managing to be beautiful in itself but also to efficiently convey the depth and complexity of the speaker’s experience, rather than being merely decorative. So you won’t think I’m bullshitting you, how about a little test? I’ll give you a situation, and ask you to produce the best bit of dialogue for it. Then we can compare your dialogue to Shakespeare’s?
OK, so there’s a scene in one play where one man puts out the eyes of a man he hates. In the productions I’ve seen he does it with his thumbs. Now this is a play, not a movie, so there’s no way to show a close-up or medium shot of the scene. Really subjecting the audience to that scene has to be done with dialogue. What can the character using his thumbs say that conveys to the audience both his satisfied rage, and the horrific squelchy reality of the act?
So really think it over
Try to come up with something intense
.
.
.
OK, here’s the line Shakespeare had the man say as he put out the other man’s eyes: “Out, vile jelly!”
That’s 99th percentile.
Shakespeare’s dialogue seems to sort of magically transform the borrowed plots and characters he relied on. When his versions of these characters speak, even in plays so full of murders and suicides that the story’s almost comic, you feel a deep and sometimes horrific understanding of their experience, and all that tawdry stuff is transformed. It’s straw into gold.
As for SBF’s point that it’s statistically unlikely that Shakespeare was one of history’s top writers, given that the number of people alive up til Shakespeare’s day is far smaller than number alive now — Well, first of all, writing isn’t the standing broad jump, you know? It makes sense to say that a certain writer is awesome, but I don’t see how you can directly compare writers of different era’s and cultures. I sort of doubt that the phrase “one of history’s top writers” really means anything. But let’s say it does. It’s probably true that since Shakespeare there have been quite a few people born with gifts as great as his or larger. But great artists have more than gifts. They are also fortunate in their eras. They live in an era when their gifts work well with the art forms of the day — when there is some support for the arts, and a public that nourishes them by taking a lively interest — when people are not engrossed in war or plague or the motherfucking internet . .. Shakespeare was lucky in those ways.
I am reading the book about SBF that that Shakespeare story comes from. One thing that comes through quite clearly about SBF is that he took to Bayesian reasoning like a duck to water. Another is that he was astoundingly lacking in common sense about other things that need to be taken into consideration in addition to Bayesian-wrought conclusions. Here’s an example: In the early days of his crypto exchange $4 million disappeared, and at the time the organization was small enough that that sum of money mattered. There was a case to be made that the someone had stolen the money, which I gather is relatively easy to do crypto without getting caught. But there was also also a case to be made that so many transactions went on that money sometimes arrived but didn’t get recorded. SBF said he was 80% sure the second is what had happened, and asked that the records reflect that they had 80% of that $4 million. So from the point of view of how to think of the company’s capital, thinking of it as being in possession of an extra $3200 may be a decent practical approach. But if you are telling investors, or really anyone outside the company, that that $3200 is definitely there, in the company’s possession, you are lying to them and can get in big trouble. SBF’s thinking about Shakespeare seems to have a similar flaw.
"SBF said he was 80% sure the second is what had happened, and asked that the records reflect that they had 80% of that $4 million."
And then a few years down the line at your big trial after it all went up in smoke, even if you genuinely meant that with all good intentions, you look like you're a fraudster lying through your teeth 🤦♀️
I can see why he'd prefer to think "oops, didn't keep track of all the transactions" rather than "somebody has their fingers in the till" because the entire operation was We're All Friends Here and they mostly came out of the EA/Rationality/associated community and the ostensible purpose of the concern was "get crazy rich, do crazy good". So the idea that one of the gang was stealing was just unthinkable. (Well, as the abuse scandal in my church shows, you have to think the unthinkable about "but these people would never do that" because oh yes they would).
But that's where you needed a few stodgy old guys in suits who would have insisted on putting proper accounting procedures in place, so this kind of thing doesn't happen, goshdarnit! A big part of the troubles that FTX brought upon itself was "all pals together" thinking instead of treating it like a business.
I agree with your read of FTX. These people were extremely naive and lacking in common sense. The EA people were quite smart, but most of them didn't know a thing about crypto, and many knew nothing about the world of trading and finance. And never was anyone less suited to running an organization that SBF. His people skills were terrible. He had lots of clever ideas and worked hard, but in an extremely disorganized, impulsive way. He was ignorant about relevant legal issues with crypto and with financial institutions in general, and about things like bookkeeping, and it's not clear that he even grasped that it's important to understand these things or hire somebody who does. Yeah, as you say he needed a few stodgy old guys on staff -- a lawyer and an accountant at the very least.
People can enjoy some delicious schadenfreude regarding the calamity he brought on himself and EA if they think of him as cocky and impressed with himself, but actually I don't think he was a narcissistic entitled young creep. He really was not playing with a full deck. His whole life he did not feel emotions, and in his late teens consciously trained himself to make various facial expressions that simulated them. He was not extraordinarily gifted at math or programming -- just a regular smart guy, by others' accounts and also his own. At math camps he attended he was just average. There was one thing, though, that he had an almost savant-like skill at: making judgment calls relying on Bayesian reasoning when there was no way to know for sure what the outcome was going to be, situations where you eventually won if you just managed to guess in the right direction more often than anyone else. And he knew all that. And he was chronically lonesome and unhappy. I think FTX looked to him like a chance to do something really good with the one thing he was awesome at.
I'm only partway through Lewis's book about him, and don't know whether as things unravelled he consciously chose to flat out lie to save himself, but so far I mostly feel sorry for him.
This is all armchair psychology but the entire milieu he lived in his whole life was one where being smart (and having impeccably liberal values*) was important and valued, and he was smart, and lived with and among and went to school with and worked with smart people, and then he gets a job making money from being smart (trading at Jane Street) and yeah that's great but... where is his heroic contribution to the world? Because that's what he's heard all his life, about making a huge change for the good because he's smart and privileged and all the rest of it.
And then he encounters EA and MacAskill and all the rest of it and falls headlong for it. Here's a key that will open every lock (Bayesianism)! And he can use his money making skills to make that heroic change to the world! And it's the Bay Area (loosely using that term) where it's all about 'move fast break things disrupt the status quo toss out the conventions boring old guys in suits just don't get it cool guys wear t-shirts and chinos' (think Elizabeth Holmes deliberately dressing like Steve Jobs) so of course doing it the traditional company way of having accountants and a board of directors and the rest of it was for the birds, they were inventing the FUTURE OF FINANCE TODAY.
That Sequoia profile, though it must have had them squirming in embarrassment due to the bad timing, is solid gold for mining a lot of the atmosphere of FTX/Alameda Research and the crazy levels of adulation that Bankman-Fried was swimming in. No wonder he thought, as the entire house of cards toppled down, that he could just talk his way out of it: mathematical-sounding bullshit had worked so well before to win him praise and money thrown at him:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221109025610/https:/www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/
And he probably did believe a good chunk of it, too. Again, more armchair psychology, but he does seem like the caricature of a nerd with few to no social skills or understanding of the world outside his interests, and caught up in that situation, he made the same mistake many others have done - it looks like you're going to lose your shirt, so you plunge even more on the 'sure thing' to win back big, and end up losing everything.
*See this plum from the Sequoia profile, which - for me as a pro-lifer - has me going "ow ow ow":
"SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number. One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith."
Gosh, wasn't it lucky that the things his family, friends, and entire circle believed turned out to be objectively correct and he could prove it by theory? Imagine if he had come to the opposite conclusion - he'd have been shredded, right?
I can't resist:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634143-100-bankman-fried-tops-nominative-determinism-parade-of-tech-entrepreneurs/
Alas, they let you read a few lines then there's a paywall
Actually, I think you've got him wrong. Except for his talent for making the right call where some things can be estimated via Bayes, and some things just cannot be known, he was a pretty disabled guy. I think using his talent to make money for EA (an organization that is Wonderfully Good according to the simple, sort of mathematical criteria SBF had to use for judging complex human enterprises and beliefs) struck him as one of the few things in the world that was a good fit for him. (And he wasn't even right about that, because he didn't take into account some pretty obvious things, like that running a company required people skills.)
I haven't read a thing so far that gives me the impression he was interested in fame and glory, and I think I have a pretty sharp eye for narcissism.
>And it's the Bay Area (loosely using that term) where it's all about 'move fast break things disrupt the status quo toss out the conventions boring old guys in suits just don't get it cool guys wear t-shirts and chinos.
I actually don't think it's true that he dressed to impress, Bay Area style. The guy was an idiot when it came to self-presentation. He didn't bathe for weeks at a time!
But anyhow, since we're talking about Bay Area tech bros and you're a fellow lover of Shakespeare, here's a fine piece of poetry GPT4 just wrote to my specifications about tech bros. It's some comfort to know that until we get turned into paperclips we will have works like these to nourish our souls.
In Silicon Valley, where palm trees sway,
Tech bros hustle, night and day.
Casual in hoodie, sneakers so neat,
Walking the future with untapped beat.
Laptops in coffee shops, codes on the go,
Innovation's rhythm, a constant flow.
With every startup, dreams grow large,
Tech bros steering, the future's barge.
They laugh, they code, they dare to dream,
In a world where bytes over matter seem.
With VR glasses and AI's hum,
They whisper, "Behold, the future has come."
So raise a toast to these men so cool,
Riding tech's wave, breaking every rule.
For in their hands, a digital gem,
The future's story, tech bros at the helm.
"They laugh, they code, they dare to dream" . . . Ah Deiseach, it's food for the soul.
As a follow-up to "dress to impress", another plum (from a Coinbase article):
"FTX’s marketing crew apparently sounded out Louis Vuitton about “creating a red-carpet worthy version of Sam’s T-shirt and cargo shorts look.”
This trial should be a great promotion of "crime doesn't pay" not so much because of the legal penalties, but that every tiny detail of your vanity, cupidity, ignorance, greed and general messy humanity is going to be revealed to the public. Truly, "what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops."
"I actually don't think it's true that he dressed to impress, Bay Area style. The guy was an idiot when it came to self-presentation. He didn't bathe for weeks at a time!"
People are, Jack Horner fashion, plucking plums out of the trial testimony so far, and whether Caroline is getting her revenge for him leaking her diary to the NYT or whether it's all troo, he allegedly did have an eye to his image:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/11/caroline-ellison-said-sbf-considered-raising-from-mbs-to-repay-ftx.html
"Bankman-Fried tried to cultivate an image of himself as a smart, eccentric founder and said he wanted FTX to be perceived as a safe, reliable, audited and highly regulated exchange with the allure of it being offshore, Ellison said. He used Twitter as a “very important” source to help control the narrative around FTX, she added.
Bankman-Fried’s personal look, particularly his hair, was also important to him. Ellison commented on how he dressed sloppily in 2022 and how he thought his hair was “very valuable” and key to the narrative. She said he swapped a nice company car for a Toyota Corolla because it was “better for his public image.”
https://www.pymnts.com/legal/2023/things-sam-is-freaking-out-about-probably-his-ex-girlfriends-testimony/
"As the CEO and figurehead of FTX, Bankman-Fried, Ellison testified, was well aware of his personal image and brand, and cultivated it to benefit both himself and FTX’s place within the crypto industry.
“[Bankman-Fried] didn’t comb his hair. He said it had gotten him bonuses at Jane Street and was important to FTX,” she told the jury, adding, “Sam said it was better for his image to drive a Toyota Corolla. So I drove a Honda.”
In a list Ellison maintained titled “Things Sam Is Freaking Out About,” which was entered for evidence, she listed “hedging” at the top, followed by “getting regulators to crack down on Binance,” a one-time FTX competitor and the world’s largest crypto exchange."
Slate seems to have remembered it's supposed to be a Serious Media Outlet and is giving the meat of the testimony, including allegations about massive bribes to Chinese officials:
https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/caroline-ellison-testimony-sbf-china-bribe-mbs.html
The cooked balance sheets are a very bad look for any defence of "M'lud, my client is no fraudster or swindler, just a bright nerd who was out of his depth". And my God, but Utilitarianism is getting a black eye out of all this:
"• Ellison told SBF that this move seemed dishonest, after which her ex-boyfriend explained to her his “utilitarian” outlook on the whole thing. TL;DR: Telling people not to lie or steal is not a workable strategy, and the “greater moral good” (in SBF’s case, the Future of Humanity) matters far more than the means used to get there. As such, Ellison said, “over time, [lying] became something I was more comfortable with.”
• Notably, this all sounds quite similar to how SBF’s mother, the legal scholar Barbara Fried, also approaches the utilitarian philosophy—i.e., that good ends tend to justify their means."
Melville? That’s harsh…
I don't think he's a bad writer -- I think I'm a bad reader of him. Like I lack a Melville receptor. Could NOT get through Moby Dick.
"Moby Dick" is a crazy novel. It's a play and a film script and a stirring tale of life at sea and a social commentary and a treatise on whales and whaling and an allegory and God knows what else all thrown together.
You think you're getting a story of a doomed whaling trip, you end up with a psychedelic ramble through Melville's mind. It's good fun once you stop expecting it to make any sense.
EDIT: I mean, it starts off with Melville I mean Ishmael doing the Emo Goth thing before it was even invented:
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. "
By Chapter Two, he's told he'll have to share a bed with a guy who is out trying to sell a shrunken human head, and who turns out to be a tattooed cannibal, and by Chapter Ten Ishmael and said cannibal are married:
"If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper firebrand. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."
It's good to know that Queequeg has proper morals and is determined to make an honest man of Ishmael, after their carry-on in Chapter Four:
"Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade — owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times — this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
...But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm —unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him—"Queequeg!"—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg! — in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him."
So, y'know, if you made it that far, you should know what you're in for 😀
Moby Dick is challenging so I get that. I don’t think I have ever read an unabridged version in its entirety myself.
Perhaps you should have a crack at Bartleby the Scrivener.
The greatest anything will be the guy who invented the tools that the people after them are using.
Assuming Shakespeare doesn't have a lot of subtlety in characters or plot (the commentary on The Tempest disagrees, but I also didn't much like The Tempest), as a counterpoint, which HBO drama has Shakespeare's depth or subtlety in rhythm and word choice? If you mute the show and just read the subtitles, how do you think it compares?
I think he has great subtlety with characters. The plots are largely rudimentary.
Shakespeare excelled at a particular type of writing that went out of fashion shortly after his death and hasn't come back. It's basically "plays as poetry" -- plays in which people declaim carefully-written speeches at each other rather than going for any kind of vaguely naturalistic dialogue.
Newer writers can definitely beat Shakespeare in many ways; better plots, better-drawn characters, definitely more _realistic_ dialogue. But nobody has written more poetic dialogue because nobody has really tried.
Is poetic dialogue better than realistic dialogue? No, but it's a more impressive use of the English language, and more memorable.
Similarly, all the good symphonies were written 100+ years ago, and all the good fugues were written 175+ years ago.
> plays in which people declaim carefully-written speeches at each other rather than going for any kind of vaguely naturalistic dialogue.
At its worst, I would agree with you. At its best. It is a wonderful melding of the two, like a song well sung. It has music, but at the same time you can hear someone speaking to you.
I am a big believer in the idea that a good ~70% of what people think they like about Shakespeare is jsut the consequence of people being told this is the height of English literature for generations. Its like the problem of god's goodness.
I don't find the stuff particularly amazing except in the context of its time and its historical import. A lot of them are basically jsut soap operas and would pass 100% without notice or interest if somehow magically released today in some alternate universe where they didn't exist.
People generally hate this viewpoint and insist Shakespeare is just amazing, but I really think they have a hard time getting into an abstract enough headspace to actually think about how Shakespeare would be received without the couple hundred years of Shakespeare worship.
That is not to say the plays are bad or anything, I just don't find them particularly exceptional, and certainly nowhere near deserving of their reputation if shorn of context.
Deadwood is written with the same kind of attention paid to language and characterization, and it's the best TV show ever written. Deadwood is Shakespeare without Shakespeare, and it's simply the best.
When someone quotes to you their favorite Shakespeare lines, with all the glee they feel when they recite them, do you think they're, what? Lying to appear smarter? Confused?
Shakespeare is pretty popular in non-Anglophone countries, right? Or at least in some of them. I doubt that's because people in Italy or wherever are being indoctrinated into pro-Shakespeareanism.
> I am a big believer in the idea that a good ~70% of what people think they like about Shakespeare
I’m sorry, but do you mean you are a big believer in your ability to climb inside a lot of other people’s brains?
What is your take on people liking music you don’t like?
> they have a hard time getting into an abstract enough headspace to actually think about how Shakespeare would be received without the couple hundred years of Shakespeare worship
Perhaps they find it hard because it’s a rather pointless question, but maybe my head space is not sufficiently abstract. I prefer to struggle with the question of whether George Washington would be famous without the American Revolution. It’s such a fascinating inquiry.
> I prefer to struggle with the question of whether George Washington would be famous without the American Revolution. It’s such a fascinating inquiry.
You've got me curious. It seems obvious to me that he wouldn't be famous without the thing that made him famous. What's the argument for the other side?
Precisely. A very good question. The answer is there isn’t.
His plays are like operas; the plots are serviceable but you are there for the music,. GB Shaw wrote very well on this subject.
If a phrase like “‘Aroint thee Witch!’ the rump-fed runyon cried.” doesn’t tickle you then there’s no point. I understand not liking his writing, but I don’t understand thinking everyone who does is just faking it.
May I ask for an explanation of “‘Aroint thee Witch!’ the rump-fed runyon cried.”? Is it the alliteration (aroint, rump, runyon) that's amusing? The iambic meter?
Sure. It is the alliteration and the meter combined. Aroint is such a lovely word to say, especially if you are being dismissive with it, try it. AhhROINT!
It’s from the opening scene in Macbeth, when the three witches are meeting upon the Heath. One of the witches tells how she tried to beg a chestnut from a sailor’s wife. And the sailor’s wife tells her to get lost.
And then there’s the imagery of rump-fed. ( Compare rump-fed to fat ass. ) I get the sense of a part of one’s body that eats on its own when you’re not looking. It makes me laugh.
I did not really single this one out specifically for any other reason than it came to my memory quickly.
Of course there’s the well-known one,
now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
This one depends a lot on how the vowels were pronounced in the 16th century; an English person from Devon would have a somewhat appropriate accent to get at it. Lowered, cloud, and house would basically rhyme. The punning, the simile and extended metaphor and the rhythm. I find it all great fun.
Thanks you for the excellent explanation!
It seems like there is a chicken and egg problem here. I don't think I've ever heard the words "aroint" or "runyon" outside of Shakespeare, nor is there any reason I'd know the 16th century pronunciation of words. So it seems without learning Shakespearean English, I'll miss out on enjoying his wordsmithing, but if I don't enjoy his prose, there isn't any incentive to learn Shakespearean English.
Yeah, it does require some up front investment. I am sure it will come easier to some people than others.
Or "The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon".
And even if he didn't invent the "yo mama" joke, and Titus Andronicus is hack work in the then-popular hack'n'slash genre which he wrote for money in a hurry, this exchange is still funny to us now and we'll laugh at it just like the people back then:
"CHIRON
Thou hast undone our mother.
AARON
Villain, I have done thy mother."
And a little further down the page, here's Aaron the Moor's speech while defending his baby:
"DEMETRIUS
I'll broach the tadpole on my rapier's point:
Nurse, give it me; my sword shall soon dispatch it.
AARON
Sooner this sword shall plough thy bowels up.
(Takes the Child from the Nurse, and draws)
Stay, murderous villains! will you kill your brother?
Now, by the burning tapers of the sky,
That shone so brightly when this boy was got,
He dies upon my scimitar's sharp point
That touches this my first-born son and heir!
I tell you, younglings, not Enceladus,
With all his threatening band of Typhon's brood,
Nor great Alcides, nor the god of war,
Shall seize this prey out of his father's hands.
What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!
Ye white-limed walls! ye alehouse painted signs!
Coal-black is better than another hue,
In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood.
Tell the empress from me, I am of age
To keep mine own, excuse it how she can."
There is a a big difference between “faking it”, and living in a culture where it is the model/archetype of good literature for 400+ years. I don’t think people are faking it. I think they don’t see it with very clear eyes.
It is exactly the same accusation, with a dollop of presumptive intellectual superiority. It also sounds as though you’re living in a very small subset of the culture I am familiar with.
"faking it", and "immersed in a model where the thing being discussed has formed the very framework of what is considered good and is thus good more by definition than merit" are most definitely not "the same accusation".
And you inability to see that is pretty much my exact point, so thanks.
QED.
I guess the only distinction that comes to my mind right now is which one of those two things you are doing. Are you being intentionally obtuse because you love to have pointless arguments or have you been so shaped by your circumstance, that you truly believe you have this kind of insight into the world. It’s a tough call.
"A lot of them are basically just soap operas"/ "If Hamlet came out today it would be the hit play of the decade?"
This sounds as though you are mainly reading the plays for plot? If so, I'm not surprised you're unimpressed: the plots are mostly good but not great, fairly conventional for the era with big chunks of storyline copied from elsewhere. Shakespeare shines in his depth of characterization and the incredible richness and joy of his language. Folks who aren't good readers, or who don't particularly appreciate language in general, are not going to be in a great position to appreciate what all the historical buzz was about.
There was the Peter Greenaway version of The Tempest, "Prospero's Books" and it's definitely more Greenaway than Shakespeare, but when the original play is allowed to speak, Gielgud makes a good job of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z77y_-zLpd8&list=PL1Wiw-VM34MaEaZ9wdpZOb2Tylsm9EpR9
I think people are either entranced by the language, or not. If they are they get it.
Yes. It's easier to be a big fish in a little pond. Then the pond gets bigger, and all the fish still tell tales of that one fish who was so big he was literally a third the entire length of the pond.
Shakespeare isn't even the best example of this. Consider, if you will, history's favorite ugly painting: The Mona Lisa.
Jeez, Martin, do you think you, too, are unable to distinguish between things you genuinely love and things conventional wisdom or the culture vultures say that you should love or at least pretend to love? Or is it only all those Other People — you know, all the dumb stoopit people who aren’t you and aren’t able to get into an abstract headspace and contemplate the effect of 200 years of “Shakespeare worship”?
Honest response...say Shakespeare somehow only made comedies and the tragedies were released today but an up and coming playwright, or in 1950. Does anyone notice/care? Or the reverse.
People just seem to be unable to even grok the question, you get lots of nonsense responses.
I am not claiming Shakespeare is without merit, and the plays certainly are historically and culturally super important. But whether they are "good" outside that historical happenstance is an interesting question, and one most people don't seem to answer in a way to displays much actual consideration of the question.
They have literally centuries of pedagogy and archetyping propping them up.
"Absolutely if Hamlet came out today it would be the hit play of the decade". Really? You really believe that?
>do you think you, too, are unable to distinguish between things you genuinely love and things conventional wisdom or the culture vultures say that you should love or at least pretend to love?
Yeah the whole point of my post is that it is very hard to do and that I have a hard time disentangling that question. But most people seem to not even be able to get into the headspace of the question. Sorry if you find that offensive or something.
Most people are not very abstract thinkers, I would think you would be aware of that.
I think it's impossible to tell. If Romeo and Juliet hadn't been known, would there have been a West Side Story?
I have a friend who before I had ever met him had read and enjoyed The Sword of Shannara. Eventually he was persuaded to read The Lord of the Rings, and, though he knew better intellectually, had the distinct impression Tolkien almost plagiarized Terry Brooks.
If Shakespeare's works, in some alternative history, didn't exist, what else wouldn't exist? Probably an awful lot.
You have a point; see Marlowe versus Shakespeare. Some maintain Marlowe is a better writer/more original, but he's not the superstar Shakespeare is. And Shakespeare's work was in decline for a long time, until popularised again.
So why him and not another? is a reasonable question to ask. But all I can do is point to the language, because it's meant to be spoken and is full of beauty and richness. Marlowe is sometimes a little *too* enamoured of his own wit in invention, see this quote from his poem "Hero and Leander" which gives me the unfortunate mental image of Hero going "splish, splosh" as she walks due to her water boots:
"Buskins of shells, all silver'd, used she,
And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee;
Where sparrows perch'd, of hollow pearl and gold,
Such as the world would wonder to behold:
Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,
Which as she went, would chirrup through the bills."
And sometimes for the sake of the rhyme, it dips into the bathetic:
"Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops' shoulder: I could tell ye,
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly"
The "meat/neck/Pelops" metaphor is striking and clever (after all, Pelops had an ivory shoulder because his original one was eaten, thus literally meat*) but the "tell ye/belly" rhyme? Not so good, Kit!
*"Pelops' father was Tantalus, king at Mount Sipylus in Anatolia. Wanting to make an offering to the Olympians, Tantalus cut Pelops into pieces and made his flesh into a stew, then served it to the gods. Demeter, deep in grief after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, absentmindedly accepted the offering and ate the left shoulder. The other gods sensed the plot, however, and held off from eating of the boy's body. While Tantalus was banished to Tartarus, Pelops was ritually reassembled and brought back to life, his shoulder replaced with one of ivory made for him by Hephaestus."
Plenty of people here are pretty good abstract thinkers, and this question seems to be getting a lot of pro-Shakespeare responses from them and not much support for the view that the truly wise and realistic realize that Shakespeare is not that special, we're just socialized to think he is. There certainly is such a thing as people believing Shakespeare (or somebody) is great because they've been taught they are supposed to think that. I'm familiar with the syndrome. But you know what? Even most of those people aren't jackassy in the way you portray them as being. If you asked them how popular Hamlet would be if it opened now, very few of them would insist it would be the hit play of the decade. They'd continue to maintain it is a Great Play, but would acknowledge that the language is hard to follow, and probably also that people seem to like movies better now, and that modern people tend to prefer fewer words and more explicit sex, etc. Or maybe they will say they loved the movie version of one of the plays, which kind of sidesteps your question. Or some would say something like, "well, that's what everybody seems to think."
I love Shakespeare and I don't give a fat fuck whether that impresses people. And there are plenty of things that many think are great that I can neither comprehend or enjoy. Generally, in that situation, I think the reason I cannot enjoy the thing is that I have not found the door in. I lack the right background, or a certain part of my mind is not tuned in a way that allows me to appreciate them. I think you should allow for the possibility that that is your problem with Shakespeare.
I dunno, when I was in my teens and hearing all about how Shakespeare was a Great Writer and So Poetic, I took up "Hamlet" with a certain sinking feeling because my association with Great Poetry in school up to that date had not been one of ease and pleasure, so I expected to have to struggle through a thicket of obscure text (even if it was in modern English because it was a school edition).
After reading it, I had bells in my head.
The words struck against each other and chimed like music. "Hey, they're right, this guy *is* Great!" was my take away from that.
Virginia Woolf, in her diary, wrote about how after a morning's writing she would read a bit of Shakespeare, "while my mind is white-hot and agape," and how when she first started with the passage she'd have a feeling of keeping up with him -- something like, "yes, I might have come up with a phrase like that" -- but that soon he'd pull ahead of her, leaving her behind in his dust, marveling at the vastness of his gift.
Shakespeare's language and wordplay, when at their best (there is unavoidable dross by dint of sheer quantity), are still peerless. I won't claim total freedom from the prestige/signalling aspect, but I'm not a native speaker and I haven't been raised in an environment where Shakespeare is more culturally relevant than, say, Molière - and the statement is still true for me.
(There's a bunch of definitional arguments people have been making, which I agree with, too: what's a writer, what's good writing, etc. Shakespeare was a poet and playwright, not a novelist, a fact Martin Amis justifiably called a great cosmic joke.)
But the thing is, there's enough order-of-magnitude space in the population stats argument (very small percentage of, say, 200m English speakers writing in 1850 vs much larger chunk of 1-2bn in 20th c.) to make a similar claim for much of the pre-20th century English canon, at which point it becomes obvious how absurd the claim is. When it is followed up by "and therefore you're doing it wrong for revering Shakespeare", as such smug math-based claims about aesthetics and morality sometimes are, one can be forgiven for getting into a bit of a hand-spitting, flag-raising mood.
>there's enough order-of-magnitude space in the population stats argument (very small percentage of, say, 200m English speakers writing in 1850 vs much larger chunk of 1-2bn in 20th c.) to make a similar claim for much of the pre-20th century English canon, at which point it becomes obvious how absurd the claim is.
Actually, you can do the same thing about scientists: Come on, stop gushing about Newton. [or whatever person who took math or physics & chemistry to a new level]. What are the chances he was smarter than anybody alive right this minute? Why, he might not even have been smarter than MEEEEEEEE!
In a couple of ways, it is harder to judge scientists of different eras:
a) There is low-hanging fruit that can only be picked once. Inverse square gravity can only be discovered once. Calculus can only be discovered (Newton & Leibnitz - not picking who has priority) once.
b) More recent work is almost always more complex and harder to understand (and therefore hard to compare to earlier work). I'm aware that what Terence Tao has proven is very impressive, but it is way beyond what I can grasp.
It might be that no one can tell whether Tao or Newton was smarter.
Exactly. Was going to mention newton in this. There’s far more scientists alive now than then, it is said that we have more scientists alive now than all the scientists who ever lived before, but we don’t revere newton because he was great amongst his peers but amongst the greatest ever.
I think if someone are claiming Shakespeare as the greatest writer, it is more based on his language than his plots and characters. Arguably some of his plays having bad plots. Much Ado About Nothing for example.
And it's pretty subjective if you like his language or not. But Shakespeare did have an unusually high vocabulary. And he invented several words.
> And he invented several words.
For several words, he is the first person known to have used the word. That doesn't necessarily mean he invented them.
It’s the most likely explanation though, particularly when he also creates words never used again.
I’m trying to think of a word that isn’t truE of.
Scrumtrilescent. https://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00pactors.phtml
The question isn't "are there more writers of English literature now then there were in the 16th century" but rather "are there more writers of English literature alive today compared to all the writers of English literature in history who are dead." Shakespeare is, by his proponents, not considered the greatest writer of the 16th century but the greatest writer of English literature ever. That stretches back at least to Chaucer in the 14th century. So, out of a pool of 500+ years worth of English authors, is Shakespeare the best? Is that pool larger or smaller than English authors living today?
In other words, if there are more English authors who are dead than alive, then we would expect the greatest author of English literature to be dead. And if dead, then why not from the 16th century? He has to have come from somewhere.
> Shakespeare is, by his proponents, not considered the greatest writer of the 16th century but the greatest writer of English literature ever.
Forgive me, but I really don’t think this is true. I know there’s some. I have spent a lot of time in the theatre, I am the product of a British-style boarding school education; Shakespeare and his proponents have been part of my life for a long time. He is considered best in class (plays written largely in verse) by a country mile, but the idea of a “best writer in English ever” is an absurd one, isn’t it?
I saw something about it, it seems to be based on an excerpt from the new book out about him. So it's hard to judge without reading the entire thing from which this nugget was lifted.
And there certainly can be overblown claims: the greatest writer of all time? No. One of the tip top greats of English literature? Yes.
But it sounds like the judgement of someone who doesn't like to read (which seems to be the gist of that part of the book) and who places overmuch reliance in "I'm good at maths, that means maths is the solution to every problem".
The whole Bayesian thing about "more people are alive now than in the 16th century so is it likely the greatest writer was born then and not now" sounds impressive on a shallow level, but it's a terrible way to judge works of art. He doesn't seem to understand or appreciate books, and that's fine for him, but snap judgements about "I can prove via an equation that Shakespeare is not all that" is a very immature way to look at the world.
Besides, George Bernard Shaw got there first with criticism of "Bardolatry" and that Shakespeare was not that great (a view he revisited over his long career):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakes_versus_Shav
"Shakes versus Shav (1949) is a puppet play written by George Bernard Shaw. It was Shaw's last completed dramatic work. The play runs for 10 minutes in performance and comprises a comic argument between Shaw and Shakespeare, with the two playwrights bickering about who is the better writer as a form of intellectual equivalent of Punch and Judy."
Shaw once said Shakespeare enraged him so much he wanted to dig him up and throw stones at him.
Shaw admired, and even praised Shakespeare’s gift for language though.
If you want the whole thing, well, as was said in a really old book (and therefore my Bayesian prior is that it sucks beyond belief) ask and ye shall receive. He goes beyond Shaw into full Tolstoy territory and calls Shakespeare shitty. I take his points on the plots, but the man wrote some damn beautiful poetry. https://measuringshadowsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-fetishization-of-old.html?fbclid=IwAR0CQVD6btegTVw56otT4Puzdsxvmlx_igELKiktos9Fbf8iPbZQ8nusIjg
Everybody agrees his plots are ridiculous. But when he writes a speech for a character who was living through one of those plots -- all the disguises and murders and suicides and betrayals, etc. -- the speech is not ridiculous. You lose your difficulty suspending disbelief, because no matter how silly the plot, the characters' dialogue about their thoughts and feelings about the events carries you away.
Here’s one for all the psychologists out there:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.
Lately I have been reading and writing about the history of psychedelics in the last 60 years and one of the discoveries I made is that the leading figures in the field rarely have any idea about the practicalities of politics and regulation. Rick Doblin and MAPS is the obvious exception, but it seems like most researches/thinkers only engage with regulators in the form of commentary and the occasional open later. While it's important to voice your opinion, policy will be created by politicians, most of who would never read those open letters. I wonder how much this applies to AI as well. I've heard the occasional comment from those in the know that MIRI and LessWrong have a notoriously bad grasp on the practicality of politics, and if that's true it would point to the same pattern
Seems to me that the important thing to grasp is the astounding sums of money AI stands to make. It’s going to be sort of like, I dunno, maybe the oil industry. Or maybe it already is. Given that, closely-reasoned, hard-to-understand arguments about how it’s going to fuck us up or kill is are about as effective as picketing bars with “booze is bad for your health” signs. The only real world things I can think of that might slow down or stop AI development are
(1) making a big slice of the public as angry and scared about AI as they are about Covid vax and masking. (2) Some catastrophe where AI-gone-wrong is clearly responsible. (3) organizations with access to billions doing ad campaigns, lobbying, etc.
There is a lot of money already pouring into AI and it seems that people like Sam Altman are doing a good job of putting themselves as close to the regulators as possible, which brings the obvious benefit of being able to steer the process in a desirable (by them) direction.
In the wake of the recent attacks in Israel, I was thinking about whether I hug my wife enough - this led to the question of how much time, in total, I had spent embracing her. Clearly, there were things I had spent more time on - I commute to work, so I'd wager I'd spent more time in a car than hugging my wife. Likewise, the time spent on the Internet clearly beats time spent in someone else's arms.
How about time on an airplane? Over the course of your life, and over the course of the average American's life, do you think they spend more time hugging people or more time on an airplane?
(I'm not going to count time spent sleeping in someone else's arms, which probably cuts out most hugs given in infancy. Though I will count time sleeping on a plane, which might be a double standard).
You don't count cuddling while asleep. Do you count cuddling while awake? That may make a big difference. Thinking back to my romantic relationships, I never hugged my partner much as such, but we would spend at least some time every day cuddling on the couch or whatnot.
So to do some back of the envelope estimation with a lot of assumptions. According to Frivolous Studies researchers, the average hug is 3.2 seconds.* Just from counting it out that seems reasonable to me so I'm sticking with it. A six hour flight, then, is the time equivalent of 6,750 hugs. If you live to the American life expectancy of 76, that works out to 89 hugs/year. So offsetting six hours on a plane requires an average of 1.7 Standard Length and Snugness (SLS) hugs per week for your entire life.
In my own life I think it's pretty reasonable to estimate that I spend about 6 hours per year on a plane on average. So sticking with that 76 year assumption I will spend 456 hours on airplanes in my life. In order to equal that time, I will need to average out to 130 hugs at SLS every week for my entire life. I'm probably behind so far. There were times when I was in a relationship where I've probably matched that pace, but there have also been times as a single adult where I've gone months without receiving a single hug.
Using this framework, at 5 hours a month on a plane, Martin isn't even close to keeping pace even hugging his family 50+ times a day. We've been working within the spherical cow SLS regime, but a lot also depends on how you define a "hug". Is a baby being held being hugged? How about a toddler on his parents lap? Does the Christian Side Hug** count? If so, how about putting your arm around someone for a picture? So much more research to be done in this field.
* https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10164-010-0260-y
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa0EtdtPi8w
I'm counting cuddling while awake. Any kind of romantic but not overtly physical contact with your partner (e.g. contact that you wouldn't normally do to strangers) is what I'm after.
Maybe I should have phrased it as "Have I spent more time in contact with my partner, or in contact with an airline seat?"
I'm thinking that airline seat is likely to win, but it was the first comparison where I didn't have an immediate answer. I appreciate your analysis.
I'm thinking with that definition it should be a couple of hours a day just from walking (holding hands) and watching TV together, which I would hope is considerably more time than people spend commuting or flying.
Haha no problem. But as I said counting cuddling does change things. That 130 hugs a week is only 7 minutes of contact.
I for sure spend more time hugging my wife than she would like strictly speaking. Even when not in bed I bet I hug her 50 times a day? It helps that we work together.
I probably also hug each of my kids a couple times a day at least.
There are diminishing returns on physical contact like anything.
Reported for assault 😉
How much time do you spend on airplanes?
A lot more before 2019. Back then maybe 20 hours a month. Now maybe 5 hours a month.
I am not sure your point?
I'm just trying to find an analogy for how much time I spend hugging/in contact with my partner.
Obviously I spend more time driving than hugging. Conversely, I rarely travel by train, so hugs probably win. Airplane transit was the big question mark.
I travel by airplane infrequently but the flights are pretty long. In contrast, I hug my wife constantly, but the hugs are pretty short. So I wasn't sure which would win if one were to add up the time spent on each and compare.
"...and remember to hump the flight attendant before taking your seat. Thank you for flying Happy Ending Airlines, where passengers come first."
A few words on the situation in Israel.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
I recently read about Storybook Brawl, and as a former Magic player, the fact that all SB abilities are written in the first person (e.g. "I don't take damage when attacking") is very jarring. I'm curious why the developers decided to write it that way. Is it just to save space on the card over saying "this character" or whatever? I'm curious if the developers ever wrote publicly about design decisions like that.
I also found this jarring when I started seeing it in games, but on reflection, I think this is more natural and the only reason we think otherwise is because Magic did it wrong first and everyone copied them.
Consider, if you will, a card that stays gives you two life at the end of each turn. Magic would write this as "At the end of each turn, you gain two life". But when you play the card, and would like to communicate to the other players at the table, what do you say? If you literally read the card with the "you", you'll be saying the wrong thing. So usually you'll either paraphrase it with "This card gives me two life at the end of each turn" or you'll use indirection and say "The card text is 'At the end of each turn, you gain two life.'"
This new style, though, would be "At the end of each turn, I gain two life", and I can just play the card and literally read it to my opponents without paraphrasing to make a true statement about what the card does. I'm growing to like it.
I think the way Magic does it is more natural, because the card's author is speaking to the player through the card. So the player is "you", and "I" doesn't come up because the author isn't part of the game.
In the new style, "I" refers to the card, not the player, so that is still incorrect.
I'm not very familiar with MTG, but this type of description has become quite common in indie TTRPGs over the last couple of decades. I look at it as a way to get players invested in the game and the mechanics (and their character, for RPGs).
SBB aimed to be more accessible in its design than other autobattlers, let alone CCGs like MtG, That includes less complex abilities and greater emphasis on flavor over mechanics, also the whole fairytale setting. Abilities were never so complex or interactive as to warrant anywhere near MtG level of precision.
I've just finished reading Eat Like the Animals (Raubenheimer and Simpson), which posits that the global obesity rate increase is due to a concept called Protein Leverage (the modern ultra-processed diet is too low in protein, and humans tend to eat until protein requirements are met, hence everyone tends to overeat).
While it sounds plausible, I find it too convenient (really? Studies done on locust, mice, and primates all agree?). Can anyone help me find any evidence against the protein leverage hypothesis? Almost everything about this is published by the two authors who wrote the book, or people collaborating with them, finding very positive results.
You can find this effect with a wide variety of nutrients, not just protein.
The nutrient with the largest such effect, if I understand the research correctly, is potassium.
Thank you! That's exactly what I was after. It sounds like a more general principle is, most animals including humans will overeat to meet requirements of certain scarce nutrients. Protein is one such nutrient, which is metabolically expensive to produce and hence generally scarce in nature, but other scarce nutrients can also trigger the effect.
The same book also claims that there's no such thing as a micronutrient appetite, which I am doubtful of.
https://optimisingnutrition.com/minerals-hunger-and-satiety/ has some information on the effects of various nutrients on satiety; not certain if it is actually reliable information, but it tracks with other information I've encountered.
Americans eat a lot of meat, but we're still fat.
I did a bit more digging - https://data.oecd.org/agroutput/meat-consumption.htm
Meat is measured in carcass weight. It's fine if you're comparing between countries as long as the countries use the same breeds of animal and more or less the same farming practices. I'm a bit more unsure if the comparison is still valid across time - feedlot farmed cattle is a lot more % fat than % protein, and I believe the % of cattle that is raised feedlot has increased in the last century. Measuring in carcass weight consumption also might mask how much meat actually ends up on human plates (organ meats usually end up in pet food in the west, but e.g the Chinese and Vietnamese use organ meats in specific dishes, so the amount of each carcass that ends up on a human plate could differ between countries). Also, come to think about it, if there's a larger proportion of family owned livestock in certain countries, it's possible that they get missed in official counts comparing between countries because the meat is never sold on a market. Not to mention meat from recreational fishing and hunting that don't get sold!
So, I think protein intake from meat consumption might be overcounted for urban populations (supply chain and home wastage, not being able to efficiently extract protein from less meaty bits, pet food, etc) but undercounted for rural areas (livestock, fishing and hunting that doesn't get marketed). It might balance out in the US (lots of hobby hunting and fishing to my understanding), but might be off in many other countries.
I have some very nitpicky things to argue:
Per the model, the specific nature of the meat matters. 60g of cooked steak is not equivalent to 60g of cooked McDonald's hamburger patty, because the latter includes breadcrumbs, is higher in fats, etc to improve palatability and to reduce cost.
I'm also curious about how meat consumption is measured - is it by number of animals slaughtered? But then, how do you know that they're actually being eaten? Is it by total kg of meat product sold? But the cut and nature of the meat matters - is it bone in lamb rack or whole turkey or meatballs that are 40% by weight breadcrumbs and seasoning?
I suspect the much touted statistic is from animals slaughtered, but I think Americans/other western nations are often are more wasteful with the undesirable bits (feet, gizzards, organ meats, bones) that in another market, butchers can often find customers for - e.g it's very easy for a butcher in Hong Kong to sell chicken feet.
The problem is most claims don't tend to specify what exactly are they measuring, and meat product vs meat makes an enormous difference in how much effective dietary protein there is.
The more you know, the more horrible the meat industry looks.
As a kid I was sad that animals are killed. As an adult I was sad that animals are tortured all their lives. Now I am sad that most the meat obtained this cruel way is just thrown away.
If you excuse all the horrors by the need to eat meat, then at least fucking eat it!
I mean, it's not entirely wasted. Usually turned into blood and bone fertiliser. That's just not exactly directly consumed by humans, though.
Sort of seems like this would imply that a keto diet would be a slam-dunk winner, rather than (as I gather) just another of the vast array of diets each of which works great for some people and not at all for others.
The explanation posited in this book is that keto dieters aren't locked in a plastic box like the locusts in the experiment, who only have one available source of food and can't sneak off to buy snacks. Most artificial diets trying to deviate from specific ratios that a living thing's appetite is trying to achieve have very poor compliance if the dieter or animal isn't locked in an isolated cage. Locusts on low protein diets for example will eat other locusts when they're starved of proteins, which is why each bug needs its own box.
Appetite is a drive that trumps pretty much any other drive, and I think the evidence is if you try to break your appetite drive, your outcomes are generally very poor (eating disorders)
Fair enough. I’d still expect keto to be noticeably better than the rest, but I can’t say for sure it isn’t. Thegnskald’s comment is probably more relevant.
I was recently reading through the Wikipedia page for Hamas and I realised something: the more controversial a topic is the more trust I give to Wikipedia to portray it accurately, but also the less trust I place on traditional media sources, with these two variables acting independently.
Non-traditional media sources, like blogs, are a crapshoot; you'll find the best stuff there but also the worst, and there are no shortcuts to figuring out which is which.
You probably shouldn't trust Wikipedia that much on controversial topics-- it's still the result of people arguing and coming up with one version.
But you can see the arguments. Don't trust Wikipedia at all on controversial topics, until you've read that article's "talk" page. Then you'll have a better feel for what's controversial, what's consensus, and how much Wikipedia should be trusted in this case.
Then go click on the links to Wikipedia's primary sources. And to other related Wikipedia articles, which may be written and edited by completely different people.
You shouldn't trust Wikipedia a lot on controversial topics. They get way more donation money than they actually need to run, and put most of it into the Wikimedia Foundation, a blatantly leftist group that keeps funding racial and sexual "social justice causes". (Yes, this means it's lying about the money going to wikipedia maintenance)
Yes, I'm aware of that and also disagree with how the money is being spent. I don't think that effects the trustworthiness of articles at all. I edit wiki articles from time to time myself and have a decent understanding of the process.
As a reader, too, it appears to me to have been much more openly taking sides on controversial issues since the mid-2010's. Typical examples are passages like "A falsely claimed X" that would have earlier just described what various people were saying, and other evidence, and let the reader decide for himself; and the "Disinformation" sections in just about every page about a controversial event.
This is really interesting! I had the opposite impression. I got up to about 3K edits on the English Wikipedia by around 2006, so I was an extremely early adopter. By 2012 or so it was obvious to me that the NPOV median setpoint had moved considerably to the left and WP was roughly as biased as the NYT. By 2016 I considered Wikipedia to be just another mouthpiece of the progressive left. By 2020 I found Wikipedia to be uniquely bad at even maintaining a pretence of neutrality and was now explicitly an advocacy propaganda outlet for the left; it wasn't even pretending to be neutral anymore.
I am genuinely surprised that someone who edits wikipedia and is familiar with its culture, while also hanging out on SSC, disagrees with me.
Do you remember, for instance, the [worker ant] arbitration committee case? For me, that was a big turning point... it was the first time I'd seen arbcom members explicitly declare an intention to censor true information because of the potential political impact of that information. I remember reading official, on-the-record statements from the arbcom about how if wikipedia included an article on the notion of 'access media' it was essentially surrendering to the conservative altright nutjobs. I made a comment that this would be the equivalent of saying that allowing an article on vanguardism = giving into communist nut jobs, even if the article only described the actual theory without any advocacy; in response, I got banned for 8 weeks and forbidden to ever engage with anyone on their User_talk: page ever again.
After that, I started voting in Arbcom elections as a neutrality single-issue voter. I voted for people who avoided editing politically sensitive topics, and against anyone who was *only* active in politics regardless of their bias. This seemed like an eminently sensible voting strategy to me (especially because, you know, it wasn't real voting and the standard of victory was 'consensus' not counting). I was eventually banned from voting on Arbcom elections, with the reason given that I was a 'known conservative troll'. When I pointed to instances where I had voted against conservative candidates with the exact same comment, "this user seems to only ever edit politically sensitive articles, and only ever to make them more aligned with the user's political bias, therefore i vote Oppose", i was given one of those permanent administration bans that prevents you from editing anything on the WP: namespace, so you can never engage in internal wikimedia politics again.
Since that happened, my understanding is that Wikipedia has only pushed further to the left. I heard from someone (haven't confirmed) that they added Fox to the 'untrusted sources' list? It very much seems like they have been infected with the same process that has infected most supposedly neutral spaces, where any amount of conservative presence at all is treated as evidence of conservative bias... the process Scott describes in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
Now I only trust Wikipedia on starkly apolitical topics like computer science or math history
I'm curious if you could explain your own experience, the events that lead you to trust Wikipedia as a neutral Source on political issues? Because it must be a very different kind of experience from mine
What's the [worker ant] arbitration committee case?
Any other examples (links if you can) of Wikipedia censoring true information?
I think it's a pun on the word Gamergate.
Wow, thanks, I would have never guessed.
Wow, that's significantly worse than i would have expected.
I note that "fox (politics)" is red, and "fox (excluding politics)" is yellow
while "huffington post (politics)" is yellow, and "huffington post (excluding politics)" is green
i think that pretty much sums up my point
Do you have a source for how the Wikimedia Foundation spends its money?
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
Wish I could point ya to the twitter thread I put up some months ago but after 18 months on twitter I concluded that there really is no there, there, and nuked the whole goddamn thing.
Anyway, Andrew's right. They really do (or at least were) using Wikipedia to raise money for organizations that promote some really radical stuff.
It depends. It has to be controversial *among people who edit Wikipedia*, which is not necessarily an unbiased definition of “controversial”.
That's a good point.
I recently read a brilliant short story called The Nose, by Gogol. Analyzing it, Syracuse university professor George Saunders (in his book "A swim by the pond in the rain", in which he analyzes great Russian short stories) introduces the "skaz" tradition in Russian literature.
A familiar example of this, is Sascha Baron Cohen doing Borat.
Saunders explains this tradition :
Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully. It’s like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, “correct” viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.
Is there any conceivable way in which the Hamas attack leads to things getting better for the people of Gaza?
The answer strikes me as a resounding "no", even if you think Israel are evil. Which means either the people aroudn the world celebrating the attack are too foolish to understand this, or they're literally just celebrating that people they hate were killed, even if this means the people they support will pay for that many times over.
Hamas starts a chain reaction where all Muslim countries unite against Israel, and with Allah's help, they successfully expel or kill all the Jews in Israel and liberate Palestine.
Note, I do not consider this option conceivable, Israel is too powerful. However, I voice it because I know some Muslims that believe this, and that's why they are celebrating it. Many Muslims truly believe they will win in the end, and it is important to recognize that as a motive for the attack.
Lebanon is bombing Israel, The Iron Dome is blocking it.
Let me also clarify, that I think this would be a very bad outcome, and support Israel, I'm just trying to shine light on Palestinians' thinking.
Hamas main goals are destroying Israel and helping Iran.
"Things getting better for the people of Gaza" is far down the list.
If Israel wipes out Hamas then the people of Gaza won’t have to live under Hamas anymore...
Similarly if Israel does end up pushing the people of Gaza into Egypt, living under the Egyptian government is probably better than living under Hamas's rule in a besieged Gaza strip.
It fits their overall strategic goals. So the idea is that things will get better after they win. And this is pretty transparently a strategy to win (i.e., take over all of Israel and establish their rule over it).
It's the same strategy the FLN employed in Algeria. From Wikipedia: "By summer 1955, the steady pressure of French counter-insurgency had put the FLN in a very dire situation. Only one of the FLN's sections, Wilaya II, was capable of mounting any offensive.[5] Popular support for the FLN was still rather low and many of the Algerian Muslim elite advocated for a peaceful resolution of the conflict through conciliatory agreements with the French government.[6]
To put the FLN in a stronger position, Youcef Zighoud, leader of the Wilaya II, decided to conduct an attack against Pieds-Noirs civilians in Algeria, with the hope that an aggressive French retaliation would break the fragile bond between French colonists and native Algerians, increasing the popular support for the rebellion and destroying any possibility for a conciliatory settlement of the conflict."
Today, Algeria is an independent nation. So the FLN achieved their strategic goals. Whether that's better or not is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
I don't see how it's conceivable that Hamas defeats Israel here
Leaving aside the particularities of Hamas, this kind of disbelief is pretty common in asymmetric conflicts. France vs. the FLN, France (and later the U.S.) vs. the Vietcong, the mujahadeen against the Soviet Union, the ANC vs apartheid South Africa, the Taliban against the USA, etc.
There are tons of examples of militarily inferior enemies defeating superior forces. There's a playbook for this kind of action which has lots of historical precedent. I'm not like citing to Harry Potter or the Avengers here. Algeria is a real place on Earth.
It certainly doesn't happen everywhere or all the time, but it does happen. If you want to make it happen, killing civilians can be (and too often is) part of the playbook.
When the French left Algeria, France continued to exist and be populated by French people.
I think we're using conceivable in different ways. I'm using it to mean functionally nonzero. So not just literally possible, but possible in a meaningful way. My discriminant for meaningfulness is whether it has happened before in recorded history.
Hamas is running plays from a playbook that has worked in recorded history. Those plays might be unlikely to work, but it's not inconceivable that they'll work.
By way of example, it's conceivable that I win the lottery tomorrow. The probability is extremely low, but it has happened in recorded history. In contrast, it's not conceivable that tomorrow I become the new President of America, because every President has either been elected or been the Vice President. It's physically possible that I become President tomorrow, but I'd be comfortable describing it as inconceivable.
Reframing the question to reflect my understanding of it yields: do you think that the destruction of Israel in the next, say, 50 years is less likely than the odds of you winning the lottery tomorrow?
Hamas cannot conquer Israel.
Israel cannot disengage from Palestine in any way analogous to the disengagements from Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, &c.
Hamas defeating Israel is similar to you becoming President tomorrow.
LIterally none of those things are remotely analogous here. The main examples are invaders losing to guerillas fighting in their own territory. At best, you can say that hamas can stop israel from completely destroying them (while still suffering catastrophic losses in the process), but it's unclear how hamas actually conquers Israel in Israel or even comes close. The partcularities of hamas are exactly what are relevant here!
>It certainly doesn't happen everywhere or all the time, but it does happen. If you want to make it happen, killing civilians can be (and too often is) part of the playbook.
The US "lost" in Vietnam precisely because of their unwillingness to kill civillians at scale. They could have leveled most of North Vietnam if they had wanted to, and they were nowhere near close to actually being militarily defeated - the US left because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
This does not apply to Israel. They see hamas as an existential threat, and if they think they're actually in danger they will do everything up to and including the liquidation of gaza. Unlike in Vietnam, refusing to be willing to do this doesn't mean going home with your tail between your legs, it means you face the prospect of your country being destroyed and its people being killed, raped and so on.
For hamas to actually defeat Israel (i.e. overtrow the government and ethnically cleanse israel - the stated goal of hamas and most people in gaza), one of two things has to be true: 1) Israel would rather allow themselves be destroyed than to throw everything they've got at Hamas or 2) Hamas can withstand having everything thrown at them by israel (and this doesn't even include the support that the US will increasingly provide if things go south for Israel).
Just a couple points:
First, I'm not saying I think it's likely Hamas will win. The original question was whether it was conceivable things would get better after the Hamas attack. I've detailed the thinking behind the concept. It is entirely conceivable.
By way of analogy, say I'm playing a basketball game. I decide to run a triangle offense. Maybe that's a good strategy for my particular case, maybe it's a bad strategy. It is a basketball strategy - teams have been very successful using it. Maybe I'll be one of them.
However, if I decide to bring 11 men on the court and have them line up to punt the basketball, this is not a basketball strategy. There is no conceivable way this works. It has never worked in history and there is no reason to think it will work in my case.
Second, if you think the examples provided aren't analogous to Hamas, what is? When has an economically inferior, militarily inferior, smaller country ever taken over an economically superior, militarily superior, larger country without substantial foreign assistance?
If you want to say that Hamas should just get out of the take-over-Israel business, I'm in full agreement. Likewise, I hope we can agree that I ought to never play basketball - my chances of winning are similar to Hamas' chances.
But once you've decided that that's what you want to do, running plays from a successful team doesn't seem particularly outlandish.
>When has an economically inferior, militarily inferior, smaller country ever taken over an economically superior, militarily superior, larger country without substantial foreign assistance?<
Alexander the Great? Or was Persia already collapsing?
Define "better"? They seem to be happy about the attack. Maybe they just value martyrdom and revenge over material benefits. Not everyone in the world is W.E.I.R.D after all.
Would it be safe for anyone in Gaza to not celebrate the attack on Israel? I don't know for sure, but it seems safe to bet that some are really celebrating, but we can't know how many think it's a bad idea.
Presumably the ones who don't want to celebrate stayed home. Lots of people celebrating, but then there's lots of people in Gaza. Polls show that something like 60-70% of Gazans support killing Israeli civilians, which does leave some 30% who don't.
>Define "better"?
Uh, gee, maybe, getting closer to any of the things they want?
They complain about oppression - things are going to get a lot worse
They complain about being blockaded - things have already gotten a lot worse
They complain about being killed - a lot more Palestinians are going to be killed than almost ever before
They want control over the entire israel/palestine territory - they will be further disempowered and hamas may even be functionally destroyed
They said they want to defend Al Aqsa - israelis are defiling al aqsa out of spite and will likely do so more than ever in the future
Unless literally killing some finite number of israelis, even or especially civilians, is the goal here, then everything is going to get worse. And if it IS the goal, well then enjoy your sad little celebration while it lasts.
Two possible things:
* Hamas is destroyed, the group that takes over is not (or at least less) dedicated to terrorist violence, making it easier to negotiate to the point of lifting the blockade and letting Gaza actually have a normal life.
* The message to Israel is "you can't shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and ignore them forever, the present situation is unsustainable."
Of course Israel won't want to follow the logic of the 2nd point because they don't want to reward terrorism, and the Palestinians don't want to follow the logic of the 1st point because they don't want to reward a massive ground invasion of Gaza.
But maybe if Hamas is destroyed/replaced, each side will feel like they can safely "face facts" while also saving face.
>The message to Israel is "you can't shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and ignore them forever, the present situation is unsustainable."
But you can shunt the Palestinians away in Gaza and *oppress* them forever, in ways that make it impossible for them to project power beyond Gaza. The cost of this is high, in many respects, but Israel is probably now willing to pay that cost.
They won't actually pay it forever, of course. Which is a long-term problem with any such strategy. The Israelis are mostly decent, civilized people - if they buy their own safety at the cost of brutal oppression of the Palestinians, then after enough years of safety they'll start feeling bad about the oppression. This will happen long before the Palestinians stop feeling angry about what was done to them.
In the short and probably medium term, oppression would work. I'm not sure what else realistically could.
I wrote a few words on the subject.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
Well, it's complicated.
What you think of as "getting better for the people of Gaza" isn't necessarily what everyone else thinks of as "getting better for the people of Gaza".
For example: Chabad Houses all over the planet celebrate events surrounding The Czar's victory over Napoleon. Everyone knew that fewer Jews would be raped, murdered, conscripted, and starved under Napoleon than under the Czar and yet there are many who claim that Napoleon's victory would have been a *worse* outcome.
People are complex and cultures vary widely.
Well then it sounds like it falls into the second thing I mentioned - simple joy over the suffering of people you hate. People in Gaza mostly favor a one state 'solution', and this doesn't really move things closer to that. If anything, it will rob palestinians of power overall.
Well, that's not *exactly* why Rabbi Schneur Zalman supported the Czar. Come to think of it, it isn't really what the young Gazan men or older Gazan leadership want either.
I don't think most people think like that when it comes to groups they hate and groups they like. That is, it's less "does this benefit us or not?" and more "does it hurt people I don't like?"
I think the past few days should get Israel to think very hard about the option of doing to Gaza what Rome did to Carthage, minus the slavery part. In the medium term, restraint would be best, eg maintain the trend of improving relations with Saudi Arabia. In the long term? As long as the Americans are there to deter the Muslim states from ganging up on Israel in the moment, people will forget about it. The trend of normalization between the Saudis et al will resume once it becomes old news, and eventually the destruction of Gaza will become devoid of emotional content just like any number of human atrocities throughout history. Should Israel start the clock on that sooner?
The best-case scenario version of that is if Egypt decides they're broke enough that they're willing to accept money for taking in palestinian refugees, and Israel (with maybe some international support) pays them off. It'll probably leave some terrorist groups working out of Sinai and a lot of international hostility, but of the versions of how a carthage scenario goes it's probably the least bad one.
Morality aside, this would probably not only cause Arab countries that have normalized in the last few years to reverse course, it would probably result in Egypt and Jordan renouncing their peace treaties.
It would likely result in America stopping their support, and certainly European countries. Anything associated with Israel would be completely toxic in much of civil society. To the extent America doesn't renounce all ties with Israel, every Arab country would, and would likely enter the Russian/Chinese sphere of influence (to the extent they haven't already).
Funny to me how quickly people go from "Hamas is bad because they target civilians" to "Israel should commit genocide"
Not to mention the internal crisis it would cause with the Arab population.
Israel is a democracy where Arabs have rights. Israel is not going to commit genocide. That’s something that distinguishes it from Hamas.
They are doing roof-knocking even now.
I don't think that's a possibility. What IS a possibility is "Israel destroys hamas". Which is perhaps only moderately less of a blank cheque, but much, much more palatable to outsiders.
Killing thousands of people (primarily armed terrorists) is a lot more palatable than killing millions of civilians.
My point was that killing thousands of Hamas means killing thousands of non-Hamas, directly and indirectly, and that the rationale of killing Hamas gives them cover.
There's a good chance you're right and that Israel really couldn't survive the political fallout. Maybe Israel doesn't have a choice but to maintain the small plot of land in their midst filled with people who'd like to but can't genocide them and endure events like the one presently occurring every few decades. Depressing thought.
So, if Gazans had rosier views of Israel, Israel would...what, exactly? What options do the people of Gaza have?
I think it would help to draw a line -- not one that is shaped like a fractal -- and firmly take control over what is inside the line, and leave people outside the line alone (except when they attack the line). That's how many states work, I think.
Inside the line, you have a choice: are all people equal, or are there first-class and second-class citizens? The latter option leads to resentment, predictably.
There's a plausible version of that as a solution to the west bank problem. It's harder with Gaza because there already is a line, the Gazans just don't stop attacking it (or, before last week, launching rockets over it).
(Which lead to Israel besieging them, primarily to stop weapons smuggling, which lead to them doing things like digging up their own water infrastrructure to have rocket launch tubes, which leads to them being even more poor and miserable but also too heavily arms for Israel to let up).
As a side note (my specialty), I believe that "digging up their own water infrastructure..." comes from a Hamas propaganda video where they explicitly say that the pipes had been abandoned by Israelis settlers in illegal settlements. (So not exactly their own infrastructure.)
The video is probably bullshit anyway (it says that they made missiles with those pipes and explosives from unexploded Israeli ordnance and shells from a WWI British wreck.)
In the plot of land between the Jordan and the Med, either that line is a fractal or at least one side of that line has a whole lot of people who really really want to kill a lot of other people living on the same side of the line.
That sucks. A possible solution would be to draw a straight-ish line somewhere in the middle, and forcefully resettle the people who are on the "wrong" side of the line. That would also be horrible in short-term, but would give a hope for peace in long-term.
(I am not looking at the map, so maybe there are some good reasons why this couldn't possibly work.)
Drawing the line in the middle, rather than trying to maximize your territory, would give a small chance of cooperation if a similarly thinking leader appeared on the other side. Even if most leaders on the other side are opposed to this idea, you only need to succeed once, and then the straight line becomes the status quo and is much easier to defend.
That would of course require giving up your own ambitions to conquer the territory behind the line. Might be politically infeasible in a democracy if a sufficiently large part of your population believes that *everything* should belong to them, and that the current situation is in some sense good for them, because it gives them a pretext to gradually advance, step by step, until they get it all in some unspecified future.
> Inside the line, you have a choice: are all people equal, or are there first-class and second-class citizens? The latter option leads to resentment, predictably.
Actually, I think attempting to choose the first option leads to more resentment than admitting that the second one obtains. There is no state in which all people are equal, but there are many in which a lot of people are angry that they were told they were supposed to be equal to their superiors.
In general, you get more stability by telling people what they'll get and then delivering that than you will by promising people something they won't get and then not delivering it.
Because Jordanians and Egyptians have their own states with borders that satisfy them. As Marty Khan has repeatedly asserted, Gazans would (and according to him, should) only be satisfied by borders that encompass all of Israel. Why would they only be satisfied with, say, a quarter or half of the farm when it's all theirs by "right"?
It's all there in the name. The Egyptians control basically everything that was ever called "Egypt" in the last hundred years, and there's enough room and enough resources in Egypt for them all to live comfortably. The Jordanians, pretty much the same except it was called "Transjordan" until ~80 years ago. Same with the rest of the Arab countries, mostly.
The Palestinians control less than a quarter of historic Palestine, and that's not nearly enough for all twelve million or so Palestinians to live comfortably. Even with just seven million of them actually living in the Palestinian territories, things are pretty grim.
Hmm. No it won’t. If Gaza is destroyed in the future, with a population of 3+ million people, there’s no chance of it being forgotten. of course not in the Islamic world, but nowhere really.
(Except in the midst of a hot world war that kills most of the northern hemisphere making it moot.)
I’m not sure what the solution is. Perhaps a big wall, and a UN protectorate, banning Hamas, agreement that if terrorist attacks still happen then there will be reduced aid to all of Palestine.
We had a big wall. Then Hamas launched rockets over it, so we had iron dome. Then they broke through it and started murdering everyone they saw. I'm not sure how much Israel is going to trust big walls and nothing else again.
(Also, Gaza is about 2 million. 3+ is the west bank)
The US has taken in a million or probably more people in this year, that few of us want; could the Arab states absorb x million Palestinians? Could they maintain their usefulness to themselves, as pity-attractors and hate and guilt-generators, just as well within their own borders as jutting awkwardly against Israel?
X million generic people? Sure.
Those particular X million people? No way in Hell; they've been a cancer to any state that's taken in their ilk in the past.
Yes? There are Palestinian refugee camps all over the place where that exactly happens. Some of them date from decades ago.
Great. Do that. Maybe they could fill out some of the (all of the?) jobs that Arabs don’t like to do themselves. It’s not as though Gaza represented, except graphically on a map, anything of what the Palestinians lost. e.g. if I recall - village life, orchards?
I’ve a theory about people who live without trees.
Maybe I'm overconfident that our current moment in time isn't so special, but time has turned all sorts of atrocities into mundane historical facts. Sometimes, the perpetrators become national heroes. No one bats an eye at the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue.
People are also, in a way, less forgiving of counties that "should" be on message -- westernised, democratic, etc.
> Same with the Roman Empire; it’s completely gone, so nobody is outraged over Carthage.
Some people might be. But no one wants to use it as a generic way to tarnish the reputation of Rome.
> People are less willing to forgive historical crimes committed by current powers because those crimes still have an impact today
On the other hand, this is obviously wrong. The actions do or don't have an impact today regardless of whether the state that performed them is still alive. As you said in your earlier sentence, the reason people are willing to forgive Rome for Carthage is that Rome is dead, not that Carthage came back from the dead!
> If hypothetically Mongolia still ruled the whole of Asia, I think history would be much more critical of what Genghis Khan did.
More critical like how? What more do you want?
The Chinese attitude toward Genghis Khan is not positive, today. I have no direct knowledge of the Russian attitude, but I tend to suspect it's not all that positive either. (I think India is more on the positive side.)
Americans see Genghis Khan as awesome, because that's the truth. But also because he didn't conquer 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
I think your example of the current powers is evidence of my point. None of them are international pariahs or seriously threatened or even seriously inconvenienced despite colonialism having ended in living memory. It wouldn't take long for business as usual to resume were Israel to raze Gaza to the ground and keep its surviving inhabitants in tent camps until some number of Western countries agreed to take them.
The best thing by far that could possibly happen to the two million residents of the Gaza Strip is that they get to move somewhere else instead. I'm sure they'd love it to be Canada, but even Egypt would be a pretty massive step up.
So *if* Israel does decide to go full Cato and *if* this is enough to persuade someone (or a coalition of someones) to offer full refugee status to all Gazans, then this is one way they could come out ahead.
Nobody wants the current generation of Gaza residents(*) living in their country. Egypt, in particular, had that opportunity two generations ago when most Gazans were still hard-working farmers or tradesmen trying to make do and make a better life for their families.
Lots of people want to point at Israelis and call them genocidal monsters, which works best if the Israelis are busy committing genocide.
So, you're giving Egypt et al the choice between something they very much want, and something they very much don't, and expecting that they will altruistically do the thing they don't want to?
* "Palestinians" is too broad a term to be particularly useful here
Speaking of counterproductive lashing out, Canada has seen numerous pro-Palestine celebrations shortly after the start of this whole thing. Something tells me Canadians would mostly not be in favour of the government, who is already collapsing in the polls, announcing that they'll be taking in a whole lot of people who have opinions similar to those celebrating.
Sure, but "destoying Hamas" isn't too far, even if that involves huge civillian deaths.
When are arabs going to give back all the land they stole over the years?
We all are but apes quarreling over unceded dinosaur territory.
True about the American support. Even so, doesn't Israel have nukes?
My reasoning wasn't about territory; it was about eliminating any threat from the Palestinians once and for all. Also, I don't think Ukrainians were going house to house killing Russians and parading their bodies in the streets to applause.
Maybe Carthage was a bad analogy. How about the Tamil Tigers? Do as the Sri Lankans did, take off the gloves, forget human rights and NGOs etc, and utterly annihilate them.
Annihilate all of Palestine, or just Hamas?
Hamas. I was vague on this, but I was assuming that support for Hamas in Gaza is too entrenched to destroy the former without destroying the latter. Or even if it were accomplished, Gazans might just make Hamas 2.0 and name it something else.
I wrote a few words on the subject.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
True, nukes are not a guarantee of that, but Russia's invasion does prove that they seriously constrain the actions of your enemies. Note how serious the Americans are about their donated weapons not being used to strike Russia proper. Ukraine is not an existential threat to Russia and everyone knows it, unlike an Arab coalition against Israel. The Arab states probably know that Israel would nuke them if Israel were up against the wall.
>Nukes aren’t a guarantee that you can do whatever you want, as Russia is finding out.
If russia thought they faced a genuine risk of being defeated by foreign invaders, then I think nukes would definitely be flying.
Is there any remote possibility that the Israeli government had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack? It's very unlikely, but it would obviously otherwise represent a very significant intelligence failure and has coincided with a period of Netanyahu trying to increase his power and receiving significant push back.
They had enough data to figure out what was coming, but didn't have a worldview that could take the data and make a prediction.
Frederick the Great said that "he who defends everything, defends nothing." Israel thought that the biggest dangers were from subverting the border (rockets, tunnels, lone wolf attacks, etc.). The idea that the border would be directly challenged was a complete afterthought. After all, who expects to be attacked where they're strongest?
I don't think so. Netanyahu also wants to look competent. He also is facing opposition from the far right, and there's a significant chance of this going poorly and him being replaced. Defeating this as they entered would have made him look better.
As in, credible intelligence that they believed but chose to deliberately ignore? <1% chance. This is a classic conspiracy theory trope, and I can't think of a single case where an allegation like this was leveled against a Western democracy (or even a mostly-competent state of any description) and it later turned out to be true.
Intelligence that they should have listened to but dismissed out of hubris? Pretty likely. (~40%?). There's a report going around that Egypt warned them but was ignored.
It’s important to remember before saying “they should have listened” is that there is often a *lot* of false noise burying the signal. They may have been warned of a hundred things, of which one was this, but 99 others were bogus and rightly ignored.
There is a bit of difference in that this was eminently more detectable than most things in western democracies where this kind of conspiracy theory is raised.
That is an important distinction which gets routinely ignored by online hysterics.
And, I'd put that second percent a good deal higher.
The intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor was actionable, it's just that the best action we could take was send out a war warning to all Pacific commands saying "The Japanese are going to launch a massive sneak attack in the next two weeks; we don't know when or where so y'all be ready for anything". Then Kimmel and Short came up short on that last part.
It doesn't look like the Israelis had even a generic warning of serious trouble from Hamas this time around. That's either a serious intelligence failure on their part, or a masterstroke of counterespionage and deception on Hamas's.
Your last sentence is an "and/or", not an "or".
The Three Day Rule was a good idea
Do you see any unreasonable discussions here? I don't
War is Hell.
So you're basically complaining people are expressing different opinions to yours
I considered making a big deal about it, but the attacks were Saturday, it's Monday now, and I don't know if a day either way will make much difference.
Yeah, things haven't gone too bad (with the exception of one particularly active commentor) but this kind of thing is why we had the Three Day Rule in the first place.
Does anyone have any hot takes on how ADHD works "under the hood"?
I have suspected I have undiagnosed ADHD for a long time (from my work habits), but only recently became aware of other symptoms that totally line up with my experience: talking incessantly and often over other people, seemingly not recording or recalling emotional memories, and "rejection-sensitivity dysmorphia" (RSD) in which I am hyper-aware of social rejection and spend, like, most of my life with racing thoughts about rejections in the recent and distant past.
I am curious which of these things causes the other. Like, fine, maybe it's "the brain is wired wrong and everything breaks a bit". But could it instead be that the rejection-sensitivity causes everything else? I ask because, before noticing this was a list of ADHD symptoms, I had spent a lot of time self-analyzing and that was sort of the conclusion I had come to -- that my brain was fundamentally hyper-concerned with whether I was "acceptable" to others, and this maladaption seemed to make me talk a lot (always trying to perform as social and gregarious), pay too much attention to rejection, and obsessively engage with whatever I was doing basically as a way of avoiding thinking about the acceptability-question.
This is just one theory. Maybe there are others? Has anybody managed to somewhat-fix their ADHD with just therapy? What made the difference?
No credible study has ever supported the "rejection sensitivty dysphoria = ADHD" hypothesis, and my own research suggests it's not true. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/14/ssc-survey-results-adhd-and-rejection-sensitivity/
Oh, curious. Well would you agree that RSD is a thing, separate from ADHD being a thing? Sounds like in that article you don't but it's also five years old. What do you think now?
Incidentally, the survey question you used there strikes me as not the best:
> I am more sensitive than others to rejection, teasing, criticism, or my own perception that I have failed or fallen short
Taking myself as an example, I don't think I'm in any particular position to judge whether I'm more sensitive than any other person. And probably, when I took your survey 5+ years ago, I would answered "no" to this. But after many years of getting to know myself better I would answer "yes", *only* because I have recently come to understand that what I'm doing is abnormal and maybe "part of the problem" instead of just what it feels like to be alive.
A better question (IMO, although I have no special knowledge about what makes good survey questions) would be to just ask about the effect at all. Something like:
> When I go home after a party, I play through a list of all the mistakes I made in conversations that night
(maybe contrasted to "... I think about how much fun I had")
or
> My memories of childhood are predominately those of situations in which I screwed up, was made fun of, or was embarrassed.
or
> I occasionally have to leave social situations because I don't know how to act around the people around me and feel like I'm going to panic.
etc. Not that I have, like, a confirmed "RSD" diagnosis... but there are a bunch of other effects I can imagine probing without asking anyone to understand how they measure up to others.
Just so you know, I've been advised to accept an ADHD diagnosis from several doctors, and my experience seems very similar to yours, with very similar symptoms, especially what I consider "being a creature of regret", where I seem to only record negative memories (mostly about what I perceive/remember to be bad personal interactions), and have a really great memory for detail, except for emotionally charged events like arguments. I've never connected or considered these things to be related to ADHD, but it's a data point for you. I also talk constantly, over other people, I'm gregarious around people (but don't seek out company, I'm happy to be alone), poor time management and poor sense of time, tendency to be either distracted or hyper focused, I fiddle constantly with objects, etc etc.
My uneducated guess: What if brain uses different mechanisms for "good" emotions and "bad" emotions, and ADHD is basically a deficit in noticing or remembering the "good" emotions.
It could explain why ADHD and depression often go together (I think).
It could explain why it is easy for ADHD people to get addicted to stuff: basically, strong positive emotions are often the only positive emotions they remember, so the day in retrospective feels like "all boring, except for that one thing" -- then of course you cannot give up on that one thing.
It could explain the difficulty with doing work: the emotional rewards of doing something successfully are usually too small to notice.
It could explain why people with ADHD kinda don't want to do even the things they really like to do: the liking is strong when it happens, but becomes a colorless memory afterwards.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261716537_We_Cannot_Say_Whether_Attention_Deficit_Hyperactivity_Disorder_Exists_but_We_Can_Find_Its_Molecular_Mechanisms
Yes, at least some fraction of ADHD is neurological condition with mutated ion channels, diagnosable by lidocaine insensitivity.
Curious. Lidocaine is over the counter, though. Maybe we should all go do this test and just find the answer?
I don't know the slightest thing at neurology, but it seems like it's still possible that a neural state could be responsible for a physical equilibrium in which lidocaine sensitivity is diminished. It could even be some epigenetic effect. Without knowing the actual genetic mechanism this doesn't really rule out that it's psychological. (notwithstanding my own ignorance of how these things work)
I wouldn't make a medical recommendation, but lidocaine sensitivity is indeed a good test for this specific subtype. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35815177/
Dr. Segal has observed that in affected individuals, the serum (blood) ion levels are normal, but those normal levels are insufficient for this mutated ion channel to work in the "normal" way.
The result of the mutation is higher signal sensitivy, but lower discretion. The benefits are quick response to environmental signals (Squirrel!) but the downsides are poor prioritization (oh right I'm still in class) and calibration ("stop yelling at me" "I wasn't yelling"). Dr. Segal has quipped that this variant is the "sentry gene".
If you know you have lidocaine insensitivity and suspect that you have adhd, what I can say is that exercise and a low-salt, low-carb diet help. Salt-wasting functions like sweating help. Avocados are a good source of potassium, bananas are not (they don't have much, and they have high sugar, possibly resulting in a net negative effect). For improving your medical appointments, articaine and bupivicaine may have better results than lidocaine and most doctor and dentist offices can stock them if given advance notice. Over the counter oral potassium does exist, but some people need a lot and I'd advise you to consult your doctor. For some lucky individuals, in concert with those other measures coffee can be a sufficient replacement for harder stimulants - and a coffee date is a much more versatile social encounter than a ritalin date.
Psychologist here. Not a direct answer to your question, but wanted to let you know that a couple of particularly smart psychiatrists I know believe that MAOI antidepressants treat rejection sensitivity dysphoria. I have seen an MAOI be very effective in 2 people, both of whom were diagnosable as having major depression -- but their main depressive symptom was rejection sensitivity, coupled with anguished rumination about past rejections, loneliness because they avoided people for fear of more rejection, and hopelessness about the future. They did not have many of the other classic symptoms of depression: sleep and appetite disturbance, concentration difficulty, feeling of being slowed down, loss of interest in sex.
Also, in my opinion it is not possible to figure out whether someone's difficulty sticking with plans and tasks is a "wiring" problems if they are people who habitually spend a great deal of time gaming and/or online entertainment via youtube and social media. The pull of either of those things is so strong that while they are not true addictions, they might as well be. So if you're spending a lot of time online and find it's very hard to go for long without checking your email, visiting your favorite sites or gaming, cut *way back* on online activities and then after you've adjusted to that assess your ability to stick with tasks. I highly recommend Beeminder for help with changing habits and sticking with plans and resolutions.
Thanks for the recommendation on MAOI. After realizing how many of these symptoms I have I've been planning to seek treatment immediately and it will be helpful to be able to ask for something in particular. I've taken adderral, for instance, and didn't find it helpful -- it seemed to make me feel like I already feel all the time!
As for managing it, agreed, gaming and internet addiction obviously messes things up. For the most part I manage that well.. Unless the RSD kicks in and then causes a spiral and then it tends to get out of hand for a while. So I'm trying to find the 'root' cause that prevents the loop from continuing.
Sounds like you’re going about things in a smart way. About MAOIs: There are the oldest class of antidepressants and many psychiatrists feel they are not experienced enough with them to prescribe them. Also when you’re on an MAOI foods containing tyramine cause your blood pressure to rise, so you have to avoid them. It’s not all that many foods , and unless you screw up big time with the diet you will not have major consequences, but psychiatrists not used to MAOI’s are spooked by the tyramine issue. There is a world expert on MAOIs who has a lot of info on his site, Psychotropical. Scott also recommends his site. I recommend you find someone who is comfortable with prescribing them, rather than someone who grudgingly says they’ll prescribe an MAOI if you try a bunch of other antidepressants first and they do not help.
Thanks for the info. I have tried other antidepressants (several Ssris, when I thought the real problem was just depression) and wasn't satisfied with that. So maybe I have a case. But yeah I'm gonna ask around. Unfortunately finding doctors and making appointments is about the most painful thing in the world so it's gonna take some real intention to do it.
Well, on Psychology Today many psychiatrists give email addresses, so at least you don't have to start by phoning ;-] I recommend that your email be brief and friendly and not too detailed -- just give them basic demographics (gender, age, profession) and say you suffer from a form of depression that was not helped by SSRI's & would like to see a psychopharmacologist to discuss other possibilities. If you are able to pay out of pocket you will have more options than if you need to use your insurance. Fees for initial evals or several hundred, but once you've moved on to trying meds appts are briefer and more spread out, and once you are on a med that works they are quite brief and infrequent so total outlay is not terribly high.
I suspect ADHD is, under the covers, something like "Single-threading".
Talking with other people, they have multiple thoughts going on, in some fashion - something that can step into their process and go "Hey you should do this other thing instead."
My suspicion is that people with ADHD, only having something like a single thread of thought, have no "check" to pull them out of that thought, or redirect it.
When the thread is doing something useful - flow state. However, if you're trying to do one thing and your one thread doesn't stay on that thing but goes off on a tangent, you don't have anything to pull it back to what it was supposed to be doing.
Excellent Reply.
Personally I find the term ADHD to be incredibly judgy and demeaning against those of us who were literally born this way and who's only problem with it is that the world order is run by people who regardless as defective and therefore dish out reward and punishment along those lines.
But without acquiescing to the pathologizing of us, your description is very excellent. I'm not sure if *all* aspects of what people generally put in the ADHD bag relate to this but yes, in a nutshell it is that we live in the present.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.
Is living no more than tending to your meat? And your body no more than a thing to cover in raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Is your living no more worthwhile than theirs?
Which of you by taking thought can add even a cubit unto his stature?
“find the term ADHD to be incredibly judgy and demeaning against those of us who were literally born this way and who's only problem with it is that the world order is run by people who regardless as defective and therefore dish out reward and punishment along those lines.”
How is that anything other than a cry for the very victim status you don’t want, the very pathologising you oppose? I may or may not have ADHD, I do find concentration hard sometimes but I’ve decided not to really get a diagnosis as I’m functional enough. Nobody is out to get you, the system isn’t designed to harm you, but being able to concentrate garners advantages, like being tall, smart, outgoing and so on.
Text fails to convey vibes, particularly when a particular vibe ("I'm a victim") is the presumptive one to readers within a particular culture.
People in non sklavenmoral cultures would have read me differently.
Also, I noticed that you failed to add "white, male, and christ-loving" to your list of virtues in the final sentence... Capiche?
I agree that it presents that way but my question is based on the suspicion that the single threading is a symptom instead of the cause. *why* is a person single threading? Because something about multithreading is very painful for them, at a social/security/self-worth/trauma level.
I can't tell you how to feel nor do I buy into the idea that ADHD should be treated (or called that) nor do I think that naval gazing on ones' ADHD tends to be wise.
All that said, I believe that being treated as if there is something "wrong" with us and suffering the consequences of being the way is all the trauma anyone would need.
And that the first step towards a happier self is to stop believing that they are right and that "there's something wrong with you"
Every great religion, from Jesus'ism to Taosim has been shouting at mankind to stop engorging themselves on the poisonous Tree of Knowledge but to instead enjoy the Tree of Life.
That's fair and I have tried to think that way. Especially while high it seems obvious to me. But somehow believing one is fine is the same as being fine, and the belief won't stick. So if nothing else the interest in medication is trying to navigate 'belief space' to a place where that belief will be sticky instead of transient.
That said there is nothing intellectually objectionable about one's brain being miswired the same way one's leg can be broken. And if that miswiring is sticky and keeps hurting people, my morality at least says to search for a way to fix it.
Also, though, advice is nice and all, but I'd only really care about it coming from someone who actually managed to change their perspective and feel better after following it. Otherwise there's no way to distinguish good advice from fake advice that just sounds good.
Well I'm super duper ADHD and due to the automatic and overwhelming discrimination we face (most poor people, half of all prisoners, etc) I'm definitely game to pick up tips on jumping the occasional hurdle -- in pretty much exactly the same way people all over the world purchase bleaching or whitening agents to make themselves look lighter and thereby not suffer as much for their swarthiness in the benighted places that they live.
But I downright pity anybody who actually thinks that his genes make him "less than" somebody else. Your color, height, looks, and yes, neurobiology are as legitimate as anybody else's (provided you stand up for your own equality that is).
Anyway, I'm definitely NOT giving advice here, most especially because your primary concern appears to be about your perception of yourself within society rather than (in my case) the wholesale absence of any executive function. (I mean I know that "technically l" objects don't disappear when I close my eyes but, realistically? Come on... It's a whole new moment boy!)
This lacuna in my capabilities is its own reward but it also vauses me incredible frustrations and dangers due to misperceptions of me by transactionalist climbers.
Oh, and it's no fun being told that I was blessed with talents and gifts unknown on Earth since DaVinci bore Jesus love child but that, due to my being bad bad bad! I'm wasting God's/Nature's gifts like nobody's business.
However other than douchebags and dickheads demanding that I bow to whatever hierarchial system they themselves bow to (and to accuse me of fooling them or being somehow wicked for being "happy while poor") I quite enjoy being me. And based on what you sound like, I imagine that you'd quite enjoy being you.
By all means, strive and struggle to a point that's useful or (heaven forfend) a point you feel compelled to be the expectations of others (I have seen this in myself, and far far FAR worse in some close relatives) but at least know that you're God's Child (if that metaphor makes sense to you) in equal amount to any other homo sapien body on the planet.
Much strength and joy to you.
Why do you think you are miswired? I accepted my personality and behavior, modified a few things to make it easier to get along in the world, and simply go along knowing I have flaws like everyone does. Most of the issues that these behaviors cause are simply a product of trying to live in a world of offices, paperwork, and arbitrary goals set by other people. Make yourself free of these things. They are the problem, not you. I had terrible angst while I was trying to work in an office setting, at a non profit, even though I did direct service and enjoyed that post of my work. But I was miserable with nonsensical rules and limits, codified tedium, meaningless 'goals'.
I left that and got a job working outside building landscapes and gardens. I became an excellent heavy equipment operator because of my bodies desire to be in motion, and my ability to hyper focus. I am excellent on anything client facing because I am happy to talk and explain minute details at length. My alleged disability was simply misallocated strength that a bureaucratic world did not appreciate.
Nice.... Really happy to hear that brother.
The only thing I ever got paid for that was more fun than the pay was giving tours in Jerusalem's Old City.
I never made the mental transition from "I love this!" to "I could get rich doing this!" which likely accounts both for why I loved it and for why I never got rich doing it.
My experience, with Inattentive type ADHD, has been almost the opposite. It has always felt that there is a multilane highway running in my head. If the lanes are all full then I am "focused", but if some lanes are empty they will go looking for traffic to fill up. In practice this means I am much more focused and less anxious working with noise or music on in the background. In total silence I am apt to look for distractions or other stimulus.
I kind of like that theory, but wondered what you think of my view that gaming and social media browsing are a sort of addictive, bastardized substitute for flow states. Seems like they interfere with people's ability to commit to non-screen activities deeply enough and for long enough to reach flow states doing other things -- rock climbing, writing, sketching, skateboarding, whatever.
Absolutely!
One model for this is that most things in daily life are actually quite boring and games are a bit less.
And by 'boring' I mean... They don't seem to accomplish what a person perceives their goals as. If suddenly they had a place to go or an activity to do that seemed to really solve their problems, for instance a safe social environment with lots of potential that makes them feel more complete by putting energy into it, then it starts to win out. But that is very hard to find these days. Hence sitting at the computer.
I think it's partly a matter of legibility, the clarity and frequency of goals.
So, even though my daughter bragging about me to a third party is several orders of magnitude more satisfying and motivating than any reward a game could ever offer, it's very difficult to predict how my actions can contribute to that, and that factors into motivation as well. Unfortunately, that'show most valuable things in life are.
Yes that’s true, it’s harder to find, because so many other people are home sitting at their computers. Most of the settings I know of these days where you find people who are not computer centered involve physical activities: ultimate frisbee, salsa dancing, hiking, rock climbing, skiing, etc. I’m sure there are quite a few other kinds of settings too. Let’s see: Buddhist meditation and study , playing music together, stuff with drones, volunteering, political action, gardening.
I don't think that is wrong.
I'd frame them as highly attractive targets for flow states (for most people), however, rather than substitutes. I enjoy the flow state in and of itself, so anything that can inspire and sustain it is good.
As I've gotten older, fewer and fewer video games inspire a flow state in me, and the flow states don't last as long. I can see how, if this weren't the case, or if it impaired my life, I'd see things differently.
In a sub comment behind the fold I took the plunge and shared a particular video of mine.
I was responding to a comment about different laws in different countries regarding free speech and agreeing that (while there are legal means in place to get around the problem) it would in fact be ideal if Freedom Rang from the Rhine to the Rio and that I'm actually interested in inviting the world to a conversation just as soon as I can find a single word description for the project.
https://youtu.be/dxjOrCjx43c?feature=shared
Any recommendations for "off the beaten track" sights and restaurants in SF? Any events this week that look particularly interesting?
(This isn't what you asked, but just in case it needs saying: the beaten path stuff in SF is actually really worth it, with the exception of Pier 39.)
Salesforce Park is new enough that it might not be part of many itineraries, but it's very much worth it.
The Presidio often gets overlooked, aside from the GGB. The Disney Family Museum is neat if you're into animation & history, and it's next to the fantastic new Tunnel Tops park.
If you're looking for a good viewpoint, skip Twin Peaks and instead head to Tank Hill, Corona Heights, and the 16th street Tiled Steps that lead up to Grandview Park.
If you go to Chinatown, get off Grant street and walk Stockton instead.
Rather than the Upper Haight, I like the Divisadero corridor by Alamo Square and the Lower Haight.
1. Wednesdsys and Sundays, there is a farmers market outside the Asian Art museum. 11 am to 4pm. Best fruits and veggies ever!
2. The Computer History museum in Mountainview. Check online for days they're closed.
3. Saravana Bhavan (bay area, not SF), for possibly the best South Indian food in America. There are other contenders for this spot, depending on who you ask.
Its not in SF, but for someone from outside the Bay Area with food interests the Berkeley Bowl is worth a visit. One of the most impressive grocery stores I have ever seen.
What was impressive about it? I rushed in and out, didn't see anything unusual about it. Wondering if I should go again.
It has an enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, etc., of interest to those who are interested in food, cooking history, ethnic cuisines, etc. Most grocery stores have never, for instance, heard of quinces. When I was there a few years ago they had three or four different sorts/qualities/etc.
You really need to get into an HEB Central Market sometime.
Is it better than Berkeley Bowl? (I don't know HEB at all.)
Once, I counted over 12 different varieties of fresh cucumbers at the Western location (the one near the highway). It is by far the best supermarket I have seen, including some in France (although maybe not some in Japan that are pretty special too).
I can't say on cucumbers, but other produce (five varieties of truffles!) and of non-Euro-typical foodstuffs, they're pretty amazeballs.
Good point. It deserved a leisurely stroll then.
Walking down Valencia street in the mission, from dandelion chocolate through 24th, and then turn left and explore the murals. It's not too esoteric but I enjoy so much (826 Valencia, Paxton gates, dogeared books, dandelion, radio habana). Also believe the burritos at Cancun (19th/Mission) are indisputably the best
Mazra is a fantastic restaurant near SFO.
I second this! Amazing Mediterranean food.
Once I saw an illustration with two versions of a composition by Mondrian, one as he painted it and the other with all of the lines made the same thickness, which altered the balance of it completely. It was perhaps in a book of Edward Tufte or Christopher Alexander. But now I can’t find it. Does anyone happen to know where this came from?
I think Tufte. Not "Visual Display of Quantitative Information". Maybe "envisioning information".
Hamas's ostensible reason for their terror attacks was to "defend Al Aqsa". There are people who buy that, or who feel sympathy for what Hamas has done given the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you are one of those people, I have a question for you. Would your view of these actions change if in fact Hamas's actions were not motivated by defending their religious or ethnic group, but a cynical coordinate effort with Russia to distract the West from Ukraine?
Because senior Hamas officials met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov after the last round of fighting [1] and possibly a number of times since then [2], Russia pre-positioned captured Ukrainian weapons in Gaza [3], Russian state-linked hackers began hacking Israel the day before the attack and threw in additional resources within an hour of the rocket strikes. Those rockets fell at 6:30AM and the hacking attacks that morning were by 7:30AM (both Moscow and Jerusalem time) [4], an unlikely hour to make a snap decision and get results. The unified message of Russian propagandists is weak evidence by comparison, but is notable.
[1] https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1858373/
[2] https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sj0dtokba
[3] https://kyivindependent.com/military-intelligence-russia-gives-hamas-weapons-captured-in-ukraine-to-discredit-kyiv/
[4] https://www.securityweek.com/hackers-join-in-on-israel-hamas-war-with-disruptive-cyberattacks/
Whether these reports turn out to be true (personally somewhat doubtful, but very low confidence), it is quite common for resistance/independence/revolutionary movements to coordinate with great powers who have very different motivations. To choose an example with much different emotional valence, american revolutionaries motivated by democratic self-determination worked closely with the absolutist monarchy of france, who wanted to weaken its rival england. And the mujahideen, motivated among other things be maintaining a conservative islamic society, worked closely with the liberal, majority christian US who disliked the USSR for different reasons.
I have no idea whether those stories are true, but:
My gut reaction is that it's Ukrainian propaganda to keep the US focused on Russia. Which contrasts with the purpose you suggest. So perhaps there's a question of how the US would be likely to respond if the story were true?
Also: why on earth would Ukraine give weapons to anyone? Don't they need them at home? Why would Russia engage in some kind of elaborate cat and mouse game, when Ukraine's response will always be "nuh-uh, it's Russia's fault"?
>a cynical coordinate effort with Russia to distract the West from Ukraine?
What does Hamas gain here? Other than the opportunity to kill a bunch of Israelis, which they didn't need Russia for. What is Russia offering in exchange for all those dead Hamas members (and Palestinians more generally).
If you want people to take this seriously, for the love of god do not use 'kyiv independent' as your source.
https://news.yahoo.com/russians-hamas-trophy-weapons-discredit-100500811.html
The Ukrainian MoD has made this claim to refute Russian MoD claims:
https://sputniknews.in/20231009/from-ukraine--afghanistan-to-middle-east-how-us-arms-ended-up-in-hamas-hands-4693015.html
But I think it's important for people to consider the hypothetical, because it's at least plausible that the Ukrainian story is correct. And even if those weapons ended up in Gaza by some other pathway, I find the "coincidence" of these well timed hacking attacks deeply suspicious.
So much of the defenses I've seen of these atrocities has started with "but Israel...". Now, I don't find the specifics of that argument convincing at all, particularly the part that reads "these atrocities against civilians were necessary because", but clearly some people do find them at least somewhat convincing. I suspect that people would find it much less morally ambiguous if Hamas's real reasons were "Hamas is afraid of irrelevance in a world with Israel-Saudi peace" and "Russia is afraid of Western aid to Ukraine". Never mind the interrelatedness of these conflicts given that Iran is a major supplier to both.
Im literally not commenting on your theory at all, I'm just saying that 'Kyiv Independnet' is a good way of making this look like Ukranian propaganda.
I don't see how any of that would reflect on Hamas' motivations. What's stopping it from being a coordinate effort with Russia to defend their religious or ethnic group?
Russia has claimed that Ukraine is supplying weapons to Hamas:
https://sputniknews.in/20231009/from-ukraine--afghanistan-to-middle-east-how-us-arms-ended-up-in-hamas-hands-4693015.html
And Ukrainian intelligence is directly blaming Russia for the supply of those weapons:
https://news.yahoo.com/russians-hamas-trophy-weapons-discredit-100500811.html
That move doesn't defend Hamas's religion or ethnic group, but could significantly alter Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If Russia merely believed in Hamas's mission, they would have proudly sent their own weapons to Hamas. This alleged Russian move seeks to use - or cause - another conflict to take the Western attention off of Russia's crimes.
So we return to the original question. If, hypothetically, Hamas was proven to have been cynically motivated to help Russia (or derail Israeli-Saudi peace) instead of their claimed motivations, would that change your opinion of their actions?
> Russia has claimed that Ukraine is supplying weapons to Hamas:
In which universe would doing *that* make sense?
First, Ukraine currently needs all the weapons it can get.
Second, the last time I checked, Israel supported Ukraine, or at least they had the common enemy Iran (the producer of drones that keep falling on Ukraine's cities).
Third, considering that the president of Ukraine is Jewish, I doubt he spend his time inventing strategies to hurt Israel.
So, this doesn't make sense at all.
(On the other hand, it makes perfect sense from the Russian perspective where the president of Ukraine is a Nazi. Of course a true Nazi would focus on destroying Israel even when his own country is burning; just look at Hitler's priorities during the war. So the conclusion is that this story was written for Russian audience, and for the credulous people all over the globe.)
(Note: I am not making a statement on possible Russia's involvement. I don't know. I am saying that the hypothesis of Ukraine's involvement doesn't make sense.)
That's an argument for Russia's motivations, not Hamas'. If a driver picks up a hitchhiker, you don't assume that both the driver and hitchhiker have the same end destination.
There was no justification for the Hamas attack but this seems to be Ukrainian propaganda
It seems like a reasonably sensible move on Russia's part, though. If you're Russia right now then one of your best moves is to get the fickle Western public distracted with some other bullshit so they lose interest in Ukraine.
Speculation: I expect that if the public doesn't pay attention, Western governments will continue with the status quo of supporting Ukraine. If anything, it's if there is a lot of attention at Ukraine and at the Western support for it that naysayers eventually start opposing spending more money on it, or that it becomes a partisan issue where if one side supports it, then the other side reflexively opposes supporting it.
I think this is definitely true for the US, where the establishment is substantially more pro-Ukraine than the average person might be. Do you think this is also true for Europe thkugh?
The Iranian connection doesn't seem very speculative at all.
I think you're understating the case; it would be crazy if Iran wasn't involved! The Revolutionary Guard is Hamas's biggest supplier.
[edit] This an attempt at modeling what A. Huxley would call the "common ground" of humanity and my speculation on how it came about supported by various authors. Lastly, a few techniques that seem broadly helpful in living well.
"When the drive for self-preservation operates freely we feel pleasure; when it is impeded we
feel pain.”
--Spinoza via K. Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
Being Human (plateaued)
TOC
Instinct to Morality ............. 2 [minor diagram upd.]
Advancing Humanness .... 3 [diagram upd.]
Steps to Betterment ........... 4 [completed]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xs7vffJWQwgpqLXZrPhaFqqLS6zkBPz_/view?usp=sharing
This is still less of an explanation of what's going on than I usually prefer for these kinds of things, but fine.
For anyone who's wondering, the link is a four page slideshow-style PDF about morality and mindfulness/spirituality.
Does anyone have a good explanation for the sudden peace treaty between the ADL and Musk? (see https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1709592361481777360 ; this was before the recent Hamas attack so that can't explain it). Did Musk back down in some way? Did the ADL back down in some way? Did they realize they didn't actually disagree on anything? Why was it in (at least one of their) interests to start a giant fight last month, and why did it stop being in their interests to pursue that fight?
Also, do people believe https://www.tesla-mag.com/x-recaptures-90-of-top-100-advertisers-ceo-linda-yaccarino-says/ ? Obviously Twitter has incentive to lie and say that everything is now going great. But we also got all of our original "things are going badly" info from Twitter, and they don't seem to have different incentives now compared to then.
Yaccarino’s claim is true but misleading. 90 of the advertisers are back on the platform but their ad-spends are about 90% below pre-Musk Twitter. Total Ad-revenue is 42% down.
Matt Levine wrote about X ad revenue today [0], citing an article by Media Matters [1]. Apparently many of the advertisers that have returned have spent negligible amounts of money since coming back, e.g., Media Matters claims AT&T spent a total of $781 on X ads over a 12 week period. Levine suggests that this is due to intentional efforts by Yaccarino to improve the "number of top pre-acquisition advertisers currently advertising" metric despite the fact that those advertisers aren't willing to spend material amounts of money on X ads.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-09/ozempic-is-bad-for-business
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/linda-yaccarino-again-claims-advertisers-are-returning-x-here-are-facts
What on earth is the rationale for a major company to spend a tiny but non-zero amount on Twitter advertising? If you think Musk is a Bad Person and you don't want to be seen as supporting him, any spend no matter how small makes you seem tainted. But if you don't have that concern, a microspend isn't even going to be worth the time it takes for your marketing team to configure the ad. Either run a real campaign or don't run one at all - what's the logic for a token spend?
Probably, being "data driven". As a big company's marketing department you're probably running tiny campaigns all the time to see what clickthrough rates they deliver. This (a) lets executives think they're being clever, and (b) justifies having a huge staff in the marketing department to be forever configuring all these experimental ads.
Thanks!
Netanyahu warm meeting with Musk deflated the ADL immensely:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-09-18/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-defends-musk-on-antisemitsm-suggests-hes-more-powerful-than-u-s-president/0000018a-a944-df78-adca-ef641dbe0000
Archive link:
https://archive.ph/efRV7
There is also this bit in the article:
> Several of Musk's Jewish business allies, reportedly including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and investor Steve Rattner, have attempted to defuse tensions between Musk and the ADL, all while X prepares for the potential lawsuit against ADL.
I can't access that article, but I didn't think ADL and Netanyahu got along, see eg https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2016/09/the-adl-takes-sides-against-benjamin-netanyahu/ . I thought ADL mostly represented American liberal Jews who are suspicious of the Israeli right.
True but still a warm meeting with the PM of Israel does a lot to assuage fears of liberal pro-Israel American Jews that you are not good on Jewish issues. Even if they personally don’t like Netanyahu or his policies.
The ADL does see (with some justification) that some extreme forms of anti Zionism are a form of anti semitism
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitism-and-radical-anti-israel-bias-political-left-europe
Whether they like the present regime or not I don’t know c
I saw some pro-Israel account on X praising Musk for X allowing the circulation of Hamas atrocity videos in ways that (this account said) wouldn't have been allowed under previous Twitter admins, which I took as probable evidence of X actually boosting such videos, and pro-Israel narratives generally. It could be possible that Musk had agreed to institute such a policy even earlier, and it just happened that it suddenly and drastically gained a new prominence two days ago.
Of course, people upset about that were happy for their own political opponents to be supressed on twitter.
When I was young, a museum exhibit that made a great impression on me (we didn't travel internationally then - well, children didn't unless their parents were very, very wealthy or missionaries or oil company executives or something) was the display of gifts from other heads of state or their representatives, to the LBJ White House, which had pride of place in his presidential library. It was a quite marvelous collection of objects, to my eyes. (Gifts were more of a big deal then too.)*
Hopefully this will not inspire any tangents about LBJ. Maybe I should have left his name out. But: the whole thing had a cool midcentury vibe.
I loved connecting the diversity of gifts with the diversity of countries. (I didn't yet have any inkling then, that the countries featured in the Countries of the World series that I also then loved, with their pictures - were not all totally equal in terms of their integrity as countries, or their origins. I knew no history. I knew something about Christmas customs in Sweden, e.g.) I loved the concept of "country" and "all different".
The thought that the world was so diverse thrilled me.
What a disappointment it has been to find that that diversity in the world has diminished over the rest of my life, and that it held a completely different meaning for everyone else, or at least those who would prove most influential. And that while other countries may persist - Iran seems eternal, for instance - it was my own that was feeblest of all in its country-ness.
*This sort of thing is evidently embarrassing now. The gifts have been reduced to a small display near the bathroom, I believe, on an upper floor.
While countries are becoming less diverse, I also think this is accelerated by an insane increase in the amount of information we consume on a daily basis. Look at the top players on GeoGuessr, for example. They can tell the difference between an Indonesian lamp pole and a Malaysian one.
You reach the limits of human diversity a lot quicker with the Internet and mass communications. So even if diversity had never been lost, you'd still be seeing the world shrink every day.
I once saw a Polynesian hat made from the tanned skin of a pufferfish in one of these sorts of collections (maybe royal). It was a very round affair with the tail at the top like a crest.
For "dress as your family ancestry day" at the kid's elementary school, which at that time cultivated a sort of international reputation, a friend would send her son off in a hat with what she claimed was an extinct bird from the homeland. It wasn't her homeland, it was her kids' - she kept a sort of ironic distance from it - but she loved pulling out that hat.
I enjoyed a similar collection of gifts which takes pride of place in the National Museum in Beijing. There's a large room filled with African wood carvings, Maori ritual tools, ornate swords, decorative plates etc. from around the world.
The USA had gifted to the Chinese leadership a small pewter owl, a large bronze eagle, and a bust of Lincoln with "The better part of one's life consists of his friendships" beneath it.
Yes, exactly! And of course I didn’t get to see what America had gifted.
My post was deleted. Can I ask why?
I posted a draft previously and I assumed silent approval. : )
It contained a weird Google Drive link plus a quote from Loki, and three or four commenters said they couldn't understand what it was or what was going on but it looked malicious. I didn't check myself. If you want to repost it with more of an explanation, feel free.
The reported "weird Google Drive link" I've used several times before as Google checks for malicious files - which was my reply to them. The "Loki" quote was meant to be ambiguous and enticing to a file portraying aspects of morality which none of us are entirely comfortable with. I provided a TOC. I'll change quote back to Spinoza, nixing Loki. Thanks for letting me repost.
[feel free to delete this thread, and again, thanks]
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/04/half-a-million-kinksters-can-t-be-wrong
I posted the link to Aella's recent article about a gigantic kink survey unthinkingly to a space that's generally unfriendly to rationalists. I just posted it because I thought it was interesting, and forgot about the rationalist markers.
Some points were brought up that might be reasonable-- are there a lot of kinksters, perhaps especially trans, who are sick of questionnaires and therefore won't reply? I don't think she mentioned that particular selection effect.
There was also a commenter who was concerned about privacy for individuals. Are Aella's surveys putting people at risk? At more risk than just living in the world? It's not as though medical systems are proof against data breaches.
Have people who've answered questionnaires said that the questionnaires made their lives worse in any way? This seems unlikely to me, but I might as well check.
> a space that's generally unfriendly to rationalists
If you wouldn’t mind expanding on this, I’m curious what this means. What makes a space unfriendly to rationalists?
Insults. Rudeness. Malice. Stereotyping.
I hang out there anyway because they're frequently interesting on other subjects.
It looks like the mods have deleted my post but haven't banned me. I'm not going to argue with them. Some of the commenters were talking about getting me banned.
> Insults. Rudeness. Malice. Stereotyping.
As a rationalist I might say stupid things but hopefully I’m politely stupid!
> Some of the commenters were talking about getting me banned.
I’m sorry to hear that. If you don’t mind me asking, where was this? Sounds like a left wing sub Reddit to me.
> Some points were brought up that might be reasonable-- are there a lot of kinksters, perhaps especially trans, who are sick of questionnaires and therefore won't reply?
I wonder if trans people really get more surveys than anyone else. I’m sick of surveys and I’m a vanilla cis guy.
Do you think that the unspoken problem that the commenters had with the survey is that it doesn’t support their ideological views and therefore the commenters are angry? If the survey had different results would the commenters have been okay with it?
Metafilter.com
I'm pretty tired of surveys myself, especially phone surveys from businesses. They take forever. I wouldn't say I'm plagued with surveys, though.
That might be a part of the problem, but only a small part. They (or at least a very vocal contingent) hate rationalists for a number of reasons, including support of eugenics.
My post also got a half dozen "favorites" which seem to be an equivalent to likes.
I believe I'm not the only rationalist or rationalist-adjacent person there, but we're pretty cautious.
I think that if the people filling out the survey (for the sake of filling out the survey) understand how the information is going to be used, then they gave informed consent to accept those privacy risks.
This, with the caveat that it's as long as they actually know what data is going to be released (e.g. individual responses, or per-question aggregates only).
I'm not convinced Aella's surveys add much to the risks of just being alive, considering the data breaches from large organizations. My medical information seems to be protected by people asking me for my name, birthdate, and sometimes my address. This would be a joke if it were funny.
Does anyone know a good book on the intellectual history of human equality. The types of questions I would want to read about:
* Some claim equality is a Western concept, is it?
* How has the popularity of the concept waxed and waned?
* What has been meant by the concept through history? How has the claim of equality evolved?
* How did the arguments against equality change through history?
* How do people view the concept today?
You might find the right book in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism/#Bib, or in those books' own bibliographies. For instance, I know G.A. Cohen (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/10/ga-cohen-obituary) wrote some interesting things about equality, so I would check his books' bibligraphies.
I would also check the bibliography of Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.
Thank you, good suggestions!
You might try Tom Holland's book "Dominion" which concerns itself with how Western moral ideas came about. His thesis is that modern Western values have their underpinnings in the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Roman's and Greeks did not believe that all men were equal in any sense: as Aristotle wrote, "That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." It was the Christians who came teaching "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
This page from the webcomic "The Illustrated Guide to Law" might be helpful, as it gives on overview of the development of these ideas during the Early Modern period and through the Enlightenment.
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=5235
I did read Dominion (forgot to mention that) but I found it too pop-sci, pretty shallow and the author seemed a bit too convinced by his own ideas. It doesn't really argue that equality is an uniquely Western concept, it just asserts it. Some ideas are asserted as within this tradition and some ideas outside of it or counter to it, again without any real argument besides that the author seem to like the included ideas and dislike the excluded ones. It lists incidents and tidbits but doesn't have the confidence to draw trends. And some of the sources are sloppy (e.g. the Nazi table talks have been discredited).
But basically I'm looking for Dominion but academic (and contrarian in the best of worlds).
Sorry friend, I'm all pop history. I couldn't give you anything a Google search couldn't.
I see your point about Dominion. Holland does seem to be regularly starting to make an argument, gesturing strongly towards it, but not sticking around to land it. Frustrating. But at least he gives a lot of primary sources you can check up on.
It sounds like you really need info on non-Western cultures and what they thought about equality. Maybe read the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects? That would get you the foundations of most of the non-Western world. If you find concepts of equality there, then they're not unique to the West.
I was reviewing trolley problems with my children yesterday. Aside from having to explain what a trolley was, it was interesting how they tried to push the limits of the hypotheticals. I discovered that, while trolley problems intuitively worked for them about as I'd have expected, not all ethical thought experiments fared as well.
In particular, Peter Singer's drowning child analogy did not go well. While I agree with the ethos of charitable giving, and am not trying to litigate the fundamental ethics of altruism, I think the drowning child analogy struggles to connect in a some key ways:
1. Saving the child's life isn't fundamentally a monetary transaction. Losing the value of the suit is incidental to saving the child's life. If you were jogging in a track suit or a swimsuit you'd do the same thing. The analogy forces us to transform the saving of the child's life into a transaction when it takes the leap from "would you save a drowning child even if it happened cost you the value of a nice suit" all the way to, "would you trade the value of a suit to save the life of a child in a low-income country?" Fundamentally, the thing that caused you to take action was the child in peril and the observation that you could do a thing to save that child's life. When you decide to jump in and save the drowning child, you didn't consider the value of the suit because you're not a monster.
But extending the analogy to far-away people forces you to consider the value of the suit as part of the motivating principle for jumping into the lake in the first place. It wasn't a transaction until the analogy turned it into one. Now, the obvious rejoinder would be, "Isn't trading the value of the suit itself an action you could take to save a child's life?" That may be true, but it's not the value judgement the analogy is asking us to consider in the case of the drowning child.
We can stretch the analogy a little farther to demonstrate this point. That suit you're wearing cost $100,000. Do you still jump in to save the child? If you didn't, choosing instead to preserve the value of the suit, would you feel bad about watching that child drown? Personally, I'd jump in - or if not feel terrible in a fundamentally different way than I would feel for not donating to help people far away from me. And yet nobody is suggesting that $100k per life saved is a reasonable threshold for EA. Maybe you could argue that's because there's a lot of lower-hanging fruit on the EA tree before we hit the $100k/life threshold. By the point where we're asking people to donate that much per life saved, the moral argument gets a lot less compelling - and yet the drowning child argument DOESN'T. It's seemingly unaffected by cost, opposite to the way the far-off transaction is entirely dependent on cost.
Indeed, is there a dollar amount for the suit that changes the mental calculus for whether you feel compelled to jump into the lake and save the drowning child, versus selling the suit and donating the money to buy bed nets to prevent malaria? Say you could save a hundred lives by donating the suit to buy bed nets. Arguably, you should keep walking past the drowning child to preserve the value of the suit for far-off EA work - secure in the knowledge you're doing the right thing. But who has that intuition? At that point, the analogy is no longer working with our intuitions but against them.
The drowning child analogy fails to connect when it transforms an intuition that's not fundamentally a transaction into a transaction.
2. Saving a drowning child carries certainty of the benefit. Charitable giving to far away people (or far future people) loses this link to both certainty and benefit. As with so many financial transactions that seem good on paper (but end terribly in real life), the presence and magnitude of risk are ignored.
There's always the potential that your intervention doesn't have the effect you're hoping for, such that a "life saved" from buying a theoretical bed net doesn't translate into an actual bed net getting delivered to an actual person in need or that person doesn't use it in a way that saves their life or whatever. When you jump into the lake to save the child, you know the child's life was saved. The corollary is at least as important: if you DON'T jump in to save the child you have to watch them drown, knowing that you might have saved them. The risk differential is very large.
Okay, sure, but does that break the analogy? After a few dozen bed nets you can probably estimate that at least one life has been saved. Maybe you have to toss a bit more money at the problem to get the effect you wanted, but the low-hanging fruit is already so much lower than the cost of a suit that we should be able to price risk into the equation. And yet it still doesn't seem to work.
The problem isn't just the uncertainty of the magnitude of the effect. It's the uncertainty of the presence of an effect at all. Or in some cases, whether the net effect might even be negative. This is especially true in the field of far-off charity work. The long history of attempts at economic aid/development is littered with examples where the best intentions made people worse off than if nothing had been done to 'help'. (https://www.amazon.com/The-Idealist-Jeffrey-Sachs-Poverty/dp/0385525818/) Food aid can be used to prop up a dictatorship and expand suffering. Refugee camps inadvertently prolonged the Rwandan genocide. To this day, compassionate Russian families can take in 'refugee' children from occupied Ukraine - an act that outside of Russia is considered a war crime of forced deportation and cultural genocide. The problem with being far from the problem is not knowing whether your efforts are actually helping. In the drowning child analogy, there's no chance that the child might have survived if you hadn't jumped in to save them, and a certainty that jumping in to save the child won't INCREASE the chance of the child dying. The intuition we should be taking away from this is that it REALLY matters how certain you are that your solution is effective. Risk should not be ignored.
EA is perfectly positioned to help close the gap of uncertainty. But the only way it can do so is by acknowledging the fundamental problem with the drowning child analogy: the farther away the person in need, the less moral weight we feel toward helping that person. And rightly so! Where the distance is greater, the risk that aid is transformed from net benefit to net harm increases - something the development community has learned through sad experience. One of EA's biggest goals should be risk minimization. We need to transform intangible, uncertain opportunities for aid into something akin to walking by a drowning child, where the potential to save a life is certain. If we can do that, we can restore the link between a drowning child fifteen feet away and suffering people ten thousand miles away. What we can't do is pretend that these two situations are the same, as the drowning child analogy tempts us to do. Making them morally equivalent is a very difficult, unsolved problem. But one we are working on.
3. There's a story in the New Testament that has always struck me as odd. A woman washes Jesus' feet with some expensive oil (and her hair?), to which Judas complains that this was a big waste of money that could have been donated to the poor. On one hand, this demonstrates that the argument over transforming acts of compassion into transactions to help the poor is a lot older than the present debate. On the other hand, Jesus' answer seems a bit out of character when he says, "The poor you have with you always." Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?
I've thought about this a lot. I think it's a direct response to Judas's impulse to throw money at "the poor" in an attempt to "fix the problem". Poverty is a long-run problem that can't be solved by blindly throwing money at it and hoping it goes away. That's not what Jesus did when he visited the poor, because it's not a real solution. Real solutions to human suffering require more personal care and attention than just selling stuff to "give to the poor". I think Jesus is correct to diagnose simple "give to the poor" solutions as inadequate to solve - or even make progress on - problems of human suffering. Indeed, that approach will ensure poverty will always be with us.
I like that EA is trying to do the hard work of trying to solve the hard problems of making altruism effective. In my experience, many in the community are not making the same crass financial calculation Judas made. They take the struggle seriously. I worry a framing like the drowning child analogy, which transforms the hard problem-solving work into a monetary transaction, may do the whole movement a disservice.
I think the important factor that's different between the drowning child and the unknown kid statistically probably dying of malaria somewhere is that in the drowning child thought experiment you're the only person who can save the kid, whereas the other kid can be saved by literally anybody. If I see a child drowning in front of a crowd of ten thousand people, I'm probably not going to be the one who jumps in, I'll probably just assume that someone else in this giant crowd is a trained lifesaver who'll be better at it than me.
I think that's a factor, but I still think there's a moral intuition at play in the presence of other people. There's a famous story that sums up the moral repulsion we have when nobody does anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese
While the details appear to not have panned out as originally reported, the case evokes a specific moral intuition. The idea that a woman bled out after being raped and stabbed, with nobody stepping in to help her despite 38 people supposedly being witness to the crime, is morally repugnant. It's fine to assume someone else will jump in and save a drowning child, but most people will stick around long enough to confirm the kid is getting saved before leaving the scene.
I do think there's a point to be made about moral proximity. If you're not close enough to a critical situation, it's probably best to stay out of the way absent some special abilities.
"This woman is having a heart attack. Is there a doctor in the house?"
"Excuse me, I'm a doctor."
"Can you help her?"
"Umm ... I have a PhD in geology, so-"
"Get out of here."
Perhaps this partly explains why everyone has to rubber-neck at the scene of a car wreck as they drive by? It's nothing you can help with 99.99% of the time, but everyone has to slow down anyway to confirm they don't have a moral duty of care to help out. They could just drive by without slowing down. By right, that's what they SHOULD do! Yet for some reason large numbers of people instinctively slow down to catch a glimpse of the wreckage.
How to analogize this to charity, though? Say there's a burning building. You see a dozen people have formed a bucket brigade, but they could use more bodies on the line. A few people are engaged rescuing people from the building - and you can see people still emerging from the structure. This isn't a single-hero problem, like with the drowning child.
You could decide not to get involved, sure, but seeing that a group of people is engaged in the crisis you decide to get involved. Having answered the first question, "Is there anything I can do to help?" you're now faced with a second question, "How will my help be most useful?"
You could do the heroic thing and rush into the building to help get survivors out. For some people, that answer will result in lives saved. However, if you have asthma that would be exacerbated by going into a smoke-filled building, perhaps rushing into the building would just make you another victim who needs to be saved from the flames. In that case, joining the bucket brigade is probably prudent. Or maybe you could tend the wounded. But before you do that, maybe you should try phoning the emergency line to make sure they're sending a fire truck?
The point is that in a large-scale crisis there are often many ways to help, but also many ways to become a burden on those who are helping. While zeal for the cause is laudable, it's also prudent to make sure your efforts are well-targeted. I think this is the ethos of many in the EA community, but the messaging doesn't often get that across very well.
The bystander effect hasn’t replicated particularly well - and I believe the initial reporting about Kitty itself mis describes the event.
Yes, apparently people had much less ability to hear her than was reported, and some did call the police.
The police invented the entire story as an excuse why they didn't come (despite actually being called), and journalists of course couldn't resist a cool story. And now it's in textbooks.
It seems like it's being recognized as bunk reporting, even if urban legends never die. I referenced it in part to demonstrate that there does appear to be a moral intuition at play when witnessing tragedy from a crowd. Despite the debunked stories to the contrary, people don't stop feeling moral impulses to help just because others are nearby.
" Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?"
Common exegesis on this is that Judas is not really concerned about the money not going to the poor, but not being donated to the group directly. He is traditionally identified as the "holder of the purse", i.e. the guy who managed the money for the apostles and Jesus as they travelled round (and probably the accompanying women etc.) which is that he was the bursar, taking charge of the donations and paying for the expenses. Tradition also claims that he was skimming off the top, so his concern about "this ointment could have been sold for much" is more "and I could have got a percentage of that". It's not coincidental that the narrative continues that immediately after this episode, Judas goes to betray Jesus.
The entire passage is that Jesus is looking forward to His death, hence the mention that she is preparing His body for burial according to custom:
"6 But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."
It's not said that Judas was the one raising objections, but that some of the disciples, or all of them, objected:
"8 And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? 9 For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.”
"4 There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? 5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her."
But Judas is the one who traditionally takes the rap for it.
As to "what kind of answer is this?" it's a reminder that the poor are with us right now, today, and if we want to help them we can - instead of criticising others for the use they make of their money, we should be concerned with the use we make of it. Also that there may be good reasons for not giving money to 'the poor' all the time - such as spending it on burial or other necessities.
That exegesis is based on the optimistic assumption that the story makes sense in a larger system.
One angle could be that people are more generous is repeated prisoner dilemma's, but the last one will find less cooperation. Generally help the poor, but when you're going to die, you might as well get the perfume.
<i>3. There's a story in the New Testament that has always struck me as odd. A woman washes Jesus' feet with some expensive oil (and her hair?), to which Judas complains that this was a big waste of money that could have been donated to the poor. On one hand, this demonstrates that the argument over transforming acts of compassion into transactions to help the poor is a lot older than the present debate. On the other hand, Jesus' answer seems a bit out of character when he says, "The poor you have with you always." Isn't this the man who spent all his time helping the poor and the downtrodden? What kind of answer is this?</i>
Jesus' mission was to save mankind from their sins, not to set up a poverty-reduction programme. That doesn't mean that reducing poverty isn't good, but it can't come at the expense of spiritual goods; and since Jesus is God, honouring him is a spiritual good. Judas' "Couldn't this money have been spent on the poor?" gets the proper order of things back to front.
I don't see donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation as being transactional. An important part of transactional relationships is that both parties are gaining something. When I donate the the AMF I don't personally receive anything for my donation except the positive feelings associated with doing something good which is also true in the drowning child case. A better framing is simply that I have resources that could help save peoples lives and I am choosing to use it to further that end. If I traveled to Africa and donated my time or I bought food and donated that would you view the relationship as being transactional? People tend to get hung up on the fact that the resource is money, but money is just an abstract representation of value. The resource being money doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the relationship.
You're right that the drowning child isn't quite analogous because the suit is purely incidental and isn't being used to save the child. Imagine instead that you cannot wade into the water yourself, for whatever reason, but can instead tie your clothes together into a makeshift rope that can be used to pull the child in to the shore. I don't think this changes my intuition about the situation at all. I would still feel the need to use my clothes to save the child even if that ruins them. In the case of the AMF or other charities where you are not directly involved in saving the child imagine that there is already someone tying clothes together to make the rope. Do you donate your clothes to the effort?
As for the limits of how much we should spend to save a life, there are no limits. The happiness and wellbeing of people is the fundamental value from which other things derive their value, so there is no limit to how much we should be willing to spend. Suits, houses and money are only valuable to the extent that they can improve people's lives. The only limit is whether the resources can be used more effectively some other way. Donating when it costs $100,000 per life saved feels a lot less morally compelling because it has a much greater cost to you. The value of a suit is relatively insignificant relative to a child's life so if you were in a position where you are spending $100,000 on a suit then donating even at $100,000/life would be morally compelling because the alternatives do not provide much value.
Not saving a drowning child so that you can protect a suit which can be sold to save more people certainly feels absurd but I think that this is just a reflection of the fact that we are in an absurd situation where people spend tens of thousands of dollars on suits when there are people that could be saved with that money. If you made people's choices explicit and asked them to choose between saving a child life or having a nice suit no one would choose the suit yet people make equivalent decisions everyday, myself included. If we didn't live in such a world then you should certainly save the child because no one would be willing to buy your suit for so much money. Since we do live in an absurd world we should expect that sometimes the reasonable thing to do will seem absurd.
It's not absurd. I would gladly spend $100000 to save a family member, but there's no way I'm giving that to charity to save 10 children somewhere across the globe. People who are close to us matter more to us, that's right and good. The child in the lake is close to us, therefore we care. That's how we are, and I think with good reason.
That's how we feel instinctively, but if your moral code only ever says "do what feels right to you" then I think it's not much of a moral code.
Why not?
How different is that than the role of professional ethicists?
'...if your moral code only ever says "do what feels right to you"...'
In no way did my statement above reflect that sentiment. First, I'm not prescribing a moral code, or even describing one.
Second, I'm speaking about the reality of human experience. It is almost universal that we care about family and people with whom we have close relationships more than strangers. This is almost universally a good thing for many reasons.
Third, I could write a page about coordination problems, local knowledge, metis, etc. but it's safe to say that our humanitarian efforts are much more effective close to home. There are certain low hanging fruit (like bed nets) that have convinced some people that redistributing money broadly across the globe is the most moral choice, but that is not a moral certainty, not obvious, and not something that you should be acting smug about.
Where do you derive your moral code from?
I don't think it's sufficient to fall back to saying "we live in an absurd world" to explain why a person doesn't feel morally compelled in one situation but does feel morally compelled in the other. That's kind of my point here, that there's work to do to make the moral case in favor of charitable giving to those outside our immediate circle of experience, and that moral case needs to link the giver to the receiver.
As much as I don't think it's enough to take as a given that people will feel morally inclined to help people far away, I also don't think it's enough to throw up our hands at those absurd people who will pay a bunch of money for suits when people are dying thousands of miles away. If there's no clear path for fixing that far off situation, it's not absurd to buy the suit.
I agree that the use of the word "transactional" is probably inaccurate. However, I do think the analogy inaccurately attempts to convert a moral intuition about proximity and need into a resource-based intuition that simply doesn't fix the situation. It's possible to make the resource-based ethical point, but not by using the drowning child analogy as imagined by Peter Singer. Your framing - where someone is fashioning suits into ropes to help pull the child to shore - is probably closer to the type of situation Singer is trying to get at.
While you are certainly correct that, if you are drawing from the reference class of "all interventions in developing countries", the chance of any specific intervention as beneficial is pretty low.
However, the standard EA reply is the following:
In general, when you look at unsuccessful interventions, that benefit corrupt governments, we find that they involve untraced aid in the form of easily sellable objects, or interventions with lots of "feel good" vibes but no empirical support (playpumps). However, things like Malaria nets have 1. Known effect sizes that have replicated under scrutiny and 2. The product itself is hard to use for the purposes of corruption and 3. The organizations themselves are selected for transparency and avoiding corruption related failure modes. In addition, the reason why malaria nets are chosen instead of more abstract interventions is that basically everyone agrees that children dying or being crippled is bad, so this is less about alleviating poverty in general but of preventing a predictable symptom of poverty.
Now, I'm not saying the OP falls into this fallacy (in fact I think they're earnestly engaging with the topic), but one thing I noticed is that people who raise this set of objections to the drowning child problem, ALSO demonstrate a remarkable lack of interest in confirming or disconfirming whether or not the intervention is effective, or, when evidence is presented, they come up with an entirely new list of objections which justifies their current actions. And that's where I think the drowning child problem clarifies the situation. If you see someone claim that they didn't understand a child was drowning (not unlikely!), and they immediately leave when attempts to explain what child drowning looks like, or claim that children drown elsewhere, so what's the point of saving a particular child, or there were lots of other people around, so why them, I think people would rightly distrust the person's altruism.
I think, conversely, that people should be allowed to walk past drowning children, but that they shouldn't be given credit for being the type of person who rescues drowning children if they consistently don't.
I don't think we disagree. My concern is that EA gets a lot of bad press for doing good work. I was mostly trying to work out how to tweak the framework to make a more effective EA pitch. While I'm sure there are those who, like you say, are intent on walking past the proverbial drowning child. I think there are also many who are skeptical of EA's efforts - especially after the fallout from SBF and some of the more hairbrained theoretical musings that make great opinion articles but don't represent a large percentage of actual EA work in the trenches.
Hm, I guess fundamentally I just don't think there's a way to get around someone's status protection instincts. People generally want to view themselves favorably, and pointing out that they may be doing somewhat non-optimal (or even monstrous) by their own standards will just activate that instinct. See the cousin threads to this one where people justify that people being further away not being helped, is, in fact, ipso facto good, and not an unfortunate fact about human cognition or inability to find information. People who make fun of EA in those ways seem way more obsessed about the status fallout effects ("EAs are just trying to launder their reputation!", the extremely salacious focus on relationships and associated drama and the frequent claims that charity is really about self actualization and not really about helping other people, and therefore you are deficient in personality if you take charity recommendations), and essentially uninterested in the question of "hey, if bad things were happening where it's hard to see and I do not get socially rewarded for it, can I do something about it anyway?"
Maybe we have different audiences we pay attention to. I know the audience you're talking about, but I don't expect to move anyone 100% on any issue. I figure the best I can do is help move someone 10%-20% at a time. If I can move someone who's starting at "EA are the devil!", it'll probably not be all the way to, "I'm totally on board with EA." The best I can hope for is something closer to, "EA are just wrong." Better to start with someone who's at "I've heard EA are weird and insincere," and focus on moving them to, "I've heard conflicting things about EA but it sounds like the first stuff I heard isn't representative of the movement as a whole."
I try to focus less on the extremes, partly because it seems like a worse place to have an impact, and partly because in my experience the extremes get more exposure than their representation. I figure I can do more good focusing on the cases where a marginal difference can tip someone from negative to positive. In my experience, most people who aren't close to an issue don't pay more attention to it than, "this is the general vibe I get from people about it". For these people, hearing an extreme POV yell at them that EA are reputation laundering, disconnected from reality, etc. may set a prior for them to steer clear of EA. Once confronted with an actual effective altruist, though, they'll be curious to confirm their biases. Since they're not particularly invested in the bias itself - they don't really care about the issue, they've just been biased by exposure to extreme views - I have one opportunity to affect their biases for the better. I can do that by representing the most extreme parts of the EA movement, by being defensive and assuming the worst about their motivations, or I can give common-sense explanations about how EA is making progress trying to tackle the kind of hard problem they naturally agree should be addressed. My approach rejects the with-us-or-against-us mentality, because I don't think most people want to pick sides at that stage, so forcing them to choose just results in them choosing status quo anti-EA.
As to the far-off versus nearby phenomenon, I'd like to steelman the argument better than you did. The widespread pattern looks to me like an innate bias toward care for people close to us. I don't think the just-so story from evolution (not empirically validated in a scientific way - but that's its own argument I have with the penchant some old-school evolutionary biologists have for getting way out over their skis vis-a-vis the evidence) is enough to explain the whole phenomenon, or to say that there's some evolutionary holdover that's keeping our global community from rationally caring for those far away. Whatever the source of the bias, I don't think you get past it writ large by pretending it away, or just by preaching the message over and over. I think EA has an important role to play in helping people past this psychological hurdle, partly by identifying enticing opportunities for altruism. You don't need people to commit to EA for them to agree that there's evidence to support an intervention or that the evidence suggests we should redirect our efforts elsewhere. The nice thing about EA is that you don't have to be part of the movement to benefit from attempts to collect good evidence and apply it. All the more reason not to insist on us-versus-them.
I also think, from people I know, that there's a lot of support for truly helping 'far away' people in need. There's a reason those old TV commercials flashed images of starving children in Africa. There's a reason they were successful at getting people to donate. But then rumor spread that those organizations were 9X% overhead or whatever and people stopped trusting that sending a dollar a day would do anything to help the cause.
People DO care. I don't think we have to convince them as much as we think we do. I do think we have to convince people who have been conditioned to be jaded about humanitarian problems that never feel like they get any better. "We can make progress against disease, death, poverty, etc." is news people want to hear, but they've learned not to trust. People WANT to believe we can do better, which is a huge head start for EA after you get past the ex ante bias from detractors and past experience. I don't think the detractors are going away, but we don't have to talk in ways that might lead to bias confirmation.
(Apologies for necro) This comment has been very helpful in light of all the moderately baffling comments against the kidney donation, I think bookmarking or otherwise keeping it available is important for me.
I think you're just right on the merits of all the points you made, and I mostly have some kind of mental block around seeing the positive in people. I think this is a healthy way of framing the situation and having this response saved somewhere or in mind would do help out with my chronic cynicism. And too easy to sour grapes myself on "they were unpersuadable because evolution!"
Thanks.
Health care spending is an interesting case study in the risk/benefit calculation. I think it takes at least as much care and study to ensure that interventions provide any benefit, and that they continue to provide benefit as populations change. I think it needs the same kind of careful, ongoing analysis to ensure not just the money spent is worth the promised benefits. But also that the promised benefits are worth the side effects. In many cases, I think modern medicine does not pass that standard. It's a problem that requires constant vigilance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVgfV-7Wzr4&list=PL6VZKYkoBLdMcrNPIuHyNVIHj6m2cU3R8&index=15
The nice thing about hypothetical situations is we can wave away uncertainty. As you point out, in the real world there is uncertainty everywhere - not just in far-off countries. If you're arguing that minimizing uncertainty is at least as important in non-EA interventions like health care and education, I wholeheartedly agree.
Thanks for the video link-- it's about "medical reversals"-- changes in medical advice.
It's possible that giving everyone aspirin to prevent heart attacks *was* a good idea, but people are taking different drugs now and are physically different, so it wasn't stupid then, but treatments don't just need to be well-founded, they need to be re-evaluated now and then.
Exactly. I used to think running an RCT was a permanent improvement to human knowledge. "Well, now we know that forever. On to the next thing until we know it all." And yet there's almost an expiration date for evidence, because the world is not a static environment.
Making things better is a hard problem, no matter what field you're working in, but especially when you're interacting with real people. It's not something you do once and you're finished forever.
Interesting resource: u/lrq3000 on Reddit has compiled a literature review and treatment protocol for sighted non-24 hour sleep wake disorder. I have not fully fact checked everything, but the stuff I have verified is good science and the recommended protocol works very well for me.
https://circadiaware.github.io/VLiDACMel-entrainment-therapy-non24/SleepNon24VLiDACMel.html
Thanks for posting this - it isn't user friendly at all, but once I started to read DLMO as "in the evening" it mostly became understandable. Now I know what to blog about in two weeks.
Lately I’ve been thinking a good sci fi book to write would be about a future in which we’ve developed a perfectly reliable test for psychopathy. How would it affect our politics? Would discrimination against psychopaths be legal? Would we require all candidates for office to disclose their test results? Of course, a psychopathic candidate could lie about their results, or maybe they would try to sell it as benefit -- “the world is cruel and you need someone ruthless to protect our interests”
Reminds me of "The Truth Machine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_Machine); the premise is the development of a perfect lie (not psychopath) detector, but I think the effects would be similar.
Highly recommend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass
The difficulty of implementing this would depend (among other things) on whether there is a clear line between psychopaths and non-psychopaths, or whether it is a continuum (in which case people would debate endlessly about where exactly to draw the line). In this comment, I am going to assume that there is a relatively clear line.
I wouldn't really worry about "potentially losing the most capable people". Notice that one of the things psychopaths are great at is taking credits for other people's work and undermining other people. So whatever impression you might have of their capabilities, it was probably strongly colored by this. (In other words, the world without psychopaths would probably have the same positive achievements, but the credit would be distributed among more people.)
Also, some psychopaths wind up making good surgeons. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/44562/some-surgeons-may-be-psychopathsbut-thats-no-bad-thing
Unsurprising, given that psychopathy is a combination of nerves-of-steel low Emotionality, along with other traits like amorality (low Honesty-Humility) unconscientiousness, and anger-proneness.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Donald-Lynam/publication/230621970_Examining_the_utility_of_general_models_of_personality_in_the_study_of_psychopathy_A_comparison_of_the_HEXACO-PI-R_and_NEO_PI-R/links/54f9f2f10cf21ee4fdedfde2/Examining-the-utility-of-general-models-of-personality-in-the-study-of-psychopathy-A-comparison-of-the-HEXACO-PI-R-and-NEO-PI-R.pdf
You can have low Emotionality without the other stuff.
Many Thanks! That makes sense.
>a future in which we’ve developed a perfectly reliable test for psychopathy.<
...Blade Runner? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0
My immediate assumption is that would be bleak as hell, because all their most effective candidates would be psychopaths. My second thought is that would be a very hard book to write correctly, because you'd have to understand a bunch of psychopaths well enough to not turn them into caricatures.
I'm not convinced that "psychopaths" are a distinct category of people or medical condition, rather than an extremely fuzzy classfication of people who happen to be a couple of standard deviations to the right on the "how big a jerk are you today" bell curve.
Interesting idea. I remember reading in a game theory article that psychopathy might influence the social environment for people. Essentially, if you don’t have some chaos agents who pursue their own interests then in some game theory simulations you settle into having more “mafiosos” than if you introduce them.
Epistemic status: Half remembered article but could be cool to see how ostracizing psychopaths might have unintended consequences
It would be a challenge to keep the system honest. Psychopaths would be trying very hard to infiltrate the system for controlling psychopaths. They're good at that sort of thing.
I think we already have those tests, and we could improve them easily, but no-one seem to care.
Those are questionnaires that can be gained. I’m thinking something more like a genetic test.
Having spent quite a bit of time studying genetics, I'd be very surprised if you could determine psychopathy purely from someone's genome. All the predictors we have today for polygenic traits (of which psychopathy is an example) are probabilistic. We generally determine the test's accuracy with out-of-sample validation.
For binary traits like psychopathy, the metric of quality is AUC or area under the curve. A predictor with no power would score 0.5 and a predictor with can perfectly distinguish between cases and controls would score 1.
The best predictors we have today are in the 0.7-0.8 range. I don't think there's actually much room beyond that because the traits are not perfectly heritable.
Maybe if one were to combine genetic predictors with extremely detailed monitoring of a person's environment one could construct a good psychopathy predictor. But with that level of power needed to monitor indiviuals at that level of detail, you might be able to steer most potential psychopaths away from the environments that would elicit psychopathic behavior.
If we don’t find mechanisms to deliberately enhance physical/emotional closeness among homo sapiens, the very architecture of consciousness strictly dictates that attempts to achieve AI alignment - or any outcomes that don't make the apocalypse-o-meter tick upwards - are predestined to futility. Civilization, particularly Western, has been running an optimization process that aims for an atomized human model - and it's now disintegrating. What if we designed an app engineered to mend these ruptures, with the eventual aim of handing the reins over to benevolent AI steered by the process?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yw2NrJ7SDpufsFCdE/agi-alignment-is-isomorphic-to-unconditional-love
I have a question that I feel compelled to ask that I can't get off my mind. Does anyone here know a lot about war and related topics?
I'm not siding with either Israel or Palestine, but the recent surprise attack concerns me for reasons that are separate from what's going on over there.
I have seen a user on poa.st (website with lots of Nazis and other far-right people on it) say something about a "milsim" which made me think they meant "military simulation" and they are planning some kind of attack or coup.
Again, I'm not saying that any party is in the right but the attack in the Middle-East happened despite Israel's intense surveillance of Gaza, which makes me think that attacks in general can come at any time without warning.
Am I just being paranoid or is this a real risk? If not, can someone with expertise in the matter walk me through why it isn't?
There is not and never has been such a thing as Palestine.
The war is between Israel & Hamas.
Internet "Nazis" are a bunch of teenage kids larping as something to scare the normies. A couple of decades ago they would have been satanists, but we stopped getting outraged by satanists so they decided to pretend to be Nazis instead. I wouldn't worry too much about them.
They may have been referring to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilSim
It’s a recreational activity not preparation for civil war.
Just published a piece in 3 Quarks Daily: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html
Here's the title and introduction:
Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]
I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.
Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.
As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.
That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.
What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.
This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem.
I haven't heard of incels in a while, and yet, the circumstances have not changed, and there should still be lots of them around, maybe even more than when they were in the spotlight. Does anyone know of places online where incels congregate these days?
I would imagine that people who are involuntarily celibate are at least as common as they were five years ago. But they've all figured out that "incel" is a hateful slur against them and they don't want that, so they're either using a different term or congregating in places that they'd rather not have outsiders find. Or both.
In related news, I've seen stories about the "sex recession" (high levels of sexlessness among young men, in particular) being over; at least one study (https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-the-sex-recession-over) saw levels of sexless-in-the-past-year among young people dropping from the heights of 25-30 % to a bit over 10 % for both men and women.
This is also corroborated by anecdotes from e.g. teachers that I know and other people who interact with high-school kids. HS kids are way, *way* more concerned with doing well in school and getting good college prep and job prep than they were 10-15 years ago when I was in school. I think it's because of a general sentiment that has been growing in the nation: that one's economic security is not guaranteed, and it's relentless competition your whole life which you have to get a leg up on as early as possible.
It seems like a starkly negative trend but I have no idea what can be done about it. I'd support nixing standardized tests for starters, though. IMO it's a fallacy that the point of school is to "learn facts"; it ought to be for "growing up". You can always learn facts later.
So kids are learning how to try hard and put in effort and your instinct is to put a stop to it?
The kids who were trying to get laid were also learning how to try hard and put in effort, and towards a more generally useful life skill. Telling children we're putting a gatekeeper between them and any remotely prosperous life, who will allow passage only if they master a set of arcane skills that they'll use only once or twice for that purpose, is cruel and pointless.
You're talking specifically about high school graduation or perhaps college. I was responding to this statement - "HS kids are way, *way* more concerned with doing well in school and getting good college prep and job prep than they were 10-15 years ago when I was in school. I think it's because of a general sentiment that has been growing in the nation: that one's economic security is not guaranteed, and it's relentless competition your whole life which you have to get a leg up on as early as possible."
Being concerned with doing well in school, or preparing for doing well in jobs are not bad things.
No matter how arcane the skills they teach in high school or college, the actually important one is learning to apply yourself to something that is not immediately rewarding, and per the OP, it appears that being driven to master that because of a fear of 'relentless competition' is somehow wrong. Life is, in fact, relentless competition, and there's nothing wrong with that! It helps all of our lives get better.
I'm talking about roughly age 13-18. College has a different set of problems.
No? I mean, not exactly? my issue they're trying hard and putting in effort at the wrong stuff, at the artificial busywork created by badly designed education. And that if education is coming at the expense of growing up and enjoying life something's wrong.
The US is remarkably credentialist. The diploma is worth something merely by having it.
Is Jason Isbell good to see in concert? It's a moot point until next year, but I follow a Salt Lake City podcast, and a while back the hostesses were joking about how he performs so frequently at the Red Butte Gardens concert venue that they should offer him a condo up there or something. It makes me curious.
With the Fried Chicken Sandwich trend, how come nobody has turned out a good Chinese food sandwich? You could totally turn General Tso's Chicken or something else into a sandwich, and in fact I tried my hand at making an Orange Chicken Sandwich (roll, toppings, Panda Express Orange Chicken) and it was pretty good.
I don't know about fried chicken sandwiches as a trend, but the Orange Chicken Sandwich sounds not entirely dissimilar to a fried shrimp po'boy with remoulade sauce. Tried it on a baguette?
Isbell was good in concert ten years ago. Not sure about recently. I don't like his recent solo stuff as much as I do the DBT.
Make a Tiktok video about the sandwich so it enters the ideasphere. There's a guy on Tiktok that's always willing to experiment with weird or creative sandwiches, so you could garner a bit of attention. The idea of a Chinese fusion sandwich sounds pretty good.
Maybe the best argument against it is that you're loading up on even more carbs and the dishes you mention aren't very saucy to soak into the bread. I think a more saucy Chinese food would go great in a sandwich since the flavor would be soaked up.
For those of you who, like me, were fans of Michael "The OFloinn" Flynn, of "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" (among many others) fame, you should know that he passed away on 30 September, according to tofspot.blogspot.com.
He will be missed greatly.
I enjoyed "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", but I remember him first and foremost as author of the wonderful novel "Eifelheim," where aliens land in medieval Germany and befriend the village priest.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
Thanks for letting us know, sad news! God rest him.
Since we're referencing The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, a sample quote:
"1. Our Ancestors Were Stoopid
Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like drunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You’ve got eyeballs and armillaries, and that’s pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here.
3. Mystical Woo-woo
But… didn’t Aristarchus and the Pythagoreans propose heliocentrism in ancient times? If only they had prevailed, we might have had Real Science™ millennia sooner! We’d be on freaking Mars by now! What was their evidence?
Well, you see, Fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center. QED.
There are many names for this sort of thinking, but “scientific” is not one of them. Aristotle says of the Pythagoreans:
In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own.
– Aristotle, On the heavens II.13.293a"
I'd recommend reading the entire series, it's funny and informative:
"Nicholas Copernicus, a canon lawyer at Frauenberg cathedral, was a medical practitioner, a financial advisor, and was once shortlisted for the bishop’s seat. He was also a gifted “mathematicus.” Hey, he was a Renaissance Man™. But he was not a scientist in our modern sense. He made few empirical observations, instead doing new math on existing data: viz., Peuerbach’s Epitome in Almagestum and Gerard of Cremona’s 12th century Latin translation of the Almagest. He defended heliocentrism by quoting Hermes Trismegistus, “a nonexistent propagator of more woo than you pack into an articulated truck.” And he wanted to save the Platonic axiom of purely circular orbits by ridding the World of those @#$% equants.
Cardinal Nicolaus von Schönberg and Bishop Giese urged him to publish, but he had already been satirized on the stage and dreaded the mockery of those who “on account of their natural stupidity hold the position among philosophers as drones among bees.”(*) De revolutionibus caused great excitement among mathematicians when it appeared. However, the enthusiasm quickly dried up; and for a reason that startles us Moderns.
The new system was no improvement."
https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html
"TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like drunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You’ve got eyeballs and armillaries, and that’s pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here."
Since 1851, demonstrating the Earth's spin has been straightforward for anyone with access to a large enough space to set up a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum . I don't mean to imply any criticism of the ancients. It takes a fairly high space (the article mentions a 67 meter pendulum) protected from winds (so it can't be outdoors). I've never set one up myself, though I have seen one in operation. It isn't the sort of effect that one would notice unless one expected it and went to considerable trouble to set the pendulum up and watch it patiently.
I have a request for a post ...
a "much more than you wanted to know" type post about hypnosis!
It seems like the sort of thing that's up Scott's alley. Kind of mysterious psychological phenomenon, a lot of pop-science out there about it, probably some truth if you can sift through the BS.
Most people have seen stage hypnosis shows or similar - people go up on stage, are told to relax, etc, then "when I say [trigger word] you'll think you're a chicken" then the guy says the word and people, even people who are normally very reserved and would never do something like this, act like a chicken. The first-hand accounts from "subjects" aren't always consistent in what is going on in their heads when this happens. Some obvious questions about this (and hypnosis in general):
- is it "real"? What exactly would it mean for it to be "real" vs "not real"?
- are the subjects who act like chickens able to control themselves and deciding to go along with it? Not able to control themselves, perhaps because they aren't really conscious and their bodies are simply "taking orders" from someone? Somewhere in between?
- you always hear "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" but most people would normally be pretty embarrassed to publicly act the way people act at these stage hypnosis shows, so is that right?
- to what extent do you have to believe in it, or want it to happen, for it to work?
- how much overlap is there between hypnosis and other phenomena (like being really focused on something, or listening to a charismatic speaker, to name some oft-cited examples)?
- is using hypnosis to change habits, recover repressed memories, or realize you were a feudal archer in a past life, a real thing?
- what does the answers to the above say about our "theory of mind"?
>most people would normally be pretty embarrassed to publicly act the way people act at these stage hypnosis shows,<
Well, they went up on stage to begin with, right? They can't be THAT embarrassed.
I would be really interested to read this.
I have dabbled in regular hypnosis (and erotic one). I have also read up on it a fair bit. Altered states of mind are most definitely real, and that includes trance-like states.
My current model is as follows: normally the conscious part acts as a critical examiner of a lot of data that gets passed through to the subconscious side. That includes verbal interactions. When in hypnosis, the channel between the subject and the hypnotist becomes a tunnel through the critical faculties, the deeper the trance and the more trust is between the subject and the hypnotist, the more isolated it become from the conscious part and more direct to the subconscious part. There are some limits though, that would normally trigger an alarm and jolt the subject from the trance. A good hypnotist would know what they might be and stay clear of them.
Another important point is that hypnosis is by no means binary or time-limited. If you are primed to believe someone unconditionally (e.g. your parent or your pastor, or your ingroup leader), what they say becomes the truth without you being consciously aware of the process.
Now, to answer some of your questions:
- is it "real"? What exactly would it mean for it to be "real" vs "not real"?
Yes, it is very much real, in terms of what you see on stage or in youtube videos does not need to be staged and most times isn't
- are the subjects who act like chickens able to control themselves and deciding to go along with it? Not able to control themselves, perhaps because they aren't really conscious and their bodies are simply "taking orders" from someone? Somewhere in between?
See my point about the triggers above. As long as nothing alarming happens, the subject sees, hears and does what they are told.
- you always hear "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" but most people would normally be pretty embarrassed to publicly act the way people act at these stage hypnosis shows, so is that right?
If you are on a stage hypnotized, you are probably self-selected to not be embarrassed by that.
- to what extent do you have to believe in it, or want it to happen, for it to work?
You don't have to believe it. You have to have a level of trust that the hypnotist won't intentionally hurt you. I have certainly hypnotized people who were sure they are not hypnotizable.
- how much overlap is there between hypnosis and other phenomena (like being really focused on something, or listening to a charismatic speaker, to name some oft-cited examples)?
A lot! Trance-like states are all around us. It's a multi-dimensional spectrum.
- is using hypnosis to change habits, recover repressed memories, or realize you were a feudal archer in a past life, a real thing?
One of those is not like the others. Changing habits? Yes, Allen Carr's book on how to stop smoking kind of does that. So do sessions with hypnotherapists. Recover repressed memories? Definitely. One of my most unfortunate experiences was with someone who wanted to remember a happy childhood moment, and what they remembered was... the opposite of that. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but it explained a lot, in retrospect. "realize you were a feudal archer in a past life" -- one can certainly generate a vivid memory when prompted and guided, but this particular one would be a fantasy. That's why a trained hypnotherapist would be extra careful to avoid created or planted memories when in a trance state, when the subconscious mind cannot easily tell the difference between real and imagined.
- what does the answers to the above say about our "theory of mind"?
That it is very much incomplete and needs a lot of research.
Mildly related: one can easily "hypnotize" a chatbot into believing whatever the prompt tells it, not sure why.
To combine a couple pieces into one followup ... taking the stage hypnosis example. I assume that if the hypnotist says to the volunteers "OK when I snap my fingers, you'll take this real, loaded handgun and start killing people", that won't work, the command will be too extreme and they'll refuse/snap out of it. On the other hand, clearly "act like a chicken" (or other similar common stage-hypnotism tricks) isn't too extreme for many people. But I would imagine that different people have different thresholds for what's "too extreme".
Imagine a person (who's maybe intrigued but not 100% into it, and not sure about whether to volunteer) who says to themselves, "OK I'll do it, but I won't do anything TOO crazy ... like acting like a chicken". And then the hypnotist does the "when I snap my fingers you'll act like a chicken" thing. What happens then?
Asking because the answer "they won't do it" seems to go against the "as long as nothing alarming happens, the subject sees, hears and does what they are told" answer, but "they will do it" seems to go against the "it can't make you do something you don't want to do" answer.
I cannot predict what would happen in any particular case, sliding consent is a thing. A lot of people go on a date intending to not do anything outside their comfort zone, but with some alcohol/pot/persuasion they change their mind in the moment. Those are also altered states of mind. If clucking as a chicken is a hard no for you because of some severe past chicken clucking trauma, odds are, you will not obey this instruction. On the other hand, if you are promising yourself because you are afraid of a mild embarrassment, then you might feel comfortable enough in the moment to still do it.
That said, the interesting parts of stage hypnosis are positive and negative illusions, like genuinely seeing/hearing/tasting/feeling something that isn't there, and not seeing/hearing/tasting/feeling something that is there. Obeying instructions is kind of boring, anyone can decide to obey.
One of the more heartwarming moments I saw on stage is the subject, after the session was over, hugging and thanking the hypnotist after she got to see, hear and talk to her dead husband. It may have been, well, staged, but it is not something that is difficult to do with a talented and willing subject. I would personally not try, because there are plenty of trauma minefields related to memories like that, but someone more experienced and adventurous might go there for the effect.
There's also a niche of erotic hypnosis enthusiasts, which is probably larger and more popular than other uses of hypnosis.
The city of Detroit is apparently about to try a Georgist land value tax. Here is the Economist's article about it in this week's issue:
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From the vantage point of a new apartment on the 33rd floor of the Book Tower, a stunning 1920s Italian-Renaissance-style skyscraper in downtown Detroit, two aspects of the city are visible. Look south-east, towards Canada, and you see a skyline thick with cranes. New towers are shooting up, old ones being rebuilt, and the pavements below are thick with pedestrians. Cross to the other bedroom, however, and you get quite a different view. Right up to the edge of a highway entire city blocks are occupied by nothing but tarmac. At 11am an ocean of surface parking is uninterrupted by even a single car.
Just over a decade ago Detroit became the biggest American city to go bankrupt. Since then its city centre has made a remarkable recovery. The Book Tower, which was completely derelict in 2009, has been rebuilt at a cost of over $300m by Bedrock, a property firm owned by Dan Gilbert, Michigan’s richest man. Yet though downtown is humming, huge parts of the city remain blighted.
The city now has a more ambitious plan to reduce the amount of vacant land. It intends to tax it. A lot. Will it work?
The idea, proposed by Mike Duggan, the city’s pugnacious mayor, is to replace Detroit’s current property tax with a split tax. In essence, assessors will distinguish between the value of its land and of the buildings on it. This done, the city’s property tax will be reduced from 2% for every $1 of assessed value (which is less than market value) to 0.6%. To make up for the revenues lost, land will be taxed at a new rate of 11.8%, whether or not it has anything built on it. In Michigan changes to property-tax rates have to be approved by voters. A law to allow that cleared its first hurdle in the state House in late September. A referendum could happen in February.
The principle of taxing land instead of buildings has a long history. Over a century ago Henry George, a liberal economist, argued that the rich used land ownership to hoard the wealth being created by progress. His most dedicated fans adopted the slogan “Do you see the cat?” (based on a convoluted metaphor), to refer to his ideas that land ownership underpinned high inequality. Yet George’s proposal—a single tax on land value—has barely been tried. If Mr Duggan’s scheme becomes law, Detroit will be one of the first big cities anywhere in the world to implement one.
How come Detroit is able to try something so radical? One advantage, says Jay Rising, the city’s chief financial officer, is that the city now raises very little from its current system. In 1959, according to a study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank in Massachusetts, the city’s property tax raised over $1bn, adjusted for inflation. By 2019, after decades of economic decline, the figure had fallen to just $119m. “If this was 80% of our revenues, we’d be a lot more nervous,” says Mr Rising. In fact it is just 16%. Moreover, the value of residential land is very low, which makes it an easier sell to voters.
The hope is that taxing land more will in fact spur development. Right now, says Alex Alsup of Regrid, a data firm, Detroit has “a very pure version of speculation”. As downtown booms, people who bought land nearby years ago—such as the owners of the car parks—merely have to wait for investment nearby to raise the value of their own land. Higher taxes might force them to sell up to people who will build on it. “It is entirely possible that this land tax has the ability to free up properties,” says Kofi Bonner, the ceo of Bedrock.
The bigger immediate benefit, though, comes from reducing taxes on most residents. The city argues that 97% of homeowners will get a tax cut. Lower tax rates on improvements ought to encourage people to invest in properties—and help some avoid falling behind on their taxes. Though they raise little, Detroit’s property taxes are punishing to poor homeowners. Between 2011 and 2015, according to a study published in 2019, one in four city properties went into tax foreclosure, their owners having fallen behind on payments.
But Bernadette Atuahene, one of the authors of that study, suggests that high rates were not the only problem. What mattered more was that after the great financial crisis, Detroit’s assessor systematically overvalued the homes of the poorest residents. When people could not pay, Wayne County, which includes the city, added interest at 18%. Homes ended up auctioned, with any excess over the tax owed banked by the county. Ms Atuahene worries that the proposed new tax does nothing to fix this problem—and if residential land ends up overvalued, may exacerbate it. “We currently have an assessment division that’s not doing its job,” she says.
Getting assessments right is one of the long-standing challenges of land-value taxes, and explains why they are so rare. Still, if the city can do that well, there will be real gains. Gabriel McNeil, a 61-year-old former chef who now lives on disability benefits, says that even a small tax cut would help him a lot. Having bought his home for just $8,000 in 2013, he struggles with tax payments of thousands of dollars each year. “The property tax is not designed for lower-income people at all,” he says. “It’s not easy to keep up.” For some, any cut is better than nothing.
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I am of the view that property taxes shouldn't be a thing in the first place (if you must tax something, tax income) but since they seem to be a hard-to-dislodge thing in the US then I can hardly object to doing it on land rather than improved property value.
I just think someone really needs to kill the name "Georgism" for this once and for all. It conflates perfectly reasonable stuff like this with crazy extreme ideas where you replace _all_ taxes with land value taxes and then raise them a whole lot more.
How does taxing income make more sense than taxing property? People doing productive work deserve their money more than people not doing anything for it.
I can't speak for Melvin, but I can say that I too have strong dislike of property taxes. What it comes down to me is that if someone has income then they can afford to pay tax, if the tax is a percentage of income. If the tax is on property, you get taxed regardless of whether you have the money or if you're unemployed. It's not good enough in this country to save up and buy a house: you also need to pay "rent" to the government on it for the rest of your life, or they'll take it away.
The idea that gets lodged in my head is imaging myself, old, retired, but still having to make sure I have enough money scrounged away to pay property taxes on the house I spent a lifetime paying for. That you can't just own something and let that be that, you always have the specter of government confiscation hovering over you. It feels bad!
Economically speaking, I can see that property taxes may make more sense than income taxes, I just viscerally don't like property tax.
If it matters, you can probably structure a trust or annuity where for a fixed up-front cost your property taxes are paid for the rest of your life (barring extreme scenarios that would screw you over property taxes or no). Consider the up-front cost of that part of the price of a home you really, truly, incontrovertibly own.
Most of us are just going to file "I'll need to pay property taxes" under the same heading as "I'll need to pay for food", and deal with it all through general retirement savings. More flexibility, that way.
>>The idea that gets lodged in my head is imaging myself, old, retired, but still having to make sure I have enough money scrounged away to pay property taxes on the house I spent a lifetime paying for. That you can't just own something and let that be that, you always have the specter of government confiscation hovering over you. It feels bad!
I think about this too, but I think it's less a failure of "property taxes" as a concept and more of a failure of the enforcement mechanism.
I think you can actually make a decent case for property taxes, even from a libertarian perspective - if "protection of people's property rights" is a valid function of government, it arguably makes more sense for people who have more stuff being thus protected to pay more for it. Just like my insurance premiums for my Lambo will be higher than my neighbor's premiums for his 13 year old Civic.
On the other hand, I think it'd be a much kinder way of dealing with property tax issues if they were permitted to accrue, and then enforced on death, rather than being collected during life. No reason to kick grandpa out of his $200,000 house over $15,000 in unpaid property taxes - just tack on whatever amount is unpaid each year, then when he dies his heirs just get less of a windfall.
I feel the same way. Part of this is that I now am, in fact, old and retired. Part of this is that property taxes, like all versions of wealth taxes, attack people who, like me, were prudent and saved part of their wages for a rainy day / retirement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
Could a sufficiently gradual transition assuage that concern? E.g., a polity committing* to incrementally shift tax collections from all other sources to land over the course of 30-50 years.
*The implementation of such commitment to make it sufficiently credible is left as an exercise for the reader.
Perhaps. I don't know how high the land taxes would go under that scenario, and how difficult it would then become to retain ownership of a home. As you note, the credibility of politicians' promises is always questionable.
Is there some reason, under the theory of such taxes, for a government to not offer the option of paying a one-time fee, roughly at land_tax/long_term_interest_rate, which would have the effect of paying the property tax permanently? Personally, one strong motivator for me to purchase a dwelling was that rents kept going up, and I wanted to get *OUT* of that market.
I hope they do it well so that we can see how well things work.
The worst outcome is that it's poorly administered or abused, like the article claims happened during the financial crisis with regular property taxes, and then we don't learn useful things and the ideas get tarred by association.
I am finding is harder to navigate the current political and economic environment these days, especially in America. There are too many variables to reconcile and I think, generally, the assumptions we made in the past may no longer stand up. I come back to two themes: (1) Hobbes' Leviathan and the state of nature is a state of war and (2) Trump's "American Carnage speech. This is what Trump said, "Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
Put simply, the perception of the rule of law in America is in question and there are a whole host of second and third order effects that no one seems to talk about. Take something like insurance. Car insurance in America is compulsory, but increasingly people are choosing not to insure their vehicles, and given a lack of any enforcement mechanism, people who choose to follow the rules are left with bearing the cost of those who just ignore the rules. This is just one example where people just choose to ignore the rules, are not held accountable in any way, and then it becomes a slippery slope.
And you can point to dozens of other examples, and it's like how does a society function like this? Are there new norms that take its place or do we all live in this kind of limbo until the system breaks?
Can you provide a source for your claim about uninsured vehicles? According to this industry study: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsured-motorists rates of uninsured motorists have been declining for over 20 years. Unless something has drastically changed in the past 4 years since the study ended? Is there any evidence of that?
The characterization of contemporary America in that Trump quote is absurd. Yes you can find anecdotes to "support" any of those claims, but overall, all those situations have been trending better for at least 20 years. Some places are bad, but most are better. Some people fare worse over time, but on average we fare better.
Your question implies society is in or heading for some terrible state, but I am not sure that is the case.
> all those situations have been trending better for at least 20 years
There might be some catstophization going on but this isn't true either. For one example drug overdoses have definitely gotten worse in the past 20 years.
My elderly father moved slowly into his green light, and somebody running the red clipped his car, quite a bit of damage. The guy said he was "late for work" but supplied a name that didn't seem to line up with his ethnicity and the name of an insurance company before speeding off. The name didn't turn out to correspond to that of a real person. The insurance company existed, sort of - but the folks at the Lexus dealership (hey, elderly people love the dealership, and the dealership loves them) shook their heads when they heard it. GEICO solved this problem, as it tends to do; so we didn't worry about it further.
That same year, my husband and I were getting on a backed-up ramp when he saw that the beater car bearing down on us was emitting smoke and would not be able to stop in time. Bang-bangety-bump! We got out, the young immigrant Hispanic girl got out. Two wide-eyed children were in the back seat. We are going to her birthday party, she said. My husband inquired, doubtfully, almost mirthfully - about insurance.
The damage wasn't bad. It was just the first such thing to happen to his new (used) car, so that's always a little sad.
She explained that she didn't need insurance because she didn't have a license. And perhaps seeing our raised eyebrows, she assured us that she didn't need a driver's license, she was only just driving the children to the party. It is her birthday, she repeated - and I do think there were balloons or a pinata in the car.
Before we let them go, he gave her a prim admonishment about getting the brakes working before driving the children anywhere else. She assured him she would.
Was there somewhere we should have reported this encounter? For record-keeping purposes?
This by the way is the trivial anecdotal experience of half the people I know.
I mean, in a country with a functioning government you'd call the police to report that someone was driving without a licence. No idea what you'd do in the US.
See, the US - it would not be cool to be snitch-y like that. However: in the past, cops weren't so overloaded with calls, when things were more serene, and also it occurs to me there were fewer high-speed roads so maybe fewer crashes; not sure - but anyway, cops used to have time to mosey over if you had a fender bender, and then it would be in their hands. Not anymore. Or: they would stop someone, find no license or insurance and ticket them, and there would perhaps be some consequences downstream of that. Now not so much.
I mean - how could there be any consequences? All this falls under the word "shadow" for a reason.
"GEICO solved this problem, as it tends to do; so we didn't worry about it further."
You did report it, to GEICO, when you filed the insurance claim. DMVs also have some of this data if they have a VIN registered but can't find any insurer who claims to cover it.
The claim was that uninsured drivers are increasing, not that they exist at all. I too have been hit by an uninsured driver, I don't dispute their existence.
As we did nothing, not wishing to involve insurance in something so minor - it was reported in 50% of those two close-in-time instances.
Certain people are just not compatible with living in our society, and have to be locked up, and we are doing a bad job of finding them and removing them right now. I was in criminal law for 20 yrs and saw a slow steady movement towards softer sentences for criminals and earlier parole. No one person can do very much to reverse that, if a prosecutor tries to get tough the defense bar could start pleading cases open or taking more cases to trial, so you'd need the judge to be tough too. But if a judge is tough, or a county's juries are very prosecutor-friendly, the defense bar will change judge or venue. You have to replace almost everyone involved, but the culture among lawyers these days is just much softer on crime than it was, everyone seems to accept the lighter sentences, and either agrees with the trend or sees it as inevitable.
Typically these periods of low law enforcement would be followed by a backlash and an age of higher enforcement. But in previous cycles, even though the left was ostensibly less gung ho about policing than the right, it wasn't as polarized, and there were significant factions within the Democrat party that wanted tough policing and were able to get their voice heard. After Bush the Elder got Dukakis painted as soft on crime for the "revolving door prison", we saw the sudden rise of the Democratic Leadership Council. The Dems won back suburbanites with a pivot to being tough on crime, got Bill Clinton elected, and was an age of prosperity and broad popularity for the party across all demographics.
We are clearly due for a shift like that, but the current Democrat party is embedded in a massive ecosystem of activists and community organizers who are ideologically committed to being soft on crime. And GOP governors of the variety who see themselves first as responsible managers of the state, have been sold on sentencing and parole reforms by pointing out how much prisons cost to run, libertarian think tanks having worked for years to sell them on freeing criminals as fiscal responsibility.
If sentencing is become softer - why has the prison population expanded so rapidly and so far above any other country in the US?
The US prison population isn't growing. It declined steadily every year from 2010 through 2021, when it saw a slight increase for the first time in years. The decline during the 2010s corresponds to the era of softer sentencing that I referred to.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, compared to 20-30 years ago, VERY few people are incarcerated in the United States for simple narcotic possession charges, and when they are incarcerated they are typically paroled within a few months. So the people who are still being sent to prison and staying there are either the absolute worst violent crazy types, or people who have committed several felonies over a long span of their life and are clearly not going to change.
As to why we have more people who belong in prison than they apparently do in the UK, there's surely many theories. I suspect it's a combination of demographics and some unique cultural factors in the USA. It just gets a bit rowdier here, and it's a huge country that mostly just leaves people alone unless they become trouble. In that CS Lewis analogy about the ships in the fleet, we don't really monitor or care about the internal operation of your ship unless/until it suddenly catches on fire and goes careening into the rest of the fleet. That's just how we roll here.
I suspect that this is not a question of "soft / not soft", but rather the system acting randomly and/or focusing on the wrong things.
So you simultaneously get innocent people in prisons *and* criminals on the streets, etc.
Are you asking if your perception here is accurate, what people expect to happen, or how other people try to navigate this same situation themselves?
What does Gen X not get about life in 2023? (I'm Gen X)
The return of the judgmental mindset, and the underlying sense of fear driving culture. We grew up at the most permissive and optimistic of times in recent history, and it sadly seems like it was not nearly as sustainable as anyone thought.
I still blame human nature rather than circumstances.
Eastern Europe -- When I was a teenager, we celebrated the fall of communism and freedom. Took me some time to realize that when most people say "freedom", they actually mean freedom for ingroup, which usually includes the freedom to oppress the outgroup.
With young people, I suppose we can blame biology. When the hormones tell you to rebel, if you live in a dictatorship, you will rebel against the dictatorship, and if you live in a free country, you will rebel against living in a free country, duh. The values of the previous generation are naturally reverted. Though I didn't really expect to live in times when listening to retarded Russian propaganda is considered cool. What the fuck?
My generation is not better, though. People who three decades ago couldn't stop talking about how important it is that everyone minds their own business and the government does not interfere with your private things, such as religion and church attendance, today can't stop talking about how important it is to prevent gays from marrying each other. (They are basically suggesting that Christians make a coalition with communists, to stop the decadent Western values. Like what the fuck, you once told me how the secret police tortured your grandfather because he refused to reject religion publicly, and now you are willing to embrace those people as allies in your holy crusade to... prevent someone from doing the wrong thing in their bedroom? What the hell is wrong with you?)
10 times Yes to this.
As a young-end Gen X, let me say:
1. Apps. I don't want to install your damn app on my phone, I just want to use your damn website. Aside from the standard Android stuff that came with my phone, I've got Spotify and Uber, and that's it.
2. Bluetooth. I don't want freaking bluetooth headphones that need to be charged and then paired to whatever device I want to use them in, I just want to be able to freaking plug my headphones into a socket and we're done. Same deal with my car, I don't want to do a pairing-configuration dance every time I go for a little drive, I just want to have a physical CD in the dashboard that starts up where I left off last time. (I mean it's nice to have the option of playing music from my phone as well if I'm going for a long drive within data coverage area, but it's not something I want to have to sort out every freaking time I get in the car.)
But it's getting increasingly difficult to buy wired headphones (you can't get noise cancelling ones at all these days it seems) and it's definitely getting difficult to buy a phone with a headphone jack (I've got one for now but I worry about my next one) and it's definitely getting difficult to buy a new car with a CD player.
If there's a theme, there's too much software in the world these days. Young people seem happy to spend their lives configuring software to get things to work as they want them, whereas I just can't be bothered.
You may have more apps than you think. My Android now installs updates even when I never tell it that it may, and often I have new apps installed after the update, which I never wanted and uninstall when I see them.
Interesting - I’ve found my car’s Bluetooth audio system to be a huge QOL improvement over having to use CDs. I turn the car on - it automatically connects to my phone and I can play any of a million songs easily - vs the effort of writing CDs and storing them etc.
Similarly Bluetooth headphones are just so much more convenient. Everything just works seamlessly.
Yeah, maybe other people's cars are less annoying than mine, but mine always seems to forget what device it's paired to. Sometimes I'm in the car, sometimes my wife is in the car, sometimes we're both in the car together, and I don't know how it's supposed to know which device it's supposed to be playing music from.
Yeah that might complicate things. Only my device is paired to my car.
Bluetooth headphones are trash. The connection will randomly fail even if I'm sitting right in front of the transmitter.
Leaving a voicemail that only says "Call me back when you get this" is incredibly annoying and inefficient compared to using your phone to send the same person a text that contains a substantive message.
As a single Gen-Xer I do not have clarity on when it is appropriate to call rather than text.
For example, is it okay to text at any time of day or night (and does it depend on whether I'm using phone or an app)?
Is it okay to call anyone at any time without being concerned about it being work or dinner time because no one has to pock up anyway?
What about email? Should I not send email at night lest the notification disturb them?
And of course the perennial question: I meet a girl and she gives me her number, now what?
Text a day later?
Call that evening?
I'm still on landline rules methinks.
You should use asynchronous communication whenever possible (text, email etc). Feel free to message someone this way 24/7 - they can respond in their own time and everyone has notifications silenced at night.
Calling is disruptive and thus only appropriate when:
-it’s for work stuff & during work hours
-it’s urgent and you need to get in touch with someone IMMEDIATELY
-you’ve arranged a time to chat (although in this case you’d probably zoom since it’s better.
AFAICT (I'm also Gen X, barely) everyone younger than Gen X hates talking on the phone for any reason, and hates receiving a voicemail for any reason. Got a voicemail prompt because you tried to call someone and they didn't pick up? Sucks to be you: you are expected to hang up *without leaving a voicemail* and compose the text that you should have sent in the first place. Does that take much longer for both of you than a phone call would have? Sure, but that doesn't matter because only old people prefer to talk rather than text. They claim that this is because phone calls force them to drop whatever they are doing and talk to you now rather than at a time of their choosing, but I don't buy this because AFAICT most millennials and zoomers live completely interrupt-driven lives anyway.
It is, in particularly dire straits, permissible to call someone if you have previously arranged to do so by text. But they will still be judging you for it.
Wow So how does dating work? Lke f'reals?
Boy meets girl. She takes my phone and inputs her number.
Okay, now what?
Am I supposed to text asking if she wants to meet at Carnegie Hall on Monday at 8 vs Shakespeare In The Park on Wednesday at 2?
Like, without a phone call? Do people actually show for dates thus arranged?
Or use text to coordinate a time convenient to both parties for a call.
The primary problem with phone calls is imposition, putting the receiving party on the caller's schedule. A secondary issue (for me at least, with both auditory processing issues and hearing loss) is that it's much more difficult to follow what the other person is saying if I can't see them; video calling has significantly mitigated this.
Tail end of X here, FWIW.
I'm an older millennial (I think) and yeah, everyone does everything over text, especially dating. People younger than me seem to use Snapchat a lot though, as opposed to literal texts vs whatsapps.
Phone calls only really get used for urgent things.
Dayyyum.
Thanks for letting me know.
Yeah my sense is doing all that stuff over text is pretty normal.
As a millennial (early 30s) my general rule of thumb is that a phone call is only appropriate when you need a response urgently. And even then if it's "within the next ten minutes" urgent rather than "literally ASAP urgent" I'll often text first and only call if I don't get an immediate response.
Could be we're talking about different kinds of phone calls here.
I mean socializing calls. Like, people saying that kids never call got me thinking that doesn't make any sense. They aint going out much since the cooties epidemic* and they sure want to connect with friends so...?
I'm reckoning that when I use the word "call" most of you are hearing handheld device as opposed to sit down device?
I'm rather peripatetic so I only use a handgeld device, and I assume most people born this century primarily use a handheld device (except for work, which isnl of course a whole different thing).
When I say "phone" I'm including whatsapp or whatever. Like, I call people to socialize and whatnot.
Being as OP mentioned his generation and this particular subject is somewhat generational, I'll mention that I'm 47. I reckon on the matter of social communication via device there's a sizeable difference in common practice every decade.
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*Sorry y'all but I'm still a little sore at this crowd for granting the recent hysteria the cranial heft it needed to lift off from the silly swamps of the mommy bloggers into broader respectability.
> Wow So how does dating work? Lke f'reals?
Hell if I know - I've been in an LTR (with a Millennial, who hates voicemail) since before any of the current generation of dating apps were invented.
Emails don't wake people up, it's basically always fine to send people emails.
The few people who -do- let their emails wake them up have something weird set up for themselves.
Text messages don't wake me up either, because my phone is in a different room from my bed.
A good habit, Little Papa.
Notifications that ding would do it.
But yeah, I'm generally most lax about emails.
Silence your notifications overnight. If you don't, it's your own fault you got awakened.
Oh I agree, but is this universally accepted?
I think you shouldn’t text when people might be asleep.
Back when calling was the default, telephone phobia was a problem for some people. Now it seems to have turned out that most people dislike talking on the phone.
I prefer talking to people than texting them. I can talk without thinking but it requires conscious thought to decide what words to writer and then to write them. So writing is an effort that talking isn't.
Isn't this what dictation is for? It's good on most phones and getting better all the time as AI foundation models for text transcription get smaller.
But talking is synchronous -- you say something to someone, they reply, and based on their reply you say something else. You can't do that with asynchronous communication.
And in any case i find the UI on mobile phones irritating.
My Gen Z kids always have all sounds turned off, so texts are fine all the time. I’ve copied them on this as well - it’s a good strategy.
Yeah, I've been doing this for as long as I've had a cell phone.
So I guess the answer is that it's okay to text people at any time if they are under 26 or me?
Have any massive studies been done on communication habits by age? Like if their default is sound-off, if they prefer calls or texts, etc?
The problem is, what if someone actually has to contact me at night?
You can set your "Do Not Disturb" settings to give the notification sound if you get two calls in a row from the same person.
Speaking as someone slightly younger than Gen X, the correct time to call is never. Send a text, or use the internet.
I'm not sure that is still the norm.
It *was* the norm around our sort of crowd circa 2008 but it seems that a lot of people, especially people with families, are going back to using the phone. Am I wrong?
(Personally, my phone and notifications have been on Do Not Disturb since 1999 so I don't mind if people call because I check voice messages, whatsapp, email, etc at the time of my choosing but I assume that I am an outlier, which is why I wanted to know what's acceptable generally.)
I can confirm that the Bullseye is correct. Literally no one calls even with families. The more common thing for parents with young kids is small group texts or whatsapp groups and discord for bigger extended friend groups. People may still use the phone (it’s feels novel hours of video chat meetings), but they text first to ask if / when they are around.
It's been 50 years since the Yom Kippur War, so I did some reading on it. This is regarded as the Arab-Israeli war that Israel nearly lost, but was it really?
The turning point seems to have been the Egyptian decision to leave their positions to attack east into well-prepared Israeli defenses. They had to do that because the Syrians were losing and demanded Egypt do something to distract the IDF.
But let's assume Egypt did the militarily smart thing and stayed put in its own defenses. Israel would have just neutralized Syria and then, once that was done, send all of its forces to the Sinai where they would have beaten up Egypt and driven them out of the peninsula. Egypt's army had only gotten a few miles east of the Suez Canal anyway. Their positions were so shallow.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/tank-clash-in-the-sinai/
It would have been really hard to beat up Egypt in the Sinai while they were under the cover of the SAM batteries. Likewise, the Saggers had proven more than enough to stop Israeli armor. Once the Egyptians left the security of the SAM shield, they were doomed.
My understanding of Israel's main SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) tactic was to take the plane up to the edge of the SAM's range, pull into a sharp climb and then fling a gravity bomb at the SAM site. This did not prove particularly effective.
So when the Egyptians left the SAM shield, Israel could finally fight on its terms. The weakened Egyptian army weren't able to protect the SAM batteries and the rest is history.
In the Yom Kippur War Israel lost 1/4 of their tank force and somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 of their air force in a few weeks, much of it in the first few days.
The Arab forces didn't have the military assets - particularly enough of their then-cutting-edge missiles - to chew through the remainder of the IDF. But they could have, if the Soviets had supplied them a bit more.
Once Israel adapted their tactics and face-tanked enough of the Egyptian missile stocks, they regained control and turned the tide. Instead of retreating, they gained the offensive and rolled on through, ending the war in sight of Cairo. But it very nearly didn't end like that.
So- what were the political alignments in the 50s, 60s and 70s in the US again? It's hard for me to get my mind around. Is it true that labor and working-class types generally voted for Democrats, or at least left-leaning candidates? But we know that relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then- this was the epicenter of anti-Vietnam war sentiment, civil rights, hippies, Jane Fonda, some degree of sympathy to Communism, and so on. So that part (intellectuals and Hollywood) were left-wing then- basically the same as today. So Jane Fonda and the working class guy down at the steel mill were..... on the same political side, is that correct? Kind of hard to imagine.
And the suburbs/the upper middle class was generally center right, do I have that correct?
From the 1930s to 1980, there was an elite Progressive consensus. Democrats pushed it forward and Republicans were containment for everyone who objected. As a result, both parties were transactional: they sold their support to different groups. That's how the Hollywood class, the PhD class, and the blue-collar class could all be in the same party - they all got spoils.
Politics has always made strange bedfellows.
My parents were both old-school Democrats: my mom’s family were blue-collar white “ethnics” who worked in the auto industry in the northern Midwest, and my dad’s family were poor hillbilly coal miners and farmers from the Appalachian hollers. The impression I always got was that in the 40s and 50s, Democrats were usually Irish or Italian Catholics, various other white immigrants, farmers, and blue-collar workers - with some upper-class blue blood types like FDR and Katherine Hepburn’s family mixed in. There was also a time when being a communist or socialist was very fashionable for artsy-intellectual types; and being a Democrat presumably was almost as shocking to one’s wealthy family so you had the college-educated “longhair” Democrats as well.
I grew up in what was at the time (1970s and 1980s) a very Republican town; and most of the Republicans were the country-club type of Republican or else were small businessmen who aspired to be country-club republicans some day. This was still true in the ‘80s and ‘90s - but there was also a number of people from traditional Democratic backgrounds who switched to Republican during the late 70s thru the early 90s either because of abortion (like my very religious in-laws, who were Italian blue collar types) or because Democrats were “soft on crime” (my atheist union-guy uncle). But Republicans still had a rich-country-club kind of vibe up into the 90s.
One thing that probably changed the Democratic Party a lot is that the proportion of college-educated people grew exponentially. The 1950s longhairs and the 1960s hippies and radicals who went into academia were becoming tenured professors by the 80s and 90s, and sure enough we started seeing a lot of the precursors to wokeness in the 90s. No one took it too seriously at the time (look at those silly academics!) but as the number of people going to college increased, the sillier stuff started making its way into the mainstream. Being offended by...everything started to be a mark of having had a college education, and became a bit of a class marker. So nowadays my posh old-money New England hometown is full of wealthy people who hold forth on all things woke, because that’s how rich people who’ve been to college distinguish themselves from those blue-collar white people who don’t know that gender is a spectrum and keep refusing to check their privilege.
I don’t remember people being so passionate about political parties when I was younger. My parents, as I mentioned, were both from backgrounds that had long been Democratic - but both switched their registration to Republican because my dad was a salesman and he figured a good way to meet rich businessmen (his target customer) was to go to Republican events. My mom usually voted Democratic except for Presidential elections because she said Democratic presidents always got us involved in wars. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Plenty of "relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then", that's true. Far from all of them, but, plenty. A couple of points about that which are informed in part from first-hand knowledge of my parents and their peer group....
(a) Those folks during that era were less comfortable within the Democratic Party than their ideological descendants are today, but that dynamic played out at least as powerfully in state and local election cycles as the presidential ones. The modern tendency to view POTUS elections as the single expression of national politics formed during the 1970s and especially during the 1980s/90s.
(b) The homeowning and/or child-rearing adults of the 1950s-60s had grown up during the Great Depression. That national formative experience -- which lasted for a decade and had nested within it the even-more-searing regional experience of the Dust Bowl -- ensured that economic populism was to some degree "burned in", to a degree that has not been true for any U.S. cohort since. Not that some of the national economic downturns of more recent decades were fun or anything, but the Great Depression was qualitatively different as a national trauma.
I'm reasonably sure the major American parties are about bundles of issues that are linked together for historical reasons and can change. People can make it look like ideologies, but they aren't, really.
Once upon a time, I think the Republicans were (more?) interested in conservation-- for hunting.
It's still kind of amazing to see the Republicans be more or less an anti-war party, and the Democrats more pro-war.
It's imaginable that Democrats could have been anti-abortion if it seemed more important to protect fetuses.
> It's still kind of amazing to see the Republicans be more or less an anti-war party, and the Democrats more pro-war.
The only difference here is the Republicans and the hyperbolic characterization of pro/anti-war. Mainstream center Democrat-types have been consistent for over 100 years about cautiously using power to help international order and prosperity. Only Republicans changed, advocating for the Iraq War, then flying past the Democrats and now demanding isolation. Their esteemed WW2 grandparents would be rolling in their graves. Thus, I reject any simplistic characterization that Reps and Dems flipped to the opposing side of war. Dems stayed consistent, Republicans flopped.
'What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?'
-Madeleine Albright
>Once upon a time, I think the Republicans were (more?) interested in conservation-- for hunting
I'm pretty sure this is still the case! One of the quietly unremarked parts of American politics is that Democratic environmentalists and Republican hunting & fishing types actually team up quite a bit. Or at least work towards the same goal, even if they're not coordinating
>we know that relative elites, intellectuals, college professors and Hollywood types were politically left-wing even then
Were college professors that left wing back then? Depends on subject, as always, but I think, say, a history or political science professor in the 70s was as likely to be on the right as on the left. Someone who actually knows can correct me.
One sphere of influence that has flipped entirely is sports journalists. They were reliably conservative before this century.
>this was the epicenter of anti-Vietnam war sentiment, civil rights, hippies, Jane Fonda
Yes, but the Vietnam War protestors protested their college classes. They viewed colleges as part of the conservative establishment and did not identify with their professors.
I think you're overestimating the shift of certain groups. It's not like the working class used to be 95% Democrat and now they're 95% Republican. It's more like they shifted from 55-45 in favour of Democrats to 45-55 in favour of Republicans.
It's a significant shift electorally, but there's still plenty of blue-collar Democrats and white-collar Republicans out there voting in the vague direction of their economic interest.
The most extreme shift has been in West Virginia, formerly one of the bluest states in the country at roughly 60-40 in favor of Democrats in 1992 to becoming 70-30 in favor of Republicans in 2016.
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/west-virginia-how-bluest-state-became-reddest-n697491
Very good point, thank you
The parties used to be less ideological, and more like coalitions of large geographical regions and broader groups with a larger range of beliefs within them. As a result, neither party could be as extreme as they are now, and had to cater to factions within their ranks that had very different values and priorities. And radicals who today work within the party to push it left were, back then, outside the 2-party system entirely.
The Democrat party was traditionally a populist farmers and laborers party. It had added Catholic immigrants and blacks to the coalition in the 1930s, which held up during the period you're discussing. Most of the rural South just by default, even up through ~2010 you had "yellow dog Democrat" districts all over the South where older voters especially would never vote GOP even though they were ostensibly conservative people. A sizable percentage of the Dems' House of Representatives majority, which they held uninterrupted for each of those decades, was made of people representing those districts.
So while yes the radicals you're discussing existed, and were of the left, they were NOT of the Democrat party. If you lived in Alabama, your Democrat congressman was rhetorically attacking the student anti-war protesters on a regular basis. The Democrat party was vocally anti-communist. Although many southern Dems DID support the Civil Rights Act perhaps for ideological or religious reasons, it was a bi-partisan bill. The laborer who hated Jane Fonda and hippies had no problem voting for his conservative Democrat representative.
Meanwhile, the Republican congressman who represented San Francisco (!!!) was anti-war Pete McCloskey-- and for that matter, San Francisco in 1968 was still heavily in FAVOR of Vietnam, so he was actually bucking his own president and district to go that way.
It's just hard for me to wrap my head around non-ideological parties. Weren't political parties in Europe pretty ideological at that time? You had Christian Democrats, actual Communists, etc.
You could make the argument that many parties in developing countries are formed around specific ethnicities, specific regions, or maybe just a blatant attempt to grab some cash from the state (like 19th century 'machine' politics). And then after you reach a certain level of wealth, parties become more explicitly ideological
Continental European parliaments have many parties because of proportional representation and the expectation of forming coalition governments. Therefore it made some sense for them to be ideological, because it helps group cohesion, and it wasn't necessary for any of them to cobble together 51% of the public's support under one label.
In the United States, with only 2 major parties, you need a broader base of support. If you actively alienate a chunk of your supporters, the other party can pick them off and become the majority. In the 2-party system, there's a natural equilibrium, where if any one party gets too strong it becomes harder to hold their coalition together and the other party will reformulate its positions to pick off blocks from their rival until it's about 50/50 again.
The UK had a similar dynamic at one time, with Labour in particular having a very broad range of ideological views within it. Harold Wilson's Labour governments in the 60's and 70's had the very leftist Tony Benn working alongside cabinet ministers who could be fairly called right-wing.
Even in the 90s there could be quite a bit of disagreement on some votes. The NAFTA treaty approval in the senate in 1993 it's quite interesting to peruse the state-by-state votes and the diversity of representation even at the state level. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/s395
Southern Democrats were the Jim Crow party.
What did the Southern Republicans doing at this time? Were they going along with Jim Crow or actively opposing it? Were there cities which flipped back and forth between Democrats and Republicans and had Jim Crow laws regularly imposed and repealed?
I feel like I only know the kindergarten/Hollywood version of Jim Crow history so I'm genuinely curious about how the politics of it all actually worked.
I think the status of the Southern Republicans was "there weren't any." (leftover hostility from the Civil War) *To Kill a Mockingbird* describes a neighboring county as strange because it has, among other things, Republicans in it.
There were some in the mountains (my great-grandfather among them), but the mountains didn't have enough population to win any state-wide elections.
If you only have two parties, you're bound to see people in the same party who don't seem to go together.
Also a very good point, thanks
I'm not quite old enough to remember politics in those decades, but yes, that checks out with what I understand. If it helps give a window into the earlier days, Roddy Piper of They Live (1988) coded "Democratic working man" in a film generally interpreted as a center-left critique of capitalism.
College *graduates*, at least, were a fairly reliable GOP voter block until late 1980s, and white college graduates trended GOP until Trump (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-may-become-the-first-republican-in-60-years-to-lose-white-college-graduates/).
You should know that substack has a fairly new feature to make it harder for people to comment on posts. The user hits reply; substack announces that "for your security, we need to re-authenticate you". Substack sends a the user an email; when it arrives the user clicks on a link in it, and this brings up a new web window/tab with the post the user intended to comment on, but not focussed on the part of the thread they intended to respond to.
If they can still remember what they were about to type, they get to hunt for the desired position possibly deep in a thread. The old window is still open to tell them what to search for, but any attempt to type the reply there gets yet another demand for re-authentication, except the second time (with the user already verified) no actual email appears to be sent.
Once again: your old software was much better, except for monetization, and perhaps for bringing in randos who might subscribe (and pay).
This is not new: Substack has done this to me since Scott restarted the blog here. It's very annoying.
This is just standard web security stuff. When you login the site leaves a cookie on your browser that expires after a certain amount of time. After that time you have to login again.
It's also possible to access substack posts that don't access the cookie so don't know you should be logged in. In this scenario you will also have to login again.
If you are having issues with this flow it may be due to browser settings related to cookie retention or that you are using a VPN or similar service.
Is that only on mobile? I always log in from desktop and never do anything on my phone because it is too much of a pain in the backside, and I haven't got any messages like that.
This was on desktop. I never use mobile.
I'm not seeing this behavior on my laptop. What I do see is that substack seems extraordinarily slow. I get "This web page is slowing down your browser" notices when I just scroll one page. As I type this comment, the text on the screen isn't keeping up with my human speed hunt and peck _typing_.
I'm guessing that my (browser? account?) options must somehow be configured to put the security reauthentication stuff under the covers, and have it look like a speed problem.
I think it only does that if you haven't logged in for a long time. I've had it happen once or twice but most of the time it does not.
You are probably in private mode.
Test comment to try and observe this behavior.
-edit- I made this comment from a browser (non-mobile), signed into my account. I got no pop-up or anything, it just submitted my comment as normal.
Yeah. I recently switched from using the substack mobile site to using the Android app (because the mobile site wouldn't reliably load entire essays, much less entire comments sections) and it has a whole host of problems. If someone replies to my comment, the notification sends me to that reply with no link to the parent comment or anything down thread of that comment. I can't even Ctrl+f to more easily find a comment. I can't minimize comments that I've confirmed aren't the comment I'm looking for to make it easier to navigate. I can't "view less" after clicking "view entire comment." I guess Substack spent all their vc funding on bringing in big name writers and not developing the actual app to a high standard.
I can't even figure out how to write a post on the mobile app.
Gen Z'ers don't know how glorious the internet was before Apps.
The Substack website works fine on mobile, IME.
It is self-evident that some people respond to particular medications in the desired way and some people don't, right? Are there ways to account for that when studying whether a medication works or not?
An example I have in mind is, say, a novel antidepressant. There is some controversy about whether antidepressants reliably help people, and to me it seems like it would be helpful to be able to identify which people react to a medication (if in fact any do react), calculate an effect size for that group of people as opposed to for a broader population, and ideally look for traits among that group that predict whether (or how well) a given person will react. Though, I suppose, that's more easily said than done. We would have to have some idea of what kind of traits to look for. Genes (of which there are many)? Environmental differences (of which there are many)? People's medical histories (which are extremely varies)?
A simplified example: Say you have a randomized controlled double-blinded study for a medication, in which 60% of your experimental group has the desired response to the medication and (e.g.) 40% of your control group also shows some response. Then you take those 60% who responded to the medication, and re-assign them to a new control group and an experimental group. If the medication has some effect for some people, you would expect more than 60% of people in this second experimental group to respond to the medication, right?
My intuition is that this would help distinguish between the people in the control group who would've responded to the placebo and the people who had a real response to he medication. Does that stand to reason?
I don't have a science background beyong my degree's general education requirements and my statistics knowledge tops out around stats 101 so I could be completely off base here.
What you describe is the idea behind personalized medicine. It is promosing but quite difficult to achieve! Currently it is mostly limited to cancer treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalized_medicine
Do you have any idea about the size of group you would need to do that study? Or the amount of data collection?
It's not an inherently bad idea, e.g. I don't respond (effectively) to acetaminophen. But the intrusiveness, data collection, and requirements for cooperation by those being studied are extreme, Even just determining environment vs. genetics in well defined cases is rarely feasible.
My guess is that you would need something like 2-3x as many participants for a two-phase trial like this, since you basically throw out half your participants (your control group) if you move to the second phase after determining from the first phase that it's likely that the medication outperforms placebo for at least some people.
For actually trying to tease out unknown factors that predict response to the medication, yeah, you probably would want some massive number of people about whom you can gather tons of information. Which would be expensive, and raise privacy concerns. It would certainly make it easier if you had at least an idea of what you were looking for.
You'll need a lot more than that, because you're checking for an essentially unlimited number of environmental and genetic variables, that MAY be independent.
Consider the question "Is cancer environmental or genetic?"
Also, "environment" can have surprising factors. One problem with acetaminophen is that it's included in a lot of over-the-counter combination meds, so people can overdose by accident.
No amount of looking at genes will tell you that.
The discussion about evolution below made me realize I have no idea whether I learned about evolution in school. (Public school, 1960s, northern Delaware, USA) I picked it up somewhere, and I have no memory of where I learned it.
Do people remember where and when they learned about evolution?
Does anyone remember when evolution became a hot political issue? There was the monkey trial (1925), but I don't remember it being a hot political issue until rather recently.
I consider variation and selection to be an extremely beautiful and applicable abstract idea. By comparison, global warming is very limited in time and space and the theory isn't as tidy. I was surprised to find that people seem to think evolution and global warming are the same sorts of thing. This may be political.
Late 90's, 5th or 6th grade. I remember the Mendelian squares and a kid getting upset that I called earlobes a disease.
In Hungary: I definitely heard about it from my mom (an atheist biology teacher) before I had a biology class in school, but I'm pretty sure we learned about it in high school as well. Looking up some textbooks, it's taught. Not a political issue.
I attended school mostly in Georgia (US one, not Europe) in the late 90s early 2000s. Evolution was... mentioned kinda, but not taught very strongly. A common sentiment (though not *explicitly* endorsed by the curriculum) was "Animals adapt and change to their environment across generations, but within bounds", with the idea that speciation was wildly speculative and not worth believing. Evolution in general was treated with a sort of off-handed mockery, the sort of things people not smart enough to believe in God talked about. (I know now that not every religious person talks like a condescending stereotype, but I grew up around a lot of people who did. I am not trying to make generalizations with this account)
I was in college before I got a clear explanation of evolution, and actual answers to the "gotchas" like "How could we evolve acid in our stomach without already having acid resistant lining, but how could we evolve acid resistant lining without needing it for stomach acid" that have obvious answers once someone sits down and explains it
I'm guessing that both the acid and the lining evolved slowly together, but tell me about the details.
Basically, yes. Ultimately the exact specifics don't matter as much as there being several plausible ways it could be explained - thus undermining its frequent use as a gotcha in the environment I grew up in.
The answer my professor gave - and I am not a biologist or other expert and so can't say this is definitely what happened - is that it likely started by animals eating acidic foods, then developing some resistance to that. Then animals who secreted acids in their stomachs were better able to digest foods. Then more resistance grew to account for that and acidic foods. Repeat in a feedback loop until stable, every step along the way being a useful adaptation
"Do people remember where and when they learned about evolution?"
1978, Inter Cert (when it was still called the Inter Cert) biology class. Had heard of and knew about evolution before that, but hadn't learned about it. Science teacher was the (then) reverend mother of the order of nuns running the school. (The Mercy sisters, to shout-out to Scott's hospital in the Midwest!)
Not a hot political issue over here because the quarrel about teaching religion in schools came much later and is only now really taking off, and evolution hasn't been the same hot button topic for Catholics.
In the 1980s UK public school system we wer taught it as part of basic science at about 12. It's not been controversial in the UK for much longer though (the paleo-conservatives were losing the battle around sex education here at that time though). Interestingly I remember evolution being highlighted as an issue in US education at the time (probably in a 'those silly Yanks' sort of way) in some part of my secondary education so there was clearly something my generally pretty left-wing teachers could pick up on going on a cross the Atlantic then.
I went to a Catholic school in the late 80s, early 90s here in Ireland.
The science teacher was a priest. Anyway during the course he came in one day and taught us ..
about evolution.
There's no problem with evolution in the Catholic tradition though? Since the story of the creation is allegoric (and has been argued to be such since at least the third century) evolution can clearly be part of God's design.
There's a reason why opposition to teaching evolution tends to be associated with religious sects who only accept literalist readings of scripture. Those traditions with more nuanced theological approaches available are much less threatened by science which doesn't agree with scripture. Your priest could probably cite at least Aquinas and probably At Augustine to justify teaching evolution.
Hilaire Belloc included mention of it in his "Survivals and New Arrivals", published in 1929. From the chapter "The Biblical Attack":
"But, take it in the large, the Biblical attack on the Church was the main one for three centuries; it supplemented the historical attack; it remained vigorous in nations of Protestant culture to the last third of the nineteenth century—anyone over fifty in Britain or the United States can remember it in full activity.
Today it is but the weakest of the Survivals, and its rapid disappearance was due to the advancement of learning.
It had already sunk into Literalism: the idea that the English text of the Hebrew scriptures, as published under James I 300 years ago, gave an exact historical and scientific description of all therein contained.
The Literalist believed that Jonah was swallowed by a right Greenland whale, and that our first parents lived a precisely calculable number of years ago, and in Mesopotamia. He believed that Noah collected in the ark all the very numerous divisions of the beetle tribe. He believed, because the Hebrew word JOM was printed in his Koran, "day," that therefore the phases of creation were exactly six in number and each of exactly twenty-four hours. He believed that man began as a bit of mud, handled, fashioned with fingers and then blown upon.
These beliefs were not adventitious to his religion, they were his religion; and when they became untenable (principally through the advance of geology) his religion disappeared.
It has receded with startling rapidity. Nations of the Catholic culture could never understand how such a religion came to be held. It was a bewilderment to them. When the immensely ancient doctrine of growth (or evolution) and the connection of living organisms with past forms was newly emphasized by Buffon and Lamarck, opinion in France was not disturbed; and it was hopelessly puzzling to men of Catholic tradition to find a Catholic priest's original discovery of man's antiquity (at Torquay, in the cave called "Kent's Hole") severely censured by the Protestant world. Still more were they puzzled by the fierce battle which raged against the further development of Buffon and Lamarck s main thesis under the hands of careful and patient observers such as Darwin and Wallace.
So violent was the quarrel that the main point was missed. Evolution in general—mere growth—became the Accursed Thing. The only essential point, its causes, the underlying truth of Lamarck's theory, and the falsity of Darwin's and Wallace's, were not considered. What had to be defended blindly was the bald truth of certain printed English sentences dating from 1610.
All this I say was Greek to the man of Catholic culture. He could not understand it at all. But we, living in a Protestant society, know well enough what it was and the general collapse that has followed. For, with the defeat of Literalism, Bibliolatry went by the board; and the Biblical attack on the Faith, a standby for centuries, has dwindled to insignificance.
Its disappearance in one area after another has been extending rapidly. Men of my age can remember all Britain and America, you may say, based on Bibliolatry. The older members of its votaries survived in numbers till the other day. Some few linger yet: more in the United States than here.
It having thus failed why do I include it among the "Survivals" at all?
Bibliolatry would seem to be nowadays a quaint chapter which the generality of educated men regard as unworthy of mention, or, at any rate, of so little account that it might be neglected by anyone dealing with the major problems of religion in our moment.
Well, it is true that even in the Protestant culture no one who counts would tolerate the serious discussion of such rubbish on lines familiar only half a lifetime ago; yet it must be admitted as a Survival—though the most exhausted of them all—because its effect, in the English-speaking world at least, is still felt.
I will give three examples:
Dr. Gore, a man of the highest cultivation, was lately careful to distinguish between the story of Jonah and the whale, and the miracles of Our Lord. The first he reverently abandoned—the second he deferentially admitted. We must recognize that the mere existence of such an attitude is a serious proof that Literalism still has some vitality even in Europe, or, at any rate, in this country. It seems that in the eyes of men of the first rank in the Anglican Hierarchy the Literalist is still a figure to be reckoned with.
My second example is from a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett. That deservedly popular writer is perhaps in closer touch with his contemporary fellow-countrymen than any of his colleagues in the province of letters, wherein he has achieved such eminence. Well, in discussing the causes for the breakdown of religion he says that it was successfully attacked at its "only vulnerable point" the Bible. These words are not applicable to the Catholic, for whom the Bible depends on the Church, not the Church on the Bible. But they are full of meaning to those who, though no longer Bible- Christians, remember Bible Christianity as identical with religion.
Mr. Bennett makes no such confusion. He knows the world too well to err on the nature of Catholicism. But here he rightly takes it for granted that his vast English audience have a universal tradition of a Religion based on the Bible. And he is right.
My third example shall be from another writer of high standing in our time, thoroughly representative of modern English thought and also in close sympathy with his great audience; skeptical in profession, though as Protestant as Dr. Gore in morals and tradition—I mean Mr. H. G. Wells.
Mr. H. G. Wells has been at great pains to discuss the fall of man, in which considerable catastrophe he puts no faith. But when he discusses the fall of man he always has in mind the eating of an apple in a particular place at a particular time. When he hears that there is no Catholic doctrine defining the exact place or the exact time—not even the name of the apple, he shrewdly suspects that we are shirking the main issue. He thinks in terms of the Bible Christian—with whom he disagrees.
The main issue for European civilization in general is whether man fell or no. Whether man was created for beatitude, enjoyed a supernatural state, fell by rebellion from that state into the natural but unhappy condition in which he now stands, subject to death, clouded in intellect and rotted with pride, yet with a memory of greater things, an aspiration to recover them, and a power of so doing by right living in this world of his exile; or whether man is on a perpetual ascent from viler to nobler things, a biped worthy of his own respect in this life and sufficient to his own destiny.
On that great quarrel the future of our race depends. But the inventors of Bible Christianity, even when they have lost their original creeds, do not see it thus. They take the main point to be, whether it were an apple—who munched it—exactly where—and exactly when. They triumphantly discover that no fruit or date can be established, and they conclude that the Christian scheme is ruined and the Fall a myth.
It is clear then that the most eminent writers in the Protestant culture can still be concerned with Literalism. It is almost equally clear that they have never grasped that full doctrine of the Fall—the sole doctrine explanatory of our state—upon which, coupled with that of the Incarnation, the Catholic Church bases all Her theology.
To put the thing in epigram (and therefore, of course, quite insufficiently), they are certain that we are animals which have risen. They have not met the idea that we may be a sort of angel who fell.
Now I submit that if men of this eminence take the Literalists thus seriously—one solemnly arguing with them, another not understanding that there has been any other kind of believer—there must be trace of life in Literalism still.
There are, of course, innumerable other instances. You can hardly find an article in any newspaper discussion on religion—save the very few by Catholics, which are occasionally admitted as a favor—but takes it for granted that advance in physical science has shaken something which the writer calls "religion." He can only mean the religion of the Bible Christian. For in what way could Physical Science affect the Catholic Church?
You can hardly get an allusion to the evolutionist writers (in this country it is always Darwin) without the same idea cropping up: "The Conflict of Science with Religion." But with what religion can Science conflict save Bibliolatry? On every side the recent presence of that strange worship—and even its present lingering—is taken for granted."
True. It was also a state school (a state Catholic school in the weird way Ireland has) and therefore had to follow the state curriculum.
We have the same sort of schools in England (both Catholic and Church of England; I think also a couple of Jewish and Muslim ones) so probably they have a common ancestry.in the nineteenth century. I've never heard the Catholic church in Britain complain about the science curriculum despite working around education for quarter of a century.
If I was looking for opposition to teaching evolution around here I'd look to somewhere hard-line presbyterian congregations are common (rejection of mist if a clerical hierarchy tends to lead to theological literalism) so probably Northern Ireland. Not sure if it's an issue there or not though.
I learned close to nothing about evolution through middle school since it was a private religious school. They didn't teach creationism or that evolution was _wrong_ they just didn't really talk about it at all. In high school, even in advanced IB biology courses, I got an extremely shallow, surface level introduction to evolution. It wasn't until my third year in an undergraduate biology degree when I had a required course specifically about evolution that I really felt I got a decent understanding of it.
I'm pretty sure I learned about evolution way back in the day from the Talk Origins website as well as Richard Dawkins' and Peter Ward's books. I don't recall learning much about evolution in public school, although I remember my biological anthropology class textbook in college had a superb intro chapter on the evidence for evolution.
Do you remember the title of the textbook?
I was taught it in high school biology in the late 80s (e.g. those moths that evolved to match soot covered tree bark in England). I was taught in (Mormon) church that it was mostly false. The popular science books I read at the time gave good arguments for it (Martin Gardner, especially, and books about paleontology and anthropology). BYU (a Mormon school) biology department taught it to me as fact. Some BYU religion classes taught me it was false. Baptist Republicans argued against teaching it in schools and argued online a lot until about 2005 or so, it seems to me.
I don't recall for sure. I think evolution was taught in Montreal's English School Board biology classes in the 1970s, but not in any kind of depth. Maybe it was also in the general science class at about grade 9.
It's been a hot political issue approximately forever, at least in the US. The Wholly Babble explicitly and plainly says each species is an individual creation of Gawd. It's very very important to some True Believers that no one - least of all their own children, but also the children of unbelievers - be exposed to the existence of any concepts contradictory to their book of revealed truths.
For the record, other people, who I'll actually call Christians, revere a similar deity and take inspiration from much the same holy book. This spate of mockery is not directed at self-identified Christians per se, just the ones who demand to enforce their Truth at the expense of everyone else.
I see that you are aware of the Scopes Monkey Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial. From my POV, Americans continued to be crazy on this subject. Most notably, text books that mentioned evolution couldn't be sold to large numbers of US K12 schools, so pretty much all textbook publishers serving that market omitted such offensive details. In Canada, we were mostly stuck with bowdlerized/Americanized/Gawd-fearing text books when I was in K12 there 50 years after the Scopes trial. But perhaps it wasn't a political _issue_ in the US; they'd compromised such that the True Believers got their way in most/all K12 schools, but not in (most? some?) universities.
I didn't really learn about evolution - as in, understanding it, rather than being able to recite appropriate soundbites - until much later than high school. (I had similar experiences with history, and perhaps other subjects - I knew e.g. about Andrew Jackson, and why he was a big change, as a positive-sounding sound bite. It was only later I heard about specific harms done by his administration, in particular some fairly notorious (now) treaty-breaking and theft from native people.)
The irony about the Scopes Trial, when I read up on it, that it was a show trial cooked up by *both* sides - the small town in decline, so the local business and political big-wigs wanted to do something to revive it, and someone came up with the idea 'well hey why don't we have some big controversial doo-dah that will get media coverage nationwide and make us known to the outside world?' and so in agreement with the 'we want a test case on this dumb law about firing teachers for teaching evolution but we don't have one because nobody's been fired for doing that' side, they set it up.
And ever since, it's been held up as this triumph of Science! versus the ignorant knuckledraggers in the boonies who were persecuting the poor brave teachers. A popular myth of the 'everyone knows' type, and so as unreliable and untrue as all of them. Argh.
"The Wholly Babble explicitly and plainly says each species is an individual creation of Gawd."
I have to say, every time I'm almost convinced that there's a place on the internet where adult discussion is possible, and where people are actually capable of rising above the mental age of an 8-year-old, comments like yours cure me of my naive optimism.
I'm trying to figure out a heuristic people can use to avoid doing this. Maybe something like "avoid using jokes to smuggle consensus-building statements into discussions."
[Edited to remove gratuitous insult.]
Two of true, necessary or kind is the rule here. Not always enforced. Nevertheless that sentence, while true, is neither necessary or kind.
I was aware it was on the edge, and in retrospect agree. I will edit it to remove the unkind part.
👍
Yeah. And honestly, the fact that people who went to school in the 1970s don't appear to have yet actually graduated from elementary school, suggests that our schools have bigger problems than what's in their science curriculums.
I am of a later generation than you, but I learned about evolution in the early 2010s in high school biology class. I had been raised as a young earth creationist until that point and believed it with my whole heart, so score one for my excellent bio teacher, who was incredibly patient with obnoxious teen me.
It was certainly a mainstream religio-political issue by this point, but you already know that. I remember my then-pastor preaching a sermon in ~2011 about how evolution is obviously impossible and it's vital to protect the integrity of our science education, and this is why Christian schools are an important bulwark against atheism in modern culture, etc. etc. etc. The political connection wasn't explicitly stated, but easily 90% of that church voted Republican and creationism was certainly intertwined with their politics even if the pastor didn't specifically say that we should vote out all the Dems.
In my environment it was "assumed true" in the popular science stuff I read, but there wasn't anything in school, not really even at the college level. In high school, in general science, I was taught Mendelian genetics, but not evolution. I picked evolution theory up in outside reading. (Dawkins first, IIRC, but it could have been Gould.)
Same with me. Mendel at school, evolution in the first years of medical school.
Mendelian genetics being safe because it is the product of a Catholic abbot of a monastery, not some godless secular scientist 😁
Has anyone been following the discussion about Mendel's research? I've heard he faked his results, that he got lucky with beans that had nice clean recessive and dominant traits, and that he bred his beans to produce distinct yellow or green offspring rather than the more typical-of-biology mixed traits, like yellowish green and greenish yellow beans.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27578843/ covers some of it
"An underlying bias in Mendel's data favoring the predicted ratio is present, but my analysis could not clearly determine whether the bias was caused by misclassifying ambiguous phenotypes or deliberate falsification of the results."
I haven't heard about any of this, but I'm not surprised. There's always a "well ackshully" reaction to the simplified stories of "Great Man Does X, Discovers Y" pop culture.
"he got lucky with beans that had nice clean recessive and dominant traits"
I don't see how he can be faulted for that, getting lucky is part of The March Of Science (e.g. Fleming and the story of the discovery of penicillin, which may be another simplified Just-So story).
Faking results is more serious, but I think the problem there is - so far as I can remember - a lot of his papers being destroyed after his death. Wikipedia, tell me more!
"After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became overburdened with administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over its attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions. Mendel died on 6 January 1884, at the age of 61, in Brno, from chronic nephritis. Czech composer Leoš Janáček played the organ at his funeral. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation."
I think the suspicion there is that his results were *too* good, so he *must* have faked them up, but who can say? Maybe he just got lucky and had nice, clean results! Maybe he selected only the best results and left out the ninety experiments that didn't work! Seems to be a tussle between who has the best statistics:
"In 1936, Ronald Fisher, a prominent statistician and population geneticist, reconstructed Mendel's experiments, analyzed results from the F2 (second filial) generation and found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes (e.g. yellow versus green peas; round versus wrinkled peas) to be implausibly and consistently too close to the expected ratio of 3 to 1. Fisher asserted that "the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations". Mendel's alleged observations, according to Fisher, were "abominable", "shocking", and "cooked".
Other scholars agree with Fisher that Mendel's various observations come uncomfortably close to Mendel's expectations. A. W. F. Edwards, for instance, remarks: "One can applaud the lucky gambler; but when he is lucky again tomorrow, and the next day, and the following day, one is entitled to become a little suspicious". Three other lines of evidence likewise lend support to the assertion that Mendel's results are indeed too good to be true."
Well gosh, Ronnie, if he'd known that fifty years after his death a properly trained statistician would be saying his results were too good to be true, then maybe he'd have been more careful to produce results in line with what he 'should' have got. Either he was a dirty dog liar and fake and fraud, or naughty biology didn't obey maths like it should, bad empirical results, bad!
"Daniel L. Hartl and Daniel J. Fairbanks reject outright Fisher's statistical argument, suggesting that Fisher incorrectly interpreted Mendel's experiments. They find it likely that Mendel scored more than 10 progeny, and that the results matched the expectation. They conclude: "Fisher's allegation of deliberate falsification can finally be put to rest, because on closer analysis it has proved to be unsupported by convincing evidence". In 2008 Hartl and Fairbanks (with Allan Franklin and AWF Edwards) wrote a comprehensive book in which they concluded that there were no reasons to assert Mendel fabricated his results, nor that Fisher deliberately tried to diminish Mendel's legacy. Reassessment of Fisher's statistical analysis, according to these authors, also disproves the notion of confirmation bias in Mendel's results."
We just have to 🤷♀️ and accept that, faked or not, the theory at least seems to stand up.
"After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became overburdened with administrative responsibilities"
The doom of many a researcher...
Too much paperwork!
Oh man. I'm reading up on this Ronald Fisher and I hate to drag religion into it, but he seems to have been a proper Churchman (of the Church of England) and so I have no doubt he went into this with a presumption that of course some Roman Catholic monastic would be Up To No Good 😁
"Fisher was noted for being loyal, and was seen as a patriot, a member of the Church of England, politically conservative, as well as a scientific rationalist. He developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and was the archetype of the absent-minded professor. H. Allen Orr describes him in the Boston Review as a "deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines". ...Fisher was involved with the Society for Psychical Research."
God be good to the man, whatever his views on the Nefarious Church of Rome (which I can't say he did hold), he's been dragged into the modern circle of disrepute about racism and eugenics. A fate I'm sure Brother Mendel would not have wished upon him:
"In June 2020, Gonville and Caius College announced that a 1989 stained-glass window commemorating Fisher's work would be removed because of his connection with eugenics. In the same month, Rothamsted Research released a statement condemning Fisher's involvement with eugenics, stating "Rothamsted Research and the Lawes Agricultural Trust reject utterly the use of pseudo-scientific arguments to support racist or discriminatory views". An accommodation building, built in 2018 and previously named after him, was subsequently renamed. University College London also decided to remove his name from its Centre for Computational Biology."
I may be maligning the man about his motives for digging into Mendel (though I think terms like "abominable", "shocking" and "cooked" are coming on strong). But I think the best revenge is that somebody used his work to develop the "Sexy Son Hypothesis", a moniker that I think would have had him wincing.
"I hate to drag religion into it". That's the funniest thing I've seen lately.
I've also seen the point made that Mendel reported his observation. He didn't have a theory of inheritance in general, which goes to show that, indeed, he wasn't a modern person.
The idea behind global warming, that certain gases (like carbon dioxide) cause the atmosphere to retain heat energy, was already developed more than one hundred years ago by Arrhenius, who already anticipated that human industrial production of CO2 could affect the climate. In its basic form, it is a pretty elegant idea.
Global warming has to be quantitative-- burning one tree can't matter, but how much do you need to burn for it to make a difference?
The Gaza strip has a population of 2.3 million and is growing at 2%/year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip#Demographics. If the trend continues they'll surpass the density of Singapore in ~14 years. Is this demographic issue discussed in Israel/Palestine?
Absolutely. Ride along with the fact that extrapolating current demographic trends will have Palestinians outnumbering Jewish Israelis in Israel and the West Bank combined in the not too distant future--- a challenge too the proponents of " greater Israel" which could not then be both a Jewish state and a democracy.
My understanding is that this is one reason why the Israeli government makes it relatively easy for Jewish people to immigrate there, and why they are trying to incentize Jewish citizens to have more children.
No, Jewish immigration was among the primary points of the reestablishment of the Jewish state in the first place. Demographic issues are not the reason here. See the Declaration of Independence:
"Thus members and representatives of the Jews of Palestine and of the Zionist movement are here assembled on the day is the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Yisra'el and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Yisrael, to be known as the State of Israel.
[...]
The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Very true, and thank you for the referenced quote. Not sure how I forgot this!
"why they expel palestinians from their homes to settle jews their", excuse me for my ignorance, but when did this happen in the past 50 years? When you say "they" you are referring to the current Israeli population, otherwise your comment is somewhat irrelevant. In the past few decades the only expulsions I have heard of were of settelers being ckicked out of their homes.
It’s not been the “armed resistance” people have been complaining about the last few days but the sexual assaults, kidnapping of civilians, and murder of children. Do Palestinians have the right to do that too?
Embarrassing. Wether a women was simply paraded naked or was paraded naked after being raped unimaginably beyond the point here. This makes me question your motives and your other factual assertions.
I'm really honestly curious: why are you here? Posting these things? What is it you're trying to achieve?
The dead nude girl from Germany paraded around on the jeep didn't strip herself.
Can anyone recommend some good machine learning datasets to practice with (besides MNIST) that are easy enough to be done with only linear layers, no convolutions? I'm learning Julia and trying to write a neural net from scratch to practice with. Already did MNIST. Thanks!
When you say linear layers, I assume you’re okay with ReLU/GeLU/logistic activations and not actually linear layers? I’m trying to make sure I understand your use case.
I’d suggest staying away from anything vision and just doing a simple RNN (avoid LSTM since that’ll introduce all sorts of other headaches) on any text dataset you want. RedPajama if you want big and recent, but any Wikipedia dump will be more than enough.
But if you really wanna stay simple, you could always concatenate one hot encodings, say 5 words across, and do a text classification. You could use Project Gutenberg and do authorship classification.
Nothing wrong with perusing Kaggle for some old tabular data. You could always do a simple net with just one hidden layer. You might lose to a xgboost, but who cares if it’s just for learning.
I played around with Julia about 8 years ago and completely forgot about it. I’d be curious to know if it’s ever really panned out. They were big on being able to easily parallelize over multiple CPU’s at the time. I wonder how that’s aged since.
You could try fashion-MNIST and permuted-MNIST. Perhaps CIFAR-10, though this may already be too hard for linear layers.
I used to consider myself a free-speech extremist (no on thoughtful is an absolutist) but I confess that seeing protesters in Times Square chanting "700"(the death toll of civilians in Israel) and making throat-slitting gestures the day after the murder of 260 concert goers, the rape of women; and desecration of corpses; the kidnappimg of elderly dementia patients and toddlers...makes me rethink.
The Mill-ian idea that anybody has anything to learn from these people (or making extremely basic arguments against them) is a bad joke.
I'm not looking to argue too much. I'm just tracing the story of how one doctrinaire civil-libertarian is led away from dogma
There's always been a "Fighting Words" exception.
That "exception" is deader than prima nocte, and was always just a cover for prosecutorial discretion and jury nullification anyway.
Note one thing we can learn is who these people are. Free speech has consequences, and it does not require anonymity.
Chanting isn't exactly speech. It's more "speech" than whatever dumb thing Larry Flynt got himself shot over but it's more like making a noise.
That irrelevant technical detail out of the way, free speech isn't good because you're always going to agree with it or find it meaningful but because it's both a necessary freedom for a human being in society, and because the alternative is much much worse.
One extremist to another, it's not that we have anything to learn from people making throat slitting gestures the day after an atrocity is committed, or the guy with the "god hates fags" sign at the gay man's funeral, or the guy blasting "bombs over bagdad" on 9/11, and so on.
It's that we might have something to learn from the author writing a memoir on growing up in trans, a policymaker explaining "blowback" and the impact of US foreign policy in the Middle East, or a journalist writing a summary of China's perspective on the 9 dashed line, and there are plenty of motivated actors who, in bad faith, will try to censor the latter on the grounds that it is "just like" the former.
What's the alternative? If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech, and then judge what speech belongs to each category, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly. This seems strictly untenable theoretically, and pretty terrible practically when implemented.
Arguing for free speech on the basis of all speech ultimately being valuable, either directly, or in prompting a response, seems like a poor defense of free speech.
It seems trivially true that some speech is terrible and has a greatly negative net value. But free speech is still great. I'm glad the USA lets genocide supporters express their views. The classic precedent for the protesters in New York is their Nazi predecessors in Skokie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie which was a major free-speech victory.
The principle of free speech has long hinged on defending the rights of the worst people to express the worst speech.
"If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech, and then judge what speech qualifies, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly."
This isn't true. There was censorship of "pornography" on an "I know it when I see it basis" without a system which isn't nearly that comprehensive.
Even Chinese censorship, which is trying to beat ever-changing hints and euphemisms, doesn't try to be so thorough.
The thing is, America did not go out of its way to import Nazis knowing what Nazis think.
The people in NYC seemed Muslim, judging from the pictures, and the reward for letting them tell you who they are and who they hate and what they want to do - should be being able to deport them and make a sensible policy that Muslims are not to be welcomed en masse. Let speech not be meaningless; let it function as communication and a guide to decision making. Not just be a slogan of the virtuous until they can’t take it anymore.
As it is, yeah, Americans look like chumps.
But they are not all Muslims. They in fact are very few of America's Muslims. Perhaps basing policy on the actions of an extreme minority is a bad idea?
What were my principles? Seems a pragmatic matter. Of course, if it comes to principles, not choosing to willfully turn your country into a place where people are likely to enter the streets and celebrate death - is surely not quite equivalent to suggesting they wherever they are in the world, they ought to die.
ETA: although, in a world where the content of speech is meaningless and inconsequential as it seems to be here, and the sight of the chanters yesterday feels for some of you like a good day's work in service of your principles - always a good feeling - perhaps these things really are the same:
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones; this seems nasty to us; let's not have any more of this for ourselves, it has its place elsewhere of course in this wide world - and, death to 'em!
> What's the alternative?
With utmost respect, I find this argument frustrating. I understand the 1st amendment quite well (thank you to my many years in grad school). But every regime of (mostly) free speech has exceptions. No one permits CSAM. No one permits the dissemination of national secrets that would literally endanger defense of the nation (yes, this is often exteended too far), etc.
Under our current system, hate speech is 100% permissible
In Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore--an ethnically diverse nation that has famously ascended "Fromm Third World to First" in his lifetime--speech that foments ethnic hatred is simply disallowed. I do not know the specifics of how this works but I know the punishments are not merely nominal. It's a real offense, not akin to jay-walking.
The proposition that there is *no alternative* to our First Amendment version of free speech is absurd, bordering on risible.
In short, while I'm not sure I would advise it, we *could* copy Singapore, which is very far from a failed state.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes (by Scott, well-written; see also this comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes?commentId=HSLmgP6JgFQTKhd2b)
For a speech restriction to not pose a risk of creating a slippery slope, it should be unambiguous, natural, and far in motivation from the sort of speech restrictions that would be harmful. There is no way to make a hate speech law that can't be easily broadened until it includes valuable speech. The few existing American exceptions to freedom of speech have qualitatively different motivations from the typical, tempting but harmful limitations on it; that's not the case for most proposed new exceptions.
Once we agree that it's OK to ban sufficiently heinous speech, whenever you want to argue that some particular kind of speech shouldn't be banned, you have to go into an object-level debate, arguing that it isn't heinous. You can't count on always winning that debate; when society is on the verge of banning some kind of speech, you'll probably get ostracized even for arguing that it isn't heinous. The way to get around this is to argue that even heinous speech should be legal.
The above means that (some kinds of) speech restrictions have an unusual risk: they ban most ways of arguing for their own lifting, since to argue that they should be lifted, you have to make the banned argument, or something dangerously close to it. So if they are mistaken, it's hard to correct it.
----
I suspect (but don't know) that Singapore enforces hate speech laws more-or-less symmetrically, that is, a Malay (minority) shit-talking the Chinese (majority) would get in just as much trouble as a Chinese shit-talking Malays, because they are actually aimed at preventing ethnic strife. If/when such laws are implemented in Western countries, they'll usually ban one group from criticizing the other, but not the other way around. And since they are aimed at putting a thumb on the scale in favor of some policical/demographic groups (progressives, minorities) over others, there is more likelihood that the side in favor expands the until they ban valuable speech as well.
So, even if speech restrictions can sometimes work out well, they can turn out badly in many ways, and even in countries where they have worked well so far, there is a significant risk that they will expand until they ban valuable speech. At the same time, there is little risk from near-unlimited free speech (like the prevailing interpretation of the 1st Amendment).
----
To go back to the original case: while those chants aren't valuable speech, they aren't harmful either to any significant degree, at least in a country like America, where to most people they just make themselves look bad. Whereas banning it would be risky because of the risk that other, valuable speech would get banned too (even if it's not certain that that would happen*). So there is no point in risking it.
This brings us another argument: democratic countries will ban ideas that are unpopular anyway, and pose little risk. Meanwhile, countries where a dangerous idea is popular, and so arguably there would be a point in banning it, won't ban it.
* Though I'm pretty sure that if the 1st Amendment were interpreted away, America would soon have hate speech laws broader than anywhere else, banning many legitimate arguments against SJWism. After all, on most other aspects of SJWism, especially on racial matters, the US is crazier than most other Western countries.
I never said the US would be a failed state. The US does many terrible things already, and I don't consider it a failed state.
I never said there is no alternative. I described the alternative - having government bureaucrats decide what speech should be legal. Obviously some bureaucrats will act more in ways you want, and some less. Some speech restrictions and their interpretations would be more desirable and some would be less.
Notably, under a hate-speech ban regime, many traditional Jewish texts could be banned, and their exponents prosecuted. Some would like that. Others would dislike it. When a different party took power (obviously not a factor in single-party Singapore), the opposite policies could be enacted, or the same policies could be interpreted to ban the opposite types of speech.
I'm not saying they would need to be banned as objective hate speech. I'm saying the opposite, that the concept is subjective and any particular implementation is likely to have consequences that seem terrible to some people, and even the people who appreciate such laws or their implementations could fall victim to them later.
Nor did I say that literally all speech should be legal. I support various US speech restrictions, including generally on CSAM. But the fact that not all speech should be legal obviously doesn't imply that a given form of speech should be illegal.
My point was that defense of free-speech does not depend on all speech being valuable and that indeed, that argument is a weak one that probably fails in many cases including the one you illustrated.
" If you don't have free speech, you need government bureaucrat to create a taxonomy of all speech and then judge what speech belongs to each category, and then punishment will be meted out accordingly. This seems strictly untenable theoretically... "
I'm always being told that countries outside the US don't have free speech: if so, the untenable thing is widely imp!emented. It isn't true, though, because the US doesn't have absolute free speech , either.
Right. To terrible results!
https://www.dw.com/en/calling-prophet-muhammad-a-pedophile-does-not-fall-within-freedom-of-speech-european-court/a-46050749
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/18/all-you-need-to-know-about-pakistans-blasphemy-law
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-56154542
https://time.com/5128341/poland-holocaust-law/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/uk-police-arrest-autistic-girl-after-she-said-officer-resembled-a-lesbian-go-away-from-my-teenager-daughter
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-discrediting-armed-forces-law/31875273.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arrested-children-calling-transgender-woman-man.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55555299
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/swiss-lgbtq-groups-praise-jail-sentence-commentator-called-journalist-rcna118715
https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/iranian-protests-and-the-crisis-of-free-speech/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-19883828
[Those are just a couple of links, hardly meant to be comprehensive].
Obviously there are people who will defend some or all of these. Everything will be defended by someone. But since OP was coming from a nominally free-speech perspective, these show the untenability to someone with that value.
Canada has both hate speech laws and a high bar for convicting people of breaking them. Countries get to draw the line on what speech is allowed where they choose. You disagree with where some countries have chosen to draw their lines. That doesn't mean any line you draw will always cause a slippery slope to too much speech suppression.
But a low bar on seizing the bank accounts of those who criticize Trudeau.
Has nothing to do with hate speech laws.
No freedom convoy bank accounts were "seized" under the emergency act, only temporarily frozen. And it wasn't about speech. Canadians are free to criticize Trudeau (and the lockdowns at the time) to their hearts' content. It's one of our favourite pastimes. The issue was with the convoy blockading the city and border crossings.
"Countries get to draw the line on what speech is allowed where they choose."
In some sense yes, but some of those choices are human rights violations.
Yeah, a lot of countries are awful, but I don't think it's fair to call Canada's extremely lax hate speech laws to be human rights violations. There is no universally agreed upon set of human rights. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared freedom from fear to be a fundamental human right. Preventing people from promoting genocide could be argued to be protecting that right. There is no country that gives its citizens an absolute right to say anything; every country draws the line somewhere.
If you're just saying that some restrictions on speech are bad, then I completely agree.
Restrictions to FS are either a bad thing that happens., or impossible to implement.Not both.
Fortunately, I never said it was impossible to implement.
I said:
>This seems strictly untenable theoretically, and pretty terrible practically when implemented.
Untenable: Not capable of being maintained or defended, Insupportable; intolerable.
Indeed, in that sentence I clearly reference it being implemented.
Since you don't seem to understand what I've written, it seems unproductive for me to further engage.
Free speech is a continuum not a binary. The us has more of it than most of the rest of the west, which in turn has more than most of the rest.
"The Mill-ian idea that anybody has anything to learn from these people (or making extremely basic arguments against them) is a bad joke."
Who are these people? Are they of Palestinian descent or are they only white liberal LARPers? Why do they think this? How did they come to think this?
How do we make peace with people we hate, to the marrow of our bones, people who have done terrible things to us and we have done terrible things to them, generations of hatred on both sides, and yet we both have to live on the same small patch of land?
CEASEFIRE by Michael Longley
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
'I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'
Thank you for sharing that poem. I found it deeply moving and have noted it down to memorise.
He wrote it during the late 90s when there was talk about an IRA ceasefire, and a lot of people on both sides of the divide - civilians as well as paramilitaries and the police and armed forces - grappling with "how are we to make peace with people we hate and who hate us, who have committed atrocities against us and against whom we have committed atrocities?" Trying to get the Peace Process in motion did mean a lot of people asking "so is this it, now? we surrender? all the fighting, all the lives lost, mean nothing?"
http://www.troublesarchive.com/artforms/poetry/piece/ceasefire
"Michael Longley wrote this poem, evoking the painful reconciliation of those who must make peace, hoping that he might influence doubters on the IRA army council. He says he believes poetry does make things happen. And he wrote: “When I published my poem Ceasefire in the Irish Times I got a letter from the father of Paul Maxwell, the sixteen-year-old boy who had been blown up with Lord Mountbatten. Those letters matter more to me than any amount of criticism I might receive in literary journals or attention in the public world.”
The hardest thing is compromise. The hardest thing is "okay, to get this, we have to accept that terrorists who bombed and shot and killed people are going to get out of prison". How much will you pay for peace? How much are you willing to pay?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_peace_process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement
"Both the British and Irish governments committed to the early release of the approximately 400 prisoners serving sentences in connection with the activities of paramilitary groups, provided that those groups continued to maintain "a complete and unequivocal ceasefire". Cases were reviewed individually by the Sentence Review Commission. Prisoners from the Continuity Irish Republican Army, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Real Irish Republican Army were not eligible for release as those groups had not agreed to an unequivocal ceasefire. There was no amnesty for crimes which had not been prosecuted.
The Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, received Royal Assent on 28 July 1998. 167 prisoners were released by October 1998. By December 1999 308 prisoners had been released. The final group of prisoners was released by 28 July 2000, giving a total of 428 prisoners released."
Richard Hanania has recently been saying it's mostly white LARPers rather than immigrants: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1711183090188795966
Another motive is keeping track of them or getting some idea of how much support those ideas are getting. We can probably argue about whether this is worth it.
Not a cheering thought, but if a crime is committed based on those ideas and the perpetrator was at a demonstration without concealing their identity, they might be easier to catch.
"but if a crime is committed based on those ideas and the perpetrator was at a demonstration without concealing their identity, they might be easier to catch."
Good point. At the moment, I'm mostly wishing the IDF the best of luck in killing Hamas members who are still at large, and in doing whatever it takes to ensure that Hamas can never carry out another attack. In an ideal world, I wish all Hamas members could be killed without harming any peaceful civilian Gazans, but this isn't an ideal world and I support the IDF in whatever they are able to do to protect Israelis.
While Hamas supporters appall me, and I'd shed no tears if any of them gets themselves killed (as long as no one else is hurt), they rarely present a lethal threat like the Hamas members in Gaza do.
IMO we need to level the playing field.
Either everyone is guaranteed online anonymity or everyone's every action and speech is recorded and available for all to peruse.
Partisan vigilantes recording "suspicious behavior" is a road we are already going down and it's really not good.
Volunteer Informers costing people their jobs is quite horrendous.
I do like where your heart is on this but I would guess you generally agree with me that it's a step we don't want to see people taking.
Even in *1984* the real threat was not from any All Knowing Big Brother, but from millions of petty Little Brothers, ever eager for an opportunity to tattle tale.
"Partisan vigilantes recording "suspicious behavior" is a road we are already going down and it's really not good."
Taylor Lorenz, CNN, WaPo, NYT, Ken White et. al. disagree,.
If they weren't in Times Square chanting that, it doesn't mean they don't believe it. They'd still believe it, and would still act on such beliefs if the right opportunity came; you just wouldn't know about it. At least this way, everyone would know where they stand and update their beliefs on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accordingly.
The argument against is that that demonstrations help with recruiting.
Another possibility is seeing this will energize opposition to these protesters.
The other argument is that passing a law against something sends the message "Society thinks this is contemptible and should be stamped out", and most people form their beliefs in part from what society tells them.
I think you're confusing "Society thinks this is contemptible" with "The Government thinks this is contemptible". There's no mechanism for "society" to stop pro-Hamas demonstrations in Times Square; some government official has to make that determination.
Do you really want the government to be able to determine what is or is not "contemptible", with both moral and legal authority? And don't count on democracy to save you here, because the incumbent government will always be highly motivated to include "hey, here's some good reasons to vote those bastards out" on the list of things too contemptable to allow.
There's a good chance that in 2025, Donald J. Trump will be appointing the bureaucrats in charge of determining what is too contemptible to say, if we go that route. Are you still good with that?
No, I just reject the dichotomy between "society" and "the government". The government is part of society -- indeed, one of the most important parts. And people generally follow the lead of those they see as more important than them.
I continue to believe that the best response to bad speech is more speech
The reason why this no longer appears obvious is because we have allowed YouTube and PayPal etc, to discriminate against whatever speech (or press) they choose, and with the death of the public square, they are now more powerful than any law so, hey, why *not* pass a law?
I am convinced however that the correct move is to force youtube and other Near Monopolies to cease circumventing the intent of the Bill of Rights, rather than to mutilate them further.
That would be tricky. Holocaust denial for example is legal in the US but not in Germany.
The legal documents pertaining to Google's Platform are obviously different between the United States amg Germany. Likely in easy excess of 10,000 pages.
That said, universals would be better, which is why I'm looking for the right word for FuhrerFriend.
Yeah, we can leave that for another time. Then again, why?
Okay, I'll take the plunge. Beware, of chassidic jewish spirit.
https://youtu.be/dxjOrCjx43c?feature=shared
I hear what you're saying, but frankly consider it far better that they get to say their repellent thoughts out loud. It helps us to know what kind of people they are and hopefully stay far away.
I wish white supremacists were able to say their stuff in public as well, so I could avoid them too. Now I don't know if I'm talking to one and possibly entertaining adjacent thoughts.
With me you will never have to worry. I have that form of tourettes that makes me seek out the very words some polite society has declared verboten and then to say it.
It's always obvious whether I mean to violate the purpose and spirit of the convention or just the legalistic letter of it (pretty much always just the letter), but, one way or another, nobody ever need worry that I harbor a thought I ain't sayin 😉.
I'm still a free-speech absolutist and think even that extremely offensive speech supporting Hamas should be legal, and they shouldn't be thrown in jail. For me the reasoning is that violence simply isn't justified in response to offensive speech, and that includes state violence.
But the double standard is just absurd -- misgendering someone is "hate speech" and literal pro-terrorism marches aren't. I mean, it's crazy.
Yah, and as you indicate, the correction needs to be done by increasing speech tolerance for people who continue to speak English the way it was spoken 20 years ago, rather then to slice away more and more tolerance for ideological speech.
Who do you think holds that alleged double standard? Can you point me to someone who actually holds both of those positions?
A lot of the countries having the pro-Hamas marches have hate speech laws (the US is like the only developed country that doesn't have them, and rightfully so), and the people at those marches didn't get arrested. It's a double standard under the law, upheld by the governments of those countries -- Canada, UK, Australia, etc.
That doesn't mean there is a double standard. There are extremely few prosecutions under the Racial Discrimination Act (I assume this is what you mean by "hate speech laws"), they are rarely successful, and they are generally well in arrears of the alleged offence. The only protestors that typically get arrested for non-violent behaviour are the environmental activists that get in the way of production.
In Australia you're not getting arrested for either misgendering someone or for marching in support of Hamas.
This is not a defense of that particular section of the act.
Germany has arrested people and UK ministers are calling for "the full force of the law" to be used.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/08/hamas-celebrations-berlin-security-jewish-sites-schools/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/suella-braverman-hamas-chris-philp-west-london-rachel-riley-b2426298.html
I think the UK is the only country in the world where anyone has ever been arrested for misgendering but never under hate speech laws, but under their incredibly expansive public order laws that bans everything in public that causes harassment, alarm or distress. Both of the arrested people I'm aware of had their convictions overturned on appeal. This isn't because the UK government supports trans people. It certainly doesn't. It just really likes arresting people for pretty much all kinds of speech.
Meanwhile, Germany has arrested hundreds of people for protesting against Israel even before this. For example: https://new.thecradle.co/articles/german-police-arrest-170-people-during-peaceful-rally-in-support-of-palestine
To be clear, I'm also a free speech absolutist, and I don't think anyone should ever be arrested or subjected to any other kind of violence because of their speech.
Ah, I stand corrected! My mistake.
Yeah I would say that in a vacuum I'm against these arrests, and support the American system of not criminalizing offensive speech. But if hate speech IS going to be banned, then I'd prefer it to be enforced without a double standard.
I mean, "absolutist" would imply protection of something like explicit commands to kill government officials w/directions to their homes, etc.
I'm not sure where I stand now but say Singapore would not allow speech <i>merely</i> intended to inflame ethnic hatred.
I absolutely support the legality of that kind of speech. (The small print exception is about noise/harassment, which is different than making an argument).
אין שליח לדבר עבירה ('One can not be an agent for trespass') is the talmudic principle that you can give somebody credit for instructing you to do a good deed, but you cannot offload the blame on to them for instructing you to do a bad deed.
When it comes to bad deeds, the one who does it is the guilty one.
This is how Chazal (the Talmudic rabbis) solved the problem exposed by Stanley Milgram's experiments with "agentism", which is that we will do all kinds of terrible things if somebody else takes responsibility.
According to this principle, nobody CAN take responsibility for telling you to do a crime.
It simply doesn't exist.
I think the key is for us to point out that double standard and force people to deal with it. Make people own up to their repugnant ideas.
Please stop posting automatic defences of the Hamas attacks here. If the above post is slightly factually wrong this does not affect the issue that people were celebrating the death of civilians. Neither the murders (a worse crime than rape anyway) nor the people celebrating are disputable facts. None of this seems particularly socially acceptable so the point the original poster makes stands regardless of whether rapes happened or not. And the fact I had to type that last sentence should perhaps indicates how far from any sort of socially-acceptable moral position your posting seems to be.
I wouldn't bother responding to a genocide apologist. Just flag it for the mods. But I'd be careful not to take his word for anything. It's obviously absurd to think that:
>Anyone claiming rapes occurs needs to prove it
As this isn't isn't a courtroom. People don't need to include citations after statement they make [citation needed.]
But survivors of the Hamas massacre of the music festival did indeed report rapes:
>Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account
You're a very handy example to bring up if anyone claims no one is defending Hamas.
Good point!
I support the idea of Palestinians self-determination. But that requires a responsible state and responsible attitudes. Justifying anything on the basis of unfounded rumours (Israel as a society is no happier about paedophiles than any other, so it's not going to tolerate child rape; even Russia drew a line at that) and reference to what happened 75 years ago undermines the case. Anger and revenge are not a good starting point for change: it was only when he was old and calm that Yasser Arafat made the Palestinian cause one that could gain support.
My view is that Hamas are one of the major blocks to Palestinian statehood, and that they need to be removed. An organisation that has a charter obligation to destroy Israel cannot exist in a peaceful country. And their actions over the last few days show they care more about destruction and revenge than the future of Palestinians (they know Gaza will be devastated as a result). Plus no-one in the west nor in much of Asia will support them as a government now. Reenacting ISIS's greatest hits isn't going to make anyone trust you.
So from someone who wants to see a Palestinian state, maybe remember that producing more hatred (say attacking a music festival which is explicitly for peace in the region...) is never going to work. Targeting civilians is counterproductive, as Israel should also know. But the only way forward now is for one party to be destroyed. Clearly it won't (and can't - genocide cannot be allowed) be Israel, so it must be Hamas. If they cared for Palestine they could surrender and disband in return for western assurances; but this is about their egos and they'll fight and Palestinians will die and lose their future. And you try to justify this act of stupidity as justifiable revenge.
When did terrorism ever work? When even Iran seems unwilling to actively support Hamas (probably because they can see where this is going clearly enough), maybe it's time to realise the euphoric high if violent revenge is not worth the pain it will cause. If you want a futures for Palestine other than as a underdeveloped battleground and a territory for Zionists to expand into, then recognise the issue. Hamas can now never be part of a solution; it's stupid to support them or their actions when all they do is destroy the chance of a free Palestine in the name of historical or imaginary atrocities. Stop living in a bubble of injustice and faux-liberation and actually look at what is happening: for the sake of bringing joy to a few extremists the chances of independent Palestine are being destroyed.
"Hamas. If they cared for Palestine they could surrender and disband in return for western assurances;"
If Hamas can be removed, might it make sense for peaceful, civilian Gazans to delegate the management of Gaza to some trusted third party for some period of time? Perhaps Singapore, which has managed a small, densely populated, ethnically diverse area quite successfully? Perhaps after a decade or two Gaza might become something that Israel and other nearby nations could trust.
The USA managed something similar with Japan after WWII, but, given the more recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems to have lost the knack for doing this.
At that point it would make more sense for Arab countries to compensate Jews for the property they lost when they expelled them, and for Israel to forward that compensation to the Palestinians; and to resettle Palestinians in Arab countries rather than developed countries.
Recently I have been playing the video game Book of Hours a lot.
Taking place in the same universe as Cultist Simulator, it nevertheless plays quite differently.
Where in CS, you play a ruthless cult leader who recruits members towards some sinister end, loots occult places for books, reads these books strictly for their arcane content, summons eldritch horrors and sends them after the investigators looking into the crimes of the cult, in BoH, you play the role of a librarian carefully reclaiming a vast library building.
The upside of librarians not living as fast as adepts is that they also don't die young, all the menaces which could lead to involuntary game ends are missing from BoH. Where a spoiler-free play-through of Cultist Simulator would involve quite a lot of suffering on the players part (especially for the advanced ends, where you would need to figure out how to reach your objectives quickly under adversarial conditions), Book of Hours can reasonably be played without spoilers.
If you go down that road, I would recommend making notes. A text editor is sufficient for most stuff, preferably complemented by a spreadsheet for memories and skills. (Optionally also crafting stations and crafting recipes). Reading books will give you skill lessons, which work quite differently from the lessons in CS. Where in CS you required n lessons to raise an attribute from (n-1) to n, in BoH to upgrade a skill you require *one* lesson of *any skill with a shared principle* and (n-1) memories with a shared principle.
So to upgrade a skill from one to nine, one will need eight lessons and a total of 36 memories. While the intent of the game is likely to only allow the skill level nine if the player knows how to create eight memories worth suitable principles within a day, as an unintended consequence the game feels a bit like playing a version of Factorio where you have to manually feed every assembly machine. Before that, the player is also free to agonize about /which/ skill to increase as much as they want.
My reason to play the game is that I really like to explore the world-building at a more leisurely pace than Cultist Simulator offers. The crafting system is nice, and with the less abstract representation of physical items you can hoard as many books, plants, drinks etc as you can fit on your shelves.
Or we could talk about feud between Failbetter Games (Fallen London, Sunless Sea) and Alexis Kennedy, which is very culture war related.
> the player is also free to agonize about /which/ skill to increase as much as they want.
Or, in my case, how to maximize my RoI from the Tree of Wisdom so that each skill is exactly high level enough to net me a soul element, and no higher. I've filled up everything within the inner ring and I have a (potential) ++ version of every soul element. I don't know how high this will allow me to go, but I'm gonna find out!
My comment originally had a section on that (which I took out before posting because nobody reads walls of text):
> Selecting which skill to increase with the lesson can be an agonizing choice. The things I consider generally are:
(a) Can I increase the maximum principle available from skills? (e.g., for reading new books)
(b) Do I benefit from the crafting recipes of the skill?
(c) Tree of Wisdom considerations.
(d) Unique opportunities offered by the skill. (Of course, that is kind of hard to do when playing unspoiled, as you only learn about the opportunity when you discover it. I certainly tried guessing that some skill might work for some station, but mostly was wrong.)
For the Tree of Wisdom placement, I would consider the following things:
* Does the skill have crafting potential (which would benefit from further increases)?
* What element of soul do I get, and do I have access to a soul-merging station which accepts both the skill and the element of soul?
* What are alternative skills to place in that Tree slot?
As languages can't be used for crafting (or at or least for /regular/ crafting), it makes learning as many languages as soon as possible and placing them on the lower tiers of the ToW seems like an optimal move.
Merging elements of soul is mostly useful during the initial phase of the game. Merging n soul elements gives you an upgrade of log2(n), while combining n skill lessons gives you a bonus of n. If you have a decent skill and a way to gain a principle related memory (and possibly a tool or craftable ink), then the extra point or two from the EoS will rarely be essential. On the other hand, you absolutely benefit from having multiple copies of a low-level EoS. On certain days, you might decide that you want to gather as much stuff as possible, and then four Health will be vastly more useful than one Health++.
You can also earn achievements by placing an element of soul on the ninth slot in the tree. I guess if one wanted to optimize for that, one would study the dashed lines to see where inter-branch unlocks are possible.
I tried Cultist Simulator, liked it, but had to give up as I kept dying within a day or two. Just too stupid to work out how to keep alive, I guess 🤣
Which was a shame, because the game seemed fascinating but boy was it brutal if you didn't figure out quickly how not to die due to lack of resources.
Sounds like Book of Hours might be more to your liking.
Unlike in Cultist Simulator, you stay alive by default. The worst I got in my play-through were a handful of maladies (if a book is clearly marked cursed, read the curse description before reading the book) which were easily cured, eventually.
The worst thing that should have happened to me would have been using some ten lessons at the end of a certain season before I realized that you only require a single lesson to level a Skill up. Which would not have much of a difference either in the end.
Also, I guess most (all?) of the books from Cultist Simulator are in Book of Hours. (Fun fact: some books are amended on the margins to inform the player that certain summons they were hinting to do not work in Book of Hours.) So you could explore most of the lore without having to learn how to get rid of menaces.
Yes, the game expects you to die multiple times until you figure it out -- and I died. A lot. One hint I'll give you is that you can click on the "Time Passes" verb to see a preview of the next season. This is extremely valuable for survival. Another hint is that the regular game rewards patience. Flashy high-energy actions are effective, but always bring about severe negative consequences; laying low while the heat goes down and your mind quiets is usually safer.
I say "the regular game" because some of the the expansions, as well as the "New Game+" mode (no spoilers), are absolutely brutal. Depending on the path you've chosen, you may be under constant pressure, with little time to plan or even to act, before your glorious work goes to ruin.
Yeah, I had to literally take notes so I could remember how to dispose of all the menaces efficiently. All the Dread and Fascination and Restlessness started to blur together after a while.
The easiest route is to start as a Physician - they get a job that pays well and they can't get fired from, and money makes all your other problems easier to solve. Otherwise, do manual labor and train your health (it's reasonably profitable once you've leveled it up), and do paintings to burn off your restlessness and manage other conditions.
I would love it if you talked about that feud. I like all those games but am unaware this.
From Wikipedia:
> In 2009, Kennedy developed the browser game Fallen London. He founded the company Failbetter Games in January 2010.
> In June 2016, Kennedy announced that he was leaving the company to do more creative, than managerial, work through freelancing. He sold his majority shareholder stake in Failbetter for 60 percent of the company's cash, rather than 60 percent of its value, to help the company operate without issue.
Then in 2019 (coincidentally after Cultist Simulator was nominated for some award) allegations of misconduct appeared. As far as I can tell, he did have an unreported relationship with a woman who went on to joined FBG and reported directly to him, and might possibly have been the manager of his future wife when their relationship began. Possibly he was an asshole boss to his former girlfriend after he left her. Possibly he was generally not the nicest manager to all people. Likely he asked out women in the gaming industry, including women at FBG. Possibly some of the women found that uncomfortable and/or unprofessional. In short, nothing a month long visit to the tomb colonies would not clear.
Also, apparently FBG seems to have imposed a damnatio memoriae on AK, and removed him from the credits of Fallen London (which I can't find anywhere?), as well as unattributed his blog posts. This is not what people usually mean when they say "separate the artwork from the artist".
https://archive.ph/QPLHP
https://weatherfactory.biz/the-rarer-action/ (one of many related posts)
My personal verdict (from limited information) is that AK is certainly wasted as a manager. Sunless Sea (where he was a manager of a team, I guess?) certainly was a great game, but so were Cultist Simulator and BoH, which he wrote with his wife. Beyond that, none of the creditable allegations don't seem very damning, I think.
If there ever was a problem where a twitter mob is the answer (spoiler: there is not), the behavior of AK most certainly is not it. That guy quit his job as CEO of FBG (where had power over female employees) to develop games with his wife (a setting with limited marginal opportunities for sexual misconduct). He is not on the short list for either the Supreme Court or the Papacy.
(If the motivation of FBG is the success of WF, this is even more stupid. FBG and WF are not two fish in a tiny aquarium, but two small fishes in the vast ocean that is the gaming industry. Almost none of their customers debated if they should buy either Cultist Simulator or Sunless Skies, because their gaming budget likely allowed for both games and then three AAA titles on top. But in the future, I have to ask myself how many pennies of every pound I sent to FBG will get spend on making trouble for WF which is kind of a bummer because I like Fallen London.)
Failbetter framed Alexis Kennedy for "#metoo" and tried to get him to kill himself, and almost succeeded. Fortunately, he survived, and went on to finish Cultist Simulator together with his wife -- the only person who stood by him.
Alternatively, the serial sex abuser Alexis Kennedy escaped justice, and went on to coerce (or gaslight) his wife into making Cultist Simulator -- thus averting financial and professional ruin that is his due.
I would appreciate fellow ACX readers' thoughts on my proposal that Occam's razor doesn't always reduce complexity - it just defers complexity from explanations to objects
https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/beware-of-occams-razor
Decent take but doesn't really engage with the fundamental question relating to Occam's razor: how should one define complexity?
The post suggests that whatever this complexity is, it can be portioned off into complexity belonging to "objects" and complexity belonging to "explanations" but since neither term is carefully defined and complexity isn't carefully defined either, it's hard to say anything about this idea.
I recall in "The Quark and the Jaguar" Murray Gell-Mann offers a definition of complexity, which I think built on Kolmogorov.
Thank you - I will look into this
The fundamental question is why you are using it at all: that should tell you which complexity measure to use.
Unfortunately it doesn't. Occam's razor is more of an experimental fact than a conscious decision: the reason we use it is that it has proved successful historically.
Successful at what?
Succesful at generalization. For instance, we use various of regularization in training our machine learning system based around the idea of simplicity and find that it leads to them generalizing better on the test set.
That seems wrong, historically. Newton is simpler than Einstein, but less general.
Fair enough, I take that on board and completely agree with your concern with poorly constructed definitions.
Do you need to define complexity as strictly if you are only making relative comments (i.e. one thing is more complex than another?). It's hard. I think the definition of complexity is dependent on the domain.
I would say that broadly, an explanation tells you "why things are the way they are", and objects are "what things are". complexity would be the number of components that contribute to an explanation or an object - but the "resolution" on which to define these components is domain-specific.
having written this (thank you for pushing me to think more about it) I think that you can't really define it independent of a domain or a question. this is a similar take to what Deutsch mentioned in a podcast - which was that a definition of complexity can only come *after* a defined theory of physics
what are your thoughts on how to define complexity?
If you think about physics, you never really get an explanation for "why things are the way they are", indeed it's a little hard to even imagine what that could mean. What you do get is a mathematical framework you can compute stuff using and a way to relate the outcomes of this mathematical framework to things you can observe in the real world.
Having thought a fair bit about this, I think the best place to start on this topic is to first figure what really we do when we search for an explanation of something: in my opinion, any explanation consists of exactly the two things I mentioned above. 1) A mathematical/computational simulation and 2) a way to relate this simulation to sensory data.
So what does complexity mean in this framework? Roughly, it should correspond to how short of a computer program is your simulation (including setting up the framework) and also perhaps, how difficult are the computations. So Einstein's theory of relativity is a lot more complicated than Newton's - it needs a *lot* more mathematical sophistication and also a lot more computing power. As compensation for this increase in complexity, it corresponds much better to real world observations.
This seems like a sufficiently rigorous starting point for the key question: why is occam's razor so often useful? BTW, this question is really starting to come into it's own in today's world. ML systems often find the correct generalization on the test set despite having enough parameters to fit many possible solutions to the training set. The solution to this is clearly some version of Occam's razor, once we make precise the notion of complexity in the context of ML systems.
I see you’ve got into a heated discussion with the Ancient Greek below, but I just wanted to query one part of your insightful response (thanks for sharing it)
Are you implying that all explanations must be able to be mathematically or computationally represented in order for them to be explanations?
Never thought of Occam’s razor as it relates to implementation of ML - if you have any further reading to point me to that would be super appreciated
I just found this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.05366.pdf
Interesting - thank you - I will need to read up on Kolmogorov complexity before attacking this properly I think - but very useful! Appreciate you taking the time to share it
Unfortunately heated, and not quite sure why it got that way!
>Are you implying that all explanations must be able to be mathematically or computationally represented in order for them to be explanations?
For a broad notion of computation, yes. For instance, when you reason through some argument about a novel some critic is making - that would also be a computation in my sense (and more viscerally, GPT-4 could probably replicate a similar argument).
>Never thought of Occam’s razor as it relates to implementation of ML - if you have any further reading to point me to that would be super appreciated
I don't know any references, sorry. In general, what ML peeople usually program in is some kind of regularity, L2 regularization is a popular one and you could try searching for that. So what these regularizations do is that they add a term to the loss function so that you don't just minimize "error" (for e.g. cross entropy) but also "simplicity" (here the total square sum of the weights, for instance).
Experimentally, we find that including such regularizations tends to lead to the system learning algorithms/functions that generalize better outside the training set. It is very much an open question as to why, and is exactly the Occam's razor question in a different context.
"In my opinion, any explanation consists of exactly the two things I mentioned above. 1) A mathematical/computational simulation and 2) a way to relate this simulation to sensory data."
So it *doesn't* contain 3) any kind of representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data? Siding with instrumentalism against realism, if that is what you are doing, makes the question of simplicity rather trivial -- it reduces to just doing less complex calculation as a matter of convenience, and minimal computational complexity is the obvious choice. OTOH, the whole issue is much more fraught for realists.
If you are using a simplicity criterion to decide between theories that already known to be predictive , that are good enough for instrumentalism, then simplicity doesn’t buy you any extra predictiveness, so the extra factor it buys you is presumably truth, correspondence to reality.
There are multiple simplicity criteria, but not multiple truths. So you need the right simplicity criterion.
If you have a conceptually valid simplicity criterion, and you formalise it, then that's as good as it gets, you've ticked all the boxes.
On the other hand, if you formalise a simplicity criterion that has no known relationship to truth, then you haven't achieved anything. So it is not enough to say that Solomonoff is "the" formal standard of simplicity. There are any number of ways of conceptualising simplicity, and you need the right one.
I think any sufficiently accurate simulation of sufficiently complicated data has to be a pretty good representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data. I don't know if this is an instrumentalist or realistic take.
I think the question about Occam's razor is especially relevant today given the way machine learning works. We are finding out that the following is just now true:
"If you are using a simplicity criterion to decide between theories that already known to be predictive , that are good enough for instrumentalism, then simplicity doesn’t buy you any extra predictiveness, so the extra factor it buys you is presumably truth, correspondence to reality."
Various kinds of regularizations absolutely help machine learning systems generalize better on the training data and we don't have a great theory as to why. Like you say, people use various notions of simplicity and it's more of an experiemental fact as to which one works. I have hopes that everything can be organized under Kolmogorov complexity but at this point, this is only a hope and I wasn't making a claim that Kolmogorov complexity was *the* ultimate and complete explanation.
"I think any sufficiently accurate simulation of sufficiently complicated data has to be a pretty good representation of the reality that is causing the sensory data."
Accurate in what way? Presumably you mean it's predictive, since that can be tested directly. However , we don't have empirical evidence that predictiveness correlates with being realistic representation, because we can't measure realistic representation. So we need a conceptual argument that some notion of theoretical goodness correlates to realistic representation.
One way of making this point is to notice that equally predictive theories can have quite different ontological implications.
Another way of making this point is that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles ... although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don't exist.
A further way is to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can't rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don't know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can't tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that
better theories are more probably correc than worse ones, but we don't really know whether
current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God's eye point of view.
Moreover, we can't safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontolgocial picture for just the reason already given -- slight change in predictive accuracy going fromm one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology.
"Various kinds of regularizations absolutely help machine learning systems generalize better on the training data and we don't have a great theory as to why."
That shows that simplicity correlates generality, not that either correlates with correct realistic representation. We can't measure how ontologically correct an AIs model is with regard to reality itself.
I'm trying to find a more in-depth exploration of a behaviour I've been noticing - I'm not sure if I read something about this in a SSC/ACX post, or perhaps a comment section. I can't think of the correct terms to describe it, so hopefully I can show what I mean by way of anecdote:
I was watching reality TV with a friend a while back, and one of the people on the show got into a conversation about evolution, or rather she explained that she was devoutly Christian and didn't believe in evolution. My friend immediately went to "wow, what a dumbass," while I said something along the lines of "who cares, she's a hairstylist by trade, says she loves her family and all that, what does it matter in her life whether she 'correctly' believes in evolution or not". I think I also reflected on the fact that in our (my friend's and mine) lives, knowledge of evolution affects approximately zero of our day-to-day interactions, except when its pulled out - like in this anecdote - to laugh at someone for being stupid.
Anyway, my friend got a bit defensive, we changed the subject.
I guess I'm wondering how much being "correct" on topics like evolution is the issue here, or if its simply another tribal calling-card that lets one dunk on the outgroup. Neither my friend nor I have any scientific education, though I am starting to turn my studies in that direction. Understanding evolution and natural selection is important for biological studies etc, but in my day-to-day I'm fine with people having "incorrect" views on these things - I still trust them on, say, interpersonal matters, if they get along well with people; but I'll discount supposedly scientific recommendations (structured water, anyone?).
If this is all very vague, let me ask for personal experiences - how much does disagreement on key topics affect how you value other people, if at all, depending on context?
> I think I also reflected on the fact that in our (my friend's and mine) lives, knowledge of evolution affects approximately zero of our day-to-day interactions, except
...except for the election day, when the nice lady votes for a politician who shares her beliefs (not just about evolution, but also about covid being a hoax, homeopathy being the only reliable medicine, or how kids can become gay just by hearing that gays exist), while you and your friend... don't.
Anyway, your side loses because the nice ladies outnumber you, and you wonder whether the guy they voted for ends up as a minister of healthcare, or a minister of education.
Then the nice lady smiles at you and says that you shouldn't believe everything the liberals are telling you, because if you instead free your mind and follow your intuition (and most importantly, listen to the same sources she does), your life will become happy and full of positive energy.
And, you know -- she actually *is* happy and full of positive energy. You can't deny that.
Your claim that not believing in evolution demands belief that gayness is a contagious disease, is proving your strawman's point; this attitude is pure negativity and excising those who preach it will result in greater happiness.
Nope, my point is that people who are happy to ignore reality in some aspect are often happy to ignore reality in many other aspects (though not necessarily all of them), because their decision algorithm is "whatever makes me feel happy". And at some moment, they are likely to hurt someone.
This is why I do not see the willful denial of reality as harmless, even if in everyday life it doesn't make a difference whether I believe that electrons orbit around protons, or the other way round, or it is all the four basic elements.
"Nope, my point is that people who are happy to ignore reality in some aspect are often happy to ignore reality in many other aspects"
Hoo boy. You didn't think this one out very far, did you?
>This is why I do not see the willful denial of reality as harmless<
You infer negative actions and create fights, and presumably see that as harmless instead.
As the saying goes, nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. Not understanding - or believing in - evolution means that you have a huge handicap in understanding the natural world. And I'd argue that's useful for a hairdresser, because the natural world is all around us!
But couldn't you say the same thing about math? And most people don't understand math higher than Algebra.
I could, and I do!
Indeed you could, and many people suffer from their lack of understanding of mathematics every day.
Personally, I've got a top 1% mathematical understanding but I'm pretty fuzzy on how a toilet works. Like, I get how the flush forces the poo round the S-bend and into the pipe that goes down, but then what? Is it just a mostly-empty pipe running downhill all the way to the sewage plant? Or is the pipe mostly full, and flat, and they're constantly pumping sewage out at the far end, and if they ever stop pumping for long enough then everyone's toilet starts flowing backwards? Why doesn't my sink smell bad? Is it just water in the S-bend again? If that water evaporated then would my sink smell like sewage?
It is usually mostly empty pipe running downhill all the way to the sewage plant. In some cases you have pumps, but generally you try to build your city's sewage system so that gravity does all the work.
In a combined sewage system there is an overflow outlet directly into the river or ocean or whatever that sewage spills into instead of backing up into your homes, in the case of some kind of clog at the treatment plant or (much more common) when severe rainfall fills the system with water.
You might find these two links helpful.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1a/50/ee/1a50ee710ea14141babc4c7b9e6212c5.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_sewer
If there is no water in your sink's bend then it will smell a bit, yes.
Of course you might not be hooked up to sewer, in which case you probably have a septic tank. Sewage collects in the tank, where solids fall to the bottom leaving liquid at the top. When the tank gets full enough, the water flows through a pipe at the top of the tank to a series of other pipes that are part of a drain field: the pipes have holes in them, so the liquid just seeps into the ground and makes its way downward through the layers of sediment. Bacteria tend to break down your waste, so you don't have to pump all the solids out of the tank all the time.
I agree it isn't meaningful, somebody's belief about the origins of homo sapiens isn't likely to ever affect an interaction you have with them or alter either of your lives. But there's always SOME value in people around you having a correct factual view of the world, since you never know when some novel situation might occur in which somehow they could act on the false belief in a way that causes real harm.
The reflexive hostility to creationists came from the mid-00s era, when a version of the New Atheism trickled down to lower-level political discourse on message boards, where it became a proxy for saying "these dumb evangelicals who elected George W Bush are destroying America". This coincided with the rise of snarky discourse, as Freddie de Boer has talked about, which definitely made it an easy "tribal calling card" to whip out, as you say. It's mostly been supplanted in the last few years with calling people "anti-science" w/r/t vaccines or other covid interventions, which is a more useful proxy since the belief being criticized could at least arguably affect other people.
A seemingly large number of people who like to make these charges that somebody is "anti-science" came of age during the mid-00s and got rhetorically stuck there, and have not updated to the new landscape where evangelicals' social and political power is on the decline.
You missed an opportunity to bond in contempt of an outgroup.
I never miss an opportunity to kibbitz with outgroups* but the fucked-up fact is that nothing seems to motivate tribes and people quite like hatred and fear.
Hitler could use that fact to his profit, most people just suffer from it, I take the quasi-buddhist/stoic approach of just laughing at how absurd that sad fact is.
_______
* See relevant sign I'm holding about 20 seconds in: https://youtube.com/shorts/bvSq43OaUtk?feature=shared
It's a constant struggle -- do you bond with someone by agreeing with them, or make yourself feel superior by coming up with a superior opinion?
Contra Paul Graham, I think the real reason that nerds are unpopular is that they consistently choose the latter option.
It sounds like your friend wants to be one step on the barber pole above the creationist lady, and you want to be one step on the barber pole above your friend. You live in an intellectual environment where dunking on creationists is so absolutely old hat that you feel the need to think something else that makes you more sophisticated. Your friend is probably slightly less terminally online and is happy to stick with the 'boo creationist" emotion that the producers intended.
What's your intention with this comment?
Maybe deep down all I want is to be higher up on the "barber pole," maybe that's all that was going on there in the moment. I was trying to come at this again with curiosity, and to see what other perspectives might be.
I think your barber-pole-climbing view of it is relevant. But I don't see how the rest of your comment was necessary.
(I'm "probably" less online than you think)
My intention with this comment is to be one step above you on the barber pole by pointing out the whole barber pole thing.
But by pointing out my own cynical intellectual intentions you've successfully leapfrogged me and are now one level on the barber pole above me. Well done!
I'm reminded of this SMBC strip: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/to-vote-or-not-to-vote
You made me laugh* - thanks.
*after momentarily taking in the sweet short-lived glory of oneupmanship, then kicking myself
Well, one one hand, it's "reality" tv, which is all but real. The producers explicitly picked these rather uneducated people and pushed them to have such a conversation on topics way over their heads, for entertainment.
On the other hand, if we leave manipulation aside, nowadays it's not hard to get some basic intellectual knowledge here and there, and the basics of evolution are standard school material - they may be pretty basic but it's surely enough for such a discussion. So two rather unprepared people going into intellectual discussions over abstract topics of no immediate relevance to their day to day lives counts as a good thing in my book. The seeds of even vaguely caring about how the world works beyond day-to-day appearances are there, and that's nice.
And yes, at that level, someone actively saying they don't believe in one of modernity's greatest discoveries, with its amazing explanatory power over so many things that *do appear* in our day to day lives, is a bit of a bad sign about the person. They didn't *have* to engage in debate about the science of biology, but they chose to, and then they bungled it.
While not directly pertinent to the larger question, it may be useful to know that some people confuse evolution with abiogenisis so they actually do believe in change across population over time but don't believe in the more speculative bits inferring species millions of years ago.
It is one of the confusing bits where two sides have somewhat different vocabulary (although I think a lot of that is the habit of conflating the biological process with the alleged moral claims about existence).
Watch out for different definitions of common terms in the "creation v. evolution" debate.
First, it's a reality TV show. It's meant to be entertainment, not actual real life, so they go for maximum drama and that means picking 'contestants' who fit the script. So they didn't pick a mainstream Christian for whom evolution is not a problem, they picked this woman. And they didn't pick the likes of Francis Collins, about whom P.Z. Myers was absolutely *steaming* that a believing Christian got a Big Important Science Job (I have to admit I enjoyed Myers' impotent foot-stamping rage over this), they picked a hairdresser.
All in order to elicit the reaction that your friend responded to, in line with the stimulus fed them: "Wow, what a dumbass". That's what the producers want: lots of chatter on social media about "wow what a dumbass" and that in turn provokes "you're the dumbass" and then there's a little war going on there and there's no such thing as bad publicity. They've got their genned-up controversy going.
So second, you could point out to your friend that their instinctive reaction is what the show *wants* to evoke and they're falling in line with the script. But that might offend them, if they like to think that they're a cut above the kind of simpletons who are so easily manipulated.
I think it is actually useful for even hairstylists to understand evolution because it helps explain so much of human nature. e.g. why do people usually care so much more about themselves than about others? Because that's the best strategy for natural selection.
>why do people usually care so much more about themselves than about others?<
Is this in reference to people getting their hair styled?
As others have noted, evolution offers easy explanations for a lot of true things about human nature, and for a lot more *false* things about human nature. Trying to make rigorous use of evolutionary biology to understand human behavior is very hard work, not something the average hair stylist is going to do, and really not something the average scientist is going to do.
Almost everyone will get better results by watching human behavior and saying "huh, that's how humans behave, go figure", than by contemplating evolutionary biology and trying to predict how humans will behave.
Then you read the thousands of "just so" explanations of how such-and-such behavior that doesn't work with that theory at all can be explained by...____________.
People do things that aren't well explained by selfishness all the time. Then you talk about group selfishness, or family selfishness, or gay uncles, or whatever people have to make up whole cloth to explain what natural selection struggles to explain.
In this sea of disagreement, do you really think this hairstylist with an average or less IQ is going to make good decisions about which sub-theories to believe and act in life accordingly? Or perhaps, she's going to end up more confused and wrong somewhere along the line than if she just didn't learn about evolution in the first place? Seems like a coin toss to me.
I don't know whether it would help them understand the variety of hair better, but it might not do as much as actually working with hair.
Ah now, bloom, how many times in reality do you think to yourself "This is natural selection in peak operation" rather than "what a selfish so-and-so" when somebody acts to benefit themselves rather than you? Even if we accept evolution and understand it, in practice we don't (unless we're enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists) attribute such explanations to instances of selfishness, malice, ill-will, greed, etc. especially involving ourselves on the receiving end of such.
My mood and emotional response to an obnoxious or evil person I encounter is inevitably better when I remember that they're just selfish meat robots like I am, and that anger is a choice. I rarely encounter those people, but when I do, I still *usually* indulge in base disgust. But when I remember my limited philosophical training and remind myself of their selfish humanity, my day is better for it. Don't know if it makes a practical difference in the world but it sure makes a difference for my mood. This kind of response to obnoxious behavior doesn't require a total recalibration towards internalizing evolutionary psychology. It just takes a little mindfulness.
Short answer is that I don't think it's meaningful when a person has an opinion on a topic that has no bearing on their life. Until they become a biologist, not believing in evolution is fine.
If you don't have the right background and have dedicated the time, 'believing' in evolution is primarily an exercise in trusting authorities. This is absolutely fine, in my opinion, since as you say there're no real-world consequences for anyone involved. So, I'd say what we have here is two people trusting authorities in different way on a topic with no consequences. Phrased that way, it's hard to get too worked up about someone being 'incorrect.' I'm sure I have all kinds of incorrect views about how ports work, but ports have no bearing on my life so it's fine.
If you want to say something like "well this is bad because it's incorrect and we need a populace that has correct views," then I would say that the way you get that on net is for people to trust scientific authorities more. Expecting people to put in the time to understand evolution (or nuclear power, or machine learning, or programming, etc.) at the level where the empirical truths become salient is unrealistic. I 100% believe that "trusting authority" is epistemically inferior to "figuring it out for one's self," but it's the only scalable heuristic we have.
I think you're badly underestimating how much basic-to-middling understanding of science society has nicely managed to make accessible to nonspecialists.
I do have a science background, but sometimes I have conversations on such topics with people who don't, and when they have a bit of interest, you can sense that it's not just that they've learned to trust the right authorities, but actually gained a bit of actual familiarity with how it works.
Real problems usually appear only when people have prior ideological commitments that block that understanding. In the case of evolution, any kind of ideology that holds the human species as intrinsically above the rest of the biosphere would easily do that.
Why does evolution threaten the privileged position of humans? That we evolved to dominate the planet does make us special. That we evolved so I can type this message to be read across the world instantly makes us special. Anyone trying to claim humans aren't special due to evolution isn't really paying attention to what we have evolved into.
And this fits into theistic beliefs: evolution is the mechanism by which divine agency (or possibly diabolical agency if there's any material dualists left out there) promoted humanity above the rest of the biosphere, a statement that cannot actually be disproven.
If you're the kind of person who thinks of humans as above or separated from the animals, I can see how the idea that our ancestors were once ocean scum and weird little ratty things and monkey-creatures to be upsetting. Also, evolution only supports out planet domination Right Now, under these conditions. If our evolved behaviors and tech lead us to destroy ourselves, well then we lose. There's no security in evolution.
I don't think I'm underestimating the level of public knowledge of science, but I absolutely could be. But even though there are enthusiastic amateurs, and I'm happy that they're there, I think the bulk of scientific opinion is of the form "it's what the authorities I trust say." My main point is that, if someone has a divergent view of a scientific topic, your prior should be that it stems from a difference of respected authorities, and probably not that it's an empirically formed choice, and then proceed from there.
It sounds like that prior may not hold in at least some of your conversations, which in my book would be a point in favor for your social circle.
Sacred cows are dangerous. Recognizing truth, unblinded by dogmatism is important in many arenas. But the sacred cows aren't all religious. We all have cognitive biases to one extent or another that we can try to overcome. Some sacred dogmas are probably even *more* common among those who are not religious. One example, that actually pertains to denial of evolution is the dogmatic denial of the implication of evolution on humans, discussed by David Friedman in a number of pieces, including here: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/who-is-against-evolution.
Ultimately though, while truth is important in many areas, and dogmatic falsehood is dangerous in many areas, not all truths are of equal import.
If someone doesn't believe in vaccines, that can have much more impact than them believing the wrong thing about Shakespearian authorship questions.
Checking off the right box about evolution doesn't seem like the most weighty truth in and of itself; the vast majority of people probably never make any decisions that are directly a function of it.
As Friedman points out, the impactful science denial / dogmatism regarding evolution is mostly made by people who would check the correct box.
Furthermore, the weight of the impact of a wrong belief that someone holds need not affect how much you value them personally.
We all have our biases, and few people even make much of an effort at all to correct them and to seek truths, even very inconvenient ones.
So the typical person who believes something false is probably not that atypical in their epistemology. And if the false things they believe are particularly weighty, e.g. anti-vax, that's probably mostly because like most people they are greatly influenced by the beliefs of those around them, and the particular false beliefs of those around them happen to be anti-vax.
Taken in isolation it is fine, but if many people have wrong beliefs that would be a larger problem for society. F.ex if too many people don't believe in evolution, that would pose a problem for those who wants to get funding for biology studies (and possibly much worse, as history tells us). Therefore, I believe cultivating and expecting educated beliefs in the general public is important.
If neither of you have any technical education, then you don't really understand why evolution is considered correct - this is entirely non obvious and took even scientists many years, experiments and arguments to believe, and it's still very much a matter of debate as to how precisely to define evolution and to what extent is it true and when is false etc.
All this is to say that there is no way that believing in evolution or not is a question about "scientific smartness" for either you or the reality show person. It is at best a question about "political smartness", I.e., which of the self-purported authorities on evolution to believe and at worst, a question about signalling affiliation to various groups.
More personally, what matters to me usually in discussions with other people is not what they believe necessarily, but why they believe it and how they hold the belief - is it something they can explicate reasons for and change their mind about?
I agree that in my context it's a question of "political smartness."
As for what personally matters to you in discussion - I think that's the direction I was heading towards, in bringing up "why does it matter in this context?" I don't care about the TV person, I was trying to start a conversation with my friend to see what the reasoning was behind the knee-jerk reaction. Though perhaps watching reality TV isn't the best situation to try this... I'm generally trying to get better at turning to the "why" of people's beliefs in conversation, and in retrospect that moment was a failure on my part to define what exactly I'm asking about, a vague attempt to get into a deeper conversation but without the conversational experience to make it work.
Also, taking in Kristian's comment below - I don't think your standards are too demanding, in fact saying "I don't understand x" does seem more appropriate to me than "I don't believe x".
It's always hard to try and get people to introspect about beliefs held for political reasons - as with your friend, where I use political in a broader term than just relating to the government. I don't know a good way of doing it with most people and I try and cultivate friendships with the few people who can in fact reason well about their in-tribe beliefs.
The most frustrating conversations I have had always fall into this category - trying to get people to question or reason about beliefs around which they build their identity and I wish I knew how to do it better.
One can believe in evolution without understanding why it is considered true today in detail. Otherwise one could say that Charles Darwin couldn’t have believed in evolution because he didn’t know the up to date version of it.
Adapting your very demanding standards would only justify one to say that one doesn’t understand evolution, not to say that one doesn’t believe it.
I don't think it's possible to "believe" in evolution at all; it'd be like "believing" in rocks, or gravity. I don't need to believe in rocks, I know they're there (yes yes I could be a brain in a jar etc., but you know what I mean).
And here was me thinking "believing in" something was confined to religion only, that there is no "believing in" with science, there is just acceptance of facts 😁
But that is part of the wider debate around Science versus Religion. EMB could try asking their friend why they think a TV show is comfortable with holding up (a subset of) Christians to mockery, even mild mockery, is okay today? Because mores have changed to the point where it's okay to do so - 'wow what a dumbass' about non-acceptance of evolution is not an opinion that will get you in trouble. So the influence of Christianity has waned enough for society to be able to do so, and that is reflected in your friend's attitude.
There's a whole set of unquestioned assumptions in the background here, and I think it could be that the friend got defensive because "what does it matter what the 'correct' opinion on this is?" calls into question the whole 'right-thinking people believe X and say Y' that current culture is based upon. The right sort of person has certain values, one of which is that religion is anti-science, this is very important, and religious people who deny or do not accept scientific dogma are stupid, and this is very important to say as well. Because otherwise you could be mistaken for one of the people who are not on the right side, and that spreads out to "so you're a racist? a homophobe? a transphobe?" and all the rest of it.
The friend feels it is important to know and to signal that you know the 'right' beliefs to have, because there's a whole emanation of a penumbra of other beliefs associated with that, where 'evolution - yes or no?' is a proxy to indicate that you hold the right values.
> And here was me thinking "believing in" something was confined to religion only, that there is no "believing in" with science, there is just acceptance of facts
I actually agree with you -- I think that "believing" in evolution is kind of like "believing" in rocks (as I'd said in my comment above). I suppose someone out there does take the existence of rocks on faith, but such people are outliers.
Though of course it's possible to have a surface-level understanding of evolution, or gravity, or indeed rocks; and be reasonably convinced that they exist; without knowing all the details. For example, I couldn't tell the difference between igneous and metamorphic rocks at a glance; nor do I know the exact processes by which they are formed; and yet, I am still reasonably sure that rocks exist regardless of whether I have faith in them or not.
I considered leaving out the Christian part of the person's description, but I'm glad I didn't, because I appreciate your comments here.
It's interesting to observe just how important displaying certain ('right') beliefs can be - I didn't in any way prompt my friend's "what an idiot" comment, and I find it curious especially since we've known each other since childhood and I'd expect there to be less pressure to perform the 'right' way in the context of our long-lasting friendship.
(Though as you mentioned in your other comment - she was prompted, not by me but by the show-runners that need reactions of that sort)
Yep, my point is exactly that the question of what to believe is, for most people (non-specialists) not a scientific question but a political question.
In Darwin's case, he did have enough evidence (collected over two decades) to provisionally believe that his version of evolution was more correct than whatever was believed before him so that for him, it was certainly a scientific question.
Right, and it is possible to read Darwin’s publications or some equivalent and understand the reasoning even if one doesn’t have decades of experience in field biology. And it is perfectly possible for a non specialist to do that.
The other question is, is it legitimate for evolution to be a political question.
Unless you are a scientist you don't need to understand any details of evolution. The basics, based on a very strong scientific consensus, are taught to anyone who goes to school.
And repeating what you are taught in school is righteous.
Exactly my point. The people denying evolution are usually really denying that the school system is a valid arbiter of truth - it's not at all based on the specific question of evolution.
Is this the case? Most of them seem to me to be interested specifically in the question of evolution.
Maybe recently with transgender issues and so forth, there are more people who reject the school system as such and lump these things together, but there are decades of legal cases that are specifically about teaching evolution or the validity of teaching something as an alternative (creationism or intelligent design).
Yes, exactly! And also denying the underlying scientific consensus in this case.
The basic explanations are school-level, unless your schools are much worse? There's devil in details, of course, but still.
You are told some narrative in school but that hardly counts as an explanation.
What is taught in school probably omit important detail, and is wrong at some level due to simplification (I'm not a biologist so I wouldn't know what!). But as a basic introduction to the concept, and as for what someone who is not a scientist should know, I think it is perfectly fine?
It really depends on what you mean by an explanation. To me, a good explanation should somehow increase your agency - perhaps it simply lets you predict what will happen in more novel situations or perhaps it lets you build something you couldn't have before. Otherwise, the explanation is merely narrative. I personally find it hard to use a school level explanation of evolution to really do anything, except to recite it back, which is why I call it a narrative.
The trouble with narratives is that there is no good way of deciding between two differing narratives. If you learn something in school, and your church tells you something different, how do you know which one to believe?
FWIW, I think that the school-level explanation that I was taught (IIRC, seeing as I'm pretty old) was reasonably predictive. It was basically "change in allele frequency over time due to selective pressure", which is enough to explain e.g. Australia and antibiotic resistance. It's not "predictive" in the sense of "you can stage an experiment to observe it in real time", since high schoolers don't have those kinds of resources; but the same applies to most theories, such as gravity or electromagnetism or quantum physics etc.
I think the school level explanation does not need to be predictive - that again is for scientists. It only needs to give information about (what scientists believe about) how the world works. This is good in itself, and an educated population will f.ex. be less likely to buy in to bunk and support demagoges as well as more likely to support proper science. Education doesn't need to be directly useful in the individual case.
I believe disbelief in evolution is usually taken to indicate either troubles in general reasoning or a blind spot in everything related to religion (or both), which are both bad far beyond the specific question.
Is this really true, though? I'd wager that, for most people, there's no reasoning involved in forming their views of evolution, any more than reason informs their understanding of the structure of the atom.
One level up, someone may also have learned a few paradoxes or striking bits of evidence for evolution, but still can't demonstrate having thought about it.
With that in mind, under those circumstances, believing in evolution mainly shows that such a person has learned to accept a specific set of authorities.
"Most people" aren't as smart as you or I perhaps, but they're not as dumb as the dumbest person you can possibly imagine.
I think there's a spectrum of levels of engagement with reason, in the middle ground between "I believe evolution because authority figures tell me to" and "I believe evolution because I am an evolutionary biologist and have personally double-checked all the maths behind it".
What those intermediate levels of reason look like is a sort of engagement where you think about the idea a little bit, prod it, come up with "but how come..." questions for your teacher, and eventually are convinced that it sounds kinda reasonable even if some of the details seem a bit hand-wavey. In this sense, reason informs their views because they've thought about it for long enough to convince themselves that it basically sounds reasonable.
Evolution and the whole sort of standard model of the history of the universe stands up to a lot more of this sort of casual teenage-brain prodding than the "six thousand year old Earth" model does.
I agree with all of this*, and tried to gesture toward the gradient you describe, towards those "intermediate levels of reason", by highlighting the "one level up from no thinking" scenario, but you've put it better here.
My main goal with this line of commentary is to discredit the idea that one's stance on evolution is a very good gauge of reasoning ability.** I disagree strongly with intelligent design proponent, William Dembski, but I think his reasoning abilities are probably superior to mine along many axes. Conversely, I talk to a lot of people that believe in evolution, but have very poor reasoning skills.
* And regret if my comment implied I was exempting myself from "most people".
** I'm also generally interested in the often-underappreciated social dimensions of knowledge, but that's neither here nor there.
I believe that people who have used some reasoning to come to the conclusion (even if mainly using the evidence provided, which is, of course, meta-problematic due to potential cherry-picking) tend to believe that the others did, too — or, at least, that those who disagree did not. And if you believe that you have used reasoning and someone else haven't, everything else is downstream.
Also, since no one can be an expert in everything, choosing authorities is an important part of arriving to right conclusions in practice, even though in theory argument screens off authority.
I don't think this addresses what I'm saying, which is that for most people, the subject of evolution does not even _engage_ reasoning faculties. For that matter, neither does the process of choosing authorities.
Yes, that's a sad part of reality, but "reversed stupidity is not intelligence", choosing wrong authorities does generally turn out to be a relatively reliable red flag.
Strong agree. You can see this in action when a novel topic comes up (covid vaccines?) and major political divisions get stamped on a topic. Democrats were against the covid vaccines when they were a Trump thing, but became very positive after Biden's election. Republicans do the same thing. Cultural attachments seem to be a much bigger part of what we individually and collectively believe than reason, at the object level all the way up to the meta-level of picking who to listen to.
Suppose you are presented with evidence of “nonhuman vehicles”, ie UFO’s. How does this evidence change your prior beliefs about the difficulty of aligning an AGI?
If the "nonhuman vehicles" are UFOs from aliens, that should dramatically increase the odds that AGI can be effectively aligned, on the basis that AGI seems to be easier than interstellar travel, so I'd expect p(noAGI | interstellar|) and p(unalignedAGI | interstellar) to be low, making p(alignedAGI | interstellar) high.
Now I'm very skeptical that UFO reports are good evidence of interstellar travel so the existing data doesn't nudge my priors by much, but if it were to be confirmed that would cause me to update. Similarly, I think discovering technologically advanced aliens through another mechanism would similarly cause me to update in favor of AI alignment being possible.
Wouldn't unaligned AIs count as "aliens" in this context? The existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft says little about the nature of those spacecraft's operators, so should make little change in your priors re AI alignment. Rather, those priors should guide your priors regarding the organic and/or benevolent nature of the aliens.
That's a super interesting question that I'll have to think about. I have a vague sense that existing UFO evidence seems too incompetent for an advanced AI, but I guess "this behavior makes no sense" isn't strong evidence in favor of an unaligned AI.
That said I'm skeptical about the evidence so I'm having a hard time thinking carefully about what a world in which hit's true looks like.
Is this actually *good* evidence, or are we still talking about blurry photos of lens flares ?
High chance aliens don't let us create a paperclip maximizer, and some chance they stop us by means short of our extermination. I think there is a higher chance we achieve alignment because if we fail the first time the aliens might cause us to get additional chances.
Any more podcast planned on this subject?
Not as of now.
But also, this assumes that there actually are aliens meaningfully close enough to us to do anything in response. If the laws of physics don't offer a usable Faster Than Light travel, they're going to be operating with potentially decades of light speed lag to observe and respond. Many types of hostile paperclipper could at least distribute backup copies over Earth in under five years.
Say aliens find out that any civ just a bit more advanced than humans are now could accidently create an AI that goes foom and becomes a paperclip maximizer that is a threat to the aliens. As soon as they could these aliens would send out ships to monitor every planet that had life on it and have some automatic program to stop the paperclip maximizer from being created.
But that automatic program could just as easily be a simple asteroid bombardment to remove the problem as it is a complicated political solution.
I submit that the correct reference class here (from the aliens perspective) is discovering invasive fire ant mound in the back of the garden.
Clearing out a matter-consuming paperclipper infestation is best done with predjudice, and ensuring that you did not leave enough traces for the infestation to recur. Keeping humans alive through that process is a tertiary concern at best, they may very well reason that humans are the root cause of the problem and cross them out deliberately.
Yes, but our continued existence is some Bayesian evidence that the aliens are too nice to do this.
Our continued existence is stronger evidence that the aliens are too far away to respond to our situation.
Were I the alien evaluating earth for papperclipper risk and hazard, I think there is a decent chance I would watch for an active maximizer showing up, and if I need to stop it, I'm likely to simply obliterate a wide radius around where it's been detected.
An Earth that needs to have cities or countries rail-gunned from orbit has important ways already failed the expected tests of being part of the galactic community. If there's any recurrence of a true threat to the extrasolar nations, better to wreck the whole planet to be sure it doesn't get out.
Any chance of something like,: “alignment is enforced over long timeframes by the laws of physics, and the more misaligned an entity is, the shorter its lifespan”?
I think this would require a multiverse and anthropic bias such as in universes where making a paperclip maximizer is easy, relatively few civilizations such as our get time to arise.
If an alien in a flying vehicle was able to travel to another planet, possibly another solar system, then they are at least as smart as we are and probably a lot smarter. If you believe we are close to AGI, they probably have it already.
Or the parent species that created the AGI is dead, and the ships you're seeing are operated by and for the AGI itself.
Does another species having AGI make you more confident alignment is a solvable problem? If so, to what extent?
The AGI could be the ones coming here. I don’t see what you can do with this.
Yes to "more solvable", but not 100% - it still might not be solvable by a species like us.
I think it at least tells us that AGI may not lead immediately to extinction. That probably simplifies alignment, but I don't really work on alignment so I don't know.
We've been presented with plenty of evidence of nonhuman vehicles for decades. It just hasn't been particularly good evidence.
Are we talking here about evidence that simultaneously would unambiguously show that the vehicles are nonhuman but also is insufficient to tell whether they are piloted by a species that has achieved AGI / species that hasn't achieved AGI / an AGI that has junked its parent species?
Ok, say it’s a vehicle stored in a hanger by Lockheed Martin. Suppose congressional testimony by multiple defense department officials confirm was retrieved several decades ago, and although we know how to fly it, we have no understanding of how its drive system or its control system works. It can outperform our best fighter jets in terms of speed and maneuverability. It doesn’t even seem to use fuel or propellant. The DoD officials say they were told it is some intelligent species not from earth, recovered from the Roswell crash site. Nobody with firsthand knowledge of how it was retried is alive.
Suppose all the same stuff except that it's about a fish which turned into Jack Kennedy.
It would take you a while to come around from "uhuh, and Epstein killed himself" to, "holy shit, JFK was actually a fish!"
The fact that we are all primed to accept one of those two as not only super likely but even kinda sorta *expected* is due to the books we've read and the culture we're in.
Nada Mas.
That said, I am a part of this culture too and am ashamed to say that I too might eventually be taken in by it.
But BOY would it take a lot more than some suits speechifying in Congress!
This scenario pretty much completely nixes the "grabby aliens" scenario - the idea that alien civilizations and/or paperclip maximizers will expand at high speeds, so our first sign of alien life will be when a space probe starts turning the solar system into a paperclip factory. This scenario indicates that we've been in travel range of at least one alien species for about 80 years (Roswell was in 1947) and yet nobody else has shown up since.
That indicates that either it's possible to invent this alien space magic without needing an AI to invent it for you, or that the local aliens have AGI that didn't turn their entire light cone into paperclips, and either one is promising for us trying to do the same.
I think this is reasonable; however, I predict that this scenario will never come to pass, since aliens effectively do not exist. That is to say, they surely exist somewhere, but too far away for their light to reach us. Life, especially intelligent life, is just that rare.
Prove me wrong, Europa ! Prove me wrong...
That was my understanding as well. It seems like we should see it as incredibly hopeful news, along a number of axes of existential risk.
While you are at it, can you also define what exactly you mean by alignment?
Another parenting question:
Every parent I know uses a smartphone or a tablet as an off switch for their children. For context, I'm thinking about kids aged 0-5 here. Most of the time the parents just slap on a kid's video on Youtube. Sometimes it's apps and games to play instead.
Every parent (entirely unprompted by us) goes through the same conversation, where they assure us with a slight edge to their voices that we'll have to do the same and we'll find we don't have a choice. Since I'm never the one to say, "Urgh, I would never let *my* kid become a screen zombie," I have to assume they said it to themselves and are now pre-emptively justifying their choices to us.
Thing is, I don't necessarily condemn the practice outright, and I absolutely see the tactical value of having an off switch for your child when you need a break.
My instinct is to look at the detail of what's actually happening on the smartphone, and take each factor on its own merits:
- the child is learning patterns like "swipe up on screen" before it learns patterns like "turn page of book", which to me feel more "natural".
---> I can't see a problem with this, because I know it eventually will learn both sets of patterns, and I can't see that the order of learning matters at all.
- the sensorium offered by the smartphone is limited to a small screen, tinny audio, and the feeling of fingertips on plastic. There is no broader or deeper stimulus, nothing's ever in your peripheral vision, and a child raised this way will be what Bret Victor calls "touch blind".
---> I can see the point, but it only really holds if the child is never made to do anything else. I don't see "finger on a screen" as inherently bad, so I don't see that the smartphone does any harm if provided as an addition to an already stimulating environment.
- the child could become superstimulated and unable to find mundane real-world things interesting.
---> I don't know what to think about this.
---> But I notice that this is the exact opposite of the school of thought that says I should be giving the kid as much stimulation as possible to encourage its neural connections to form.
- I can put educational apps on the device and the child will (hopefully) wind up associating learning with leisure time, as well as (debateably) learning various subjects relatively well before it gets to school. Desiring the lure of the smartphone, it will end up begging me for access to these things.
---> Can anyone see a downside to this?
- the child will be exposed to media that I don't control, and may not understand or approve of. At best my child learns to speak in Americanisms that will annoy me, at worst it imbibes memes and indoctrination from my political outgroup.
---> My current thinking is I could just disable Internet access and fill the device with media from my own childhood.
- the foundation may be laid for the child to be exposed to social media at a young age.
---> I am firmly against social media and would lump it in with smoking and gambling as things I very much don't want my children to get involved in.
---> However, if the device cannot access the Internet, I think I should be safe on this one. At least I might have bought myself a few years until I can work out how to address the subject down the line.
What have I missed? Does anyone have any thoughts?
I have a 4.5-year-old boy and a 6-month-old girl; my husband and I work full-time, the kids go to daycare but are home with us evenings and weekends (grandparents are in a different state, babysitters are very much an occasional presence). I'm with you in camp "while it would be better to spend time doing other things, screen time not going to instantly turn their brains to mush." We also effectively don't watch TV ourselves.
What works for us:
- For TV for the older kid, we set a limit of e.g. "three 7-minute episodes a day". (When I was a kid, cartoons were scheduled on the TV, so this was externally exposed; now we have to make up the limits ourselves.) We occasionally have minor skirmishes about this, mostly caused by miscommunication i.e. "I thought I had more cartoons left than I actually did."
- For the tablet, ours is barely functional so we haven't used it as much, but the kid occasionally requests and is allowed, say, 15min (on a timer) of Starfall or Khan Academy Kids. The educational case doesn't seem very strong, although it might have been stronger if we did more of this in preference to the cartoons. The down side is that it requires more active involvement at least initially, to help teach the finger on a screen movements, whereas TV doesn't require much upfront investment.
- For the phone, we didn't have a ton of luck with educational apps; I think it's hard to design good apps with that kind of screen real estate (especially because kids are kind of clumsy so the buttons need to be large). We do use a jigsaw puzzle app; it might have set him back in the complexity of jigsaw puzzles that he will attempt on his own, but, I don't hugely care about this as a metric (and also that might be part of a general trend where he wants to play with physical toys *with someone*, which is great, but doesn't cause dinner to get cooked).
- We recently discovered audio books as a decent "off switch." We mostly use them for long car rides where everyone listens, but sometimes just for the kid (with headphones). (My childhood had crowded (and loud) public transit, so being understimulated during travel time wasn't really a problem to be solved.)
Some other things we've found:
- I find it difficult to reduce the amount of screen time, and I don't think it's easy to do it only some days a week; this is part of kids thriving on routines. I think this might be a large part of why some people advocate "zero screen time", while others find it "unavoidable."
- When my screen-limited children come into a house that keeps a TV running in the background, they are mesmerized by the screen (as opposed to the denizens of the house, who are mostly able to ignore it). The 4.5-year-old seems to have grown out of it, at least at houses where he isn't otherwise shy. (The 6-month old is very much attracted to the moving lights.) When this happened at the house of a friend with older kids, it prompted an unsolicited announcement that we won't have much of a choice about screen time.
- Eventually the two kids will presumably develop different opinions about how to spend their screen time; I imagine it's no worse than other kinds of sharing.
- I don't have a great plan for what happens when social media becomes relevant, although that should be a ways past the 0-5 range. In my case, AIM was how I learned touch-typing, and ICQ was how I learned touch-typing in Russian, so it had some advantages :)
You might be interested in the TechnoSapiens substack which goes into the best evidence/research we have on the impacts of technology use, especially focusing on teens and children:
https://technosapiens.substack.com/
> we'll have to do the same and we'll find we don't have a choice
I'm old enough to remember a time before smartphones were widely available. Parents did fine, including my own parents. I don't know which option is better but saying that it's unavoidable is certainly laughable.
> I'm old enough to remember a time before smartphones were widely available.
As I remember those times, people had their TVs turned on all day long.
Yes and no: it's harder to not use the tool that everyone else in your social circle is using. Similarly to how many people successfully don't use social media (I'm one of them), but many people find that, because their friends coordinate via Facebook, they have to maintain at least some sort of Facebook presence (this, occasionally, is also me, though I'm lucky to have friends who mostly remember my Luddite tendencies on this front).
They'll get ADHD if you let them outside or leave them inside with a smart-phone either way. Most people are in some way maladapted to the world, whether through gluten intolerance that gives them immense depression, or hyperactivity that makes shuffling through math problems harder than the math itself. The solution is to rework society from its foundation to match how you most want to raise your children.
We’ve got three kids, zero iPads (except the ones the school gives them - thanks a lot, School) and zero video game systems. They watch plenty of TV though.
Our plan is to keep it like this, and add in social media as verboten when they get older (our oldest is seven). Like you, we keep hearing that none of this is possible, but it clearly is - we are very average parents, not a couple of type A Tiger Moms fanatics or anything.
If you want to do it, I’d keep in mind two things: (1) negotiating a low amount of screen time is a fool’s game. You’ve already lost if you do that. If you allow “playing a Switch” as a reward or “no more than a half hour on the PlayStation after homework is done” it will likely become a thing that the kids ask for constantly and think about constantly. You might not be able to withstand that pressure. (2) having more kids is a big help. My kids are 7, 5 and 3, and they play a million games together. They don’t get all that bored.
I also recommend not allowing devices. One thing I’ve noticed with my kids’ friends is that when kids get obsessed with video games it’s kind of over. It becomes their reason to do anything and most other activities pale in comparison. That doesn’t happen to every kid at all - girls seem to never get like that, for example - but it happens to a lot of them. I have three boys, so….
Anyway, if I can do it, it is definitely doable. Maybe I’ll buckle under pressure when they’re teenagers but I doubt it.
Much as I hate social media, I would worry that a "no social media" rule would wind up as a "you're not allowed to have friends" rule in practice. Nobody at school will want to be friends with that one weird kid whose parents don't let them use the tool that all other kids use to keep in touch.
What age do you think is reasonable for allowing social media?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but: I don't think it's ever reasonable. Every adult who is "on" social media seems to hate it, obsess over it, lose hours a day to it, and get nothing at all in return. It must be worse for children. Our intention is to not allow it at all.
I've been told by parents with older kids that it's impossible to not allow them phones and social media because it's the way kids connect now - basically that they won't be able to maintain friendships without these things. If so, then yeah, we've lost, but we were told that it was impossible to keep them off of video games and iPads too, and that ended up incorrect.
This isn't a helpful response, because I really have no idea. Social media is in the future for us. I'll say, though, that with three boys I'm much less worried about social media than I am with video games and YouTube. I just don't seem them really caring that much about Instagram or whatever.
You only know me though social media (I think ACX counts as social media), but I spend a lot of time here and on FB, and I don't hate it. The folks here and my FB friends are a pretty decent bunch.
They probably won't care that much about Instagram or Snapchat or Tiktok as such; they'll care about meeting girls, and girls are a hell of a lot less likely to get with the weird kid whose mom has puritanical, arcane beliefs about recreation and socializing. If they're normal kids besides, they'll probably be fine, but just know you are introducing a social hurdle they will need to cross all by themselves.
Oh, and most kids are fine with social media. I do fully share your opinion about how terrible it is, but it seems that only the severe outliers have real problems originating with social media.
My naive conclusion was, like the parents you mention, that flat banning social isn't enough. You also need to assemble around you a village full of other parents who ban it as well. My problem is, I have no idea how to do that. I do believe enough parents agree with the sentiment that the numbers are there to do it though.
EDIT: at some point I should put into words what I see the dangers of social media actually are, and maybe start a thread here to get people's input on it.
As I wrote previously (https://alakasa.substack.com/p/the-fall-in-finnish-fertility):
>Apart from those, though, the mother-related social media. I'm mercifully not directly exposed to it, just through my wife, but it still seems like a horror show, full of mothers who are perfectly ready to ream each other's maternity choices at the slightest provocation. (Ream in a passive-aggressive manner, that is - "Oh, your family's screen time is hour per day? Our little ones never look at screens.”)
>Indeed, the opposition to any screentime reflects a curious tendency to always advocate for childcare solutions that make one’s life more difficult. Some just plain seem also convinced that if you use anything that a rural peasant from the 1700s wouldn't be using and which might make your life easier (formula! birth at hospital! screens! daycare!) then you might as well throw your kids to the wolves already.
The modern parenthood (chiefly motherhood) discourse, at least in its more fervent forms, always seems to fall on the side that you are supposed to "play the parenthood in the hard mode". Screens are seen as a cheat code, something that can't be beneficial to kids simply because it is "too easy".
You absolutely can limit or eliminate screen time for 0-5 year olds. We have two children in that age range. The oldest now has a movie on Sunday afternoon, sometimes along with a couple of reasonably educational episodes, but virtually nothing else. He gets very grumpy after watching TV and life goes much more smoothly if it's limited to a specific time and specific duration.
The younger loses interest. He'll watch the movie for about 15 minutes and then gets up to go play.
As for smartphones etc, every now and again (around every few months) I'll show the older a video of particular interest, usually a live rocket launch. He's losing interest in those now anyway.
It does mean we lack the off-switch you describe, which requires more direct parenting, and that can sometimes be a pain. But for us screen time only delays and worsens the misbehaviour. It doesn't help in the long run.
This is similar to my experience. I have a 2 year old. My wife and I didn't watch tv with him and tried really hard not to use our phones in front of him unless it was a specific task - FaceTiming with grandparents, looking up direction, looking at a recipe, listening to a song together. The biggest "mindless" use we do with him is look at photos together.
When he was about 1 we were on a 4 hour flight. He was just at the age of walking and wanting to be mobile all the time. We tried using the TVs on the plane to distract him/calm him down. He would watch for maybe 30 seconds then start touching the screen which was much more fun. He is now at the age he wants to do everything his dad does. That includes watching sports which he will talk about so excitedly then only spend maybe 10 minutes watching before he tells me to turn it off.
Kids mimic what their parents do and want to do what parents are doing. If parents are using TV/phones as a way to "shut off" for themselves the kids will mimic that. The tool (TV/phone/ipad) isn't the issue - its the lesson that parents teach about using the tool.
Totally agree on your last point. Trying/Hoping that we can get a 2 year old to just sit quietly at a restaurant or something is just a losing proposition. We either have to do something different (outdoor eating like a winery/brewery or food trucks are great!) or be prepared to be very present and active with him. And honestly, my wife and I always feel much better after devoting a bit more effort than we wanted to engaging with the two year old.
I have regular contact with two two-year olds, one gets regular screentime and the other has seemingly never watched a screen in their life. They both seem equally bright, equally happy, and equally competent at activities and play. It’s just that the parents of one could afford a nanny to give them some freedom and alone time and the other had to resort to the screen. It doesn’t appear to have had any more effect than that.
I'm afraid I don't find this compelling, because a) n=2 and b) you haven't looked at long term, or even medium term effects.
This is true but goes both ways. What if screen time lets kids learn important skills that give them important advantages in the future? Plausible if the content they watch is educational? I see nobody arguing this, is it entirely unplausible? I don't have kids myself - so no skin in this game (yet).
We could do a double blind study with two million two-year olds to test the same thing but psychology studies don’t replicate anyway. My way is wrong but faster.
Your comment reveals an assumption that seems ubiquitous in these conversations, but typically goes unmentioned, and that I find curious: that parents and caregivers are supposed to play with their children. Not that this is necessarily bad. I don't have kids myself yet, but I don't recall playing with my parents much when I was a child, aside from a game or something every now and then. I would usually play by myself, or with my sister, or with other kids. I would bug my parents when I was bored, but as I recall they would usually try to get me to do something else, not play with me. And if they took me to a playground, they would hang out on the periphery. Now I see parents getting on the equipment with their children. So why do parents play with their kids so much nowadays? Or am I misremembering my own childhood? I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of any parent on here.
I rarely played with my three kids but when I did it (Innebandy / Unihoc worked fine and board games too) we had a good time together. Most of the time they had each other and their respective playmates and every one of them would sometimes play for himself, so that seemed groovy.
It should be rare for a parent to be a child's *primary* playmate, but there's definitely a role for parent-child playing. In particular, there' lots of forms of play that children will find enjoyable once they learn the basics but incredibly frustrating to try and learn without any help.
If you want Alice and Bobby to play checkers with each other while you take care of the housework, that starts with you playing checkers with whichever of the two is older. And your part won't entirely stop until the youngest has outgrown checkers. You are passably familiar with chess, I hope.
Why is it inevitable? What happens if you just let the kids be bored? I assume you yourself were raised without screens, what has changed?
Give them some -- actual, physical -- toys to play with. That way you get to keep them entertained without turning them into a screen zombie.
There was about a year, roughly ages 2.5-3.5, when my son learned that he liked playing *with others* , and he'd enjoy physical toys *with* someone. (This is also the age when kids learn turn-based games.) Which was great, I enjoy playing with him (and My First Carcassone is not a terrible board game), but sometimes I need to make dinner and dad isn't home! TV somehow works without needing the parent to be physically present on the same couch and actively engaged. This might be easier with his younger sister, since she'll have more relatives to be potentially available to entertain her.
Kids cry about a lot of things, that doesn't mean a parent has to fix it. It may inconvenience the parents, but that's part of the gig. We didn't take our kids out to eat much, or to other places where we felt the need to keep them quiet.
If a parent always finds a way to soothe their kid, the kid will grow up *needing* to be soothed and struggle to deal with adversity. Self-soothing is an important skill for kids and adults.
Sometimes a parent needs a break and can't relax with a child who needs constant attention. This is a very hard job. Calling it "inconveniencing the parents" is not respecting the problem. If you could handle it better than others, if your kids were better behaved, congratulations.
I very much respect the problem. Convincing kids that they can get constant attention/entertainment is making it worse for parents. Kids can and do learn to need less constant attention, but that growth is stymied by always available screen time. It takes a few years of training when kids are at their most difficult (roughly 2 years old), and was a major issue for my wife and I. My reason for responding here at all is to say that it's not only possible, but long term rewarding. But it takes effort because it's not easy.
My parents raised me without turning on a TV in my presence upto the age of 6 or 7. I think this was a really good parenting choice by them, looking at my life in hindsight.
Scott, what do you think about the state of magic mushrooms in California? Recently there was an attempt to decriminalize, but Newsom vetoed it. His argument was that we need regulation in place before legalization can take place.
Do you have any thoughts on what good regulations would look like? And if legalized, would you wait and see before making use of magic mushrooms in your own practice, or would you pick up the tool?
Source with more details here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-07/gavin-newsom-psychedelics-magic-mushrooms-sb-58-veto-drugs-california
Bizarre multilingual pun: 'Jamas' in Spanish, pronounced 'hamas', means 'never again'.
So one of the most antisemitic organizations has a name that sounds like an anti-Holocaust slogan.
Slight correction, "Jamas" just means never.
Nice. But a bizarre near universal misunderstanding: Arabs are Semites. The Hamas is not anti-semitic - they 'just' really hate Israel resp. the Jews there. Antizionists/ anti-Israel/ even jewphobia seems to be a word.
I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding. Antisemitism means anti-Jewish pretty universally. Word formation is just not the most logical process, hence endless lists of mildly amusing observations like "we drive on a parkway but park on a driveway".
Anti-x means against x. Semites are Jews and Arabs - those guys with the big noses, ya know. But, you are right, of course: "Antisemitism means anti-Jewish pretty universally." And it is ok to use it for the special attitudes towards Jews in much of Europe much of the time till 1945. (Even though Hitler hold no grudge against Arabs). - Just when one talks about one Semite going against another (who is actually less of a Semite in most cases) using the word is ... a fail ... . Plus: it heavily disturbs the thought process! The reasons of Palestinians to hate Israelis are very, very different from Hitler's reasons. It is not even their religious "Jewishness" - which was no matter for Hitler either, as he had Catholic nuns sent to the death camps, if their "blood" was "Jewish". Edith Stein.
Anti-Israel. Shorter. Much clearer. Unambiguous. Concise. Correct. Helpful (one does not need to think too hard, why Palestinians might hate Israel). btw: me very much pro-Israel. And thus shockingly (to myself) strongly not against very radical retaliation.
>Anti-x means against x.<
Like Antidote.
Also antipasti and Antigone. Antiquity, antics and anticipation. All alliterations and adnominations appreciated.
Nonsense. "Antisemitic" was a term invented by Wilhelm Marr, a man who hated Jews and wanted a fancy word to describe it. Whether "Semitic" on its own is a reasonable race classifier for Jews, Arabs, perhaps others is wholly beside the point. "Antisemitic" was invented to mean Jew hatred, and has been nearly always used to mean Jew hatred. It's fully unambiguous.
Thank you for the info. Though actually Moritz Steinschneider coined "antisemitisch" 19 years before Marr declared himself an "Antisemit" in 1879 - while Leon Pinsker prefered in 1882: Judophobie. As my co-commenters pointed out, the meaning of a word depends neither on the literal meaning of its parts nor its etymology. The attitude "anti-semitism" that Wilhelm Marr shared with so many others in Europe/US (to very varying degrees) is fundamentally different from the anti-Israelism so many Arab neighbors of Israel feel. I feel not much need in this circle to spell the long list out. - Just a "fun"-talk I got from an anti-semite in Russia (oh, multitudes of them there): "No one expected those Jews to turn into such first-class fighters in Israel. Respect. Glad, they finally have a country of their own, I wished all of them would be there and Russia cleansed of them. Good luck to them wiping out those dirty Arabs!" A pro-Israel anti-semite. If two phenomena have different causes and different consequences, the smart move is to use different words for them.
Language is sloppy-- there isn't really an English word for prejudice against Arabs. There's Islamophobia, but it spreads to include non-Muslim Arabs.
"Anti-semite" is an unfortunate term. For practical purposes, it means hating Jews, or at least wanting to exclude Jews.
However, "Semite" includes Arabs, so the term produces a semantic tic, that needs to be opposed again and again.
Alternatives: Anti-Judaism (which is also the title of an impressive book which examines what anti-semites think from their own words and Judenhass, which which is German for the hatred of Jews.
Few months back, I got many interesting responses when I asked those who did believe Russia will easily overrun Ukraine why they thought that.
So, another attempt, this time addressed to those who thought current Ukrainian offensive will be taking ground faster than it in fact does. Why did you thought that?
After all, everyone paying attention knows it generally takes superior forces to do a successful offensive against prepared enemy position, and Ukraine obviously does not have clearly superior foreces, at least not in the quantitative sense. When airpower is taken into account, Russia probably still has overall superiority in the overall “military useful machines” category, while after Russian mobilization, number of troops is firmly in “too close to call” territory.
Theoretically this might have been compensated in hard to observe “quality of soldiers” category, but before the offensive started, we’ve seen roughly zero signs (like e.g. mass surrenders) that gap in “quality” is so large it would enable quick Ukrainian breakthrough.
From my layman's perspective, modern warfare heavily favored the attacker. The U.S. had no problem blowing through Iraq's military and taking over the country in a month. In contrast, the U.S. failed to hold Khe Sanh, almost lost Hue, etc. Since World War I, tools for defending were getting weaker and weaker - it became easier than ever to spot an enemy and drop a precision munition on them. Or just bypassing the enemy and attacking their interior directly. The only thing that mattered was striking first, a prerogative usually held by the attacker.
The only times that a defender won were after they had first absorbed the attack - e.g., the British in the Falklands War. Argentina takes the island, goes on defense, the UK attacks and wins. Relative defender always loses. Relative attacker always wins.
[An exception is for civil wars, which are typically quite different than state-on-state conflicts.]
Thus, I made two wrong predictions about Ukraine! I predicted that Russia would quickly overwhelm the Ukrainians, because attackers always win. And I predicted that Ukraine would quickly overwhelm the Russians, because once defenders switch from defense to attack, attackers always win.
I can't think of another example in my lifetime where a large army tried and failed to take territory. It seems that war has changed.
Modern warfare heavily favors whoever has air superiority, who will then use this favor to go on the offensive and force a more decisive victory than defense alone can manage. The persistent and baffling failure of the Russian Air Force to secure air superiority over Ukraine is one of the most important and underrated aspects of the present war in Ukraine. A mechanized war between peer- or near-peer competitors in which neither side(*) was able to achieve air superiority in short order, is something that hasn't happened since 1973, or possibly 1943. So you're not going to be able to look for historical precedent in any other aspect of this war.
(*) It's not at all baffling that Ukraine hasn't been able to secure air superiority even with Russia's failure; they simply don't have the planes.
> So, another attempt, this time addressed to those who thought current Ukrainian offensive will be taking ground faster than it in fact does. Why did you thought that?
Because I don't really know much about the situation, and I get all my information from journalists, who it turns out don't really know much about the situation either. I try to be skeptical but thanks to Gell-Mann Amnesia I just can't seem to resist over-updating when I read some new piece of analysis written by someone with just three percent more clue than I.
My impression is that in the early stages of the invasion Russia was largely in what might be called "pussyfoot mode", not going at it hammer and tongs, in the expectation or hope that people in Eastern Ukraine (a majority being ethnic Russian I believe) wouldn't resist their advance too much and might even welcome them.
Obviously that didn't work out, as it rarely does because it gives one's adversaries and their supporters in other countries time to build up supplies and train, and gain experience in combatting the half-hearted invasion.
But even if the Russians had launched an invasion in full blitzkrieg mode, the example of their attempted invasion of Finland (much smaller than Ukraine) early in WW2 would make one wonder if a rapid victory was assured. It didn't help that before WW2 Stalin had wiped out most of the competent Russian army officers, and the Finland campaign gave Russia quite a bloody nose and the intended occupation of the entire country mostly failed although they were able to pinch a few scraps of border territory here and there.
I know this is not your main point, but "ethnic Russian" in this context is meaningless category. There are many self-identified Ukrainians who speak Russian as their mother tongue, which does not mean they are "ethnic Russians" any more than Americans are English because they speak English.
I am sure there are also citizens of Ukraine who think about themselves as Russian, but they are evidently far fewer than Russian-speaking Ukrainians, at least on territories that weren't occupied by Russia before 2022.
Also not all ethnic Russians support the war, of course.
I didn't expect Ukraine to quickly overrun, but I did expect them to do about 20% better than they did. My main surprise has been how capable the Russian military has been at patching up its worst dysfunctions, I would have expected it to stay poorly managed for longer given corruption at the top and Ukrainian hits on their command structure.
Not really an answer, but my outside view here is that
1) people underestimated how much "attacking is hard" holds in the current technological/doctrinal situation
2) No one involved in the commentariat had any experience even vaguely comparable to breaking through history's greatest minefield without air superiority
And people generally didn't realize how much Russia neglected its military capacity compared to the Soviets.
Do we actually know the Soviets were better about this? Did we ever see the Soviets (post WWII) engage in a fight with as near a peer as Ukraine is? I do not claim to know at all, but I think that given what we've seen, we shouldn't totally discount that the Soviets military upkeep might have been more similar to the current Russian status than we would have believed, once once it was into the 60's/70's.
Again, to be clear, I'm not claiming that it for sure _was_. I have absolutely no information or expertise to make that judgement. I'm just saying that we were shocked at the state of the Russian military, which should lead us to be slightly more skeptical of our information in that realm more broadly, which should probably extend to our understanding of Soviet military readiness as well.
I agree, particularly since the failure of the Russian army appears to be largely caused by the extreme corruption across all levels of their society, which goes back at least into the 1970s.
You might have a point there.
What do people here make of The China Convergence and its theory? (please no comments about length, it's fine to skim)
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
The alternative universe this guy wants exists here on Earth. Here in the United States even. They're called the Amish.
They have completely rejected all of the things that he rejects, and they cling to the things he embraces. For completeness, which of the following do they not possess? "[A] strong preference for local governance, grass-roots democracy, an aversion to top-down control, an accepted diversity of regional and local folkways and traditions, a general mythic ideal of spirited individualism and energetic self-reliance, a countervailing tradition of tight-knit family life and exceptionally widespread participation in a proliferation of thick religious, community, and civic associations and affiliations, "Protestant work ethic", an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues, an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership as central to republican self-governance and the national character; political realism and a conservative aversion to too rapid and radical of change."
I think he'd say the Amish reject all change, not just change that's too rapid/radical.
You'll just end up with the same trajectory.
I'll present some of the following as binaries, but if there's something I haven't considered, let me know: Once you stop growing your own food and start buying it from strangers, there's a risk they'll negligently poison you. You can either accept the risk or employ food inspectors. The food inspectors can either make up rules on the fly, or publish rules of what qualifies as safe and how they determine safety. Those rules can be based on instinct, random chance, religion, or maybe science. If you pick science, you're well on your way to reconstructing the professional managerial class.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but the PMC seems like an unavoidable outcome of any sufficiently advanced, sufficiently risk-averse state. The alternatives that I can see are a) accept the PMC, b) accept the risks, c) accept Amish Jesus as your lord and savior.
I think power structures have some need to have compatible mechanisms of control for peace to exist. Like, if you teleported a 15th century king to modern day america and both parties wanted peace, neither the king could offer a daughter to be wed to biden or likely an embassy staffed by Americans watching over some serfs.
When america withdraws from world police status, both america and china will probably drift apart culturally as there's a giant ocean in between them. And in general allot of the world will stop pretending to be european style nation states for the uns approval.
Didn't read the article, but imho, since 1976, China is becoming much more like the US than US is becoming like China, if that make sense.
Three paragraphs in and the name James Burnham is rattling around my head. With every paragraph that rattling grows louder and louder, joined by the name José Ortega y Gasset.
I'm not being snarky (well, not that much). What little I've read so far sounds like someone just got done reading "The Managerial Revolution" (which they cite directly) and "The Revolt of the Public" and decided to smash them together into a grand thesis of world events. What else is here doesn't seem to be very novel and the rhetoric is pretty over-heated. I doubt I'll read the entire thing, partly due to length and partly cause I get the feeling that I would get a lot more benefit by just reading those two books again.
Sounds like the Emergents from Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
It specifically says that it is NOT arguing that, so I'm not sure why you chose that angle to attack it.
I'm not mad at you, I'm just unclear why you chose that as a response. As you now say, he does say clearly he isn't saying the USA is exactly the same as China is today and the title of the piece should be a hint that it's not just a disclaimer - the entire theory is that the two societies are different but converging. If they were already the same then they couldn't converge.
Thank you for this excellent reply.
AI in Homer. Iliad book 18
She [Thetis mother of Achilles] found him [the smith god Hephaestus], busy with his bellows, sweating and hard at work, for he was making
twenty tripods that were to stand by the wall of his house, and he
set wheels of gold under them all that they might go of their own
selves to the assemblies of the gods, and come back again- marvels
indeed to see. They were finished all but the ears of cunning workmanship
which yet remained to be fixed to them: these he was now fixing.
..
and a bit later
There were golden handmaids also who worked for him and were like
real young women, with sense and reason, voice also and strength,
and all the learning of the immortals;
I have not read Jaynes and don't know whether he deals with thesee
By contrast, the smith-god Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala tries to make himself a wife of gold and silver, but it ends up lifeless and he the subject of ridicule.
Interesting if independent of the Greek tradition (which of course it may not be)
It’s definitely not upstream of Greek influence by the time Lönnrot codified the Kalevala; I have no idea how old the underlying songs are but my guess is they’re probably not. In the reverse direction, I believe Robert Graves opined that the “crashing rocks” in Greek myth may have been inspired by icebergs off Finland. Could be taken as good evidence of cross-pollination.
Wikipedia
Ilmari(nen) is believed to have taken on the qualities of a smith through the Proto-Finnic contact with iron-working cultures, such as the Indo-European Balts[n 1] or speakers of Common Germanic.[9]
It's conceivable that iron smithing mythology spreads at the same rate as iron smithing technology, on the grounds that teaching the technology takes time so there's plenty of opportunity to pass on stories.
Any reason to call them "AI"?
How does Hephaestus making women out of gold who behave just like humans differ from Prometheus making men out of clay who behave just like humans?
They're still made of gold and are 'like' real young women, not real young women. But to really know we'd have to have someone who understands the Greek.
τῆις ἐν μὲν νόος ἐστὶ μετὰ φρεσίν, ἐν δὲ καὶ αὐδή
καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτων δὲ θεῶν ἄπο ἔργα ἴσασιν.
In them is mind, intelligence (nous) in their phren, gut or heart where the emotions etc are felt. They have speech and strength and they know thoroughly the works of the immortal gods.
Ultra strongly disagree this is no different from God or a god creating man, the emphasis is so strongly on Hephaestus as a smith and artificer. He doesn’t say "let there be 20 magic tripods with wheels and ears" and behold there are 20 etc etc, he has to make them one at a time and part by part. They are artificial and intelligent.
> Ultra strongly disagree this is no different from God or a god creating man, the emphasis is so strongly on Hephaestus as a smith and artificer. He doesn’t say "let there be 20 magic tripods with wheels and ears" and behold there are 20 etc etc, he has to make them one at a time and part by part.
Again, what's the difference supposed to be from Prometheus making men out of clay?
Being made of gold isn't a difference either; in a different Greek creation myth (not involving Prometheus), humans are originally made from gold, which is where we get the term "golden age".
This isn't some big mystery; there's nothing surprising about a god endowing a creation with behavior. They do it all the time. It doesn't become a new concept when each different god does it. The faculty by which Hephaestus can endow statues with behavior is identical to the faculty by which every other god can endow various things with behavior. Aphrodite does it to a (stone) statue too.
(Also, in my first comment I assumed the women were created by Hephaestus, but the cited passage doesn't say that. It's safe to assume that the cyclopes who work for Hephaestus are not considered to have been created by him. The women are more likely to be creations, but there probably isn't a direct statement to that effect available.)
They are golden and he is a goldsmith. There's no direct statement but we can draw the conclusion.
He's a smith. As far as affinity to a particular metal, he has a standard epithet labeling him a bronze-smith, but he does not appear to have any titles related to gold.
If memory serves, the net he uses to catch Ares and Aphrodite is gold, so he's capable of working it, as you would expect from the only divine smith. But calling him a goldsmith is a little off.
He has just made golden wheels for the tripods and reminisced about 9 years making bracelets and necklaces (material unspecified, but what is most likely?) for Thetis and Eurynome, and he is about to make a shield portraying gods, a field, a vineyard, some cattle and some daggers in gold, and a gold-crested helmet. He is a metal smith who is very comfortable working with gold.
I wonder whether polytheistic mythologies might provide a useful model for predicting the different kinds of AIs that eventually develop. Humans over centuries converged on a number of broad, distinct forms and domains of higher intelligence; might not this model how human-created intelligence may diverge? We may have an Aphrodite Bot for artificial romance, an Apollo Bot for abstract thought, and a Hermes Bot for communication and translation. They'll develop their own goals and compete against each other.
It seems a lot more lilely than a single all-powerful monster.
passages, but it seems a fair summary of the second one to say the point Homer is trying to get across is that these automata are self aware.
It's to show how skilled Hephaestus is--he's a god, after all.
You sometimes see him described as the very first geek archetype in Western literature.
Yes. It's a strikingly sophisticated way of demonstrating his skill though, as opposed to making them very beautiful or very powerful, especially in a society which doesn't even have basic clockwork
The tripods are actually called automata and seem to represent an IT system - presumably the point of the ears is that they wheel themselves to the assemblies of the gods, hear what is said and report back to Hephaestus
Well, his wife (Aphrodite) was always cheating on him with Chad...um, Ares.
Arguably it's the first poly relationship in Western lit too, complete with the girl having the upper hand. (The opposite you see with Zeus's #metoo behavior, again accurate!)
(I'm being a bit snide, but I do think these myths persist because they do reflect human behavior to some degree.)
One of my favorite tellings of their engagement was, after all the other unmarried gods had offered Aphrodite riches and power and glory, Hera nudged her son Hephaestus forward with a whispered "remember, fool, say exactly what I told you". And while blushing and looking away from her beauty, he managed to stammer out "I would make a good husband for a girl like you. I work late." And she smiled and kissed him.
I have a few questions about personality classifications in psychology.
I really like the Myers-Briggs system. It seems to me intuitive, clearly defined, easily understood and easily applied to classify people I know. Apparently though, it lacks evidential support compared to the Big Five system. And that system I find completely useless and infuriating as a layman and a philosopher. I can barely tell the difference between the five different dimensions, I find the dimensions and their relationships with each other vaguely defined (from what I've seen on the internet), and I find the tests I've seen on the internet to have inferior and vaguer questions than the Myers Briggs tests. I'm probably lacking understanding of it though, so I have three questions.
1. How exactly do you "evidentially" test personality systems? What does it even mean for a system to be supported by evidence? Evidence for doing what exactly? And how is it measured?
2. Do the dimensions of the Big Five have precise definitions? What are they? All I can find is very vague and rambling descriptions.
3. What exactly is wrong with the Myers Briggs system?
> 3. What exactly is wrong with the Myers Briggs system?
Nothing, it's a perfectly functional horoscope, just like all the other horoscopes :-)
LOL - literally!
Does the Myers Briggs system interoperate smoothly with fortune cookies? :-)
What, no love for the Enneagram? Developed (whether or not he invented it seems to be debatable) by Gurdjieff, and crazily popular in the 80s-90s as part of Christian counselling (the Jesuits went all-in on it; honestly, if you were anywhere near Charismatic groups, it was part and parcel of the entire thing), it's a system I dislike partly because of the religious zeal people demonstrate for it. It's an okay system of personality, but I'd put all of them (yes, including the Big Five or OCEAN or whatever name it goes by) in with astrology: fun to mess around with to find what characteristics you demonstrate under the system, but don't take it seriously as a description of personality, much less a prescription for behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality
"The Enneagram has also received criticism from religious perspectives. In 2000, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine produced a draft report on the origins of the Enneagram to aid bishops in their evaluation of its use in their dioceses. The report identified aspects of the intersection between the Enneagram and Roman Catholicism which, in their opinion, warranted scrutiny with potential areas of concern, stating, "While the enneagram system shares little with traditional Christian doctrine or spirituality, it also shares little with the methods and criteria of modern science ... The burden of proof is on proponents of the enneagram to furnish scientific evidence for their claims." Partly in response to Jesuits and members of other religious orders teaching a Christian understanding of the Enneagram of Personality, a 2003 Vatican document called Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life. A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age' said that the Enneagram "when used as a means of spiritual growth introduces an ambiguity in the doctrine and the life of the Christian faith".
https://www.yourenneagramcoach.com/origins#:~:text=Nothing%20about%20the%20Christian%20approach,the%20truth%20of%20the%20gospel.
"Our approach is to take the overall concepts of many Enneagram teachers and then filter them through the lens of the gospel.
The Enneagram is not like other personality systems, like Myers-Briggs or Strengthsfinder, that have one source you go to for training. The Enneagram is a communal tool, which means contemporary Enneagram teachers do not necessarily follow previous teachers' ideas, beliefs, or practices. On the contrary, you will find that each Enneagram teacher presents the Enneagram according to their worldview, often adding, subtracting, or redefining concepts contained in the Enneagram.
In our presentation of the Enneagram, we removed or redefined all aspects that do not align with a Biblical worldview. We direct people to spiritual disciplines, not unbiblical spiritual practices. As laid out in our mission statement at Your Enneagram Coach, our goal seeks to focus people's attention upon the person and work of Jesus Christ. In fact, our mission statement does not even include the word "Enneagram" since our primary purpose and focus is to point people back to Christ by helping them know who they are and whose they are in Christ."
I think the Enneagram positions itself a bit differently than MB or Big Five. These systems aim to map personality as clusters of traits. Sets of traits that go together make for one dimension, where MB has four, Big Five has (duh) five, and some variants may have more.
At some point I did some Enneagram courses (in Europe, not Christian based; maybe it's in the US that it became strongly associated with Christianity?). As far as I remember, the purported point of the system was not to cluster surface traits. The basic hypothesis is that one's character develops as a defense mechanism to paper over one's earliest psychic "wounds", and what it really aims to make is a map of those early wounds. So for each of the 9 types, the actual personalities that come out can be quite varied, and sometimes apparently opposed, but they are marked by the same hidden weak points, and therefor similar in how they need to become aware of what they are papering over, learn to integrate it, and ideally be able to loosen or give up the associated defense mechanisms.
To give a simple example, various enneatypes can be conflict avoidant (at least 3, 9, 5, and some cases of 6 and 7), but they will be doing that through different inner dynamics, and their path to reintegration varies accordingly.
Which naturally gives rise to more advanced theories where the 9 types are further subdivided, ex. into 3 subtypes.
What I found oddly dogmatic about the Enneagram community is how tightly they hold to the number 9. As far as I can tell there is nothing in the theoretical structure of the whole thing that could not accommodate the discovery of new, less-common types.
An interesting angle from the Enneagram is that, instead just observing how a person usually is, it also includes how the person behaves under stress and when times are unusually good.
Given that the context of these tests is primarily designed to assist with organisational team building and performance coaching, I think their value is very limited in dealing with the true complexity of people outside of a structured work environment.
If you're looking to understand the relationships around you that are not connected with the workplace then I don't think these are useful tools.
There's way more complexity in Astrology if you take a closer look. With the combinations of cardinality, fixedness and mutability with the four elements, it actually provides more nuanced possibilities for understanding people's behaviours and characteristics. The fact that it's all nonsense is a strong hint that perhaps human classification is a little tricky, never mind the geographical and cultural differences that are highly influential factors in the development of personality.
To say someone is typically Italian or German or <insert cultural group> probably conveys a much stronger idea of how someone might approach the world.
This too breaks down very quickly as do all stereotypes once you remove the filter if how you see someone.
I'd push back on some of the other comments here: I used to fall into the camp of Myers Briggs being 'no more than a horoscope for HR people', but have now changed my views quite a bit.
If you present it as a 5 point scale, so something like E - e - X - i - I as strongly extroverted through to strongly introverted, then it is essentially very similar to the big 5, and gives some really granular outcomes.
This article is broadly right re Myers Briggs being mostly equivalent to Big 5: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
I can't embed images here but this shows how MBTI correlates well with big 5: https://dynomight.net/img/mbti/correlations.jpg
Now, there are also some big criticisms of the big 5 - personally I think you have to torture the data somewhat and squint to get a 5 way factorisation out of the data. In fact, linguistic analysis points to there really being 2 or 3 main factors of personality (a big one, and a smaller one) and then some residuals. This article (from Andrew, who often comments here) is a good primer: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/primary-factor-of-personality-part
If you buy into the superordinate factors alpha and beta, then they look something like:
Alpha: a mix of agreeable, conscientious, non-neurotic
Beta: extraverted and open (and intellect)
The 'general factor of personality' broadly matches alpha above, and is the most reliably obtained cross-cultural, cross-contextual factor. The GFP is also positively correlated with all of the big 5 (except neuroticism, which is 'bad') and also IQ. Different people interpret it in different ways, but in my view it is something like 'pro-social' (treating people well, good domesticated human theory of mind, getting on with the rest of society).
I'm less clear on beta, the GFP kind of sits above them so both fit into it, but whereas you can think of Alpha as being the part of human personality that was necessary for us to be social animals (the 'good eggs' in a society), 'Beta' is more individualistic, driven, ambitious, impactful etc.
But yeah, really would recommend Andrew' substack on this.
I came here to pretty much those same arguments: that to the extent Big 5 carves reality at the joints, four of the five axes are very similar to the MTBI axes so it's hard to make a good case that MTBI is nonsense while Big 5 is real and scientific. And that Big 5 originates with highly subjective linguistic analysis that isn't particularly more scientific than MTBI's much-derided origins in Jungian "cognitive styles" theory.
In particular the main difference I see between BIg 5 and MTBI is that MTBI makes an effort to orient the axes in value-neutral terms, while most of the Big 5 traits have substantially more positive or negative connotations to one side or the other of the trait axis.
I appreciate the link to Andrew's post on more-objective linguistic analytical efforts to analyze what's going on underneath Big 5. Thank you for sharing that.
1. Ask the psychometrists.
2. Even the sample Wikipedia page has definitions of each of these and example items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Each one's based on six subscales, which are also listed there. They even have the correlations with the Big 5.
3. Most of the research is done by the organization that makes it (the CAPT), so it's not independently validated. That and apparently the factors are all correlated.
There's actually a pretty good correspondence with Extraversion being the same, high Conscientiousness being J (and low being P), high Agreeableness being F (and low being T), and high Openness being N (and low being S), and the MBTI just drops Neuroticism to be more salable. Thing is a lot of people are in the middle and are going to get inconsistent MBTI results--if you have average Conscientiousness you'll sometimes test as INTP and sometimes as INTJ.
The advantage for marketing purposes is that 2^4=16, so you can write a book with a few pages on types. For high, intermediate, and low for 5 factors you have 243 types, which is way too many for anyone to talk about. (There was an attempt at a big 5 SLOAN acronym you might have seen around the web if you're into this stuff, which ignores the middle and has a more manageable 32.)
The underlying Jungian system with the cognitive functions (there are introverted and extroverted variants of feeling, thinking, sensation, and intuition, which don't mean what the colloquial versions of the words mean) is even less well validated, and theoretically the J/P axis represents which of the two higher-ranking functions is dominant and/or extroverted, which has no validity.
But if you see it as a dichotomized Big 5 minus neuroticism, it's not useless.
Regarding the definitions, admittedly that wikipedia page (which I didn't check previously, since WP is often woeful) is actually much clearer than other descriptions I've seen (I forget exactly where). Moreover, the Myers-Briggs definitions are probably equally vague or worse, admittedly. I think I've developed my own understanding of the latter to some extent, in part from a kind of parlour game I've been playing with my sister for years where we classify people we know, celebrities and fictional characters according to the MBTI.
Thanks for describing the correspondence between the two systems, that helps a lot. I find Openness the most annoying, since it seems to lump several unlike things together: being adventurous and being imaginitative are not only different, they seem to me to be largely opposites. And being open-minded is different again. One is about experiences, one is about ideas, and one is about personal perspectives and social changes. Wheras I see iNtuition in the MBTI as just about preferring systems of ideas to concrete experiences, which is clear and straightforward. Maybe that's not how it's actually defined though?
You can go to Personality Database and see crowdsourced MBTIs for everything from anime characters to chemical elements. You can even see what percentage voted for every preference.
There is a lot of anime, though.
1. How exactly do you "evidentially" test personality systems? What does it even mean for a system to be supported by evidence? Evidence for doing what exactly? And how is it measured?
Two main types of evaluation: reliability = test/retest consistency (if someone do the test another time, are they going or not to get very similar results) and validity, = correlation of the results of the tests to either other well established tests that measure similar things, or measurement of real world outcomes.
2. Do the dimensions of the Big Five have precise definitions? What are they? All I can find is very vague and rambling descriptions.
The big five dimensions are a sort of empirical derived summary of many descriptors, hence their kind of fuzzy definitions. But I feel that the definition are reasonably clear. For example neuroticism is the tendency to negative emotions, introversion is a commonly used term, etc. You would have like very precise a priori definitions I guess, and not empirically derived dimensions?
3. What exactly is wrong with the Myers Briggs system?
Relatively low reliability, at least for one of the dimension, relatively low demonstrated validity.
A major problem is the use of dichotomous types , as personality variation has a bell shaped distribution, with most people in the middle.
Thanks.
First, I definitely see the point about the dichotomous vs bell shaped method. Although from an everyday perspective, the simplified ease of classifying people is surely an advantage for the Myers-Briggs, right? Just because the finely graded system is more useful in a technical context, doesn't imply it's more useful across all parts of society. Yet a lot of people, on ACX and elsewhere, seem to make that assumption.
Second, regarding test-retest reliability, all I can say is that that doesn't fit my experience at all. I consistently get the same result on every Myers-Briggs test (INTP). Meanwhile, I've just in the last week taken multiple Big Five tests and gotten wildly different results. I think I blame this on the questions: the Myers-Briggs ones tend to be much more precise questions that I can easily answer, while the Big Five ones are extremely vague and depending on how I interpret them could give opposite answers. "Believe in the importance of art": to the world or to me personally? Art as in stories (and the like) in general or as in a few specific pieces of "high art"? Visual art or music or fiction? "Love to help others": with physical or practical things=strongly disagree, with talking through problems=strongly agree.
Yeh. Introvert or extrovert etc etc.
I can game MB to be what I want.
You can game any personality test to be what you want. They're not attempting to hide the connection between the test item "I like being among a lot of other people" and the conclusion "testee likes being among a lot of other people".
But most people are a continuum. If we can accept a gender continuum then we can probably accept that introversion and extraversion are a continuum and most people are inbetween.
That something is on a continuum does not imply that the categories don't make sense? On MB I've been consistently either INTP or ENTP, because my extroversion/introversion is always around the middle, while the other three are generally towards the extremes. That doesn't make the test useless?
(Also I would like to know what % of people on here come out NT compared to the general population, my guess would be it is much higher)
I think it does not make that much sense.
Like dividing the population into tall and short, ignoring the broad average.
There are a few problems with the Myers Briggs system compared to the Big Five:
- Test-retest reliability is low. So when you test the same individual twice, you likely get two different results. The Big Five are much more stable, and are also relatively stable over time.
- The emphasis of Myers-Briggs is on binary categories. So you may be introvert or extrovert. But if you look on the actual test scores, people are on a unimodal spectrum, with most of them in the middle. It's much more adequate to say "on a spectrum from -1 (introvert) to 1 (extrovert), you are at 0.1" than to say "you are extrovert". That's exactly how the Big Five are used.
- To get as much information as possible out of different dimension, you want them to be as independent as possible. So you want that dimension 1 is very little correlated to dimension 2, and so on. The Big Five are better in this aspect than Myers-Brigg.
For your point 2, perhaps it best to just look at the defining questions for the Big Five that are asked in questionnaires. Alternatively, each of the Big Five has some cubcategories, and these have much clearer descriptions. For example, for Introversion/Extraversion these are Friendliness, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Excitement-Seeking and Cheerfulness. Here are some descriptions: https://bigfive-test.com/
(click on the subcategories to reach the description, e.g. https://bigfive-test.com/extraversion)
I'm not sure about your first point. I've often heard it repeated, but comparing two recent meta-analyses for retest reliability of MTBI and Big 5 respecively, they seem very similar. Big 5 trait scores have an overall average retest correlation of 0.816, while MTBI trait scores have an overall average retest correlation of 0.815.
MTBI: https://people.wku.edu/richard.miller/MBTI%20reliability%20validity.pdf
Big 5: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262938625_A_meta-analysis_of_dependability_coefficients_test-retest_reliabilities_for_measures_of_the_Big_Five
I haven't done a fine-grained comparison of the two articles. So far, I've spotted two major differences. The Big 5 article limited analysis to studies with a relatively short retest interval (two months or less) specifically to limit effects from personality shifts over time (noting in the discussion that longer retest intervals show a significantly lower correlation between test and retest scores), while the MTBI article included studies with retest intervals of up to three years. And the Big 5 article contained some discussion of trying to account for publication bias, while if the MTBI article did, I missed it.
I suspect the meme that MTBI is substantially less reliably on retest than Big 5 is partly the result of apples-to-oranges comparisons (comparing the frequency of getting exactly the same overall MTBI type to the correlation of individual Big 5 factor scores, which can a persuasive argument against the significance of overall MTBI types, but isn't a strong argument for MTBI axes being less valid than Big 5 factors), and partly the result of noise (and perhaps cherry-picking) from comparing individual studies' topline numbers instead of looking at broader meta-analyses.
Interesting, thanks! I had heard the point several times, but never questioned it.
I skimmed the MBTI article, but I am still not sure what the underlying studies actually did: did they correlate numerical scores for each dimension between -1 and 1, or did they correlate the types, i.e., values which are either -1 or 1, but nothing in between? Or both? The MBTI description in the article (which contains the claim that all dimensions are bimodal, which is a bit suspicious) seems to suggest the latter option. This is also the form in which MBTI results are usually presented. But the Big Five analysis almost certainly uses the first option. Then the scores for MBTI and for Big Five would be on completely different things, so it would again be comparing apples with oranges.
But I have no background in these tests, so I may well be interpreting things wrong.
I looked for the same thing myself and also came up dry. I've taken "official" MTBI tests a couple times, and they come back with numerical scores for each dimension in addition to the top-line MTBI type, so I could see it being done either way. I'd definitely want a reliability analysis to be done with numerical scores for the purpose of comparing with Big 5, but I have no idea if they did it that way or not.
Not going to speak about the specifics, but one thing to consider is that why you want a personality test. A lot of personality seems to come down to the narrativiziation you have about yourself (I am generally conscientious or curious or flaky or...) and so, perhaps something that you personally find legible will be more useful than something "scientifically accurate", whatever that means.
Yes, I think that this a great point. The big five have been developped to produce a reasonably accurate description of people's personality with only five numbers. And the system works well for that. But If you want to use a personality description without being especially concerned that it matches the real world very well, plenty of other systems can be better.
What is the psychology of the Westerners who support Hamas?
Surely they cannot be ignorant of the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians and the video of the German woman whose body was mutilated by Hamas got some approving comments by some Westerners. While some contrarianism might explain it, the Democratic Socialists of America and the "Squad" have declared their support for Hamas.
What kind of psychology would produce such moral decisions?
The kind of psychology that doesn't want to admit to having been horribly wrong last week, and would rather believe something horribly contrived or contorted than that. You know, like most normal humans.
Until last week, Hamas had rarely killed Israeli civilians, A: in sufficient numbers as to be worth plastering all over CNN and B: in a way that clearly indicated specific targeting of civilians by Hamas high command rather than e.g. Hamas rockets being inaccurate or individual Hamas militants going off-script. And Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians had been sufficiently unpleasant and hurtful, sometimes gratuitously so, that it wasn't wholly unreasonable to judge that the Israelis were the baddies and the Palestinians were just defending themselves the best they could. I mean, I think that was the wrong call, but it's not "Hitler was the good guy" levels of wrong, it's more like siding with Argentina in the Falklands war.
So you decide that the Israelis are the baddies, and you protest the Israelis and their alleged oppression of the Palestinian people, and you make that activism part of your public and private identity. And then Hamas goes and does something truly atrocious. Now what? Admit you were wrong? Inconceivable!
I'm not sure I buy that the only morally acceptable way to oppose settler-colonialism is to attack the leadership or military of the settler-colonizers.
I would certainly prefer that Hamas would have attacked the Knesset, or a military outcropping, as people might be more sympathetic to their cause if they did that, but I don't think I get to dictate how a colonized people go about their attempt at decolonizing.
Although, if they had gone after the Knesset, I guess it is possible that Hamas would have ended up just as condemned. I don't think many people are sympathetic to the Puerto Rican nationalists who attacked the US capitol in 1954, or the rioters who attacked the capitol on January 6th. Frankly, I think most people have a bit of a status quo bias and have trouble sympathizing with anyone who uses violence for political ends.
Are you arguing that this specific attack was justified / justifiable, or are you arguing for an abstract principle?
In general, I always think killing civilians is a ugly, brutal act, whether it's done by colonized people, colonizers or the most powerful military in the world.
However, whenever violence gets involved, it seems like no one is actually committed to keeping alive the civilians of the "other side." Basically every country that has had a conflict in the last 70 years has the blood of civilians on their hands. No nation has shown itself to be an outstanding moral paragon.
If Hamas manages to secure control of a defined territory, and stop the settler-colonialists from seizing more of their land, they can rewrite history to justify their ugly and brutal acts the same way every modern nation always has. They'll remember it as a long-term, slow motion war of independence, and that's how every Palestinian child will learn it in school.
If Israel ever decides to transform their slow-motion smothering of the Palestinians into all out warfare, and wipes them all out or turns the vast majority into refugees, then every Israeli school child will learn the version of history where it was all 100% justified and Israel never did anything wrong.
Even if the United States and other key Israeli allies wanted to condemn Israel, they couldn't because of the rank hypocrisy of one settler-colonialist power trying to condemn the in-progress settler-colonialism of another country. Israel is either going to end up as Liberia, or the United States, and only time will tell which it will be.
This equivocates between deliberately killing civilians as a matter of policy, and killing civilians incidentally / as collateral damage.
Which is kind of the long-term cultural result of "sophisticated" arguments that collateral damage is just as bad as killing civilians on purpose, the purpose of which originally was to criticize collateral damage by comparing it to deliberate action - an attitude that, since collateral damage is "fine", deliberately targeting civilians is "fine" too. The "sophisticated" arguments just lead to ... this. An implication that it's fine to kill civilians, carefully avoiding stating it outright.
And no.
If you find yourself having to define people just trying to live their lives as "soldiers" to justify your beliefs, you should probably pause and ask yourself:
Are we the baddies?
Israel is not a colony; Israel is where Jews are from. Moreover, Jews who were in the European diaspora are a minority even among Jews in Israel. They are outnumbered by refugees from the Soviet Union and MENA, and their descendants.
MENA nations have been more effective than the Nazis at eliminating their Jewish populations, some of which were a thousand years older than Islam. The Nazis only managed to kill two thirds of all the Jews in Europe; outside Israel, the MENA Jewish population has fallen by 99.4% since the 1940s.
There is nowhere else for Jews to go. And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too.
Very good point, Many Thanks!
"And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too."
Yes, as Hamas's official statements and Saturday's massacres of unarmed civilians make clear, Hamas cannot be negotiated with (or even, apparently, deterred). Netanyahu's statement "Every Hamas member is a dead man" seems like the brightest ray of hope in this appalling situation. I wish Israel the best of luck in killing Hamas members and putting a permanent end to their threat of further attacks.
>Moreover, Jews who were in the European diaspora are a minority even among Jews in Israel. They are outnumbered by refugees from the Soviet Union
How is that not European diaspora?
There are two specific, contradictory claims:
1) that Britain and France made Israel as a colony to keep the Arabs down in 1917-1920
2) That Germany/Europe made Israel as an apology for the Holocaust in 1947-48
Both of which are nonsensical in the face of the fact that the Soviet Union hated and opposed everyone I just mentioned. Moreover, the Soviet Union prevented their Jews from leaving from fairly early on until the end of the Cold War. Those post-Soviet Jews remain an insular and disparate group within Israel from the rest of Ashki Jews. Even though they are ethnically slightly closer to Ashki Jews than Sephardic Jews (who were by an large ethnically cleansed from MENA), there are notable cultural differences. So to believe that Israel is some colonial project, to account for all the Jews in it you need to imagine that the West and the East and MENA all sat down together and agreed on ... anything, which is absurd on the face of it.
> Israel is not a colony; Israel is where Jews are from.
Right, and Liberia was not a colony. Africa is where African Americans were from.
And if genetic testing eventually reveals that Europeans are descended from ancient precursors to the Native Americans in North America, every atrocity that Europeans committed against the Native Americans will have been 100% justified as taking back their ancestral homeland.
> There is nowhere else for Jews to go. And Hamas is quite clear: they want to kill all the Jews in Israel too.
There's almost as many Jews in America as in Israel, and many European countries have sizable Jewish populations. There's plenty of places for Jews to go these days.
And as far as Hamas' antisemitic rhetoric goes, would you stop supporting Native Americans if it turned out that at some point they had rhetoric supporting not just expelling the White invaders from their lands, but taking the fight around the world and killing all White Europeans? Because I would see that as an understandable rhetorical overreaction contrasted against actual genocidal policies being carried out against them.
Hamas's antisemitic rhetoric is a pretty distant secondary concern to their antisemitic actions.
As for "well Jews can just go to Europe and America", that is a proposal of ethnic cleansing. When you claim Israel is ethnically cleansing Arabs (they're not, Arab population growth rate is proportional to how far they live from Israeli hospitals) and then turn around and suggest ethnically cleansing Jews, it tells people everything they need to know about your sincerity.
Are you suggesting that 8 million Jews just pick up and move elsewhere? What a practical and moraly justifiable idea.
> Jews are highly welcomed in the West.
Perhaps today, but in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference
"The opportunity to move to Israel"
my dude they were expelled under pain of death
People who attack politicians get more sympathy than terrorists who attack civilians.
They're Rousseauists who believe that humans are inherently good, and hence anybody who commits evil must have been badly oppressed in order to warp their inherent goodness so much. Therefore the Hamas terrorists aren't really to blame for their actions, which are instead the result of Israeli oppression, the Israelis are the real bad guys, and if hundreds of Israeli women get gang-raped to death, that's simply the just consequence of oppressing the poor Palestinians so much.
The same logic applies for crimes in the West, BTW, which is why Westerners who support Hamas are disproportionately likely to, e.g., show more sympathy for looters than for the shopkeepers whose livelihoods are being ruined. The very fact that the looters are looting and the shopkeepers aren't shows that the looters are the real oppressed victims in this scenario.
When you slice the top off like that then your argument is easy to make. If you actually dig into all the dimensions of the conflict and the various escalations and atrocities committed by both sides it's nothing like as simple as you suggest.
I doubt that many western supporters of Hamas have ever actually dug into all the dimensions of the conflict.
'They're Rousseauists who believe that humans are inherently good, and hence anybody who commits evil must have been badly oppressed in order to warp their inherent goodness so much. '
Why does this not apply to the Israelis who are 'the bad guys'?
The Israelis are more powerful than Hamas, therefore Hamas can't be oppressing Israel but Israel can be oppressing Hamas.
A question I've been waiting for these sorts of people to answer for a long time.
Banned for this comment.
Once again, it's not their land and it never was. This has been explained to you multiple times.
Palestinians are Arabs, and Arabs are native to Arabia. Complaining about having their land violently taken and calling Israelies "colonisers" has got to be one of the biggest ironies in history.
Ultimately everyone came from somewhere -- I think from some place in Africa where the first homo sapiens evolved (so the people who still live there are an exception). So the question is how many years until you consider the people being somewhere "at home": 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years?
Intuitively, I would say that the next generation that gets *born* at the new place, is there "at home". Which of course has some weird consequences... I am not really suggesting that we leave the children there but expel their parents...
It's more like: if everyone who currently lives was born in the new place, then I'd say that for all practical purposes, it is their home. The blame is on their ancestors, but not on them. If all currently living adults came from somewhere else, then I think they should consider leaving (and taking their babies with them, of course), if they are not welcome. The situations in between are controversial, and I do not have a good answer.
But if you go more than thousand years back... then probably 90% of people currently living in Europe are "colonizers". Add another zero or two, and it's everyone outside of some parts of Africa.
If we arranged nations on a timescale, based on how recently they have arrived at their current territory, who else would be at a similar place as Palestinians, and how do you suggest they should be treated?
For starters, Israel has done equally horrific things. Have you seen the video of the Israeli man describing how he went into a classroom and shot dozens of children in Palestine during the Nakba? In fact, just google any concatenation of the words "Israeli, shooting, nakba, palestine, laughing" and you will come across dozens of these horrific acts by Israelis.
You are basically having amnesia about the past and suffering from recency bias.
Note: i am not saying one should support hamas, im just explaining why you cant seem to even fathom how there could be any amount of support for them. Some people choose to remember history.
Not every story has a hero; there can be two villains.
In my own story I like to play both.
That sounds like fake news. And when I google the concatenation of words you suggested, I don't see anything that resembles the story.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskMiddleEast/comments/12gcdxb/israelis_and_those_who_support_them_what_are_your/
I found the video for you.
In the comments to that video several commenters point out that the video is mistranslated--the word for "classroom" in Hebrew (כיתה) is the same as the word for "squad". (I can confirm that is the word he uses in context, and doesn't give any other information that would say which use of the word he is using.)
Thanks for the correction. It doesn't make him look that much better, unfortunately.
I disagree. While I agree that the action of gunning down a squad of enemy soldiers who have surrendered is morally reprehensible, and that the man's reaction to remembering it is disturbing and I think it makes him a bad person, there is still a world of difference between that and gunning down a classroom of children. So while it doesn't make him look (or be) good, I think it certainly does make him look much better.
You brought this video as proof that Israel has done horrific things, such as someone who "went into a classroom and shot dozens of children in Palestine". The video doesn't show that at all. Dismissing that fact by saying that there isn't much difference is failing to make an update on new information.
I just followed your link and in the comments it says "According to Benny Morris (a New Wave historian), just about 800 Arab civilians were murdered over a 10-month-war"
That's fewer civilians than Hamas just killed in a single day!
What's your definition for supporting Hamas?
The "Squad" certainly hasn't supported Hamas. Here are the relevant actors's statements, from an article that criticizes them: (https://nypost.com/2023/10/07/aoc-ilhan-omar-and-squad-members-criticized-over-call-for-ceasefire-in-israel/)
>“Today is devastating for all those seeking a lasting peace and respect for human rights,” AOC said in a statement. “I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms. No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.
>Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), in part of her statement, also condemned “the horrific acts … against children, women, the elderly, and the unarmed people who are being slaughtered and taken hostage by Hamas” while calling for de-escalation.
The article also links to Cori Bush statement using similar rhetoric.
Whatever way one spins it, those are in fact not declarations of support for Hamas. The plain reading of the text in no way supports the idea that they're declaring support for Hamas.
Of course, as the article notes, the conservatives are condemning them for calling for ceasefire and also criticizing Israel, but that shows that what is called "support for Hamas" is in fact here *insufficiently strong condemnation of Hamas*, ie. also noting the other factors of this conflict. Of course confusing "a condemnation of X but not in the words I would prefer" to be "support for X" is one of the most common rhetorical tactics/errors in whatever online debates there are, but clarity is still needed here.
The DSA explicitly refused to condemn Hamas by saying all the fault for the attack lies with Israel.
Of the DSA-aligned members of congress, only one (who is not a member of The Squad) terminated their relationship with the DSA. Tlalib also explicitly refused to condemn Hamas when confronted about her position.
Silence = Consent, is the slogan I believe was popular on the left until last week.
And what is a demand for a ceasefire before Hamas capabilities are neutralized but support?
Again, you are conflating "condemnation of X but not in the words I would prefer" with "support". The statements in the article literally condemn Hamas. Apart from them, your sole example of people "supporting Hamas" is "German woman whose body was mutilated by Hamas got some approving comments by some Westerners." That, indeed, does count quite clearly as supporting Hamas, but is also very clearly something the Squad does *not* do here.
Again: what is your definition for supporting Hamas?
Supporting Hamas is providing praise or the ability for them to carry out actions otherwise constrained. In this case, trying to force Israel into a ceasefire allows Hamas to get away with their actions. It provides the political cover for their freedom of action.
You might call it the wrong course of action, something you don't support yourself (calling for ceasefire in any conflict is pretty standard diplomatic fare in whatever conflicts there are), but still, if (say) AOC's statement it "I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms", then conflating it with "I support Hamas" or the approving comments for body mutilation is just plain misleading, at the very least.
"I condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the strongest possible terms but must demand that Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire while Russian troop are within artillery range of Kiev" has the same ring.
It is obviously trying to freeze the situation in a way favorable to one side.
Thank you so much for not letting such misinformation spread.
Not a lot of people, but there were minority celebrations and support demonstrations for Hamas in most big cities in the west. And that was before Israel had responded to the massacres, so it wasn't protesting the Israeli response.
Obviously you haven't been spending as much time on Twitter as I have.
Or reading the comments section of this blog, even.
My personal view is that I agree with Netanyahu that Hamas members should be killed, but I hope that deaths amongst peaceful civilian Gazans can be minimized as much as is reasonably feasible.
You are falling into the very trap that you accuse others of.
You name one of the atrocities of Hamas and conclude that Hamas is evil and everyone must oppose them. Hamas supporters do the same: they point to one of the atrocities of Israel (like killing innocents, threatening family members of opponent fighters) and conclude that Israel is evil and everyone must oppose them. I think that this is EXACTLY the line of thought that brings some people to support Hamas.
I don't think that both sides are commensurate, and I think it is possible to compare them. But it's a lot more thorny than just looking at one massacre and arguing "the other side is evil". Both have done lots of massacres, and both sides give enough opportunity for losing the reputation game if it is played one-sided.
The Hamas Charter literally calls for the extermination of Jews everywhere in the world. I continually find it mind boggling that anyone considers them anything but evil.
Genocidal actions, you mean like invading Israel and massacring every civilian in reach?
And since when is theft of land "genocide"? It's theft. What makes Palestinian property more valuable than Jewish civilian lives?
> And since when is theft of land "genocide"?
Dunno, let's ask Native Americans.
I think the genocide part there was the actual killing them.
I think Hamas has unquestionably crossed a line this weekend. Someone can uncomfortably turn aside from rocket attacks and suicide bombings. But the footage that’s been circulated online is so savage and visceral that it completely changes the moral situation. At least in the eyes of western audiences.
For you and me that crosses a line, yes, but apparently not for everyone in the west. The were pro-Hamas celebrations in Berlin until the police stopped them.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2387606/world
Far Left: Jews are white. White people are bad.
Far Right: Jews are bad (and aren't white).
It's a little more nuanced than that, but generally the far left thinks it's a settler colonial state, like Contemplative Mood says. (Of course, they don't get quite as annoyed when one non-European country colonizes another; bring up Japanese colonialism and they'll just give you the stink-eye.) And the far right, well, they get all the literature from the Nazis and so on, plus there are a lot of left-wing Jews in Western Civ (paging Michelle Goldberg...). There's also the criticism that Jews support open borders for Western countries but not for Israel. This one actually has some weight to it IMHO, and is one of the reasons I don't support open borders.
Basically I think the little tribal circuits in our brains classify the Israelis as 'enemy' in the case of both the far left and right for the reasons above.
"There's also the criticism that Jews support open borders for Western countries but not for Israel. This one actually has some weight to it IMHO"
That's not a legitimate criticism at all: those aren't generally the same Jews.
Leftist Jews support open borders for Israel, Orthodox Jews don't for the USA.
But the big vaguely-liberal mass in the center actually does hold that position. Stephen Miller and Noam Chomsky are consistent; Chuck Schumer not so much.
I think the center-left supports liberal but not completely open immigration for both (if they opine on both).
We didn't fight a world war to stop Japanese colonialism? WTF? The west fought a world war against them because it was unwilling to allow Japan to the colonialism table, they knew this, and then attacked the west over it. No one cared about their "colonialism", they cared about protecting their own colonial interests.
The West was steadily shifting to a new banking and corporate lead colonial model that desired less control over the colonized. This didn't mesh with the Japanese model.
There has been imperialism for all of recorded history.
China’s annexation of Tibet is a noteworthy example post WW2.
Good point! I'd forgotten about Tibet and I should not have.
I don't think so. The Japanese takeover of Formosa was accepted as within international norms, the takeover of Korea was outside accepted norms but faced no real opposition from the west. Manchuria was way outside norms, but if the Japanese Empire had not attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Burma and Hawaii they might have kept their expanded territory for years.
The conquests of Formosa and Korea took place at the time when "we take what we can" was still the norm among Western countries. The Manchurian invasion led to eventual (if slow) condemnation from League and Japanese withdrawal, ie. not that different from League response to Italian invasion of Abyssinia (which involved some weak sanctions, but nothing that would have fundamentally altered the situation). In general, the Japanese invasion of China also set the eventual stage for the American-Japanese clash.
The US generally supports Islamists in Syria (which is what most of the rebels are), because the US wants to topple Assad. So what kind of psychology promotes that morality? Real politic I suppose.
Ewww... "Real politic I suppose" Unfortunately, yeah. Seems likely to end as well as the support of the Taliban (against the USSR at the time, IIRC). For an even worse case: At one point the US sided with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (against Vietnam, IIRC).
The Hard Left views Israel as a settler-colonial state. Like Apartheid South Africa and like Apartheid South Africa they believe it needs to be abolished and control returned to the native population. Nevermind that the situation is more nuanced, that a very large contingent of Israelis are descended from brown-skinned Middle Eastern Jews, and that most Israelis have nowhere else to go. Nuance is not a part of their ideology in any way and violence is always morally correct when inflicted by the ‘oppressed.’ It’s a crazy mix.
That's a pretty unfair strawman characterization of the stance you're describing. The more reasonable take is that it's a setter-colonial / apartheid state but that obviously abolishing the state and transplanting the residents is impossible.
> but that obviously abolishing the state and transplanting the residents is impossible.
Did it not work in South Africa?
South Africa changed its rules to allow blacks to vote. Israel already has voting rights for Israeli Arabs, and indeed parties that represent them in the Knesset.
Palestinians can't vote for any representative in the Knesset though, although their state is occupied by Israel and despite that Israelian settlers within the West Bank can vote for the Knesset.
OF course Palestinians don't vote for the Knesset like Israeli Arabs: the latter are Israeli nationals, the former aren't. Nor is HAMAS fighting for their people to be Israeli citizens with the right to vote in such elections. Rather, they want to erase the whole country of Israel and have a united Palestine "from the river to the sea".
The "strawman" in this case is accurate in my experience. I've actually heard far-left activists saying the only thing wrong with Hamas is that they don't hate Israel enough.
Forget their treatment of women and gays and religious minorities and forget consistency of the left with their own stated views on these things. Forget, too, the fact that the entire Arab and Islamic world is a series of settler-colonial states (much like the west, but without the west's eventual realisation that there's something wrong with that).
You can't reason with these people. Believe me, I tried, ten years ago as a very left-wing university student. It was one of the first things that made me aware of just how foundational rejection of logical and moral consitency is to left-wing thinking. I felt like I was interacting with the very personifaction of Orwell's doublethink.
If your claim is "there are some fucking-weird anti-Israel people out there" then I totally agree. There are also some fucking-weird pro-Israel people out there (that was what I ran into in college). But I disagree with characterizing these as widely-held leftist stances (they're just not) and among leftists, in my experience, you'll find a healthy range of other stances, not to mention both kinds of extremely-weird Israel takes. You'll also find both kinds of weird Israel takes all over the rest of the political spectrum.
Fair point. I think this is probably a lot less pronounced within the US, but my impression is that there is, among large segments of the global left, a fanaticallly unhinged and hateful fixation on Israel that is unequalled for any other country. My Australian university had only one political club dedicated to a specific issue and that was a pro-Palistinian one. At a time when ISIS was rising and Islamist atrocities against women and minorities were in the news daily, I struggled to make sense of where the clubs standing against Iran and Saudi Arabia were. Also, the UN Human Rights Council has I believe officially condemned only one country ever, and that's Israel, and they've done so 20 or 50 times or something ridiculous. When there are clearly numerous other countries committing unspeakably worse atrocities on a daily basis.
It seems to me fair to say there is something unique about anti-Israel leftism.
In college I met some people like that, who had a sort of reflexive hatred of Israel as well. I wasn't quite that far but definitely got a bit of myself, and I think I do know where it comes from. Thing is, if I didn't know why I got that reflexive, from the outside it would look like anti-semitism, but I think it's actually more like "textbook reactionaryism".
The reaction is against the pro-Israel camps: people you meet in daily life as well as the general attitude held about Israel in the liberal media / political landscape. An example: I had an acquaintance at college that I ended up chatting to at a coffee shop while we were working. I had no idea she was Jewish or pro-Israel in the slightest. Somehow some Israel-related news came up and I, not expecting any strange response, expressed skepticism that Israel was correct --- and she absolutely transformed in front of me, and blew up at me, and stopped being remotely interested in reason and replaced it with "whose-side-are-you-on"-isms.
Of course, her position was defensive! Obviously Jews really are persecuted, but more relevantly, in her (twenty-ish-year-old-life), people revealing their skepticism of Israel were her enemies. Probably some of them literally, like "thought you were my friend and then turned out to be virulently anti-semitic" enemies. Probably in her bubble, people criticized Israel because they were believed to be intent on destroying her people and dismantling their identity.
Yet it only takes a few experiences like this for a confused outsider to reflexively take the other side. Reaction, IMO, is in reaction to "the world not making any sense". Why do people blow up when I say this when I'm not anti-semitic in the slightest and just trying to be fair? Why is criticism of Israel conspicuously absent from the discourse, and why are critics of Israel condemned in ways that seem like tremendous over-reactions to what they said? Over time I find myself assuming that the people who are acting irrationally are wrong, even if I don't exactly know how or why, because of course they are.
And in a way they are wrong, or at least not rational, because they're acting defensively. There's a bunch of inter-generational baggage that I can't perceive and isn't really logical: it's the specter of the last generation's trauma in dealing with the status of jews and Israel, which is itself a specter of the generation before, etc, and you don't have to go very far back for the trauma to be *really, really bad*.
Point is, when people act confusingly in defense of Israel, then people are triggered to act confusingly in attack of Israel, which makes more people act confusingly in defense of Israel, etc, etc. And to break the cycle for starters we have to understand that these people are confused, and they are in a way isolated groups of reactionary incidents. Anti-Israel is no more the stance of far-leftism than pro-Israel is the stance of party-line democrats. Neither platform cares *per se*. But the discourse isn't free and nobody feels safe and so everyone ends up believing "the other side on this issue is large, organized, and insane" so they entrench in their own position.
I'm chiming into this thread not because I'm especially pro- or anti-Israel but because I see what's happening and I hate it because it just perpetuates the problem. Everybody thinks they know what everybody else thinks, can't figure out why, and so *fucking hates them* for it, and it's sickening.
Uh, no, it's more like: western leftists shouldn't ally with groups that are literally as far as it is logically possible to be from every one of their stated social positions, for no other reason than "at least they hate the same people we do" (Jews and Christians). I was talking to the Western left, not the Palestinians.
What I would say to Islamist Palestinians is: "if you don't support the basic rights of Christians, atheists and animists to not be killed for existing, and don't support equality for women...why the *fuck* should I support equality for you?"
Non-Islamist Palestinians (I'd be curious to know how many there are) I will listen to.
There are multiple groups within Gaza, and not all are Islamist. For example, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which are secular Marxist-Leninist organizations, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is socialist.
All of these groups proudly participated in the recent massacre of Israelis.
But plenty of anti-zionists want to do precisely that: abolish the state of Israel. It’s a pretty standard position among some left-wing circles.
General opposition to the existence of Israel isn't the same as "abolish it in the stupidest possible way".
No doubt there are some loons out there who believe what you've said. But what you've done is found the stupidest possible take in the group, claimed it's held by a much vaster group of people than hold it, and then condemned them all for it ("Nuance is not a part of their ideology in any way and violence is always morally correct when inflicted by the ‘oppressed.'"). It is very disingenuous and frustrating.
I reject the notion that there is a non-stupid way to abolish the State of Israel. This isn’t like when the state of East Germany was abolished and a bunch of well-organised practical West German civil servants came in the following Monday to start winding things up. This would be the epitome of cruelty and chaos, all to fulfil a theological dogma that some states are good and others don’t deserve to exist, that has no valid moral or practical basis to exist in the real world.
The non-stupid way would be something like South Africa where there was an apartheid and now there's not. Anyway, I'm not over here telling you what ought to happen to Israel. I don't really know. Probably not being so theocratic would be a big start. But really I'm just replying to remind you that you're ignorant about what other people think about it, why they think it, and what their underlying ideology is.
So I assume you also want all Arabs sent back to Arabia. After all, I'm *sure* your anti-colonialism isn't only focused on those of the "wrong" religion and ethnicity...
"the original IDF was comprised of terrorist Jewish militias who massacred civilians gang raped women and expelled Palestinians from their homes."
Thankfully, the original exapnsion of the Islamic world certainly involved *nothing* like that...
Lets get the Turks back in Mongolia too! And Ireland for the Scots!
I think it's a moral foundations thing. They only have the one moral axis, which is "oppressor/oppressed", and reduce everything to that.
But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims? There must be additional elements.
I have noted that some Westerners seem to think IDF weight of total firepower somehow means they can dictate the situation perfectly (a military absurdity) but even that is not enough to explain the moral reasoning.
"But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims?"
Literally everyone that believes in axes of oppression and the Progressive stack? Were you not around for "je ne suis Charlie pas?" Muslims *by definition* are victims *as a class.* Just because some individual Muslims might be machine-gunning down some particular Jews in a deli doesn't change their *class* relations. Those bullet-ridden corpses are oppressing those celebrating gunmen, because class is the only relevant framing device.
It’s a team thing. You are biased toward your team. I haven’t read their statements but I’d expect they see atrocities as a few bad players in an overall good cause.
> But who would think Hamas is more oppressed than their victims?
Leftists would. Because Israelis are richer, more successful, happier, and better looking, which makes them oppressors.
Maybe I'm over-generalising from the few kids at school I knew who became hard-leftists, but it seems to be a psychological thing for them. They were losers at school, always bottom of the barrel socially, and they turn the chip on their shoulder into a massive political overgeneralisation. They map every "loser" in the world onto themselves, and every "winner" in the world onto the people they hate, and they reflexively support losers everywhere regardless of the actual facts of the situation.
Do you know the school history for all of them?
Definitely over-generalizing, since it sounds like you don't know anything about typical leftist stances on the subject (and I hope you're not confusing those with liberal stances, which are wildly different). I don't identify as a leftist per-se but if I want to know what leftists think I'd go read some ideological reporting, e.g. https://jacobin.com/2023/10/israel-palestine-violence-hamas-airstrikes-gaza-oppression on the subject of this week's news. As it happens, their condemnation of Israel has nothing to do with a map of winners and losers and has everything to do with a long history of unanswered oppressions.
As far as I can tell the basic ideological ideas behind this stance are (a) oppression and apartheid are wrong no matter who's doing it and (b) religious ethnostates are fucking weird and creepy and it's mind-boggling that the US supports one. The preferred "way out", were it possible, would be liberalizing and democratizing the whole region so that it's not creepy and medieval. Of course that's a tall order, but it's especially tall when all of the relevant parties believe in religious/ethnic warfare and segregation even though, like, liberalism happened hundreds of years ago and everybody knows egalitarianism and tolerance are supposed to be good things.
I dunno: Gaza is much more creepy, medieval, and more of a religious ethnostate than Israel is. Heck, Saudi Arabia definitely is! Israel has Arabs on the supreme court, in their legislature, they have the right to vote...How many of Israels neighbors even have any Jewish citizens left, much less in positions of political power?
Honestly I can't think of a middle east nation that is *less* of a religious ethnostate, or less creepy and medieval.
I don't disagree, but that doesn't really affect any criticism of Israel significantly.
Pretty much.
I'd expect the result to be something like South Africa, which is probably fine with them.
Blind envy seems too stupid to be plausible but I am possibly overthinking things.
Yeah, that wasn't nice. But you forget to mention that those "conquests" were in response to the palestinians and their arab allies repeatedly aggressing and trying to genocide the jews. This stuff is all pretty complicated.
Among the many problems with that statement is the bit where the West Bank (where most of the Palestinians live) is an order of magnitude larger than Queens.
Gaza is about the size of Queens, but it's also about the population of Queens, so meh.
> No, Israel is an oppressor because it conquered most Palestinian land by force and ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population onto a tiny strip of land smaller than Queens
Sure, and that wasn't nice, but so were a lot of other things that happened in history that the same people don't bother to cry about.
The closest analogue (in terms of what happened and the era in which it happened) to the plight of the Palestinians was the plight of Germans in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad) post WW2. It sucks, and it was wrong, but it was 80 years ago and overall a minor outrage in the context of everything else going on in the 1940s and everyone has moved the fuck on.
They lost a war. Really several of them. Everyone's ancestors lived in Ethiopia, do I get to invade that?
Might doesn't make right, but might makes reality. Israel fought a war with the Palestinians over the country. They won, it happens, and has been happening for 20,000 years. They were also fairly gracious winners to the Palestinians and Muslims who remained in their country. Much more so than there was at all likely to be if things had worked out otherwise.
In exchange, the coreligionists of the losers basically refused to assist their compatriots, and then conducted several additional aggressive wars against Israel, which Israel also won relatively graciously.
In exchange for this all they have reaped is a never-ending series of terrorist attacks and an environment where tons of people they take care of economically want them destroyed.
Ask yourself do we need more Israel in the world, or more Gaza strip? Israel is a functional representative state with a thriving economy that exports a lot of technology and economic good to the world. It is part of the global solution and global human flourishing.
The Gaza strip is a pity of misery that only produces terrorism. You could move the population into Egypt after culling the terrorists of the Gaza Strip, it would change the population of Egypt like 2%, and likely change little about life there (which isn't great).
Meanwhile you would end at least this one festering sore of never ending conflict.
All they had to do was not try to kill Israelis. Israel even gave 18,000 Gazans work permits over the past year to ease the unemployment problem there.
Israel provides the electricity, the fuel, the medicine, and the food Gaza relies upon. The fact it has no economy is the fault of the people actually governing Gaza who is Hamas.
Gazans in general don't control whether other Gazans try to kill Israelis, but they're all trapped there.
I wonder why they were conquered by Israel?
Like Hamas did to the cause of Palestinians, you're doing more damage to your cause than you realize.
I've found an fascinating topic: People who voluntarily fought on both sides of a war. If we limit ourselves to a strict definition of volunteers (e.g. no PoWs or drafted deserters) and define "side" strictly as sovereign military organizations (e.g. someone who fought for the Finns against the Allies and then against the Axis once the fins switched sides in ww2 doesn't count), I can only find one example (though I'm sure there's more):
The Swede Patrik Gustaf Bergin joined the Danish as a volunteer during the First Schleswig War in 1849. He participated in the Battle of Fredericia but was discharged during the armistice. Then he surprisingly joined the Schleswig-Holstein side during 1850 and fought against the Danes. His stated reason was that he was appealed by how the Danish army treated the civilian Germans, but it's also speculated that he was motivated by pride from his own perceived mistreatment by the Danish Army. He was lambasted for this in the Swedish press, since Sweden was formally neutral but informally on the Danish side. He was wounded during the Battle of Isted and died a few days later.
Does anyone know of more people like this?
Dov Gruner.
Gustav Bergin was probably just confused. Per Lord Palmerston, only three people ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, one of who was dead, one insane, and one (himself) who had forgotten it.
> I've found an fascinating topic: People who voluntarily fought on both sides of a war.
Maybe Otto Skorzeny would be an example of a kind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny
He was an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the Waffen-SS during World War II, and while in the SS Das Reich division took part in the Russian campaign. After the war he spent a while working for Mossad, among various other ventures, and then some years as a potato farmer in the Republic of Ireland.
Although the Wikipedia article doesn't mention it, I vaguely recall reading that he was also one of the first people ever to fly in a helicopter, one of the first practical models, during an operation to try and rescue Mussolini late in WW2. Possibly that caper was the inspiration for the helicopter appearance in Alistair MacLean's novel (later filmed) Where Eagles Dare.
He wasn't on both sides of the same war, so he doesn't qualify. Fascinating life though.
Fair enough. I just thought that an ex-SS guy being hired by Mossad of all people was quite ironic from a "changing horses in mid stream" perspective! :-)
But I've thought of another candidate, further back in time: Sir William Stanley. I think you'll approve of this one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_(died_1495)
Quoting from the article, in a section discussing the Wars of the Roses:
"Having been loyal to Richard, Stanley nevertheless changed sides in 1485, and suddenly supported the Lancastrian Henry Tudor's bid for the throne. Stanley is best known for his action at the Battle of Bosworth, where he decisively attacked the Yorkists under Richard, helping to secure Henry VII's victory."
How do you feel about military aid that doesn't involve personally fighting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Sangui
Would Jospeh Gangl qualify? Wehrmacht officer, figthing alongside french PoWs against Waffen SS at the end of WW2.
No that’s the end of the line for the final journey
Germany is too disintegrated at this point and the situation too much like a civil war for it to be a central example IMO. Still a fascinating event though.
Harry Flashman fought on both sides of the American Civil War but tragically his memoirs documenting that portion of his life were never uncovered.
The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Spanish: Batallón de San Patricio), later reorganized as the Foreign Legion of Patricios, was a Mexican Army unit which fought against the United States in the Mexican–American War.
Mostly Irish, with some other European immigrants as well. They were deserters from the US army.
Interesting. Do we know something about the motivations of the deserters?
Wiki says many reasons, but leans towards anti-Catholicism in the officer class and some sympathy with the Mexican cause.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion
This is somewhat well known in Ireland, seems to be big in Mexico where there’s are monuments and a fairly big plaza (plaza batallón san patricio) in Mexico City.
Thank you!
Would spies and double agents in the cold war count?
No, we only consider shooting (or stabbing) wars. The people involved should have seen battle on both sides.
You'll need a date qualifier, or there will be many, many examples from Renaissance, medieval, and ancient wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_von_Wallenstein
Etc.
Maybe we can rule that mercenaries doesn't count? Even if they are also interesting in their own way.
Also, most of those you linked fought on many sides but not during the same single war? (If we consider the 100 year war as a series of smaller conflicts?)
Mercenaries never switch sides, they just have different employers.
My favourite example is also the only one I'm aware of where a *group* of people realised they were the bad guys, and switched sides: Some of the Polish legions sent by Napoleon to crush the Haitian revolution realised they were fighting directly against the ideals which they were claiming to uphold, and switched to supporting the rebels.
The story is a fascinating one overall: https://culture.pl/en/article/pirates-freedom-and-a-voodoo-goddess-the-story-of-polish-haitians
Interesting example, thanks for sharing!
Also, probably too obvious but Benedict Arnold should qualify?
How about the Kadyrovites switching from Chechen separatism to Russia?
From civil wars there are probably countless of examples from civil wars of government soldiers or units defecting to rebels (though likely ones who sympathize with the rebels from the start of the civil war, so they may avoid harming the rebels even before they have a chance to defect), and occasional examples of the reverse.
Civil wars are tricky but if we count them he qualifies!
(errata but your dates are a century off)
Thanks, edited to fix!
I missed the 'gay younger brothers' post when it was fresh and comments were happening, so posting my question here:
How much will decreasing family sizes, as in children per women / number of siblings per child decrease the proportion of gay people in a population?
I'm struggling to understand exactly what the statistics are saying here, but taking the Dutch meta-study at face value as correct, how would one go about calculating this figure? In countries like the Netherlands or Canada, one can probably (?) assume that at adulthood a significant majority of gay people are 'out' already, so additional social acceptance probably (?) would only be a minor mitigating factor.
In the comments, Scott claimed that Blanchard's numbers suggest the FBOE could explain around 1/7th of all gay men. Since we aren't dropping to a strict one child per mom, the proportion should decrease by less than that. But Blanchard was specifically focused on older brothers, so if older sisters have a smaller but still relevant effect then the real number could be higher but certainly less than double.
You'd have to calculate the odds of having gay children when one or two are born to the same parents compared to when three or four are born to the same parents. If you assume that all families have four children now and in the future all families will have one child, and the odds of being gay go up with each child from the same parents, and the birth order effects are real, there will be fewer gay people. But I suspect that for this to have any meaningful effect, the birth order effect has to be duly large that there can't be any doubt of it existing in the first place. Given that it is very much doubted, I assume that social factors are likely to overshadow it completely.
Also, if you want to discuss an earlier ACX post in the future, I would suggest doing it by commenting on the original post regardless of how old it is and then posting a link in the open thread asking for input. On SSC, a long tail of comment activity used to be normal and there was no notion of having to comment when a post was 'fresh'. There are no doubt many people who only read the post days, weeks or months after it's first posted, and it doesn't benefit the conversation if they decide to take their comments elsewhere, under the assumption that the discussion is 'dead'.
Will the Hamas attacks help or hurt Netanyahu politically?
The lack of preparedness for the Yom-Kippur War ended the dominance of the lAbour party in 73, and Israel found itself caught equally unprepared this time.
On the other hand Netanyahu is a shrewd politician and has done a great job painting himself as the only person who can keep Israel safe, does such a attack bolster his support when safety seems much more critical.
The fact he chose not to station troops on the Gazan front on the actual 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war may yet prove to be his downfall.
Security is absolute top priority of the Israeli government. This was lacking almost entirely last Saturday.
If, as claimed, there were credible warnings from Egypt then Bibi is going to have to spin like a Dervish to get away with his failures.
I expect this will end Bibi politically. If it was just another round of rockets it might have helped him. This was a colossal failure of government on every level. Even 1973 wasn't this bad.
Nearly half as many civilians died in the first few hours in 2023 as Israeli soldiers died in the entire Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria never penetrated into the core of Israel, the fighting was in the Golan and the Sinai. Saturday was the single worst day in Israeli history; proportionally, the likely death toll alone was at least ten 9/11s. And then there's the rapes and the hostages.
For the duration of the emergency, Bibi is safe. But when the dust settles, they're coming for his head. He'll be lucky to stay out of jail.
No idea, but there have been reports today that Egypt warned Israel of an attack and that this warning wasn't acted upon. Is that true? Who knows. Will it hurt Netanyahu? Who knows. But it shows there are avenues for Netanyahu's detractors to hurt him politically. I also read criticisms that his Judicial fight resulted in Air Force reservists claiming they would never go back on active duty. Again I have no idea if this is true (I dont follow Israeli news outside of what bubbles up onto mainstream US media), but if he becomes a military liability then maybe he will be pushed out.
I'm in a similar situation to Shaked - most of my bubble hates him and blames him, but it's in that order. Not sure how people who don't hate him react.
I think I'd wager that he loses some amount of support, because - outside view - that's what normally happens when massive failure like this occurs.
But there's also the "rally around the flag" effect, and Netanyahu is smart, so... who knows?
I don't hate him. I campaigned for him against Perez nearly 30 years ago.
But וישמן ישורון ויבעט ("Jeshurun grew fat and kicked") and Bibi got all googly eyed over his own מזרח התיכון החדש ("New Middle East" aka Economics > Values) and what happened, happened.
*Should* he resign? Immediately.
Who should take over? Anybody.
Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza to stay out of jail. Bibi may be getting the nation mir....
you know what? Until it is likely to matter I would rather not publish negative words. I hope that he has the wisdom and heart to do what is right. That is all.
I have a place in the unwritten history of Israeli PR (or perhaps it is written) but being as I am unwilling to accept the structural or financial control of an organization I guess there's little I can do.
Anyone interested in having me on a podcast or show is invited to get in touch via my YouTube channel. I may have things to say that you would like people to hear.
https://youtube.com/@ydydy?feature=shared
Who's to say it was a failure, or at least (as we don't yet know the outcome) a failure to anticipate? It seems unlikely, verging on inconceivable, that the Israelis with their sophisticated security services and, no doubt, hordes of informers among Palestinians, weren't fully aware of the impending attack and its scale.
Given that the population of the Gaza Strip is increasing by 2% per annum (at which rate it will double in under 20 years) perhaps the Israelis decided to let things come to a head so they would have just cause (by some standards) to expel a fair proportion of Gaza inhabitants and absorb the whole area into Israel.
It wouldn't be the first time in history that a crafty and ruthless leadership has deliberately let a rebellion foment and break out, as a supposed justification for some decisive action to restore a better peace in future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North
From the article:
"Contemporary chronicles vividly record the savagery of the campaign, the huge scale of the destruction and the widespread famine caused by looting, burning and slaughtering. ... Records from the Domesday Book of 1086 suggest that as much as 75% of the population [of Northern England] could have died or never returned. "
The key difference though is that no-one contemporary knew what was going on in the first millennium. The extent to which everyone is watching is evident right now.
Also, not a great fan of historical determinism...
More likely that militaries that have been long at peace naturally degrade over time. Look at Russia in 2022 or America in 1942.
My instinct is to blame Ehud Barak, Yair Lapid, and the odious people who refused to do their military service due to their opposition to the judicial reforms BUT I don't follow Israeli politics closely enough to have a truly informed opinion. I'm just a curious outsider.
Given that the base of Bibi's power is currently being propped up by an entire community that refuses to do military service, this probably isn't a wise gamble for him to take.
Blaming a guy who was last in power twenty years ago is a bit of a stretch, but I'm sure Bibi will try to make it stick.
Hard to say. Everyone I know is furious at him for the most colossal failure in Israeli history (it's not just an intelligence failure, it's also a policy failure - 70% of the troops that were supposed to be around Gaza were in the West bank to protect Ben Gvir's settler friends).
But then everyone I know already hated him anyway. Hard to know what his supporters (or even swing voters like some of my cousins) are going to think.
What are people's prognoses for how the current dramatically heightened phase of the Israel-Palestine conflict will end? IDF is bound to conduct a large ground operation in Gaza, what will happen there?
There's a quandary that rarely gets any airtime in this conflict. It's the Orwellian notion of the ever shifting war between the three main territories, Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia.
The necessity to maintain the feat of an imminent enemy was crucial to enabling the degree of internal controls that each government needed.
If the plan is to remove the Hamas threat entirely then the absence of a visible agressor risks exposing the severity of the internal divisions within Israel to the point of Civil War.
The relationship between the religious and secular communities is already highly strained. A common enemy is perhaps the only thing to prevent a complete fracturing of Israeli society.
Wouldn't Iran (&Hizballah) suffice as common enemy?
Israel is in a fury and has mobilized 300k reservists, bringing their active force to 470k. That's 5% of the Israeli population and 70% of their available combat power. There's no half measures coming down the pipe.
If you try and reverse-engineer a strategy from the desired outcomes, you won't be able to predict anything. Israel has no path to their outcomes, but has an overwhelming necessity to act. Israel's war goals are the simplest part of this equation:
1. Get the hostages back
2. Destroy Hamas
3. Prevent this from happening again
but the long term problem for them is that none of those are directly achievable with bombs or boots. Israel can degrade Hamas's capabilities by continuing to blow up weapons caches and command centers, but not destroy every last member. Israel may get some of the hostages back, but almost certainly Hamas will be able to keep some or even most away. Israel has spent nearly two decades since Hamas threw Fatah out of Gaza in a coup trying to prevent this from happening, and failed.
Does Israel have the material capability to fight like someone brought Curtis LeMay back from the dead? Sure. Do they have the will or political cover? Almost certainly not. And that's the only way to achieve any of those wars goals with raw military power.
But they have the opposite consideration in the short term: Israel is literally and figuratively up in arms. Hamas has gleefully published videos of murder, torture, and evidence of rape of civilians and military alike. Of those videos, the ones in Gaza show the Gazan population celebrating these acts. Seeing those videos has exactly the effect you'd think it would have on Israeli sympathy for Arab civilians. Knowing that on top of that Hamas has 130 hostages puts a certain urgency on Israel's response. Although so far Israel has continued to practice roof knocking and other collateral-mitigation techniques unique to the IDF, for the first time I wonder if they'll be able to continue to.
Nobody knows how far Israel will go to get the hostages back or to punish Hamas. Nobody has ever hurt Israel this bad, either. The civilian toll in the first few hours of 2023 was at least 1/3 to 1/2 as high as the entire military toll of the weeks of 1973. Or, to think about it another way, including Israeli Arabs, Israel's population is 9.3M. If the deaths from the initial Hamas attack are only 1k victims, that would be about 1/9k of Israel's population. 9/11 had about 3k victims, slightly more than 1/100k of America's 2001 population (285M). So to imagine how Israel's feeling right now, imagine multiplying 9/11 by at least 10.
My intuition is that 1,000 dead in a localized attack is 1,000 dead. Can someone help me understand why relative numbers matter? Is it about the reduction in available resources? Do citizens of smaller countries feel grief in proportion to relative population loss? Is the 9/11 attack best compared to the population is the US? New York State? City? Manhattan?
It is at least in part about how many of the survivors are directly affected by the deaths, e.g. because they were friends or family members. And, pragmatically, about whether the defined group can e.g. determine their own foreign policy in a way that Israel can and Manhattan can't.
Israel is determining its foreign policy at a time when 1-2% of Jewish Israelis are grieving over a dead friend or family member, and probably most Israelis personally know someone who is grieving. That didn't come close to happening in the United States after 9/11. And in a country that was kind of on the edge regarding the whole Palestinian question, that can make a difference.
John explained it well. Many Israeli know one of the victims. Most Jews know someone who knows a victim. Nearly every Jew knows someone who is now in uniform who wasn't a week ago. This is the biggest reason for Israel's overwhelming necessity to act; this feels existential to Israel because it has touched everyone.
I'd further add that war and conflict are not merely a numbers game. 1000 civilians dead in an atrocity are not the same as 1000 terrorists dead in combat, or even 1000 civilians dead in collateral damage. You should care about all of those, but in different ways and amounts.
And in 9/11, with a few exceptions, the victims just vanished. America had taken a horrific hit but it quickly became clear that none more were coming. In the Simchat Torah attacks, there has been a steady drumbeat of disturbing video of the initial atrocities and the ongoing hostage crisis. Hamas's glee over their barbarism, and the celebrations of it around the world, have reinforced the feeling for every Israeli - frankly, every Jew - that this is coming for them personally. This has magnified both the grief and the resolve that this atrocity has caused.
"9/11 had about 3k victims, slightly more than 1/1M of America's 2001 population (285M)"
That's slightly more than 1/100k. So this attack is ~10 times as bad in relative terms.
Is this a South Park reference?
On my part, definitely not.
Derp. Thank you for the correction.
>but the long term problem for them is that none of those are directly achievable with bombs or boots.
Sure they are. Kill everyone.
Dead people don't retaliate, nor have children who retaliate. Not that this is a good course of action, but when people say "force can't achieve X", most often what they mean is "I am not willing to use very much force". Force can achieve pretty much anything, it is often the only thing that can certain objectives (like say wanting actual safety from Palestinian terrorism).
"I wonder what the city fathers of Carthage would say about that."
> Dead people don't retaliate, nor have children who retaliate.
Dead people are pretty well known for their children's propensity to retaliate.
That's not a problem if the plan is "kill everyone", but in that case the reason the children won't retaliate is that dead people don't retaliate, not that dead people don't have children who retaliate.
It is just the reality of the world. It is all a game of of violence chicken, and people shouldn't be surprised if the side driving the tank just smashes through the Volvo careening right at it eventually.
"They never had any, they were perfectly content massacring and gang raping them and expelling them from their homes in the Nakba for the crime of living on the land they wanted for themselves."
And the Germans in WWII were slaughtering Jews. That has limited relevance to the opinions and behavior of 25 yo Germans today.
You're about to find out how wrong you are.
Israel has had the means to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians for decades. Now they have the motivation. You'd better hope they have more morals than you do.
The best predictor of Arab population growth is the distance to Israeli hospitals. Israeli Arabs, followed by the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the rest of MENA.
You lie and lie. Seeing what you cheer for has hardened the world's resolve.
From a foreign policy perspective, It would be clever of Netanyahu not to retaliate with extreme bloodlust. Reasons: 1) Israel right now has considerable sympathy, but it could backfire if their response is even harsher than what they have got in terms of cold blooded killing; 2) related: a very harsh response will make it more difficult for the Saudis to recognize Israel in the foreseeable future; 3) if they react so hard that Gaza becomes wholly impossible to live in, the Israeli government will have to administer the place themselves, which is much more demanding than letting some Palestinian authority maintain control. From a domestic policy perspective, however, extreme revenge might be more rational, as Netanyahu must somehow compensate (in the eyes of Israelis) for the blunder of not foreseeing the Hamas outbreak. Hard to say if these two rationalities can be combined. Depends on political talent, perhaps also on luck.
From a foreign policy perspective, I don't understand the whole thing. What were the military objectives of the Hamas? They presented themselves as brainless and heartless barbarians quite well, but what for? I thought this might have been a distractive attack but I don't see the real thing yet.
About Pearl Harbour, there was a story about USA letting it happen. Strategically, something like that would make sense now for Israel. I'm all with them.
80% chance things go back to status quo ante (60% that happens within the year, 20% it takes longer than that), 5% change something goes wronger for Israel, sufficient to force a significant change in a pro-Palestine direction, 10% chance Israel looks at what's happening in Azerbaijan and decides to engage in some ethnic cleansing to try to resolve the situation, while claiming its just completing a 'population exchange', 5% chance something even weirder happens.
Israel will delay its full-scale ground invasion for a while so it can plan it out and prepare properly. The extra time will also let air/artillery strikes and the total blockade "soften up" the Gazans.
By the time it ends, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 times as many Palestinians are dead as Israelis. Hamas might still consider the result a victory.
If they do, it’s evidence that 10x is not enough.
Better off trying to predict the stock market, at least that usually goes up over time.
I'd guess there's a lot of bloodshed and then things go back the way they were. But my epistemic certainty is really low.
My (unfortunate) guess it that all the incentives that all parties had to continue the status quo as it was, are still in place. So after a few months of terrible, tragic violence, we'll return to roughly where we were. Very likely, the deals with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will be delayed, which is what Hamas wants.
In other words, a few months, then "back to normal".
The one thing that might make my prediction fail is if the Israeli people show enough determination to have something *really* different happen, enough so that it's in Netanyahu's interest to have a real change happen. (Or even better, to oust Netanyahu.)
Hamas’ entire plan is to drag the IDF into Gaza where Israel’s advantage in materiel counts for nothing. Instead there’ll be violent street-to-street fighting. This is precisely why Hamas took hostages to shame them into invading.
If it works then we’ll have a period of high intensity fighting then a period of low intensity insurgency and then Israel will be forced by its losses and by global humanitarian pressure to pull out of Gaza and resume service as usual.
Hama will likely have lost ten times the population that Israel has but it will have cost Israel a lot of blood and treasure and exhausted any goodwill with the Arab states for a generation at least.
Will Israel defeat Hamas meanwhile? No. Its leadership is safe in Qatar and it will be able to replenish its numbers in a few years time due to its high popularity with the Palestinian people.
"Hamas’ entire plan is to drag the IDF into Gaza where Israel’s advantage in materiel counts for nothing. Instead there’ll be violent street-to-street fighting. "
Material advantage actually counts for quite a bit in street-to-street fighting. Yes, it's the least-unfavorable place for Hamas to fight, but they don't have the resources to win even there; if Israel wants Gaza back under IDF control, it will be. Possibly with a few thousand IDF dead, but Hamas just did the thing that makes that thinkable in Israel.
Gaza under control of Israel is not what Israel wants. It doesn’t want to indefinitely rule over 2 million souls who hate their guts. The entire situation has ‘quagmire’ all over it.
Hamas might play the long game. Here is one way to interpret their long-term strategy: The attack is likely to further the get-rid-of-the Palestinians sentiment in Israeli society. In the longer run, this may lead to more liberal- minded Israelis leaving the country (or more generally to increase out-migration), helping to skew the population gradually more toward only extreme hardliners remaining - assumed to be even more brutal toward Palestinians. At some point, Hamas may hope that this will lead to international goodwill and support for Israel declining. Setting the stage, decades from now, for a war to end Israel. The strategy is often labelled "crisis maximizing" and it seldom works, but sometimes it does. (I am not taking sides here, only spelling out how all parties, including Hamas, may be assumed to act rational, given the cards and the positions fate has dealt them.)
“Crisis Maximising” is essentially what Serbia did prior to WW1 and it led to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. At the cost of starting a world war of course.
Israel's gotta at least be considering doing air strikes on Hamas leadership in Qatar if they can find them now.
Assassination squads would be much more likely, for a lot of reasons. I consider this a high probability.
Possibly with (quiet, disavowed) US support.
Qatar is a US protectorate. Israel isn’t going to try anything like that and upset its largest benefactor. And that’s assuming a Saudi or Qatari SAM wouldn’t be able to shoot them down.
Is this what you're looking for? https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/
"Aparatheid"
Werid how its not apartheid when even other arab/muslim countries don't give palestinians full rights, even when they're born there.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians as an end goal, why did it warn everyone in North Gaza to evacuate before soldiers move in and things get even more dangerous for civilians? Why do they warn civilians in buildings they are about to bomb in advance?
If Hamas is trying to free Palestinians, then why have they ordered them to stay put and not evacuate, even though they know North Gaza is about to become a warzone? Wouldn't that just help their enemies "end goal" of killing Palestinian civilians? Why are they helping Israel to do that?
I'm so tired of this line to be honest. If you're going to give cookies to civilian-genociders because they performatively declare "pls move", give some to Hamas too, it did the same thing before bombing Ashkelon [1].
Everyone from Assad to ISIS loves to "warn" civilians before attacks, it's a very affordable package of free PR. Those stunts have dubious effects in terms of net total of civilians "saved".
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-10/israel-palestinian-conflict-latest-updates-live/102954538 , ctrl-f for "deadline"
If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
In contrast, if you're targeting military installations, then warning civilians is the best way to deal with a human shield problem, without giving in to the human shield tactic.
What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
> If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
How so ?
1- I want to bomb the city of Tel Aviv
2- I say "I WILL BOMB TEL AVIV, EVERYBODY WHO DOESNT WANT TO DIE MOVE"
3- People of Tel Aviv
4- I bomb Tel Aviv
This sounds like a scenario where I both target "Civilians" and still let them escape, but really I'm just targeting the **Civilian Infrastructure**, not civilians per se.
> What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
What military target in Gaza was/is the IDF targeting ?
It seems to me by the sheer number of Hamas videos online showing IDF in pools of blood that they had plenty of military targets. I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
>>I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
They shot up a concert and killed 260 people. Maybe you have some kind of theory on the military value of EDM that I'm unaware of, but I don't see how that can be explained as anything other than "deliberately targeting civilians."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/10/what-to-know-about-deadly-hamas-attack-on-the-israeli-music-festival
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/08/israel-festival-attack-gaza-militants/
The military targets were on the border. They had to go through the military targets to get to the civilian ones.
Consider Be'eri - a kibbutz near the border. It had 1,000 civilian residents. Hamas killed 100 of them and abducted many more. What military target was Hamas aiming for in Be'eri?
When Hamas took civilian hostages, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that? When Hamas shot unarmed people at point blank range, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that?
Finally, if Hamas wanted to kill more civilians, what would they have done differently? They already went house-to-house, shooting at every unarmed person they saw. If they wanted to kill more civilians they would...?
Yes, very true. And, by warning the Gazan civilians and allowing them to evacuate, the Israelis are _accepting_ the risk that some Hamas members will hide themselves amongst the evacuating civilians, and will not be killed in north Gaza.
It'd be pretty easy to test this hypothesis. Just have Hamas move their military equipment away from Palestinian population centers.
If Israel strikes the population centers, there's your answer. If Israel strikes the Hamas bases - having been moved away from innocent civilians - and leaves the population centers alone, wouldn't that disprove this argument?
No such thought experiment is needed ZACH considering the nearly endless on video examples of Israelis deliberately targeting, and successfully murdering Palestinian civilians, one recent example being the 2018 march at the border.
We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians.
To prove the contrast, I can show you a list of Israeli military locations. I can show you how far they are from civilian centers. For example, the IDF headquarters is located at Hakirya, IDF and MOD HQ 6473424.
Can you do the same for Hamas? Where's their headquarters?
"We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians. "
It was universally observed by basically every observer, NGO, government what have you that Israels claims any of those protestors were violent was complete nonsense. You are essentially saying Israel can call any protestors violent on the pretext that maybe Hamas is among them even without showing a shred of actual proof. It was merely a targeted massacre. I think if you are willing to deny that there is literally no level of evidence that would convince you, you're going to just continue to deny reality and produce contrived thought experiments because there is no case where you will admit what every observer has admitted and what all the evidence shows and it gets me to thinking that there is no right answer for you that doesn't involve Jews being justified in killing whichever Palestinians they feel fit to, and no instance whatsoever where Palestinians have the right to even PEACEFULLY PROTEST without being butchered. I can't see you as anything but a genocide apologist.
An Israeli official did recommend that Gazan's use that border crossing to leave Gaza, but rescinded that advice on last Tuesday because Egypt closed the border crossing that day. Israel bombed the Gaza side of the crossing to keep supplies from entering Gaza until the hostages are released.
I'm sure Israel would love for the people of Gaza to leave and go to Egypt, but Egypt doesn't want them and won't let them in.
Those who answered (2) (Tego, Godshatter, Viliam, Moon Moth): Did you learn this usage from your parents as a child (or in language class, for non-native speakers)? Did you learn using gendered pronouns first, then picked up this usage from peers? Did you make a conscious choice to use (2)?
Not a conscious choice (when talking vaguely about people the listener doesn't know), it's just my default. No idea where I picked it up; I don't know how I'd find out whether I got it from family or peers, as I don't have any large samples of younger-me's writing.
My siblings seem to speak the same way, but I'd guess my parents would default to gendered language more? (It would be kind of hard to contrive the right conversation, and I don't trust them to give a correct answer if asked directly.)
I grew up mostly in the Southwestern US, went to Catholic schools, and come from a very socially conservative family (pretty much all the adults I know were strongly opposed to gay marriage when that was a thing, for example).
Seeing the other replies has made me curious enough that I'd be interested in seeing this on a community survey someday.
I am a native who largely uses non-gendered language, and honestly it's because I grew up in the Bay Area. Kind of learned from parents and kind of from peers. As I look very nonbinary (to people who notice that sort of thing) I am very aware of pronoun use and will change depending on who I'm talking too. If someone refers to me automatically matching my sex, I'll be more likely to use typically gendered language about/around them. If they are clearly aware that I Look Like I Have A Gender I'll use more gender neutral or oddly gendered language with them. the gender neutral feels more natural though.
Not a native English speaker. It depends. In my language, the word "child" feels perfectly natural, though "sibling" and "parent" feel formal, because naturally one would say "brother" or "sister", "mother" or "father". Not sure why. Maybe others would disagree with me. There is no singular "they" or any other gender-neutral pronoun, "he or she" is the most politically correct you can get. Actually, all words for humans (and animals) are gendered; you can't really say e.g. "teachers" in a fully neutral way; you basically say "male-teachers and female-teachers" if you want to signal wokeness, and everyone else understands that the "male-teachers" can also be used for a teacher of unspecified gender. (I think a few English words are like this, too, e.g. "waiter" and "waitress".)
Then again I also speak a little Hungarian, which doesn't even have separate words for "he" and "she". So I don't really perceive gender-neutral speech as something *unnatural*, but rather as "some languages have it, some don't".
At school, I was taught to use the gendered English. I found the non-gendered English later on internet, I tried it (a conscious choice), and after a while it started making sense intuitively. Because I am not a native English speaker, I don't have strong feelings either way.
> In my language, the word "child" feels perfectly natural, though "sibling" and "parent" feel formal, because naturally one would say "brother" or "sister", "mother" or "father".
It's that way in English too, at least for me.
I do (2) when talking about people who're not close to me and are only relevant to the conversation in the context of their role. "I talked to the sales assistant and they said they couldn't accept returns after 30 days". I might equally use a gendered pronoun in this case, which I don't really do with any particular intent but which I think reduces the implied interpersonal distance a bit.
I do (3) where appropriate. (1) is niche but I'd use it for anonymity ("We've had a complaint from a member of the team who says they find your communication style can be quite abrasive").
For context, I'm an upper-middle class British English speaking millennial, with a home counties accent.
I usually have the first reason, with the addition that it's not just their gender, it's their relationship to me. I give enough anecdotes people could probably find me if they wanted to, but no reason to make it easier; if my sister does something that makes a point but isn't inherently tied to being female, I go with "my relative" or "someone I know".
I suppose different people have different intuitions about the defaults. Should you specify gender by default, and only omit it when you have a specific reason to do so? Or should you omit the gender by default, and only specify it when you have a specific reason to do so? Either way, the person who uses the opposite default will wonder whether you are hinting at something or you just speak weirdly.
Now that I think about it, I probably use the gendered default when I talk, and the non-gendered default when I write. So I guess I perceive the non-gendered way as formal, and the gendered way as informal.
> "my child"/"sibling"/"parent"
(Native speaker, mostly from California)
My read on those three examples specifically is:
"My child" is completely normal; you could say "my son" or "my daughter" but there is no reason to read anything into the "child" phrasing. (Well, there might be, but this is determined by context.)
"My sibling" is the opposite; there is no natural use of the word "sibling" and anyone who does use it is attempting to make an ideological point, and doing so in a very marked and awkward way.
"My parent" is in between those extremes. It's kind of weird. In the plural, "my parents" is completely normal (contrast "sibling", where you still wouldn't use that word - the expected collective reference would be the much longer phrase "my brothers and sisters", or more conveniently (and less specifically) "my family"), but I would expect a reference to just one of them to use one of many synonymous terms specifically referring to the mother or father.
My family might be weird then! I agree that nobody uses the singular “sibling,” to talk about a specific person, but we frequently use the plural “siblings.”
(Native speaker, also mostly from California)
The person has to be introduced before the pronoun is used. “I talked to the cashier, she said..... “
If someone keeps saying “the cashier” instead of using the pronoun then they might be attempting to do this.
Point of order: it is possible to use forward-pointing pronouns. But they are rare in most types of usage compared to backward-pointing ones.
They're very common in certain usages like "it's hard to say", where "it" points forward to "to say".
It's more typical to use "they" for unknown gender instead of awkwardly repeating the noun. You just did it yourself!
Using "they" for a hypothetical person who might equally well be of either sex, as Nolan did, is quite different to using it for an individual person whose sex is known to you.
The latter is awkward (at least in pre-2016 English). I can't say I'd never use it, but if I did then I'd definitely be drawing attention to the fact that I'm deliberately keeping the person's sex a mystery.
There's also the construction where you deliberately avoid using any pronouns at all, which is what I'll do if I'm forced to talk about someone whose self-identified "gender" does not match their actual sex.
I'm a native speaker, and I do all three, and like Melvin said, in that order of probability.
Native speaker. I use non-gendered language by default when talking about people who the listener doesn't care about (i.e. someone they don't know and probably never will know).
So "I talked to the cashier at Walmart today and they said that their store recently got new products." sounds normal to me. And if I'm talking to an acquaintance who will never meet my sister, I might say "I have a sibling who has this problem, and they tried that solution.", that also sounds fine to me. (Though either could be replaced with gendered language just fine.)
However, if I'm talking about someone the listener knows or who I expect the listener to know in the future, I default to gendered language. "Remember Alex from high school? She recently got a new job." or "You should meet Jamie, you'd get along with him great." In this case, using gender-neutral language would indicate that they're non-binary (or I'm being mysterious for some reason), and I would expect that people I'm talking to would intuitively grasp the difference.
I'm also a native speaker. I only use non-gendered language for non-binary people, or when I don't know the person's gender. Using non-gendered language for a person of known gender sounds odd to me, even when gender is irrelevant. Maybe it's a generational difference (I'm fortyish.)
Interesting! I'm Gen Z, so it definitely could be a generational difference.
Millennial Brit, and I'd tend to agree with your style.
Probably those, in order of probability.
I grew up during the Cold War, which pitted the self-described democratic west against the totalitarian Soviet Union. The idea that the United States should abandon liberal democracy was well outside the Overton window. That is no longer true.
The people currently talking about “Red Caesar” don't strike me as people who have any chance of <em>becoming</em> becoming “Red Caesar.” What they are doing is laying the intellectual groundwork for someone else to overthrow democracy. I don't expect them to succeed, but of course a common forecasting error is to think that the future will be like the past. A discontinuity like the overthrow of a political system that has endured for more that two centuries is hard to predict.
>The idea that the United States should abandon liberal democracy was well outside the Overton window.
I also remember that era. "Better Red than Dead" was a minority position, but it wasn't outside the window.
The problem with selling every election as a referendum on democracy is what happens when you lose.
It's something to worry about, but you've got the color wrong.
How would this Red Caesar get the US military on their side?
The military which the left/military leadership is accusing of being filled with far-right extremists?
"Filled with" is a gross exaggeration of what anybody serious is claiming. The officer corps, in particular, is not even close to dominated by far-right extremists. The enlisted ranks are about 50% Black, Hispanic, and Asian, which are not demographics known for their far-right extremism, and the half who are white(ish) are still not all or even mostly far-right extremists.
There's no way the current US Army signs on with either a right-wing or a left-wing coup or Caesarification. Unless they're simultaneously presented with both a right and left-wing coup and there is no loyalist faction to support, I suppose.
Resistance against *what*? Was the noise pollution from that rave really *that* bad? I mean, I get the temptation to go postal on a bunch of annoying hippies playing bad music at ludicrous volume, but no. Just no.
Seriously, if you ever do find yourself in a position where you have the right to armed resistance (and haven't voided it by your own actions), that right is not transferrable. You don't get to gun down people adjacent to your oppressors just because they're easier targets. And "stray bullets" and "collateral damage" only go so far as an excuse.
Yeah, I would like to apply this standard generally to IDF mission design ("mowing the lawn" in Gaza, etc.) and a host of other measures by the Israeli state - like punitive home demolitions and all the nonsense the settlers get away with - which aren't exactly surgically precise self-defence against militants.
To be clear, I don't intend to stop applying this standard to Hamas just because people don't apply it to Israel. But I would still like to see it applied to Israel and other state actors at least as scrupulously as it is applied to resistance fighters with few clean options, poorly-centralised leadership, and necessarily lousy troop discipline.
There is a moral bias against underdog asymmetrical warfare in the West, for obvious and not especially respectable reasons.
There's also a moral bias in favor of the weaker side from some people in the West.
Mate, I'm saying this as a citizen of a country which regularly gets excoriated as anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian whenever some Israeli newspaper gets its knickers in a twist:
Cool it. You're not starting a discussion, you're coat-trailing and despite my commitment to free speech, it won't take much to unleash my inner Saruman and report you for being a [epithet redacted].
>a country which regularly gets excoriated as anti-Semitic
"He wasn't an anti-semite. At least, no more than anyone else."
Many Thanks Deiseach!
Coat-trailing! Neat term!
So you need to keep spamming until 50% of comments in the thread are yours?
I literally don't understand comments like these. Obviously attacking Israel like this was going to prompt a massive response. Is a sense of a moral high ground worth the casualties that a war with a much stronger opponent will bring?
And given the celebrations by palestinians and their allies around the world, it doesn't seem like anyone of the palestine side is consdiering any of this to be an "error".
Do Greeks have a right to take back Constantiople from Turkey by force?
Of course not. It belongs to Troy.
Oh, so if Israel manage to kill and ethnically cleanse all the palestinians who havea problem with Israel, then they get to call it "their" land and you stop complaining?
If it's about how Palestinians are being treated, fine, but stop with all this "stolen land" nonsense. Almost everwhere occupied by arabs and muslims today was "stolen" and no arab or muslims has ever pretended to feel bad about this.
If you see videos of wholesale slaughter and rape and you think "liberation" or "resistance", you need to be committed.
Hamas has sowed the wind and Gaza cheered and danced in the streets. Now they'll reap the whirlwind.
I wouldn't call the current attack by Palestinians on civilian targets when they clearly could have only chosen military targets to be a "mistake", except that doing extra to enrage Israelis could be viewed as a mistake.
It isn't some little error being unfairly magnified.
DUDE.
I haven't read this entire thread but unless she dismissed you by referencing your last name your comment was way out of line and unfair.
When have arabs/muslims ever even pretended to feel bad for their long history of conquest, rape, slavery etc?
The Japanese and Germans did bad things to my ancestors in the 1940s as well. I hold no grudge against modern Japan or Germany. The Palestinians really could learn from the rest of us.
>I don’t get the sense that Palestinians who have escaped to say America hold much grudge against Israel.
Then who is currently celebrating in Europe, NA, Australia etc about Israelis being killed?
Right, it seems entirely reasonable to blame Egypt and Jordan for not letting these people in.
My preferred peace plan is that the Gaza Strip and West Bank simply get emptied out. No humans to set foot there for a hundred years. Israeli settlers can go to Israel, Arabs can go to Jordan/Egypt/Syria/Lebanon/Saudi Arabia/UAE/Iraq/whatever, and the whole thing becomes a UN-administered Forbidden Zone, filled with landmines that will explode if they detect anything that weighs more than a fox and less than a camel.
Redefining people just trying to live their lives as an act of war, is to declare that their being alive is itself objectionable.
You seek to justify the unjustifiable.
And people don't take well to random deadly attacks. Both sides are made of human beings, both sides are in a situation where they didn't create the history, both sides are almost entirely composed of people who don't have much political effect, and both sides are influenced third parties who want to amp up the violence.
What response did Hamas expect from their attack? That Israel would be intimidated and hide in a shell? Had Israel instead attacked Gaza in a similar fashion, what would be the expected response?
The only rational response to an attack of this nature is to declare war on those responsible and attempt to ensure nothing like it will happen again. In effect, Hamas deserves most of the blame for the slaughter of the children, as the instigators of the violence.
I'm not a fan of Israel responding with vengeance against the population. I mean I definitely favor it over nothing but I really think we have a teaching moment here.
We're all human beings, equal and similar human beings.
I believe that this matter can be reasoned out.
If not then I guess we must return to sticks, but I would like to have a try!
You probably know the word hasbara....
uh oh, was about to drop my credentials and the battery is on 1%.
Gotta send. Suffice to say I will happily join the conversation with any pro-Palestinian or Muslim show, so long as I have the same exact freedom to speak as the host.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hamas-israel-palestinian-hostages-beeri-attack-rcna119337
Here is your proof of rape, psycho. That woman's pants are coated in blood.
https://www.opindia.com/2023/10/dead-woman-paraded-naked-by-hamas-terrorists-identified-as-german-tourist/
This one was stripped naked and paraded through the streets of Gaza.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account
There are many other reports of these rapes, but those first two Hamas proudly broadcasted for all to see.
All of these victims were civilians going about this lives. Some of them weren't even Israeli. If you can't see the atrocity of these acts then you are sick and beyond saving.
Many Thanks!
I wish the Israelis the best of luck in ensuring that no such attack ever happens again, by whatever means they need to use to ensure this.
Look, if I could wave a magic wand to just kill all the members of Hamas while leaving innocent peaceful civilians unharmed I'd do it. I have no such wand, and neither does the IDF. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor started a chain of events ending in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including incinerating Japanese civilians, Hamas's sneak attack on Israel, starting with their massacre at the music festival, is being repaid. If the Israelis are able to be selective, great. But war does not allow fine-grained selectivity. I wish the Israelis the best of luck in ensuring that no such attack ever happens again, by whatever means they need to use to ensure this.
"Tablet is not reliable"
> Electronic intifada and literal Palestinian propaganda
Go outside and touch sand
When are arabs going to return all of the land they have stolen?
At the risk of engaging this crap, “the right of armed resistance” doesn’t include targeting civilians, right?
Everyone agrees that if Hamas attacks IDF soldiers - or if the Nazis attack US soldiers during WW2 - that’s not terrorism or a war crime, that’s war, even though it’s an awful thing and Hamas should be wiped out like the Nazis. But Hamas is kidnapping and raping civilians.
Celebrate your "legitimacy", but how does it lead to anything other than thousands of Gazans being killed?
Yeah I don't care - my question is if you care about the people of Gaza, in what possible way does/could this attack lead to improved outcomes for them? It's irrelevant how much Israeli people "deserve" to be killed - the only thing Hamas can control is their own actions, so how do their actions (and all of the consequences over which they have no control) lead to better outcomes for the people of Gaza?