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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
> 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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😁
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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'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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
* 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 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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!
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" )
Many Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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
"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.
> 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.
> 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
>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?
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
> 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
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.
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?
"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.
One guy repeating himself ad nauseam is functionally an echo chamber. That's what literal echoes do.
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.
>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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Killing thousands of people (primarily armed terrorists) is a lot more palatable than killing millions of civilians.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but "destoying Hamas" isn't too far, even if that involves huge civillian deaths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
War is Hell.
So you're basically complaining people are expressing different opinions to yours
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Good point. It deserved a leisurely stroll then.
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
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
'...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.
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.