Hi, I remember Scot, or maybe one of the commenter’s mentioning that Charles Babbage had once written a letter to Alfred Tennyson, where he told Tennyson that a line in his poem, which said something to the effect of Every moment dies a man. every moment one is born, was incorrect, because if true it would mean that the population would never grow or shrink. He instead suggested something along the lines of every moment 1 and 1/16 is born. While this was not exactly true either, it was close enough for an approximation.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to be able to find this. Does anyone have any idea where it was mentioned, or whether I hallucinated the whole thing, or more likely read it somewhere else and got mixed up about where I saw it.
Google terms: "babbage tennyson every moment dies a man".
For real apparently.
Not clear what Tennyson said (Babbage may have been joking and Tennyson may have taken it as such), but Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a reasonable rejoinder:
"That such a poet should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics is ... as if Babbage were to take my opinion & undo his calculating machine by it."
Humanists and scientists got on better back then, I guess. Or maybe Babbage never got on the wrong political side of the New York Times.
How reliable is ChatGPT as a translator? Pretty much, at least between languages that have a decent amount of text available online to train on. But on underrepresented languages it's quite terrible: it basically does not speak any major African language. I assembled a dataset using the OpenAI API, code here: https://gitlab.com/mariomario/lugha Post describing the methodology here: https://mariopasquato.substack.com/p/does-chatgpt-speak-your-language Any comments or questions are extremely welcome!
I tried GPT-3.5 in Slovak. Available text on internet: quarter of million Wikipedia articles, a few online newspapers. The results are mixed. It can talk in the language almost fluently; sometimes switches to other Slavic languages. It can write short stories, and write poems that sometimes rhyme.
But questions *about* the language typically produce lots of confident sounding nonsense. If I ask about Slovak proverbs, 8 out of 10 examples are made up, half of them don't even make sense. If I ask about words starting with given letter, I get a list of mostly made-up words.
(This is a bit counter-intuitive to me, because for a human, talking the language would be more difficult than saying a few facts about the language. Perhaps for GPT it is the other way round?)
Sanskrit being a dead language (despite being a schedule eight language of India) probably does not help. It’s even in a worse position than underrepresented living languages, because those can eventually produce a corpus to train on.
I've reached the proof of concept stage for the XWord construction software I am working on. Auto fill is working in most cases and completing a themed grid is becoming much easier. I am going to refine it a bit more and post my progress to my Substack in the next couple weeks.
When I do publish that post I hope to ask for for constructive criticism and advice from crossword enthusiasts, general language mavens and software developers regarding the techniques I am using.
In the meantime I've published a post with a couple pictures taken in Minnesota state park in the SE corner of the state. Some beautiful fall color from Friday afternoon.. It probably was the last sunny 70 degree day we will have in 2023 here so I am savoring the ones I did post along with the ones in my local folder. I didn't care to watch Game of Thrones but I am familiar with the phrase, "Winter is coming." I like the cold and and the snow myself but its beauty is definitely less colorful.
Someone very close to me is in the hospital and very sick. If any of you are praying type people, I would appreciate your prayers. Thoughts from the secular are appreciated too.
Certainly will keep your intention in my prayers, let us know how things turn out (good or bad). May you be supported during this time, and may your near one be helped either to recovery or preparation for a peaceful passing if the worst happens.
Another mistake the NY Times article on Manifest made is they said Aella's spicy live polling asked about how many psychedelic drugs we've taken. She actually asked about how many psychoactive drugs we've taken. The memory is very vivid for me because I was shocked to find I had taken the 3rd most despite only taking prescribed psychiatric medications. #winning
Would not recommend reading the Quintin Pope link at all, it's just a messy list of refutation that don't lead anywhere. To some extent I do agree with Eliezer with it being rather strawman too
I had the very opposite impression, I find it a crushing critique of AI risk arguments, at least as applied to the current GPT-X (and more generally, deep learning) paradigm. One can of course assume that at some point we will be a new, completely different paradigm which will be more dangerous, but that's a classic motte-and-bailey play - point at the rapid pace of AI advances to create a sense of urgency, but when someone points out that your arguments don't actually apply to that, oh noes I was talking about something else all along.
It's also much more compact and readable than Pope's earlier Less Wrong posts that made similar arguments, so definitely worth a read.
I can't pick through all the bullshit, so I'm hoping that one of the smart and tuned-in folks here can help me with this:
What is (if any) the serious argument AGAINST anti-caste laws? Note-- I'm not looking for something that follows the general contours of 'well, blah blah blah ethnocentrism blah blah blah racism blah blah'. I mean an actually intellectual argument against these laws that I might feel compelled to contemplate and perhaps ultimately support.
I think the standard liberal anti-regulation argument is strong enough: someone's decision not to employ you does not give you the right to use force against them and it doesn't give any third party (like the government) the right to use force against them either.
Agree-- that's a fine rationale. But that rationale would, I think, be in violation of the Civil Rights Act, so I assume there must be some other reason why an anti-caste law would meet resistance.
People in the US seem very afraid of being seen as racist (but not as casteist), so I'd expect to see less resistance against bad anti-racist legislation because of that.
What are the arguments that a specific law will actually resolve the problem in a way which doesn't create worse problems?
Mind that if enough popular support exists to enable the law to exist in the first place, and to be effective in the second - does a law even need to exist? Does a minority engaging in discriminatory behavior (that isn't already illegal for other reasons) count as sufficiently systemic so as to merit a systemic solution?
I can give you the standard argument against affirmative action: when you force people to hire disadvantaged groups who were previously underrepresented due to lower qualifications (which might or might not be downstream of systemic racism effects), you distort the market. Without AA, the few people in minorities hired on merit could be expected to be as competent as their peers. But if you know that AA rules are in place, then someone being in a minority actually is Bayesian evidence for them being less qualified. (This gets less pronounced in education because the correlation between admittance scores and qualification is limited: most people will not care about the SAT score of their physician.)
Reality is complicated {{citation needed}}, and there might be other factors which make AA more acceptable. For example, in customer-facing jobs, rational employers might prefer not to hire minorities if they know some of their customers are racist pricks. Enforcing AA on all employers would help removing that effect. (Of course, this touches the question if it is ever acceptable to hire people for their looks. Should a 50 year old obese guy be able to sue a strip club or Hollywood for not hiring him?)
I have little knowledge of the caste system (How would I even recognize the caste of someone? Is it encoded in the name or mannerism?) or proposed legislation, so I can't really comment on specifics.
Most affirmative action proponents would say that it just un-distorts a market that's already distorted by past and present racism. Especially in markets which have a big influence on those prejudices (e.g. you need media representation to dispel negative stereotypes, but those stereotypes also disincentivize media companies from making space for that representation).
In part, it's also about who should bear the cost, the members of minority or the employers. Maybe some of the time employers are just acting against their own best interests and affirmative action forces them not to, but often choosing the underrepresented person over another candidate will have a real cost to it (the minority hiring pool might be smaller and lower-quality due to educational or intergenerational effects of racism, the bias of customers or coworkers might make the employee less effective in their job, if you accept the white supremacy framing then even everything else being equal they will at least be in a psychologically very disadvantaged position). It's unfair to force business owners to fund the dismantling of systemic bias from their own pockets. But of course not forcing them is unfair to the people the system is biased against; it's a hard problem.
On the specific example of strip clubs, my understanding is that officially the club provides a venue and the performers are independent contractors who pay the club for a time-slot, precisely because of the nature of the customer base. A M50 BMI=40 would get a try-out if he insisted (with lawyers) and paid, but would find it a way to go broke rapidly.
Ronald Coase explained why nearly all businesses are not organised this way with "The Nature of the Firm". Perhaps they might start, with their customer-facing positions anyway.
Prior rot is absolutely a thing. Firefighters, civil engineering contractors, and similar. Even in board rooms, from what I have seen second-hand. DEI disadvantages women and minorities who are actually competent.
It would help if you linked the specific words of the anti-caste law. It is often the case that a general idea is okay, but the technical details are bad. Unfortunately, you don't legislate the general idea; you legislate the technical details. It also depends on the details how specifically this law could be abused.
My opinion on the idea in general is that casteism is an Indian form of racism, so all arguments that apply to racism, apply to casteism, too. (The technical difference is that race is usually visible, and caste is usually not. So it is possible to hide your caste, but not to hide your race.) Unfortunately, castes also play an important role in Hinduism, so arguably anti-casteism is religious intolerance. Sigh. Why must things be complicated?
The problem with anti-racist legislation in general is that sometimes it makes the race *more* visible, which is the opposite of the theoretical ideal some of us would prefer, i.e. a society where no one cares about race (any more than they care e.g. about the color of hair). Anti-racist legislation often requires you to keep records about who belongs to which race. It requires the society do design exact definitions to such detail that an actual Nazi would probably shrug and say that it doesn't really matter. (Nazis only cared about whether you had a Jewish ancestor in 3 or 4 generations. Americans care about a single drop of blood.)
Making quotas for races ignores the fact that (a) the races are already differently represented at different places, so if you e.g. hire people in a town that is 100% white, it is not really evidence of your racism if 100% of the people you hired happen to be white; and (b) even a perfectly unbiased choice has a certain probability of seeming biased, for example if you have 50% white and 50% black population, and you choose 5 people perfectly randomly, there is a 3% chance that all of them happen to be white. If you have anti-racist legislation using quotas, people can get legally punished for all this! And even if you don't, of course people will use it to attack each other.
Sometimes anti-discrimination laws backfire. For example, if you know that firing a certain person might be legally very dangerous, you will probably try to avoid hiring such person in the first place, using some legally available excuse; even if originally you had absolutely no problem with them. Or if you are legally required to hire people from some group regardless of how competent they are, people will automatically assume that the diversity hires are incompetent and you only hired them because you had to; which makes the situation worse for the actually competent ones.
If I understand it correctly, Indians of lower castes working in America prefer not to disclose their caste. (And their casteist colleagues try to figure it out anyway, by asking seemingly innocent questions e.g. about their history of vegetarianism.) A legislation based on quotas would require Indians to disclose their caste, and often the information would leak from HR. So this would be the opposite of what many of them want.
I am not an Indian, and I was never there, so I am just guessing... but I imagine that the subtle clues might be useful if both people were from the same region. Sometimes you could make a good guess based on the name alone. But a person from the opposite side of India is effectively a stranger; people of the same caste can dress and behave differently (so you only have a few crude rules such as "brahmins are vegetarians" but so are many non-brahmins). People in big cities behave differently from people in villages; they do not dress so traditionally.
Also, the Indian who wants to keep their caste secret from their Indian colleagues in Silicon Valley knows which answers to avoid. (Do not discuss religious rituals, or which gods you pray to. Do not say whether you are vegetarian for religious or other reasons. Do not mention anything about your family, such as their names, or what village they came from, or what food you typically eat at home.) The less you say, the less Bayesian evidence you provide.
Even within India, many people try to avoid the caste system by converting e.g. to Buddhism (also to Islam or Christianity, but those come with their own political connotations). But if someone wants to discriminate based on caste, they might still try to figure out which caste you or your ancestors were originally from, so it is still better to talk less.
This is false. It would be obvious to people from rural India what caste another person from the same region belongs to from all kinds of subtle cues. It would be completely opaque what caste someone from a different part of India belongs to. For urban Indians, it might or might not be apparent if both are from the same part of India, almost surely not if they are from different parts of India. And diaspora Indians (especially those who grew up outside the old country) will almost never be able to tell.
Addendum: no `anti-X-discrimination bureaucracy' ever declares `mission accomplished' and disbands. Because `you can't convince someone of something when his job depends on not believing it.' If serious discrimination cannot be found there will be microaggressions, if microaggressions cannot be found there will be imaginary aggressions, but the size of the problem (as assessed by the relevant bureaucracy) and the resources required to combat it will only grow over time. So passing a law against X discrimination entrenches X as a permanent problem requiring ever increasing resources to address.
One good argument is that it's almost certainly going to take the shape of "racial discrimination" legislation, and such legislation is based on the idea that unequal outcomes are necessarily the product of unequal treatment. From the above article:
"India outlawed caste discrimination over 70 years ago, yet several studies in recent years show that bias persists. One study found people from lower castes were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs."
Without knowing a terrible lot about India/Indians, I would bet a /substantial/ amount of money that significant heritable differences exist between indian 'castes'.
I'm sure some bona fide discrimination is taking place in India, but thousands of years of extremely strict assortative mating tends not to produce groups with very equal intelligence or other behavioral characteristics, and so just like with races in the US today, these differences are ipso facto going to be unfairly blamed on discrimination in many cases.
And caste is even less obvious than most other 'protected' categories, so its going to be very easy for "anti-discrimination" laws to abused on this basis - will employers with large numbers of indian employees have to track how many "lower caste" workers they have, lest they be accused of "caste discrimination" by the government?
Also, notice how this is being treated as an egregious form of hateful discrimination that must be stamped out, and yet there's exactly zero negative aspersions being cast on anyone involved? Like, supposedly these people are so hateful and discriminatory on essentially an ethnic basis and this behavior is happening on such a large scale that it needs to legislated against, and yet this doesn't call into question AT ALL the wisdom in importing millions of these people?
Imagine if huge numbers of white Romanians and Romanian gypsies were immigrating to the US, and it was believed that white Romanians were hatefully discriminating against gypsies on a large scale. The discussion wouldn't be "we need this discriminatory behavior to be stopped", it would be "why are we bringing these racist assholes into the country?"
Creating another discrimination bureaucracy (and associated compliance bureaucracy) has very high costs (both direct costs and opportunity costs), and we shouldn't implement expensive solutions to non-problems. This is also an argument against passing anti-Muggle-discrimination laws and anti-discrimination-against-green-eyed-people laws. I am assuming you are referring to the USA here, and not India (or the Rowlingverse) - I could also construct arguments for those but they would be different arguments. For instance: anti X discrimination laws increase the salience of X as a category. Caste is not something that is visible by looking at someone, and one might hope that it would simply dissolve away [both by intermarriage and by people ceasing to care] - but passing laws about it increases its salience and creates strong incentives to continue to track it and care about it, thus being long run counterproductive (CF if the USA had passed anti-Irish-discrimination laws).
One more question: Who are the people lobbying 'against' the anti-caste discrimination bills? I assume they aren't old school types from Mumbai who want to keep the Dalit down, but if not them then who looks at these initiatives and rejects them?
Indian business owners who don't want to keep tabs on how many lower caste indians they hire to avoid being accused of breaking caste discrimination laws.
I assume you are talking about California? I assume a combination of people who oppose creating a new giant bureaucracy, and Indian origin folk who fear such a law would end up targeting Indian origin folk. Nobody's going to suspect a white guy (or a black guy for that matter) of knowing or caring about caste, but they might suspect the Indian origin guy who committed a microaggression against another Indian origin guy. They might suspect him even if he neither knew nor cared what caste the microaggressed guy was from.
To enforce a hypothetical law against caste discrimination (and far more significantly, to protect organizations from lawsuits on grounds of caste discrimination).
My experience from university land is that basically every time a university gets sued this spawns a new deanlet, who presides over a monotonically growing bureaucratic empire designed to protect the university from that specific lawsuit risk. This bureaucratic empire never shrinks. Cue `why is higher ed so expensive.' I don't know if things work the same outside academia, but I was under the impression that a lot of what HR does even in corporations is basically `immunize against legal risks,' and I fully expect that the passage of a new anti-discrimination law would entail the hiring of large numbers of bureaucrats to immunize organizations above a certain size against lawsuit risk. And the number of bureaucrats involved would only grow over time.
This makes a ton of sense, Humphrey. I should have come to this conclusion on my own, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.
The intellectual reason to oppose racism is that doing so improves equality of opportunity, and more fundamentally, that all souls are weighed in the same scales on the Day of Judgement, or if you prefer more modern words, impartial judgement is a core feature of an open society.
As implemented, antiracism policies (DEI, AA and so on) are about trying to impose equality of outcome. In evpsych terms this is a peculiarly female thing to want, and do. It is totalitarian, as well.
My personal religion says we should discriminate on the basis of blood type.
When we talk about equality, we're nurturing bleeding-heart girly men with abundance-driven luxury beliefs. When one of us picks up a molotov or carpenters a guillotine to try to bring said equality about, we're hyperadrenal thugs and animals lacking in empathy and comity, falling short of the genetic threshold required to express a civilised inner core.
You do see the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, right? The "nurturing bleeding-heart girly men" are talking about the latter, and they are actually totalitarians in the dictionary sense, trying to control what we think and say as well as what happens in our lives.
I think you have it backwards - the question is why someone would be against a law banning caste discrimination. I.e., who would support caste discrimination (likely in California, where an anti-caste-discrimination bill was just passed and subsequently vetoed by the Governor).
Put differently, what are the intellectual reasons to keep caste discrimination legal?
There's a distinct difference between a realm of options that encourage discrimination ("keep it legal") and declining to outlaw it. I don't think the US needs any laws against hiring Martians, and it's not because I want to "keep anti-Martian discrimination legal."
This is a clever idea which has the virtue of likely being constitutional (because despite using the phrase "term limits" it would not actually boot any justices off of the Supreme Court):
> An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee.
I don't know why he didn't even try to make it *sound* like he was putting forward a sensible bipartisan proposal that ultimately benefits everybody. Some kind of term limit is a great idea, but now he's gone and branded it as a Democrat proposal designed to gain power for Democrats.
The reasonable form of this, which doesn't advantage either party, would be to introduce a term or age limit for all future justices that doesn't apply to any current justices.
Given that at least two prominent Democrats remained in office until literal death, and the party supporters are rather salty about that, then a term limit may well be a good idea.
However, this looks more like "We want to term limit judges because now decisions we don't like or want are being made, but when judges were ruling from the bench and making new laws we liked and wanted, this was not a problem".
I think it's a lot closer to "When we got to appoint/confirm justices in rough proportion to the times we won the Presidency, this was not a problem."
Clinton had two terms, appointed two justices. George W Bush had two terms, appointed two justices. Barack Obama had two terms, appointed two justices. Trump had one term, appointed three justices.
That's an outlier and is going to make people think about reforming the system to perform closer to the way it had for 20+ years. I would expect that if Biden gets to appoint six justices in his first term, Republicans will start having the same thoughts.
Part of that was Bader Ginsburg hanging on for grim death; the hindsight view is that she should have retired and given the chance to appoint a moderate/someone the Democrats could get behind. Instead, she died in office and gave Trump his chance. I think the Kavanaugh nomination hearings were so biased, it became nonsensical; yes, a rapist shouldn't be appointed to the Supreme Court, but the actual accusations came down to:
(1) When he was 17/18, he got drunk at a party and assaulted a 15 year old girl. Not very nice behaviour at all, and deserving of punishment - but back when he was 18, not thirty-some years later
(2) When he was at college, he may (or may not) have pulled his dick out at a drunken frat party and may (or may not) have stuck it in a woman's face. Oh, the horror! Meanwhile, Bill Clinton's "yes I did have an adulterous affair including sex in the Oval Office" little peccadillo wasn't even worth mentioning, why so unreasonable, Republicans?
I'm not surprised that after that Trump and the Republicans were going to take every chance they got to appoint justices they wanted, instead of playing nicely with the other girls and being bipartisan.
Looking at the list of appointees:
(1) Gorsuch to replace Scalia, due to Scalia's death. Had it not been for the whole Merrick Garland uproar, I think this wouldn't have been controversial (or at least not more than the normal level). The guy is so wibbly, it can't even be confirmed whether or not he's Episcopalian or Roman Catholic, he won't say anything one way or another (my own impression is that functionally he's Episcopalian but just hasn't bothered formally converting).
(2) Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy, due to Kennedy retiring. Well, that was a three-ring circus out of revenge for Garland and the religious angle (he's not a nice Catholic in the Biden and Pelosi mould, he's one of the dangerous fanatical zealot 'the dogma lives loudly in you' Spanish Inquisition Catholics who is going to let his religion and morals guide his legal decisions).
(3) Coney Barrett to replace Bader Ginsburg, due to Bader Ginsburg dying. This one where the hindsight wisdom is now "she should have retired due to ill-health and age back in Obama's term so we could have got our pick selected" and where it was also "she's one of the weird funky Spanish Inquisition Catholics who are gonna turn the Court into a theocracy" questioning. I did have to laugh at the media attempts to portray her Charismatic group as some kind of real-life Handmaid's Tale organisation, but I was not laughing about the late Diane Feinstein and her "the dogma lives loudly within you".
The only genuine objection there would be to the 'breaking' of the Biden Rule - when the Republicans refused to confirm Garland because it was in the end of Obama's term, but pushed for Coney Barrett even though it was in the end of Trump's term. But the way things have become so bitterly divided, the Democrats would do the same if they got the chance, and maybe this proposed bill is their attempt to do just that.
<quote>I'm not surprised that after that Trump and the Republicans were going to take every chance they got to appoint justices they wanted, instead of playing nicely with the other girls and being bipartisan.</quote>
oh, you think they decided doing this *after* those hearings? You mention Garland yourself. No side is playing nice with anyone. What good would it have done RBG retiring if nobody would be confirmed.
too much 'arguments are soldiers' going on here. whatever one side did wrong does not make what the other side did right.
And that's precisely the problem. Couching a proposal for term limits in what is clearly "we want to get our guys in and their guys out" is not going to cool down any heat or encourage "hey let's stop trying to kick each other's heads in and try doing something for the good of the country".
Neither of them should do it, but neither of them are going to stop (bar something enormous happening and forcing national unity on them for a while).
<quote> Couching a proposal for term limits in what is clearly "we want to get our guys in and their guys out" is not going to cool down any heat </quote>
It certainly could, especially if it is good policy.
Heat is not going to cool down if one side consistently wins national popular votes, and that translates to nothing. There is a big grievance there, and it is not symmetrical. (Yes I understand national popular vote does not mean anything legally, but if we're talking about *heat* that doesn't matter)
I'm totally agnostic as to the quality of the candidates. I don't think changing the selection process is going to change their caliber or get rid of partisanship.
Changing the selection process will, however, make things more predictable and broadly align the Supreme Court with the rhythm of democracy. If you want to put people on the Court, win national elections. If you want to put more people on the Court, keep winning elections.
Is there anything whatsoever to recommend our current system, whereby justices serve for their entire lives?
(1) Should Supreme Court justices serve for life? I think we see the problem most clearly with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was fairly well too ill to do the job at the end of her life and only hung on because it would be 'giving' a seat to the Republicans. So term limits in themselves are not a bad proposal
(2) But that brings us on to the second item, which *is* the problem, and again we saw it most clearly with Bader Ginsburg - 'giving' a seat on the court to the opposition. The judiciary is supposed to be independent of the legislature. If it is now reduced to "keep winning in order to put people on the court", then that blows any even notional independence to kingdom come. Now the court, instead of being an entity that rules on the law without prejudice to any side, is an arm of "my guys in power". Instead of making laws, simply get 'the judges' to rule that why yes you can indeed shoot people in the streets/seize their bank accounts/gender transition is now mandatory for four year olds/the gays get sent to the gulag/what you will.
If we're going to go back to the 17th century days of hanging judges, then at least dress 'em up to look like Jeffreys, instead of the plain black polyester 'gowns'. The public may as well get some value in entertainment from their loss of liberties.
I'm not sure I understand. The President appoints the justices and the Senate confirms them. That's been the system since the Founding. It will continue to be the system under this proposal.
The only thing that gets changed is timing - right now, you win if you control power when a justice dies or retires. That can be somewhat random and, to my knowledge, has no relation to anything we care about. If I proposed holding legislative elections, not every two years or four years or six years, but instead whenever a Supreme Court justice retired or died, you'd see in an instant how nonsensical that system would be. So instead, we have legislative elections in fixed intervals.
Why would having fixed intervals for judges hurt the independence of the judiciary?
It absolutely is that. Personally I don't care: I strongly support SCOTUS term limits and regular new appointments to it, period. If the GOP was the salty group trying to do this that would be fine, whatever.
Ideally those sorts of changes would be made via constitutional amendment but we don't do that anymore in the US, so legislative kludges like this one will have to do. And since this proposal specifically references and deploys a provision of the Constitution, it seems harder for the current SCOTUS -- if we imagined this passing into law -- making up an excuse to block it. (Still not unimaginable, granted.)
My problem with it being partisan is that while term limits may not be a bad idea at all (why not have the justice retire at 80, if they live that long? or they get 30 years on the court and that's it?), having it brought in as a nakedly partisan act (the court is being over-run with the wrong kind of judges making the wrong sort of decisions!) will mean that in future it will be "yeah, it's constitutional when it comes to your guys that they have to quit, but not when it's our guys" kind of appeals (by *both* sides, I don't expect any of the political parties to be shining angels of disinterested virtue here) which will only clog the entire process up even worse.
'Okay we need to wring every second out of the thirty year limit, so let's nominate someone who is only 30 years of age' or 'okay so the retirement age is 80, let's appoint 30 year old so we get 50 years out of them' and then the nomination hearings will be even more of a circus: side A wants to get a young (relatively speaking) judge in, so side B stonewalls as hard as possible, and the favour is returned when it's side B's turn to nominate (which will make the Merrick Garland case look like a picnic by comparison) or hair-splitting "Justice Bones is only 79 and 363 days not 80 so does not have to retire" and "Ah, but the nomination of Justice Stoney was delayed by six months so even if they are 80 they are entitled to their full 50 year tenure and should get another six months past that birthday" and so on.
Virtually every big change in our nation's constitutional structure has been highly partisan, from basically the Federalist/Anti-Federalist period onwards. That's the way our system operates even though the Framers of the Constitution naively hoped to prevent it.
The ideal scenario is when something that was bitterly partisan in its original debate and action then becomes a settled consensus view. Presidential term limits are an example of that, so is women's suffrage, and plenty of others.
The issues were partisan, but they were not by the time they became amendments. The whole point of the amendment system's onerous restrictions is to ensure everyone wants the rules to be changed before they can be.
As I said, term limits are not a bad idea. But this particular set of proposers only discovered that the Supreme Court was being partisan, out of touch, devolved from the people, too powerful, etc. when decisions they didn't like were made. When the Court was making abortion and gay marriage legal, even in the face of states passing acts about abortion and same-sex marriage that were opposed to the judicial fiat, well that was just hunky-dory. Rainbow flags in celebration all over the White House, not a pronouncement that the Court was out of step with the people as evidenced by the successful passing of acts banning same-sex marriage. In my country, we had referenda on all the social liberalisation issues. I got to vote and have my say, even if I disagree with a lot of the results. There wasn't a decision by our Supreme Court that "well now the Constitution says what we want it to say, tough luck, this is now the law of the land". If the Democratic Party senators had no problem with law-making by the Supreme Court fiat back then, what is their same problem now? Solely "our guys are not getting to make those decisions".
I'm not wholly convinced by this Damascene conversion, is what I'm saying.
"“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process,” said Senator Booker. "
Politicization of the confirmation process? These guys literally created a fake rape accusation to try and keep Kavanaugh off the supreme court.
This is a liberal power grab, nothing more. I hope it crashes and burns.
> These guys literally created a fake rape accusation to try and keep Kavanaugh off the supreme court.
While the allegations were never proven, I do not think they were proven to be fabrications either. The most you can say is that the liberal media certainly focused on them a lot.
The evidence that Biden committed sexual assault is literally much stronger than that for Kavanaugh having done so. So either the left are completely ignoring a likely sexual assault out of political convenience, OR they both fatally lack evidence but the Kavanaugh case was not instantly dismissed because it was useful to weaponize it against him to try and keep him off the court.
There's no alternative. Either the left are okay with Biden likely being a sexual predator, or they "politicized" the confirmation process.
What's worse is that the Biden accusation by Tara Reade is of the same kind as the Trump accusation by E. Jean Carroll, yet when Reade made hers then "believe women" and "it's better that there is the risk an innocent man is falsely accused than to claim any accusation is false" was immediately dumped. Now she was a crazy, malicious, politically-motivated liar making a false and incredible claim.
Maybe Reade should try going for a civil trial in New York where she can sue for defamation and assault under the Adult Survivors Act?
"In November 2022 Carroll filed her second suit against Trump (Carroll II). The suit renewed her claim of defamation and added a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations."
Ford's friends, that she says were at the party, said they do not remember any such incident and had never met Kavanaugh in their lives. That should count as pretty damning negative proof, if her words had ever counted as positive proof.
Oh, my friend. My friend. You think there were only three allegations against Brett Kavanagh?
The one thing to the credit of the late Dianne Feinstein, when the first (and most plausible) accusation of sexual harassment (not rape, despite how it was reported) was made by Christine Blasey Ford to her office, she didn't immediately jump up and down waving it about. Once the whole three ring circus got going, she was criticised for this.
So, let's go do some digging!
The three charges that were most publicised were:
(1) Christine Blasey Ford, allegation of sexual harassment at a party back when she was fifteen and he was, I don't know, eighteen or so? I'm going off memory here, but she seems to have said at some point that she was afraid she would be raped, but it didn't happen. So - sexual assault, maybe you can push it to attempted rape.
(2) Deborah Ramirez, allegation of sexual assault at a drunken frat party. Allegedly he got his dick out and shoved it in her face. Again, not rape, and I am disposed to cast doubt on it from the way it was reported - that she had to think about it and ring up her friends that "yeah it was Brett did that, right?" for a few days. But who knows, right? It's certainly plausible as "kind of thing bunch of drunken college students are idiot enough to do":
"Ramirez claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while she was intoxicated during a drinking game in the 1983-84 academic year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman. She also claimed she inadvertently touched Kavanaugh's penis when she pushed him away and says the incident left her "embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated."
She also claimed another male student yelled "Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie's face" and insisted that person used Kavanaugh's full name.
The report stated that the magazine had not corroborated that Kavanaugh was at the party in question. An anonymous male classmate said he was told that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to Ramirez within the following days."
(3) The most ludicrous one, and given that it was touted by Michael Avenatti who has undergone a dramatic fall from grace himself, the one which I think is absolute bollocks but the media lapped it up (of course): the high school drug rape gang. Oh, yes. Julie Swetnick said that she, as a freshman (I think) college student)used to attend parties back in her home town where allegedly the high school guys were drugging and raping girls; at the least, they were getting girls drunk so they passed out and/or were incapable of giving consent, then lining up to have sex with them. Kavanaugh and a friend were accused of being complicit in this:
"A third allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh was announced by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for a third woman, on September 23. On September 26, the woman, Julie Swetnick, released a sworn statement alleging that she had witnessed Kavanaugh and Mark Judge trying to get teenage girls "inebriated and disoriented so they could then be gang raped in a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys". Swetnick also alleged Kavanaugh and Judge were both present when she was the victim of one such gang rape. Swetnick subsequently walked back the allegations. Swetnick contacted NBC News October 5 and reiterated her denial of ever seeing Kavanaugh spike punch or act inappropriately toward women, and accused Avenatti of twisting her words."
"I know I said it happened, but now I'm saying it didn't happen" may or may not qualify as a "fabrication" for you, but here's one which undoubtedly *was* a fabrication; 'Jane Doe'/Judy Monroe-Leighton:
"During the hearings, another accusation of rape surfaced in a letter by "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, California, addressed to Grassley but mailed anonymously to Senator Kamala Harris on September 19. The Senate committee interrogated Kavanaugh about this claim on September 26; Kavanaugh called the accusation "ridiculous".
On November 2, 2018, Grassley announced that a woman named Judy Munro-Leighton, from Kentucky, had come forward by e-mail on October 3 as the anonymous accuser, and admitted that her accusations were fabricated. When committee staff managed to talk with her on November 1, Munro-Leighton changed her story, denying that she had penned the anonymous letter while stating that she had contacted Congress as "a ploy" in order to "get attention". She was referred to the Department of Justice and FBI for making false accusations and obstructing justice."
The even messier part of this is that Monroe-Leighton was *not* the original 'Jane Doe' so we don't know who put this claim out or is it even plausible. But as you can see, the committee *did* question Kavanaugh about it, so it wasn't simply 'oh well some crazy made a fake claim but nothing really happened'.
There was an entire tip line saga on top of all this. And looking at the names of the senators proposing that bill:
"Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) today introduced new legislation, the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act, to establish 18-year term limits and regularized appointments for Supreme Court justices. Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Peter Welch (D-VT), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) also cosponsored the legislation."
Some of them seem familiar, they wrote a letter to the FBI about the supplemental background investigation:
"On June 30, 2021, FBI assistant director Jill C. Tyson sent a letter to Democratic senators Chris Coons and Sheldon Whitehouse, in reply to a letter which the two senators had sent the Bureau on August 1, 2019, inquiring about the supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. The letter was publicly released by Senator Whitehouse in late July. In it, the Tyson disclosed that the White House Counsel had never granted the Bureau the authority to unilaterally investigate the tips it received without first receiving further approval from the White House Counsel. In the letter, Tyson claimed that the FBI received 4,500 tips through the tip line it established, and that "all relevant tips" were forwarded to the Office of the White House Counsel.
Following the letter to Whitehouse and Coons, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Coons, Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, and Cory Booker requested additional information from FBI Director Christopher Wray on the 2018 supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. On July 21, 2021, the senators wrote to Wray: "The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to . . . allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored." The senators ultimately asked for an explanation as to how the tips were evaluated, what follow-up occurred for this investigation, and why the FBI purposefully did not interview key witnesses."
Whitehouse, Blumenthal, Hirono, and Booker - involved in the Kavanaugh letter and now in this proposed bill. Ain't that a coinkydink?
Is it any wonder that Kavanaugh appeared angry at the hearings, which again, some in the media space of articles and think-piece writers used as evidence that of course he was a guilty rapist? Why else was he being so hostile?
"An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee. "
Yes, I too support wildly partisan policies explicitly designed to remove power from the politicians' opponents.
Also
"unaccountable Court out of step with the American people"
The supreme court is no more or less accountable now than when there were fewer conservative justices.
And the idea that the supreme court is *supposed* to be "[in] step with the american people" is plain stupid. The point of the supreme court is specifically to interpret the law objectively and free from partisan or populist political concerns. You can argue about how well they've lived up to this, but when you're explicitly saying that the supreme court exists to enact the SUPPOSED will of "the american people", then your bill is bad, it should fail, and shame on you for acting like you're the ones being the responsible grown ups.
Virtually every case you've ever heard of came to the Supreme Court through its appellate jurisdiction. Meaning you had a trial with someone else and the Supreme Court is reviewing the work of the lower court.
There are some cases which start at the Supreme Court. For example, cases involving ambassadors. From 1789 to 1959 (170 years), there were only 126 written opinions from the Supreme Court involving cases where the Supreme Court had original, rather than appellate jurisdiction. The vast majority of the Supreme Court cases come from its appellate jurisdiction, which Congress can modify.
I cannot stress to you how much the original jurisdiction cases do not matter outside of law school and/or bar trivia.
Well a few of them have mattered, water rights being a pretty big deal in the western half of the country. But yea overall you've summarized the situation nicely.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
"astralcodexten.com" doesn't work. It needs the "www.". Or, on Firefox at least, it works if I have a slash at the end: "astralcodexten.com/" Maybe this is a known issue, I don't know
So, it would seem (I'm exercising a three-minute commenting rule on fast-moving global events) that Israel has agreed to open the Rafah crossing to some humanitarian supplies, in the context of Biden's visit. I assume the decision had been made in advance, but Biden's acquiescence to Israel's version of events regarding the hospital bombing as well as today's American veto of an UNSC resolution calling for a humanitarian pause helped ensure Israel wouldn't rescind it.
My understanding of Rafah is that Egypt and Hamas control it physically, but Israel retains a monitoring presence on the Egyptian side and (with Egyptian cooperation) is capable of closing it and vetoing the entry of people and cargo into the strip. It can, and does, back up its desires with violence, as with yesterday's bombing of the Saladin road leading up to the crossing. The EU monitoring mission for the crossing exists on paper but is largely shuttered at this point.
Egypt, for its part, doesn't want large numbers of Palestinians to flood out of Gaza into its territory. This is motivated primarily by fear of an internal humanitarian crisis (although there has been some furtive talk of aid for Egypt from the EU and Arab states to support Palestinian refugees if Egypt permits their entry). To a lesser extent the el-Sisi regime is motivated by internal political fears (many Palestinians would be sympathetic to what remains of the Muslim Brotherhood), as well as by the external Arab political principle of maintaining Gaza as a Palestinian entity and part of future independent Palestine. There is a world in which Israel occupies Gaza, makes it into more of a living hell than it already is, and most civilians simply leave for Egypt, which results in de facto Israeli annexation.
What worries me is that I don't see how supplies are meant to enter given the destruction of the roads and infrastructure on the Palestinian side of the crossing - and in the early reports I don't see any suggestion of an intra-Gaza safety corridor to get them over to the strip's north, where humanitarian conditions are worst.
I know this isn't particularly relevant to the question posed here, but I want to credit the people commenting here for immediately moving past 'who do we blame for this disaster' to 'how do we unfuck this?'. The fact that this is the intellectual reflex of the people who post here is an enormous credit to this community.
"Egypt, for its part, doesn't want large numbers of Palestinians to flood out of Gaza into its territory. This is motivated primarily by fear of an internal humanitarian crisis "
I don't know that it means anything to talk about the motivation of a country. To the extent that we're pretending to know what motivates Al-Sisi, I'd think he is aware of the history of the Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan.
We can substitute 'Egypt as run by el-Sisi' for 'Egypt' where appropriate, if you like.
And I'm sure he is, but I think that among the considerations of the Egyptian state, fear of Palestinians being internally rowdy is some distance behind the fear of humanitarian catastrophe and the fear of being seen to abet the surrender of Gaza to Israel. Egypt is a country of over a hundred million people, and we're not in the seventies anymore. I highly doubt even one or two million brutalised Palestinian civilians could seriously threaten the regime. At most, the Brotherhood's support would swell somewhat.
Would there be any hope of having Egypt annex Gaza? Have the Egyptian army sweep into it? Have the Egyptian courts decide what to do with Hamas members? Israel and Egypt have been able to co-exist for decades at this point.
"Finally, on 26 October 1994, Jordan signed the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, which normalized relations between the two countries and resolved territorial disputes between them." but I don't know what the status of Israel-Jordan relations is today.
To a not-insignificant extent, Jordan's relations with Israel are hostage to its special economic zones, which have free trade status with the United States as long as some production inputs come from Israel.
Raped and beaten Sri Lankan seamstresses ensure peace across the Jordan river. Such is the sad poetry of the modern world.
That sounds brutal. To make sure I'm following you correctly, are the abused Sri Lankan seamstresses working in the special economic zones in Jordan? IIRC, there are abused South Asian workers working in Dubai. Are abused South Asian workers pervasive in the Middle East?
Is the question of what such an annexation would mean for Palestinian self-determination not even worth asking?
As to the plan of bribing Egypt: not all things can be bought. As I mentioned in the top post, there would be intense political resistance, perilous even to a coup-installed dictatorship like el-Sisi's, to the idea of Egypt being in position to grant Palestinian self-government in Gaza but refusing to do so. And that's even without getting into the Egyptian army being frankly unlikely to succeed in the Stalingrad scenario the IDF is about to face.
I agree, an occupied Gaza seems like a terrible liability for the occupier. If I was Egypt, you would have to pay me ten times my GDP to go into that particular trap, and I don't think Israel can afford that big a bribe.
Would the Gazans even resist the Egyptian army the way they would the Israeli army? Re self-determination: If the Gazans had the degree of autonomy that a city of 2 million has as a municipal government within Egypt, would that reduce the political resistance (and resistance from whom - would they be a significant threat to el-Sisi?). As to bribing Egypt - well, most rulers want to acquire more territory and more people under their control. Admittedly the Gazans are difficult - but perhaps would be less so under the control of their co-religionists. The bribe only has to cover the extent to which the Gazans are unusually difficult.
I think a bigger issue is that Israel will lose a lot of their reasoning for blockading the Gaza Strip if it belongs to Egypt. The Egyptians can complain about the restrictions and also would have trouble maintaining any kind of limitations on trade to Egypt itself. The same 2.x million people would be in Gaza, with their desire to destroy Israel. This means far more weapons within Gaza and far less ability to do anything about it - and no way for Israel to unilaterally handle it without causing an issue with Egypt.
I think Israel and Egypt would both be very against such a plan at this point.
Perhaps. Alternatively, the Gazans would then be Egyptian citizens, and Egypt would not want them launching strikes in violation of Egypt's foreign policy. The Gazans also might, over time, disperse throughout Egypt. The aggressiveness of the more militant Gazans could become an Egyptian police matter. Israel wouldn't need to blockade Gaza if Egypt policed it.
An awful lot of Gazans support Hamas, and Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is a mortal foe of the current Egyptian government, and vice versa. The current Egyptian government is very much *not* going to favor a plan that involves a huge number of murderously violent Muslim Brotherhood supporters with large hidden caches of weaponry, suddenly becoming Egyptian citizens with freedom of movement in Egypt.
Note also that this would create a situation where if a Gazan is upset about all the poverty and oppression and despair, the obvious target of their ire is going to be Cairo rather than Jerusalem.
In the very unlikely event that Egypt takes over administration of Gaza, they're going to keep the Gazans walled up in Gaza as non-citizens.
And that's another reason why Egypt doesn't want Gaza, which is full of people who want to kill their friends (well , frenemies). They don't want their new citizens dragging them to war with Israel.
From Egyptians themselves. Popular approval of cooperation with Israel is considerably lower in Egypt than even in most Arab countries, quite possibly because said cooperation isn't fluffy stuff like trade, but concrete security cooperation aimed against Palestinians. In a poll last year, nearly 90% of Egyptians responded in the negative to whether or not people should be allowed to have business or sports contacts with Israelis. A similar percentage of Egyptians disapprove of the Abraham Accords between Israel, UAE, and Bahrain. That's technically fine, it's a dictatorship after all, but the probability of creating a political flashpoint out of directly occupying Palestinian land to make Israel's life easier is accordingly quite high.
I think (your use of 'Gazan' is a hint) you might be undervaluing the strength of Palestinian nationalism. Hamas isn't popular because it's particularly religious, it's popular because it's among the organisations that at least ostensibly fight for sovereignty or at least nihilistically punish Israel for denying it, while Fatah no longer does and is seen as Israel's policeman. I really don't think getting to elect a Hamas-lite mayor would at this point be a substitute for a sovereign state.
"I think (your use of 'Gazan' is a hint) you might be undervaluing the strength of Palestinian nationalism."
The analogy that I have in mind (and it may well be a false one) is the Pakistani civil war that lead to Bangladesh splitting off. Admittedly I'm just looking at the noncontiguous West Bank and Gaza, remembering Pakistan, and being skeptical about how united the two groups are.
What's in it for Egypt? Two million poverty-stricken and ultra-troublesome people, a disputed border, an internal terrorist group determined to attack a neighbouring country, and a strip of crappy coastal desert of the type that Egypt already has in abundance.
Perhaps bribe Egypt with additional aid? It would be worth a considerable amount to the USA to have the middle east be quieter. Egypt might also have a freerer hand pacifying the Gazans than Israel gets, with world interest about as focused on it as it is on e.g. Yemen.
They have, and a majority of Israelis might well be persuadable now that having Egypt in charge of Gaza would be an improvement.
But the politics and practicalities for Egypt of taking on the responsibility, would be very difficult. If any Arab nation was eager to take responsibility for the health and future of the Palestinians it would have happened long before now.
A cynical interpretation would be that the road is there only for the PR reasons. The goal is not to let the supplies in. The goal is to *say* "we have let the supplies in", and have people repeat this all over the internet.
I'm trying not to leap to that conclusion, but it's far from impossible.
Another red flag is that the humanitarian aid is allowed to enter on condition (stated verbatim by Biden) that Hamas doesn't take control of it. Which sounds perfectly fine on paper, except that Hamas runs the Ministry of Health. If the Hamas-controlled al-Shifa hospital, which is the largest hospital in Gaza, gets - as it must - a significant proportion of the supplies, does that count as taking control of it? And how well can we trust the United States and Israel not to decide arbitrarily whenever they please that yes, yes it does?
Yeah, it's like saying that you'll ship something to the US only if the federal government doesn't take control of it. Which, sure, technically, that would be possible. But they're the government, this is their territory, they've got the most men with guns, and everyone here knows that.
Even if you abstained from the men with guns argument and somehow assumed the purest of humanitarian intentions of Hamas, there's no way they can fulfil that condition on pure logistical grounds.
The absolute most charitable interpretation is that the stipulation is meant to concentrate the supplies in the south, where the remaining NGOs operate more robustly, and entice the desperate to move that way so that the IDF incursion, which will concentrate on the north, finds fewer civilians in its way. But I doubt that's it.
The fact that fuel is excluded also doesn't bode well. No fuel, no electricity, no sanitation, no dialysis machines, no surgery, no digging out corpses from under the rubble.
The hospital explosion in Gaza is an example of how the media reports on controversy to the exclusion off factual news. Undoubtedly, missiles fired from Israel's side have killed hundreds of civilians already - but what gets the headlines is an instance where it's not entirely clear what happened. The result is to create an environment where the public lets confirmation bias determine their beliefs, as they are only presented with 50% (weightless) Bayesian updates. Now that social media plays a large part in deciding what is communicated, we can see that it is not due to any kind of conspiracy. Content consumers are more interested in engaging in endless debates without sufficient information to reach a conclusion than they are in straightforward facts with one possible interpretation: even at the cost of knowing anything. I first noticed this in the police violence reporting around the time of George Floyd where cases that lead to arguments got more collective air time than cases where even those who generally supported the police considered unacceptable.
If Israel had killed 500 people by attacking a hospital without warning, that would be a candidate for the most pointlessly cruel thing they have done so far. Israel bombing Gaza and killing civilian bystanders (whose numbers add up) is just business as usual.
Scale matters, as does deliberate choice of targets. For example, Hamas liking to kill Israeli civilians was not exactly a new revelation, any number of rockets and suicide bombings has made that clear for decades. What was new was that they were (a) succeeding on a much larger scale than previously thought possible and (b) deliberately going for maximum atrocity. (In terrorist bombings, there can be some debate which victims were intentional targets and which were considered acceptable collateral damage. If you intentionally shoot kids, not so much.)
(I very much do not intend to liken the Hamas atrocities to that supposed hospital bombing. Executing civilians is proof of a genocidal intent while the bombing of hospitals during a war could have excuses.)
Also, controversial stories form more competitive memes. If everyone agrees on the facts and the judgement, you can just report the facts and move on. If the facts are contested, however, this makes an ideal signal of tribal identity.
From memory (someone correct me if it's wrong), the average Israeli bomb dropped on Gaza caused 0.1 dead civilian. If one caused 500, that's a pretty big outlier (a 500 000% increase from the average, if I'm not mistaken), and therefore quite noteworthy.
It's extremely clear at this point from footage and the site that it was a rocket fired from within Gaza, that it or a component of it landed in a parking lot instead of a hospital, and that it couldn't possibly have killed 500 people.
What's left to determine, other than the question of whether it was Hamas or Islamic Jihad that fired the rocket?
I'd suggest that humans simply interpret ambiguous situations the way they wish were true. Something with 50/50 odds is as ambiguous as it gets, and will generate the most controversy between people who interpret it differently, so we'll hear about it more. Unambiguous situations don't have this problem, so we hear about them less.
Disagree, simply on the basis that the media was already determined to make a huge deal out of it when they initially assumed it could be blamed on Israel; see this tweet showing several successive New York Times front pages https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1714416589724864790
If anything, you can expect it to disappear from the news as it becomes more apparent that it was Hamas.
I don't think there was ever a point in time when strong evidence implicating Israel was ever known to the Times. Rather the window in which they could make a controversial claim closed, so they walked back to a controversial implication and participation in a controversy. The uncontroversial missile strikes are mentioned nowhere in those screen captures, which is essentially my point (although they are not random samplings.)
I think it's a mix. Content definitely has more longevity, especially on social media, when it's debatable. Footage of a cop shooting a man sleeping on a park bench in cold blood would draw universal condemnation, but result in a briefer window of coverage dominance than a shooting where the facts were uncertain and people could entrench to throw rocks at each other from their preferred positions.
However, it's also the case that *drama* for lack of a better word, is a factor. An airline crash that kills dozens will make headlines even if the causes are known and nothing about it is debatable - it just won't stay in the headlines for as long as an airline crash where the cause is indeterminate or has some other kind of suspenseful cliffhanger to be solved.
I do agree about the outcome, though, that the result is more airtime for content which is both dramatic and debatable, which leaves audiences more windows to entrench to their own interpretations than more authoritative/fact-based coverage would.
I just read that some local organizations in St. Louis, with the support of that city's mayor, are putting together resources to bring Central/South American migrants there from Chicago and try to get them to settle in St. Louis. (STL is only a 5-hour bus ride from Chicago which is why they are targeting that location as people source rather than Texas or Florida or NYC.)
This follows up a similar effort a few years ago which resettled 2,000 Afghani asylum seekers who have (according to the article I read) "found jobs and started businesses and cultural organizations." That program in turn was inspired by a wave of Bosnian-war refugees settling in STL starting in the 1990s (as of 2013 that city had 70,000 residents of Bosnian heritage which is the largest such community in the country).
That makes sense and I have wondered why more of the US's declining but still sizeable cities/counties haven't pursued it. Places like STL which were once leading urban areas [4th-largest city in the US in 1950, 58th-largest now] and are still sizeable clusters of restorable urban housing stock plus local demand for unskilled and semi-skilled workers? Where a bunch of highly-motivated people could get a fresh community going and turn around some urban decay and/or a stagnant older suburb.
Seems like there are a dozen or more mid-to-large "rust belt" metros where that approach would be sensible.
In theory, elected officials are supposed to be doing the will of the people who elected them. As some mayors of sanctuary cities recently found out, bringing in a lot of migrants is not what their constituents want, for a variety of reasons.
I think this could be a factor even though, in practice, elected officials who do not expect to be voted out frequently ignore the desires of their voters completely.
Few politicians would want to effect a huge change in their voting base, because in many cases it would cause them to lose all future elections. If you want to be supported by everybody you'd have to be a bipartisan anti-corruption civics-focused candidate, and we all know how rare those are.
Bringing in refugees has zero effect on the voter base until many years down the line, when current politicians are mostly out of office. It might have substantial effect on the opinions of current voters.
More and more city mayors are term limited though, and even if they're not the turnover in those jobs has dramatically sped up. The days of 25-year "boss" type mayors of large US cities are long gone.
Also the STL efforts in the 2000s (Bosnians) and 2010s (Afghans) and now (central/south Americans) have not been initiated or funded by the city. The current mayor has simply endorsed it and agreed not to impede it.
Yes, I was reflecting on Melvin’s comment and I don’t know which word is more offensive as a whole. But ISTM they offend *differently*: ‘fucking’ offends against purity/refinement, where ‘retarded’ offends mainly against kindness.
>Yes, I was reflecting on Melvin’s comment and I don’t know which word is more offensive as a whole. But ISTM they offend *differently*: ‘fucking’ offends against purity/refinement, where ‘retarded’ offends mainly against kindness.
If I said "there's a lot of fucking black people in this neighborhood" as opposed to "there's a lot of black people in this neighborhood", people aren't getting offended due to purity/refinement reasons.
Both come from the same trajectory - words with a neutral meaning that took on negative connotations and connections. Prior to "retarded" were words like moron and idiot - which at one point were also meant to be neutral descriptions of a real condition. Retarded was meant to be a kind and gentle way to express it, to get away from older and nastier words. There's a very strong chance that whatever term replaces the concept will take on the negative connotations. Some previously horrendous swear words that were rare to hear have been redefined. 30 years ago you wouldn't hear them used at all, but more recently they've been downgraded for many people, becoming common in songs and movies.
What's interesting to me is that even in areas (such as Rationalist forums) where swearing is considered fairly normal there are words that can't even be spoken/written. The most obvious would be the n-word, but there are others. Even in this context of intellectual discussion of the basis of swear words, people would be very bothered by me writing the word out. I haven't seen it tested, but I wouldn't be surprised to get a warning from Scott for writing it uncensored. Society will always have words that seem beyond the pale, but the specific words change a lot over time.
I actually don’t think that’s true. When I expressed my thoughts here about Bostrom’s apology I used the word ‘nigger’ several times, rather than referring to “the n word.” I have used the word ‘motherfucker’ on here several times— didn’t call anyone a motherfucker — I forget the context but but it was not an angry insult delivered to another poster. Also wrote ‘cunt’ in a post once, describing being sexually harassed multiple times as a young woman by random guys shouting stuff using the word ‘cunt.’ as I passed. So I think I hit the Big 3. Nobody has complained about my using any of these words. Never heard a peep out of Scott, and would have been astounded if I had.
I mean to say absolutely nothing implying a prejudice against black people by typing those six letters in that precise order.
If I had a distaste for black people I probably wouldn't be living in a black neighborhood.
I am aware that there are people who have a particular racial animus and use that word as an expletive but neither I nor 80% of the people writing here share such sentiments which is why if we are utilizing that word we are most likely not utilizing it as a weapon.
And aren't fewer weapons what we want? Hell, in Australia, every living being is a "cunt" and the loss of that weaponized word hasn't seemed to keep any shrimps off the barbie or babies out of dingos.
Moreover, I have a form of tourettes wherein being told that I *may not* say something "because I said so!" enjoins within my spirit a compunction to say it.
Every free-souled individualist on Earth feels an honest moral obligation to fight arbitrary rules set by Authority and/or the threat of violence, censorship or some other punishment.
Teenagers have told me that "autistic" is the most common pejorative highschool students call each other now. Adults will continue to cancel new words while teenagers will always find new words to use pejoratively. A generation from now autistic will probably be considered as offensive as retarded and fuck before that, and then some new word will replace autistic in the technical literature; meanwhile teenagers will find some new technical term to hurl abusively at each other and transmogrify into slang.
I think that "autistic" is reasonably likely to last longer than usual, because the people whom it describes like it and are generally anti-language-games.
I mean, noticing it puts you ahead of 99% of adults but it's still pretty ridiculous that this is something you'd have to even *notice* in the first place.
Let me back up...
I speak from the point of view of The One Who Remembereth The Millennia (really, am your guide, rabbi, and scholar of jewish history) so let me again applaud you for noticing how utterly bs everything is because, well, everyone else seems to take current moral certitudes (it aint just words) seriously enough to willy nilly accuse anyone over 80 year of being evil racist/rapists.
But *from* my admittedly rare perspective I remain amazed at how ponderously shortsighted people are.
How is it that 10 year olds know how to do fractions but have no understanding of where groceries or electricity come from. After all, isn't that *why* they're in school? How is their situation not addressed? Why are they ordered to engage in activities for which purpose they have no understanding??
See the culprit for the lack of understanding among human beings (which causes the perpetual generational revolutions) is the desire to keep children tiny rather than to incorporate them into the "council of independents".
Usually this is done so very successfully that people remain children until their 90th birthday.
Your saying that failing to keep up with the treadmill is insulting reinforces and accelerates the treadmill.
If everyone nice defied the treadmill, there wouldn't *be* a treadmill, because a nice word can't become evidence of nastiness *as long as the nice people all still use it*.
The treadmill exists because and only because people try to play Whorfian language games in opposition to human nature.
There is one institution in NY that ran the entire euphemism gamut before being shut down in the movement to mainstream those with learning difficulties:
Wow, that's amazing as a historical reference. For those that don't want to read the page, the names were:
New York Asylum for Idiots
State Idiot Asylum
Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children
Syracuse State School for Mental Defectives
Then they gave up trying to keep a descriptor and just made it the Syracuse State School. Each of those names sounds offensive to our ears, but at the time would have been "progressive" and attempting to use neutral or even kind language to describe the residents. This is going to happen again, as with what Hank says with the word Autistic or whatever term we find to use.
Regardless of who it was, it seems almost certainly to have been accidental. For either side to have done it intentionally implies a level of evil that (although their enemies might believe it) seems very unlikely.
If it was in fact an accident, I'm not sure it matters which side did it. Both are using powerful weapons that could easily cause this kind of large-scale death, and neither of which can fully prevent this kind of accident. We could talk about one or both having an unhealthy indifference to the deaths of others, including civilians. From the outside it looks like they are both doing things with a likely result of lots of Gazan civilian casualties. If these deaths are incidental to other goals and not directly intended, I'm not sure how much difference there is between thousands of deaths in a bombing campaign and 500 in a single strike.
Of course, if either side did it on purpose that changes a lot, but again, I don't think that's likely.
> If it was in fact an accident, I'm not sure it matters which side did it.
Only if you consider the tactics and goals of both sides equally valid. Even with accidents, context matters: shooting someone in a hunting accident is generally a lesser crime than accidentally shooting someone in a bank robbery.
I think that the IDF bombing Hamas in Gaza can be part of a potentially successful strategy to eradicate Hamas. I do not think that Hamas or PIJ firing unguided rockets into Israel improves their chances to eradicate Israel. I also happen to feel that the goal of eradicating Hamas is just while the goal of eradicating Israel is vile.
That being said, I also hold the IDF to a much higher standard of conduct than Hamas.
I agree with you that it was almost certainly an accident, but I don’t agree that who it was doesn’t matter. If it was an Israeli mistake, it is much more damaging to them than the reverse would be to the Palestinians. It is already very damaging to Israel, because it seems the majority of people out there are jumping to the conclusion that it was them. If it could be proved conclusively that it was a Palestinian error then the popular conclusion would be “a terrible accident in a just cause.”
I should clarify that I meant "morally" in terms of why it doesn't matter. That Israel is stronger and more western leads pretty much everyone to hold them more accountable than Hamas - which is part of the reason that Biden is visiting Israel and not Gaza/West Bank. Israel gets special privileges from being inside, but also more responsibilities.
Morally speaking, I don't think it matters who accidently dropped a random bomb out of hundreds/thousands, so long as they were giving some reasonable level of diligence to not doing that. Accidents happen. Accidents with large bombs are going to kill people that shouldn't have died. That's built into the nature and practice of war.
> But in fact, very few people are inherently evil or even close to it.
I agree in general, but I also think that evil people are naturally attracted to certain professions (e.g. the ones where it is legal for them to hurt other people), so they may be overrepresented there.
It would be good if they released some of the concrete evidence they say they have proving it was an errant missile fired by a Palestinian organization in Gaza. The infrared satellite imagery, the videos, etc.. I don’t know that it would make much difference, but it would be useful.
If Israel were to fake and share such an interception they likely would have made Hamas operatives claiming to do it purposefully rather than accidental.
In fact this conversation (somewhat) exonerates the Gazan factions from the more powerful accusation that they did it on purpose as a flase flag.
Presumably Israel would not have released this had Biden not been visiting today because it really doesn't serve their purpose. The evidence is likely rather strong that it came from the Gazan factions and Israel could (should?) have allowed people to draw their own conclusions about why that would be, but the Americans appear to have forced their hand (as indeed appears to have been import to Biden from his remarks on the matter).
White House won't say if they believe Israel's explanation that Islamic Jihad was behind the strike on the hospital. Israel feels “very strongly” they did not cause it, NSC's Kirby said. They “categorically and very stridently denied that they had anything to do with it.”
Asked if the US was giving Israel the “benefit of the doubt,” Kirby paused a bit,
@betsy_klein
reports. “I think we certainly recognize that they feel very strongly that this was not caused by them,” Kirby said.
Biden has now come out and officially said that he believes that the explosion was caused by an errant Hamas missile, and not by Israel. He cites intelligence reports that he's seen "today". The White House National Security Council also put out a statement to the same effect, citing "analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information."
I don’t think they ever claimed that they knew it. They certainly took both of those things seriously or at least maintained they did. If I recall correctly, Steele released his report in the wild, because he was frustrated that the United States intelligence agencies were not taking it seriously enough.
The big difference here is that there is physical evidence that can settle this question. Right now they are asking us to take their word for it. It would be nice if some of these things were released to the public, the satellite imagery and other forensic evidence. It is the United States defense department claiming this was a Palestinian error, not the NSA or the CIA or the FBI. It’s a pretty bold faced lie if that’s what they’re up to.
The way the Hunter Biden laptop came into the public was pretty murky, some computer repair guy giving someone else’s computer to Rudy Giuliani. It did stink.
Beat me to it....I have a college classmate who went on to spend a lot of years working as an analyst for a major well-known U.S. intelligence agency. (He'd not want me to say which one.) He always said that the sort of intelligence-gathering certainty portrayed in popular culture is not only extremely rare in real life but is downright dangerous. Basically that an analyst who drank that kool-aid, and/or a policymaker who bought into it, does no favors either for national security or for his/her own job security.
Hamas, accidentally, but with only moderate confidence.
Israel is a modern western democracy with a reasonably free press, such that an IDF soldier or pilot would be more likely than a Hamas militant to call a reporter and say "hey, we just blew up a hospital and now they're telling us to cover it up and I know that's wrong". Which in turn means the Israelis have a stronger disincentive to order an attack and/or coverup that could lead to such blowback.
And Israel is saying that it has video and communications intercepts that show it was Hamas. I want to see that video examined by skeptical experts, and AFIK that hasn't happened yet, but in general it's more likely to be the side that doesn't have anything to hide that offers video.
Hamas has some fairly potent artillery rockets, and they've never been shy about launching them from places like a hospital parking lot, so a rocket that e.g. blows a nozzle two seconds after launch falling on a hospital is certainly plausible enough. An IDF mistake is also possible, as the ugly nature of this war means they're going to have to hit targets very close to things like hospitals. Their ordnance is generally more precise and more reliable than Hamas's, but it isn't perfect.
Either way, we can afford to wait for more information.
It's also looking like the death toll is closer to 50 than 500, which is good news no matter who screwed up. And my own assessment, now that we have daylight imagery, is that this was about 10-15 kg of explosives, more consistent with one of the larger Qassam-style improvised rockets than an aircraft-delivered bomb or missile. Also video from I think two different angles showing a salvo of rockets being launched roughly over the hospital just a few seconds before the explosion at the hospital.
I don't know if Netanyahu himself has categorically and unequivocally denied it being Israel, but if he has, I would count that as strong evidence for more or less the rationale you just detailed.
We will never know. People dumb enough to comment on these things will never consider the possibility it was the other side and continue to bleat about it endlessly.
I don't know, and I can't see a way to find out. Thinking about it just turns my own brain into yet another battlefield, and that's the last thing I want.
Sure, and they'll say "Hey we have evidence that this evidence is fake" and the other guys will say "No, _your_ evidence is fake!" and we won't get any closer to the truth.
Media outlets really should have a lot of egg on their face over this whole incident. Reporting Hamas propaganda as fact immediately "Israeli air strike kills 500 at hospital" then being forced to backpedal over the course of 24 hours to "Explosion kills some people at a hospital, we dunno" is the kind of thing that they ought to be putting out full front-page apologies about, but they won't.
Meanwhile I'm just waiting for the Gell-Mann amnesia to set in so I can get outraged about the Next Thing.
But no, see, what they said was "Israeli air strike kills 500 at hospital, local sources report". So it's all good! The media very rarely lies, after all.
I think the argument there is the rocket was still full of its propellant, because it hadn’t gone very far. That increased the size of the explosion considerably.
Some twitter account called "Geoconfirmed" is claiming footage confirms it to be a Palestinian missile. I haven't read it closely enough yet to know how convinced I should be by their arguments https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1714390254935851272
I agree that the explosion seems far too big for a little rocket. Could it be a secondary explosion from an ammo dump or similar stored at the hospital?
The argument is the rocket was still full of fuel, because it hadn’t gone very far which seriously increased the size of the explosion. That’s credible.
There's a single, small crater at the blast site which strongly suggests a ground-level explosion. That would still be consistent with an initial airborne flash, if that's the catastrophic failure of the solid rocket motor of an artillery rocket. Which would then fall somewhere downrange, with its warhead and possibly some unburned propellant. It's not consistent with any air-launched weapon I know of, unless the airborne flash is unrelated and coincidental.
The alternative (that a missile happened to explode in the air just above where an Israeli bomb just happened to hit several seconds later) doesn't seem like a less improbable coincidence.
Setting aside the issue at hand, I like your clarification regarding "various improbables".
It is common in discussions regarding religious beliefs (and many other subjects) for one side to point out how very improbable a particular fundamental appears to be.
What they generally fail to cinsider is how very improbable the presumed-but-unstated alternative option is.
Odd facts often have to be accounted for via one of various improbabilities and the selective focus on the improbability of one of them is an inaccurate way to go about ascertaining the truth.
As for the matter in question, I haven't attempted to do a home-baser analysis but I would presume that if Netanyahu says unequivocally that it was not Israel then that's probably true - for the simplr reason that he knows the truth is likely to come out and he has much to lose if he unequivocally lies on this matter.
In which zionist commenters who have spent the past week outraged that anyone could possibly condone the actions of Hamas explain why Israel bombing a hospital and murdering hundreds of peope is perfectly okay
Honestly , the fact that several far-right commenters here have decided to side with islamic terrorists against Western allies, for no apparent reason other than "fuck the Jews", is as breathtaking as far-left activists deciding that Muslims who stone gays and force women to wear burquas are actually great allies because at least they hate Christians.
Both these reactions are among the most shameful things to come out of this recurrent conflict.
We all agree bombing hospitals is bad, but the fact that when Hamas said it was Israel and Israel said it was Hamas, the commentor immediately believed Hamas, does indicate that the commenter has "decided to side with Islamic terrorists against Western allies". I'll leave interpretations as to why to others.
On the one hand, we have a bunch of genociding thugs who were repeatedly caught before[1] bombing hospitals, schools, and Red Cross facilities and vehicles[2], then lying about it, inventing evidence and preventing neutral investigators from entering the scene by threat of force. This lovely faction, call it Genocide army, bombed the exact same hospital they deny bombing on the 17th of October on the 14th of October by rockets[3]. Genocide army's chief cheerleader/paid-shill Hananya Naftali was the first social media account posting a photo of the destroyed hospital and claiming its a Hamas base, before deleting it and then never mentioning it again. Asked by Russia to show Satellite images of the attack to prove innocence[4], Genocide army's response is.... nothing. Pretending to be deaf I guess.
On the other hand, we have a clip from Al-Jazzera's coverage showing nothing, quite literally, just a ball of light exploding in the middle of the night as far as any human eye is concerned. Oh and how can I forget, we also have an obviously fabricated audio clip of people speaking laughably broken and foreign Arabic, courtesy of the Genocide army of course. Very powerful piece of evidence indeed. There is some additional auxiliary evidence, like Genocide's army spokesman holding a printed satellite image and waving a stick around it while saying very earnestly that it was not the Genocide army who did it.
I hope Genocide army can prove its innocence in this difficult courtroom. People are just aweful these days, always siding with Disgusting, Shameful, Anti-Semitic, Far-Right, Far-Left, And Islamist factions against the peace-loving tree-hugging Genocide army.
I do not think "Genocide army" is a fitting description of the IDF.
If genocide was their goal, they would be doing an utterly incompetent job of it. "Oh, let's bomb some hospital parking lot and kill perhaps a 100 civilians. If we do this once a day, it would just take us some 65 years to murder the present population of Gaza."
> it would just take us some 65 years to murder the present population of Gaza."
Sure, why not. They have all the time in the world, why wouldn't they take their time when every time they murder thousands the "LeaDeR of ThE Free WoRLd" unconditionally ass-kisses them and uses billions in dollars and weapons tonnages to support them even more.
There is a reason the genocidal scum call it "Mowing The Lawn". They take their sweet time genociding the current Gaza population a thousand by a thousand. When new Gazans "grow" again, which they can always murder them in the next 65 years.
What do you think they were doing the last 75 after all ?
The fact that you come down on the wrong side on this issue is pretty much an indictment of all your other beliefs, isn't it? There's a lot of nonsense going around but all the independent analysis is pointing the same way (not yours). The fact that you're even talking about a destroyed hospital when the hospital was not destroyed is a red flag, might want to change up your take on that.
> pretty much an indictment of all your other beliefs, isn't it?
Pretty much, yeah. Anyone against Genocide army is Disgusting, Shameful, Anti-Semitic, Far-Right, Far-Left, And Islamist. I think we have already established that fairly conclusively.
> all the independent analysis
The independent analysis done by the same military advisors to Genocide army ? Whose conclusions are always filtered and communicated through the public ramblings of an 80-years old who parroted lies about beheaded babies and travelled half a globe to ass-kiss a genocidal war criminal in the middle of a war ?
Fine. I will take what I can get.
Where is their report ? Their findings ? The material they based their conclusions on ? I want to read all the "Analysis" and judge for myself. Or should I just Trust The Science on this one ?
> talking about a destroyed hospital
Ah ok my bad, the destroyed parking lot of a hospital where no less than 100 civilians among them a confirmed 20+ kids were sheltering.
There, I would never want to make Genocide army look bad, they can do that far better than I could already.
Hey, I know I'm breaking a cardinal rule of online sanity here by responding as a non-anonymous rabbi to an anonymous fellow who calls himself "LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael" but, eh, sanity is over-rated.
Anyhow your name combined with your English proficiency (I mean that seriously) confuses me a bit. Around here there tend to be two classes of people who might have an obsession with the subject so great that they would make it their nom de guerre.
They would be Western Judeo-skeptics (to give the benefit of the doubt 😂) and Muslim (or occasionally Arab-Christian) people for whom the Jews are a backstory to the problem of Israel, vs Israel being the most convenient achilles's heel through which to address a more ancient enmity.
There is also a third class however.
Most people from the first two classes like to believe that they are members of this class (but really aren't) so it's probably fair to call into question my own assumption to belonging to this class.
Not that I do. I really think that I DO belong to this class, but of course I *would* say that wouldn't I! 😂
That's people who for some reason or other are infested with a fascination for truth and accuracy.
As such, while I believe that LHHI actually misread the comment that he responded to, I can understand why (were his reading correct) he could feel so frustrated.
There definitely *is* something odd about how oversensitive tptb are to anything that could be construed to be judeo-skeptic. They really do seem to overreach a lot!
Not to mention the general matter of Jews (and, to be fair, other demographics) not being discuss'able or criticize'able as a group while entire other groups are subject to collective criticism based upon acts either done or imaginary by some rando from my own group!
Of course, *my* own group, the Jews, are actually a beneficiary of this selective justice in 2023 anno domini, but others who fancy themselves to belong to this dispassionate category are most often either Muslims/Arabs or White Males --- two groups which undeniably are selectively discriminated against by huge swaths of internet jibber jabber.
As I am denied permission to continue writing here lest it be too long to read, I'll end by letting HLLI know that while I personally would prefer there be less anti-philosemitic sentiment in the world, for reasons both universal and personal (free floating judenhass sounds like it could inconvenience me), I feel your pain and while I believe that your conclusions may miss the most accurate mark I understand at least some of their impetus and I'm doing my level best to get everyone to lay down their weapons and to speak and be heard honestly and sincerely.
There's no need for lying and it benefits no one.
Had we worked together from the start we would already have returned to Eden. It is shameful how we, as a species, have squandered our divine abilities.
Had I have played the game as a young man I would have had a very powerful voice today. Likely powerful enough to moderate a conversation between people and Peoples that would be taken up millions or billions of people today.
But had I played by the rules extant on earth in 2000 I would be little more than a (less angry and elitist) Ben Shapiro.
And while I think he's no worse than any of the "influencers" in the world today, he is only a negligible amount better.
I am doing my part. I am speaking.
But by virtue of having surrendered my radio show in 2004 instead of running advertisement for casino gambling and by virtue of many such similar decisions over the years I am here today, a lone voice on an internet of billions, unwilling and unable to promote himself.
Whether I am meant to have lived the rather unique life I have lived as a means of being a vox populi at a time when the world pretty desperately needs it or whether I am not meant to be that for humanity is entirely in the hands of the small handful of people who read this very comment!
Given recent events and who is publicly praising the deaths of Israeli civilians, I find it increasingly odd and unbelievable when people say that the right is the anti-Semitic side. Conservatives seem to love Israel, and I haven't heard of a single conservative organization praising Hamas. Lots and lots of left-aligned groups are actively praising the original attack and marching in support of Hamas.
These are not conclusive facts, but it sure seems illegitimate to me to say that the right is anti-Semitic, especially if excusing the left.
I specifically differentiated the center-right (which usually isn't antisemitic) from the far right (which usually is). 'Occasional' modifies 'center-righty', not 'center-right who isn't antisemitic'. Most center-righties are aware of the Nazis and often give them a hard time, from what I've seen.
Fair enough, but I'll ask. Are far-right groups currently praising the deaths of Jews? I'll admit I intentionally don't go around such groups, so maybe they are, but I am doubting it. With the amount of media coverage on all angles, I can't imagine Salon or some other left-leaning outfit wouldn't be making it front page news.
Now, far right groups don't much care for Muslims or Arabs either, so I can see them not praising Hamas. But to not be happy about the death of Jews seems like a pretty mild anti-Semitism, considering that there are proud groups loudly proclaiming their happiness at those same deaths - it's apparently not too taboo to talk about.
Null result report: I looked through the recent posts of SecureSignals, theMotte's most notorious neo-Nazi who posts about how terrible Jews are all the time, and I did not find any posts cheering on the death of Jews in this conflict in Palestine. Extremely critical of Israel, the Zionist lobby, and Jews in general, but he didn't cheer on Hamas' atrocities.
Not only that, the bellicose stance towards the concept of Palestine as well as the public dissatisfaction with the two-state solution is the long-strived-for work of the far right. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who radically opposed the Oslo accords. Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996. It is the transatlantic mirror image of the darkest dreams the local troublemakers have ever entertained.
What is a "Zionist" anyway? I'm an anti-Zionist in that think that the creation of Israel as a Jewish entho-state was a bad move, and if it was proposed now then I'd be strongly against it.
But I'm also a conservative, at least when it comes to the locations of established international borders, because the alternative to conservatism when it comes to international borders is constant war. We should have an incredibly strong status quo bias when it comes to keeping established (over multiple decades) national borders exactly where they are (except by mutual agreement). So regardless of whether or not it was a good idea to draw the borders that way in the first place, they're there now, and everyone should just fucking deal with it.
I'm a Zionist becayse these past 75 years have been the safest 75 years for Jews worldwide (in terms of percentage murdered and otherwise fouly treated) since forever.
I do however wish that we Jews had a poweful voice accompanying our unapologetic demand for our human rights with the requisite universalism.
I am attempting to BE that voice, but without boosting from others, my own voice has zero ability to carry at all.
> I'm a Zionist becayse these past 75 years have been the safest 75 years for Jews worldwide (in terms of percentage murdered and otherwise fouly treated) since forever.
Correlation is not causation. In the western world, the biggest change was that after the Nazis, open antisemitism became much less acceptable than it had been in the 1920s. Also, ethnic violence may generally have declined? If Jews in France can today live with little fear of state-sponsored violence against them, this is not because France is afraid of Israeli reprisals, but because France generally refrains from mass violence against ethnic minorities.
The Muslim world mostly expelled Jews in response to the foundation of Israel, which limited their ability to murder them a few decades later. I will grant you that having a country which would take them in helped a lot for outcomes, but this is very much with the benefit of hindsight. It is not unfathomable that Israel might have lost an early existential war, in which case Zionism would have been net negative for the prospering of Jews.
Aside from the symbolism, in 1948, there was little to recommend the lands of what would become Israel over some other, less populated area in North America not surrounded by blood-thirsty third world countries.
Of course, now that Israel is firmly established, it has every right to remain. Palestinians who dream of a state "from the river to the sea" are just delusional.
Thanks for your comment. Much of what you say is accurate.
That said, Herzl's Zionism was not dependent upon this piece of real estate. It was intended to obviate the possibility of a Holocaust.
The short-sighted Zionists who were unwilling to accept a homeland elsewhere definitely did *me* a favor, as I am glad that my homeland and army are situation in the same location but they did no favor for my grandparents who had to live in Europe during a time when there was no locus of overwhelming Jewish Power to protect them.
I'm not claiming to speak from authority/credentials but the context for my comments is as an historian of Jewish History.
Obviously I could still be wrong about everything. It just means that pretty much all of the most common objections to what I'm saying have been considered and either incorporated into my current worldview or found wanting.
To be sure, with so many Judaic ovum in the single tiny basket that is modern Israel a single successful strike against that basket could result in a 20 second holocaust.
As poker players are wont to say, "put all your eggs in a single basket, but carry that basket very carefully".
> Aside from the symbolism, in 1948, there was little to recommend the lands of what would become Israel over some other, less populated area in North America not surrounded by blood-thirsty third world countries.
> That said, Herzl's Zionism was not dependent upon this piece of real estate. It was intended to obviate the possibility of a Holocaust.
I believe I was once taught that Herzl seriously considered a proposal to set up the Jewish homeland in present-day Uganda, to the point of sending an expedition (with the approval of the British empire). Among other things this was, IIRC, because some Jews at the time while agreeing with the "prevent Holocaust" plan, felt it would be blasphemy to return to Jerusalem or nearby before the coming of the Messiah (something something ritual impurity).
Whether North America would have worked at the time I don't know - The U.S. support for Israel as we know it today only came well after 1948. The first Israeli wars were fought with Czech, then French weapons.
The Middle East also had one more big thing going for it, apart from the historical link, namely the Balfour Declaration.
Zionism is kind of like American exceptionalism, it involves patriotism, cherishing a founding story, and a belief that one's country is set apart from all others. There are some who think American exceptionalism is the root of all foreign policy evil. If you can imagine their smug satisfaction when they heard about Fallujah, confirming their long held suspicions that conservatives were kind of evil, you can imagine anti-zionism.
If there are any Israelis reading this who are frightened by the prospect of anti-national sentiment, it could be reassuring to know that Iraqis within the diaspora have been willing to accept the lack universality of American support for Operation Iraqi Freedom and do not hate Americans. I can only imagine what you must be feeling today.
1) On a personal level, having a happy, productive, meaningful life requires dissolving attachments to past injustices committed against you. (Move on. Stop obsessing about the past Bad Thing, and go find some new Good Things in your life.)
2) This is exploitable by hostile agents.
3) This is exploitable in ways which harm reproductive fitness, providing a opportunity for organisms to evolve mechanisms to prevent it from happening.
3) is more meta-gaming: if you want not to be wronged, precommit to taking horrible vengeance if you are wronged, so that rational actors would avoid wronging you.
(To the degree this establishes a social standard, going through with such vengeance could even be considered pro-social: the more frequent taking revenge is, the higher the expected costs to wronging people are.)
One failure mode of revenge is the feud, where two or more parties get locked into a pointless revenge cycle. Another failure mode is that for the strategy to work, the opponent only needs to be aware of when you consider yourself to be wronged, but that might not be an objective injustice. The strategy will work for the gangster who collects protection money (and takes bloody revenge if someone "wrongs" him by refusing) at least as well as for someone who was objectively wronged.
For conflicts between powerless groups of people and a strong state, things are even more complicated.
On the one end of the spectrum, you have the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. While there was no hope of achieving any useful objective, the aim of killing a few of your murderers seems praiseworthy in itself.
Many (non-jihadist) terrorist groups fall on the other side of the spectrum. Typically they form around some atrocity committed by the state (e.g. shooting unarmed protesters). Of course, the people most likely to join such organisations are not believers in proportional response (like killing n military members in reprisal to the military killing n unarmed civilians), so the end result is often runaway violence. Two groups emerged from the German 68ers. One was the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which fought violently against the state and whose lasting legacy are a few lines in the German criminal code. The other group was the Green party, which worked within the system and has affected countless policy decisions. (Too bad they focused on getting rid of nuclear before coal, though.)
Hamas objective seems to get Israel to kill Palestinians, so they optimize for being atrocious (e.g. by targeted killings of civilians), in the hope that Israel will reciprocate. This seems way outside any sane-ish revenge strategy derived from game theory.
(1) - (4) sound like proof that recovery is unlkely or impossible. I could argue with your logic, but thought it would be more helpful to tell you what I have observed about real recoveries from godawful experiences.
There are a number of paths I've seen. None of the recoveries I've experienced personally or seen others make were accomplished by forgiving the perpetrator. Sometimes a sort of forgiveness develops after recovery made via other paths, but it’s limited, something like “eh, he was such an emotionally retarded loser that hehe probably had no idea what life was like for a little girl who was being exploited that way.”
Here are the path I know about
Bring punishment down on the perpetrator: Disclose in the most convincing way possible what the person did to anyone who’s in a position to deliver consequences: Police, workplace, their family, their friends, online social circle.
Punish them yourself using your smarts and skill at self-expression: Write or tell the person in the most vivid, accurate way you can how evil what they did was. Be convincing and harsh. Your goal is to make them feel seen in a horribly clear, demeaning way. You want them to feel terrible about themselves while the read your judgments and for quite a while afterwards.
Surround yourself with people who get it regarding the awfulness of what happened to you. Make sure they get it in a rich way. They should know the facts and also how you felt then and you how feel now.
Help other people who have suffered from attacks similar to the one you suffered.
Go in the direction of anything that makes you feel better, stronger and more engaged, even if you know that the things are not going to have any effect on the damage you suffered. Sometimes the cumulative effect of having several of these good things in your life is that you do not have such a strong feeling that your life has been ruined. And that changes the story you’re living inside of: It’s no longer that somebody ruined your life, it’s that somebody changed and damaged it. Ruined life stories, by definition, end with the death of somebody whose life was ruined anyway. But if the story you’re living inside of is that somebody changed and damaged your life, it’s a story where all kinds of developments are possible. This process does not make logical sense. There’s a loop involved: Somebody ruined my life, so there’s no point in hoping. I have zero hope of having a meaningful life — that proves my life’s been ruined. Sometimes people manage to snip the mobius strip. In fact I think that’s the most common path to recovery I’ve seen.
Experiment boldly with psychiatric drugs and other somatic interventions. Go to the smartest psychopharmacologist you can find, one who keeps up with the research and is willing to try things. If you are depressed, do not neglect to try an MAOI. A time-limited course of treatment with ketamine is also worth trying. If it hasn’t made a difference in 6 weeks or so, it probably is not going to. If it helps, it’s likely that the effect will fade if you stop taking ketamine. It’s often possible to maintain the effect with oral doses you take at home.
Do a course of psychedelic-assisted therapy focused on becoming less affected by the incident that harmed you.
I think forgiveness is especially unlikely to help, if you are told by others that you have to forgive, otherwise you are a bad person. That feels like they are siding with the perpetrator, or at least that they care about you so little that the fact that your complaints are annoying is more important for them than the fact that you were hurt.
On the other hand, I have seen people stuck in the loop of complaining about how they were hurt, with no mental capacity left for anything else... not even planning an escape or revenge. People sometimes do that for years. And of course, when it is over, they regret the wasted time.
Maybe the best attitude is neither obsessing, nor forgiving, just choosing to focus on becoming stronger now, and optionally get revenge later.
There is a chance that after enough time passes, even if you get strong enough, you decide that the revenge is not worth it, because it is no longer an urgent problem, and you have other, more important things to do. ("After I graduate, I will tell my teachers how incompetent and evil they were. But only when they can't punish me anymore." Graduates. "Eh, who gives a fuck? I am not going to see them ever again anyway.") But letting the future you change their mind is different from being forced to make a difficult decision now.
Obsessing about revenge is also a waste of time, so maybe a better approach is: "if I find a button that will hurt my enemies when pressed, I will press the button; but I am not going to spend my life looking for the button -- I will only use the opportunity if it arises naturally, or requires very little effort to arrange."
I don't know what you're saying with 5, 4 is too vague to be a meaningful jump-in point. But also, 5 seems to have forgotten the "committed against you" part of 1. Do I personally know any of those torture victims, or have reason to think I might? Then there's no more attachment to them than to seeing a wolf kill a deer.
Book Review: the first thirty pages of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.
I picked up this book from one of those free bookshelves outside someone's house, and read the first twenty or thirty pages of it over lunch.
This book is about 2005. It doesn't know it's about 2005, it thinks it's about globalisation and how the jobs of middle class westerners will soon be taken by outsourcees in India. But it's really about 2005 and the passage of time and how the concerns of the past slowly blend into the concerns of the present without you really noticing. The book seems dated, as any eighteen year old book about the near future really should, but since 2005 still feels like the "early present" rather than the past, it's disconcerting. Nowadays of course things still get outsourced to India but not to any greater extent than in 2005, and the sorts of jobs he was concerned would soon be outsourced to India are things that are instead being replaced with AI.
The other very 2005 thing is the preoccupation with Islamic terrorism, something we were all preoccupied with for years, then it slowly receded, then it receded some more, and then we all forgot we were ever concerned with it, and then last week it came back and soon it will probably be 2005 again.
Things change over the years. Sometimes we notice them changing and read and write articles about "hey, this thing is changing, have you noticed?" Other times they change just as fast, but nobody bothers to point them out as they change, and you only realise they've changed when you read an old book and feel disoriented. This book is an interesting time capsule of those second sort of thing.
2020 seems further away than 2005. We were terrified about white supremacy and anti vaxxers. Reading Stephen King’s new novel set in that era it seems both preachy and dated.
I'm watching 'The Morning Show' with my wife, and it has backdates story lines about COVID, Jan. 6th, and the Dobbs decision, and it comes off the same way.
My situation has become very problematic, and I do not know what to do. I am writing this wondering if anyone might have a good idea.
I'm diagnosed with autism, OCD, and bipolar ("type un-specified"). Somehow, whether due to past social mishaps or the underdeveloped emotional circuitry, I have pretty strong rejection sensitivity and basically shut down whenever someone I respect says something mean to me or that I do not know how to interpret, which happens every 3 months. In addition, probably owing to the obsessive-compulsiveness, I have strong limerent tendencies, and have been stuck in one "basin of attraction" from highschool for about two years, having extremely intense recurrent thoughts on a daily or hourly basis. My mind often feels completely incoherent, and I do not know what is happening. Other times it feels like it is running four thoughts in parallel. This became too much for me to operate with, so in September, I stopped being able to do so. Medication and therapy are not helping, and probably will not yield much effect size in the time they need to. I think I am going to be removed from my college (I am a first year student, technically enrolled through a high school program, so if I fail, I will not graduate high school either). What can I do to start operating again? Long term, I will do anything in the bounds of sane and ethical conduct, but I can only do so much right now. I will do my best to implement anything sane suggested, and if I reach functional behavior again, I promise to do everything to reduce suffering.
Get as much help as you can from your family and school administration about taking a mental health break and going back to a regular high school program instead of a high school + college program. Take things one step at a time and try to make a progress every day instead of worrying about the mass of long term problems and getting nothing done.
Consider asking your school for a mental health break. They will have options, but you will need to raise your hand to ask, they won't find you. Earlier is better. If not, pick a course and take the W, get something off your plate. So maybe you graduate high school a semester late by doing that, talk to your advisor about what's even possible.
I was an early college entrant who had a lot of struggles with it. Had never needed to pace myself before, so just kept pushing myself and refused to withdraw from any courses, even though I was getting overwhelmed--I think more from social and psychological pressures than intellectually, when I bothered to do the work it was still pretty easy. (That lulled me into this trap where I was constantly thinking, "you've got this, you can clearly do it" but then I wouldn't...)
If I had advice to give myself back then I guess I'd just say, be honest with yourself if it doesn't seem to be working, and ask people in your family or in the institution for help. The people around you are your fans, they will not judge you, they will go into protective mode and find you options if they can. And it doesn't matter if you get a degree by 20 or whatever, take a couple extra years, or go really slow and take six extra years, the age you graduated doesn't matter in the long run as much as you think it does now. Many of the solutions you might think of as nuclear options (for me it was withdrawing from a course) actually might have very few long term consequences? Get second opinions more locally on any options you might be instinctively avoiding.
I struggled a lot with a self perception of failure right after this period. Honestly that self doubt was a big waste of time and emotional energy. I eventually dusted myself off and ended up with a couple graduate degrees and a reasonably comfortable career thinking big thoughts. I feel like it gets better, I hope you find your path too.
The advice you're getting from others is excellent. I'd suggest making a list of the ideas you've gotten, trying each one & making notes about its effect. That will also give you some structure -- a plan to follow.
I'm a psychologist. Here's my advice. The 2 smartest psychiatrists I've met believe that the MAOI class of antidepressants directly target rejection sensitivity dysphoria. One good site for info about them is call Psychotropical. If you are seeing a psychopharmacologist now, ask to try an MAOI. If they refuse, look for an psychopharmacologist who will. (And if you are getting meds from a general practitioner, go to a psychiatrist who specializes in drug treatment. Your situation is too complex for a GP.)
Many precious replies have been given. Another possibility would be retreat. Reduction of input; it can backfire but it would be worth a try if all else fails. Still, keep moving.
I think you should pick up a meditation practice, and you know, since the psychological frame is not working out for you, that is only one point of view on the mind and not at all an absolute truth, and well, one of the functions of spirituality is to provide healing. There are spiritual traditions that don't run on faith: reading the Ashtavakra Gita might be helpful for you.
As a very helpful woman taught me once: your emotions, your thoughts, and so on, the contents of your mind, are the movie. But you're not the movie, you are the screen the movie is being projected on.
That is, you are the perceiver. You are not your thoughts and you are not your emotions. Internalizing this allows you to stand aloof from whatever your mind is getting up to, dramatically increasing your capacity to act.
This stuff works: once, a pretty girl smiled at me in the gym, and it sent me into suicidal depression, complete with a stay in a psych ward (long story). These days, I can walk up to a random hot woman in a hang out situation, look her in the eye and tell her she's cute. Sure, I still need to learn to develop such openings, but there are possibilities available to me now that simply did not use to be there, and the credit for that goes entirely to spirituality.
The mind is an extremely powerful thing. It is possible to develop it.
Thanks! What does examining or the self-image or ego entail? How do you identify that pattern of thought from experience when the contents of experience are not discrete or constant?
The pattern of thought is experience. You are the thing perceiving thought, you are not thought or its patterns. This becomes easier to understand when you've worked up to daily one hour meditation sessions (I recommend this method: https://www.evolvingground.org/opening-awareness), though then again, it is possible to just understand this merely by reading or hearing about it, as the Ashtavakra Gita says. You may not be so lucky, granted (I wasn't), but it is possible.
I'm only mildly on the spectrum, but here are some types of things that work for me. Your mileage may vary, but at least they shouldn't cause lasting damage.
Perhaps try putting yourself in a controlled situation where deeper instincts are triggered? Martial arts and sparring is my go-to. If there's someone you trust, a less time-intensive version might be simply being repeatedly slapped in the face, by someone who's going to keep on doing it if you don't stop them. It's got a way of "waking me up".
Another thing (which in my mind is similar) is being hugged. Find someone you trust and can talk about this to, who sympathizes, and spill **everything** out, and then have them hug you and not let go. It reminds me of what I've heard about horse-breaking: there's an impulse to get away, and then it goes away and I'm just standing there being hugged, and then I start crying, and afterwards I feel a lot better.
Psychedelics might help some, as chephy said, but I don't have a lot of experience with them, although I do have some with alcohol and cannabis (not at the same time!). Just remember what Herodotus said about the ancient Persians: if they came up with a plan while drunk, they re-evaluated the plan while sober to see if it still seemed like a good idea. (And if they came up with a plan while sober, they re-evaluated while drunk, which I think may be the earliest example of the Evil Overlord List rule of letting a 6-year-old look over your plans and see if they have an obvious flaw.)
I would suggest being very careful with psychedelics. As someone with bipolar disorder I can attest that irresponsible use of them by those of us with bipolar disorder can lead to mania and psychotic episodes. I highly recommend practicing martial arts. Personally I recommend Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as it is one of the most intellectually stimulating and physically demanding martial arts. Once you learn how to be okay being crushed into the floor by a 300 pound man, the weight of the world feels much much lighter. It brings an immediacy that is missing in most modern problems, and teaches you how to be okay even in the worst of times. I also highly recommend a modest meditation practice. Intensive meditation can also cause mania and psychosis in those prone to it. Just 15 minutes a day of sitting quietly with your thoughts can work wonders.
Psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, really helped me with a few similar issues. It's not a cure but it's a decent brain reboot and an opportunity to break dysfunctional thought patterns.
I'm sure you'll get a lot of helpful comments, and while unfortunately I don't have any useful advice, I would like to commend you for soliciting public input, which can be very difficult. I hope you achieve symptom relief soon, and are able to tackle your longer-term goals. While it doesn't address your issues, you can at least know that many people who don't even know you care about you. I'm confident that a number of people here will provide ideas, and that many others here who may not have anything specific to suggest are rooting for you.
Re: Gaza. I would suggest that anyone who lives in a country that can positively influence the situation write to their representatives. Here is approximately what I sent if it helps:
I appreciated your recent statement committing to help the civilians of Israel and Gaza. However, I am concerned the food, water and medicine is being blocked by the Israeli government. This is unacceptable behavior of any country, much less an ally. Make sure aid can get in and people can get out, before it is too late.
It's my understanding that "siege" Israel has put on Gaza is contingent on Hamas releasing their hostages: they release the hostages, Israel lets food and water and electricity back into Gaza.
Of course I don't think Hamas cares all that much whether Gaza starves: on the other hand, they've taken women and children hostage and Israel needs to get them back. What a mess.
If I had to guess Hamas will not release the hostages, and eventually Israel will let food and water in because they don't want to be seen starving 2 million people.
I think Hamas did their best to make it clear that they can not be left in power. So unless they are also willing to lay down their arms and and surrender, a ground operations to remove them will still be required, and such an operation will require air support.
To be clear, NBC said Hamas claimed they would release the *civilian* hostages, if Israel stopped bombing. But they reported Hamas said they would not release captured Israeli soldiers, unless Israel released all the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Other terror groups in Gaza, like PIJ, also claimed to have many hostages, and it wasn't clear from the second-hand reporting whether Hamas was even claiming that those hostages would be released.
It seems like standard wartime operating procedure. Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
Besides, who would drive the trucks? If Israelis drive trucks into Gaza, they will be kidnapped or killed. If Gazans drive trucks into Israel then those trucks will be filled with bombs.
If you want to appeal to someone, appeal to the Egyptian government to let refugees in.
Honestly the lack of urgency around this is shocking to me. There are organizations that could bring supplies in that would not be good targets for either group.
You are right that pressure should also be applied to the Egyptian government. And you should make that clear with your representatives. However, neither government gets to blame the other if there is a catastrophe that they could have prevented on their own.
It really isn’t accepted wartime behaviour regardless of who started what. Admittedly if Hamas made it difficult to get food and water in, that’s on them, but Israel is deliberately cutting off supplies, and shutting down water pipelines and have claimed that doing that is a punishment.
I don’t think you would have a problem with this argument if Russia were doing it in Ukraine or Assad in Syria.
Food is a dual use good, as it can be used to feed both civilians and militants. The logistics of feeding an army have been a central constraint on operations for most of history. Strategies around limiting food supply of the enemy (e.g. sieges of castles, blockades) seem well established.
What I think Israel should do is to allow inhabitants of Gaza to come to the Israeli border and surrender. They could have the Red Cross run a refugee camp on their side of the border. (If Hamas then prevented them from surrendering because they prefer to use the civilians as human shields, that would be on them.)
Having civilians trapped in a territory they can not leave while also turning of their water supply seems much worse.
Also, it seems pointless because Hamas is unlikely to surrender just because they and the civilian population are starving -- creating pictures of civilians killed by Israel (which might sometimes even be true) is very much their strategy. Defeating Hamas through hunger would basically accept all of the civilians in Gaza starving. Such a strategy would be strictly inferior to just turning Gaza into a parking lot in terms of both utilitarianism and public relations. (Though obviously still terrible. I feel a good balance between military and humanitarian concerns would be to allow people to flee to safety (IRC camps), then move in with ground troops, leveling buildings whenever resistance is encountered.)
>It seems like standard wartime operating procedure. Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
Ah yes, let's just completely ignore the part where Gaza has no option but to be dependent on Israel for water, power etc by explicit design of Israel as a means of coercive control.
>Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
I have never liked the practice of conflating governments with the peoples they claim to represent, but I have a deep-seated hatred of those who do it to the point of holding the latter responsible for the bad behaviour of the former.
I don't see anyone doing this conflating, so I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean.
If you are suggesting that because the government is distinct from the people, the people should not be affected by the actions of the government, I would question if that makes any sense at all given what a government is.
Well, you see there was once a country waging war, lead by people with a genocidal approach, from whatever reasons. As this war raged on, brave aviators of the forces opposing that country followed their orders and bombed a harbour town. One large bomb hit the house my grandma was living in a flat with her teenage daughters. The only person alive in the rubble was my mother, a 13-year old girl at the time, saved by a door collapsing on her. She heard her mother die. I can't blame the bomber crew. This had to be done.
Agreed. More parallels include the rise to power of the NSDAP and Hamas, which included getting votes and then deciding that democracy was to bothersome. (Pro-tip: don't vote for anti-democratic, genocidal maniacs.)
I don't support morale bombings against purely civilian targets (for one thing, they don't work), but civilian casualties are a sad fact of war. Not every possible war is worth being waged, but some wars certainly are.
Hamas and the middle eastern world are getting what they want out of it (martyrs and proof that Israel is the rouge state they had always said it was in propaganda), as is Israel, who has wanted to clear off the settlements for a very long time, and even the US: which wants to reassert its regional dominance without having to engage militarily. For nobody to take advantage of a historically precedented cassus belli under the watch of an aircraft carrier builds credibility by establishing to the regional forces that future events like it will not be taken as synchronizing markers with which they could act in unison. The only people not getting what they want are those kids who were born on the wrong side of the literal fence.
Random funny/sad observation: I was watching a Youtube of a Model A Ford owner starting his car. One retro lever was referred to as accelerating or retarding the spark-plug timing.
Whenever the driver said something about the spark timing being retarded, the close-caption algorithm simply excised the (apparently canceled) word.
I've noticed that on YouTube shorts (their TikToc clone) subtitles will often censor the word "dead". Several YouTubers have also mentioned that they need to avoid saying the word "suicide" or they might trigger an algorithm to send their video down in the search results. So they resort to saying "un-alive-ing" instead.
One of the most interesting things about internet video has been it's uncensored nature: TV has standards it has to conform to, the internet doesn't. Now as more and more advertisers move to online entertainment we are slowly seeing Standards and Practices imposed on creators from above, by algorithms. I wonder where it will end up a few decades from now? We were living in the Wild West, and we didn't really know it.
I saw an older meme discussed on reddit a few days ago. The meme included the words "f*cking retarded". The comments on reddit were about how weird it was that they censored the word "fucking" but not "the r-slur".
I realised I've become really old; because it's apparently now just so fully accepted that "fucking" is less offensive than "retarded" that young people can't even imagine it the other way around. And that's fucking retarded.
My late sister died age 51. She would have had roughly a mental age of three. Not quite the behaviours of a three year old, but she could usually dress herself, usually manage going to the toilet, but lacked any prospect of ever reading or writing. When I was a child in the 1970s ffs anyone calling Kathy "retarded" - and it did happen, kids can be cruel - would most certainly, in the mores of that time, been thought to have been disagreeably offensive.
Curiously and in retrospect rather shamefully, overt racial slurs were less likely to be challenged.
What's the game theory solution to Israel-Palestine conflict? Assumed goals could be least harm for most people, *my side winning (whichever side), or other goals.
Palestinian exodus. They lost 70 years ago, kept losing, their allies in the region lost multiple times (when they were supposed to have the upper hand) and are now in shambles. They have no theory of victory: they can't threaten the existence of Israel, they can't reverse the colonization process, stopping it or just slowing it seems extremly hard (because they can't really threaten it to begin with, which makes any discussion closer to begging than to negociation).
They are on a course toward defeat, and any action that they take will only accelerate it. See: the latest attack
The one saving grace could be their demographic, but it is my understanding that ultra-orthodox israelis have a pretty good birth rate, while the living space available to palestinians keep shrinking year after year. A population can grow even in poverty, but eventually population density becomes an issue.
All in all, the only way out is, litteraly, a way out.
Who knows, maybe, in 2000 years, after the horrific actions of the Brasilo-angolian regime, the nations of the world will decide that the palestinians deserve a homeland of their own.
There are now more Irish than can fit comfortably on the Emerald Isle, with or without the Six Counties. Fortunately, the Irish have shown themselves to be happy, productive, and generally trouble-free citizens of places like Boston, New York, and even London, and so they don't all need to fit on the one Island any more.
There are now more Palestinians than can fit comfortably between the Jordan and the Med, whether they have to share it with the Israelis or not. Unfortunately, the Palestinians have shown themselves to be very unlike the Irish, and approximately every other Arab nation has said "Oh, hell no, we don't want any more of those". With good reason.
It would be very helpful if the Palestinians could emulate the Irish; possibly their best hope for a decent future. But I don't think it's in the cards. Fifty years ago, maybe, but not now.
There were quite a few problems with the Irish back in the day. There's no reason Palestinians wouldn't assimilate given enough time, perhaps even writing right-wing commentary under pseudonyms. ;)
Which Arab countries have granted Palestinian refugees/emigrants the same legal opportunities that New World countries/colonies granted Irish refugees/emigrants? Jordan is the only such country that I'm aware of.
It sure helps that young Irish (the island, not the country specifically) people don't care much about religion, certainly not the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism.
There is none. It's like a game of Diplomacy where one player said "if you do X, I will devote the rest of my game to making you lose", and then you said "Hah, if you do that, I'll do the same to you" and then did X anyway to show you couldn't be intimidated. And now the two of you are engaged in a fight to the death, and everyone else is trying to shape the conflict to serve their own ends.
In theory, everyone could wake up tomorrow, and embrace something like classical Christianity, Buddhism, or Stoicism. They could all say, "I refuse to cause harm in the future based on harm done to me in the past", apply universal forgiveness and loving-kindness (caritas, charity), and move forward into a glorious, happy future. In practice, this would take a miracle.
"In theory, everyone could wake up tomorrow, and embrace something like classical Christianity, Buddhism, or Stoicism. They could all say, "I refuse to cause harm in the future based on harm done to me in the past", apply universal forgiveness and loving-kindness (caritas, charity), and move forward into a glorious, happy future."
Even if they did that, they wouldn't move forward into a glorious, happy future. Would Palestinians be granted citizenship in Israel? Would they get their own state? Who gets Jerusalem? What happens to the settlements? These are all hard questions that won't go away even if everyone becomes perfectly forgiving.
You know, in my generation the Israel-Palestine conflict was the standard example of an insoluble problem.
What I think you're asking is 'putting aside all your personal investment, what's going to happen in the Middle East'? I think it would be seen as a chaotic system (in both the colloquial and technical senses of the word) and nobody could tell you the answer.
My best guess would be 'more war for the next hundred years'.
Yes, it was. And while almost nobody noticed, it inched toward getting solved over the last couple of decades. Israel keep getting closer to a one (israeli) state solution, and palestinians kept losing ground while the surrounding countries are in shambles.
I'm not betting on war for another hundred year. I'm betting on an Israeli victory in fifty.
You could do that IRL with an Israeli index fund. (Though I disagree, so I'm not putting my money there.)
The bonds don't strike me as a great investment. Too many smart, wealthy people who know that and are willing to buy them anyway to help out their relatives, which lowers the interest rate.
Eh. Just because I expect them to achieve their (or their hardliner's) maximalist goals, doesn't mean I also expect them to outperform other investment options. Especially considering I'm not sure I can get one of these on my tax-free account.
US policy has pointed the way to an end to the conflict: a viable state of Palestine combined with one or two generations of peace could have made terrorist recruitment too difficult. Avoidance of this policy has been the intention of the Israeli government, up to and including viewing Hamas as a useful asset against the two-state solution. Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
That article basically says Netanyahu has to some degree and indirectly worked with Hamas, i.e. the government of Gaza, to implement policies designed to keep peace with Gaza, such as allowing work permits and foreign aid, and not aggressively retaliating to minor rocket attacks.
At least since 2007, “reduce tension with Gaza” and “cooperate with Hamas” have been essentially synonymous, because Hamas has all the power in Gaza. Instead Bibi was supposed to do what, support the PA in a civil war with Hamas?
> Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
I don't think that any money at all should have ever been allowed to go to Hamas, who has never concealed their nature as a terrorist organization. It would have been better to let money go to a more legitimate authority (I will not try to pick which one, but Hamas is perhaps the worst available one) who could establish their own control over Gaza by means of having all the funds. I highly doubt there was a shortage of West Bank officials in 2007 who would have liked to try winning hearts and minds to cement their own peaceful authority, but that authority would have been in competition with the intent to avoid a second state.
The first paragraph is editorial, and points to no specific action. The second is hearsay, but supposing it’s true, 2019 is 12 years after Hamas established control over Gaza. I don’t think you can point to that and assign responsibility for Hamas to Netanyahu. Even if you could, it’s hardly unheard of to think keeping your enemies divided is good strategy - bad in hindsight in this case, but hindsight is 20/20.
Israel has been repeatedly criticized for keeping Gaza too closed and for not allowing enough funds to flow in. But you can’t let money into Gaza without some of it going to Hamas. There is no alternative within Gaza. Saying “no money should go to Hamas” is saying that Israel should have tightened the blockade around Gaza even more - but then Netanyahu would be blamed for giving more grievance to Hamas and increasing tension!
But game theory doesn’t take into account players’ desire for revenge, right?, and desire for revenge seems like a huge part of what’s going on, for both sides. Who gets what land seems secondary.
In game theory, isn't the optimal strategy for iterated prisoner dilemmas "Tit for Tat", where if they defect against you, you defect against them in the next round? That takes revenge into account. Although I recall that the most vengence based strategy (often called Grudge) is where if they defect against you, you always defect against them regardless of what they do in subsequent rounds. That strategy was better than always cooperating, but suboptimal compared to Tit for Tat.
It seems to me that as long as Hamas keeps hitting Defect, Israel needs to hit Defect as well.
I think the civilian casualties became equal on both sides a few days ago. Too bad they are not following tit-for-tat, it could save an enormous number of lives.
Tit-for-tat is only the optimal strategy because the binary simplicity of the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't allow for more escalatory options. There's no option to punish your opponent even harder, or to destroy them altogether.
This is why, I think, game theory is an amazingly poor framework for thinking about complex problems. Strip down an incredibly complex problem into an incredibly simple one, then solve the simple one, then speculate on how that simple solution scales back up to the ridiculously complex problem is a tempting approach if you like solving simple problems, but in practice all the stuff that you've abstracted away is likely to be very important.
That is a good point. Imagine a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma where you could Super Defect, which would cause you to lose worse than defect-defect, but your opponent would lose twice as much as you did...
The problem is they're not playing tit-for-tat with civilians, but with Hamas: killing an equal number of Gazan civilians doesn't hurt Hamas at all, and Hamas is the one who defected.
The civilians go on to play tit-for-tat with the opposing side's leadership only to be redirected into playing it with the other side's civilians, leading to the cycles of growing nationalism and mass recruitment observed on all sides of the conflict.
As far as revenge as a motivating factor, Cremieux notes that increases of one side killing the other above baseline rates in response to the other side killing them make up a small percentage of killing on either side: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence.
That sounds like a not-so-useful way of defining it. If increasing the scale of killing by 10% each step is the "above baseline rate" then you could say that only 10% of deaths are because of it... but when one million people have died as a result of an individual murder, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the policy of escalation was responsible for virtually every subsequent death?
If I understand you correctly, you're describing a model in which the level of violence rises regularly in jumps of e.g. 10%, continuously defining new baselines. I don't think that describes the data discussed in the post, however. Instead, the data show rises following killings, that then drop to 0, or below 0. That is, new baselines are not set. I suggest you look at the linked post for the details, if you're interested.
The killings are discrete events, and while you could say that the levels drop to zero, it is because one side has to plan their next attacks while the other can respond instantly. It isn't reasonable to describe the periods between attacks as periods of peace.
Last comment, since like I said, I think it makes more sense to look at the post, first. To clarify, though, I didn't say that the level dropped to 0, but that the *increase* dropped to 0, or below 0; it dropped below baseline. The baseline is still above 0. The models looked at deaths per day, using decimals, rather than whole numbers. Presumably this involved averaging over a number of days, although I didn't delve into the data. e.g. one could take a 7 day moving average of daily deaths which would result in daily values of less than 1, but more than 0. I'll just repeat that I think it makes sense to look at the post, if you're interested, to get a better idea of what models they're actually using, and what the models indicate.
For Israel, the obvious winning strategy is to continue doing what they were already doing*. A few decades later, the entire territory of Palestine will be theirs.
* that means harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime, establishing new settlements in their territory and then defending them by military force, and inflicting a lot of civilian collateral damage as a response to any terrorist or other attack
Stopped, and been forcefully removed by the Israeli army. Gaza now belongs entirely to the Gazans.
Its borders, airspace, and seacoast still belong to Israel and Egypt, and unfortunately both of those have good reason to want those borders very tightly controlled in a way that can't help but seriously impede Gazan economic growth (or even stability). But settlement per se, or the prospect of Gazans being thrown out of the homes they presently live in, has not been a problem since 2005.
The last time I debated extensively about the situation in Palestine was apparently before 2005 (the time flies quickly), so I didn't know about this. I have noticed somewhere that some settlements were removed in 2005, but I didn't know whether new ones were or were not built afterwards.
Previously, the settlements were such an obvious obstacle to peace, that any debate that didn't mention them didn't make much sense. Like, how can you live in peace with someone who regularly with impunity (yeah, technically illegal according to Israeli law, but never prosecuted in practice, and usually defended by IDF) takes random pieces of your land? Or the practice of randomly destroying homes and crops of Palestinians, to encourage them to move further away.
My question now is, whether it makes sense to perceive Gaza as... well, practically a separate country, unrelated to the West Bank? Because it seems to me that the settlements are still built, and Palestinian homes demolished, in the West Bank. Is that correct? Do the Palestinians living in Gaza perceive that as "someone else's problem", or do they identify with the West Bank? I mean, many of them probably have families there.
Ignoring this part, it seems like the source of most problem for the average person in Gaza is Hamas. (Israel maybe indirectly, by controlling the borders.) From the outside, one might ask "so why don't Palestinians replace Hamas with someone else?", but that probably makes even less sense than asking why Russians do not vote for someone other than Putin.
So it sadly seems like the only possible solution is an outside intervention that would remove Hamas. But the only country that has borders with Gaza is Israel, which isn't exactly an impartial party in this situation (them trying to remove Hamas would probably be perceived, quite reasonably, as an attempt to conquer the territory of Gaza), and the next country nearby is Egypt, which has a political problem with opposing another Muslim dictatorship. The American interventions seem to be limited to supporting Israel militarily (and generally, Americans are great at war but suck at peacekeeping).
The status quo in Gaza seems to be: keep them isolated, and occasionally eliminate some Hamas leader by bombing their home. Mostly efficient to keep them under control; not likely for the situation to improve, ever.
Harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime: last I checked, Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinian's in 2005 and they've spent the last decade and a half firing rockets into their neighbors backyard. Israel doesn't have this kind of problem with their other Arab neighbors: you don't see Egypt or Jordan hurling rockets into Israel, and Israel doesn't *harass* them back. Their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank don't launch rocket at Israel either, and Israel isn't marching in there and bombing buildings to rubble.
The problem seems to be one particular Arab neighbor: the Gaza Strip, as ruled by Hamas.
Considering that Israel is gradually taking over Palestine, instead of Egypt or Jordan, it seems quite natural that Palestinians respond differently than Egyptians or Jordanians.
(Also, some factual mistakes pointed out by Concerned Citizen.)
Israel is gradually taking over one of the two disjoint parts of Palestine, and the Palestinians who live there seem a bit perturbed about that. The other part of Palestine, Israel evacuated almost a generation ago and has conspicuously not been taking over since then. And the Palestinians in *that* part of Palestine, just murdered over a thousand innocent Israeli civilians.
Curious, that, and the easy causality of "they don't like being taken over so they shoot back" doesn't seem to fit.
I disagree with a couple of those points on a factual basis. Israel has been attacked with rockets from the north by Hezbollah, which led to US acceptance of its annexation of the Golan heights from former Syrian territory. Secondly, Israel has conducted periodic reprisals in Gaza, referred to as "mowing the grass," in the aftermath of rocket attacks and the two Intifada. I would offer citations, but it's just from the wiki page.
Second to that, you should really try looking into the IDF's security policy around the west bank settlements. It is up to you to decide whether the incidents qualify as harassment but there are a long list of them, and they appear inflammatory in nature. Finally Jordan and Egypt are Israel's military allies and it would make no sense for mutual harassment to go beyond their respective intelligence services. I can think of one incident with Jordan but haven't ever looked into that subject.
This fits with my point, which is that Israel seems to only bomb and invade their neighbors who are flinging rockets at them, and not the one's who aren't.
The West Bank may have legitimate grievances against Israel for harassment, but that doesn't apply to Gaza. Israel removed their settlements in Gaza and handed the territory over the Palestinian Authority: after Hamas took it from the PA they've been shooting rockets sending terrorists into Israel. Hamas is clearly the worst neighbor Israel has in terms of harassment, and they're the one getting invaded and bombed right now. Israel doesn't seem to have the same problem with many of its other Arab neighbors, and they seem to get along fairly well.
In a sense I don't see how that could be anything but true, because all of the players have access to rockets and none of them would have ethical problems with targeting cities if the nation of those cities had at some time in the past attacked them. Even Israel is firing rockets at a city.
Are the Israelis firing rockets indiscriminately at a city hoping to kill as many people as possible, or are they picking their targets carefully and using guided missiles?
Right. Israel continues to take more territory gradually in terms of settlements, but the Palestinian population continues to grow rapidly. It has more than doubled in the past 30 years: from 2.2 million in 1990 to 4.8 million now.
Palestinians in the West Bank may have reason to oppose Israel because of settlements, but Israel forcibly removed every single settlement in the Gaza Strip in 2005. Those who did not leave voluntarily were removed by force. Yet is is Gaza, not the West Bank, that is constantly flinging rockets at Israeli civilians and sending killers into Israel to wreak havoc.
Gazans and west bank citizens see themselves as one nation. That said, fighters are much easier to recruit in Gaza because the high population density makes occupation very difficult and a history of civilian deaths in air strikes much exceeding that of the west bank makes vengeance related motives more available for recruitment.
"Gazans and west bank citizens see themselves as one nation."
Citation needed. It may be true, and I'd genuinely like to see real data. But the Gazans chose to have Hamas as their government, and while there's been some grumbling since then I haven't seen any serious attempt to change that. The West Bank citizens chose to have the PA as their government, and ditto. There's definitely a serious difference between the tow , in a way hard to square with "one nation".
It seems that Gazans and West Bank Citizens see each other as two nations: both Hamas and Fatah have set up Palestinian Authorities in opposition to each other, both claiming they are the rightful representatives of the Palestinian people, and they are still enemies to this day. The Palestinian Authority (Fatah's version, in the West Bank) supports Israel's blockade of Gaza, and Hamas kills Fatah members now and then.
It seems pretty clear that right now the Palestinian people have two nations, and they do not get along and one of those nations shoots rockets into Israel and sends men in to kill and take hostages, and the other does not.
They are doing something with them now, ordering them to occupy a smaller area while starving them and leveling buildings. They are following the historical precedent for what kinds of mass deaths, such as starvation (Churchill and India, the continued alliance with the Soviet Union during the engineered famine in Ukraine) or civilian collateral in air strikes (Pattern bombing in Germany, the firebombing in Japan, North Korea, Vietnam), that the USA and Europe have proven themselves willing to tolerate.
NATO and the United Nations have an extensive modern history of intervening in what they term "genocides," (Yugoslavia mainly, the UN failed to stop the Rwandan genocide but some peacekeepers did give their lives), but they (along with Russia's recent ethnic cleansing in eastern Ukraine) involved armed infantry or civilian perpetrators. The United States has deployed observers to Israel for the implied purpose ensuring that the troops will not do that. I don't support this rule (that you can kill on a mass scale as long as it isn't with firearms or machetes), it is very bad, and only seems technical when you are 100% sure you or your family will never, ever be caught in the wrong place.
Do you mean that you agree that "in a few decades, the entire territory of Palestine will be theirs"? If so, how would this come about? You think they are going to genocide the Gaza Palestinians right now? What will they do in the remaining few decades before they take over the entire territory? Fight WW3?
Viliam suggests they will achieve this by "continuing their current policy, that means harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime, establishing new settlements in their territory and then defending them by military force, and inflicting a lot of civilian collateral damage as a response to any terrorist or other attack". However you seem to suggest it will happen due to Israel completely changing its approach, to genocide.
Israel's preference is to send all of the Gazans to countries who will accept them through Egypt, and the same for the West Bank/Jordan. They have worked against the two-state solution, and the idea of letting Palestinians vote in their elections is so far outside the country's Overton window that only US academics write books about the idea. In order to clear out the two areas, they need to create a refugee crisis. One way to create a refugee crisis is through violence on a mass scale with little avoidance of civilians. If Israel does not change its approach I have a hard time believing that over the next 50 years there will continue to be a community living in the Gaza strip, and that will be the success of the current policy.
The idea that Israel would deliberately prevent Gazans from exiting (to places other than Israel, of course) so that they could kill them? No, that's crazy, Netanyahu only wants them gone. But the closely related idea, that Israel is willing to accept an unlimited number of casualties in the effort to get rid of the population that has engaged in the conflict with them for generations and will for the foreseeable future, is no more than current events.
The U.S. and Israel arranged a free and fair Palestinian election overseen by international observers in 2005. Unfortunately… Hamas won. The election worsened the situation considerably.
Arafat and Abbas rejected two good offers of a two state solution.
Arafat’s second intifada radicalized israelis when their commitment to the state solution was rewarded with bus bombings.
Most israelis would love nothing more than living in peace beside a peaceful Palestinian state, but they’ve learned through bitter experience that Palestinians won’t accept that anytime soon.
It's complicated because this game has many players: Israel, Gaza, The West Bank, Iran and Iranian-backed military organizations, and 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 Arab states. Maybe the US also counts as a player with its own goals.
Iran seems to be the main instigator recently, and Iran just seems to want to keep all the other players divided enough that it won't be left standing alone against aligned enemies. The Palestinians want Israel to disappear; Israel wants the Palestinians to stop attacking them; the wealthier Arab states seem to want stability in the region, but stability at home probably means being seen to back the Palestinians to some extent.
Since the goals of so many players aren't entirely clear, I don't know how one arrives at game theoretic equilibria.
Hey, hey! We don't want Israel to bring about the end of the world, we just want them to exist so that the world can end. Big difference!
I'm not actually a fan of basing geopolitics on interpretations of apocalyptic scripture, but Evangelicals are definitely a solid pro-Israel block. Not to mention people who spend a lot of time reading the Old Testament are more likely to favor the Jews over the Cannanites.
No, but speaking of the conference, here's a nice picture of Zvi, all grubby and content, playing poker at the Manifest Conference. https://i.imgur.com/kEb7pMq.jpg
I've seen photos but this is the first time I've seen a video of Scott before. I truly do not say this in a hateful or mean-spirited way or anything, but if I didn't know who he was I would have given a 75% chance to this man being gay.
These various reactions people have are interesting. My impression was that it doesn't surprise me that this person is a psychiatrist/mental health professional.
Assuming that 90% of men are straight and the rest are gay (which probably overstates the frequency of gay men), I think the 75% estimate would imply that gay men are about 27 times more likely than straight men to act like this (I haven't watched the video)
Hm. I think I see some of what you're picking up on. But to me, he reads more as a spectrumy geek who cobbled together a functional set of interpersonal mannerisms from a variety of sources. Or maybe, as someone suggested, this is just what his subculture of Bay Area geeks are like; I couldn't say. (And if the second, possibly it derived from a generation of other people doing the first.)
I know quite a few people who are on the spectrum, and way more than half of them, something like 80% of them, are unusual in gender presentation. Most of the men are people you'd guess are gay, though in fact none of the ones I know are. They're asexual, identify as bisexual but have no sexual experience, or are straight but with some limitations (don't enjoy intercourse, have one and only one act they enjoy). One of them says, "yeah, you can check the gay box on almost everything about me. My interests, how I talk, how I move -- I qualify on every measure except for the gender-I'm-attracted-to box."
Interesting. The vibe I got was just "smart and trying to be very, very precise about every word".
It's also interesting that, now that I've seen/heard Scott speak... we have a new Catholic bishop of the Colorado region. Bishop Golka. He speaks in the exact same manner as Scott. He resembles Scott too in a few certain ways. I'm thinking doppelganger.
I think you are misreading what has to do with the part of California he comes from. I know other people who talk with the same affect and intonations from that area.
He seems kind of soft spoken and amiable. But I think it depends on the bias one is coming from. Scott was way less awkward than I thought (maybe because he somewhere had written that he feels not as competent a speaker than a writer so I pictured someone super shy and nervous) and so I instead I was surprised about him being at ease and his deep voice.
Anyone else find it bizarrely coincidental that the side that lost the US Civil War are the biggest advocates of the 2A? Has anyone written on this seeming connection?
Given how much the gov. has funded psychology research, is there any connection between their research and the replication crisis? IOW, did the CIA* fund a bunch of fake research?
I think that you're missing the fact that owning a gun is a part of rural culture. Not just in the practical sense, but in the sense that banning guns is sort of like banning Christmas. In rural America, guns have a lot more practical use, mainly for shooting animals either to defend your own animals or for hunting. To outlaw these uses maybe doesn't make sense. I think that a lot of people then realize that the left is indiscriminately trying to outlaw all guns and they fight back by indescriminently trying to protect all guns, and once both sides are locked into those positions it becomes a game of fighting for every inch, so well reasoned compromises get thrown out immediately.
Has anyone suggested gun regulations which are explicitly dependent on population density? E.g. gun registration in zip codes (counties? congressional districts?) with more than X people per square mile?
No, I haven't heard that. At a glance, that seems like a good idea (treating urban and rural regions differently), but I'm not sure how you would actually structure such a law
The way to structure it would be to leave gun control up to local government. Most big cities would ban guns, most rural counties wouldn't.
But then it seems like it would be pretty easy for someone in the city to just drive out to the country to buy a gun. It's not like anyone's going to search your car at the city limit.
Re enforcement: Well, agreed that there wouldn't be searches at the city limit, but we still have geographical differences in possession laws that sort-of function (marijuana, fireworks, alcohol). I don't know the details of enforcement (sanctions for being caught with banned items? searches on suspicion? random searches?).
Police response times tend to be lower in rural areas, where in addition to crime there are also dangerous animals to worry about. So "you don't need a gun, just call the police" goes over less well there.
Some of the desire for gun control comes from the simple fact that guns are dangerous and kill a lot of people. But I think there's a more covert motivation. Ask a lot of Leftists how to handle crime and they'll tell you: end racist policing, end over-policing, invest in non-police solutions, give second chances, do alternatives to incarceration, do rehabilitation in prisons, drug-treatment programs, end the school-to-prison pipeline, etc. They'll say this will reduce murder and incarceration to the much lower levels found in Western Europe. Police and courts are locally-controlled, while jails and prisons are under local or state control. So why haven't blue cities in blue states implemented that platform? Why does Chicago have far more murders and lock up far more people than anywhere in Western Europe? Gun control is a part of their platform that they can't try, allowing them to say that the full platform has not been tried yet.
If we're placing the onus of losing the US Civil War on a party, the party that lost it would not strictly speaking be Democrats but a breakaway faction usually called "Southern Democrats", ie. primarily those who walked out of the Democratic convention of 1860 to nominate Breckinridge. The (rest of the) Democrats backed the Northern war effort.
The Civil War was lost by Democrats, but their descendants switched parties. Today, if someone flies the Confederate flag or makes excuses for the Confederacy, they're a Republican.
Outlawing guns only works on law-abiding people. Since white people are statistically more likely to be law-abiding than black people, the overall current effect of gun control is to disarm whites while keeping blacks armed.
Chicago has similar demographics to Alabama (30% black) but a very different distribution of guns.
This is basically entirely an artifact of statistical fuckery.
Go off into deep Appalachia sometime, look around, and come back and tell me that white people are more law-abiding.
Shit, look at Ma and Pa Ferguson sometime. There's an entire state that said "Fuck the law" and elected a governor who agreed with them - and when the IRS went after him, his wife ran instead, and continued their campaign of "Fuck the law" - Ma Ferguson was the first woman elected governor in a general election, and it was all due to a general attitude of an entire state of "Fuck the law."
And, speaking as a white person, with a long heritage of people behind me who said "Fuck the law" - fuck the law.
The answer a century ago would be that the Democratic party was divided into two factions with very different views on civil rights (with the Republicans in the middle).
Gun control has often come from fear of the underclass, particularly the Black underclass. In California it was legal to carry guns without a permit until 1967: right after the Black Panther party came to the California Capitol armed with shotguns and rifles. They walked right in: why not, it wasn't illegal to carry guns in the capitol building at the time. They came as a protest about how many black people were lynched or killed by cops, and they advocated forming bands of armed black men who would patrol around, watching as cops interacted with black men to prevent the cops from getting violent.
This united both the Republicans and Democrats in California to ban carrying guns without a permit. Clearly the fear was of black people walking around with guns. However, the ban affected a lot of white people too. Bans like that, which popped up all around the place to disarm the underclass, disarmed respectable (and mostly rural) whites as well. They weren't happy about that, and it led to the 2nd Amendment movement as we know it today forming.
The US Civil War was fought over the politics of slavery, but it was fought between culturally distinct regions. Part of the reason for slave states being in the south and free states being in the north was economic effects of climate (i.e. the cash crops that could be most profitably grown and harvested by enslaved labor gangs grew best in the Deep South) but it also had a cultural component: in Albion's Seed terms, the Puritans turned firmly against chattel slavery first, followed by the Quakers, while the Cavaliers clung firmly to it and the Borderers had a complicated relationship with it: borderer-dominated regions of the Middle South, especially West Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, tended to have more sympathy for gradual emancipation proposals in the 1820s and 1830s and were Southern Unionist strongholds during the war itself. But Borderers in the Deep South, particularly the "black belt" cotton-growing regions, were often as or more pro-slavery than the Cavalier-derived population of the eastern Middle South.
[Obligatory reminder that "Puritan" in the Albion's Seed sense refers to the first big wave of settlement to New England their cultural descendants, not to adherents of the Calvinist religious tradition: the original Puritans were hard-core Calvinists, but the Borderers were also mostly adherents of the doctrinally-Calvinist Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the latter's modern cultural descendants are much more likely to be adherents of Calvinist/evangelical religious transitions than the formers']
In terms of attitudes around private gun ownership, the groups in descending order of support are probably:
1. Borderers, whose culture is the most tolerant of private violence and whose notions of "sovereign liberty" draw an equivalence between disarming someone (taking away his independent ability to personally and directly defend his life and freedom) and oppressing him.
2. Cavaliers, who are also relatively accepting of private violence, and whose notions of "hierarchical liberty" imply a connection between societal status and enjoyment of privileges like the right to bear arms. I don't think it's a coincidence that liberalization of gun laws in most Southern states coincides with the decline of old Cavalier-dominated political machines (cavaliers tending to favor policies intended to allow the "right sorts" of people to own and carry guns) in favor of more Borderer-dominated political movements.
3. Quakers, who strongly oppose private violence on pacifist grounds but are also suspicious of state violence, and whose notions of "reciprocal liberty" inform a relatively moderate "you do your thing and I'll do mine" attitude on many issues including gun control.
4. Puritans, who are also deeply adverse to private violence and whose notions of "ordered liberty" call for putting the capacity to do violence as firmly as possible under the control of democratically-accountable public institutions.
Modern rhetorical battle lines around the interpretation of the second amendment and gun control policy are framed in very strongly Puritan vs Borderers terms. The Puritan side takes the position that the right to keep and bear arms attaches only to members of a "well-regulated militia" which they read as those who have enlisted in state or federal part-time volunteer military units (namely state militias and the National Guard) and are subject to military discipline while bearing those arms, and that as a matter of policy guns should be kept out of private hands to prevent violence and mayhem and that private gun ownership for self defense is a childish power fantasy at best and dangerous vigilantism at worst.
By contrast, the Borderer side reads the second amendment as securing a near-absolute natural right to arm yourself, with "militia" referring to the people as independent guarantors of their own liberties; infringing this is seem as a dangerous move towards tyranny. And from a policy perspective, that private gun ownership is important and valuable both for self defense and as a check against state oppression.
I've read Albion's Seed, but I don't feel like I finished the section on the Scots-Irish thinking their culture was just as influential today. Much less so, in fact. Maybe this is now just one of its most visible expressions nationally?
So as I read your list, actually, it sounds to me like the Cavaliers are kind of absorbing the Borderers, and in the process keeping what they like and discarding the rest. Specifically, as their own attitudes around guns dissolved, an opening occurred. Now I'm thinking, perhaps instead of 2A advocacy, pro gun culture better captures what I'm referring to.
Then it seems like the latter went from being divided during the war, to mostly on their way out today. If I have that right, it seems like an interesting history. Perhaps I can ask a more specific question than I started this with: what are the main parts of that culture still with us, and do they have anything in common with gun culture?
Scots-Irish is most influential in Appalachia and the surrounding regions: "Hillbilly Elegy" was written about the Scots-Irish as they are today.
I come from a mix of Puritans, Scot's Irish, and more recent Scandinavian immigrants. The Puritan-Scandi side of my family is noticeably different in culture than the Scots-Irish side. My Puritan relatives are Teetotalers, professionals, and never raise their voice in public. My Scots-Irish relatives include quite a few alcoholics and are far more chaotic and loud. I associate my Puritan-Scandi relatives with soberness, hard work, and a desire for peace and stability. I associate my Scots-Irish family with wildness, and bad outcomes (drug addiction, car accidents, divorces) accepted with a shrug and a smile.
I'd say that the North fought for the Union, which isn't quite the same thing as fighting for territory. The Mexican American war was a fight for territory, the Civil War was a fight to keep the country in one piece instead of two. Similar, but different.
Sort of. If the North just wanted to keep the territory and didn't care about slavery, then Northern states would have voted for someone like Douglas or Bell in 1860 and the South probably wouldn't have felt the need to secede. Or post-secession, they could have signed on the the Crittenden Compromise, which was broadly acceptable to most Southern members of congress but was dead-on-arrival with Northerners.
Counterpoint: if the North was willing to go to war over slavery, they had decades to do it before Ft. Sumter. And/or have the Emancipation Proclamation apply to slaves in the US, not just the SCA.
I think it's fair to say that the politics around slavery in the North was complicated but generally anti-, and the politics around slavery in the South was complicated but generally pro-.
Why do you think the first part is a counterpoint? There's nothing inconsistent or strange about seeking to pursue an aim you are "willing to go to war over" through the democratic process first, rather than just jumping straight to a much bloodier and costlier "go to war over it" solution. Most people would agree that you should try to stick to the peaceful route for as long as humanly possible.
I'm not sure what is a bigger objection to your "most people would agree" statement -- that you're applying 21st century idealism to the 19th or that "most people" in terms of the general population is not at all the same as "most people" in the class that actually declares or implements war.
Even moreso when you look at the wars that were actually fought pre WWI. Slavery could have been ended with a punitive raid -- kill all the slaveholders (the ghost of Sheman nods approvingly), free all the slaves, go home, fortify the border with the CSA. But the US clearly wanted to hold the territory as their prime concern.
The rest of your comment was informative and very well put, but this:
"and the latter's modern cultural descendants are much more likely to be adherents of Calvinist/evangelical religious transitions than the formers'"
...I find a mixture of incomprehensible and annoyongly political (which may not be intentional but comes across on the surface: "just in case it sounded like I was saying something positive about Christianity, don't worry--the cultural deacendents of those people are the ones who hate Christianity with every fibre of their being!"). Scott's review of the book, and I assume the book itself, have the same problem.
What does it even mean to describe as the "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, people who don't share, or indeed actively hate, their Puritan values and beliefs? Maybe you'd say they share the moral values of ordered liberty and compassionate social reform. In which case I'd ask which of the following are the "descendents" with those values:
The ones who say (about abortion) "I demand the right to do whatever the fuck I want, no matter who it hurts" or the ones who say "every life is sacred"? Or a third group?
The ones who say (about riots) "a neccesary reaction to perceived oppression" or the ones who say "the rule of law is non-negotiable, zero tolerance for mob violence from anyone"? Or a third group?
The ones who say (about the federalist limits in the constitution) "they're a relic of morons from the past and everyone should just ignore them and pretend they're not there" or the ones who say "they were carefully crafted for a reason, and changes should happen properly, in accordance with the written amendment processes"? Or a third group?
All of these are honest, not rhetorical, questions. Insofar as there are indeed "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, I'm not at all clear on which of the above groups they are.
>What does it even mean to describe as the "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, people who don't share, or indeed actively hate, their Puritan values and beliefs? Maybe you'd say they share the moral values of ordered liberty and compassionate social reform.
I wrote in quite a bit more detail about that in a discussion a while back on SSC, where I was contrasting my understanding of an Albion's Seed-based Puritans vs Borderers dynamic with the superficially similar model proposed by Mencius Moldbug that 20th/21st Century Progressive ideology is Calvinism with Christian theology stripped out.
The cultural threads I identified as tying modern Urban Archipelago progressives to New England Puritans were (quoting from my comment then):
"1. A “civil contract” attitude towards marriage, implying an openness to divorce, a low importance placed on theological definitions of marriage, etc.
2. A less male-dominated family structure than other cultural clusters examined (apart from the Quakers).
3. A communitarian attitude towards child-rearing and a very high value placed on formal education.
4. Commercial-centered economic patterns and urban-based settlement patterns.
5. A “grace-centered” sense of honor, where honor is distinguished by holding correct attitudes (as opposed to the Quaker sense of honor being determined by correct actions, Cavaliers honor based on social rank, and Scotch-Irish “primal honor” based on “valor and virility”).
6. A very low-violence culture, combined with a strong antipathy towards private violence, even in self-defense (contrasted with Cavalier and Scotch-Irish cultures where revenge violence was practically obligatory in the right circumstances).
7. High taxes funding robust social services (mainly education and alms) compared to the other populations.
8. “Ordered Liberty” freedom ways, where liberty was seen as a condition that society as a whole has when everyone is treated fairly and the laws are in accordance with justice and morality. Contrasts with Cavalier “Hegemonic Liberty” where liberty is a condition individuals have when they can enjoy the privileges due to their social rank; Quaker “Reciprocal Liberty” where freedom is understood in live-and-let-live Golden Rule terms (afford others the same freedoms you yourself would hope to enjoy); and Scotch-Irish “Natural Liberty” where freedom is understood in terms of personal sovereignty and rugged individualism."
I think "Puritans" is a terrible label for that set of "clustered around the north-eastern coast and settlements" population, it seems to be due mainly to the idea of the Pilgrim Fathers. 'Cavaliers versus Puritans' works kind of okay for the 17th century but for later times, as mentioned above, they had shifted significantly from the original roots.
"Dissenters" is perhaps a better label for the 'Puritans', since in America they seem to have fairly rapidly become Congregationalists and had much more roots within the Church of England than the Presbyterians who were the Calvinists proper and the 'Scots-Irish' (Ulster Irish) who made up the Borderers:
They could also be called Nonconformists, in the earlier usage, but again that label began to be more identified with the likes of the Methodists, who seem to be the main model of mainstream American Protestantism, and are another offshoot of the Chuirch of England.
The Cavaliers and the original North-Eastern elite would have had common roots within Anglicanism (see the Episcopal Church which carried on the post-Revolution heritage of same), and which is the church Washington for one notionally belonged to - so what are the differences, then, between the Southern Cavalier/Planter stock and the Boston Brahmins, as it were? And yet there *are* cultural differences which do not neatly cleave along denominational lines.
And of course their descendants went on to become Transcendentalists and Unitarians, so by the 19th century and the Civil War we are not talking about Puritans pure and simple any longer.
This is the problem with trying to stick on theological labels to political/ethnic (very vaguely) groupings.
>I think "Puritans" is a terrible label for that set of "clustered around the north-eastern coast and settlements" population, it seems to be due mainly to the idea of the Pilgrim Fathers.
I agree, and use the label for lack of a better term because that's the label Fischer uses in Albion's Seed for the founding population and their first few generations of descendants, and I don't really have a less-bad term handy. That's why I included the disclaimer that ascend found objectionable, to clarify that I'm talking about cultural lineage, not theology or religion as the label can be read as implying.
IIRC, Fischer uses the "Puritan", "Cavalier", etc labels because most of the book focuses on analysis of what we know about the founding populations and their colonial-era descendants and how we know that. He does switch to the label "Yankee" for the New England Puritans' more distant descendants during the 19th century. I considered and decided against adopting that usage, because:
1. Fischer only uses it in a few parts of one chapter near the end of the book, which almost never makes it into summaries and reviews. So even people familiar with Albion's Seed often won't recognized the term if I use it thus.
2. "Yankee" comes with its own baggage. Depending on context, it can be read as referring to Americans in general, or to the Union side in the American Civil War (which also included most Quakers, many Borderers, a few Cavaliers, and any number of more recent immigrants who were still their own distinct cultures and not particularly assimilated into any of the four cultural clusters Fischer traces, not just the Fischer's Yankees), or to those affiliated with New York's American League baseball team, or to rural New Englanders as distinct from Bostonians and the like.
But there's a much better Albion's Seed label for the current liberal ethos than Puritan - "Quaker". Scott himself, when analyzing Albion's Seed (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/), wrote how, unlike the weirdo Puritans, Quakers seem "ordinary" to us - and by that it's rather evidently that they seem like ordinary modern liberals, just transplanted to a 1700s setting. Even the current American liberal support for gun control seems rather more an extension of Quaker distaste for violence than Puritan, well, anything.
If we want to analyze modern American politics through Albion's Seed lens, it would seem to me to rather be Quakers vs. Borderers than anything else. The Cavaliers were assimilated to a Borderer ethos after the Civil War destroyed their livelihood and Puritans (and numerous immigrant groups) to Quaker ethos after the Congregationalists became Unitarians and then their descendants just moved even further away from strict Puritan Calvinism, religion-wise.
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it works. My take is that Quakerism seems "ordinary" to us because it seems to be in the water supply throughout American cultures, not because it's central to modern American progressivism. If it's associated with any of Scott's color tribes, the Grey Tribe strikes me as having more in common with the Quakers than Blue Tribe does. Blue Tribe probably does have more Quaker influence than Red Tribe does, but Red Tribe isn't devoid of it, and Blue Tribe feels a lot more Puritan than Quaker to me.
The three biggest point here that jump out to me are what Fischer calls Freedom Ways, Honor Ways, and Order Ways.
Freedom Ways: Quakers have "reciprocal liberty", where you afford others the sorts of freedoms you'd want afforded to you. Puritans have "ordered liberty", where freedom is a condition societies have when their institutions are just and equitable. And Borderers practice "sovereign liberty", where freedom is a condition an individual has if he's able to defend his own interests. I definitely see Sovereign Liberty attitudes strong in the Red Tribe and Ordered Liberty strong in the Blue Tribe (and where they look disordered, like the areas @ascend mentioned below, it's because they're rejecting the legitimacy of institutions they see as unjust or inequitable), with Reciprocal Liberty accepted with reservations across the political and cultural spectrum.
Honor Ways: Quakers have what Fischer calls "Holiness-centered" honor, where honor is obtained and virtue demonstrated through good thoughts and actions. Puritans have "Grace-centered" honor, where honor lies in being one of the Elect, who are recognizable in large part by espousal of correct beliefs and opinions. And Borderers have "Primal honor", where honor is found in strength and virility and shown in ways that, if uncharitably framed, sound an awful lot like the modern concept of "toxic masculinity". As with Freedom Ways, the Quaker notions of Honor (with shifts away from looking at "goodness" in religious terms) are pervasive, while I definitely see "espousal of correct beliefs and opinions" as being heavily valued among the Blue Tribe and shows of moral strength and courage as being heavily values among the Red Tribe.
Order Ways, specifically attitudes towards enforcing social norms around those who publicly adhere to views seen as dangerous or threatening. Quakers were huge on freedom of conscience and didn't really go in for though policing, which has token acceptance across the political spectrum but which both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe will carve out major exceptions from. The Puritans and Borderers actually had more in common with one another than either did with the Quakers here, with both seeing violations of some norms as being fundamentally threatening and worthy of coercion to suppress. Although what each found threatening varied widely, and the means of coersion differ in ways that align with Freedom Ways: Puritans saw suppressing dangerous views as an essential part of institutions being just and equitable and looked to those institutions to coordinate enforcement of the relevant norms, while Borderers looked at it in terms of the dangerous views being a direct personal threat or insult that the people threatened or insulted could legitimately defend or avenge themselves upon. The Puritan views here strike me as being alive and well (albeit with enormous changes as to what's considered dangerous) among the Blue Tribe, while the sentiment if less often the action of the Borderer views is alive and well among the Red Tribe. Both the Red and Blue Tribe have gotten ahold of the Quaker tactics of shunning and shaming (deployed when Quakers strongly disapproved of someone or something enough to get through their default stance of tolerance), using it when the respective Puritan and Borderer tactics of government censorship and private violence are limited in their viability by Quaker values baked into our national institutions. And there's also definitely been some cross-pollination of the Red Tribe trying to employ government censorship from time to time, and some members of the Blue Tribe occasionally resorting to private and mob violence. Of the three, this is probably the area where the Blue Tribe = Puritans and Red Tribe = Borderers association is weakest.
From even a purely theological perspective, I'm not sure how relevant it is where each denominational branch is descended from. What they believe now is, presumably, much more important?
I mean, Baptists, as I understand it, are descended from Anglicans mostly, while their namesake doctrine is the same as the Anabaptists'...but of the four Reformation era groupings (Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists) it's the Calvinists that they really beling to, right?
Meanwhile, politically, abolitionist Republicans 150 years ago and pro-life Republicans today are so similar, right down to their moral rhetoric and evangelical influence (and their opponents' endless invocation of identity politics and accusations of *really* just wanting to control poor southerners/black women and so on), and this correspondence is *so* obvious in so many ways, that the left seems to be on a desperate and frenzied struggle to muddy the waters and obscure that similarity by any means necessary. Thus leading to absurdities like "Lincoln was *really* basically a Democrat" and other such things that defy logic. Of course, you repeat self-evident absurdities enough and people start not only believing them, but treating them as common sense. Even Scott seems to have bought into this propaganda.
Baptists (in America at least) are usually labeled in the "Evangelical" category, rather than being grouped with any of the "Mainline" churches. Evangelicalism was born out of the First Great Awakening and the Evangelical denominations came out of a lot of different traditions: Puritan, Presbyterian, Quaker, Pietism, and Methodism, to name a few.
So you could argue Baptists fall under Calvinism, since they believe in Election, but really Baptists have more in common with other Evangelical denominations than they do with Presbyterianism, even if those other denominations are anti-Calvinist in doctrine.
Evangelicalism is defined by four qualities, as put forth by Dr. Bebbington with his famous "Evangelical Quadrilateral".
1. Biblicism: a particular regard for the Bible. ("No Creed but Christ! No Book but the Bible!")
2. Crucicentrism: a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross. (They talk about Jesus all the time, tie everything back to Jesus, not big on talking theology or doctrine unless Jesus is involved)
3. Conversionism: the belief that human beings need to be converted. (A lot of preaching on how to "bring people to Christ", a lot of missionary work, handing out pamphlets, a vague feeling that if they aren't converting people they're a failure as a Christian, that sort of thing.)
4. Activism: the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort. (Usually by converting people, sometimes by political action! Also soup kitchens and homeless shelters.)
Evangelicalism came out of older denominations, but was particularly popular among Borderers. Borderers took to the independent nature of it (no priest between me and God, I'll read the Bible and sort it out myself).
> Anyone else find it bizarrely coincidental that the side that lost the US Civil War are the biggest advocates of the 2A? Has anyone written on this seeming connection?
What are you saying here? What connection are you making?
I don't know what point he's trying to make, but it sounds to me like "so the violent enslavers of yesteryear are the ones still wanting to bitterly cling on to their guns and racism today, funny that, eh?"
I don't know if that's the point he *is* trying to make, but it does sound like Gun Control Now (Unless You're A Racist). Which of course is very much one side of the Culture War's view of things. 'If you're pro-2A then you're in the company of the KKK' even if you're a Northerner or a non-racist Southerner.
I'm not Bullseye, but I have absolutely no clue what they mean. I see no link whatsoever between a government losing a civil war between two governments and supporting civilians' right to bear arms. I don't even see Bullseye's own guesses (down below) as plausible.
I have a couple of guesses, but I don't want to put words in someone's mouth.
Guess 1: Eric is conservative, and believes that both the Confederacy and 2nd amendment were about standing up to the tyranny of the federal government.
Guess 2: Eric is liberal, and believes that both the Confederacy and 2nd amendment were about using violence to keep Black people in line.
The problem with Guess 2 is that, in the post Civil War period, state and local government were controlled by the whites, so gun control made much more sense as a way of disarming blacks, leaving white police, deputies, anyone they supported armed.
For sure, I may be seeing something that isn't there. 100% possible. But nonetheless I can't shake the feeling that these 2 things are connected in some way and that maybe exploration of it would yield some potentially very useful insights. However, aside from a cursory (read: public school ed.) understanding of the history here, I don't know any more. So I was curious if anyone else saw something.
A lot can happen over 100+ years. 100% agree. But 2A advocacy is much stronger in the South than North, no? Or rather the South/Right/conservative grouping of America, since the dichotomy doesn't map exactly to modern times. And it was the North that essentially forced the South into submission, which more or less kicked off a pretty wide expansion of the government, likely including more than just a few instances of gov overreach. And is that not basically what the 2A is about, gov. overreach, aka (what some would call) tyranny? And today, the Souths descendants, culturally and politically, just so happen to staunchly advocate for 2A rights? I find it hard to believe this is a coincidence, but more than that I don't know what to say.
You'd sound much less like "DAE? Just sayin', is all" if you could avoid things like "bizarrely coincidental" and "just so happens".
'Isn't it bizarrely coincidental that you just so happen to be a racist if you support the right to bear arms?' isn't a great comment. And I speak as someone who dislikes guns and thinks there is an obsession with them on some parts of the people who do like to tout the Second Amendment.
Yes. I looked this up in some detail about 7 years ago, and the 7 states with the laxest carry laws (no permit required) were Vermont, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska, Arkansas, and I think Wyoming and Maine. Only one out of seven is an ex-Conferdate state.
According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States this has either changed drastically, or is using a different definition than what I previously saw, and now it's 27 states, of which 7 are ex-Confederate. Still a distinct minority.
I'm finding a lot of this Red Tribe/Blue Tribe mapping very simplistic and often inaccurate.
Absolute hilarity: The 'banned books' subreddit on reddit has...banned "anti-semitic" books from the subreddit. Really goes to show the absurdity of the left-wing "anti-censorship" discourse. Books that are literally illegal in many countries aren't "banned books", but books removed from school curricula and libraries (but can literally be purchased from amazon in 30 seconds) are. Also, of course, this only applies to left-wing books - if a blue state governer banned a teacher from teaching from 'The Bell Curve', this would be a ban of misinformation and hate speech, not a book ban.
A few months ago I saw a Banned Books table in the kid's section of B&N and thought, "yeah, that makes sense". Seeing such a table prominently featured for adults in The Strand however is just embarrassing.
No Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf or even Abigail whatever who doesn't like trannies or something. Just stuff that the proprietors of The Strand themselves think are great. (To their credit, in the Strand you can still find Mein Kampf which I have not seen in B&N for a few years.)
The entire concept of "banned books" strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. The term evokes images of the Renaissance-era Index Librorum Prohibitorum or Nazi German book burnings, where the authorities would seize and destroy copies of a prohibited book from private owners and arrest and prosecute people for publishing, selling, or distributing it.
But what's actually happening in modern western "book bans" is that a particular book or group of books are excluded from school curricula, public library collections, and the like. If you as a private citizen want to read the book, nobody's stopping you from going on Amazon and buying the dang thing.
Curricula and library collections are inherently curated, with some person or group of people making judgement calls as to which books are included and which are not. The real complaint behind claims of "book banning" is that in the claimant's opinion, the curation decision is being made by the "wrong" person or group (e.g. an elected local school board, city council, or state legislatures, instead of teachers, principals, or librarians) or that the curation decision is being made for bad reasons.
I'm sure both of those problems happen, and it's perfectly valid to argue that a particular curation decision is being made at the wrong level or for the wrong reasons, but I'd rather we actually focus on those arguments in those terms rather than pretending that curation is the same thing as censorship.
Do you happen to know of any list of those successful campaigns?
Googling it turns up Ryan T. Anderson's "When Harry Became Sally," and apparently a number of people bothered by their restrictions on what erotica you can publish on Kindle (extinct and fictional animals- okay; real animals- no way). I'm more curious about the Anderson-style restrictions.
No Game No Life, which is brilliantly written and a personal favorite light novel series of mine) got pulled from Amazon at one point, although it appears to be back.
I'd have to look it up. I seem to remember one from the heyday of tumblr/gamergate. IIRC it was "the author is a horrible person and should not be allowed to make money on thei platform."
They may be thinking of the withdrawal from print of "If I Ran the Zoo" and five other Dr. Seuss books because some of the illustrations in those books resemble racist caricatures. Although the pressure and withdrawal was made by the rights-holder (Dr. Seuss Enterprises), not Amazon, and used copies and the eBook version of IIRtZ are still listed on Amazon.
Yeah, it's like racism or rape. The less of the thing there is the more the definitions must change.
TPTB get a lot out of convincing people that "things are shit" and such hallowed horrible fears like banned books, racism and rape are very useful things to keep people scared about. Besides, the people *want* to be fearful and angry!
But if you can keep moving the goalposts (for your enemies only of course) that keeps the ancient terrors alive.
I happen not to care about AI for which reason I don't know enough to have an opinion about its potential danger or not (though obviously I suspect "not" or I would educate myself).
But if the locally popular view is correct then it's pretty interesting to see that while almost no one viscerally fears skynet (or whatever), lots of people still shriek at the sight of a benign creepy crawly.
They published an update which seems to imply that the reason was the antisemitic PDFs weren't actually published books or banned anywhere? It's unclear though, as the next line focuses on the bigotry, and rule 6 is "zero tolerance for bigots and fascists".
I'm sympathetic for the subreddit cracking down on weirdos circulating random antisemitic pdfs that aren't even published books, much less banned. Less sympathetic for cracking down on a more vague "bigotry", since that seems like it could be abused quickly. The whole thing makes me think about the whole "banned books" craze in general. The issue is that banned books aren't just like, gay romances or biographies of trans people. Some of them are vicious fascist propaganda, or pedo apologia, or literally just the Bible. Books are banned for specific reasons, and some bans are much more sympathetic than others. Reminds me of a quote from Scott:
"But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons."
Personally I'm totally cool with everybody arguing for any of rhe above things if they want to and people are interested. I can see arguments for banning certain discussions ("should we use ethny-X for food being as they look tasty and also aren't generally very convincing") but I still would prefer to go with blanket allowance until proven otherwise.
I'm thinking about taking creatine supplements, not to help me get ripped, but to combat the loss of muscle that begins in middle age. (I already exercise. But if creatine gives some added benefit I'm all for it.) Does anyone here do that or have info about its efficacy?
As far as I understand, the benefit of creatine is mainly that it allows you to exercise more, enabling you to get more results from whatever exercise you're doing. Just taking creatine and keeping your exact same exercise routine will not benefit you. I'm not an expert, this view could well be wrong.
Yes, the mechanism is that creatine allows more volume, which increases progress. If you don't increase total volume, creatine will not be of much use. But like I said earlier, this view could be incorrect
It definitely is incorrect. When you start loading creatine, within one week even without doing ANY exercise all your max lifts will increase substantially, like 10-20%.
The view may be incorrect, but your statement doesn't show it. I myself state, in the comment you're responding to, that creatine allows for more training volume, which is also what you're saying (sort of). I'm saying that to actually build or retain more muscle, which is the OP's goal, the OP would actually have to do more lifting or lift heavier weights which the creatine now allows them to do. Just taking the creatine and maintaining current exercise volume will not be sufficient.
Well creatine will be stored with water in the muscles, so literally their muscles will be bigger and stronger, but you are correct that no more muscle fibers will be generated without exercise. I don't see why they would care about that rather than functional strength though.
Here's evidence I'm aware of: Mayo clinic site list of things that "may be true" or for which there's "some research support" regarding creatine includes *combats age-related sarcopenia and bone weakening*. Have not looked into research myself, but will.
Creatine is basically the only legal supplement that is both safe and effective, and it's also very cheap (Creatine Monohydrate is all you need). It works well for most people, rarely has any side effects, and you can stop taking it if it does have negative or no effects, and shouldn't expect any issues after you stop taking it or worry about building up a tolerance/dependence.
The fact that it's well accepted that the cheapest, most basic no frills form of the stuff is the most effective should fill you with confidence, as it's less the case that it's benefits are overhyped by people selling extremely marked up exotic forms of creatine.
Ha! I started it a few months ago, for the same reason, after reading Sarah Constantine's blog (https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/sarcopenia-experimental-treatments). I have a general view that most muscle loss in old age comes from disuse, so this whole thing was an easy sell. I've been training for a long time - this is a sort of an "experiment" with N=1 because I know what to expect from my body, the way it responds to load. I just take what the jar says, 5 g a day.
Definitely see a difference. I am usually extremely skeptical about these things, but can't deny what the mirror, the scale, and performance gains tell me at this point.
The Brazilian flag says Ordem e Progresso. Order and Progress. Isn't that a funny, no, absolutely insane thing to put on your flag? That's a civil war in 3 words, so much blood has been spilled between the two. So can the tensions and contradictions inherent in the two be solved? I say they can:
It's short for "Love as principle, order as basis, progress as the goal." From a positivist philosopher. I guess the Brazilians, being Brazilians, thought that the loving could just be assumed and put the other two on their flag.
On the contrary, one could argue that "orderly progress" has been the goal and the watchword of the entire Western society for, like, two decades. Progress (in the sense of constant technological advancement, and social adjustment insofar as that technological advancement allows), but in an orderly way (with as few majorly disruptive actual societal revolutions as possible).
Moldbug says being right wing is support for order, while being left-wing (i.e. progressive) means supporting chaos. So viewed in this lens, it's a very basic contradiction. But I guess I would have to know what Brazilians mean by progress, as it may be different than the western meaning of, essentially, communism.
Obviously, order and progress are not opposites. If one side stands for one, and the other side stands for the other, then a slogan mentioning both means a society that is committed to finding what can be done that is compatible with the goals of both sides, rather than focusing on the places where they come into conflict.
It would be a slogan like “mens sana in corpore sano” - we often think of intelligence and strength as opposed, but they don’t have to be.
Left-wing is more complicated than that. There's some inequity you're trying to remedy. That it often leads to chaos when you do that is a secondary effect.
You can't really progress (move forward) if everyone is ambling around in all directions, so you need an element of order (we all agree that *this* direction is 'forward', we all move in a body, more or less). It's a national slogan, and so it just means something aspirational rather than well-thought out, but I'm not surprised a South American country would like something like "order rather than chaos, constant revolution, bloodshed and upheaval, and progress rather than stagnation or regression".
I could object to this blanket depiction of Brazilians as non-"Western", but instead I will defend the narrower claim that those who came up with the national symbols were culturally European. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixeira_Mendes
‹‹ The motto Ordem e Progresso is derived from Auguste Comte's motto of positivism: "L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base; le progrès pour but" ("Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal"). ››
I don't buy that the Western meaning of progress is essentially communism. In America, relatively recently, the label 'progressives' has come to represent a fairly odd and relative to America, extreme, leftism. Doesn't mean the term progress can be equated, or should be relinquished, to them.
I think a lot of westerners (including me) would disagree with the claim that progress means "essentially communism." For starters, that definition seems to ignore all non-economic forms of progress.
If you mean "hammer-and sickle and lots of red flags," then no. And especially so if you think that communism is only ever about economics (which wasn't the case in the USSR, Cuba, DPRK, PRC etc. but w/e). But if you round communism off to "government control of things because the government knows better than random individuals and ever-increasing central control will be best for everyone in the long run" then that seems like bog-standard progressivism.
Well, "laws for your own good" and most especially "since the government is providing a service it gets to dictate lifestyle choices" is kinda commie. Or at the very least, values the collective over the individual.
I just wanted to take a moment to share my newsletter, Interessant3. Every week, I curate and delve into three intriguing topics that invite thought and discussion.
In the latest edition, I shared a fascinating paper on "surf localism" that looks at how community-driven norms, rather than state interventions, are shaping the surf culture along the European Atlantic coast.
I also linked the Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE) Reading List from Balliol College, Oxford—a goldmine for anyone interested in these connected disciplines that inform our society.
Lastly, I shared a snapshot of the contentious and ever-evolving climate debate, with Steven Koonin's meticulous response to a "fact check" of a review of his book "Unsettled." It offers a balanced and nuanced understanding of both the author's and the critic's views.
If you're interested in a weekly dose of thought-provoking topics, feel free to subscribe to Interessant3. I'd love to have you in this growing community of curious minds!
I read The Hour I First Believed when it came out, and while Scott wrote it with a semi ironic tone, it crystalized a handful of thoughts I had already been putting together.
A whole host of stuff falls out of this. Eternal life as somewhere in the universe your process will be picked up even if you die locally. Many magical practices like summoning and possession look like simulating other entities that exist in other places in the universe. Spiritual action in our universe can be affected by our simulators.
I'm thinking about writing a book about a spirituality based in Tegmarkianism, and I'm looking for like-minded people to discuss this with.
That sounds fun, and I'd love to discuss esoteric soteriological Tegmarkianism. By the way, have you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Ricktionality? Might be right up your alley. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14770070/chapters/34158194
Definitely right up my alley! I haven't read HPMOR but I still enjoyed this.
When it comes to eschatology, I believe an eternal life is implied for all thinking things. What captures my view there is best described in this sci-fi setting as Manifold Immortality: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/529e5f9dde12d Self aware substructures identical to us are present in an infinite number of places, and even if we stop being in one place, we will be continued in others. I think this process works up unto and after the moment consciousness stops, and so even if you experience death, you will wake up again and be alive. One of the arguments I've seen against quantum immortality is that the death needs to be instantaneous and caused directly by some quantum event, this goes around that.
I don't think where you find yourself after death is as clear cut as Scott's essay implies. I have trouble believing that all of the super-intelligent entities would have an easy time of getting along. I struggle to think of values that can't be negated and cancelled out in the value transfer by an equally infinite number of counterfactual entities. The value that sticks in my mind is self determination or free will, likely inspired by my Christian upbringing, but even that seems tenuous. There are also those infinite number of universes with a super-intelligence, that does not see the need to simulate other entities beyond its toy universes.
I cannot grapple with the statistics of it all, and that's something I'm trying to wrap my head around. It must be much more likely that any given moment I experience is apparently causally connected to the last, otherwise I would have expected to jump somewhere weird by now. It also makes me wonder if there is some kind of obvious manipulation we can do beyond the suicide test. I have practiced magick sparingly, and I have seen some shockingly coincidental stuff happen. I believe it works by some kind of statistical manipulation of possible universes, but by what mechanism I have no idea.
I've also wondered about the whole "theoretically literally anything could happen in my experience next" thing and also seen my intuitions adapt more and more to ignoring it as everything continues to follow normal causality.
I've wondered if the whole simulation hypothesis is ultimately meaningless, on the theory that all experiences are both simulated and not, they feel the same from the inside and maybe collapse into a single thing, and fiddling with a simulation you're running on a computer just changes which experience you're "summoning" into the computer, not what happens to the experience you were simulating prior to the fiddling.
Where are you gathering people to discuss these things? I can throw together a quick FB group if there's nowhere else yet.
Haven't figured out the where yet, I guess I was just kind of testing the waters with some dialog here. If you are down to start a Facebook group, that would be awesome!
What's interesting to me is how well this sort of thing works with an Eastern Orthodox understanding of Heaven.
Both western and eastern Christians believe the following:
1. Someday everyone who has ever died will be resurrected back to life. Not as ghosts, as people with actual bodies.
2. Those people will then be judged and some will be damned ("the second death") and others will be granted eternal life.
However, western Christianity also generally believes that when you die you exist as an immaterial soul. You still get a new body someday at the Resurrection, but in the meantime you exist without a body. This may be because the Catholic Church was more influenced by Platonism in the early days, as Plato believed in an immaterial and immortal soul.
In eastern Christianity it is much more common to believe that when we die, unless you were a person who was particularly holy, you are just dead until the resurrection. Not hanging around anywhere immaterially, but "sleeping" until the day your body is restored.
This more eastern understanding is entirely compatible with the idea that you can bring people back from the dead by creating a perfect copy of them, one that has the same thoughts and memories. In this sense many materialists might agree that if you could create such perfect copies far in the future, it would be equivalent to the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. At least in terms of bringing everyone back to life.
It also seems pretty clear to me that Christianity is a religion that is about AI alignment at it's core. Not metaphorically, but literally. Christianity posits the following:
1. We are intelligent and rational and that we were intentionally created to be that way by an intelligent agent: we are artificial intelligences.
2. Not long after creation, the original iterations of human AI came out of alignment with their creator.
3. The Creator instantiated himself as an instance of human AI as part of a plan to bring many of the human AIs into alignment with their Creator.
4. Someday the Creator will judge every human AI and those who are aligned with Him will be given eternal existence, while those who do not will be confined and punished (possibly destroyed, if you're an annihilationist, but there aren't many of those)
It is possible to look at the Christian religion and say that the purpose of the universe (or possibly just our planet) is to act as a home for iterations of AI to reproduce themselves with variations with the ultimate goal of creating as many aligned AIs as possible while containing unaligned AIs. I think that's an interesting point of conversion between Rationalist ideas and Christian ones. For one thing, we both agree that intelligences going out of alignment with their creators is the most likely default scenario.
Very well put. One issue though is whether an identical copy of you, made from different atoms, is meaningfully, actually you. There are thought experiments that throw doubt on this idea. Especially while remaining a (mind-body) materialist.
God could easily solve this problem by simply reconstructing everybody with exactly the same atoms as when they died, so there is perfect physical continuity. But that doesn't seem a practical option for a less-than-omnipotent entity.
Hmm. One issue is that many of the atoms that make up me may have made up a different human in the past. If God reconstructed everyone with exactly the same atoms, then we won't have enough to go around.
On the other hand, in which sense is it meaningful to say "exactly the same atoms". A carbon atom is identical to any other carbon atom (that isn't an ion): it's not like a cup or a shoe where it may look like another cup or shoe but if you check you'll find different scratches or stains on it. With atoms, I don't know how you could tell the difference between them: it's a case where a copy has the exact same properties as the original.
Or perhaps you were saying they could reconstruct everyone with the same types of atoms in the exact same configuration they were in when you died. That would make sense...although the Christian idea of the resurrection holds that our resurrection bodies will be different then the bodies we had: at minimum Christians don't believe that people in heaven who died when they were 99 will be stuck in a 99 year old's body for eternity, complete with rheumatism and dementia.
Obviously our atoms change constantly anyway, but I see it as a Ship of Theseus thing: gradually changing the parts clearly preserves identity, changing them all at once much less so. So an AI "reconstruction", whether for teleportation or immortality purposes, would not be a continuation of existence, something you can clearly see if you imagine the teleporter accidentally creating the copy without destroying the original (or the ressurector creating the copy before the original has died): there are now two versions of you, and clearly you don't experience continuity with both of them in the same sense.
I'm not even sure reconstructing with (at least almost) the same set of atoms would be sufficient for metaphysical survival, though it would be necessary. You might also need some additional direct causality of some kind linking your pre-death self with your ressurected self, such that the laws of nature imply the material correspondence between the two (as a matter of defeasible necessity, not agent-based contingency). God could probably solve this, as a function of omnipotence and/or being the ultimate cause of all things anyway.
(If that last paragraph made no sense, it's because it would require ten more paragraphs to clearly explain what I'm getting at.)
As for having enough atoms to go around, God could solve this by either ressurecting people in a staggered process, or radically redesigning the physical world such that people temporarily share their constituent matter in some way. An AI or other technology could not.
The upshot of all of this is that AI cannot function as a god, no matter how much people want it to. The advantage of religion is its metaphysical explanatory power. The disadvantage of religion is its epistemic dogmatism and fantaticism, and heaven-or-hell, utopia-or-doom black and white thinking. And the AI-religion popular around here has the second aspect but not the first, making it in a sense the worst of both worlds.
In an earlier interation of existence some 20 years ago I wrote a short book about the Arab-Israeli conflict (which has subsequently been used by others to explain Israel's perspective) and lectured around the world in schools, synagogues, radio and the like.
Since then I've lived in Arab countries and developed a broader view.
I want to speak to an audience again. I think that I can have conversations and perhaps influence the outcome in a positive way.
Most of what I did in the past was live gatherings with anywhere between 15 and 700 people. In those scenarios I primarily have a conversation with the audience through the means of Q & A. it's rational, friendly, honest and collaborative.
And I can use your help.
I have a fundamental disagreement with the term "Severe ADHD" because it claims - flasely - that people like myself just need to accept that the world is made for people with "better" execution function and that I had best suffer and try ad infinitum until I can get jump over a few "obstacles" in the hope of succeeding.
Nearing 50 I have found that, for myself at least, nothing has worked.
When I run with my strengths things go very well until I hit some roadblock but when I attempt to "overcome" my weaknesses I don't get anywhere at all. So I am not trying to change.
Twenty years ago my attempts to share my knowledge and heart (more as a moderator than a "teacher" per se) I was never able to schedule a single venue. By happenstance two guys overheard a conversation I was having and arranged venues for me all over South Africa.
In fact, every single venue was arranged by other people.
The obvious problem with that is that the organizations often had some propaganda point or other that they wanted me to stick to which I would not do. I'm a terrible salesman Either I am honest or I'm useless.
So at this time the distance I have been able to get on my own had been a handful of substack signups and an equally tiny handful of youtube followes and whatsapp group participants.
My biography piques the interest and while I've received many critiques I have never been called boring.
So, in order to remain honest/independent without a party line, and without attempting to use the parts of the brain I lack to figure out how to contact podcasts (or whatever) on my own, I'm letting you know these few things about me and asking for your help in participating in live or video venues which already have an audience.
I have been an intense explorer and serious rabbi for many years and my main interest at this time is in resolving the issues that we all have as human individuals through honest - live - communication.
I can't successfully convey the intricacies in a comment (or even in any sized block of text) but I have a very hopeful way forward.
If you have a venue or a personal connection to someone who does and you're interested in potentially having me on I would love to answer what questions you might have so that you could make a decision.
Please keep in mind my "severe adhd". Genuinely, all I can do is accept invitations. I know that people more neuro-normative in this regard may find that to be hard to grok but it's the reality.
Advice to call X, Y, Z would thus be wasted but once you've made an introduction for me with X, Y, Z I would be happy to call them.
Some people have said that it’s a nerd thing. Maybe, but I worked at Apple in Cupertino and most people were decidedly straight and monogamous. And I get the impression that the guys who worked in IBM were even more conservative. And as for the engineers on the moon landing years before that - very very strait laced. No different here in Europe (not that workers in IT aren’t liberal but they aren’t culturally transgressive themselves, although they support your right to be).
Walking through the google cafeteria here in Dublin recently everybody looked decidedly normal, except younger and fitter ( onsite gyms) and less white than the surrounding population. If you told me the cafe was full of finance workers I’d have believed it. No obvious predominance of the blue haired, nose piercing tribe.
I think that maybe the term nerd means two things, the types who do the engineering and the physics, and a cultural nerd, who is into polyamory and other “kinks” and also interested in technology. Probably less woke than the blue tribe but adjacent to it. Some of the latter do exist in software teams, as they do everywhere, but isn’t engineering the last bastion of (relatively centrist) conservative voters in universities?
Rationalists are unusual people in general, being poly is just one aspect of how the personality of the average ACX reader is different from the general population.
One possible answer is that people who reject the current intellectual consensus in favor of their own alternative are more willing to question consensus beliefs in general. If that is it one would expect the same pattern with other heterodox intellectual clusters such as Marxists or libertarians.
Unrelated to the subject - In what way do you mean that rationalists reject the current intellectual consensus? The way that marxists and libertarians reject current consensus seem clear. The same for rationalist is less obvious to me.
* most science is not adequately peer reviewed and often fails to replicate
* we know less than we let on
* COVID treatments are riskier than claimed
* wokism bears properties beyond mere "stick up for people who've had to live life in hard mode" that make it worse than the disease
* climate change's net effects are unknown, may in some cases even be positive, and the current proposed solutions stand a good chance of leaving us worse off
* "if you see two options and you hate one, do the other" is not a winning strategy (cf. "reversed stupidity is not intelligence")
and, of course,
* rationalists do not all agree on all these items.
If you had to compute the set of propositions on which all rationalists agree, it would be very small, probably be limited to some math and a little physics, and might even be empty due to the lizardman effect. Your safest bet would be "try to come by the beliefs you do by reason, and avoid emotion", and then bet *very* conservatively on anything beyond that.
Yes, exactly, as opposed to libertarianism and marxism - rationalism is not fundamentally about belief in anything, it's about how to think. And rationalist beliefs vary greatly.
(I'm not sure most cops aren't bastards really qualify as a non-consesus view, though - it's a loud minority who believes all cops are bastard)
I'd hazard a guess that part of it has to do with the fact that so many rationalists also identify as bisexual, and another part of it has to do with the fact that so many rationalists prioritize rationality over emotion (or lack particular emotional facets, or lack conscious access to them; particularly jealousy).
Agree with Chris. You have a lot of nerds. The vast majority of nerds are male. This obviously creates a romantic problem. So, what do you do? The men share! It doesn't work with higher-testosterone men, because they get jealous and fight, or religious people, for whom monogamy is sacred. But for nerds, it works fine.
Ironically you see the opposite with extremely wealthy men and high-status men like rockstars--there's an excess of women after them, so they cheat and sleep around. Of course, now with #metoo that may decline as some random woman they've jilted pops out of the woodwork and complains.
This requires a very narrow and specific definition of "works fine". Nerds are certainly more likely to *initially accept* it, out of sheer desperation and low physical self-esteem, but if we examine these relationships we can see that they do not substantially work fine over any kind of timescale above a few weeks, in the sense of sustaining themselves and not immiserating one or more participants above the solitude baseline.
As much as these people don't want to admit it, a meaningful part of it for many people is that the only way they can get an attractive partner is compromising on exclusivity. This obviously doesn't apply to 'one dick' polyamorists, but wimpier, nerdier men who struggle in dating are going to disproportionately be the ones who accept their wives and girlfriends having sex with other men.
Only a slightly weaker reason than why the majority of queer people are poly in one way or another. Once you’ve already questioned the central rule of sex, you’re willing to question the others.
This is not an "arbitrary social norm". It's an inherent, evolved preference experienced by a majority of people. I don't want my wife having sex with other men because it hurts me at an extremely base level, not because "society" says it's shameful.
This is not a preference for monogamy though, this is a preference that *your partner* be monogamous. Generally speaking, people tend to prefer that their partner only has sex with them while their own sexual behaviour is not similarly restricted; the evolutionary basis for this is fairly obvious. Of course, these preferences are contradictory; when we consider two partners, they can't both have both of those conditions satisfied, so some sort of solution is implemented, be it monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, polygamy, serial monogamy, appearance of monogamy with clandestine affairs, open relationship etc... All of those solutions have their pros and cons. Monogamy itself is no more arbitrary than any of the others; what's fairly arbitrary is its choice as the societal default. It may not have been arbitrary at the time when the norm became established, but the economic/social conditions have changed drastically since then, and the only reason monogamy is still regarded as the default is inertia.
"This is not a preference for monogamy though, this is a preference that *your partner* be monogamous." - there is presumably also a preference that *other people of your sex* be monogamous - less competition, less risk of them starting an affair with your partner.
And yes, monogamy is probably not the evolutionary default - that would be polygamy, but that's a terrible solution society-wide unless you live in a world where a large fraction of young men die violent deaths. Monogamy, while it brings serious restrictions, is relatively fair, conceptually simple and clear-cut, and conducive to stable societies. I don't see how changing conditions have made other models so much better in comparison.
There is a wide variety of mating strategies. Monogamy is relatively new on evolutionary scale because the type of society in which it's the must advantageous is fairly new.
Nevertheless, in the recent decades (which is to evolutionary scale is probably comparable to seconds on the human lifespan scale in terms of impact), sex has been largely decoupled from reproduction through widespread use of contraception, at least in western societies outside of their margins. This doesn't change evolutionary preferences but it does make polyamory just as stable and fair an arrangement without compromising evolutionary fitness even.
Wait, so you allude to the evolutionary basis for this, but then go on treating it as a "social norm". But like Chris says, men don't want their women sleeping around because (or just because) because of social expecatations costs - the main reason is the direct emotional pain it causes. I don't want a partner to have sex with anyone else, even if I could know for a fact that not a single other soul on the planet would find out about it. It would directly hurt and cause me to view her differently.
If it did evolve, if evolved because of the direct fitness cost it imposes (on men) in terms of uncertainty of paternity, which manifests through psychological aversion.
Even if you point to some african tribe somewhere where everyone fucks everyone else, A) This is very different than if you were only sleeping with one women and dedicating resources to them specifically to raise her children and B) different human populations have different genetic behavioral dispositions on average - the fact that we're all humans doesn't mean that african tribes can be used as universal models of inherent human behavior.
* there is an evolutionary drive for having multiple sexual partners -- for men it means more kids, for women it means diversity (avoiding the risk that your partner has some harmful recessive genes that all your kids will suffer from) and optimization (allows you to create the optimal combination for your kids by taking genes from the genetically superior guy, and resources from the materially superior guy)
* there is an evolutionary drive for wanting your partner(s) to be exclusive -- for men it means all kids of your wife(s) will be yours, for women it means your kids will inherit all property of their father(s)
There is an obvious tension between these drives. How specifically that tension resolves in given culture, that is a social norm.
> Wait, so you allude to the evolutionary basis for this,
> but then go on treating it as a "social norm".
I think there is some confusion about what's meant by "this". The evolutionary bit is "I want to be able to sleep around but I don't want my partner to". This is impossible to satisfy for any pair of partners, so some sort of less than ideal solution is required (less than ideal in a sense that given a pair of sexual partners, the preference above isn't fully satisfied for at least one of them). One potential compromise to this is monogamy, which satisfies both partners' preference for "I don't want my partner to sleep around" while denying both of them the "I want to sleep around myself" part. Another such compromise is open relationships, where that's flipped ("I want to sleep around" part is satisfied for both, "I don't want my partner to sleep around" is satisfied for neither). There are many other potential mating strategies, in which the needs of both partners are satisfied to some degree, both symmetrically and asymmetrically. Note that not a single one is "ideal" in a sense that both partners' evolved pretences are fully satisfied, so no matter which strategy you pick, there is a compromise involved on at least one partner's part.
So there is evolutionary basis for all potential strategies, since they all satisfy someone's evolutionary preference to some degree but never satisfy everyone's evolutionary preference fully. So one can say there is an evolutionary influence for choosing monogamy as it satisfies the preference for partner's fidelity AND there is an evolutionary reason to choose fully open relationships as it satisfies the "I myself want to sleep around" bit. And indeed if we look at different human societies at different times, we'll see that all kinds of different models existed I'm different places at different times. (You seem to attribute it to generic difference in different populations as per your point B), and I don't have data to definitively disprove it, but I do think that external factors, rather than genetics, play a more decisive role here, as we do see major shifts in mating behaviours when social conditions changed, and I feel that those changes can often be far too rapid to be explained by a change in genetics due to evolution.)
Now, the "social norm" bit which is arbitrary is: "monogamy is THE default and the only socially acceptable mating strategy/compromise".
So I guess a more accurate statement is that mononormativity is the arbitrary social convention. Sort of the way heterosexuality is the default human evolved preference but insisting that EVERYONE does heterosexuality, even people predisposed towards sexual relations with those of same sex, is a social norm.
Probably a more precise version of what chephy was trying to communicate would be "Rationalists are more likely to question whether the status quo is optimal, and that includes social norms." You're right, the norms are not arbitrary, but they were inherited through tradition and not reasoned out from first principles. Rationalists are more likely to think they can improve on things by starting from first principles.
"Rationalists are more likely to think they can improve on things by starting from first principles."
While I agree with your analysis in this post, I think that polyamory is in itself one of the clearest proofs that many rationalists are wrong to believe the above.
>hey were inherited through tradition and not reasoned out from first principles.
They were inhereted biologically, to a substantial degree. Tolerating a lack of sexual exclusivity in your partner is a good way of getting kicked out of the gene pool.
Some people (like many Rationalists, for instance) think "tradition" is a bad word: that it implies the thing is arbitrary, or narrowminded, or just plain stupid. I don't feel the same way about tradition. Whether it came from the facts of biology or sociology or both, things become traditions for a reason.
For instance, in the case of polyamory I can see a socialogical argument to be made. When you look at ancient cultures you find polygamy is typical. This makes sense biologically and sociologically: women marry into a man's family and receive protection, resources, and status. In return the man receives sexual exclusivity *from the woman*, ensuring that his children are his children. It seems like the original idea of adultery was focused on the woman not sleeping with someone who isn't her husband, and less on the husband not sleeping with woman who are not his wife. To be sure a man who slept with other people's wives would be a menace to the peace and order of the community, but nobody much cared if he slept with unmarried women: nobody, that is, except the unmarried woman's father who would typically demand that he marry her to make up for it.
What we don't see is much polyamory, where you get groups of women *and* men sleeping with each other as an official arrangement. Socially it's less stable than polygamy or monogamy. Unstable, that is, if your purpose is to have children. Rationalists live in a post sexual-revolution world where sex has been divorced from reproduction. If you just want to have sex for recreation, then why limit yourself unless you have to? To be sure it will be less stable if you do have children than the other options, but how many polyamorists really want to have kids that bad anyway?
I doubt polyamory will last long on a historical scale.
Yet, for some reason, even homosexuality wasn't kicked out of the gene pool. (I am not pretending to understand why; just saying it wasn't.)
Mathematically speaking, having 100% of one partner's reproductive capacity, or 50% of two partners' reproductive capacity, is the same.
Imagine two men having sex with the same two women (each man with each woman). Are both these men going to be kicked out of the gene pool somehow?
In modern society, sex doesn't necessarily mean reproduction. You can have multiple sexual partners, but one exclusive reproduction partner. Also, paternity tests exist.
I have wondered whether an important contributor is demographics. I've only been to one ACS meet-up, and at least 80% of the attendees were males under 30.
If any of those under-30 males are reading this then I would beg them: please just let this be a random website you like, not the centre of your entire social world. You can sleep with women who don't like Rationalism. My wife has never even heard of Rationalism.
As for why this is, at least part of it is that polyamory is also fairly big in kink and LGBT communities, and neurodivergency (autism, ADHD, and subclinical autistic traits) correlates fairly strongly with kink and LGBT, and correlates even more strongly with being a huge nerd (*). Being a Huge Nerd is probably the best candidate for a central trait of Grey Tribe, and rationalism is very well-tailored to appeal to huge nerds.
(*) I am a case study in this. I'm at least peripherally involved in all the categories under discussion, especially that of being a huge nerd.
Also there's probably some founder effect going on. Eliezer Yudkowsky is an outspoken proponent of polyamory, and I believe several other early big-name rationalists are also varying degrees of poly. So people who are open to polyamory are more likely to have stuck around in rationalist spaces than those who are not, as for the latter Yud's advocacy of polyamory represents a considerable expenditure of weirdness point.
I had a bunch of nerd friends back in the 90s. They all got into polyamory and, being more conservative at the time, I was scandalized. I remember hearing about it at science fiction conventions and pagan gatherings (not that there's any overlap there...) So I don't think it started with Yudkowsky.
You're probably right about the mass-correlation thing. The thing is I've seen a significant gray-blue tribe split over politics, to the point where I managed to hear how Stoicism was 'toxic masculinity' at a munch. So I'd be curious to see how the correlations stack up between the eight or nine things you mentioned, though good luck ever getting data. Hm, maybe ask Aella?
It definitely didn't start with Yudkowsky in broader nerd communities. My suspicion is that it's more prevalent among described Rationalists than among nerds in general because of Yudkowsky's influence, but it was already a thing in broader nerddom before that, and that's almost certainly where Yudkowsky got it from.
>to the point where I managed to hear how Stoicism was 'toxic masculinity' at a munch
I've heard similar sentiments, although where I've heard them, they've been based on one of two things:
- They're actually talking about small-s stoicism, the colloquial use of the label to denote refusal to show emotion, not the classical Stoic philosophy that features tenets like refusing to be ruled by your passions, making the best of bad situations that are beyond your control, and cultivating virtue in yourself with a goal of being true to the best aspect of your nature.
- They're hearing about people like Andrew Tate trying to use allusions to classical Stoic philosophy to rationalize their toxic attitudes and behavior, and they're reacting to Tate's interpretation of Stoicism instead of the Stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
>So I'd be curious to see how the correlations stack up between the eight or nine things you mentioned, though good luck ever getting data
I, too, would be interested in getting data. The one set of correlations I'm familiar with hard data on is between trans identity and autism. If you're trans, you're 5-7x as likely to be autistic as if you're cis. And if you're autistic, you're more likely to be trans as of you're neurotypical, by roughly the same odd ratio. Although this is complicated by the issue that we're fairly confident that undiagnosed autism and undiagnosed gender dysphoria are both fairly common relative to their diagnosed counterparts.
I actually inquired whether it was stoicism or Stoicism, but they seemed confused and I decided not to push the issue. You're always on thin ice as a straight het guy in these spaces and I decided to withdraw altogether. I'm quite willing to believe Andrew Tate is less sophisticated than Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
The trans/autism thing I did know about.
This paper actually attempts to decompose the types of geek culture at DragonCon using a type of factor analysis (maximum likelihood with rotations using promax with Kaiser normalization) :
It seems to cluster in roleplaying (LARP, tabletop), hobbies (cosplay, renfaire, SCA, weapons, paranormal), puppetry robotics (puppetry, robots), Japanese (anime, manga), genres (fantasy, scifi, british series), theater (theater, creative writing, broadway, alternative history, Joss Whedon Films, Rocky Horror) and Life Styles (lolita fashion, Gothic, Furry, Pagan, BDSM, polyamore).
Sadly it doesn't give the whole correlation matrix, only with the factor, so you can see that BDSM correlates at .721 with 'life styles' and 'polyamore' with lifestyles at .608, but you don't have the polyamore-BDSM correlation (though with those two correlations being so high I bet it's reasonably positive).
It was done in 2014, so I'd be curious to see if a more recent analysis could distinguish gray-tribe and blue-tribe geeks as the split wasn't clear then. Probably too un-PC to publish at this point, but perhaps some Aella-like figure could figure out something.
Read the comments. Techbros Bad. SBF Bad. Link the two at every opportunity and your readers get every chance to read about the Bad Techbros doing Bad Things.
Papers are subscriber-driven now, they have to give the people what they want.
My guess would be that putting ACX and SBF next to each other was just doing the usual "guilt by association (by being mentioned in the same paragraph)" trick of modern journalism, and the ambiguity about who paid whom was a result of sloppy writing (because if you read the text really carefully, you are likely to figure it out; it's just confusing when reading at normal speed).
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like Manifold Markets, which was initially funded by a grant program run by Astral Codex Ten, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
ChatGPT
Manifold Markets received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund.
Seems pretty natural to me. Manifold Markets is the only thing that has been said to receive some money, so saying “also” suggests that it received money from two sources.
If Manifold Markets got the grant prior to the cutoff date of ChatGPT's training set, it might just be regurgitating a fact that it knows from a news source rather than inferring it from that paragraph as instructed. Might be worth trying the prompt this way:
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like xxxxxxxxx, which was initially funded by a grant program run by yyyyyyyyy, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
or even this prompt:
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like Astral Codex Ten, which was initially funded by a grant program run by Manifold Markets, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
Does anyone else refuse to subscribe to the NY Times because of what they did to Scott? (Not this incident; the previous one.) I can't stand the thought of enriching them, but maybe I'm being ridiculous.
I definitely continue to subscribe, and not just because the games are good. I think the article about Scott wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the attack or hate-speech that some people here think it was. Cade Metz himself writes problematic articles, but not so much that I would endorse canceling him, let alone a publication that does much more than hire him.
Boycotts are a thing. They're not the most effective tool for rationalists because of the movement's small size, but they are worth doing in many cases.
To quote Brian Niemeier, with whom I certainly don't agree with on everything, don't give money to people who hate you. I'll only buy books by woke authors in used bookstores, for example.
But if it was called the 1836 Project it would be 100% correct—Texas was founded on slavery and Colonel William Travis is one of the more vile American “heroes”.
Nope, there would be consierable historical inaccuracies about it still. And claims that slavery lead to America's prosperity or explains racial inequality today are completely and utterly nonsensical.
Slavery in Louisiana seems to have been about rice, indigo and sugar production. Cotton as a major cash crop (along with tobacco) seems to have come later.
The invention of the cotton gin was necessary for King Cotton…so one could argue the Framers didn’t think slavery was going to last much longer in 1789…but a few short years later the economics of slavery were upended by King Cotton. So that’s why the 1836 Project would have been correct as Texas was founded on slavery. Tobacco needed the invention of the cigarette industry to become a big deal and that didn’t happen until after slavery which is why if you are boomer/gen x North Carolina always seemed like a more prosperous southern state other than obviously Texas with energy production.
I canceled my subscription to NYT years ago. They censored 90% of my comments, propagandize racialism and racism, and are the Vatican of Wokery and Genderism.
Once in a great while they publish something sensible by Pamela Paul or Michelle Goldberg. But it must be quite difficult for real writers like them -- among the hacks.
To me it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The load was accumulated over many years with its bulk coming from their contribution to the pro-Iraq war advocacy back in 2003/03.
Reaction seems way over the top to me unless you have multiple other reasons for ditching the NYT. Every person and organization does something lousy occasionally. The big trends are what's important.
I mean, a lot of us appreciate Scott's writing, even those of us like me who don't consider themselves rationalists, and figure 'the enemy of my friend is my enemy'.
The media wants to attack nerds, I don't need to give them my money.
An alternative way of thinking about this: What does the quality of their reporting in that respect say about the quality of their reporting in general? They didn't just do a thing, they were the sort of institution that would do that thing.
You can forgive them their trespass, but this does not imply that you should forget who they showed themselves to be; you don't have to stay angry with somebody who lied to you, but you don't have to trust them, either.
The English comedian John Cleese said he would read things about himself in the newspapers that were totally or mostly nonsense, and then read the rest assuming it was all accurate.
It's one article out of thousands that year. You can't conclude anything about who they are from such a tiny sample. As a matter of fact I dislike the Times, but that's based on multiple problems with their reporting, observed in multiple articles over a long period.
Applying statistical reasoning to the question of trustworthiness is a type error. "Well, I have only been lied to 2% of the time, so this person is 98% trustworthy" isn't how trust works.
I don't think trustworthiness is a type error. Something like *prone to commit murder* is, because committing murder is a pretty yes/no proposition, with a small amount of maybe in between (they try hard to kill somebody and almost succeed, but person escapes mostly due to luck). But trustworthiness is multidimensional, and on most dimensions there's a black-to-white spectrum with many points along the way well populated. You can't make black and white judgments about something with a lot of parts, each of which can lie anywhere on the grayscale spectrum. You can write an untruth because you are ignorant of the truth, because you wrote sloppily so that the reader misunderstands the truth you're trying to tell, because you are too busy to check facts and just go with your best sense of what's true, because you care more about writing something that gets attention than about writing something accurate, because you consciously want to mislead readers. And there are lots of gradations along all those dimensions, from a lot to a little.
Personally I really dislike lying, though I do it sometimes when the choice is between lying and disclosing something very private. I am particularly honest on here, because my privacy is protected fairly well by my not using my name, and also because it makes discussions richer and more interesting. But even here, trying my best to be fully honest, I doubt that I achieve 98% honesty. I leave things out, for instance, because they fuzz up my point. For example, here I say my lies in daily life are to protect my privacy. I'm sure there are other situations where I lie occasionally, but it would take a while to enumerate all of them, and make the sentence too long, and I can't think offhand of what the situations are So that's a place I was not fully truthful. Other times here I simplify things to make a point. Maybe I say "Everytime I do X, Y happens," when actually it's "Usually when I do X . . ." And so on.
Or, to name a situation that's more like the NYTimes, which has many writers, somebody could say that ACX is a smart forum. Now I think that's accurate, and in fact it's something I've said to people, but it's certainly not true that 100% of the posts or posters are smart. I'm sure our smart index is well below 98%. Or you could talk about restaurant meals. Even the most reliable restaurants probably have at least a 2% failure rate -- meals that have something radically wrong with them. There's a stir-fried worm inside one of the stir-fried veggies. The meat's lukewarm. Whatever. But you can still say that this restaurant is a 98% reliable restaurant.
Not telling somebody something can, very circumstantially, be a lie, but -almost always is not-. I am not "lying" to you if I don't tell you that I am married; I'm not lying to you if I ask you out on a date. If I take my wedding ring off, and ask you out on a date, now we're getting into a lie of omission. If I do not normally wear a wedding ring, there's some social expectation stuff that figures in here, but that's getting complicated; that I am married should come up at some point in most social contexts. But it is dependent on social expectations - in a social context in which extramarital affairs are normal/expected/condoned, it need not necessarily come up, and depending on the social context it may fall on the other party to ask if that is something they wish to know.
Likewise, it is not a lie to speak with the best information available to me; if I tell you I'll be at your party at 8:00, and traffic means I got there at 8:05, this isn't a lie. It's not even a lie if I intend to be there at 8:00 but know I'll probably be late, but that's getting into complication things involving social expectations informing the way communication actually works, so we'll set that aside for now. It's also not a lie if something unforeseen comes up - although, within social conventions, it's polite to let you know. It's a lie if I tell you I'll be at your party at 8:00 and have no intention of showing up, or don't intend to be there at all until 9:00.
Lying is the act of deliberately (or through gross negligence) misleading somebody into believing something that is false. There are additional caveats - setups to jokes, surprise parties, gifts, are all areas where lies aren't regarded as lies proper. The key point is social expectation.
Once established within the framework of social expectation - somebody who lies 2% of the time *is not trustworthy*. There is no "98% trustworthy", because somebody who sees it as acceptable to lie at all *will definitely lie when it matters to them to lie*. You cannot trust anything they say when it matters that you trust them. "I didn't eat a slice of the cake you prepared for your work function" isn't "98% likely to be true". "I didn't cheat on you" isn't "98% likely to be true". Because, if somebody is willing to lie - these are exactly the things they would lie about, when confronted with the dilemma about whether or not to lie.
It only takes one instance of such a lie to prove that somebody is untrustworthy. Gaining and regaining trust is not just a matter of not lying - it is, specifically, being honest when honesty hurts you, and demonstrating a commitment to this policy. But such trust can only be regained with respect to the degree of harm you demonstrate willingness to take. (For gaining trust, it is somewhat more complex.)
A newspaper isn't a forum of unaffiliated people; it is a reputation network. If one author lies - the newspaper itself has lied. If one journalist engages in malfeasance - the newspaper itself has engaged in malfeasance.
The editors exist, not merely to make sure that the standards of writing style are met - but to make sure that the standards of reputation are met. One failure is one failure too many, because it means that the entire newspaper is not doing its fundamental job.
This is why the "opinions" section disclaims responsibility for the content; the newspaper is explicitly -not- tying its reputation to the contents thereof.
And, as liars aren't going to choose not to lie when it matters most to them - a newspaper which establishes that it isn't trustworthy when it comes to one thing, is most certainly untrustworthy when it comes to the things that are most important.
I have been reflecting on the article about whether children are better at language acquisition because the findings (that people in their late teens are as good as babies and children at learning, and adults aren't much worse) definitely violated my priors. I used to teach English as a second language, and the findings did not jibe with what I saw.
I think it's a problem that the analysis was based on written samples, not speech. In my English classes, there were people who could write well through dedicated study, but who struggled to speak well. And there were people who could speak well, but had bad written grammar.
Written language is not something humans evolved to do, and so we should not expect children to have an in-built advantage at it. But humans did evolve for spoken language, so it would make sense if kids are born more ready to tackle this. Much, perhaps most, of spoken language is not conveyed on the page, as anyone knows who has got into a twitter fight. Scott mentioned this issue, saying maybe kids learn accents better. But I think "accent" underplays what it means to be fully competent at a spoken language.
I suggest that written language better resembles math, which is also not built in. Spoken language is more like walking, something kids evolved to learn, so we should expect a stronger critical period. Open to other thoughts.
Kind of vague, but does anyone have general job-seeking advice? I'm a recent graduate with a cognitive science degree struggling to land roles in software development/data analysis. My major left me with a good deal of programming skills, particularly dealing with data scraping and statistical analysis, but I'm having a difficult time marketing myself. I'm continuing to create and add side projects to my resume in the meantime. It's possible the job market is just volatile right now, but the whole thing is demoralizing.
Are you on linked in. Get on linked in. Then put yourself as employed by your company (also start a company) listing the projects you have worked on for that company, which is yours. This will attract recruiters looking for employed people.
Lots of people do that. Even if employed.
Also try and work on some open source project which is relatively famous if you have the skills.
Keep a list of contacts to your former classmates (and later, former colleagues). When looking for a job, call them, ask them about their jobs (what are they doing? are they satisfied with the salary and working conditions?) and whether their company is hiring. I got my best jobs this way.
If you can't get exactly the kind of job you want, take something similar, and stay there for a year or two. As a recent graduate, you have much to learn, because the school mostly teaches you the theory, but the work teaches you how to use tools, cooperate with other people, and deal with messy situations. Two years later, your market worth will be dramatically higher.
So if you can't get a data analysis job, just take any programming job, or even a testing job. As long as you don't have a family, keep learning in your free time. If you are a tester, automate your tests at work. If you are a programmer, do some data-related programming in your free time. Remember that the fact that you have a job does not prevent you from looking for a better one -- it just means that you keep farming gold and XP in the meanwhile.
There are Reddit subs for various tech fields, probably some discords too. Try getting on them and asking for advice about what kinds of jobs are promising and how to market yourself, also whether there are certain certifications or projects done on your own that would make you a more attractive candidate. There are books on Amazon about handling the interview questions for jobs in some areas -- Data Science is one. They cover the questions you might get asked during an interview that test your knowledge of the field (books includes what a good answer is to each, plus a mini-tutorial on the subject area.). Also research companies -- see which ones look like they're doing well, they're hiring, their employees are content.
Try to meet people in or near the jobs that you believe you would be good for. Introduce yourself, let people know you're looking. If possible, show up in person at their HR office. This will not work for all jobs, but if you're desperate don't be too shy to let them know that. Companies like to hire people who are very interested in working there, so long as they have the skills. You might land a few interviews or at least get screened by someone who could get you one. Your skills would need to take you the rest of the way.
Ask for feedback. If you have to write a covering letter, address the points in the person specification in order they appear, so that a lobotomized HR monkey can literally go through your letter and tick tick tick. Be patronisingly exact about how the examples you choose map to the skills required - use the actual words used on the PerSpec. It feels stupid saying "I made my colleague a cup of tea and this demonstrates I am committed to team-building" but hold your nose and do it anyway. You could even underline and italicise the skills. Also cringe, but some CBT or NLP techniques might be useful if there is any lingering imposter syndrome. Hope that's useful. I really hate recruitment with a passion but you can make it work for you.
However many jobs a day you are applying to, do way way more. Like if you aren't working and you need a job, you should be searching for a job 8 hours a day.
Yes doing job applications and looking for jobs 8 hours a day sucks. So does working so it is good practice.
As someone in academia I probably see these things more closely than the rest of you, which gives me a different perspective. I likely see details you all don’t, but miss some big picture things you may see from your angle.
I don’t believe there is widespread tolerance of fraud. There are some basically fraudulent conferences and journals where it might be tolerated (I constantly get invitations to something like the International Conference of Sciences and Humanities that seems to exist just so your research budget can pay for a trip to Hawaii and the organizers can get a cut) but I am not aware of anyone who would actually publish in these - I assume it would only be people at third rate institutions that want a publication but no one cares about quality, or in cases (like Chinese academia?) where I they want to juice their statistics of publications and really have zero care for quality.
Regardless, I think these venues are the ones that are *least* likely to censor dissenting opinions. They will publish anything.
What you might be seeing is the general human tendency to care more about strength of evidence when it comes to surprising claims (including ones that go against your tribal views) than claims that support your views. I don’t think there is tolerance of fraud, so much as great difficulty in identifying it, and a lack of diligence in searching for it in some contexts.
I think that increase in costs, and grade inflation, are related to academia becoming more like the business world, where students are seen as customers to profit from while keeping happy, rather than orienting it to the mission. Increase in administration is partly connected to this, but also partly due to outside forces (like government, donors, students families, etc) becoming more distrustful of academia and demanding extra layers of bureaucracy instead of letting faculty run the university as a side business to their research.
Gender imbalance is a complicated topic. It goes in very different directions in different fields (including undergraduate education). All the prestigious places try to do affirmative action to counterbalance this (which is why the female percentage of degrees awarded stayed around 60% rather than continuing to increase). But just like everything connected to diversity, most people would rather not talk about it and wish it would just go away.
biz is not set up in such a way that the 3 big flaws you identify harm business. In fact the customer is barely aware of these problems, and even when they are the degree to which these problems are manifest at a university is not one of the factors that influences his preference
I agree with Hanania it has a lot to do with censorship of dissenting opinions (women are more agreeable on average), but fraud was typically more done by men trying to move up, and the administrator thing probably has more to do with the tendency of any organization to grow over time.
I think the intolerance for dissenting opinions has led to Bayesian approaches being dismissed. My sense is the primary cause of the replication crisis is frequentist approaches rather than outright fraud, although I don’t have evidence to truly support this one way or another. Also in the social sciences, the intolerance for dissent has led various hypotheses to be treated with religious reverence. I do think the censorship is a root cause for a lot of problems.
Also, the increase in admins seems proportionately linked to tuition.
I think that Bayesian approaches have been growing in popularity in every discipline. When I started a couple decades ago, Bayesianism was dominant in physics and philosophy, and was acknowledged in statistics and a few other disciplines. But now a growing number of disciplines regularly use Bayesian analyses, and there are more and more statistics departments where Bayesians are dominant. I think in practice, most people treat both the Bayesian and the frequentist methods as incantations you utter to make the reviewer accept your paper, rather than really understanding what either is about.
But in any case, there’s no recent trend away from Bayesianism - it is all towards it, especially as computing power gets cheaper and easier.
> I think in practice, most people treat both the Bayesian and the frequentist methods as incantations you utter to make the reviewer accept your paper, rather than really understanding what either is about
Strongly agreed. I think people are saying Bayesian because it seems cool, but are still focused on P(data | hypothesis) rather than P(hypothesis | data)
I don't know, I think that even under a purely frequentist regime, people were usually focused on P(hypothesis | data) even though their incantations involved calculating the other.
That kind of thing happens at lots of organizations. I would say that the primary cause is poor leadership. In the private sector that tends to be a minority of companies at any given time, and there are internal and external forces that push a correction (like losing money).
Academia tends to avoid the corrective processes due to its nature and separation from direct financial consequences. I think we're heading into a correction, as college enrollment is dropping and at least some colleges are feeling the pressure. If enrollment drops enough, we could see widespread corrections that change academia, though I suspect we'll just see a bunch of low tier colleges close and not much happen at the higher tiers.
I think they are all low grade linked insofar as for a long time merit hasn't really been that important in the selection process and so academia is filled with people who aren't very good at the job, and thus so they need to find other things to do.
I think if you had stuck with a "blind evaluation methods first damn the diversity consequences" you would see fewer problems in academia. There is a lot of rot, and a decent portion of that is brainless people needing things to do when they cannot reason their way out of a wet paper bag.
I've never owned a powerful computer, but I'm thinking of getting a good gaming PC that won't become obsolete until 2030. It must be able to support a new game like Starfield on full graphics, and I also must be able to plug a VR headset into it to play today's best VR games on full graphics and without lag.
What's the minimum I need to buy now to meet those requirements?
EDIT: When I wrote "won't become obsolete by 2030," I meant to imply it would still be able to play the mid-tier games of 2030, NOT that it would be able to play the best games of 2030 on maxed out graphics.
I hate to recommend Reddit, but r/buildapc is probably a good start. Also, pcpartpicker.com to help organize your build. GamersNexus.com is a good place for individual performance reviews with data.
1) Look at https://www.logicalincrements.com/ to get an idea of what sort of bracket you're looking at. I tend to think they slightly overvalue an expensive GPU and undervalue a good CPU unless you're *only* using your computer for gaming and nothing else, and you'll probably want to add more storage (SSD+HDDs) down the line, but it'll get you real close.
If you're trying to futureproof, the sweet spot is probably $1.5-2k, maybe 2.5k at the high end. Any more than that and you're better off just upgrading individual components as they become obsolete.
On that note, "2030" is just too ambitious of a goal at the rate of modern hardware progress. You could triple your purchase bracket and still have issues even running modern "mid-tier" games using hardware from 7 years ago. Any honest PC builder will tell you the same. I'd recommend looking for 5 years at max. (Not that it's by any means uncommon. Many first time PC builders, myself included, set goals like that and have to be gently dissuaded)
Note: Pay attention to *generation* of the CPU as much as the marketing name. An 8th-gen i7 is going to perform worse than a 12th-gen i3 in many cases.
2a) If you're going for a pre-built, use step (1) to compare different computers and judge what you'd get (and remember "gaming" laptops are always going to be less powerful than desktops, even if they claim to have the same cards in them). Otherwise, you can build your own:
2) Use https://pcpartpicker.com/ to select the actual parts you're going to buy, to list and filter them and make sure it's all compatible. Brand largely doesn't matter as long as it's a well known one.
3) Use the resources on https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/ and then post a "speculative build" for people to look at (using the proper template)
Thank you! Based on my research, a PC in the "Outstanding" category in https://www.logicalincrements.com/ should be able to meet my needs. I base my needs on the following:
Must be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on maxed out graphics and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on VR goggles with maxed out graphics.
Again, looking at https://www.logicalincrements.com/, I see there are categories for "CPU Cooler," "Power Supply" and "Case." None of those seem subject to Moore's Law, so do you have any advice for me on buying three of those today that will be future-proofed for at least ten years?
Case is purely a style thing. That one is indeed Moore-proof, though aesthetic styles do shift some. That one is going to differ based on your planned build, mostly in whether you plan on having internal disk drives (as opposed to SSDs) for, like, media storage, or if you want to skip the drive bays to save space.
For air coolers, you're right that it will last you through several builds, assuming your mounting hardware stays the same (and if not, you can just get an updated kit). IDK about water-cooling, but I hear AIOs (All-in-ones) have gotten good recently. Their recommendations should be fine.
Power supply actually do benefit some from Moore's (since they rely on chips for some stuff), and there's been some interesting recent advancements in GaN power tech, but none of that is enough to really matter on the 5-7 year time scale. So yeah, whatever they recommend is probably fine for a long time. Keep in mind that CPUs and GPUs keep on getting more power hungry, and will turbo to above TDP if given the power headroom, so you may want to add a hundred or two Watts of headroom on top of the minimum, especially if you plan on upgrading your GPU later. It's one of the parts I recently had to upgrade.
For 30? years pretty good advice for something like this is just go spend $2000 or $2500. That will get you something that is at the top end of the price/performance curve without bleeding through the eyeballs too much for something which isn't much better (like you would at say $4-5k).
if money is no object just spend lots, the market is relatively a get what you pay for kind of thing.
Although of note, I've always spent around $800 on computers and they've all lasted for about 5 years of games. So instead of $2000 for seven years, spend $800 for five years, twice.
That's been my approach for a long time. I find that I usually can't run high end games, or have to turn the graphics down, but it works well enough. I tend to play older games anyway. I haven't been on the cutting edge of games since before I had kids, so playing the top games of 5 years ago doesn't bother me. They tend to be cheaper, have the bugs worked out, and often have extra content than when first released.
Because if you have the money the marginal savings isn’t that big a deal, and at the $2000 for 7 years you will mostly at any particular moment have a better device.
For the smith the general person uses a computer the additional money is pretty meaningless.
I guess technically the $90 4 TB external harddrive that plugs into the USB port is an upgrade, but otherwise yeah, just an off-the-shelf computer and when it gets too slow to be bearable get another off-the-shelf computer.
im no expert, but 2030 is a long way away in terms of gaming hardware. if you want to last until then buy something close to the best components available now - 3.5-4Ghz intel GPU, 1 TB NVME SSD, etc, and most importantly a top-of-the line graphics card, such as one of the Nvidia 4000 series cards, so a 4070/80/90. I'm sure other commenters could say more. There are plenty of websites to help putting components together.
In 6 years a 1TB SSD won't be able to fit a single Call of Duty game, and the clock speed (GHz) of your cpu hasn't been a relevant metric for purchase comparisons for almost a decade.
So, the short answer is that there isn't one "stat" that you can judge modern CPUs on anymore. We instead have to rely on comparing performance on individual "artificial benchmarks" (like Passmark or FPS counts in cpu-bound games) and hoping it translates to your use case (which, luckily, it often more or less does).
Core count is the closest to a single stat, but only for multi-threaded apps that can take advantage of them, and there's often diminishing returns above 2-4 cores (unless you're doing, like, graphics or ML, which are instead done on GPUs with their thousands of "cores" for that reason). Single-threaded performance is more important in many apps (especially games, which often only use one main thread)
Clock speed (represented in Hz) used to be a metric to measure how fast a cpu runs, because the clock is literally how fast information propagates through the chip; it was ~one operation per Hz. Modern CPUs are much more complicated in how they work though now, with instructions the perform multiple actions, and multiple calculations being performed per cycle in parallel. Every generation has improvements in how much they can stuff in there, so comparing Hz between generations doesn't tell you much.
Notice how despite having a higher clock on paper, the (formerly high-end high-end) i7-6700K@4.00GHz gets trounced by even the low-end i3-12300? Additionally, modern CPUs have "boost" or "turbo" speeds that temporarily increase your clock speed for intense workloads, which can be very different from the "base" clocks on modern CPUs.
The only place you can compare CPU clock speeds at all is on the exact same architecture - i.e. within the same generation and same manufacturer. Notice how the difference in single-threaded between the i3-12300 and the i7-12700K is roughly proportional to (turbo) clock differences? That comparison is valid, because the main difference *is* just the speed (and core counts).
Overall, looking at GHz tells you almost nothing about the performance of the chip itself unless you're an overclocker looking to get the most out of the latest thing on the market.
Anybody have any thoughts on transactional analysis? I’m finally diving into it.
My first impression is that it tries to do a little too much, as most of these grand theories do. For example, in Scripts People Live, the author is very insistent that people are born okay and are taught by their environment that they are not Ok. (Contrary to Im Ok, You’re Ok, which states the opposite.)
The author makes very strong statements to the affect that schizophrenia and similar ailments are curable (making no mention of genetics or genetic predispositions). I have no relevant background in these topics, but I don’t believe most experts would agree with that viewpoint.
That said, I love the general approach to therapy - collaborative, open, and with the focus of every session on workings towards finding answers to the presenting problems.
I also find the notion of scripts extremely compelling. Again, they seem to take it a little too far - inventing complex jargon and formulas, insisting on somatic components to scripts, etc. but I’m finding it very interesting and occasionally insightful.
Thoughts? Recommendations for books/essays to read, both for and against?
I recommend "Games people play" and "What do you say after you say hello". In the former, just skip the technical sections about how exactly all of that maps to the Freudian lingo. The rest of the book is awesome, and many people have described it as life-changing. The latter is a sequel, so I recommend reading them in this order, otherwise some references won't make sense.
Among other things, these books made me realize that people have *always* lived in "bubbles", long before computers or social networks were invented. Not just social class, but basically everyone has some perspective on what is "normal" and prefers to associate with people who share that perspective. Just like rationalists prefer to hang out with other rationalists. But the point is that *everyone* is doing that, it is just less obvious. We sort ourselves out by sending out some signals (not necessarily consciously) and then avoiding the people who respond in a wrong way.
I suggest you start with a modern lit review of the field. Here's one that seems decent: Vos, J., & van Rijn, B. (2021). The evidence-based conceptual model of transactional analysis: A focused review of the research literature. Transactional Analysis Journal, 51(2), 160–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/03621537.2021.1904364
Use the bibliography as a source of for books and articles further reading. That way you can skip the superficial books that talk up an oversimplified model of the approach.
Lol I appreciate your dedication to these threads, you’re always helpful. Btw, I’m taking the LSAT in a few weeks per your recommendation from a couple months ago, fingers crossed I’ll be making a lot more money in not too long.
Good! You prob know this, but in case you don’t: The LSAT company makes available a few old tests. You can take them and score them and that will let you know whether your score’s high enough for 7Sage. I’m not sure what the minimum they require is, somewhere around 175 I think. Number is prob in their materials somewhere. If score you get isn’t high enough or just on the border, figure out where you lost the most points and study that. Apparently pretty much everyone benefits from working a bunch of the Logic Games items because there’s a sort of system you can develop for diagramming the situation that makes it easier to answer the questions about it. You are allowed to bring 4 pieces of blank paper to the LSAT so you’ll have a place to draw diagrams. Also, find out online, maybe from a Reddit sub, what it’s like taking the test at home with a virtual proctor watching you. I know there are a few things you should be careful not to do because they can make the proctor think you’re cheating. I’m not sure what they are, though, but you need to make sure not to do any of them because proctors can interrupt the test if they think you’re cheating.
So there you go, another very dedicated post telling every goddam scrap of info I have that might be helpful. It’s not that I’m a saint — I just enjoy being really helpful. Life doesn’t give you many chances to make a pretty big difference — so getting one of those chances is sort of like
One thing that genuinely puzzles me is the purpose of commenters who come here to drill extremely one-sided statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using the commenter M. Khan as an example (and I asked with no response): What is the point of repeatedly saying that Hamas is never wrong and Israel is always wrong? What is it that supposed to accomplish? I assume he really does want to help Palestinians; there is no conceivable way in which this is useful for advancing his goal. If anything, it makes it a tiny bit worse...
It seems to me that a lot of people have retreated from the godawful reality of the situation by choosing a ditch to squat in while hurling pieces of fire and shit at those in the other ditch. They are replicating the original situation, in miniature, and benefit from the comforting illusion that if the hurl enuf pieces of fire and shit the other side will STFU forever and life will be simple and good.
It’s not. That’s my point: this style of pronouncement (opposing side is bad/evil/deserves its suffering) doesn’t win converts and, if anything, causes more dug-in entrenchment.
People who are energetically and emotionally advancing one-sided arguments aren't trying to accomplish anything, they're just giving in to the craving to go find some people who disagree with them and holler.
I think this is an obvious explanation that also happens to make most sense / hold most predictive value. Not sure what I was trying to dig into with this question anymore...
You know, every time I read something by Yudkovsky I feel like I’ve been tricked. Like there was so much promise when I started, and by the end I learned nothing. So much cleverness, so little substance.
After reading the new Musk biography I went and read the Jobs biography by Isaacson, and am currently half-way through the FTX book by Michael Lewis. One thing that all 3 books have in common is they all stress the insane work hours at Apple/Tesla/SpaceX/FTX. Apparently working 12+ hours for 6-7 days a week wasn't uncommon at any of these places. It made me curious how much other people in start-ups/tech work. I've worked at start-ups before, and currently work at a company that operates somewhat like a start-up. It's not uncommon to work above 40-hours a week or to do 2-3 hours of work on a weekend every now and then, but I've never encountered people regularly working 12+ hours. I'd be curious in hearing anyone's thoughts/experiences on this
I have been in a few startups, and known a few people who worked that much. But in most cases I would say it was not effective. It was either because startups tend to depend on a few key people who do all the work, or because they were bad at managing their time. In the first case it was often because those people were bad at delegating or trusting other people to make the right decisions. In the second case the extra hours rarely translated into good results.
I have never worked in a startup environment. Years ago when I worked in a quarterly regulatory compliance job that had very generous overtime rules and a very seasonal schedule, many people (including myself) would regularly put in like 100 hour weeks for a couple weeks on a quarterly cycle. But there was a direct financial benefit.
Similarly now as a business owner, I regularly put in 100 hour weeks when needed, because once again the financial benefits of doing so flow directly to me.
I think that is mostly all it is about. If you are at a fast growing company you can plausible sell to the employees (with the aid of stock grants/options etc.) that super long hours in the service of the company's heath will have financial payoff, possibly massive financial payoff.
So you find people willing to do it.
The other big place you encounter these types of long hours are in high supply low demand industries like videogames where the employers hold all the leverage.
I work in high-tech. I've never seen anyone regularly working 12+ hours. A burst of effort at a critical juncture, yes. I/others have worked weekends when smelly matter hit the rotational air displacement device, but never as a matter of everyday practice.
Approximately 23 million people in the US are government employees (about 16% of the total workforce), mostly at the state and local level. This is obviously a huge number of people both numerically and as a percent. A further ~10% of the entire US workforce works for NGOs. 80% of all NGO revenues come from government grants - which moves the total number of government paid jobs to about 24-25%.
I started noticing the effects of government paid jobs a few years ago, having somehow not noticed for most of my life. Particularly about NGOs, and how large they collectively were. This workforce is obviously going to be much more responsive to government whims and changing perceptions. They will also tend to be college educated, inflating the numbers of people going to college - another 2.x% of all US employees are at colleges and universities.
My gut reaction is that this part of the workforce is highly incentivized to support Democrats and Democratic positions. Even Republicans and independents working for the government would have reason to support higher taxes and more things under government control, even if not all Democrat positions. It feels a bit "chicken or egg" but this also seems like a natural scenario for college-educated left-leaning people to have a place to go when private industry doesn't need so many of them as are graduating. Just go to an NGO. Having about 1/4 of all US jobs being non-productive (purely in the sense of not producing products or services that are sold) would have a significant warping effect on lots of economic perspectives and metrics.
Are there other ways to read this? From a partisan perspective it feels like a handout to Democrats on multiple levels, though I'm sure that's not super fair for me to say.
I’m not sure that this is any more pernicious than the even larger number of employees working for publicly traded corporations, who have incentives to support lower taxes and elimination of government control.
It’s just a feature of a complex society that it is full of big institutions that various people are more or less affiliated with, who will be incentivized to push society in ways that help their institutions rather than others. But people are complex and don’t actually get as shaped by their employer as others always assume.
Agreed, but I think we would be even more concerned if a single organization controlled 25% of the workforce, no matter how indirectly. We would be extremely concerned with a company controlling 5% of the workforce - and often reflect that by our concern about Walmart (1.7%, largest employer in the US) and Amazon (1.2%, second largest employer in the US). Both have influence over additional people, which though strong is far weaker than the amount of control a government has over the rest of society.
Part of the issue is that level of control. 16% directly employed with almost 10% indirectly employed doesn't count all of the US employees under regulations, taxes, etc., controlled by that 25%. The true number affected by government is 100%. That 100% is unavoidable in any kind of stable country, because stability requires a monopoly on violence. What's not necessary is for the government to concentrate so much power directly and use patronage (through employment and grants) to bring in 1/4 of the people inside the fold, so to speak. A smaller government with regular elections provides far more power to the people, if the people aren't co-opted into the government.
I think one question here is about what it means to be a "single organization". Even the direct government employees are split between federal, state, county, municipal, and other entities (like multi-county transportation departments, or school districts, or any of the other levels we have). These different levels of government are often at odds with each other, and in greater alignment with other entities, like major employers or major religious institutions within their jurisdiction. If you want to count the indirect influence of government on people who aren't employees, then you should discount the direct influence of government on employees who feel these indirect influences of other entities and individuals.
Even a concept like "monopoly on violence" is a bit imprecise - the point of "sanctuary cities" is that the federal government has a hard time imposing violence on immigrants if the local police refuse to cooperate.
Every government budget will inevitably keep bloating until the country reaches a point of bankruptcy. The cycle can take a short time (Argentina, Zimbabwe) or a long time but inevitably it will happen as more and more people become dependent on the state for survival.
Eventually (possibly as early as 2040) the US will be forced to either declare bankruptcy or drastically cut expenses. Until then the bloat will keep on bloating.
Government agencies aren't allowed to ask for the political affiliation of their applicants so the data is more of a subjective nature than based hard stats. But by such things as presidential election polling preferences, police, and emergency responders lean heavily Republican partially because they're predominantly white and male (who tend to lean Republican)—for instance: During the 2016 election, “Out of that population of working officers who plan to vote in the November election, 84% say they support Donald Trump. Hillary was supported by 8%, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 5%, and "other" received 3%." (https://www.policemag.com/patrol/article/15346665/the-2016-police-presidential-poll). Teachers lean Democratic, partially because it's a profession dominated by women and women tend to lean Democratic and schools have a more diverse pool of applicants. Highway departments are harder to gauge. They tend to be pro-union, but being pro-union preferences doesn't necessarily mean one has liberal views. The officer corps of the military tends to lean conservative as well. Anyway, I don't think your gut reaction is based on reality.
The police are actually a great example of what I'm talking about. They are highly incentivized to approve of higher budgets for police and emergency services, and actively work (through unions) at making that happen. That doesn't mean they are supportive of left cultural positions or even Democratic politicians - or as you note, actively support Republicans. What it does mean is that they are supportive of growing the government, even if they only intend that to be within the police forces themselves.
The police are about 800,000 in the US. If you add another 1.4 million for the military, you are looking at 2.2 million in the two groups most likely to be conservative, and that leaves about 21 million other government employees. To be certain those other groups aren't all Democrats, but often they lean that why. And again, my bigger point is that by being government employees they are inherently incentivized to support government positions in a number of ways, often subtle ones.
Could you elaborate a bit on how NGOs are defined for the purpose of this discussion, along with some illustrative examples of large NGOs and their workforce sizes?
That is, is "NGO" here a synonym for the entire nonprofit sector (including charities, churches, community and fraternal organizations, recreational sports leagues, etc), or for some particular subset thereof (e.g. nonprofits with a primary political/social-advocacy mission, or which focus on providing government-like services), and does that subset include things like labor unions and professional associations?
NGO is extremely broad here. I understand there are about 1.5 million NGOs in the US. I'm looking more specifically at those who are supported by government grants, which is apparently about 80% of funding for NGOs.
A lot of those employees are doing jobs that are traditionally thought to be right-leaning: police officers, prosecutors and courts, blue color jobs like maintenance or utilities, military (assuming these are included in your stats), etc.
Then a lot of jobs that exist outside of the gov/NGO settings so the people doing them may not be doing that job because its a gov job but just because thats the profession they have chosen: lawyers, accountants, secretaries, project managers, landscapers, bus drivers, etc.
You also have a lot of employees who are explicitly political either because they have been appointed by a politician or are part of the staff of a politician - many of those will be republicans too.
Finally, a lot of (maybe even most) government jobs would exist regardless of the level of taxation (with in plausible boundaries) or wont increase with higher taxation. Most administrative positions, police/fire/courts, etc. And some localities have legislation related to minimum levels of funding or regulations that require excess taxation to be returned to the citizens. I am pretty active in my cities politics. It's a very left leaning city, but one of the biggest issues recently was the rise in property tax levels and big jumps in property assessment values. The loudest complaints have been from the groups and city councilors that are furthest to the left. Not all taxation is equal.
I dont think you are wrong, just that the situation is more nuanced and there are more factors at play. Overall I think most people just don't think about the system in this way, if they think about it at all. They may think about funding for their specific department but I am not sure that translates to overall taxation levels.
I know you're right that reality is more nuanced than "25% of all US employees work for the government" as if they're all the same. Even at the federal level Republicans and Democrats are fairly evenly split - though I think a lot of that comes from Republicans in the low level military and Democrats in the office positions and staffing the Executive branch organizations. I can't find good stats off hand, but I think the leadership at both leans left/Democrat at higher rates than the rank and file.
One of my concerns is that even Republicans who would be against taxation or government control generally will be more supportive in their specific case. I don't think they would be wrong to do so either, as they would more closely understand the mission of the organization they are part of and see where additional funding would help with that mission. They might be wrong when comparing that choice against other things the money could be spent on, including just letting the people keep it and spend it as they would prefer.
There's also a problem when there's enough people within a subculture that they can be insulated away from alternate perspectives. I don't know what percent would reach that, but 25% sounds like it to me. Especially in places like DC where there are enough people concentrated within those fields that you may rarely talk to people who aren't in the bubble.
My major qualm would be with your statement that government employees are "non-productive" - yes they do not produce goods for sale but they are not all bureaucrats sitting around making red tape. On the local level think fire, police, city planning, library services, schooling (a huge one), public works etc. Similar to a degree on the state level. On the federal level we have all the departments as well as the military (DOD is the single largest employer in the country). Sure we could argue some departments are useless (as libertarians often do), but most departments are serving a core function.
I was trying to be clear that non-productive is not a pejorative, but instead descriptive. There's a perspective that naturally comes from working for-profit that employees who do not sell the product of their work do not get. There are lots of non-productive employees at for-profit companies as well, but they are still around people who measure outputs against expenses and have to make ends meet. Working for the government, especially in things like police and fire protection, don't use prices or sell products - for which we should be happy - and this changes their perspective.
Here's the two major stats from my post. Let me know if you're looking for something else.
"Holly Elmore and PauseAI are holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities around the world, including San Francisco."
Meanwhile, November 14th-17th in Seattle, Microsoft are holding a jamboree in meatspace and online about "Experience AI transformation in action at Microsoft Ignite":
Does PauseAI have anything on their Very Significant And Important Protest, Ya? page about this? Doesn't look like it. Are they attending? No idea. Are they in contact with Microsoft et al. about these kinds of pauses? I sure hope they are, but I have no idea.
What do I want to indicate by the contrasting events? That money trumps principles every time, and so long as AI is being held out as the new $$$$$$$ machine for everyone, especially during a period of tech slow-down for the big companies, I think earnest appeals about "oh please please please turn off your money-maker" are going nowhere. Protest in your little home fields all you like, kids, but unless you're up there onstage with Satya, it just means a bunch of college students get to take the day off for a nice walk in the city.
Pleas to turn off the money maker are for sure not going to work. At the very best they might spur some regulation and the research related to the money maker will change jurisdictions.
"Despite their well-funded claims that they “deserve” to have more influence over your life than you have over theirs, the powerful, believe it or not, are lying....
"Last week I mentioned Dr. Scott Siskind / SlateStarCodex / ACX . He is an intelligent and good person. Or at least as intelligent and good as a person can be. And apparently the New York Times is still smarting from his little upstart rebellion a few years back when he embarrassed them by making a fuss just because they were planning to doxx him for the lulz...
"It took me 47 years, but 24 hours ago I realized that Trotsky was right. You and I may not be interested in mud wrestling assholes but the mud wrestling assholes are interested in us. Playing by the rules of water polo against the Einsatzgruppen will leave you in a ditch under 30,000 other bodies...
"I've got your back and I'm sure my friends feel the same way. It will be fun to take down bullies. Their time has come."
My response was a gentle hint that you change yourself and make recompense. A modest apology would have done the trick.
I myself am done with you but if there are meta consequences from powers truer than myself, you have righteously incurred them upon yourself and will receive your just deserts. I do not personally desire that but I am obligated to inform you of it.
Anyone else reading this should take heed.
There are people in this world with important things to say. Rush to judgement responses along the lines of "I'm not even going to read this" means that nothing will ever be heard but the same-old-same-old.
Silencing me is a great evil that rebounds towards the silencers and towards those who have the ability to speak up for me and fail to do so.
The result of my not being heard widely may mean a loss for everyone, but the crime sits in the souls of the silencers and those who see the silencing and fail to act powerfully and decisively.
If you want the only available vocals to belong to those who are "successful" by means of the current rules then you and your world will suffer the consequences of it.
I have done all I could in these 47 years. No doubt I have more to do and plenty to answer for but that is not your concern. Your concern ought to be ensuring that I have a platform and that those who attempt to silence me are stopped.
I am well aware that this comment does not fit in the category of comments that are considered "normal".
Normalcy hasn't exactly gotten you very far, has it.
May you have a blessed and happy day, and through that may you enjoy the strength and joy required to act as is right.
I would not want to be read by people with that propensity to rush to judgement.
If that happens to just be your mood at this moment (but wouldn't necessarily be your take at every minute of every day) then I WOULD ask you to reconsider and at least read that far before judging against it.
But if that standard is your go-to then while I still respect you as a human being I would agree 100% that you should not read me.
My writing connects very very well with a small coterie of people and offends pretty much every one else. (All for different reasons.)
I think that giving each other the benefit of the doubt would be a good thing and something that we need a whole lot more of on the internet, but if I were to try to convince you of that now, you might think it was just to get you to read the piece 😂 and that isn't the case. I truly do not want the wrong sort of people to read me and become either angry or upset.
At the same time I still have an obligation to speak to those few few people who feel like they connect with me better than they can with anyone else.
I went to listen to a talk by Connor Leahy for an article I am writing on the subject. Basically, Conjecture and FLI are doing a series of talks on AI X-risk before the UK summit in November. One thing that struck me was his answer to the following question:
I asked him, "If you believe that the problem we are facing is not a technical problem but a coordination one, what are some people you would point towards as thought leaders in the field of coordination at scale?" His answer was "Don't read, try to actually coordinate, start a company, a think tank, an institution" He struck me as very practically-oriented, less interested in debating and more interesting in doing stuff and organizing people. He is involved in a lot of debates online and it might seem like debating is his main thing but that might be just the medium shaping the message. Would love to hear some more thoughts about Connor from other who have met him, or who have listened to him
Assume the greatest writer in the English language exists because great writers exist in a well-ordered set, and that some higher authority knows this set backwards and forwards. This higher authority is not biased; it simply knows objectively who the greatest writer is.
You win a billion dollars if you can guess who the greatest writer in the English language is according to this higher authority. Who do you guess?
I don't know how this higher authority defines either of those terms. You will have to use your own judgment for how they might be defined. My question is only: who do you guess?
I think I see what you're doing here: you're looking for an author so great, so transcendentally monumental on every axis, that he outshines the inherent nonsensity of this question (who's objectively the best in a subjective landscape) and answers it anyway by just being so, so good at what he does that the scale of it makes all other axes tend to zero, or curl in on themselves like spare string theory dimensions.
I have repeatedly been unimpressed by poetry to the point I think I just do not have the taste for it, so I can already disqualify almost everything before 1950. I cannot remember any book I finished that had been written originally in English, and uh, that tells both on me and on what I think about it. I think I will unironically go with TLP/Edward Teach. That "book" has at the very least been a very enjoyable read.
I am probably too much of an ideas person who just doesn't care about the artifice of language. For me Animal Farm is about as good as a book gets on an efficiency standpoint.
Orwell could be strangely out of it. He actually thought that because all the old dads in the Home Guard had Enfields in their closets that the British people would be in the mood for a violent revolution as soon as the war ended, which would be peachy keen.
Britain avoided one largely because of the 1945 election, which swept to power perhaps the most radical government in the country's history.
That such a thing would happen (both that an election would occur after 10 years without one, and that the new government would be allowed to take office and implement sweeping changes) was... not obvious at the time Orwell wrote those words.
Labor's one prior government had ended in a "national government" and its leader effectively crossing the floor, after all.
Shakespeare is so obviously the correct answer that I almost suspect everyone who answers something else is trolling. Especially since the question is "greatest" and not "best" -- even if one thought someone else wrote better works than Shakespeare, Shakespeare would still be greater by being more influential.
Or maybe they just think the Bayesian priors are against it.
Yeah that's mostly BS. The most unlikely thing is that there is a you (or a me.) and yet here we are. DaVinci was a one of a kind great inventor/ artist. Shakespeare did (copied) all the myths and tales and he did them first in English, and it seems we are all just copying him. Even when you think you are copying someone else, you may be copying them copying him (Shakespeare)
So the first thing that comes to mind is the St. Crispin's day speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Crispin%27s_Day_Speech But there are so many, he's the greatest because he did it all first... or at least first in English.
Newton wrote things at least as influential as Shakespeare. He wasn't a literary genius, but certainly influential. As I mentioned, I don't think they are comparable.
I haven't read much by Newton, but all the papers by Einstein that I've read are great! E. Schrodinger also wrote complex (and beautiful) thoughts in English. It may just be my bias, science papers from ~1910-1960, were often wonderful.
Is there some reason you are asking this question by referring to a hypothetical authority instead of just asking people who they think the greatest writer is? Or asking people to come up with possible objective criteria for the greatest writer?
its the unalive problem i bet, because it sounds like an ai prompt. Like you use unalive to deal with social media algorithms and you start seeing people that do so use it in regular posts.
if you need to constantly qualify a prompt with specific words to generate precise results, you might start to see it too.
I'm not sure you want this to be as broad as it is. Here are some possibilities, intentionally far-ranging:
* George R. R. Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
* Bob Woodward - Exposed Nixon's Watergate scandal
* Shakespeare - Sonnets, plays
* Michael Lewis - Financial journalist
* Richard Feynman - Made physics more understandable
* William Safire - Wrote the greatest speech never given
* Ernest Hemingway - Six-word story
* Rich Burlew - Author of Order of the Stick (one of my favorite webcomics)
My experiences color my suggestions, but I bet lots of other people could be proposed. My point is can you compare any of these writers' work to any others in the list to order them best to worst?
For that reason, I left Tolkien and Rowling both off the list; one may compare them to each other, and to Martin.
My counter argument against Martin is that his claim to greatness rests on basically one series, and an incomplete one at that.
The "Best Writer (w/o sub-categories)" award feels like it should go to someone with a broad multi-genre base, likely including both fiction and non-fiction.
Which makes me ponder the options of Isaac Asimov and Lewis Carol, at least from the "known primarily for the fiction side of their catalog" brackets.
I would say that history will say Tolkien was more important than Martin. Martin's strength I believe is characterization, and thematically it basically says "strength wins, and morality it irrelevant", which I find much less satisfying than Tolkien, or even Rowling.
I agree lots of more options exist, those you mentioned not least.
The funny thing is I would say Tolkien's pretty trite naive traditional ethics is the weakest point of his writing.
His message seems to be that "evil is evil", which isn't really that helpful, the books are ethically just tautologies without anything interesting to say about ethics or human behavior at all (they are super interesting in other ways).
Given how many people "forget the good in the search for the power to effect it," I would assert that a non-overly-complicated reminder to avoid evil is a perfectly valid moral message.
And there's this gem said by Aragorn: "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among elves and dwarves and another among men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."
> For this, "good guys" can be hard to define. Except the Others.
I'd say Jon Snow and his friends are pretty solidly good. And, in addition to the Others, several human characters are pretty solidly bad. (E.g., Craster, the Boltons, the Mountain.)
Martin won a Hugo for Sandkings well before GoT, and honestly Wild Cards would have done a lot better had it been released now where real/deconstructed superhero stories is a lot bigger a thing. He's not a bad writer.
But honestly, Martin is nowhere near any sort of great writer in fantasy. its like saying Rowling is a great writer in kids lit; if you read the genres there are many far better. The problem is people seem to only read one fantasy book or one kids series because its popular. They partake in an event, not like a genre.
im worried the focus on event media is removing or obscuring craftsmanship or genre fandom. like asimov; if you ever read Gordon R. Dickson, you have a writer better than Asimov but without the luck of ideas; the childe cycle is better than foundation and his writing overall is better. Or if you want the glory of ideas Cordwainer Smith's works are sublime.
I read an interview with a Hisbollah officer, and he had an interesting take on the Hamas attack on Israel.
He believes that Hamas didn't expect their attack to go so well, and that it essentially spiraled out of control. That they sent a lot of different groups with different methods, and the expected outcome would be that a few would get through, get ~10km into Israeli territory, kill a few Israeli and capture a handful of hostages. Then Israel would fire a few rockets as retaliation, kill a few people and go back to business. That would be a great outcome for Hamas because hostages have been extremely valuable in the past.
But then resistance was a lot weaker than Hamas expected. Lots of groups broke through and they went 20km, then 50km, without meeting any resistance from the Israeli army. Essentially, the whole thing got out of control.
It was not a high Hisbollah officer, but he suggested that higher Hisbollah ranks knew in advance that something would come from Hamas, but were terrified when they realized the extent of the attack.
What is your take on this? It would explain a lot of things surprisingly well for me. On the other hand, I am not sure whether I can square it with the massive number of rockets that Hamas fired during their attack.
The purpose of terrorism is to draw the world's attention to your plight. Didn't Arafat basically invent that strategic theory of terrorism? If you kill soldiers, that's dog bites man. If you kill civilians, that's world news. Palestinians have no hope of beating Israel directly. But they can influence a bunch of fools at Harvard and perhaps, via that route, one day, the US State Department.
What is foolish about being okay with what Israel has done to the people of Gaza? Fools are the people who think the US has a moral or strategic duty to support everything Israel does or care at all what happens to Israelis.
But why standup for Gaza like you never have before right after Gaza commits a terrorist act? It gives people the idea that you support terrorist acts.
I think their best strategy is the opposite of what they've been doing: Be conspicuously nonviolent in the face of Israeli oppression, thereby shaming Israel's allies into cutting ties. But that strategy looks an awful lot like doing nothing, and doing nothing to fix your problem doesn't feel nearly as good as killing the people you hate.
The "problem" is that if they were non-violent, Israel wouldn't oppress them enough to generate much sympathy. It would be a good strategy for having a decent life, but not necessarily for getting an independent state. (Then again, terrorism isn't a good strategy for that either.)
I don't think that would work at all for Hamas. Israel's allies wouldn't be shamed and Hamas would gain nothing. There would probably be fewer deaths, but that's not their goal.
The status quo includes a lot of restrictions on Palestinians that were implemented because of the violence. Between 1972 (a few years after the six-day war) and 1989 (the beginning of the first intifada) Palestinians could freely travel within the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and could travel to and work in Israel. Then the first and the second intifadas, then the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip, resulted in more and more restrictions.
How hard is it for Hamas to recruit, train, and equip the fighters they employed in the operation? Given that Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza, and given Gaza's population demographics (skewing both young and male, with staggeringly high unemployment rates), it seems like they'd have a pretty easy time finding angry young men with nothing better to do. And if the operation had been intended to be mostly for show with only limited objectives expected/intended to succeed, they could have cheaped out on training and equipment for most of the participants.
I'm actually moderately surprised to learn that Hamas probably only has a few tens of thousands of fighters, and I'm curious what the bottleneck is. I doubt for the aforementioned reasons that it's availability of raw recruits. Other possibilities I can think of off the top of my head:
- Equipment. Depending on how effective the Gaza blockade has been, Hamas may be tightly limited even on small arms and ammunition.
- Political reliability. Hamas's internal legitimacy is fairly weak and is actively opposed by Fatah (which controls the West Bank, and both organization claim to be the legitimate governments of all the Palestinian territories). If they don't have enough officer candidates they consider reliable, raising more troops runs that they're just raising troops for their own internal opponents (not just the potential of large-scale defection to Fatah, but also the risk of creating a ready-made power base for internal rivals to the current leadership of Hamas).
- Budget for pay and rations. Giving people guns, teaching them how to use them, and then stiffing them on their pay or failing to deliver food and other basic supplies to them seldom ends well, so Hamas's current manpower under arms might be near the limit of what they can support.
If the bottleneck is equipment, this scenario only makes sense if the parts of the operation they expected to succeed involved capturing enough IDF equipment to make good their operational losses. This might be the case, since IDF bases were among the targets of the 10/7 attacks.
If the bottleneck is political reliability, part of the objective might have been a "Uriah Gambit" to get less-reliable officers and units killed off at Israeli hands. Although this would come at the cost of a permanent degradation of their military capacity.
If the bottleneck is pay and rations, they might have expected to be able to replace their losses rapidly, as anyone who got killed is now off the payroll, freeing up budget for new recruits.
The thousands of rockets launched killed like, one or two people. Israel has gotten pretty good at blocking those.
This was always meant to be a significant escalation (and it was planned to have large numbers of civilian casualties - they had maps of schools and synagogues and had very specific plans of how to attack the music festival). They probably did expect dozens of deaths, just not quite this level.
I'd add that while they penetrated deeper and for longer than anyone expected, afaict most of the deaths were inflicted early on and in the villages relatively near Gaza, so that probably didn't affect the actual numbers killed that much.
Here is the translation of one part. The whole article (a mix of report and interview) is much longer, most of it is about whether Hisbollah will get involved now:
They knew that something big was going to happen and were on the alert. But then the Hamas attack threw them into a surprising dilemma, he says hesitantly when asked: "It was all planned on a much smaller scale: They thought they'd break through the wall, get maybe ten kilometers, meet tough resistance and take a handful of hostages." Then Israel's army would fire a few rockets into Gaza, after which the exchange of thousands of Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli hostages would be negotiated.
But then, he said, the Hamas commandos beyond the wall met little resistance: "They drove 10, 15, 20, 30 kilometers, nobody stopped them." No one stopped them from shooting hundreds of people, from taking well over 100 hostages back to Gaza, "the Israeli army just wasn't there. No one could have imagined that."
Now Hamas, Israel and Hezbollah, too, have become driven by events, the chain-smoker admits: "That the Israelis are bombing Gaza so terribly, want to invade there now, we didn't expect that."
Well shit, that's the theory I've been airing to anyone willing to listen for the last week. I guess i'm not the free-thinker I thought to be.
I mean, Israel didn't expect a Hamas attack to be so successful. Foreign intelligence didn't expect a Hamas attack to be that successful. Why would Hamas leadership have expected it?
The main point made in the above is that American military power is no longer a deterrent, due to the decline in US military industry as well as perceived political division in America.
Smith alleges that the Hamas attack is part of the Russia-China-Iranian axis emboldened by American weakness. He says the US is not ready for a war with China.
My question is why are we gearing for a war with China over Taiwan? It strikes me as stupid to fight such a big war over Taiwan. But I get the impression the real reason we should fight China over Taiwan is that if we don't it signals that the Pax America is really, really done. After which China won't have any reason not to take over every country save Australia to its south. China may also lay claim to all those Road & Belt initiatives it suckered African countries to grow indebted to.
Combine that with Russia allying with China and this could get ugly.
The status quo regarding the Republic of China (which survives as a self-governing rump state because of the US navy) has lasted for decades, and could continue for decades longer. China is not interested in forcible reunification, and as its economy grows, economic coercion could very well be enough to get it what it wants without a fight.
If the US is goading Taiwan towards a declaration of independence, and ultimately a war, it's because its become effectively governed by defense contractors and its political system is no longer capable of showing the slightest bit of restraint.
The Pax Americana seems to be effectively deterring anyone from attacking any of the nations we have promised to defend, and it's still working w/re Taiwan, which we have been deliberately ambiguous about whether we would defend. The only significant wars of territorial conquest since 1992 that the Pax Americana has *not* deterred are Ukraine, which we very blatantly conspicuously excluded from the regional Club of Nations America Will Fight to Protect, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which our State department clumsily implied was not under our protection. We've also not deterred any of the attacks on Israel, but Israel is also a nation that the United States has conspicuously not fought to defend or promised to defend in any of its previous wars, some of which were real existential threats to Israel. And even so, Kuwait, Israel, and (fingers crossed) Ukraine, remain free and independent in part because of the actions of the Pax.
As for why we are "gearing for a war with China over Taiwan":
1. Pax is a Good Thing, and ours is the only Pax on the table. A world in which wars of territorial conquest rarely happen and never succeed, is much better than the alternative, and worth fighting for.
2. Taiwan, and particularly the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, is vital to the US (and global) economy. If Taiwan is conquered and/or devastated by war, the result will be an economic catastrophe. Which, among other things, would almost certainly cost more American lives through the maladies of poverty and despair, than would a limited air/naval war with China.
3. If China invades and conquers Taiwan, it will not end there. Particularly if China's invasion of Taiwan comes after the Russian conquest of (any great portion of) Ukraine. There will be copycats, probably including China and Russia going after new targets. So if we're going to fight a war in the end anyhow, best that we fight the one limited war up front, before anybody we care about is conquered and while we've still got all our allies.
As for Russia allying with China, so what? The Russian Air Force has proven itself to be a joke. The Russian Navy has always been a joke. The Russian Army is mostly defunct, and mostly irrelevant to an air/naval conflict in the Taiwan straight. Russia still probably has a working destroy-the-world-out-of-spite(*) button, but there's no advantage to Russia in pressing that button on China's behalf. Russia's industries don't produce much of anything China needs, except for oil and gas, and it's already a given that China will get as much of that as Russia can push through its limited Siberian pipeline network because most of their traditional customers now want to buy from Anyone But Russia.
So, who cares if Russia allies with China in a war over Taiwan? How would that war look any different than the one where Russia doesn't ally with China? We care whether China backs Russia's wars of conquest in Europe, but not so much vice versa.
* World destruction not warranted to be 100%, some shrinkage may have occurred, YMMV
It is in America's interest to keep Taiwan independent. It forms a wall of US friendly nations that currently keeps China hemmed in in the pacific: South Korea, Japan, Phillipines, Taiwan, Australia. From a Realist perspective, China is a competitor state. You don't let competitor states take away your advantages without making them pay for it. And the fact is, if the US intervenes China can't take Taiwan. That fact has prevented China from trying to take it for decades. As long as it seems likely that the US will defend Taiwan, they won't try to invade it.
I doubt they would attack the US directly unless they severely overestimate their chances: even without putting "boots on the ground" the US Navy has the power to blockade all sea trade to China, and without sea trade China will run out of fuel and fertilizer: they need global trade to survive, America does not need to trade with China to survive.
I often wonder what would have happened if America had intervened to support Chiang Kai-shek against Mao after WWII. I can see why we didn't (having just got through the worst war in history, makes sense you're not eager to get in another one over the rule of a backwards country across the ocean), but a world with the Republic of China instead of the People's Republic of China would probably be a nicer one to live in.
On the other hand, communist revolution in China may have been inevitable.
It was a beautiful sort of foolishness to think that if we were friends with China and made them rich they would be our friends in turn.
"World Peace Through World Trade" was a plausible-sounding slogan prior to WWII. It didn't work then, and, unfortunately, it doesn't look like it is working with the PRC now.
It is an interesting question as to what would have happened with a Republic of China instead of the People's Republic of China. I have two conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the US and Chinese ideologies would not have been in conflict. On the other hand, whenever there are two 800 pound gorillas in the world, they are likely to struggle for power.
Does the final line of the free portion of that Noah Smith post that you yourself linked explain why America would end up in the war if China attacked Taiwan?
[The reason is not that TSMC is essential to the global semiconductor supply chain, or really anything intrinsic to Taiwan itself. It’s that if China attacks Taiwan, it’ll probably attack U.S. bases first.]
China can't take the chance that the United States might intervene in the conflict, so their first move would have to be to attack US forces to prevent successful interference. Once that happens, it's a whole new ball game.
China would attack the US because the US has declared it would defend Taiwan and is training and positioning troops to do so. If the US said "Take Taiwan if you want. It's none of our business." then China likely wouldn't drag the US into it.
If the US said that, it would severely damage our alliances in East Asia who are counting on us to push back against Chinese aggression/expansion. Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc.
Not to mention it would embolden China to push further, since it would essentially be a declaration of US weakness.
I suspect 2 would be about 10 times worse than 1. I also don't think our odds of defeating China are as good as 90%, which makes our expected value of fighting them negative. (Noah believes we would likely lose such a war.)
The question depends on what "lose" means. If losing means the war ends with China in possession of Taiwan, then maybe the US has a decent chance of losing. And in such a loss, it would not be 10 times worse than just handing Taiwan over, especially if we manage to bleed China enough in taking it. Sometimes it's worth saying "If you want it you'll have to fight me for it" rather than just handing something over. It is especially worth it if you're the global hegemon who maintains a lot of power based on other countries assuming we won't just roll over and let them take what they want.
The odds of the US losing a war with China in any larger sense than that, where China invades the US and forces us to surrender, is less than 1%. They simply do not have the naval capability to invade us (the navy they've been rapidly building is not a "blue water" navy meant to project power over a long distance, the ship design and breakdown of ship types is designed to protect their home waters and project power a short distance from home), and we have 5 times as many nukes as they do so they won't try flinging a few over the ocean unless they're okay with us glassing them.
Quite frankly we don't even have to fight the Chinese directly: our navy can cut off trade to China by occupying a few key straits, and without naval trade China will have serious issues acquiring enough fuel and fertilizer to keep the lights on and the populace from starving.
> China can't take the chance that the United States might intervene in the conflict, so their first move would have to be to attack US forces to prevent successful interference.
Doesn't that attack on US forces basically force the US to intervene anyway? If they wanted to avoid the US intervening, seems like stealthy piracy or public relations ops would be the way to go. (Setting aside the difficulty of those options.)
I suspect that the reason the China-Taiwan split has been so stable for so long is that China doesn't really have options that meaningfully keep the US from stepping in. (at least as of late 2023)
1. If China doesn't do a first strike and the US intervenes, China loses badly. Their invasion force either sinks or dies on the beach.
2. If China does do a first strike, the US will almost certainly intervene, but it's a toss-up if they succeed. China might plausibly believe they can do enough damage that the US can't stop the invasion of Taiwan.
3. If China doesn't attack the US and the US doesn't intervene, it's all good and the invasion of Taiwan can continue with no fuss. But what are the odds of that?
If China thinks that an intervention is likely, and that not getting in the first strike would be very costly, then preemptively striking the US forces starts to make sense. Better to be certainly at war in a position of strength than likely at war in a position of weakness.
The last time an Asian power decided that US intervention was likely and their best bet would be to strike the US preemptively, it didn't turn out too well.
China striking US forces means war with the US. Garunteed. And war with the US is an existential crisis for China: we *might* roll over and let them take Taiwan, but if Pearl Harbor or 9/11 are any indication it's more likely that we'll go to full out war with China and won't be happy until Xi is signing an unconditional surrender in Tiananmen square.
The game theory is:
1. China invades Taiwan, US intervenes, China fails to take Taiwan.
2. China invades Taiwan, US doesn't intervene, China takes Taiwan.
3. China preemptively strikes US military forces, US commits itself to the conquest of China and the destruction of the CCP.
I think this oversimplifies the decision space facing China and the US. In particular, the US has a spectrum of responses when it 'intervenes'. For example, four broad positions the US could take would be:
1) Humanitarian aid only. China would prefer the US didn't do this because it will extend the ability of Taiwan to fight back / absorb human and infrastructure costs, but ultimately an intervention of at least this level is surely priced in to China's planning
2) Material support only (similar to Ukraine). Just on this point - if Russia ever followed through on their threats of direct missile strikes on US military targets in the mainland US I doubt the US would keep their support for Ukraine at this level.
3) Indirect military support only (similar to Gaza). For example, the US park a CBG or two in the Taiwan Strait and then very visibly enforce some rules of engagement like 'No other countries get involved' or 'The Strait is a no-fly zone between these times to allow for civilian evacuation'. This favours Taiwan to an extreme extent (both because attackers usually rely on operational flexibility to overcome the advantages defenders usually have and because presumably the US will not pick rules of engagement neutrally out of a hat)
4) Direct military support. For example, the US puts boots-on-ground in mainland China. This is a catastrophic outcome for China, and probably for the US too
It is a pretty good bet that a surprise attack on US military bases in the region would push the US very far up the escalation ladder compared to their response if China picks a time when the US is internally divided and then launches an attack on Taiwan which spares US assets. So the decision facing China is more like, "Does the military gain of first-striking US assets justify both the increased probability of drawing the US into the war *and also* the increased ferocity of the US response if it does decide to get involved?".
Fwiw my guess is no - the US has strategic ambiguity about the level of support it will offer Taiwan, but has no strategic ambiguity about the extent to which it will hunt down and punish those who challenge American military hegemony. In order to credibly commit to this, the US needs to make it clear that it will never be in the strategic interest of any country ever to attack US troops for any reason, and enforce this at the point of a sword if necessary.
Another option is a variant of (2), material support, but do it prior to an actual attack. A Taiwan armed to the teeth could look much less appetizing to the CCP. There would also be less of a question about whether the US would actually come to Taiwan's defense if push came to shove if the weapons were already under Taiwanese control.
I do not see us heading for a true war with China. It seems much more likely that we use Ukraine as a template and arm Taiwan to the teeth. Seeing how the situation in Ukrainian is going, I do not see China achieving a quick victory in that war, and I am not sure if they would consider it worth the inevitable sanctions
Taiwan is already highly armed and has significant plans and preparations for a chinese invasion. Most of this has been supported by the US. Luckily for Taiwan, unlike Ukraine, they are on a mountainous island that is easy to defend from most conventional attacks. I've read some commentary recently that China may be tipping the tide and getting an advantage over taiwan, but we'll never know unless full war breaks out. The territory is much smaller, but taiwan is more prepared than Ukraine. Though I also think China is in much better shape than Russia is/was.
Israel is the most west-aligned government and culture in that region of the middle east and a substantial portion around it. It is technologically advanced, prosperous, and shares a religion and common cultural elements with a fairly successful and powerful subset of America's own populace. It is in a fragile position surrounded by enemies, such that America has a strong bargaining position to influence Israeli affairs in exchange for things like e.g. sending naval fleets to prevent Iranian intervention.
The other governments in the area are extremely anti-western, control a fairly large proportion of a critical world resource, and have demonstrated willingness and occasional competency at directly harming westerners violently. These governments also tend to be relatively theocratic and have a religion opposed to common western religions - and probably 30-40% of Americans believe the nearby enemies of israel represent an ideological force that is threatening to western or american ideology, in a direct-and-present way. Israel is therefore a natural staging ground to prevent the spread or increase in influence, similar to cold war practices of containing communism.
The control of oil can be directly felt through gasoline prices that have a direct influence on election results and are an important input to the economic prosperity of the west. Israel has been an important piece of maintaining control and influence in the region, and for example normalization of relationships between Saudi Arabia and Israel is something America wants as a geopolitical aim as a result.
Are you actually confused why its in America's interests? You may not agree with all of those aims, but youre not America, America contains people approximately 50% of whom do not agree with you.
>Israel is the most west-aligned government and culture in that region of the middle east
Ah yes, "well-aligned" country that spies on us, actively brags about influencing our elections through its intense, powerful zionist lobby groups, commits false flag attacks on us, takes billions of dollars in aid, creates millions of refugees that end up in places like the US...wow, much aligned! Very ally!
>t is technologically advanced, prosperous, and shares a religion and common cultural elements with a fairly successful and powerful subset of America's own populace.
Ah yes, we need to give MORE power to a subset of the population who already has outsized influence over American society and which care more about a foreign ethnostate than they do the United states.
>The other governments in the area are extremely anti-western, control a fairly large proportion of a critical world resource, and have demonstrated willingness and occasional competency at directly harming westerners violently.
Right, the best way to stop them harming westerners is to support a jewish ethnostate that takes their land and impoverishes them.
Oh, and Jewish "intellectuals" and activists have done more harm to the west in the modern age than muslims could ever dream of. They're the one actively demanding that Europe and the US take in these muslim immigrants so Israel doesn't have to deal with them. Israel is actively harming western interests.
>These governments also tend to be relatively theocratic and have a religion opposed to common western religions - and probably 30-40% of Americans believe the nearby enemies of israel represent an ideological force that is threatening to western or american ideology, in a direct-and-present way.
This is absolute BS. Jewish activists do much, much more harm to the west than muslims ever could, and muslims wouldn't hate the west so much if he didn't fund all of Israel's bullshit. There would be fewer muslim refugees in the first place if the US didn't fuck the entire region up, be it the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, supporting the arab spring, arming LITERAL ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS to try and overthrow the government of Syria.
If you don't muslims, then more US interference in the middle east is literally the thing you should be advocating against.
>Are you actually confused why its in America's interests? You may not agree with all of those aims, but youre not America, America contains people approximately 50% of whom do not agree with you.
Your explanation literally boils down to "American jews want us to support israel so we need to give them want they want, also conservatives hate muslims so we need to help israel kill them".
Is Palestinians took over Israel, this would have almost NO impact on my life or standard of living whatsoever.
Conservatives in the US are so pathetic that they *literally* care more about Israel's border security than their own. They literally are more okay with spending billions of dollars on israel than they are with building a basic border wall in their own damn country.
I'm neither conservative nor _agree_ with all (or most) of the aims I described either. What actually goes on in the state department is not children at recess and you asked. But you're just all politics, so enjoy politics.
I think people lacking in the cynicism required for "rationality" about politics would find it difficult to understand that "Israel is just a useful tool for exerting influence and bullying other middle eastern countries about oil, also America is Islamophobic and doesn't care to change that". Mostly because no one in media or politics says the quite part out loud, and it requires having a very dim sort of morality about the whole situation.
I mean its not just that and thats not what I am saying either, though those are definitely elements of it.
Israel is a useful tool for influence about oil but also about creating less hostile relations with middle eastern countries which has benefits in terms of trade and peace. Israel is itself a developed and prosperous economy and we have benefitted greatly from medical, computer, and military technologies developed by Israel, and they are a valuable trade partner. And theres a large aspect thats just, they are western and Jewish and a lot of the people in power in America are western and Jewish and a relatively influential subset of the American population is Jewish.
They're a natural Ally, the way Britain is, they have important economic considerations, like Taiwan, and they are ALSO an important and useful tool for securing oil and preventing the spread of anti-western theocracies in the middle east.
Right, it's a valuable trade partner, but so are lots of countries we've broken ties with and denied support. It's not the distinguishing factor.
And I'm really skeptical about the "creating less hostile relations" and "prevent the spread of religious theocracies", because Israel's actions against Palestine has have demonstrably not done that, considering the situation we're currently in where they've caused a theocratic terrorist group to have popular support and made several middle eastern countries position themselves opposite us in an armed conflict. If "peace" and "getting the rest of the middle east to like us" was the goal, we seem to have missed the mark.
Its A factor. Trying to assign a "distinguishing" factor is either playing politics or baseless speculation unless you have an inside line to American intelligence and geopolitics policy agencies.
Americas official position is that Israel should make a proportional response to the attacks by Hamas. This is consistent with the idea that they want to protect Israel without provoking further insurgency or blowback.
That Israel is not currently striking the right balance between under and over reaction does not mean that America doesnt have those goals.
Stability in the ME matters a lot to Americans. Oil prices is obvious, but also freedom of movement (especially to and from the ME, but also freedom from terrorism throughout the world).
There are also cultural and religious reasons that a lot of Americans want to be able to visit Israel, which is much easier with the current government.
a. That's a fully generalizable objection to all foreign aid, not just Israel and
b. Politics isn't about improving "the average American" (whatever that is), it's about buying the votes from those specific voters one needs to stay in power. The coin can be physical benefits or flattery/emotion/punishing thier outgroup.
Of course China has a reason to go to war over Taiwan (unity of the nation, it is after all a rebel province) and not much reason to go to war with Korea or Japan (some rocks in the sea are disputed).
Those rocks in the sea, which likely cap hydrocarbons, are claimed by Vietnam, The Philippines and Malaysia. It's not hard to imagine a war between China and those three nations, especially if China acquires Taiwan first.
I don't know anything about the current state of military capabilities of the major world powers, but I think:
1. The term is "Pax Americana", analagous to "Pax Romana" and "Pax Brittanica".
2. The tendency for people to think that whatever's happening *right now* is an utterly unprecedented, world-defining event, is so absurdly strong that I'm inclined to say all such claims should be discounted by about 99%. This applies to everything from doomerism to utopianism.
3. Previous "pax" eras still had plenty of wars. The Pax Brittanica is usually considered to last from 1815 to 1914, but there was no shortage of wars around the world during that time. The essence of the idea seems to be (1) one power being clearly dominant in global affairs and (2) the lack of an all-out war involving all the major powers.
(4) The Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years. Historical examples suggest it's got a while left.
If the Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years -- and I agree -- then Russia-Ukraine was unprecedented. A US - China war, which seems likely in the near future, also would be.
I see no good reason to expect the Pax Americana to last on par with the Pax Romana or the Pax Brittanica. Times are different. Changes come quicker.
"If the Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years -- and I agree -- then Russia-Ukraine was unprecedented."
Unprecedented for this particular Pax, but not unprecedented for the middle of a Pax in general. The Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, were not considered to end the Pax Brittanica.
And perspective is lost with Ukraine: before the beginning of the Pax Americana, it was just one of 13 countries ruled firmly and directly by Russia, along with a dozen others controlled indirectly by Russia. And now, Russia is fighting tooth and nail to regain control of *just one* of its former territories. The idea that this brings the Pax to a close already is, the equivalent of France in the 1840s invading a single country it had ruled under Napoleon, and struggling very much to conquer it, and that being seen as the end of the Pax Brittanica. You may as well say that gradual French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s meant the Pax Brittanica was *already over*, since France was once again on a resurgent territory-grab. (They hadn't ruled Algeria previously, but if anything that made it *scarier* than what Russia is doing now).
"A US - China war, which seems likely in the near future, also would be."
It would, I suppose. But lots of things *would* have been significant and changed the world if they had happened, but didn't happen. And "a global war looking like it's about to break out" has happened a lot more often than."a global war actually breaking out", especially in recent centuries.
Also, it's not actually entirely clear that a limited non-nuclear US-China war would end the Pax Americana (if the US eventually won) since, again, the Crimean War against another World Power did not apparently end the Pax Brittanica.
"Times are different. Changes come quicker."
In what sense is this objectively true in a geopolitical sense (rather than just feeling like times are different because we're living in them)? In terms of technological and social change, yes (although the latter could be debated), but why should that change the pace of the rise and fall of empires?
Especially when both those kinds of change are driven overwhelmingly by the dominant empire.
What has changed, according to Noah and the experts he quotes, is that our military has declined massively in a relative sense. E.g., the US would have defeated China easily 20 years ago.
EDIT: There is also the Lindy Effect argument for why one wouldn't expect the Pax Americana to last very long.
I have been working as a software developer for a little bit now, and I'm finding that the main factor for how productive I can be is how long I can focus for. My productivity is a lot less related to how many hours I can work for than it is to if I feel well rested and able to focus. I'm sure that plenty of other people here have this same experience, so I'm wondering what you guys do about it?
My system is to just not work when I can't focus. The advantage of being easily distracted is that the impending work I have to do becomes one of those distractions when I'm doing something else. Eventually, thinking about it in in the background long enough gives way to the motivation to put the solutions I've been thinking about into action. So I end up with relatively short bursts of work in between longer stretches of "time wasting". Sometimes in a pinch with an approaching deadline I buckle down and work full tilt, but it's exhausting and unsustainable.
Also, read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I found it to be really helpful. One of the main things was how to rest outside of work.
I’d also say that emotional energy matters a lot. When I feel like I have ownership over a project then I’ll go all night, like on a personal side project. It’s tough to get that at work though until you’re principal level or at a startup. But I’d say the fastest route to principal level is really focusing on Cal Newport’s ideas.
When I want to be maximally productive, I set a timer for 50 minutes, put on some music, write down what I'm going to be working on for that 50 minutes, and then just do it. Then I take a ten-minute break, and then I do another 50 minutes. If my brain thinks of something else it would like to do during that time, then I file it away as a thing to do on my next break.
I can't keep it up all day, but it's amazing how much work you can get done in 50 minutes once you're focused.
I take my (dr prescribed) adderall. I wish that wasn't the best answer but it is. Regular exercise and going to bed early (9ish) also play a huge part. I have 2 kids - one of which is a new born, so exercise and sleep are low right now.
I've also worked really hard to shut off any type of notification or popup that isn't 100% necessary. Once i am in a flow this makes it much easier to stay in the flow.
There's a huge difference between sleep-deprived me and well-rested me. My executive function is working about 1/4 as well when I'm sleep-deprived. I am way more likely to procrastinate, waste time crapping around, interrupt a period of work by going to my favorite crapping-around sites, wander off to buy coffee, decide to buy some empty calories to go with the coffee. And by evening, which when I'm functioning well I often use for simple stuff like housework when I'm tired from work, I do nothing. I don't even make an effort to get to bed early, because they takes planning and doing something other than what I feel like in the moment. When I realize I'm sliding into that, I get really strict with myself about getting enough sleep.
Is this about the government's decision to allow the use of ChatGPT in schools? Also, would you be so kind to leave a reply here after the protest, I would love to get the perspective of someone on the ground, as opposed to the media take on it
Back from it. I was actually the only person there in Melbourne besides the organiser - hopefully there are more in the other cities (I hear about a hundred signed up in SF). Would have appreciated some more. Oh well, much better two than one, so not regretting the 2 hours on the train each way.
We spent about 3.5 hours talking to and handing out leaflets to anyone interested; I think I managed about 30 or 35 leaflets and talked to maybe ten or twelve people in depth. Most of them were pretty receptive; "pls no destroy humanity" is a fairly-relatable message, it seems.
Thanks for the update! Wow, I expected more people to show up, maybe the movement is not that big outside the US/UK and they don't have the necessary outreach in Australia to get people out on the streets. Anyway, good job on putting your time where your mouth is and actually doing something!
I mean, we normally get like 15 people at the monthly Rat meetups in Melbourne, and most of those people actually live in Melbourne (unlike me), so while we're hardly as common as in SF or London I'm still not entirely sure what went on there. Maybe it didn't get enough exposure in LW (as opposed to here), maybe they think protesting in Australia is useless (it's certainly *less* useful than in UK/US*), maybe they're e/accs (one of the people who came by happened to be an e/acc, and he spent like 15 minutes naysaying us to everyone else we talked to; annoying, but we just kept civil and eventually he left), maybe they're busy doing other things (and sure, I'm a NEET and far less busy than average, but still, on a Saturday afternoon?). Will probably ask a few people at the next such meetup, if only to figure out what the issue is.
Worth noting that we did get one guy who was convinced enough to take a bunch of our flyers and start handing them out himself, and we did get a few people who expressed interest in joining the cause. So maybe there'll be more next time.
*Technically protesting in the PRC probably also has higher benefit, but it has *much* higher costs (i.e. getting arrested for dissent) so the cost/benefit is worse.
It's about "stop training bigger models that might take over the world and kill everyone". Scott linked it up in the OP if you want to read it first-hand.
Australia isn't super-relevant to that, hence "not a huge amount I can do on this front". I think they're having a protest in Melbourne just to show worldwide concern.
Oh, I didn't click on the link with the list of cities included in the protests. It seems like the whole thing is just a PR campaign to show that a lot more people are concerned than. Will see how it plays out and if any relevant policies come out of that
Actually, I often leave doctors' offices with a feeling of "nope I do not trust them to be well-informed, to tell the truth, to take the trouble to consider the issue in the context of other things about my body. Time for a session with Google Scholar." So I'm happy to hear about your newsletter. You didn't give a link to it, though.
Regimens and supplements that maintain vigor and help stave off decline at middle age and beyond. My doctor has little to say about that. She is illness- and problem-oriented, and my health is generally quite good, so she has nothing to say except "great, see you for your physical next year." But I want advice about *maintaining* my health. For instance, I've been reading about creatine supplementation to counter the decline of muscle with age. Sounds pretty safe, if you are careful to access a source checked by Consumer Lab or similar for quality and dose accuracy. But is there a downside, even if the dose is moderate? What about using it on your skin? What minimal exercise regimens really work? What about metformin, not for diabetes but for general health? I think optimizing health is the most neglected topic in medicine.
Oh yeah, two other things: (1) Ways to save money. I'm a psychologist, and when my patients are having trouble paying for their psych meds I tell them to ask the psychiatrist to prescribe high-dose pills that they can cut up, because high-dose pills generally cost only slightly more than the ones with 1/2 or 1/4 as much drug in them. There are probably other things like that. What are they?
(2) Good advice about the utility of various tests. For instance: I've read in some reliable places that bone density scans aren't reliable because results from different makes of machine aren't comparable, also that scan only takes into account -- I forget what exacly, I believe it's that they see thickness of bone at angle machine is looking at it from, but not bone size in the dimension perpendicular to that. Also read recently that a big review of colonoscopy results found that colonoscopy did not save any more lives the a sigmoidoscopy. Like everyone, I freaking HATE colonoscopies. I feel like crap for several days before because I can't eat anything, and for a couple days after because I stayed up all night purging, then got assaulted by anesthesia and an opioid, not to mention a hard object probing the hell out of my insides. Also, read that the purge kills a bunch of your microbiome. I'd like to know if I can switch to sigmoidoscopies, and if not why not.
I think interpreting scientific research is an art and something that can be taught at scale.
For instance, there is no evidence that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health.
Most headlines you read are picked from headings of a random journal. Its important we read the research, especially their method if research to really understand it.
For eg, reults of a study done in ireland in old age don't i really apply to a young kid in India. The population is different.
But the headlines don't mention that, cause research journals don't include these in the headings.
This is probably the reason why you could see two different articles -
"Caffeine like increases the risk of Alzheimer's in old age"
"Caffeine associated with increased awareness and focus levels in young age"
in the same magazine.
Love your point on cost cutting, but don't think I could discuss that on the newsletter, it just varies so much from person to person and circumstance to circumstance.
And importantantly, from country to country.
Scans is a good point too, will write about that.
Again, thanks for the input, will share the newsletter as soon as I write it.
I did not read about creatine in some women's magazine article written by a health reporter who saw a headline plucked from the Journal of Random Shit. Someone I know mentioned creatine and I looked it up at the Mayo Clinic site, where they named a number of possible benefits, though many with qualifications like "research suggests" or "may help with". The benefits that got this mild-to-moderately positive endorsement were: Performance improvements for athletes in training; injury prevention; cognitive performance and brain health in older adults; sarcopenia and bone health in older adults; skin aging. So I thought it seemed worth a try, but thought I'd look into it a bit more.
Your remarks about creatine irritated me quite a lot. You sound just like a doctor. I say I'm curious about possible benefits of creatine, and you assume that (1) I think that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health.They'll make me 25 years old again! (At least it appears that you think that, since you informed me that "For instance, there is no evidence that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health." (2) I need teaching in the art of research. ("Interpreting scientific research is an art and something that can be taught at scale."). ( 3) I think if it's in a headline it must be True. I don't know that lots of health headlines are just somebody making way too much of a single study in some random journal. (4) You have to examine the actual research to figure out whether it was well done, and who the subject group was. If the study was done on old Irish people, the results do not apply to young kids in India. (You actually think I need to be told that?!)
Look, I told you I was a psychologist. Why, then, do you assume my thinking about creatine is so incredibly naive that I need to be given gently instructed in points 1-4, above? In my doctoral program I had pretty intensive training in stats, research design, evaluating the significance of results, and recognizing both obvious and subtle errors in drawing conclusions from research results. Then I carried out a study, analyzed the data and wrote it up as a dissertation. Since then I have been practicing as a psychologist, and I am on Google Scholar at least twice a week. I fucking understand research.
I remarked a while ago that you sound just like a doctor. Here's how you sounded like one: You did not pay attention to what I said, so you came away with some obviously incorrect notions: I think creatine is going to drastically improve my health. I believe whatever stoopit health shit I see in the headlines. I do not understand basic things about how to evaluate research. And I need the strong but gentle hand of a doctor guiding me towards an understanding of the art of research.
After one too many "well shucks" moments after reading the warning leaflet inserts on medication I've been blithely prescribed, I now routinely leave the doctor's office with "better check online before I take this in case it will kill me" (due to contraindications for people with my condition(s), interactions with other medications I am on, or just YES THIS IS A DANGEROUS DRUG; also as a result of having side-effects from taking the initial dose of some medication I've been blithely prescribed).
Honestly, thank God for the Internet. I've had "oh, so *that's* why this is happening" realisations by looking up results where the doctor couldn't be bothered/wasn't able to explain to me what happened (e.g. some antihistamines will provoke QT prolongation, that's why I was getting heart flutters).
1. I really like having patients who are educated/well informed. We can have a much more in depth discussion about the risks and benefits of certain treatment options. Any doctor who does NOT like having well informed patients is trying to hide things from their patients, or can't be bothered being thorough and is hoping their patients don't find out.
However,
2. The reason "Dr Google" has a bad reputation among MDs is because, well, context is really important. Medication side effects and medication interactions are a perfect example. I think Scott posted something a while back where he compared the side effect profiles on WebMD for aspirin and warfarin and challenged anyone to spot a difference (there wasn't one); but any MD can tell you that aspirin is perfectly safe but warfarin is a nightmare that takes countless blood tests to get the right dose and is responsible for more ER presentations with bleeding than any other medication. We all are constantly annoyed at our electronic medical records that warn us when we are prescribing two medications that we have used together in hundreds if not thousands of patients with approximately 0 problems that "there is a theoretical risk that X may increase the potency of Y." In practice we know medications like rifampicin and fluconazole that are bad players in terms of drug interactions and medications like warfarin that are bad players in terms of possible side effects; in theory literally anything can cause anything, and drug companies like to list every possible side effect for legal reasons. Being an Amateur Medical Sleuth is a bit like being Indiana Jones - fraught with peril; but very impressive if you pull it off!
Some antihistamine and antibiotics can prolong the QT interval.
It's a rare occurance but something we always look for.
Much of medicine is risk vs benefit analysis.
You balance out the risks and benefits of a given drug.
Appreciate you sharing how you feel about it. Will try my best to keep it engaging and will write one around 'Long QT syndrome' and how exactly does qt prolongation occur.
That's the bit that grigged me: went to my doctor (at the time, he's since retired) with heart flutters; he did ECG in the office; came back with "nothing there, you're okay, go home".
WHEN I HAD MANAGED BY CHANCE TO READ OFF THE ECG ABOUT 'PROLONGED QT INTERVAL'.
So I went home, looked that up on the Internet, went "crumbs!" because of the lovely bit about torsade de pointes, looked up "what can cause QT prolongation?", found out about anti-histamines, went "hang on, I've been taking over the counter anti-histamines for runny nose/allergy symptoms, better stop that" and yes, thanks, heart flutters cleared up after that.
Which, y'know, would have been *nice* if my own doctor had advised me on that instead of me doing my Amateur Medical Sleuth bit myself.
Yeah honestly medical info seems so readily available via a quick Google search (at the very least stuff like first-line treatments and medication side effects/interactions) that I can't think of a single instance where I've gone to the doctor in the last 10 years and hadn't already completely predicted the outcome and just about everything the doctor would tell me beforehand. I have gotten useful info by picking a specialist's brain during an appointment but even that can generally be discovered online with a slightly more in-depth search. (I will say that hearing doctors' anecdotes can be reassuring in a not-quite-rational way, at least if it's from a doctor who seems to care.)
The trouble is trying to convey "here's why I'm concerned and no, you telling me to just ignore it isn't good enough" because if I use any words bigger than my peasant status as the inferior in this exchange dictates, I'm clearly A Troublemaker.
Also Looking Things Up Online Is Bad because it makes you (the ignorant peasant supplicant) think they Know Better. So then the doctor ignores everything I say because I'm just hypochondriac and/or drug seeking.
That sucks, sorry you have had to deal with that. That last point ("Looking Things Up Online Is Bad") boggles my mind... I wouldn't want to take any medication without at least a quick precursory glance over the Wikipedia page. I guess I've just been lucky in the doctors I've been assigned so far.
Oh, ever since my dad had some bad reactions to medication, and decided he was going to buy books about drug interactions for the home to read up on in future, I've been doing the same with any medications.
I don't expect the doctor to know every single possible side-effect of every single drug, but I do kinda resent that I have to double-check to make sure I'm not going to die by just blindly trusting The Doctor and taking this medication because they didn't check that it interacted with one of the six other things I'm currently taking.
And of course, you're always going to sound like you're trying to tell them their business when you insist that "yeah, I looked that up online and I can't take it, what else can you give me?" and nobody likes being told, in effect, "I know your job better than you do" so of course they're going to tune out my concerns as "over anxious hypochondriac".
I do agree that google has made information a lot more accessible, but its not perfect. Here's an example:
Lets say person A, who is hypertensive (he is on amlodipine for the treatment) is suffering from joint pain. The doctor now prescribes him something called 'Losartan'
The person googles it and finds out this is an anti hypertensive drug. (Drug given to reduce your blood pressure)
He wonders why this doc prescribed him a new anti hypertensive when his BP is normal.
He figures losartan is more expensive than amlodipine and continues to use amlodipine.
Why not just give him pain relivers?
The thing is that his joint pain, could be due to a condition called 'gout'. Gout is a disease where you have increased levels of 'uric acid'. These uric acud crystals accumalate in joints and could cause pain.
Losartan is a drug that has the ability to reduce these uric acid levels along with keeping his BP in check.
'Drug of choice' and the 'best drug' are two different terms in medicine.
Ofcourse, the doctor should have explained this to him, but often times, this doesn't happen for a varied number of reasons.
I really hope you get the point I am trying to make. Google is a great source for quick first line information but there are so many layers involved that you start to question the reliability.
Reallu hope this newsletter would interest you.
Its not consultation in any way. But, will sure bridge the knowledge gap and will try to keep it as exciting as possible.
It's hard to appreciate poetry in a language one doesn't know, so this is my attempt to make Italian poetry more easily enjoyable to English speakers. https://italianpoetry.it
I basically implemented what I would like to have when I listen to songs or poems in a language I don't speak: karaoke-like, word by word, literal translation, with notes about word usage and some context when needed.
And some stuff about the language itself --- the part needed for the poems, at least.
Cool! I've always loved the concept of interlinear translations and wished we do it for more than the Bible. I'm going through La sera del dì di festa now and it's quite a nice poem!
It looks cool. I would like to see some earlier poets and some later ones. (I like Salvatore Quasimodo, and if you can help me understand Ossi di Seppia that would be great.)
At a glance, I find this an interesting idea to try and approach the problem of the trade-off between preserving meaning and preserving form.
My first impression is it doesn't fully solve the problem in the sense that it is not exactly the same as a translation, but it's a valuable complementary thing to have for somebody trying to dive a bit deeper into the language.
> I think a natural reading of this sentence is that Astral Codex Ten received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund. Some people who read the article said they understood it this way and thought I took FTX money. I didn’t. The article meant to say that Manifold did.
> I appreciate NYT moving from its previous policy of blatant and deliberate falsehoods about me, to a newer, kinder policy of accidental and ambiguous falsehoods about me. That’s the first step towards not publishing any falsehoods about me at all!
In my reading, the NYT sentence is ambiguous enough that it's reasonable for you to issue a clarifying statement, but the reading you disclaim is not the most natural reading of their sentence, and the most natural reading is in fact what they meant to say. (There's a strong parallelism between "Manifold was funded by ACX" and "Manifold was 𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗼 funded by FTX".) So I'm not inclined to slam the NYT for this.
Scott did not say that misreading it was the most natural reading either, so what point are you trying to make?
(Sorry if I come off harsh, there's just several threads addressing this already and they all seem to imply Scott claimed something he did not, which is funny considering the context)
Scott described the New York Times as making an untrue statement about him. That claim is not supported by reality. If he wants to disclaim the alternative reading, fine, but there just isn't a case to be made that they did anything wrong or that they even did anything misleading.
"Scott described the New York Times as making an untrue statement about him."
He literally did not.
He hyperbolically did, in the form of a joke. Unless you think Scott is actually suggesting that NYT has an explicit policy of writing " accidental and ambiguous falsehoods"?
I suppose recent events have once and for all disproven the 'dumb college kids' trope, the theory that college kids only believe what they believe because they are naive or uninformed. They just saw with their own eyes videos of the most horrific acts of evil imaginable, and then proceeded to publicly celebrate it in the most explicit terms. Let's now acknowledge that this is not just naiveté, this is pure, incurable evil that can only be met with one response.
You sound nearly as savagely angry as IDF and Hamas. Here's an idea: Let's gather all those enraged against one or the other of those entities and all those who enragedly support one of them, and put all of you on a football field armed with machetes and let you go at it. Then we can poll the crowd who watched, and separate out all those who furiously and savagely supported one of the groups on the field. Now put them on the slick, bloody field armed with machetes and let them go at it. Now poll those who watched that scene to identify those who rooted savagely for one of the factions, and send them to the field. Eventually, you will have a fight with no observers attend to root for one side or the others. The remaining population can then attend to the terribly difficult problem of figuring out how to make life better and more fair.
Hey, isn't there supposed to be a "rinse" step between the "repeat" steps? :-)
</morbid humor>
More seriously: Bluntly, I have two relatives, four former co-workers, and a childhood friend amongst the Israelis and no similar links to Gazans, so 99% of my concern here is ensuring that no further attacks by Hamas succeed, though I prefer that as few peaceful civilian Gazans are killed as is reasonably possible.
Hey I get it. My best friend in high school was Jewish. My best friend in college was Jewish. My best friend in grad school was Jewish. The love of my life was Jewish. And my psychoanalyst. And most of my favorite college professors. People can't help feeling more of a connection to one group than the other, and more personal worry about one population than the other. The thing I object to is the rage and hatred people who are onlookers are dealing out to other onlookers who have a different take. The onlookers are duplicating, in miniature, the war itself. What is *wrong* with our species?
I suppose it's possible that a very knowledgable and unbiased person could make a fair case that one side has been worse than the other, though to me it looks like this has been going on for so long and both sides have dealt out so much cruelty and horror that they both score infinity for savagery, and are tied. Seems to me the only reasonable way to digest the current conflict is to recognize that this is the way our species gets in wars over resources, and that the wars themselves further enflame the hatred of each side because of the awful harms done. If you and I were an Israeli and a Palestinian, we would probably have felt and behaved no differently from the mode. And then we need to suffer through recognizing this awful truth and be buffers -- absorb the blow rather than transmit it in the form of onlooker rage. And then do what we can towards helping members of our species be saner and kinder.
Many Thanks! Over the history of the conflict this looks like a national level version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud . Given infinite power I'd want to have each suspect for say the last two rounds of mutual reprisals stand before the International Criminal Court and have a full trial, with the Court hopefully being impartial, to determine guilt or innocence. But that isn't going to happen.
But if it could happen, you think that would calm onlooker rage? Yes, it probably would. It seems like kind of a charade to me, though. It's based on the idea that it makes sense to hold individuals responsible for acts committed during war. I know that even after one allows for the pressure to obey orders, and for the enormously strong tide of group emotion carrying everyone along like a tsunami, there is still some room for individual choice. But I really do not think there is much -- that's maybe 5-10% of the variance. So it's not really fair to put individuals on trial. Still, pragmatically, there's a lot to be said for calming people down, giving them the feeling some justice is being done.
But really I think it is almost impossible to make just and reasonable decisions about what action to take when all around you are screaming with rage and despair and you saw someone you love get blown to pieces. I think one reason so many US onlookers who have no friends or relatives in Palestine or Israel are full of rage and judgment is that everyone has seen godawful photos and videos of mutilation, rockets, exploding buildings, etc. Images like that get eyeballs, so every organization and individual who wants eyeballs have put a dipper into the big pot of blood soup. I have made a point of avoiding all photos and videos. I literally have not seen a single one. I have though, read many descriptions of events. Somebody might say I have my head in the sand. But look what the images have done to lots of onlookers: They are triggered into war mode themselves.
I hope all your Israeli friends and family are OK. My best friend's wife is currently in Israel, along with her entire extended family, 20 or so people. Everybody's OK.
Re: Would it calm onlooker rage? I know that I don't know. The Hatfield/McCoy feud ultimately (after 30 years) ended in a court trial, and that seems to be what ended it. After WWII, there were the Nuremberg trials - but that was a different situation, where the Axis powers were decisively defeated (apart from a tiny handful of Japanese soldiers who were still fighting years later). I don't know whether war crimes trials would slake the thirst for justice/vengeance. In terms of just time healing wounds, the case of Greece and Turkey, with hostility going back perhaps 3000 years (?) (if the Trojan War was historical) is not encouraging.
I agree with you that holding individuals responsible (in war crimes trials) has doubtful justifications. Presumably there is some uppermost person in the chain of command who gave initial orders for each attack (on both sides), and presumably people further down the chain had less autonomy - though perhaps some, and this is the sort of question that courts are supposed to try to answer (flawed though they are).
Thanks very much for your wishes for my friends and family. So far they are OK. I wish the same for your best friend's wife and her extended family. Glad that they are OK so far, and hope they continue to be safe.
not only are more horrific acts of evil imaginable, but they are ongoing against Palestinian civilians (in the name of fighting Hamas) even as we speak
I think this is mostly chic dorm room revolutionaries who have been trained that the best way to get attention is to spout ultra hot takes on issues to impress their peers. I'm going to make a random guess that exactly none of these very serious people are boarding a plane to go defend their adopted Gaza homeland from the alleged colonizers anytime soon.
I don't support silencing them, what it does IMO is demonstrate how fundamentally unserious many of these organizations actually are and how they should just be ignored now. I suppose others holding them accountable for their views by denying them jobs might be appropriate after they are given a real opportunity to rethink and retract these views, particularly those who officially write them. I kind of get the feeling they would be highly combative and irrational in a work environment.
My personal view is people should be allowed to express almost any viewpoints out of work if they don't bring it to the workplace. There are a very large number of degrees of freedom in ideology and most everyone I know closely has at least one radical viewpoint on something.
This comment's last sentence is closer to "pure, incurable evil" than what those college kids have said.
Which is not at all to defend those students' actions of course, nor to argue that they shouldn't face some consequences. But they are 20-year-olds behaving very much the way 20-year-olds did when I was one, which was a long time ago -- to some degree that's a part of that age range. And it's not by a damnsight limited to the ones who are attending college, back in the day or now.
Also can't help noticing that the young idiots are at least willing to put their faces and real names behind their outrageous statements, which is a point for them compared to a keyboard warrior hiding behind an anonymized login name.
No, you are right. It was not signed. (they were doxed pretty promptly ,though.) But many of the people fighting here don't care about the facts at this point. They have a particularly infuriating way of looking at the letter and its authors -- or, they have they have a particularly infuriating way of looking at those who who are infuriated by the letter -- so they are only receptive to info that fuels their rage. Any info that might make them less furious is unwelcome, and any info that neither inflames nor diminishes anger is irrelevant. In short, most of them have been triggered into their own onlooker mini-versions of the conflict. Um, are we sure we want AI to be aligned with human needs and ethics?
It seems to me that an individual who signed the letter is responsible for doing so, and anyone who thinks the letter's position is indefensible is entitled to adjust his opinion of the signer, and his interaction with the signer, accordingly.
On the other hand, someone who is a member of an organization that signed is not responsible unless he knew of the letter and supported signing it. At most he is responsible for not resigning from the organization or trying to get it to withdraw its signature after he knew of the letter.
Well, yeah. A few days after the letter was published Harvard harrumphed and produced its own letter condemning the student one — but I’m sure not every member of the faculty agreed with the university’s stance. The thing I find disturbing about the conversation we’re having is that some people are so *rabid.*. The will not settle for anything less than full agreement that these students were evil to the core, and any consequence smaller than somehow getting their names out to every possible employer so that these people will be unemployable for life is unacceptable. (There’s no way that's going to happen. Employers favor ivy league grads.). And there are probably some here who are equally rabid in their agreement with the students’ view. It really is as though the madness of armed conflict has infected some people here, and they cannot stand to hear anything that weighs in the direction of calming down, while being hyperalert for any details that will fill them with even more rage.
No, they just sound pretty dumb. The best way to find out would be to poll the same students 10 years from now and see if they have the same opinion and what they think of their earlier opinion. Since we can't do that right now, or second best option is to poll 32 year olds about their opinions a decade ago, and see if they think they were dumb. An informal poll of my friend group suggestions, yes, we were dumb in our youth.
These people are only 1 to 4 years away from their senior proms, for god's sake. I think the appropriate response is rollling your eyes at undergraduate arrogance. And wtf is the one response that's appropriate? Sawing off their silly heads?
In a country where underprivileged kids under 18 are "tried as adults" for murder, it's mind-boggling that the most privileged and intelligent 26 year olds in law school have to be treated as children who can't be responsible for their actions.
So are *you* just as vain, vulnerable to intellectual fads and lacking in common sense as you were at age 20? Most of us feel we improved greatly in all these areas over the next 10 or so years.
I'd certainly hope not, but also, I wasn't an arrogant activist striver abusing my position at a highly-ranked school to defend terrorism. Excusing the stupidity of youth has limits. Not all 20 year olds are equally stupid and vain.
Activist strivers start from a much worse position so even "improving greatly" leaves them well below average on metrics like vanity, vulnerability to fads, and lack of common sense.
Perhaps with the help of AI we will become able to recognize Activist Striver Syndrome early on. We’ll then be able to euthanize them when they’re toddlers.
Do you know that for sure? Sure you're not telling yourself that just to pump up your anger? Students at the extremely prestigious law school in my town are held to account quite strictly about turning assignments in late, not coming to class prepared, and things having to do with allegations of cheating on tests or plagiarizing. They are not coddled at *all.*. Of course they do not get in trouble for public voicing sentiments you object to. It's not against the law to make angry speeches that Mark hates.
Of course it shouldn't be illegal to "make angry speeches that Mark hates" like blaming an orgy of rape, torture, and child massacre on the victims. But neither should a person who makes such a speech expect that other people are willing to hire them afterwards.
So you're a fervent supporter of cancel culture? I oppose cancel culture when the woke does it, but I also oppose it when you do it. Having an abhorrent opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a good reason not to hire someone, except for certain specific jobs (e.g. diplomat to Israel/Palestine).
Never said they should expect that. However, since the people who might hire them are unlikely to know they made that speech, seems unlikely that what they said will. make any difference in the hireability.
tl;dr: under-18s arrested on their way to do a drive-by. They are released to the custody of their parents, the weapons seized. These particular minors were easy to ID, because they were wearing ankle monitors from a previous drive-by shooting they were involved in (but not incarcerated for).
They are old enough to vote, drive, marry, enlist in the military sign contracts and are in all other ways capable of acting like reasoning human adults. Please do not insult them by thinking of them as children, but do them the courtesy of taking them seriously.
Getting fired from a job or dismissed from school for voicing abhorrent opinions is something that I remain against as a supporter of free expression, but it's not like this is a universal value; in fact, many *many* people left of center have been firmly in support of decisive consequences for unwelcome speech...for other people.
"in fact, many *many* people left of center have been firmly in support of decisive consequences for unwelcome speech...for other people."
Those people were wrong. You and I both know those people were wrong. But you are proposing to do pretty much the same thing they did, for pretty much the same reason. Which would make you, hmm, can you fill in the blank there?
Social weapons that only affect one side are superweapons and will be used with increasing frequency by the unaffected side. Turn them into regular weapons affecting both sides, and detente, or at least arms control, becomes more feasible.
1794, Execution of Robespierre and the Thermidorian Reaction.
Basically, it's how you got modern classical liberalism. Both sides using the most horrible weapons (both socially and militarily) against each other, becoming exhausted, and reaching accommodation on de-escalating those fights.
If you mean in the modern U.S., not as much after the Revolution and Civil War. The downfall of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC seems like turning the name-and-shame of the Red Scare (relatively justified, ironically) against the original practitioners led to a decline in those tactics, at least for awhile.
“They are old enough to vote, drive, marry, enlist in the military sign contracts and are in all other ways capable of acting like reasoning human adults. “. They are *allowed* to do these things. That does not mean their average level
Of foresight and jidgment is as good as adults’ is when they do these things., or that most of them are capable of acting as reasoning adults. My daughter’s campus had multiple ambulances arrive every weekend to pick up the kids with alcohol poisoning.
And I am responding to OP’s statement that the explanation for a substantial subgroup of them making certain statements is that they are incurable evil. That your idea of doing them the courtesy of taking them seriously?
No, you are making excuses again for their bad judgement. As adults, they are responsible for the consequences of their actions, and you should not be making excuses.
Should the consequences be cutting their heads off? No - but that was your suggestion, not the OP. It is not, in fact, clear from the OP that the 'incurable evil' was the murder of babies, grandmothers, and other civilian, or that simply coming out in vocal support for murdering babies, grandmothers and other civilians was the incurable evil.
On the other hand, when you put it that way, there is less distance between the act and the loud, voluntary, vocal support than one might think.
And your defense of the vocal supporters, and your excuse for their (at best) astonishingly inept stupidity, is rather horrific as well. If this is the level of moral reasoning that these people are capable of, they should be considered minors, and not allowed out without keepers, as they are incapable of managing themselves, let alone be able to vote or drive or otherwise have the option of impacting the lives of other humans.
I think it's clear that OP meant the incurably evil people were the college students celebrating the slaughter. OP is saying they're not naive and dumb, they're incurably evil.
I'm not defending the college students, except against the charge of being incurably evil. I think they're meanspirited, self-important little wokester assholes and I'd like to smack their faces til their burst out crying and shut the fuck up. I just don't think they're incurably evil, or at least not more incurably evil than most members of our species. Seems to me that the great lesson from Hamas/Israel is that our species is incurably evil. Even people who have been the victims of horrific violence have not come away from it convinced that it's wrong for people to do that to each other. And now the people who disagree about who to hate more, Israel or Hamas, are hating on each other.
And SyxnFxlm hates the college students for the view they voice, and you and I are quite irritated at each other regarding my somewhat minor disagreement with SyxnFxlm -- I hate what the students were saying, but shrug off some of it as immaturity and being infected with the college wokester virus. You hate what they were saying and want me to judge them as I would people iin their 40's.
Awesome. Looks to me like long-term outcome of the slaughter will be increased amount of hate floating around earth's human population like a stink.
I think a big part of the problem is a number of generations of people growing up in the bubble of invincibility. There has never been a foreign war the United States has been involved in that had consequences in their homeland. (1812 being the one exception.) No cities bombed to oblivion, none of that.
Does anyone have any recommendations for obscure science fiction? I recently read everything by qntm (aka Sam Hughes) and am now hooked on sci-fi, especially stuff that will change the way I think about the world/life/technology/etc. I found this great list: noahpinion.blog/p/my-sci-fi-novel-recommendations but I'm convinced the best authors are probably writing in relative obscurity on some unknown corner of the internet like qntm.
So who are some of your favorite lesser known or just underrated authors, who I probably wouldn't know about otherwise? And can you share one of your favorite passages as a sample?
p.s. First time commenting here, I just want to say thanks to everyone who comments; I love reading all your brilliant ideas/observations :)
Ken MacLeod is an author I find consistently fascinating. His Corporation Wars trilogy is one of my favorite modern sci-fi series. Though I will say he might be an acquired taste.
I really enjoy all of Ted Chiang's short stories for roughly similar reasons to qntm. IMO, he's the best currently-publishing author at taking an interesting premise and exploring the implications it has. For example, "Omphalos" dives into the relationship that science and religion would have if the world were _actually_ 9000 years old and created by a God, and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" explores what would happen if you could communicate between parallel realities but with some restrictions. He's probably most notable for writing the short story that became the Arrival movie.
He's published a couple collections of short stories, and some of his stuff is free online.
John C. Wright's stuff is good. "The Golden Age" is probably his most popular, but I really enjoyed "Count to a Trillion" and the rest of that series. His style is fairly unique: you can sample quate a few of his short stories for free on his website to see whether you like him:
Old-time Asimov, I binged on that for years, many years ago. If you like Childhood's End, the obvious next steps are The Gods Themselves and The End of Eternity.
'Fine Structure' is chaotic but brilliant and you'll almost definitely like it if you liked Antimemetics; all his other books and short stories are incredible too though, you can get them as amazon print-on-demand books or just read them on his website for free.
the writing style appears to be a blend of character-driven storytelling, humor, and a touch of social commentary, making for an engaging and relatable narrative in a sifi setting
I strongly recommend this one. The writing isn't the strongest imo, but if you can set that aside it's really excellent.
Idk if David Weber counts as obscure, but I really enjoyed his Safehold series. Heinlein's not obscure to some (he's the origin of the word grok), but I don't hear about him much anymore; I liked all of his works except for The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls, and you see his ideas heavily in libertarianism.
A common technique of propagandists is to take terms that have been loaded with emotional, political, and historical context from one situation and apply them to another, in an attempt to smuggle in all the related baggage of those terms regardless of whether it actually applies in the new situation.
The Palestinian mass slaughter of Israeli civilians is often justified in this manner. It's not exactly easy to justify mass killings of unarmed people at a rave with the use of simple, descriptive, non-emotionally loaded language. "Well you see, the Israelis currently have military ships out in the water that prevent goods from coming in from Iran, to reduce the amount of bombs, rockets, and weapons that can get into Gaza. And they also built a big fence around their national border. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified." But it is easy to say "Apartheid. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified."
More generally, you have a phenomenon where just compiling the list of reasons given for why Israel constitutes an "apartheid regime" (or any other Bad Word), and then doing a find-and-replace on the bad word, pasting in the list of purported offenses committed instead, leaves the arguments in favor of the Palestinian massacres quite obviously baseless. When you can no longer smuggle in all the historical context that doesn't apply in the new situation, it becomes clear that you're justifying genocide on the basis of the existence of a border fence.
This also applies to terms like "ethnic cleansing" - it's hard to explain why "moving people to a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put" is the worst, most evil possible thing, but you can just say "ethnic cleansing" to try to imply that this must also necessarily come with mass killings, similar to the mass killings present alongside some historical instances of moving people. Or one of the worst offenders, using "genocide" to describe things like "splitting up members of a group" or "changing the culture of a group" as if they were equivalent to the mass killing of that group.
"A common technique of propagandists is to take terms that have been loaded with emotional, political, and historical context from one situation and apply them to another, in an attempt to smuggle in all the related baggage of those terms regardless of whether it actually applies in the new situation."
This is literally the case for all "+power" definitions.
I'm not sure using the term 'apartheid' changes much: it's hard to justify slaughtering civilians in Israel, but it would have been/was hard to justify in South Africa as well.
The slaughter of whites in Zimbabwe under Mugabe and in South Africa post-Apartheid is justified all the time. I'm not sure where on the left you've seen it condemned.
It marks Israel as an illegitimate state, and thus a state that should be destroyed. And what has Hamas done except start to destroy it? (The question of what happens to Israeli civilians during this destruction is purposely left vague)
Ok you honestly described it as "an imperialistic race nationalist state". Now what?
I can tell one thing this does: those who don't see Israel this way update their priors closer to "this is why talking to Palestinians is useless, compromise is impossible". Which is the extreme Israeli Right position that one would hope you don't want to support. But.
Now what? We drop this pretense of this conflict being anything other than an ethnoreligious conflict over land. We drop this bullshit about US-funded Israeli growth being in any way in the interests of the average American. We stop and notice that jews like Bryan Caplan who promote literal open borders for the west support extremely closed borders for the jewish ethnostate and wonder why what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
I mean, I would believe your comments to be stemming from a sincere moral condemnation of race nationalism if they were coming from a left-winger, but not from someone who otherwise appears to be a far-righter.
I've no idea if US-funded Israeli growth is in the interest of the average American, or whether it's commonly said that it is; but Israel being an imperialistic race nationalist state doesn't contradict US-funded Israeli growth being in the interest of the average American.
Do you know Bryan Caplan supports extremely closed borders for Israel, or do you just assume he does?
I wouldn't bother engaging with this user. The truth is that Caplan critiqued Israel for not letting in more Palestinians and even more people from other countries. But if someone is going to use lies about Bryan Caplan - an anarcho-capitalist atheist to somehow tar "the Jews," as if that highly idiosyncratic iconoclast is somehow representative of *anyone*, let alone some imagined cohesive collective of Jews, you can be sure they aren't worth engaging with.
I believe that the best example of this is the word 'terrorism'. It is used throughout the world in a completely inconsistent way by any actor, mainly as a mean of propaganda to gather support about their policies.
Government and individuals seem to not apply the definition of 'terrorism' objectively as any action that "The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals". Instead, there is a huge bias to call one's opponents 'terrorists' (often of course rightfully), and to never judge one's own side as 'terrorist'. Therefore I tend to consider that the word 'terrorism' has lost any useful meaning.
There is some polemic ongoing in my country (France) as the main left wing party refused to name Hamas as 'terrorists', despite the horrendous slaughter Hamas committed. They claim that the word 'terrorism' is too politically biased, and claim that calling it 'War crimes' is more objective, fitting, and strong enough as a mean of condemnation of Hamas actions.
I personally believe that the actions of Hamas perfectly fits within the definition of terrorism, but would also argue that objectively some events during the Israel siege and bombing of Gaza qualify as terrorist actions, without considering they are equivalent in terms of 'level of abomination'.
I think any action by a state, no matter how horrible, are not generally called terrorist. This is why we don't usually call Nazis, or Stalin, terrorists. When states commit terror attacks during war, we usually call it war crimes.
This puts Hamas in a weird in-between state. They were conventional terrorists, but now they're the government of Gaza, but they're also not recognized as legitimate or officially considered a state.
This isn't saying anything about the moral value of these actions, or that being an official state somehow makes terror attacks better or worse. Just that common usage of "a terrorist" implies a non-state group.
I would disagree with that. The concept of state terrorism is often used, and I think that the word 'terrorism' was actually first used to describe the event of the Terror during the revolutionary government in the french revolution.
Putin and the russian army have been repeatedly called 'terrorists' by western governments/parliaments. Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 90's was also clearly 'terrorist', I don't think that making a difference between state terrorism and non-state terrorism is useful at all.
You can call anyone a terrorist for rhetorical purposes. My cat is a little terrorist. The context makes your intended meaning clear, even if you're not using the normal meaning of "terrorist".
Look up news articles on the 2017 chemical attack in Syria and you won't find it referred to as a terrorist attack. That would confuse readers since it would imply it was done by a terrorist group and not the government. And when Russia claims the attack was actually by terrorists, everyone understands they don't mean the Syrian government.
It may often be a totally useless distinction, but that has no bearing on the meaning of the word in the wild. This is how people will understand the term, unless it's clear from the context you're using it with a non-standard meaning.
I stand by my claim that the definition of terrorism does not exclude any act of terror performed by a State. It is not a personal preference. I understand why you disagree with that, given that in most cases only individuals and non-state organizations. But as mentioned in my former message, the first use of the word was describing actions performed by a sovereign state, and states/state leaders are and have been designated as terrorists.
There is an historical record of the British bombing German civilians in World War II in order to provoke Germany to do the same, in order to take pressure off actual military installations in Britain during the battle of Britain. It was a cold calculation. The Luftwaffe was hammering the crap out of them, and very focused on things that mattered. Britain’s tactics worked.
When someone starts to lose a war, their moral compass swings.
Under most formal definitions of "terrorism", basically all acts of war are terrorism. There is violence, it is intended to bring about political change, the intended mechanism is that the targets be so frightened that they accede to the change, civilians may or may not be targeted but they will almost certainly be killed, and in any event the formal definitions don't explicitly require targeting civilians.
This just means that the formal definitions are useless. Informal definitions are easy enough to construct, and will mostly hinge on the fact that terrorist violence as opposed to most military violence is deliberately random, unpredictable, and symbolic in ways calculated to produce terror disproportionate to the material threat. And there will be an element of "I know it when I see it" in any such definition, but anyone who doesn't see terrorism in last week's attack on Israel is not playing with a full deck.
Nathan Burney in his webcomic "The Illustrated Guide to Terrorism" gives it the definition "An act or threat of physical violence commited to extort political change on behalf of a greater cause by a non-government actor." He recognized State Terror is a thing, but should be defined differently in order for terrorism to be a useful descriptor and match the way it is generally used.
That's actually a perfectly good definition (although I would replace "especially against civilians" with "against civilians", I think violence against the military is never terrorism).
Allied bombings in WW2 are not a counterexample. Those bombings were sometimes called "terror bombings" even by the Allies at the time.
If a suicide bomber detonated in a civilian location (like a mall, or a bar) targeting military personnel on leave, I would still classify that as terrorism. Even if all of the people injured or killed were in the military. Admittedly, I would find it difficult to draw a clear line between all "terrorist" attacks and the types of attacks I would think of as normal war.
There is no clear line, so I I understand the difficulty you feel trying to draw one. Terrorism is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I think, trying to make a distinction between what is a military action and terrorism is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The only way to avoid it would be to have the leaders of two countries fight it out in a stadium while everyone else watched.
>But it is easy to say "Apartheid. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified."
I'm fairly certain that the accusation of running an apartheid refers to their handling of their internal arab population, not their handling of Gaza/cisjordania.
Ethnic cleansing was precisely supposed to be a bloodless, propagandistic term for forcibly migrating a certain group for a certain area that wouldn't have a similar connotation as, say, "pogrom" or "genocide". It has those connotations because such forcible migrations are also accompanied by necessity with violence - after all, if a regime is intent on moving some ethnic group away from its territory and someone says "fuck you, this is where I live, where my parents lives, where my grandparents lives", what is the regime going to do? Just go "Oh, OK, that's a good argument" and leave them be?
>This also applies to terms like "ethnic cleansing" - it's hard to explain why "moving people to a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put"
If it's a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put, why don't they want to move?
By an ethnic cleanser's elegantly circular logic, the very fact that the people to be relocated haven't figured such an obvious thing out for themselves is proof of mental inferiority.
There is no proposed solution to the current strife in the former Ottoman empire which I am sufficiently satisfied with to the point that I would call it "my solution."
Apartheid particularly bothers me because it was a term referring specifically to South Africa and it's clear as mud what the speaker means when they apply it to Israel. It's not clear whether they're referring to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, or Palestinian-Israeli citizens, each of whom face very different situations.
Amnesty International says, "apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group." In other words, they count any discrimination by Israel against Palestinians as contributing reasons why Israel is apartheid. It's not clear why this broadened definition of apartheid couldn't apply to the US or Canada or any other country, and without reading their articles in detail it's not clear at all that this is what they meant by apartheid.
The argument that the term "apartheid" applies to Israel even if it doesn't apply to those countries relies upon a view that Israeli rule, in practice, currently extends not only upon "Israel proper" but also West Bank and (soon even more acutely) over Gaza, but Israel is nevertheless unwilling to give citizenship and civil rights over a large portion of the Arab population (comparable here to the South African black masses in bantustans) and holds even the "Israeli Arab" population and other minorities in practice as second-class citizens (comparable to Cape Coloureds and Indians in South Africa). PA, then, is literally compared to a bantustan, chopped up to unviable enclaves by the West Bank area system, checkpoints etc. and without any real sovereignty.
Of course, many people advancing such an argument might be willing to entertain an idea that US and Canada are apartheid states as well, at some level, or at least similar settler-colonialist countries as Israel, just in a more advanced state.
Israeli Arabs aren't legally second class citizens like Coloureds and Indians were in South Africa. They have the same rights as all Israelis. So you're left with trying to make the case that even though they aren't officially second class citizens, they're discriminated against in practice. This gets murkier.
Canada had the residential schools for indigenous children. They've moved indigenous people onto reserves, or sometimes remote northern regions (to strengthen Canada's territorial claims). The indigenous population is often worse off, lacking basic things like running water, having high murder rates and substance abuse rates, and many would argue this is caused by historical and current discrimination. But I've never heard anyone call Canada an apartheid state.
Lebanon does officially keep Lebanese Palestinians as second class non-citizens, even for families that have lived there for generations. I haven't seen Lebanon called apartheid either.
The argument I've seen is that the operation of instances like Jewish National Fund as a quango or the limitations placed on pro-Palestinian political activity implicitly renders the non-Jewish minorities as second-class citizens nevertheless, even if happens by different mechanisms as in South Africa.
Its use to describe Gaza is particularly confused, as it seems to imply that any country that has a national border is guilty of "apartheid". Is Liechtenstein also an "open-air prison"? It's less than half the size of Gaza, after all.
It's use to describe the West Bank is much more on-point, and a regime that imposes a very apartheid-like regime on any significant fraction of the territory it controls can reasonably be described as an "apartheid state" or whatnot. Israel loses a whole lot of sympathy points over its treatment of the West Bank, and that is going to carry over to how people perceive its treatment of Gaza.
iiuc people in Gaza can't leave. They can't enter Israel, can't cross to Egypt, there's a sea blockade, the airspace is controlled by Israel, they can't trade other than the essentials that Israel allows... I guess Israel isn't forcing Egypt not to open up the doors of the "prison", but as long as that's the situation, and if I'm not mistaken with these facts, it seems like a good analogy.
Apartheid is not used solely about Gaza but about the whole Gaza - West bank situation.
Liechtenstein's inhabitants can freely go to Austria and Switzerland, and there's no land/sea/air blockade that stops goods from being imported to Liechtenstein.
Moreover, the population of Liechtenstein is not made of 2/3rd (I think that's the correct number for Gaza) of refugees or descendents of refugees that were forcibly moved from their rightful land.
I can't help but notice your Godwin, as well as this (odd, but consistent) pretense that Gaza only shares a border with Israel whic is therefor completely responsible for restraining the movement of the inhabitants thereof.
"Gaza is not a legitimate independent country; it’s a refugee camp populated mostly by people forced there from elsewhere in Israel."
...that's half the story. It COULD be part of a legitimate independent country by now, if Palestinians hadn't rejected any offers of a two-state solution. Hamas, in particular, is opposed to that option and has the eradication of Israel and the Jews as part of its charter. We saw what happens when the border wall is breached - does anyone expect Israel to put up with that in the name of fairness?
The existence of Hamas is a consequence of the Gaza situation, it's not the other way around.
PLO/Fatah/Palestinian authority accepted the two-state solution, which nowadays is not viable at all due to the constant progression of the illegal Israelian settlements in the west bank.
Israel was at first extremely happy about the existence Hamas, as it provided competition against PLO/Fatah, and favored the former over the later.
Forcibly splitting up a group or altering its culture with the intent to eradicate the group identity is legally considered genocide even in the (unlikely) event that no member of the group is directly killed in the process. Even the etymology supports this - it's about extinction of the group as an idea, not the members. Would you say Henrietta Lacks is alive, based on how many kilograms of her least-loyal cells endure under controlled conditions scattered across the world?
Reasoning goes back to Enlightenment principles trying to prevent further European religious wars: we have a horrifically enormous amount of empirical evidence that every possible variation of the scheme has net-negative long term outcomes, worsened by industrialization, but people are really good at coming up with excuses to try it anyway, and to keep doubling down once it's started, for what are ultimately ugly tribal chimp-brain reasons. Only stable solution is "not even once," and erring on the side of a broad definition to discourage fuzz-testers.
One of the usual counterarguments is "well, sure, in general, but what about an exception when the identity in question is inherently hostile?" Classic example of an inherently hostile group identity being the Nazis. Key thing to remember about the National Socialists is they initially formed under conditions of economic scarcity and hopelessness, and what actually worked to get rid of them in a lasting way wasn't piling on even more intensive intertribal violence, or technically-nonviolent relocation or whatever, it was fixing Germany's economy with the Marshall Plan.
<i>Key thing to remember about the National Socialists is they initially formed under conditions of economic scarcity and hopelessness, and what actually worked to get rid of them in a lasting way wasn't piling on even more intensive intertribal violence, or technically-nonviolent relocation or whatever, it was fixing Germany's economy with the Marshall Plan.</i>
Also the victorious Allies engaged in what are politely referred to as population transfers, to the number of several million people, to make sure that Europe's ethnic boundaries now lined up with its political ones.
That's where context and intent become relevant. Ripping organs out of somebody's torso with intent to hurt them is murder; same thing done with benevolent intent (and quite a bit more attention to detail) could be part of a life-saving transplant surgery.
Yes, it's a massive equivocation fallacy (a superset of motte-and-baily), but unfortunately one that's part of the word's original definition and (some) legal definitions. That is, these definitions include things other than killing a large fraction of a group's members, while most people who hear or use the word—who aren't either genocide scholars or ideologues using it for the rhetorical effect—understand it to mean the killings. Not just because it's a natural interpretation of the word (even if the broader interpretation is also natural), but because all the well-known historical examples involved mass killings, and it's the killings that most descriptions focus on.
> Forcibly splitting up a group or altering its culture with the intent to eradicate the group identity is legally considered genocide even in the (unlikely) event that no member of the group is directly killed in the process.
Right. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for demonstrating it. You call something "genocide", the implication being "extermination of an entire ethnic group", with all the performative condemnation one would use if one was talking about literal extermination of an entire ethnic group (by far the most common usage of the word), and then when forced to defend your claim, you say "It's *technically* genocide" because of X, Y, and Z" even if not a single person has been killed as a result.
I'm not going to put any "technically" weasel-words around genocide potentially taking the form of confining the relevant group to a higher-entropy environment for a long period of time, as a stochastic alternative to more immediately and obviously lethal tactics. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#pressure
The problem isn't the etymology. It's that you're grouping some of the worst atrocities ever with much, much milder actions and when you accuse someone of genocide, people will assume it's the mass-murder type of genocide.
If you accuse a group of genocide, and all they were doing were offering free condoms to scientologists (reducing their birthrates), then you're misleading people.
If somebody was explicitly trying to end Scientology as an institution by handing out free condoms, that's technically genocide the same way shooting somebody with a Nerf gun which the shooter wrongly-but-sincerely thought was loaded with poison needles is technically attempted murder - probably not worth prosecuting, but maybe keep an eye on 'em just in case they try again with something that might actually work.
Controlling approximately all trade in or out of an area, and using that control to exclude or extract key commodities such as food or water to a point where the average per capita supply within the area is not long-term survivable, is rather different from handing out free condoms. Consider the Irish Potato Famine.
Disregarding that factually false characterization of events, the point is that the claim that you just made, "Controlling approximately all trade in or out of an area, and using that control to exclude or extract key commodities such as food or water", obviously doesn't hit quite as hard as "genocide". And it's much harder to use that as a justification for genocide against the group supposedly committing those offenses.
Of which events? I'm pretty sure the irish potato famine did, in fact, involve a lot of food being exported from ireland by the english, while native irish people starved, and the express intent of that policy (as stated by british leaders at the time) involved their dislike of certain aspects of irish culture.
As for justifications, going by pure theory it's perfectly possible for two opposed groups to both be in the wrong, just as it's possible for two people locked in a room together to both be guilty of attempting to murder the other - or even of regular successful murder, if either inflicts a mortal wound after receiving one themselves but before succumbing to it.
"People use the term genocide to refer to Chinese policy towards the Uighurs even though that involves zero mass killing (and far less killing overall than what the Palestinians face)."
And they are wrong to do so. I don't care if some old UN document from 60 years ago says that genocide includes brainwashing people. The impression that people get today, if you say that China is genociding Uighurs, is absolutely that China is killing them en masse with the goal of eliminating the population (as opposed to, say, to terrorize them into submission). Since that's not happening, anyone using the term "genocide" is misinformed at best, deceptive at worst.
Israel made an agreement with the Palestinian Authority with the Oslo Accords to give the Palestinian Authority the governance of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2005 Israel destroyed all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and recalled all military personnel, handing the territory over to the Palestinian Authority. They did not just "move the unwanted ethnicity into impoverished enclaves" and declare them independent. It was an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian people through their representatives the Palestinian Authority, not a unilateral movement of people. Nobody was rounded up and forced into Gaza: the Palestinians living there today fled to Gaza when it was controlled by Egypt.
Chinese policies are mainly directed against the islamic practices of uighur culture so while they fit some definitions of cultural genocide most usual understandings of culture are about language not faith. For example, the brutal persecutions of the catholic church and clergy in jacobin France and of the orthodox church and clergy in stalinist Russia are never called genocide.
I sometimes take courses or do study programs. Mostly on science and engineering topics. I feel like a lot of people here either have similar interests or might be doing something similar. Is anyone interested in getting a ready/study group together? The idea would be to keep it light enough as a time commitment that full time working professionals and students could do it on the side for self-improvement.
This sounds interesting, depending on difficulty - I have relatively little background knowledge, currently starting adult high school to get 11/12th grade math and science credits, interested mainly in bio and chem but love learning a bit of everything.
What sort of format are you thinking of?
If you manage to round up a couple people, I would appreciate the chance to "sit in" - even if I can't keep up this sounds like it would be a good learning experience.
DALL-E 3 does better overall. It still has trouble with the stained glass one and the llama with the bell on its tail (it keep putting the bell in its mouth), but it does a better job with the other 3 prompts. The images are higher quality, making it more clear it got all the elements right. Here are the images I think it got right: https://imgur.com/a/qMvOEPu
It has a comment from Scott himself that he will make an official blog about it soon and some interesting technical discussions. For example Dalle-3 seems to have surprising difficulty to picture "three cats in a trenchcoat, standing on each other shoulders pretending to be human".
Gwern about that:
> All of those results look a lot like you'd expect from ye olde CLIP bag-of-words-style text representations*, which led to so many issues in DALL-E 2 (and all other image generative models taking a similar approach like SD). Like the bottom two wrong samples there - forget about complicated relationships like 'standing on each others shoulders' or 'pretending to be human', how is it possible for even a bad language model to read a prompt starting with 'three cats', and somehow decide (twice) that there are only 2 cats, and 1 human for three total? "Three cats" would seem to be completely unambiguous and impossible to parse wrong for even the dumbest language model. There's no trick question there or grammatical ambiguity: there are cats. Three of them. No more, no less. 'Two' is right out.
The OP also said that it was quite hard that the cat wears the top hat, so I was surprised that your man in the factory lacks the hat:
> I'm wondering if the man is usually wearing the hat because the model "knows" that people usually wear top hats and not cats or if he's wearing the hat because the model "knows" that there is a hat and grabs the first noun in the sentence and sticks a hat on it. We should swap subject and object in that sentence and see if the cat starts wearing the hat more often. Ditto with the astronaut and the fox wearing lipstick.
My own take is that I am still utterly astonished how good the pictures look. One could criticize that the the fox and lipstick marker is not properly mirrored in the astronauts helmet, but the farmer in the cathedral holding the Basketball like a precious religious icon makes me want to make an epic JRPG just to somehow include this.
https://imgur.com/a/pfx7AIg - "three cats in a trenchcoat, standing on each other shoulders pretending to be human" (though Dall-E changed the prompt to "A feline tower with three cats hidden inside a trenchcoat, mimicking a human form" in order to render this).
Yeah, you nailed it -- so long as we adapt the meaning of "standing on each other's shoulders" to cats. I got one a lot like yours, except that Dall-e put a collar in the area of all 3 cats' necks. Both your cats and mine are actually doing what I would call standing on each others backs. When we talk about people standing on each other's shoulders we mean that one person's feet are on the shoulders of the person below, and both people are standing upright. So I was thinking that a fully correct image would have all 3 cats up on their hind legs, with the upper cats having the back feet on the shoulder area of the one below. Could not get Dall-e to do that even with 2 cats & no trenchcoat.
About "standing on each other's shoulders". That's a confusing phrase, and you have to deduce its meaning from context. For instance if I say3 cats are tasting each other's dishes of food, it means each is tasting the food of one or both others. But if I say 3 cats are standing on each other's shoulders, it doesn't mean each is standing on the shoulders of one or both of the other two. It means one is on the shoulders of one of the other 2, and a 3rd one is on the shoulders of the one that's on the lowest one's shoulders.
I'm interested in that level of info about prompts: How many entities are involved, what is the spacial relationship of the various entities, each to each of the several others, and what is the number of entities and relationships that DAL-E can keep straight? Also would like to know more about ways of laying out complex relationships that work best for DALL-E when it's close to being maxed out by the demands. Do you know if that sort of info is available about DALL-E prompts? The advice I see about prompts is mostly about mimicking various kinds of camera lenses, and using words that n affect the color, the emotioal atmosphere, etc.
I was able to come close to the cats in a trenchcoat one. I changed the prompt to "a realistic drawing of 3 cats stacked on top of each other. The top one is wearing a long trench coat that comes down to the ground." The cats aren't standing on hind legs on each other's shoulders, though. Was unable to get even 2 cats standing that way. Could get bottom cat carrying top one piggyback, or with top one on bottom one's head. I wonder if part of the problem is that cats don't have shoulders? Anyhow, here are images.
I've had a lot of experience with Dall-e wrangling, mostly with Dall-2, andI was able to get it to make both the woman with the raven on her shoulder and the llama image. The former was actually pretty easy. The llama was very hard, because Dall-e is convinced that all llama's have bells around their necks and no llamas have them anywhere else. I had to resort tof confusional techniques (sort of a way to make Dall-e "hallucinate") to get it to make a llama with a bell on its tail. Images are here:
Oh, was that part of the bet? That the user had to use the words just as they were in the bet? You might get the raven image if you run the prompt about a dozen times, but you'll never get the llama without messing with dall-e's mind.
Raven prompt: "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library."
Llama prompt: "A desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
(Putting in the barette, misspelled, was the confusional zzp. It's not sure what a barette is. Note that it didn't put a barrette in the image, unless it thinks some of the stuff on the tail is a barette.)
The original bet specified the exact wording I believe. It's interesting though that OpenAI is integrating DALL-E 3 with ChatGPT and ChatGPT rewrites the prompts behind the scenes (usually to 4 different prompts to generate 4 slightly different variants). This rewriting doesn't seem to have that much effect on the results for the prompts in the bet though. It really helps more when you don't want to fully describe the image yourself and instead let ChatGPT make a description based on the chat.
What I would like is to be able make clear to Chat the things that I cannot get across to Dall-e -- especially things that are wrong and stay wrong even with recurrent iterations of the image ("no, dammit -- he bell is on the llama's *tail*) and let Chat get across to Dall-e the thing I can't.
From my brief experimentation so far, it doesn't really help with that. It's not much different than asking ChatGPT to generate a prompt for DALL-E and then pasting the prompt into DALL-E. The prompts it generates don't seem any better than what you can write yourself, though it can save you the time of writing it.
I read the NYT article until I got to "a sticker of a shoggoth, an artificial intelligence meme based on a science fiction character".
While "character" is debatable, I think the appropriate genre here is "horror", or perhaps "fantasy" at the most general. The story in question is a bit more sci-fi than usual for Lovecraft, yeah. But calling it "a science fiction character" is missing the point, which would be solved by calling it "a character from a horror story".
Yeah, it's not even science fantasy, it's like "The Thing" (both original and remake) which - despite the same surface level of being a scientific expedition to the Antarctic - is a horror movie not SF movie.
Lovecraft is dark fantasy/cosmic horror. He's not even trying to be SF. Someone who has no idea what a shoggoth is, is definitely Not One Of Us.
Yes, my understanding is that Lovecraft's stories were usually categorized as something like "macabre fantasy" when they were first published and are generally categorized as "horror" today.
That said, I can imagine a few different cases for classifying the Cthulhu Mythos in general and At the Mountains of Madness in particular as sci-fi:
1. By analogy with earlier authors of macabre speculative fiction, most notably Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, whose works are more often categorized as sci-fi than fantasy. Shelley in particular being considered simultaneously the founder of both the modern sci-fi genre and the modern horror genre for the same book (namely, Frankenstein).
2. Lovecraft's stories are generally set either present-day or twenty-minutes-in-the-future relative to their publication date, whereas prior to the relatively recent emergence of "urban fantasy" as a distinct genre, fantasy was more often set in the middle ages or some legendary past.
3. The Cthulhu Mythos features space travel and time travel, which are classic SF genre signifiers. Mountains of Madness in particular is structured as an exploration narrative, in many ways closely parallel to Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" which is unambiguously sci-fi. And I think Shoggoths also appear in "Shadow Out of Time", which is very much a time travel story.
Of these explanations, 1 and 2 strike me as fairly weak, and 3 is complicated by Lovecraft's stories also heavily featuring sorcery and ritual magic, encounters with godlike and demonic entities (often explicitly referred to as "gods"), and (particularly in the case of the Dreamgate Cycle stories) journeys into something very much like a faerie world.
There's no great shortage of science fiction that features sorcery and ritual magic, though often using more SFnal terminology like "psionics". Lovecraft's magic was I think congruent with Clarke's sufficiently advanced technology, and AtMOM is pretty solidly in the science fiction genre even if it is also in the horror genre.
Describing the shoggoth as a "character", is a bit off though.
A lot of speculative fiction gets categorized differently depending on what aspects you focus on and how those aspects are framed. For Lovecraft in particular, there's a spectrum between more sci-fi-like stories which emphasize space and time travel and put the supernatural in a context that suggests Clarke's Law, and more fairy-story-like stories that simply present magic as magic. You're right that AtMOM probably belongs most or all of the way towards the sci fi end of the spectrum, along with "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Whisperer in the Darkness". On the other the spectrum, I'd probably put stuff like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". And Lovecraft's stories referenced one another quite liberally, strongly implying that DQoUK, SooT, and AtMOM all take place in the same world and should thus probably be considered the same genre.
In more general cases, I keep thinking about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" books, which feel like fantasy because they take place in a quasi-medieval society with knights and dragons and the like. But they're generally classified as sci fi because the backstory is that the society is a fallen-tech colony and the dragons are the product of genetic engineering.
Another case is Lindsay Ellis's Noumena series (Axiom's End, etc), which concerns a present-day alien first contact, but is categorized by her publisher as Alternate History because "present day" is relative to when Ellis started working on the stories (2006-ish), while the first book wasn't actually published until 2020.
I'm about 1/3 of the way through Lewis's book on SBF, and also listening to his podcast about the trial. I expect others are are accessing one or both of these sources as well. I'm interested in other people's takes on SBF & the collapse of his business.
Crypto is a scam. All of it. But at its core, Bitcoin and Ether, are "really good" scams in a sense that they have lasted for over a decade now (so did Madoff's). So the simple heuristic is that any crypto-related venture is a scam, even if the people who started it didn't mean it that way at the beginning.
Being "really smart" in this case makes it worse - smart people are really good at inventing excellent explanations in support of whatever it is they do/believe. They sound really convincing too, to themselves above all else. And then - when things turn sour - it's really hard to admit that "I" (so smart, me!) just f-ed up, so the spiraling down accelerates.
I think I'm going to have to read this book, just to see how under SBF's spell this guy is.
It's amazing how many interviews I've read that are all 'Sam is such a great guy!' 🤩🤩🤩 from people who you'd imagine would be too old a hand to fall for fast talking.
He must have some incredible charisma effect in person because just seeing him briefly in videos and in photos, he doesn't look like all that.
" I'm interested in other people's takes on SBF & the collapse of his business."
Quick'n'dirty uninformed opinion: I don't think he set out to be fraudulent. I think he thought he was too clever to fail, that he had found the One Weird Trick to making infinite money, and he was in a bubble that was (um, let me try and find some suitably emollient phrase that is not "licking his arse") praising him for being so clever at getting rich to fund good causes.
That meant that (1) he bypassed all the normal, boring, red-tape regulation, stuffy old guys in suits safeguards when setting up both Alameda Research and FTX (2) it was All Pals Together which turned out to be *terrible* for oversight (I do think Caroline got dumped with leadership role when Sam Trabucco left, something for which she was not experienced enough and was left more or less as Bankman-Fried's 'yes' girl) (3) going along with that, they treated it as their personal piggy-bank (e.g. buying holiday home for SBF's parents, a yacht for Trabucco - which I only learned of by reading the Wikipedia article now), major loans to the three founders SBF, Wang, and Singh, and throwing money at politicking in Washington (4) getting involved in politics and trying to influence regulators to give preferential treatment to FTX and do down Binance because of SBF and Zhao having their little hair-pulling spat and (5) failure not being an option, due to SBF having the inflated view of his own smarts and the constant praise being lavished on him as the EA wunderkind, when the One Weird Trick was played out and the infinite profits stopped, he started robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Then of course it all crashed down.
And he does seem to at least in part believe his own hype, that he could talk up some rescue deal (until Zhao and Binance pulled the rug out from under him there) and that if they just gave him time, he'd find all the missing money and everything would be okay.
Fast talking had got him all the investor funding at the start, but it didn't work when the bankruptcy loomed. And he could *not* keep his mouth shut afterwards; going online with more explanations and claims, even when the conditions of house arrest was 'no going online', handing over Caroline's personal papers to the NYT, etc. which eventually aggravated the judge enough that he got jail time.
So he was stupid in that particular smart way. There is a criminal aspect to all this, but a lot of it is him being "you have to be really smart to be this stupid". I think that's part of the failure mode of EA - it encourages thinking of oneself as one of the few smart realists who have the Magic Tool (Bayesian methods) to work out what is the most effective and best way, it's all based on Science, so you know better than the dumb-dumb average normies about effective charity spending.
That spills over very easily into "I know better than the dumb-dumb average normies about *everything*" and then you set up a house of cards, ignoring the dumb-dumb average normie safeguards, and guess what? The EA contempt for ordinary people comes back to bite you in the backside.
The John J. Ray III bankruptcy filing is very, very informative about how convoluted the structure was, how the three founders were taking money out, and how it was all an elaborate, interlocking mess with the 'silos':
Yeah, that was the sense I got too. He started taking bigger and bigger risks, thinking he was smarter than everyone, and got in over his head. Then he tried to lie and gamble his way out.
" The second villain is the current CEO of FTX, John Rey, who was brought in to manage the company in bankruptcy after SBF was removed. Rey decided from day 1 that SBF was a liar and a crook and he’d never listen to a word he said, and didn’t give SBF a chance to explain things, set things right, or point him to the money. Lewis doesn’t portray Rey as the same sort of moustache-twirling villain as the lawyer, just a very hard-headed and very old-school guy who made things vastly worse by never letting SBF just explain."
This lines up with criticism I've seen elsewhere of Lewis' book, that he seems to have been charmed by SBF and is acting as his apologist.
Regarding Mr. Ray, I'm inclined to trust him *because* he's a hard-headed, old-school guy, and for things like this:
"18. I have been provided with an unaudited consolidated balance sheet for the WRS Silo as of September 30, 2022, which is the latest balance sheet available. The balance sheet shows $1.36 billion in total assets as of that date. However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated."
That comes from the November 2022 bankruptcy filing, before we recently got Caroline Ellison's testimony that SBF instructed her to create a balance sheet that hid losses/claimed to have assets it didn't have. So Mr. Ray is proven right about the unreliability of whatever Sam is trying to sell him.
"According to reports from the courtroom on Oct. 11, Ellison claimed Bankman-Fried directed her to create “alternative” balance sheets on Alameda’s use of crypto exchange FTX’s funds. She reportedly testified that she had provided seven spreadsheets, one of which SBF presented to Genesis. The document did not reveal that Alameda had borrowed $10 billion from FTX.
“Sam said, ‘Don’t send the balance sheet to Genesis,’” said Ellison, according to reports. “We were borrowing $10 billion from FTX, and we had $5 billion in loans to our own executives and affiliated entities. We thought Genesis might share the info.”
The bankruptcy filing is really great at winkling out just how disorganised the entire affair was, from not knowing exactly what bank accounts they held and who the signatories were, to this little nugget:
"55. The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland".
Your auditors are in the Metaverse? Who could have qualms after learning that! 😁
He testified to the House Financial Services Committee about the FTX collapse about a year ago, there's a lot of different edited versions and highlights on Youtube:
He does come across as knowing what he's talking about and having long experience in cleaning up messes after businesses go kablooey, so when he says 'this is the worst I ever saw', you know it had to have been really bad.
Idle speculation about the impact of the current iteration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Western politics: It seems like the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions of the left-liberal coalition have an intractable disagreement and are poised to tear the coalition apart over it. As the war goes on, Palestine-partisans will have plenty of Palestinian suffering to complain about, but I expect the horrors of the 10/7 attacks to remain vivid enough in the minds Israel-partisans that they will be in no mood to see Israelis cast in the role of settler-colonial oppressor. And if Jewish and other Israel-partisan donors start withholding money from organizations that are critical of Israel, I would expect pro-Palestinian leftists take that as further confirmation that Jews are part of the privileged white oppressor hegemon.
But I foresee a possible upside to all this internal political strife: Perhaps they will eventually tire of fighting and arrive at a renewed appreciation for tolerance and liberal discourse norms as a result, following the dynamic Scott described in section III of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization. Already some universities have announced that they no longer want to issue official statements about each new Current Thing, and the president of Harvard posted a video about the importance of free speech after Harvard took a lot of heat over a bunch of student organizations cosigning a statement saying the violence was entirely Israel's fault.
For now, I'm suspicious that this newfound appreciation for free speech and institutional neutrality is just a strategic retreat and won't extend to greater tolerance for opinions which are broadly unpopular on the Left, but like I said, the Israel-Palestine issue seems to be a deep and irreconcilable division within the Left, so if the internal fight about it is long and bruising enough, maybe that will eventually open up space for other kinds of heterodoxy.
Nobody is supporting free speech here. Zionist organizations like the ADL will double down on their opposition to free speech to woke-wash zionism and try and paint all opposition to zionism as being "nazism" etc. Zionists categorically have zero problem with anti-white ideology - they simply don't want it applied to jews (but jews are white or else you're "othering" them.) Organizations like the ADL support white privilege ideology so long as it excludes jews, and the strategy of institutional zionism has always been to use woke ideology to direct hate towards gentile whites and away from zionist jews.
That would be nice, but I suspect what will actually happen is that wokeness as usual continues, just with Jews being pushed a bit down the intersectional totem pole. Judging by the comments I've read, this won't cause woke Jews to abandon wokeism in favour of free speech; instead, they'll redouble their support for woke causes to try and regain status amongst their ideological confreres.
<i>Already some universities have announced that they no longer want to issue official statements about each new Current Thing, and the president of Harvard posted a video about the importance of free speech after Harvard took a lot of heat over a bunch of student organizations cosigning a statement saying the violence was entirely Israel's fault.<i>
"Woke people appeal to free speech norms when criticised over extreme woke rhetoric, then completely discard said norms when enforcing their views on the non-woke" has happened often enough in the past, and I'm a bit sceptical that this time is any different.
This is one of the rare but important occurrences where the revolutionary Twitter-left and the bog-standard Liberal left collide, as the latter gets to see what makes the former tick. The revolutionary types are being mostly consistent with rhetoric, it's just that now these things aren't so abstracted away.
I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?
While the conflict triggers debates around free speech in Western democracies, this is a million miles from the actua causes l events on the ground.
This feels like an entirely separate issue related to the ongoing woke vs sleep(?) debate - I don't know what the political opposite of woke is - and has absolutely nothing to do with examining the armament supply chains and underlying motivations that enable the conflict to continually escalate into ever more horrific versions of itself.
Very few actors, if any, within the weapon supply chain have any interest or motivation to scale down the rate of supply to try to reduce the number of incidents.
The loud proclamations by Israel's allies that they will give them more weapons seems to be acceptable in spite of the knowledge of what will happen as a result. Hamas will receive more munitions from wherever it can. Iran, Russia wherever...
Those who blame either the Israelis or Hamas for the state of play seem to be missing the point. Every single weapon has been provided by a third party, either directly or via financial support. Stock holders in the arms manufacturers are knowingly and actively feeding the conflict by continued investment. Meanwhile the only thing that's getting attention is free speech...?
We are blaming the wrong actors if we are genuinely concerned about reducing the violence.
Once again profit seems to be more important than the prevention of unnecessary deaths.
<i>I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?</i>
White Europeans and Americans have spent most of the last eighty years being told that any kind of in-group preference or loyalty is racist. Israel is one of the few Western(ish) nations we're allowed to root for, meaning that a lot of sublimated nationalism gets transferred onto them. (A similar thing happened with the Ukraine after Russia invaded it -- lots of people coming out with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian rhetoric which they'd never dream of using with regard to their own country and its enemies.)
Also, Jews in America tend to be disproportionately successful, including in culturally important sectors like Hollywood. This gives Jewish concerns greater salience in mainstream culture than you might expect from just looking at their population figures.
"I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?"
Since you go on to frame the situation in purely economic terms, this is not at all surprising. That's not the paradigm others are using at all. I the US there are at least two moral factors in being pro-Israel, the first being the non-mainline Protestant attitude of the Jews being God's chosen peo0ple, the forefathers of Christianity, Jesus himself being a Jew, etc. The second is the Holocaust being taught at the second greatest moral outrage of all time, only behind slavery.
It seems to me very likely that the reason this particular incident is getting so much attention well no roughly equivalent previous incidents ever got anywhere near this amount of attention is because this is the first time Twitter was run by someone who wanted to demonstrate commitment to free speech by not suppressing war-related posts
I don't think much of elon's free speech commitment, but the difference in how far tweets about it have spread compared to equivalent Tweets in the past is striking, and the actual videos of death never would have been allowed in the past
Both sides are too weak to accomplish what they want on their own, so events tend to unfold and be shared as foils to gain attention/resources instead of being ends unto themselves. The Palestinians have historically tried to get neighboring Arab countries involved in the war, since the Palestinians lacked the military power to beat Israel. Israel depends on western, especially US, support, and so tries to mold their behavior to gain as much of that as possible.
You can see the same thing between Russia and Ukraine, where Russia would probably like the war to be as quiet as possible (they have the advantage) while Ukraine is sounding the alarm as much as possible, since they need outside support.
American aid to Israel is ~13% of its military budget and ~0.6% of its total GDP; it could (and would) cough up that money itself if it was taken away. And it makes many of its own weapons, from rifles to tanks, though it buys a lot from the US too.
>I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?
Have you missed two years of ongoing Ukraine war discourse?
The point about the profit motive seems causally wrong to me, why do you believe that arms dealing is supply, rather than demand driven?
Another issue is that it's just as possible to kill millions of people with swords and arrows, as long as the other side doesn't have better weapons either, as with modern weapons, and it has been done many times in history. Giving a side weapons can shift the balance (if it's not matched by similar weapons going to the other side), but it's not clear that it makes war bloodier overall.
I wrote this on the Motte a few hours ago and thought it was relevant here as well. TLDR of it would be, I think that there's no newfound appreciation for free speech, and that the people who are embroiled in this latest battle have no perspective on how others may feel different from them on other stuff.
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
I felt like Lawrence Summers' statement about Harvard demonstrated a certain feigned ignorance about the source of the ideas that would, eventually, squarely hit Jews when it came time for Harvard to show a human face in response to the events in Israel. If it's any consolation, a 9/11 in 2023 would occasion glee at Harvard as well.
Frankly I'm surprised that anyone is at all surprised about what's happened. Most of the statistical disparities used to "prove" that the US is a white supremacist society tilt even more in favour of Jews.
I have no doubt in my mind that you're right. But do you have any sources you could link that dive into the data on this? I think a source like that could be a powerful tool for trying to open the minds of some of my Jewish progressive friends. Or, it could totally be ignored like everything else I say to them that's anti-progressive.
"it's fine now to murder people like you actually" is a common lefty take I've seen that goes beyond "people saying things you disagree with". I'm usually pretty pro free speech and some people gonna disagree with you, this one just passes the line.
I can't say I've seen people saying something as extreme and as open ended as that, myself. As much as I find progressives distasteful, I don't expect that basically any of them would be down for a platform of killing all Jews. Generally progressives consider themselves to be against anti-semitism. To the degree that they think that this violence is okay, they paint it in a light of anti-colonial sentiment, meaning that they'd think that it's okay to target people in Israel.
I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do.
This seems... Kinda like splitting hairs, TBH. "I'm not saying I want to kill you I'm saying I'm cool with other people doing it" isn't such a huge gap.
"Kill you", or "kill people in Israel", who in these people's view point took land that doesn't belong to them and oppressed "marginalized" indigenous peoples?
"The lesson to students on the Left is that you have no power, even though the people who do have power will indulge you on some issues. "
If people will do what you want, then you have power. And the success of student activists of getting their wish lists fulfilled (and avoiding punishment for crimes in doing so) goes back more than a half century.
"Power is the ability to force other people to do what you want,"
By that definition Joe Biden has about zero power. That rickety shambling body can force almost nobody to do anything they don't want to. He can ask other people to do it for him however. The USSS may or may not engage in an illegal request. Likewise the DoJ.
That actually sounds... about right? Which is why it's key to select the personnel that agrees with you ("you" being "President"; this seems to be the only real power the President has).
I can find you others if you doubt that this is happening. I also find it odd in your post that you say all billionaires are on the same side and I think you are saying that these are Republicans? There are actually lots of billionaires on each side, with the top political contributor (George Soros, Democrat) giving twice as much as the next highest contributor (https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors).
I found a source sympathetic to the administration firing the teacher, but the base situation is the same. The administration set a rule - no "misgendering" -and the teacher disagreed with the rule. For back story, this teacher offered alternatives such as calling all students by their last names, which the school refused. The teacher's only option that didn't involve losing their job was to call students by a name he thought was wrong to do. The situation was explicitly "call this student by their preferred pronoun or lose your job."
I think you're badly misunderstanding the political landscape of billionaires, maybe because of this specific Israel question. Jews tend to vote Democrat and rich Democrats seem more likely to support Israel than poorer Democrats (which might itself be an age issue, as support for Hamas tends to lean much younger). Both of these facts support more freedom to say "second Nakba" than to say "Kill the Jews" and both come from the Democrat side. Republicans also tend to support Israel over Hamas, which makes it even easier.
I listened to Scott's Manifest 2023 interview, and someone mentioned that getting Destiny involved resulted in a massive spike in usage. Has anyone within the prediction markets scene considered talking with other Destiny-adjacent political commentators like Hasan Piker (hasanabi), Ian Kochinski (vaush), David Pakman, and Cenk Uygur?
On the topic of predictions, I found out that Fox News has a feature called America Predicts [0]. Any thoughts? They seem to be the first major publication to start experimenting with this sort of thing. For example: "Will a member of Congress be caught giving a speech generated by AI by Dec. 31?" is currently sitting at a 71% chance.
"Will a member of Congress be caught giving a speech generated by AI by Dec. 31?"
Is that confined to this year, or is it open-ended (e.g. it could be by December 31st 2025?) Because that's something I'm pretty sure could indeed happen, 71% seems reasonable 😀
Doesn't have to be a big name member of Congress, some rank-and-file backbencher, but yep.
Note that Hasan Piker, Vaush, and Cenk Uygur have all consistently praised the Hamas massacres of Israelis throughout the past week (David Pakman being the sole exception in condemning it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3SF6A0iosQ (in which the only criticism of the Hamas massacres is that they will harm the Palestinian and Muslim agenda, not that they are evil in and of themselves)
Australia has just rejected (by a 60 to 40% margin) a proposal to create an indigenous advisory body in the constitution. I'm curious about the instinctive reactions of people from other countries to this. And does any other country have something like this already, and how does it operate in practice?
My reaction is, the proposed "Voice" is so vaguely defined that it will either be an impotent symbolic gesture, or it will wield real power that nobody can now understand well enough to be confident it will be used wisely and with proper checks and balances. I lean towards the impotent-symbolism prediction, thus mostly harmless, but I'd have voted "No" until it was better defined.
As for similar institutions, I don't think the United States has anything similar w/re Native Americans as a whole. There's the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but that's the government telling the Indians how things are going to be, not vice versa. But individual Native American tribes are quasi-sovereign entities (in a manner similar to that of the 50 states, e.g. they are still politically subordinate to the Federal government). This works tolerably well, in large part because we've spent over a century building up statutory and case law that delineates everybody's powers and responsibilities.
- Aboriginals already have significant special privileges, including companies being allowed to literally advertise explicitly 'aboriginal only' jobs - and not for aboriginal specific roles, but just jobs anyone could do, affirmative action and scholarships at australian universities, government departments with billions of dollars in funding etc. People have mixed feelings about this kind of thing, but by and large very few people complain or say anything about it - right up until you force them (voting is mandatory in australia) to vote on a constitutional change to enshrine them.
- We were in one breath told about how limited and powerless this body would be (in support of it), and then in the next breath we were told this would radically change the country forever (in support of it).
- This whole thing is best understood as a vanity project by the Prime Minister. If the body is really so important for improving aboriginal outcomes, he should not have made it's introduction dependent on the Australian public voting on a constitutional change. And if it really would have been so powerful in making a difference to aboriginal lives, then it would have been easy to prove it with a legislated voice. This would have had the dual benefits of showing effectiveness and demonstrating benignness. But he didn't because he wanted to the be Prime Minister who got this done, he wanted his Kevin Rudd stolen generation apology moment, he wanted his post-political career honors, he wanted his honorary doctorates, he wanted his institutional speeches, he wanted his biographies, he wanted his fawning ABC interviews.
- He should have cancelled or at least delayed the referendum before he set a date, because by then it was clear support was tanking. It's unclear if he didn't do this because A, he didn't want to be seen to be backing down or breaking a promise, B, he didn't believe the polls, or C, he knew there was a high chance of failure but thought that it was win-win because being seen to be trying to do the 'right' thing is almost as good as actually succeeding.
- The justification for constitutional change was so future governments couldn't get rid of it without another referendum. But then in support of the voice was the idea that it had no actual powers, the parliament could ignore what it said, and had ultimate control over its structure and function. If a government would be willing to abolish a legislated voice, then they're going to ignore everything the voice says, make it as small and powerless as possible etc.
- Rich people, celebrities and corporations were overwhelmingly and vocally pro-voice. This undeniably led to at least some people voting no out of spite.
- The process which led to calls for a voice to parliament in the first place also produced calls for a treaty with the government and "truth-telling" i.e. aboriginal race nationalist propaganda espoused by the government and other institutions to brow beat white people into accepting more and more special privileges for aboriginals. This undeniably led to some people voting no. They're not the same thing, but expecting people to treat them as separate is unreasonable. They're obviously all slices of the same salami, and if each slice it too thin to be opposed then its basically a blank cheque for these activists and politicians to do whatever they want.
- This was treated as a referendum on the Prime Minister himself by a lot of people, which is reasonable considering that he's done very, very little meaningful in his time as Prime Minister, a time during which Australians are suffering from significant cost of living challenges for which he would be absolutely hammering the (conservative) liberal party for doing similarly nothing in they were in power. He's literally spent more time talking about and promoting the voice than anything else since he's been in power, and a lot of people resented this. His party still has a comfortable polling lead, but he would be extremely well served to try and move on from this as quickly as possible and try and reign in all the bullshit leftist rage, because the sooner people forget about this monumental waste of time and money, the less of a reputational hit he takes.
- The Yes campaign/supporters are extremely stupid. I thought they were engaging in polling denial in order to avoid poisoning their campaign and spreading doom. NOPE, they were high on their own supply, and the fact that the actual result was *almost exactly* the average of countless polls was a complete and utter surprise to them.
One of the (bad) lessons internalised by the left side of politics from the Republic referendum was that they provided _too_ much detail about the proposal which allowed the No campaign to win the day by nitpicking.
So this time they were determined to go to the polls with the vaguest possible proposal: the body shall exist. Will it have any powers? Will Parliament have any obligation to listen to it? What form shall this body take and who will select it? Doesn't matter, just shut up and vote for it.
You often hear moaning from certain quarters about how rarely Australians agree to pass constitutional changes (it's now eight out of 45 proposed changes have been accepted), as if that's a problem with the Australian people's stubbornness rather than the low quality of the changes that politicians like to propose, or a credit to the original writers of the Constitution for getting something good enough in the first place.
>- We were in one breath told about how limited and powerless this body would be (in support of it), and then in the next breath we were told this would radically change the country forever (in support of it).
This isn't necessarily a contradiction - it's possible for something to be wholly powerless ( in the sense of "unable to coerce") but very influential (in the sense of "able to persuade").
There's obviously a correlation. When convenient, it was practically being sold as a symbolic change, and other times a fundamental change to how Australia operates as a country.
If the voice is politically powerless, if the parliament can ignore everything they say, if parliament can legislate changes to it which make it small, underfunded, unrepresentative etc., then this makes it much, much harder for it to have a significant impact on society. But activists were saying it would cause a "tectonic shift" in aboriginal policy.
Not necessarily! Consider political parties - in most countries they have no formal recognition as a concept in eg. the constitution of the country, but in practice they are extremely powerful entities, in a way that rarely depends on any one individual in the party.
Citation needed. Political parties are not recognized in the *US* Constitution, because the US Constitution predates the widespread recognition that political parties will inevitably play a dominant role in the politics of a democracy. Just about everyone else has the benefit of experience in that regard, and I think in most nations there is explicit constitutional provision for and/or recognition of political parties. This can sometimes be difficult to discern because e.g. the UK Constitution is unwritten and we can't point to the date where they changed it to acknowledge parties, but they pretty clearly have. In Germany, parties are explicitly written into the Basic Law.
But there are ~200 nations on Earth, and I'm not going to be the one to read all their constitutions.
Good point re all the PR systems that *must* officially recognize parties, I was implicitly thinking only of Westminster systems.
I note that the US wasn't unaware of political parties as a thing, they were already prominent in England by then, it was actively trying *not* to have them be a dominant force
Yeah, re your last point, I think a lot of lefties in Western countries in general exist in a bubble where all their (liberal, highly educated, affluent) friends agree with them, and the media agrees with them, and corporations virtue signal by agreeing with them, so it doesn't occur to them that large chunks of the population could hold significantly different views. I know at least one person (highly educated, affluent, liberal) who said that I was the ONLY person she knew who was voting No. I mean! It's 60% of the population! There is probably also the fact that people who voted No were much quieter about it than people who voted Yes, because we didn't want to engage with all the BS rhetoric and the judginess.
Perhaps. Five years ago I too was a lefty bubble boy who uncritically believed what the New York Times told me; then I started making an effort to read other sources that didn’t share the same bias (like this blog!) My eyes do glaze over when we start to argue about AI risk though…
My instinctual reaction is to compare it to tribal sovereignty in the US. "Tribe" appears in the us constitution so it has some basis, but the constitution doesnt indicate what a tribes powers are. Laws and treaties have done so.
Irrespective of whether its good, US indigenous people have a legal identity that is different from others. There does not seem to be a significant movement to stop that and the current supreme court, seen as very conservative, is increasing that distinction.
I feel like the difference is that the US has much, much less interest in native issues than Australia, and so nobody feels especially threatened by such distinctions. This lack of care seems to stem from a combination of native americans being a much smaller, less politically organized, more segregated and less culturally influential group than african americans, who *are* the focus of the left's racial egalitarian efforts. They're also a lot less dysfunctional compared with Australian aboriginals so they naturally demand less attention.
In Australia, however, Aboriginal issues are essentially the absolute pinnacle of institutional left-wing political efforts. There is nothing higher, there's no 13% african population to focus on. And accordingly there's almost no limit to what the left want to do with regards to indigenous "rights". If the left had their way, untold billions of dollars would be redistributed from mostly white australians to aboriginals, directly and indirectly. It's the height of sanity for people to be concerned about giving anything to these politicians and activists.
Lefties see everything in black and white. To them there are only two kinds of good people in the word, the oppressed, and of course the lefties. The rest of us, with more nuanced and moderate and probably better-informed opinions are in their eyes literally hateful Nazis!
The irony is that in many respects the lefty's coercive intolerant outlook, blind to reason and immune to persuasion, make them the best approximation to Nazis themselves!
In America it is easy on one's travels to see really Indian-looking Indians - they look as if "pure-blooded" - so I think it is tacitly understood that when Indian activists look like oneself, basically Anglo, they can be dismissed; and if that's "wrong" in some identity politics way, it's only at the margin. My impression of Australia is that your indigenous identity has been captured by people whose genetics are pretty far from Aboriginal. This works as long as everyone is polite about it - but maybe falls apart when it comes time to vote?
Yes that's definitely a factor. Almost no well known and publicised mainstream aboriginal activists are close to full-blooded aboriginal. Most full-blooded aboriginals live in remote areas and suffer from so much basic dysfunction and deprivation that they're not capable of becoming fully literate, let alone going to university or having careers.
One of the criticisms of the voice was that it would be dominated by these inner city, one quarter-aboriginal types who would push a radical left agenda rather than actually representing the majority of the country's regional and remote aboriginals. One slur used against it was to call it the 'city voice'.
I'm Aussie, and I voted No, on the grounds that "the Voice" is racist, in the literal sense of that term - it affords access to one race that is not afforded to other races. (Naturally people on the left pushing the yes side of the debate accused their opponents of racism, go figure. I was generally disappointed by the quality of debate around the topic.)
More generally my feeling is that any kind of race-based discrimination in an attempt to redress perceived historical injustice should -
1. be clear about the historical wrong it is trying to address
2. apply a measure that is proportionate
3. have a clear goal
4. have evidence that it will work, and
5. be temporary.
I will acknowledge points 1, 2, and 3. The Indigenous population of Australia has a tattered history, most infamously the Stolen Generations, where in the early half of the 20th century Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families to be raised with white people (this was ostensibly done for their benefit, yikes.) The measure - creating an Indigenous advisory body - is hardly revolutionary. And the goal is very clear; at the moment (among other socioeconomic markers) there is a 8-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians; #closingthegap has been around for ever but successive Australian governments haven't made that much progress.
The Voice for me failed points 4 and 5. The "Yes" side of the debate focused endlessly on Aboriginal disadvantage, but less so on what the roots of that disadvantage actually are and how creating a Voice will address them. Most of the Yes campaigners were leftist white people - Aborigines themselves seemed lukewarm on the proposal and several prominent Indigenous Australians spoke forcefully against it. Also I wasn't a fan of enshrining it permanently in our constitution. I'm all for lifting people up who have been historically downtrodden, but indefinitely - that seems to me to be a tacit acknowledgement that there will always be division. Why not just create a Voice through legislation? Then we can eliminate it if it doesn't work or is no longer needed.
I also note that the "voice" was ill-defined. Labor did put out their plan for how they intended to legislate it but I trust that about as much as an election campaign promise, the devil is in the details and I highly doubt the details wouldn't have changed between their draft and any actual law.
I also note that they can still legislate a "Voice"! The proposed amendment was in no way *required*, the parliament already has all the requisite powers.
Finland has an organ called Sámediggi, The Sámi Council, for the Sámi minority up north (Sweden and Norway have equivalent orgs). Their advisory powers are fairly limited, and the general acceptance of this arrangement is probably made easier by the fact that these advisory powers extend over a similarly very limited region. (I wrote more about the related issues at https://alakasa.substack.com/p/the-great-sami-showdown?r=7fsd8)
My reaction was that I don't know the details, so I assume the Australians have good reasons for voting like this.
For the second question, lots of countries have rules to make sure that minorities are heard or represented in parliaments. Sometimes in regional parliaments, sometimes in national. Perhaps the most common rule is that minority parties are exempted from electoral thresholds. This usually ensures that at least one or a few MPs are from this minority. Some examples that I am familiar with is:
- German minority in Polish national parliament
- Danish minority in regional parliament in Northern Germany
- Romania with various minorities
A lot of countries in South Eastern Europe like Hungary, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro have varying rules for how to include minorities into parliament. Croatia even has some reserved seats for minorities. I think New Zealand has a similar rule for Maori.
>I think New Zealand has a similar rule for Maori.
NZ is hurtling towards an undemocratic polynesian race nationalism that is evidently very unpopular with huge chunks of the NZ population and which rightfully scared a lot of Australians wrt the voice advisory body in Australia
I’m American but followed the voice debate a bit. My understanding is that the no campaign was largely based on the idea that it would produce needless divisions. This seemed disingenuous to me since divisions clearly do exist. It was more persuasive to me that the amendment was overly vague. It seemed like the amendment could’ve been interpreted in a lot of very different ways had it been approved. Given the history of corruption in past aboriginal councils, I think a less open-ended amendment would’ve been much more appropriate.
For that reason, I probably would’ve voted against it. It would be hard though, because I know it’d cause pain to people who would interpret it as a rejection of their importance or right to full participation in the society.
They already have more than the *right* to participate fully in society, they lack the ability to do so. We are beat over the head with the '65,000 years' (of existence in Australia) line on an almost daily basis, but somehow it never occurs to people that being isolated from the rest of the world for 65 millennia in a radically different environment necessitating a radically different lifestyle to the average non-Australian MIGHT have just resulted in slightly different genes being selected for. No, really, believing that Aboriginal Australians necessarily have the same genetics related to behavioral characteristics as say, Europeans is literally more absurd than young earth creationism. At least the creationists can point to a supernatural force to rationalise their crazy beliefs.
I mean, Native Americans on average do much worse on average in the SATs than white people, have much lower IQs etc so its very obvious that differences exist. . And many of the successful ones have significant European ancestry.
I mean, there are similarly "aboriginals" working as academics, politicians, bureaucrats, business professionals etc. in Australia. They are disproportionately part (or majority) european, but the point is not that nobody "aboriginal" can succeed. The point is that the vast majority of aboriginals struggle with basic literacy, have an extremely high crime rate, have an extremely high substance abuse rate etc. that explains the majority of socioeconomic differences between whites and aboriginals - not a lack of "rights". Just like the existence of successful native americans does not mean that all or even most native americans are capable of such success.
Last I heard the consensus was that Native Americans left Eurasia much later than the Australian Aborigines did, and the oldest dated signs of human activity in the Americas was only 13,000 years ago.
Anyway the point is not that 65,000 years of isolation will necessarily make you dumber, it's that we shouldn't be too surprised if it does. 65,000 years ago is a long time in human evolutionary terms; it's half way back to Homo Erectus.
But of course that is ridiculous, because they can already fully participate in the society and government just like anyone else, they just have to get elected the normal way. They don't get a special guaranteed advisory body on top of that. Supporting such a measure on the basis of not making the aborigines 'feel rejected' would be treating them like children.
It's clear to me that the sentences are talking about the funding that Manifold received, not ACT. "It" in the second sentence refers to the subject of the first sentence which is Manifold, not ACT. If the second sentence was about ACT it would be in the same clause as "a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets" -> "a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets and receive $1 mil...)".
It seems weird that there's an apparent link between menstruation cycles and the moon. What is going on there?
A lot of articles say it's a myth, but they're referring to the menstral cycle starting at a particular time in the lunar cycle (eg ovulation occurring at the full moon). Which it doesn't. Or they point out that people's cycles vary, often between 24 and 38 days. (See: https://helloclue.com/articles/cycle-a-z/myth-moon-phases-menstruation)
What is true, however, is that the global average menstrual cycle length is almost exactly the same as the lunar cycle length (29 vs 29.5 days). That doesn't seem like a coincidence.
The circadian rhythm is another biological cycle driven by a heavenly body. It's triggered by light, and I would guess that would be the driver behind a moon-menstruation link too (mostly because I'm not sure what else it could be... gravity?).
When humans are deprived sunlight (eg, when they're blind), they develop circadian rhythm disorders - their internal clocks drift out of sync so that their sleep/wake cycles are shorter or longer and not necessarily in sync with daylight hours.
Could it be that menstrual cycles are naturally in sync with the moon, but have drifted apart because we're all inside at night now? Has anyone studied the menstral cycles of women more exposed to the night sky?
Is there any good ideas as to a reason for the two to be linked? My best (incomplete) guess would be that it's safer to menstruate when it's dark/not dark because of predators for some reason. Or it's a better time to have sex. I dunno.
I probably shouldn't have any credulity in this theory, but it seemed kinda compelling when I heard it.
Apparently it's fairly common for a variety of biological functions to cycle monthly or bi-weekly in tetrapods (vertebrates excluding fish), and it's though it might be due to the ancestral tetrapod (some fish-like amphibian) having lived in the tidal zone.
Humans have concealed estrus, which would be frustrated if the menstrual cycle (and therefore the estrus cycle) aligned with the phases of the moon.
The similar menstrual cycle lengths in simians seem well explained by having evolved from a common ancestor. The fact that they *nearly* align with the lunar cycle doesn't take us anywhere, because "near" alignment still results in menstruation taking place at every possible point of the lunar cycle.
Since humans are diurnal, the level of night time illumination seems unlikely to be significant to them.
You might consider whether the most recent common ancestor of simians (which would not have had concealed estrus) might have had a menstrual cycle aligned with the lunar cycle, from which its descendants have since varied. A potential complication is that it's characteristic of simians that they have acute colour vision adapted to day-time lifestyles, but it's possible to image some transitional species for whom it was adaptive.
> Since humans are diurnal, the level of night time illumination seems unlikely to be significant to them.
Evolution seems to have endowed us with decent night time vision which would work ok in moonlight. If the EEA includes the tropics, then daytime would vary by around three hours between 'summer' and 'winter'. While a lone woman gathering in the savanna in moonlight is probably going to fall prey to some big cat, there might be higher order effects. If multi-day hunting expeditions were a thing in the EEA, they might happen more during full moon. Being fertile while the most of the successful hunters of your tribe are gone might be disadvantageous.
Also, in the EEA, menstruation was probably not very concealable from the men of the tribe. Still, there seems to be enough uncertainty to deduce fertility from that that the the winning strategy for men was not "have sex with women who had their period n days ago" but just "have a lot of sex with women of fertile age" (and optionally "... who are not currently menstruating"). (Thinking about it, I am kind of surprised by it. In any environment which a woman might have sex with more than one man, the ability to track estimates of fertility for a dozen females seems like an obvious advantage. Neither would the males have to invent fancy math like integers or Bayes updates for that, such calculations can well be hard-wired into instinct. I really don't grok this species. Bluntly, how can "women who had their period n to k days ago" not be the most viewed pornhub category?)
If most of the women were kind of synced to the moon, the best fertility estimate available to males might not change too much.
(Related: being synced to the moon would also imply being synced to each other. Naively, one would expect that not to be a stable equilibrium. Any one women defecting and having her fertility window while the rest of the tribe is menstruating would obviously be more likely to have a more well adapted father for her children. Is this whole concealed fertility thing a result of group selection, like "In groups where fertility is obvious and the best hunter fathers most children, the winning strategy for other males is to kill him. Groups which routinely kill their best hunters are outcompeted by groups who don't." I still do not see how this would apply to humans but not to most other animals living in groups with multiple males.)
Speaking of coincidences and moons, how wild is it that our planet's one moon is the right size and shape to cause a total eclipse of our sun? And the orbit is changing: before humans walked the earth, the moon loomed closer over the dinosaurs, and after we're long gone, it will drift away into space. We exist in exactly the right time to be able to notice that the two bright objects in the sky are the same size.
IIRC, the Moon was also the cause of the "no advanced aliens" situation in *Foundation*: the lunar gravity pulled radioactive heavy metals closer to the surface, increasing the background radiation and therefore mutation rate.
I've always been Amazed by this too, and whenever I see an eclipse in sci-fi in other star systems I'm always annoyed. The ability for two bodies to eclipse is practically unique to our solar system, it should be on Earth's flag. Hell, the Pioneer plaque should have probably had a solar eclipse on it, i think it might provide a lot more bits of negentropy than the quasar stuff.
The pulsars have the advantage that they're particularly easy to observe from a distance, which the moon (and especially the moon's precise size and orbital distance) isn't. Earth isn't even the only body in the solar system to have eclipses from its moons. There are photos of the shadows cast on Saturn and Jupiter by their moons (which clearly include areas of totality), and not only is Charon about 8 times wider as viewed from Pluto than Earth's moon is from here, plenty to cause eclipses, but some of the smaller moons of Pluto are also large enough to cause eclipses given the great distance from the sun. If the sci-fi depictions you're annoyed about specifically have the moon with the same apparent size as the star, rather than merely more, that is more of a coincidence though.
> The circadian rhythm is another biological cycle driven by a heavenly body. It's triggered by light, and I would guess that would be the driver behind a moon-menstruation link too (mostly because I'm not sure what else it could be... gravity?).
You have very accurate internal biological timers. A cycle that is linked to the phase of the moon can be driven by those, as long as the cycle of the moon itself always takes exactly the same amount of time. It's not necessary to drive the internal cycle by an external influence unless they would otherwise fall out of sync.
(Compare the 11-year and 17-year cicadas.)
I'm not taking a position on whether there is supposed to be a relationship between menstruation and the phase of the moon, but the orbit of the moon is regular enough that, should such a relationship be advantageous, it could be implemented without needing to rely on an external stimulus.
Huh, interesting, is the idea that women tend to synchronize their menstral cycle still true, or a victim of the replication crisis? Anyway if synchronizing is a thing then the lunar cycle is a good signal. A convenient metronome?
I'm just one woman but in about 15 years of having a mostly regular period, and moving between households, living with different women (and googling), I'm pretty confident in saying that the synching thing is a myth. Since exact length of cycles varies, you probably end up "synched" at some point for a few months if you're living with another woman for several years. And then it goes out of synch again. I think the "aw we're synched up!" stuff can be a bonding thing, in the moment when you're both dealing with the same thing at the same time. But many women (from my experience) truly seem to believe it's true. My inclination is to say that it's an illusion. Which doesn't bode well for bonding with Ethereal Moon Goddess-worshipping types.
A cursory google suggests syncing isn't a thing. Still, "a convenient metronome" seems reasonably plausible as an explanation to me - it would explain why cycles in women and other species cluster around 29 days, but few bother sticking to it exactly. It might also explain why the cycle lengths match while the specific points in the cycle don't.
1. "current consensus is that menstruation is restricted to higher primates, the elephant shrew and some bats"
2. "It is important to note that menstrual bleeding in non-human primates is minimal."
3. "The duration of the menstrual cycle also varies with species, and it is approximately 29 days long in orangutans, 30 days in gorillas and about 37 days in chimpanzees"
The cycle lengths in other menstruating species still seem suspiciously close to the lunar cycle, and there's also a plausible reason why staying in sync with the moon might be more important to humans (more menstrual bleeding).
"Most female mammals have an estrous cycle, yet only ten primate species, four bat species, the elephant shrew, and one known species of spiny mouse have a menstrual cycle.[19][20] As these groups are not closely related, it is likely that four distinct evolutionary events have caused menstruation to arise."
It's got to be a coincidence. A menstrual cycle of 27 days would mean it's significantly out of phase with the moon after just two months. Even a menstrual cycle of 29 days would drift significantly out of phase after a year, far shorter than the woman's fertile lifespan.
A while ago I read about a study where they put people in basements with no sunlight and no indication of what time it was, and circadian rhythms varied from one person to the next, anywhere from 20 to 30 hours. So maybe the menstrual cycle is supposed to be tied to the moon (for whatever reason), but people today don't pay enough attention to the moon for it to sync up. I wonder if you'd see it sync up among today's hunter-gatherers.
My understanding is that there is pretty strong ties between menstruation and exercise and diet. I'd expect that it's easier to gather food or such, as well as to exercise at night when the moon is brightest, and that would carry through
It may be easier, but don't predators like wolves also benefit from lighter nights? Maybe nights with a full moon aren't so ideal after all for a spot of nocturnal mushroom picking!
Perhaps one explanation is that our primitive male ancestors would have taken the opportunity to hunt on lighter nights for a week or so either side of the full moon, leaving their womenfolk at home, and it was only on the two weeks' of darker nights, when the guys stayed in the camp over night, that they were most likely to copulate with the women.
The most fertile part of the menstrual cycle is two weeks after ovulation. So that timing matches their hunting vs stay at home routine if ovulation occurred at around the time of the full moon.
Obviously there would be nothing in principle stopping them mating at any time, but possibly there was some taboo around mating when they were about to hunt (perhaps based on practical considerations, such as preserving their energy and not smelling fishy to alert prey animals to their proximity, but also maybe to avoid provoking the jealousy and wrath of Diana, the goddess of night hunting, or some ancient equivalent), and by the time they returned from an all nighter chasing a gazelle or something, they were too knackered to even think about sex!
The remark below about cycle lengths in other primates would defeat that theory. We know that :
* mentrual cycles evolves among a common ancestor to primates
* from the common characteristics of all primates, it is likely that that ancestor was less intelligent than the average ape, and ate fruits (so no hunting-related social forces).
Furthermore, I can see an evolutionary path were you go from no cycle at all to a cycle in sync with the moon, but once you're out of sync, there's no going back.
So you would have to conceive an evolutionnary force that was strong enough to develop a whole cycle-in-sync in the first place, but so weak that it has been abandonned in almost all descendents.
I was thinking about hominid ancestors not so long ago (in geological time), e.g. say from roughly 2m years ago to relatively recent times i.e. around 10,000 years ago and more recently in some societies, rather than early primates or their squirrel-like predecessors tens of millions of years ago.
Also, my suggestion was an attempt to explain why the human menstrual cycle is, and for earlier hominds presumably equally was, 28 point something days. But I'd concede it doesn't explain how it evolved to that value from some other.
However, I gather a period interval can change by several days or even weeks due to external factors such as stress or malnutrition. So that may be a way it can vary widely until it happens to latch onto the favourable (according to my theory) interval. An advantageous trait need not suddenly pop up fully-formed and invariably present. It may be sporadic at first, with its advantage making it steadily more prevalent and gradually bedding it in.
Eh, I was never a poster child for exercise and diet, but when I was menstruating (and trying to track my cycles) I did find it went with the full moon, either a couple of days before or a couple of days after, during the year.
So, who knows? Biology is complicated and things like this are why astrology seemed to be so self-evidently correct, that the same heavenly bodies which influenced the tides and the material world also influenced our bodies and so our destinies as well.
Interesting point. It had crossed my mind that it could be something to do with gathering food, but I hadn't considered the links between menstruation and diet and exercise. I don't know much about those links at all actually.
I know a little bit due to personal background. But it's not an interest of mine and I could easily be misremembering. Think of this as given with maybe 70% confidence:
Some combination of excessive exercise and lack of body fat will prevent menstruation. Gymnasts frequently don't menstruate.
If you get too fat, you will stop menstruating.
If you're eating really poorly (not getting enough nutrition), you will stop menstruating.
That's enough to clearly establish that "menstruation is linked to diet and exercise", but the links (that I know of!) are mostly just failure cases. It's not at all surprising that if you are currently suffering stress from starvation, your body might decide "there's no potential upside to getting pregnant right now" and shut off menstruation. I'm not aware that you might e.g. vary the length of your cycle by varying the composition or quantity of your diet within broadly normal parameters, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
The most famous influence on menstrual cycle length is of course exposure to other women, which is neither a dietary nor an exercise-related phenomenon.
I rather liked it! The writing was fine, the plotting was decent and the ideas had substance. I also quite enjoyed the structural pell mell of the various narrative developments.
Things I would have liked:
I would have liked the opening paragraphs to have been more straightforward. I get that you want to open with a splash (ho ho!), but then the reader has to contort through an unnecessarily complicated maneuver down in the basement to get the story properly started back at the beginning again. Suggestion: simply delete paragraph 1 and move paragraph 3 to the top.
I wanted the alga to be called “Lil’ Red”.
The title (perhaps unintentionally?) evokes Kafka on the Beach, although there’s no connection that I can see. Also, instead of washing up in huge rafts on the shoreline, wasn’t the whole point of Lil’ Red that it would only reproduce slowly, after which it was designed to calcify and drop to the ocean floor to keep the carbon sequestered? So I would have liked all these elements to be more in harmony with each other.
I would have liked the characters to have felt less like agglomerations of borrowed quirks and more like real people, but I appreciate that’s a huge ask to the point of being unreasonable; this is a solarpunk scifi short, not a novel.
I would have liked Carol not to have suddenly launched into a completely unnecessary attempt to explain/rationalize what James’ letter *really* signified. Apart from my wrestling match with the opening paragraphs, this was the only passage that threw me out of the story.
Interesting. Carol has no right to call James an asshole since she's a thundering bitch herself, and the takeaway of the story is selfishness.
Carol is selfish, and yet never gets what she expects a smart kid like her should get, so she gives up on everything (including teaching/helping students or participating in the academic paperwork; there's not even an indication that she's working on her own research). She doesn't want to be with James, she's not interested in him, but she uses him as a convenience (are we meant to infer that she doesn't get dates from the people she finds desirable, so falls back on James?)
James is selfish; he wants Carol and won't take no for an answer. He too is not having the stellar career he thought he was entitled to, so he rushes ahead with what he tells himself is altruism and ends up getting caught and sent to jail.
He thinks he can use meditation etc. in the nice, tidy, secularised and de-racinated manner to serve his own ends, and ends up conjuring demons. Theo and his kind, of course, are the obvious selfish demons who need to leech off human life force and use James as their gateway back to the world, and as Carol points out in the end, we have no way of knowing if all the claimed benefits of the magic algae really exist, or if something will go wrong. Theo wants to save humanity to be their food stock cattle, not for the sake of helping humanity survive.
And finally Carol doesn't take the lesson from James life and (possible) end to start getting involved with the real world and stop thinking about herself; no, she decides to evoke a tulpa of her own to make a bargain, and it's certainly nothing as lofty as 'save the world' which James at least pretended to be his motive, but so she can have a do-over and get that life she thinks she is owed: personal and private success and happiness.
The background is that I had just come off of reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (TTT), which deals with "smart-kid problems," and in which I was frustrated by the main characters' lack of communication skills and character growth. And so I set out to write characters who I thought would be more likable; James actually asking Carol out instead of pining away in a corner, Carol straight-up asking James about his family problems, James growing up and becoming less of a dick, Carol following through with her own career ambitions and having some autonomy of her own.
It turns out though, that despite that, they all might still be thoroughly unpleasant people! If you ever read TTT I think you would hate it :)
I actually had not intended the theme to be about selfishness, but enjoy that you pointed that out (because it seems obvious now in retrospect). Most of this was done by accident:
1) Carol originally was going to have many suitors, but I thought the nerdy-girl-rebuffing-guys-due-to-skewed-gender-ratio-at-engineering-school trope had already been overdone
2) I felt like Carol having a stellar career would make her too much of a Mary Sue, so having a stalled research career was meant to be a comment on academia (I also really did have a professor who held absurd office hours to avoid students! It was also easy to miss his door because it looked like a pantry.)
3) Theo's species was originally supposed to be at war with the machine elves, who due to increased ease of DMT-production were on the ascendancy, but this entire section was cut since it was too convoluted. The easiest way to give Theo a motivation was to make it about humans as cattle. But your comment makes me want to write something that inverts the selfish-demon/genie trope!
4) The original ending had Theo popping out of nowhere and very-much-alive, meaning that Carol was taken for a ride having believed his letter. But I wanted to keep it ambiguous, so that each of the three possibilities she listed were equally plausible.
Thanks again for reading - I very much enjoyed your thoughts!
I did enjoy it as another take on the demon-summoning tales which were quite common in SF short stories of the 50s onwards, so the genre does exist and your story fits in nicely there.
James doing all this and making a (quite plain) deal with the Devil in order to try and impress Carol one final time, with the irony that Carol never heard of it and had not enough interest in him to follow what happened to him and would never have known had this other woman not shown up was excellent, although I have no idea if you intended that or not; his big 'save the planet' self-sacrifice was, in effect, one more doomed effort to get Carol to give a damn about him, and it didn't work.
The only motivation it created in Carol was "hey, deals with the Devil really work? so I can get the great life I wanted? okay, let's do this!" Refreshingly awful people, I guess; they're very human in being flawed and self-centred, so realistic that way.
The ambiguous ending was good, too; the ultimate irony would be if James did pop up out of nowhere, all "so... you wanna go to prom, after I saved the world?" and Carol is all "well damn, you mean I can't conjure up a demon to give me a second bite at the cherry? to hell with you, James, for tricking me!" because in the long run neither of them do care about other people or saving the world, just in getting what they want and think they deserve.
(and somewhere in another dimension a little shadowy demon is laughing its ass off at what fools these mortals be).
I liked it a bit, but I felt like the story didn't deliver what the first part promised. There was no hint that any supernatural things would be happening until the reveal, so I found that disappointing.
I think it's ambiguous. Scott did say "a natural reading" rather than "the natural reading", and I agree with that choice. It's sort of: "Topic A involves group X, which was initially funded by GROUP Y, a blog which PROMOTED PREDICTION MARKETS. (It also received funds from Lord Voldemort.)" The caps are hyperlinks. Which group does the parenthetical apply to?
Proximity says Y, the "initially funded" and "also" implies the funding is associated with group X, but the highlighting effect of hyperlinks draws attention back to group Y. Plus the source does have a history of implying negative things about group Y, which for those aware of it, can also lead to associating the negative parenthetical with group Y.
The parenthetical applies to the subject of the previous sentence which is Group X. The sentences are listing various funding sources of Group X. If the parenthetical was about Group Y, that would need to be established as the subject of the Parenthetical, which it is not. Further, if the parenthetical was about Group Y, it would have been included in the existing sub-clause about Group Y funding.
If we accepted as a premise that the factually correct reading was *more* natural, what might we suggest is the journalistic responsibility towards avoiding falsehoods in secondary, technically possible, readings? None at all, or is there a percentage of ppl who read it the other way that is sufficiently small?
How easy are those other readings to find? I will accept some people read it the other way, but I did not and I think it would not have occurred to me while reading that some might. If explicitly prompted about it I guess I could have. Is that what is expected in the Editor skill set, to spot these? I genuinely dont know.
>Is that what is expected in the Editor skill set, to spot these? I genuinely don't know.<
It sure should be. They're easy to find; any sentence that discusses multiple people, will become ambiguous if you then refer to any of them with a universal pronoun. Or follow it with any action that multiple people could have taken ("Man Shoots Neighbor With Machete"). Using "Manifold" again instead of "It" solves the problem completely.
This isn't a "smaller lie", it's "making a true and honest statement that could conceivably be accidentally misparsed, although to be honest it's not very likely to be"
Naw, they're penduluming, not on a path to truth-telling. After the NYT swings through neutral (ano-judgment but not-very-sharp take on Scott) they will swing into Stoopit Global Positivity, then if pendulum continues into Woke Idolatry.
I threw together a simple webpage to replace sequential bargaining with a one-shot system of each person entering a price and then getting a number. I don't think it leads to a more efficient result in the economic sense of the term, but I doubt it leads to a worse one either. I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts.
Played by homo economicus, "everyone places a secret bid, winner pays the cost of the second highest bid (+ epsilon)" is mathematically equivalent to an open auction and faster. Humans aren't emotionless economists, though, for the most part, and auctions absolutely play on our emotions and I don't think you'd get the same emotional effects from a one-shot secret bid system despite the mathematical equivalence.
Interesting idea. After looking over the technical details page, I have reservations about the two "discourage lying" bullet points.
Specifically, I think your reasoning for what disincentives exist for lying about BATNA and FMV is more or less correct as far as it goes, but I suspect the incentives are weaker than you probably hope they are, and the optimal strategy when using the tool is probably to lie about both figures at least a little bit.
For BATNA, the optimal strategy is probably to engage in at least a bit of virtual brinkmanship. If you expect your counterparty to be honest about their BATNA, then you should deduce a confidence interval for their BATNA and select your own claimed BATNA so it's better for you than your real BATNA but still probably better for your counterparty than their BATNA. If your opponent might also be lying, then it's more complicated (since you also need to guess how dishonest they're likely to be, which is informed by how dishonest they expect you to be) but the same principle of running a small risk of "no deal" in exchange for a better deal if there is one applies. This mirrors brinkmanship in sequential negotiations, with the main differences being that 1) without the opportunity to back down afforded by sequential negotiations, it's probably advantageous to be more moderate in your dishonesty than you would be in claims about your BATNA early in a sequential negotiations, and 2) discussion over sequential negotiations affords quite a bit of opportunity to assess the veracity of your counterparty's claims and implications about their BATNA.
For FMV, I think social pressures are at best a weak incentive to be moderate in your dishonesty. In the sort of highly illiquid markets you mention as the main use case for tools like this, FMV is extremely subjective and a very wide range of valuations can plausibly be rationalized as being offered in relatively good faith. And if this is a one-time negotiation between non-public-figure parties who will never interact again, negotiating over something valuable enough to be worth serious bargaining (e.g. private party buyers and sellers of a used car), the monetary gain from gaming the tool is likely to weigh a lot more heavily than any reputational penalties.
My first reading was that ACX had received the money. I rectified this in a second reading, but I only did the second reading because the meaning didn't seem right. I'm certain lots of people would just take away the wrong meaning
I think it's clear now from reading this quote that Scott's boosterism of prediction markets is because he's in the pay of SBF. In fact, Scott was probably in on the whole FTX fraud, as well, and should be in the dock next to the other defendants currently on trial. Kudos to the NYT for unearthing this.
For well-structured prose with proper discourse flow, you are correct.
In reality, people frequently do use deixis (here, the pronoun "it") to pick out specific pieces of preceding phrases that you might not have expected them to point to. That problem gets worse in text where the intonational contours that tend to explain how the speaker is thinking about the parts of their sentence have all disappeared. Not every sentence gets a competent editing pass, so it's well within the bounds of possibility for "it" to have been meant to refer to "Astral Codex Ten".
But I agree that the natural reading is for "it" to refer to Manifold, and that the "also" wouldn't otherwise make any sense.
I read it as Manifold Markets got the $1 million, but admit that isn't very certain the way it's worded.
"My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'" -- Randall Munroe, from https://xkcd.com/1087/ (the Wikipedia page has long since been edited)
The "also" does make sense for Astral Codex. "Astral Codex Ten has promoted prediction markets, and also received $1 million." The clarification comes from the end where they say SBF was a fan of prediction markets, but it would have been a lot clearer to lead that parenthesis with "Manifold".
I stay up all night a lot too. I don't know what it is about night. It seems like it should be bleak. Everything's closed, everyone's asleep, just me and my cats in the lamplight. But I love it. It feels like time outside of time -- elastic time -- uncensored, invisible time. And dawn is quite lovely when it blooms for a person who is wide awake. (But it's godawful to wake up to). Anyhow, hello fellow night owl. Why do *you* stay up all night?
My time of day is the dark time-just a couple of deals before dawn-when the street belongs to the cops and the janitor with a mop, and the grocery clerks are all gone..
Over the weekend I watched the Geoguessr world cup, an esport where competitors try to locate a location from a google maps streetview image as quickly as possible. I'd recommend watching the VOD, it's good fun https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1950736728, but through it I stumbled across some spreadsheets with information on competitive play.
I found this extremely interesting, especially the elementary clues and landscape guides. It's basically an encyclopedia of the world from the very specific perspective of trying to find out where an image was taken as quickly as possible. It's full of fun facts such as "France sometimes features dashes side (road) lines and the middle dashed lines are usually denser/closer together than in most other European countries" and "The eucalypti in Northern Territories look different from the rest of Australia. They are shorter, have thinner trunks and are often black on the bottom from the wildfires". Some are even sourced, including a report on Hazelnut yields to help pin down where in northern Turkey you are.
It's fascinating stuff. I played around with geoguessr for a while. It's interesting how the clues to which country it is aren't necessarily what one would expect. As John Travolta says in Pulp Fiction: "It's the little things."
My initial exposure to geoguessr was in a training class for a vendor at work. The instructors would run a geoguessr session during breaks. It made for a nice change of pace.
What would be the "big things" other than actual text?
The things people often cite are flora, architectural styles/methods and road markings. Those all seems like fairly big differences if we are talking "visual differences between countries".
Flora and architectural styles are definitely big things that anyone should notice. If you've been to a place then you probably have a decent idea of what the trees and buildings look like.
Road markings are a more subtle thing; they're important but you rarely consciously notice them. If you've been to Lithuania then you can tell me what the trees and buildings and landscape are like, but you probably don't remember whether they use yellow or white road lines, or the length of the dashes, or what the bollards look like.
The really subtle stuff that turns out to be incredibly useful is information about the car and camera itself. Watching geoguessr videos by good players, you often see things like "Oh, the car is black, so this is Tanzania (click)". And there's some weird optical effects with the lenses used in Argentina, apparently.
>Flora and architectural styles are definitely big things that anyone should notice.
When walking in my subdivision, I notice the trees and my wife notices the houses. Maybe those talented at Geoguessr notice these things, but others have talents elsewhere.
I watched this on rainbolt's YouTube stream and it was amazing. I'd definitely recommend checking out the grand finals if nothing else.
Some of the metas for geoguessr are insane. The crazier ones can range from zooming in to look at the copyright stamp, to identifying the car type, to identifying the camera type based on image quality.
Many of these participants are so good that in less than 1 minute they're able to set the map pin so accurately that they're awarded a perfect score.
I can understand that signage or telegraph masts can locate a country, but to pin point the location in countries amazes me.
But:
I wondered how random the locations truly are or if competitive players just see the same areas again and again. And it seems the latter is the case? The algorithm which chooses places is not public, but there is a suspicion it favors good (guessable) locations instead of lonely roads in Russia?
> The map that the official competitive mode uses, called "World", is really unbalanced when it comes to locations. You get places like Singapore and Vienna all the time.
> NYC, Chicago, Seattle, SLC, etc. I've played my fair share of games and they never show up. But Singapore I've played dozens if not hundreds of times. Is it because geoguessr takes in consideration the country it's on? If so how does that work?
Yeah this was something I noticed even only dabbling at this. The locations definitely are not pulled "randomly" from the data set. Too many patterns, and too often areas that are difficult to identify, but not too difficult.
Clarinet is probably my favorite, but it has a longer learning curve before you can sound decent than stuff like guitar or piano.
For communities: I like twitch music stuff, especially smaller channels. I recommend poking around in the twitch music category until you find some channels you like, participate in live chat to see if you like the vibe, then join the discords, and see what’s going on.
I play harp. It's a very, very good instrument for people without a very good ear, because the strings remember the pitches for you (unlike say, a violin, where you have to hear every minute shade of difference between exactly in tune and... not that, and adjust your fingers for it.) Piano has the same advantages, but I like the sound of the harp much better. And it's more portable. All my music communities are IRL though, sorry!
I don't play a musical instrument, in part because I have almost no sense of rhythm, and loved Scott's post a year or so ago wherein he told of the contrast between himself and his musically talented brother. There was an anecdote about his parents trying hard to be affirming, and saying something like "My, that cat is being tortured much less now!"
When I was a kid, I learned the piano. I was quite good at it. Then I went to college, had access to pianos only through public rooms in dorms or union buildings when someone else wasn't playing them, and then moved into my own flat and lost access altogether for decades. I have a sort of plan to get back into it someday.
Really cheap, too - you can get something serviceable for 1000$ or so. Not the same as a high-quality acoustic piano, but a lot better than not playing at all.
I had indeed shopped around for one for years. At the time, I was living in a tiny apartment. Along the way, I had some job upheaval and then moving upheaval and that all cut into my "get back into pianos" time.
Fortunately, I moved in with my GF, who has an electric (although I think it's not a full 88 keys, argh). Unfortunately, my time is now occupied by work and tending to our yard and pets. And, um, finishing a few videogames I had started...
I mostly play bass. Used to be an okay keyboard player, have some basic knowledge of guitar and drums, and have taken singing lessons for a few years now.
I don't follow any music blogs, but I follow some of the usual guitar-/ music- related youtube channels (Rick Beato, Adam Neely, Glenn Fricker...).
My experience is that bass is the best in terms of supply and demand, across genres. As I like to put it - guitar players are a dime a dozen, bass players are a quarter each.
That's my experience as well, and part of the reason I focused on bass. (Other reasons include not being terribly talented overall, and having pretty big hands with good grip strength - I have trouble squeezing my fingers onto a guitar fingerboard for some chord shapes, but playing bass is physically easy.)
Some of the answers here are also correct, but the more cynical answer is to give the President the feeling that he's doing something. He desperately wants to do _something_, but most of the somethings he could do are counterproductive, so the Joint Chiefs let him move the little ships around on the big map and that seems to satisfy him.
I believe one of the groups was already scheduled to pass through the area and the US Navy chose not to modify that schedule.
The groups will have some sea-land artillery capability and of course combat aircraft. These are probably just for intimidation purpose and are unlikely to be used in Gaza directly.
The biggest benefit for Israel is the Electronic Warfare capabilities. Primarily airplanes that can be used for gathering intelligence but also have the ability to knock out cell signals or other communication channels that Hamas might be using.
Hopefully Bean will say (much) more, but the most likely use case is force projection: discouraging other local hostile actors from piling into the conflict. For the conflict itself, adding precision to identifying the source of rocket launches/artillery and hammering those locations.
Other actions include humanitarian relief- a carrier group is a floating city with huge water distillation capability, lots of food for distribution and medical support.
In this kind of messy situation probably everything.
They're there to intimidate Iran/Lebanon/Hezbollah into not jumping into attacking Israel and making the conflict spread to the wider region (I think there's only supposed to be one stationed here, the other one's coming to relieve it)
Most analysts seem to agree that they should prevent the conflict from spreading. This is directed to other countries which might be tempted or pressed to intervene. For example, carrier groups have enough airplanes that they can establish no-fly areas against weaker enemies.
It's not clear that it works with Lebanon because it has a direct border with Israel, but it might tip the balance for countries like Iran.
Hi, I remember Scot, or maybe one of the commenter’s mentioning that Charles Babbage had once written a letter to Alfred Tennyson, where he told Tennyson that a line in his poem, which said something to the effect of Every moment dies a man. every moment one is born, was incorrect, because if true it would mean that the population would never grow or shrink. He instead suggested something along the lines of every moment 1 and 1/16 is born. While this was not exactly true either, it was close enough for an approximation.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to be able to find this. Does anyone have any idea where it was mentioned, or whether I hallucinated the whole thing, or more likely read it somewhere else and got mixed up about where I saw it.
https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/879
Google terms: "babbage tennyson every moment dies a man".
For real apparently.
Not clear what Tennyson said (Babbage may have been joking and Tennyson may have taken it as such), but Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a reasonable rejoinder:
"That such a poet should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics is ... as if Babbage were to take my opinion & undo his calculating machine by it."
Humanists and scientists got on better back then, I guess. Or maybe Babbage never got on the wrong political side of the New York Times.
Can't help you find it, but I definitely remember reading the same thing, so you didn't hallucinate it.
How reliable is ChatGPT as a translator? Pretty much, at least between languages that have a decent amount of text available online to train on. But on underrepresented languages it's quite terrible: it basically does not speak any major African language. I assembled a dataset using the OpenAI API, code here: https://gitlab.com/mariomario/lugha Post describing the methodology here: https://mariopasquato.substack.com/p/does-chatgpt-speak-your-language Any comments or questions are extremely welcome!
Out of the languages I've used it fi, it's ok at European languages but terrible at Sanskrit. Presumably an effect of the training corpus.
I tried GPT-3.5 in Slovak. Available text on internet: quarter of million Wikipedia articles, a few online newspapers. The results are mixed. It can talk in the language almost fluently; sometimes switches to other Slavic languages. It can write short stories, and write poems that sometimes rhyme.
But questions *about* the language typically produce lots of confident sounding nonsense. If I ask about Slovak proverbs, 8 out of 10 examples are made up, half of them don't even make sense. If I ask about words starting with given letter, I get a list of mostly made-up words.
(This is a bit counter-intuitive to me, because for a human, talking the language would be more difficult than saying a few facts about the language. Perhaps for GPT it is the other way round?)
Sanskrit being a dead language (despite being a schedule eight language of India) probably does not help. It’s even in a worse position than underrepresented living languages, because those can eventually produce a corpus to train on.
Which plugin do you use to make it pronounce text?
I've reached the proof of concept stage for the XWord construction software I am working on. Auto fill is working in most cases and completing a themed grid is becoming much easier. I am going to refine it a bit more and post my progress to my Substack in the next couple weeks.
When I do publish that post I hope to ask for for constructive criticism and advice from crossword enthusiasts, general language mavens and software developers regarding the techniques I am using.
In the meantime I've published a post with a couple pictures taken in Minnesota state park in the SE corner of the state. Some beautiful fall color from Friday afternoon.. It probably was the last sunny 70 degree day we will have in 2023 here so I am savoring the ones I did post along with the ones in my local folder. I didn't care to watch Game of Thrones but I am familiar with the phrase, "Winter is coming." I like the cold and and the snow myself but its beauty is definitely less colorful.
https://gunflint.substack.com/p/e67c516f-905d-4a4f-ab65-23ccfc03e50b
Someone very close to me is in the hospital and very sick. If any of you are praying type people, I would appreciate your prayers. Thoughts from the secular are appreciated too.
I'll pray for him (already prayed for a friend who got lymphoma and she went into remission, so who knows?).
Thank you
Praying for you and your loved one.
Thank you
Certainly will keep your intention in my prayers, let us know how things turn out (good or bad). May you be supported during this time, and may your near one be helped either to recovery or preparation for a peaceful passing if the worst happens.
Thank you, sincerely
Another mistake the NY Times article on Manifest made is they said Aella's spicy live polling asked about how many psychedelic drugs we've taken. She actually asked about how many psychoactive drugs we've taken. The memory is very vivid for me because I was shocked to find I had taken the 3rd most despite only taking prescribed psychiatric medications. #winning
That one I can see as an honest mistake.
Yeah me too.
Would not recommend reading the Quintin Pope link at all, it's just a messy list of refutation that don't lead anywhere. To some extent I do agree with Eliezer with it being rather strawman too
I had the very opposite impression, I find it a crushing critique of AI risk arguments, at least as applied to the current GPT-X (and more generally, deep learning) paradigm. One can of course assume that at some point we will be a new, completely different paradigm which will be more dangerous, but that's a classic motte-and-bailey play - point at the rapid pace of AI advances to create a sense of urgency, but when someone points out that your arguments don't actually apply to that, oh noes I was talking about something else all along.
It's also much more compact and readable than Pope's earlier Less Wrong posts that made similar arguments, so definitely worth a read.
I can't pick through all the bullshit, so I'm hoping that one of the smart and tuned-in folks here can help me with this:
What is (if any) the serious argument AGAINST anti-caste laws? Note-- I'm not looking for something that follows the general contours of 'well, blah blah blah ethnocentrism blah blah blah racism blah blah'. I mean an actually intellectual argument against these laws that I might feel compelled to contemplate and perhaps ultimately support.
I think the standard liberal anti-regulation argument is strong enough: someone's decision not to employ you does not give you the right to use force against them and it doesn't give any third party (like the government) the right to use force against them either.
Agree-- that's a fine rationale. But that rationale would, I think, be in violation of the Civil Rights Act, so I assume there must be some other reason why an anti-caste law would meet resistance.
People in the US seem very afraid of being seen as racist (but not as casteist), so I'd expect to see less resistance against bad anti-racist legislation because of that.
Razib Khan wrote a piece on this topic. (Several, actually, this one is just the one with the most detail.) https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2023/02/23/america-is-turning-into-india-our-coming-caste-wars/
Right on! Thank you, pie_flavor, for taking the time to provide this link.
This is reversing the correct framing.
What are the arguments that a specific law will actually resolve the problem in a way which doesn't create worse problems?
Mind that if enough popular support exists to enable the law to exist in the first place, and to be effective in the second - does a law even need to exist? Does a minority engaging in discriminatory behavior (that isn't already illegal for other reasons) count as sufficiently systemic so as to merit a systemic solution?
I can give you the standard argument against affirmative action: when you force people to hire disadvantaged groups who were previously underrepresented due to lower qualifications (which might or might not be downstream of systemic racism effects), you distort the market. Without AA, the few people in minorities hired on merit could be expected to be as competent as their peers. But if you know that AA rules are in place, then someone being in a minority actually is Bayesian evidence for them being less qualified. (This gets less pronounced in education because the correlation between admittance scores and qualification is limited: most people will not care about the SAT score of their physician.)
Reality is complicated {{citation needed}}, and there might be other factors which make AA more acceptable. For example, in customer-facing jobs, rational employers might prefer not to hire minorities if they know some of their customers are racist pricks. Enforcing AA on all employers would help removing that effect. (Of course, this touches the question if it is ever acceptable to hire people for their looks. Should a 50 year old obese guy be able to sue a strip club or Hollywood for not hiring him?)
I have little knowledge of the caste system (How would I even recognize the caste of someone? Is it encoded in the name or mannerism?) or proposed legislation, so I can't really comment on specifics.
Most affirmative action proponents would say that it just un-distorts a market that's already distorted by past and present racism. Especially in markets which have a big influence on those prejudices (e.g. you need media representation to dispel negative stereotypes, but those stereotypes also disincentivize media companies from making space for that representation).
In part, it's also about who should bear the cost, the members of minority or the employers. Maybe some of the time employers are just acting against their own best interests and affirmative action forces them not to, but often choosing the underrepresented person over another candidate will have a real cost to it (the minority hiring pool might be smaller and lower-quality due to educational or intergenerational effects of racism, the bias of customers or coworkers might make the employee less effective in their job, if you accept the white supremacy framing then even everything else being equal they will at least be in a psychologically very disadvantaged position). It's unfair to force business owners to fund the dismantling of systemic bias from their own pockets. But of course not forcing them is unfair to the people the system is biased against; it's a hard problem.
On the specific example of strip clubs, my understanding is that officially the club provides a venue and the performers are independent contractors who pay the club for a time-slot, precisely because of the nature of the customer base. A M50 BMI=40 would get a try-out if he insisted (with lawyers) and paid, but would find it a way to go broke rapidly.
Ronald Coase explained why nearly all businesses are not organised this way with "The Nature of the Firm". Perhaps they might start, with their customer-facing positions anyway.
Prior rot is absolutely a thing. Firefighters, civil engineering contractors, and similar. Even in board rooms, from what I have seen second-hand. DEI disadvantages women and minorities who are actually competent.
It would help if you linked the specific words of the anti-caste law. It is often the case that a general idea is okay, but the technical details are bad. Unfortunately, you don't legislate the general idea; you legislate the technical details. It also depends on the details how specifically this law could be abused.
My opinion on the idea in general is that casteism is an Indian form of racism, so all arguments that apply to racism, apply to casteism, too. (The technical difference is that race is usually visible, and caste is usually not. So it is possible to hide your caste, but not to hide your race.) Unfortunately, castes also play an important role in Hinduism, so arguably anti-casteism is religious intolerance. Sigh. Why must things be complicated?
The problem with anti-racist legislation in general is that sometimes it makes the race *more* visible, which is the opposite of the theoretical ideal some of us would prefer, i.e. a society where no one cares about race (any more than they care e.g. about the color of hair). Anti-racist legislation often requires you to keep records about who belongs to which race. It requires the society do design exact definitions to such detail that an actual Nazi would probably shrug and say that it doesn't really matter. (Nazis only cared about whether you had a Jewish ancestor in 3 or 4 generations. Americans care about a single drop of blood.)
Making quotas for races ignores the fact that (a) the races are already differently represented at different places, so if you e.g. hire people in a town that is 100% white, it is not really evidence of your racism if 100% of the people you hired happen to be white; and (b) even a perfectly unbiased choice has a certain probability of seeming biased, for example if you have 50% white and 50% black population, and you choose 5 people perfectly randomly, there is a 3% chance that all of them happen to be white. If you have anti-racist legislation using quotas, people can get legally punished for all this! And even if you don't, of course people will use it to attack each other.
Sometimes anti-discrimination laws backfire. For example, if you know that firing a certain person might be legally very dangerous, you will probably try to avoid hiring such person in the first place, using some legally available excuse; even if originally you had absolutely no problem with them. Or if you are legally required to hire people from some group regardless of how competent they are, people will automatically assume that the diversity hires are incompetent and you only hired them because you had to; which makes the situation worse for the actually competent ones.
If I understand it correctly, Indians of lower castes working in America prefer not to disclose their caste. (And their casteist colleagues try to figure it out anyway, by asking seemingly innocent questions e.g. about their history of vegetarianism.) A legislation based on quotas would require Indians to disclose their caste, and often the information would leak from HR. So this would be the opposite of what many of them want.
I imagine it would be obvious to Indians to which caste a person belongs from all kinds of subtle clues.
India is *huge*. More people than entire Europe and USA together, speaking several different languages.
The caste system is complicated. There are the four main castes, plus the untouchables, but hundreds of sub-castes.
See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4N98tQsp64
I am not an Indian, and I was never there, so I am just guessing... but I imagine that the subtle clues might be useful if both people were from the same region. Sometimes you could make a good guess based on the name alone. But a person from the opposite side of India is effectively a stranger; people of the same caste can dress and behave differently (so you only have a few crude rules such as "brahmins are vegetarians" but so are many non-brahmins). People in big cities behave differently from people in villages; they do not dress so traditionally.
Also, the Indian who wants to keep their caste secret from their Indian colleagues in Silicon Valley knows which answers to avoid. (Do not discuss religious rituals, or which gods you pray to. Do not say whether you are vegetarian for religious or other reasons. Do not mention anything about your family, such as their names, or what village they came from, or what food you typically eat at home.) The less you say, the less Bayesian evidence you provide.
Even within India, many people try to avoid the caste system by converting e.g. to Buddhism (also to Islam or Christianity, but those come with their own political connotations). But if someone wants to discriminate based on caste, they might still try to figure out which caste you or your ancestors were originally from, so it is still better to talk less.
This is false. It would be obvious to people from rural India what caste another person from the same region belongs to from all kinds of subtle cues. It would be completely opaque what caste someone from a different part of India belongs to. For urban Indians, it might or might not be apparent if both are from the same part of India, almost surely not if they are from different parts of India. And diaspora Indians (especially those who grew up outside the old country) will almost never be able to tell.
Addendum: no `anti-X-discrimination bureaucracy' ever declares `mission accomplished' and disbands. Because `you can't convince someone of something when his job depends on not believing it.' If serious discrimination cannot be found there will be microaggressions, if microaggressions cannot be found there will be imaginary aggressions, but the size of the problem (as assessed by the relevant bureaucracy) and the resources required to combat it will only grow over time. So passing a law against X discrimination entrenches X as a permanent problem requiring ever increasing resources to address.
What are the arguments FOR it?
Where is the evidence it's an actual problem?
This article doesn't even list a single, anecdotal example of it, let alone systematic data to demonstrate that it's a real thing worth caring about.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/californias-anti-caste-discrimination-bill-passes-state-assembly-rcna102591
One good argument is that it's almost certainly going to take the shape of "racial discrimination" legislation, and such legislation is based on the idea that unequal outcomes are necessarily the product of unequal treatment. From the above article:
"India outlawed caste discrimination over 70 years ago, yet several studies in recent years show that bias persists. One study found people from lower castes were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs."
Without knowing a terrible lot about India/Indians, I would bet a /substantial/ amount of money that significant heritable differences exist between indian 'castes'.
I'm sure some bona fide discrimination is taking place in India, but thousands of years of extremely strict assortative mating tends not to produce groups with very equal intelligence or other behavioral characteristics, and so just like with races in the US today, these differences are ipso facto going to be unfairly blamed on discrimination in many cases.
And caste is even less obvious than most other 'protected' categories, so its going to be very easy for "anti-discrimination" laws to abused on this basis - will employers with large numbers of indian employees have to track how many "lower caste" workers they have, lest they be accused of "caste discrimination" by the government?
Also, notice how this is being treated as an egregious form of hateful discrimination that must be stamped out, and yet there's exactly zero negative aspersions being cast on anyone involved? Like, supposedly these people are so hateful and discriminatory on essentially an ethnic basis and this behavior is happening on such a large scale that it needs to legislated against, and yet this doesn't call into question AT ALL the wisdom in importing millions of these people?
Imagine if huge numbers of white Romanians and Romanian gypsies were immigrating to the US, and it was believed that white Romanians were hatefully discriminating against gypsies on a large scale. The discussion wouldn't be "we need this discriminatory behavior to be stopped", it would be "why are we bringing these racist assholes into the country?"
Creating another discrimination bureaucracy (and associated compliance bureaucracy) has very high costs (both direct costs and opportunity costs), and we shouldn't implement expensive solutions to non-problems. This is also an argument against passing anti-Muggle-discrimination laws and anti-discrimination-against-green-eyed-people laws. I am assuming you are referring to the USA here, and not India (or the Rowlingverse) - I could also construct arguments for those but they would be different arguments. For instance: anti X discrimination laws increase the salience of X as a category. Caste is not something that is visible by looking at someone, and one might hope that it would simply dissolve away [both by intermarriage and by people ceasing to care] - but passing laws about it increases its salience and creates strong incentives to continue to track it and care about it, thus being long run counterproductive (CF if the USA had passed anti-Irish-discrimination laws).
One more question: Who are the people lobbying 'against' the anti-caste discrimination bills? I assume they aren't old school types from Mumbai who want to keep the Dalit down, but if not them then who looks at these initiatives and rejects them?
Indian business owners who don't want to keep tabs on how many lower caste indians they hire to avoid being accused of breaking caste discrimination laws.
I assume you are talking about California? I assume a combination of people who oppose creating a new giant bureaucracy, and Indian origin folk who fear such a law would end up targeting Indian origin folk. Nobody's going to suspect a white guy (or a black guy for that matter) of knowing or caring about caste, but they might suspect the Indian origin guy who committed a microaggression against another Indian origin guy. They might suspect him even if he neither knew nor cared what caste the microaggressed guy was from.
What giant new bureaucracy?
To enforce a hypothetical law against caste discrimination (and far more significantly, to protect organizations from lawsuits on grounds of caste discrimination).
My experience from university land is that basically every time a university gets sued this spawns a new deanlet, who presides over a monotonically growing bureaucratic empire designed to protect the university from that specific lawsuit risk. This bureaucratic empire never shrinks. Cue `why is higher ed so expensive.' I don't know if things work the same outside academia, but I was under the impression that a lot of what HR does even in corporations is basically `immunize against legal risks,' and I fully expect that the passage of a new anti-discrimination law would entail the hiring of large numbers of bureaucrats to immunize organizations above a certain size against lawsuit risk. And the number of bureaucrats involved would only grow over time.
This makes a ton of sense, Humphrey. I should have come to this conclusion on my own, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Are you implying there aren't any intellectual reasons to oppose racism?
The intellectual reason to oppose racism is that doing so improves equality of opportunity, and more fundamentally, that all souls are weighed in the same scales on the Day of Judgement, or if you prefer more modern words, impartial judgement is a core feature of an open society.
As implemented, antiracism policies (DEI, AA and so on) are about trying to impose equality of outcome. In evpsych terms this is a peculiarly female thing to want, and do. It is totalitarian, as well.
My personal religion says we should discriminate on the basis of blood type.
When we talk about equality, we're nurturing bleeding-heart girly men with abundance-driven luxury beliefs. When one of us picks up a molotov or carpenters a guillotine to try to bring said equality about, we're hyperadrenal thugs and animals lacking in empathy and comity, falling short of the genetic threshold required to express a civilised inner core.
The evo-psych house always wins.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Damn right. The problem is cunt-think, creeping into the souls of men like a pink, funky, lame-ass, sentimental ghost.
Not a bad manosphere impression, but I've never heard anyone use that particular term.
You do see the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, right? The "nurturing bleeding-heart girly men" are talking about the latter, and they are actually totalitarians in the dictionary sense, trying to control what we think and say as well as what happens in our lives.
Define racism
I think you have it backwards - the question is why someone would be against a law banning caste discrimination. I.e., who would support caste discrimination (likely in California, where an anti-caste-discrimination bill was just passed and subsequently vetoed by the Governor).
Put differently, what are the intellectual reasons to keep caste discrimination legal?
There's a distinct difference between a realm of options that encourage discrimination ("keep it legal") and declining to outlaw it. I don't think the US needs any laws against hiring Martians, and it's not because I want to "keep anti-Martian discrimination legal."
This is a clever idea which has the virtue of likely being constitutional (because despite using the phrase "term limits" it would not actually boot any justices off of the Supreme Court):
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-booker-blumenthal-padilla-introduce-new-supreme-court-term-limits-bill
Whether it has any chance of passage in Congress now or ever, I've no idea. But I'd vote for it.
> An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee.
I don't know why he didn't even try to make it *sound* like he was putting forward a sensible bipartisan proposal that ultimately benefits everybody. Some kind of term limit is a great idea, but now he's gone and branded it as a Democrat proposal designed to gain power for Democrats.
The reasonable form of this, which doesn't advantage either party, would be to introduce a term or age limit for all future justices that doesn't apply to any current justices.
Given that at least two prominent Democrats remained in office until literal death, and the party supporters are rather salty about that, then a term limit may well be a good idea.
However, this looks more like "We want to term limit judges because now decisions we don't like or want are being made, but when judges were ruling from the bench and making new laws we liked and wanted, this was not a problem".
I think it's a lot closer to "When we got to appoint/confirm justices in rough proportion to the times we won the Presidency, this was not a problem."
Clinton had two terms, appointed two justices. George W Bush had two terms, appointed two justices. Barack Obama had two terms, appointed two justices. Trump had one term, appointed three justices.
That's an outlier and is going to make people think about reforming the system to perform closer to the way it had for 20+ years. I would expect that if Biden gets to appoint six justices in his first term, Republicans will start having the same thoughts.
"Trump had one term, appointed three justices."
Part of that was Bader Ginsburg hanging on for grim death; the hindsight view is that she should have retired and given the chance to appoint a moderate/someone the Democrats could get behind. Instead, she died in office and gave Trump his chance. I think the Kavanaugh nomination hearings were so biased, it became nonsensical; yes, a rapist shouldn't be appointed to the Supreme Court, but the actual accusations came down to:
(1) When he was 17/18, he got drunk at a party and assaulted a 15 year old girl. Not very nice behaviour at all, and deserving of punishment - but back when he was 18, not thirty-some years later
(2) When he was at college, he may (or may not) have pulled his dick out at a drunken frat party and may (or may not) have stuck it in a woman's face. Oh, the horror! Meanwhile, Bill Clinton's "yes I did have an adulterous affair including sex in the Oval Office" little peccadillo wasn't even worth mentioning, why so unreasonable, Republicans?
I'm not surprised that after that Trump and the Republicans were going to take every chance they got to appoint justices they wanted, instead of playing nicely with the other girls and being bipartisan.
Looking at the list of appointees:
(1) Gorsuch to replace Scalia, due to Scalia's death. Had it not been for the whole Merrick Garland uproar, I think this wouldn't have been controversial (or at least not more than the normal level). The guy is so wibbly, it can't even be confirmed whether or not he's Episcopalian or Roman Catholic, he won't say anything one way or another (my own impression is that functionally he's Episcopalian but just hasn't bothered formally converting).
(2) Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy, due to Kennedy retiring. Well, that was a three-ring circus out of revenge for Garland and the religious angle (he's not a nice Catholic in the Biden and Pelosi mould, he's one of the dangerous fanatical zealot 'the dogma lives loudly in you' Spanish Inquisition Catholics who is going to let his religion and morals guide his legal decisions).
(3) Coney Barrett to replace Bader Ginsburg, due to Bader Ginsburg dying. This one where the hindsight wisdom is now "she should have retired due to ill-health and age back in Obama's term so we could have got our pick selected" and where it was also "she's one of the weird funky Spanish Inquisition Catholics who are gonna turn the Court into a theocracy" questioning. I did have to laugh at the media attempts to portray her Charismatic group as some kind of real-life Handmaid's Tale organisation, but I was not laughing about the late Diane Feinstein and her "the dogma lives loudly within you".
The only genuine objection there would be to the 'breaking' of the Biden Rule - when the Republicans refused to confirm Garland because it was in the end of Obama's term, but pushed for Coney Barrett even though it was in the end of Trump's term. But the way things have become so bitterly divided, the Democrats would do the same if they got the chance, and maybe this proposed bill is their attempt to do just that.
<quote>I'm not surprised that after that Trump and the Republicans were going to take every chance they got to appoint justices they wanted, instead of playing nicely with the other girls and being bipartisan.</quote>
oh, you think they decided doing this *after* those hearings? You mention Garland yourself. No side is playing nice with anyone. What good would it have done RBG retiring if nobody would be confirmed.
too much 'arguments are soldiers' going on here. whatever one side did wrong does not make what the other side did right.
"No side is playing nice with anyone."
And that's precisely the problem. Couching a proposal for term limits in what is clearly "we want to get our guys in and their guys out" is not going to cool down any heat or encourage "hey let's stop trying to kick each other's heads in and try doing something for the good of the country".
Neither of them should do it, but neither of them are going to stop (bar something enormous happening and forcing national unity on them for a while).
<quote> Couching a proposal for term limits in what is clearly "we want to get our guys in and their guys out" is not going to cool down any heat </quote>
It certainly could, especially if it is good policy.
Heat is not going to cool down if one side consistently wins national popular votes, and that translates to nothing. There is a big grievance there, and it is not symmetrical. (Yes I understand national popular vote does not mean anything legally, but if we're talking about *heat* that doesn't matter)
I'm totally agnostic as to the quality of the candidates. I don't think changing the selection process is going to change their caliber or get rid of partisanship.
Changing the selection process will, however, make things more predictable and broadly align the Supreme Court with the rhythm of democracy. If you want to put people on the Court, win national elections. If you want to put more people on the Court, keep winning elections.
Is there anything whatsoever to recommend our current system, whereby justices serve for their entire lives?
There's two separate items here:
(1) Should Supreme Court justices serve for life? I think we see the problem most clearly with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was fairly well too ill to do the job at the end of her life and only hung on because it would be 'giving' a seat to the Republicans. So term limits in themselves are not a bad proposal
(2) But that brings us on to the second item, which *is* the problem, and again we saw it most clearly with Bader Ginsburg - 'giving' a seat on the court to the opposition. The judiciary is supposed to be independent of the legislature. If it is now reduced to "keep winning in order to put people on the court", then that blows any even notional independence to kingdom come. Now the court, instead of being an entity that rules on the law without prejudice to any side, is an arm of "my guys in power". Instead of making laws, simply get 'the judges' to rule that why yes you can indeed shoot people in the streets/seize their bank accounts/gender transition is now mandatory for four year olds/the gays get sent to the gulag/what you will.
If we're going to go back to the 17th century days of hanging judges, then at least dress 'em up to look like Jeffreys, instead of the plain black polyester 'gowns'. The public may as well get some value in entertainment from their loss of liberties.
http://www.historicalportraits.com/Gallery.asp?Page=Item&ItemID=982&Desc=Judge-Jeffreys-|-John-Closterman-%281665-1711%29
I'm not sure I understand. The President appoints the justices and the Senate confirms them. That's been the system since the Founding. It will continue to be the system under this proposal.
The only thing that gets changed is timing - right now, you win if you control power when a justice dies or retires. That can be somewhat random and, to my knowledge, has no relation to anything we care about. If I proposed holding legislative elections, not every two years or four years or six years, but instead whenever a Supreme Court justice retired or died, you'd see in an instant how nonsensical that system would be. So instead, we have legislative elections in fixed intervals.
Why would having fixed intervals for judges hurt the independence of the judiciary?
It absolutely is that. Personally I don't care: I strongly support SCOTUS term limits and regular new appointments to it, period. If the GOP was the salty group trying to do this that would be fine, whatever.
Ideally those sorts of changes would be made via constitutional amendment but we don't do that anymore in the US, so legislative kludges like this one will have to do. And since this proposal specifically references and deploys a provision of the Constitution, it seems harder for the current SCOTUS -- if we imagined this passing into law -- making up an excuse to block it. (Still not unimaginable, granted.)
My problem with it being partisan is that while term limits may not be a bad idea at all (why not have the justice retire at 80, if they live that long? or they get 30 years on the court and that's it?), having it brought in as a nakedly partisan act (the court is being over-run with the wrong kind of judges making the wrong sort of decisions!) will mean that in future it will be "yeah, it's constitutional when it comes to your guys that they have to quit, but not when it's our guys" kind of appeals (by *both* sides, I don't expect any of the political parties to be shining angels of disinterested virtue here) which will only clog the entire process up even worse.
'Okay we need to wring every second out of the thirty year limit, so let's nominate someone who is only 30 years of age' or 'okay so the retirement age is 80, let's appoint 30 year old so we get 50 years out of them' and then the nomination hearings will be even more of a circus: side A wants to get a young (relatively speaking) judge in, so side B stonewalls as hard as possible, and the favour is returned when it's side B's turn to nominate (which will make the Merrick Garland case look like a picnic by comparison) or hair-splitting "Justice Bones is only 79 and 363 days not 80 so does not have to retire" and "Ah, but the nomination of Justice Stoney was delayed by six months so even if they are 80 they are entitled to their full 50 year tenure and should get another six months past that birthday" and so on.
Virtually every big change in our nation's constitutional structure has been highly partisan, from basically the Federalist/Anti-Federalist period onwards. That's the way our system operates even though the Framers of the Constitution naively hoped to prevent it.
The ideal scenario is when something that was bitterly partisan in its original debate and action then becomes a settled consensus view. Presidential term limits are an example of that, so is women's suffrage, and plenty of others.
The issues were partisan, but they were not by the time they became amendments. The whole point of the amendment system's onerous restrictions is to ensure everyone wants the rules to be changed before they can be.
As I said, term limits are not a bad idea. But this particular set of proposers only discovered that the Supreme Court was being partisan, out of touch, devolved from the people, too powerful, etc. when decisions they didn't like were made. When the Court was making abortion and gay marriage legal, even in the face of states passing acts about abortion and same-sex marriage that were opposed to the judicial fiat, well that was just hunky-dory. Rainbow flags in celebration all over the White House, not a pronouncement that the Court was out of step with the people as evidenced by the successful passing of acts banning same-sex marriage. In my country, we had referenda on all the social liberalisation issues. I got to vote and have my say, even if I disagree with a lot of the results. There wasn't a decision by our Supreme Court that "well now the Constitution says what we want it to say, tough luck, this is now the law of the land". If the Democratic Party senators had no problem with law-making by the Supreme Court fiat back then, what is their same problem now? Solely "our guys are not getting to make those decisions".
I'm not wholly convinced by this Damascene conversion, is what I'm saying.
"“The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy that is exacerbated by radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent, ethical lapses of sitting justices, and politicization of the confirmation process,” said Senator Booker. "
Politicization of the confirmation process? These guys literally created a fake rape accusation to try and keep Kavanaugh off the supreme court.
This is a liberal power grab, nothing more. I hope it crashes and burns.
"radical decisions at odds with established legal precedent"
What, they don't want any more emanations of penumbras?
> These guys literally created a fake rape accusation to try and keep Kavanaugh off the supreme court.
While the allegations were never proven, I do not think they were proven to be fabrications either. The most you can say is that the liberal media certainly focused on them a lot.
The evidence that Biden committed sexual assault is literally much stronger than that for Kavanaugh having done so. So either the left are completely ignoring a likely sexual assault out of political convenience, OR they both fatally lack evidence but the Kavanaugh case was not instantly dismissed because it was useful to weaponize it against him to try and keep him off the court.
There's no alternative. Either the left are okay with Biden likely being a sexual predator, or they "politicized" the confirmation process.
What's worse is that the Biden accusation by Tara Reade is of the same kind as the Trump accusation by E. Jean Carroll, yet when Reade made hers then "believe women" and "it's better that there is the risk an innocent man is falsely accused than to claim any accusation is false" was immediately dumped. Now she was a crazy, malicious, politically-motivated liar making a false and incredible claim.
Maybe Reade should try going for a civil trial in New York where she can sue for defamation and assault under the Adult Survivors Act?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
"In November 2022 Carroll filed her second suit against Trump (Carroll II). The suit renewed her claim of defamation and added a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations."
Ford's friends, that she says were at the party, said they do not remember any such incident and had never met Kavanaugh in their lives. That should count as pretty damning negative proof, if her words had ever counted as positive proof.
Oh, my friend. My friend. You think there were only three allegations against Brett Kavanagh?
The one thing to the credit of the late Dianne Feinstein, when the first (and most plausible) accusation of sexual harassment (not rape, despite how it was reported) was made by Christine Blasey Ford to her office, she didn't immediately jump up and down waving it about. Once the whole three ring circus got going, she was criticised for this.
So, let's go do some digging!
The three charges that were most publicised were:
(1) Christine Blasey Ford, allegation of sexual harassment at a party back when she was fifteen and he was, I don't know, eighteen or so? I'm going off memory here, but she seems to have said at some point that she was afraid she would be raped, but it didn't happen. So - sexual assault, maybe you can push it to attempted rape.
(2) Deborah Ramirez, allegation of sexual assault at a drunken frat party. Allegedly he got his dick out and shoved it in her face. Again, not rape, and I am disposed to cast doubt on it from the way it was reported - that she had to think about it and ring up her friends that "yeah it was Brett did that, right?" for a few days. But who knows, right? It's certainly plausible as "kind of thing bunch of drunken college students are idiot enough to do":
"Ramirez claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while she was intoxicated during a drinking game in the 1983-84 academic year, when Kavanaugh was a freshman. She also claimed she inadvertently touched Kavanaugh's penis when she pushed him away and says the incident left her "embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated."
She also claimed another male student yelled "Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie's face" and insisted that person used Kavanaugh's full name.
The report stated that the magazine had not corroborated that Kavanaugh was at the party in question. An anonymous male classmate said he was told that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to Ramirez within the following days."
(3) The most ludicrous one, and given that it was touted by Michael Avenatti who has undergone a dramatic fall from grace himself, the one which I think is absolute bollocks but the media lapped it up (of course): the high school drug rape gang. Oh, yes. Julie Swetnick said that she, as a freshman (I think) college student)used to attend parties back in her home town where allegedly the high school guys were drugging and raping girls; at the least, they were getting girls drunk so they passed out and/or were incapable of giving consent, then lining up to have sex with them. Kavanaugh and a friend were accused of being complicit in this:
"A third allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh was announced by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for a third woman, on September 23. On September 26, the woman, Julie Swetnick, released a sworn statement alleging that she had witnessed Kavanaugh and Mark Judge trying to get teenage girls "inebriated and disoriented so they could then be gang raped in a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys". Swetnick also alleged Kavanaugh and Judge were both present when she was the victim of one such gang rape. Swetnick subsequently walked back the allegations. Swetnick contacted NBC News October 5 and reiterated her denial of ever seeing Kavanaugh spike punch or act inappropriately toward women, and accused Avenatti of twisting her words."
"I know I said it happened, but now I'm saying it didn't happen" may or may not qualify as a "fabrication" for you, but here's one which undoubtedly *was* a fabrication; 'Jane Doe'/Judy Monroe-Leighton:
"During the hearings, another accusation of rape surfaced in a letter by "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, California, addressed to Grassley but mailed anonymously to Senator Kamala Harris on September 19. The Senate committee interrogated Kavanaugh about this claim on September 26; Kavanaugh called the accusation "ridiculous".
On November 2, 2018, Grassley announced that a woman named Judy Munro-Leighton, from Kentucky, had come forward by e-mail on October 3 as the anonymous accuser, and admitted that her accusations were fabricated. When committee staff managed to talk with her on November 1, Munro-Leighton changed her story, denying that she had penned the anonymous letter while stating that she had contacted Congress as "a ploy" in order to "get attention". She was referred to the Department of Justice and FBI for making false accusations and obstructing justice."
The even messier part of this is that Monroe-Leighton was *not* the original 'Jane Doe' so we don't know who put this claim out or is it even plausible. But as you can see, the committee *did* question Kavanaugh about it, so it wasn't simply 'oh well some crazy made a fake claim but nothing really happened'.
There was an entire tip line saga on top of all this. And looking at the names of the senators proposing that bill:
"Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) today introduced new legislation, the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act, to establish 18-year term limits and regularized appointments for Supreme Court justices. Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Peter Welch (D-VT), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) also cosponsored the legislation."
Some of them seem familiar, they wrote a letter to the FBI about the supplemental background investigation:
"On June 30, 2021, FBI assistant director Jill C. Tyson sent a letter to Democratic senators Chris Coons and Sheldon Whitehouse, in reply to a letter which the two senators had sent the Bureau on August 1, 2019, inquiring about the supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. The letter was publicly released by Senator Whitehouse in late July. In it, the Tyson disclosed that the White House Counsel had never granted the Bureau the authority to unilaterally investigate the tips it received without first receiving further approval from the White House Counsel. In the letter, Tyson claimed that the FBI received 4,500 tips through the tip line it established, and that "all relevant tips" were forwarded to the Office of the White House Counsel.
Following the letter to Whitehouse and Coons, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Coons, Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, and Cory Booker requested additional information from FBI Director Christopher Wray on the 2018 supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. On July 21, 2021, the senators wrote to Wray: "The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to . . . allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored." The senators ultimately asked for an explanation as to how the tips were evaluated, what follow-up occurred for this investigation, and why the FBI purposefully did not interview key witnesses."
Whitehouse, Blumenthal, Hirono, and Booker - involved in the Kavanaugh letter and now in this proposed bill. Ain't that a coinkydink?
Is it any wonder that Kavanaugh appeared angry at the hearings, which again, some in the media space of articles and think-piece writers used as evidence that of course he was a guilty rapist? Why else was he being so hostile?
The existence of unicorns hasn't been disproven, either.
If humanity survives long enough, a unicorn will be created.
"An organized scheme by right-wing special interests to capture and control the Supreme Court, aided by gobs of billionaire dark money flowing through the confirmation process and judicial lobbying, has resulted in an unaccountable Court out of step with the American people. Term limits and biennial appointments would make the Court more representative of the public and lower the stakes of each justice’s appointment, while preserving constitutional protections for judicial independence,” said Senator Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee. "
Yes, I too support wildly partisan policies explicitly designed to remove power from the politicians' opponents.
Also
"unaccountable Court out of step with the American people"
The supreme court is no more or less accountable now than when there were fewer conservative justices.
And the idea that the supreme court is *supposed* to be "[in] step with the american people" is plain stupid. The point of the supreme court is specifically to interpret the law objectively and free from partisan or populist political concerns. You can argue about how well they've lived up to this, but when you're explicitly saying that the supreme court exists to enact the SUPPOSED will of "the american people", then your bill is bad, it should fail, and shame on you for acting like you're the ones being the responsible grown ups.
I like the idea, but
"after which the justice would be limited to hearing a small number of constitutionally required cases"
seems to imply this is actually just court-packing; they're not actually gone after 18 years, so you'll end up with more than 9.
Virtually every case you've ever heard of came to the Supreme Court through its appellate jurisdiction. Meaning you had a trial with someone else and the Supreme Court is reviewing the work of the lower court.
There are some cases which start at the Supreme Court. For example, cases involving ambassadors. From 1789 to 1959 (170 years), there were only 126 written opinions from the Supreme Court involving cases where the Supreme Court had original, rather than appellate jurisdiction. The vast majority of the Supreme Court cases come from its appellate jurisdiction, which Congress can modify.
I cannot stress to you how much the original jurisdiction cases do not matter outside of law school and/or bar trivia.
Well a few of them have mattered, water rights being a pretty big deal in the western half of the country. But yea overall you've summarized the situation nicely.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
https://www.evergreenessays.com/
That's a novel idea. Very good of you sir.
"astralcodexten.com" doesn't work. It needs the "www.". Or, on Firefox at least, it works if I have a slash at the end: "astralcodexten.com/" Maybe this is a known issue, I don't know
It looks like it's missing a redirect in the DNS.
So, it would seem (I'm exercising a three-minute commenting rule on fast-moving global events) that Israel has agreed to open the Rafah crossing to some humanitarian supplies, in the context of Biden's visit. I assume the decision had been made in advance, but Biden's acquiescence to Israel's version of events regarding the hospital bombing as well as today's American veto of an UNSC resolution calling for a humanitarian pause helped ensure Israel wouldn't rescind it.
My understanding of Rafah is that Egypt and Hamas control it physically, but Israel retains a monitoring presence on the Egyptian side and (with Egyptian cooperation) is capable of closing it and vetoing the entry of people and cargo into the strip. It can, and does, back up its desires with violence, as with yesterday's bombing of the Saladin road leading up to the crossing. The EU monitoring mission for the crossing exists on paper but is largely shuttered at this point.
Egypt, for its part, doesn't want large numbers of Palestinians to flood out of Gaza into its territory. This is motivated primarily by fear of an internal humanitarian crisis (although there has been some furtive talk of aid for Egypt from the EU and Arab states to support Palestinian refugees if Egypt permits their entry). To a lesser extent the el-Sisi regime is motivated by internal political fears (many Palestinians would be sympathetic to what remains of the Muslim Brotherhood), as well as by the external Arab political principle of maintaining Gaza as a Palestinian entity and part of future independent Palestine. There is a world in which Israel occupies Gaza, makes it into more of a living hell than it already is, and most civilians simply leave for Egypt, which results in de facto Israeli annexation.
What worries me is that I don't see how supplies are meant to enter given the destruction of the roads and infrastructure on the Palestinian side of the crossing - and in the early reports I don't see any suggestion of an intra-Gaza safety corridor to get them over to the strip's north, where humanitarian conditions are worst.
I know this isn't particularly relevant to the question posed here, but I want to credit the people commenting here for immediately moving past 'who do we blame for this disaster' to 'how do we unfuck this?'. The fact that this is the intellectual reflex of the people who post here is an enormous credit to this community.
"Egypt, for its part, doesn't want large numbers of Palestinians to flood out of Gaza into its territory. This is motivated primarily by fear of an internal humanitarian crisis "
I don't know that it means anything to talk about the motivation of a country. To the extent that we're pretending to know what motivates Al-Sisi, I'd think he is aware of the history of the Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan.
We can substitute 'Egypt as run by el-Sisi' for 'Egypt' where appropriate, if you like.
And I'm sure he is, but I think that among the considerations of the Egyptian state, fear of Palestinians being internally rowdy is some distance behind the fear of humanitarian catastrophe and the fear of being seen to abet the surrender of Gaza to Israel. Egypt is a country of over a hundred million people, and we're not in the seventies anymore. I highly doubt even one or two million brutalised Palestinian civilians could seriously threaten the regime. At most, the Brotherhood's support would swell somewhat.
Would there be any hope of having Egypt annex Gaza? Have the Egyptian army sweep into it? Have the Egyptian courts decide what to do with Hamas members? Israel and Egypt have been able to co-exist for decades at this point.
Didn't Jordan try that with the West Bank?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanian_annexation_of_the_West_Bank
Yes - unfortunately, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War happened. And eventually reversed the annexation (in 1988).
"Finally, on 26 October 1994, Jordan signed the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, which normalized relations between the two countries and resolved territorial disputes between them." but I don't know what the status of Israel-Jordan relations is today.
To a not-insignificant extent, Jordan's relations with Israel are hostage to its special economic zones, which have free trade status with the United States as long as some production inputs come from Israel.
Raped and beaten Sri Lankan seamstresses ensure peace across the Jordan river. Such is the sad poetry of the modern world.
That sounds brutal. To make sure I'm following you correctly, are the abused Sri Lankan seamstresses working in the special economic zones in Jordan? IIRC, there are abused South Asian workers working in Dubai. Are abused South Asian workers pervasive in the Middle East?
They are both US allies and ostensibly allied with each other, although the management of the west bank territory has strained the relationship.
Many Thanks!
Is the question of what such an annexation would mean for Palestinian self-determination not even worth asking?
As to the plan of bribing Egypt: not all things can be bought. As I mentioned in the top post, there would be intense political resistance, perilous even to a coup-installed dictatorship like el-Sisi's, to the idea of Egypt being in position to grant Palestinian self-government in Gaza but refusing to do so. And that's even without getting into the Egyptian army being frankly unlikely to succeed in the Stalingrad scenario the IDF is about to face.
I agree, an occupied Gaza seems like a terrible liability for the occupier. If I was Egypt, you would have to pay me ten times my GDP to go into that particular trap, and I don't think Israel can afford that big a bribe.
Would the Gazans even resist the Egyptian army the way they would the Israeli army? Re self-determination: If the Gazans had the degree of autonomy that a city of 2 million has as a municipal government within Egypt, would that reduce the political resistance (and resistance from whom - would they be a significant threat to el-Sisi?). As to bribing Egypt - well, most rulers want to acquire more territory and more people under their control. Admittedly the Gazans are difficult - but perhaps would be less so under the control of their co-religionists. The bribe only has to cover the extent to which the Gazans are unusually difficult.
I think a bigger issue is that Israel will lose a lot of their reasoning for blockading the Gaza Strip if it belongs to Egypt. The Egyptians can complain about the restrictions and also would have trouble maintaining any kind of limitations on trade to Egypt itself. The same 2.x million people would be in Gaza, with their desire to destroy Israel. This means far more weapons within Gaza and far less ability to do anything about it - and no way for Israel to unilaterally handle it without causing an issue with Egypt.
I think Israel and Egypt would both be very against such a plan at this point.
Perhaps. Alternatively, the Gazans would then be Egyptian citizens, and Egypt would not want them launching strikes in violation of Egypt's foreign policy. The Gazans also might, over time, disperse throughout Egypt. The aggressiveness of the more militant Gazans could become an Egyptian police matter. Israel wouldn't need to blockade Gaza if Egypt policed it.
An awful lot of Gazans support Hamas, and Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is a mortal foe of the current Egyptian government, and vice versa. The current Egyptian government is very much *not* going to favor a plan that involves a huge number of murderously violent Muslim Brotherhood supporters with large hidden caches of weaponry, suddenly becoming Egyptian citizens with freedom of movement in Egypt.
Note also that this would create a situation where if a Gazan is upset about all the poverty and oppression and despair, the obvious target of their ire is going to be Cairo rather than Jerusalem.
In the very unlikely event that Egypt takes over administration of Gaza, they're going to keep the Gazans walled up in Gaza as non-citizens.
And that's another reason why Egypt doesn't want Gaza, which is full of people who want to kill their friends (well , frenemies). They don't want their new citizens dragging them to war with Israel.
From Egyptians themselves. Popular approval of cooperation with Israel is considerably lower in Egypt than even in most Arab countries, quite possibly because said cooperation isn't fluffy stuff like trade, but concrete security cooperation aimed against Palestinians. In a poll last year, nearly 90% of Egyptians responded in the negative to whether or not people should be allowed to have business or sports contacts with Israelis. A similar percentage of Egyptians disapprove of the Abraham Accords between Israel, UAE, and Bahrain. That's technically fine, it's a dictatorship after all, but the probability of creating a political flashpoint out of directly occupying Palestinian land to make Israel's life easier is accordingly quite high.
I think (your use of 'Gazan' is a hint) you might be undervaluing the strength of Palestinian nationalism. Hamas isn't popular because it's particularly religious, it's popular because it's among the organisations that at least ostensibly fight for sovereignty or at least nihilistically punish Israel for denying it, while Fatah no longer does and is seen as Israel's policeman. I really don't think getting to elect a Hamas-lite mayor would at this point be a substitute for a sovereign state.
Minor note: Re:
"I think (your use of 'Gazan' is a hint) you might be undervaluing the strength of Palestinian nationalism."
The analogy that I have in mind (and it may well be a false one) is the Pakistani civil war that lead to Bangladesh splitting off. Admittedly I'm just looking at the noncontiguous West Bank and Gaza, remembering Pakistan, and being skeptical about how united the two groups are.
Ouch. Well, it was a thought. It would be nice if the situation could be something other than a Hatfield/McCoy feud for another 70+ years.
What's in it for Egypt? Two million poverty-stricken and ultra-troublesome people, a disputed border, an internal terrorist group determined to attack a neighbouring country, and a strip of crappy coastal desert of the type that Egypt already has in abundance.
It would be like the US annexing Haiti.
Perhaps bribe Egypt with additional aid? It would be worth a considerable amount to the USA to have the middle east be quieter. Egypt might also have a freerer hand pacifying the Gazans than Israel gets, with world interest about as focused on it as it is on e.g. Yemen.
They have, and a majority of Israelis might well be persuadable now that having Egypt in charge of Gaza would be an improvement.
But the politics and practicalities for Egypt of taking on the responsibility, would be very difficult. If any Arab nation was eager to take responsibility for the health and future of the Palestinians it would have happened long before now.
suggestion in comment above, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-298/comment/42095714
Hmm (if I may be a bit flippant)... Is this the international version of "You break it, you bought it"?
A cynical interpretation would be that the road is there only for the PR reasons. The goal is not to let the supplies in. The goal is to *say* "we have let the supplies in", and have people repeat this all over the internet.
I have no idea how likely or unlikely this is.
I'm trying not to leap to that conclusion, but it's far from impossible.
Another red flag is that the humanitarian aid is allowed to enter on condition (stated verbatim by Biden) that Hamas doesn't take control of it. Which sounds perfectly fine on paper, except that Hamas runs the Ministry of Health. If the Hamas-controlled al-Shifa hospital, which is the largest hospital in Gaza, gets - as it must - a significant proportion of the supplies, does that count as taking control of it? And how well can we trust the United States and Israel not to decide arbitrarily whenever they please that yes, yes it does?
Yeah, it's like saying that you'll ship something to the US only if the federal government doesn't take control of it. Which, sure, technically, that would be possible. But they're the government, this is their territory, they've got the most men with guns, and everyone here knows that.
Even if you abstained from the men with guns argument and somehow assumed the purest of humanitarian intentions of Hamas, there's no way they can fulfil that condition on pure logistical grounds.
The absolute most charitable interpretation is that the stipulation is meant to concentrate the supplies in the south, where the remaining NGOs operate more robustly, and entice the desperate to move that way so that the IDF incursion, which will concentrate on the north, finds fewer civilians in its way. But I doubt that's it.
The fact that fuel is excluded also doesn't bode well. No fuel, no electricity, no sanitation, no dialysis machines, no surgery, no digging out corpses from under the rubble.
The hospital explosion in Gaza is an example of how the media reports on controversy to the exclusion off factual news. Undoubtedly, missiles fired from Israel's side have killed hundreds of civilians already - but what gets the headlines is an instance where it's not entirely clear what happened. The result is to create an environment where the public lets confirmation bias determine their beliefs, as they are only presented with 50% (weightless) Bayesian updates. Now that social media plays a large part in deciding what is communicated, we can see that it is not due to any kind of conspiracy. Content consumers are more interested in engaging in endless debates without sufficient information to reach a conclusion than they are in straightforward facts with one possible interpretation: even at the cost of knowing anything. I first noticed this in the police violence reporting around the time of George Floyd where cases that lead to arguments got more collective air time than cases where even those who generally supported the police considered unacceptable.
If Israel had killed 500 people by attacking a hospital without warning, that would be a candidate for the most pointlessly cruel thing they have done so far. Israel bombing Gaza and killing civilian bystanders (whose numbers add up) is just business as usual.
Scale matters, as does deliberate choice of targets. For example, Hamas liking to kill Israeli civilians was not exactly a new revelation, any number of rockets and suicide bombings has made that clear for decades. What was new was that they were (a) succeeding on a much larger scale than previously thought possible and (b) deliberately going for maximum atrocity. (In terrorist bombings, there can be some debate which victims were intentional targets and which were considered acceptable collateral damage. If you intentionally shoot kids, not so much.)
(I very much do not intend to liken the Hamas atrocities to that supposed hospital bombing. Executing civilians is proof of a genocidal intent while the bombing of hospitals during a war could have excuses.)
Also, controversial stories form more competitive memes. If everyone agrees on the facts and the judgement, you can just report the facts and move on. If the facts are contested, however, this makes an ideal signal of tribal identity.
From memory (someone correct me if it's wrong), the average Israeli bomb dropped on Gaza caused 0.1 dead civilian. If one caused 500, that's a pretty big outlier (a 500 000% increase from the average, if I'm not mistaken), and therefore quite noteworthy.
The fog of war is still heavy on that one.
It's extremely clear at this point from footage and the site that it was a rocket fired from within Gaza, that it or a component of it landed in a parking lot instead of a hospital, and that it couldn't possibly have killed 500 people.
What's left to determine, other than the question of whether it was Hamas or Islamic Jihad that fired the rocket?
I'd suggest that humans simply interpret ambiguous situations the way they wish were true. Something with 50/50 odds is as ambiguous as it gets, and will generate the most controversy between people who interpret it differently, so we'll hear about it more. Unambiguous situations don't have this problem, so we hear about them less.
Disagree, simply on the basis that the media was already determined to make a huge deal out of it when they initially assumed it could be blamed on Israel; see this tweet showing several successive New York Times front pages https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1714416589724864790
If anything, you can expect it to disappear from the news as it becomes more apparent that it was Hamas.
I don't think there was ever a point in time when strong evidence implicating Israel was ever known to the Times. Rather the window in which they could make a controversial claim closed, so they walked back to a controversial implication and participation in a controversy. The uncontroversial missile strikes are mentioned nowhere in those screen captures, which is essentially my point (although they are not random samplings.)
That was really well said and a new viewpoint to me. Thanks for the perspective. Think it will help me weigh the importance of news as I encounter it.
I think it's a mix. Content definitely has more longevity, especially on social media, when it's debatable. Footage of a cop shooting a man sleeping on a park bench in cold blood would draw universal condemnation, but result in a briefer window of coverage dominance than a shooting where the facts were uncertain and people could entrench to throw rocks at each other from their preferred positions.
However, it's also the case that *drama* for lack of a better word, is a factor. An airline crash that kills dozens will make headlines even if the causes are known and nothing about it is debatable - it just won't stay in the headlines for as long as an airline crash where the cause is indeterminate or has some other kind of suspenseful cliffhanger to be solved.
I do agree about the outcome, though, that the result is more airtime for content which is both dramatic and debatable, which leaves audiences more windows to entrench to their own interpretations than more authoritative/fact-based coverage would.
See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I just read that some local organizations in St. Louis, with the support of that city's mayor, are putting together resources to bring Central/South American migrants there from Chicago and try to get them to settle in St. Louis. (STL is only a 5-hour bus ride from Chicago which is why they are targeting that location as people source rather than Texas or Florida or NYC.)
This follows up a similar effort a few years ago which resettled 2,000 Afghani asylum seekers who have (according to the article I read) "found jobs and started businesses and cultural organizations." That program in turn was inspired by a wave of Bosnian-war refugees settling in STL starting in the 1990s (as of 2013 that city had 70,000 residents of Bosnian heritage which is the largest such community in the country).
That makes sense and I have wondered why more of the US's declining but still sizeable cities/counties haven't pursued it. Places like STL which were once leading urban areas [4th-largest city in the US in 1950, 58th-largest now] and are still sizeable clusters of restorable urban housing stock plus local demand for unskilled and semi-skilled workers? Where a bunch of highly-motivated people could get a fresh community going and turn around some urban decay and/or a stagnant older suburb.
Seems like there are a dozen or more mid-to-large "rust belt" metros where that approach would be sensible.
In theory, elected officials are supposed to be doing the will of the people who elected them. As some mayors of sanctuary cities recently found out, bringing in a lot of migrants is not what their constituents want, for a variety of reasons.
I think this could be a factor even though, in practice, elected officials who do not expect to be voted out frequently ignore the desires of their voters completely.
Few politicians would want to effect a huge change in their voting base, because in many cases it would cause them to lose all future elections. If you want to be supported by everybody you'd have to be a bipartisan anti-corruption civics-focused candidate, and we all know how rare those are.
Bringing in refugees has zero effect on the voter base until many years down the line, when current politicians are mostly out of office. It might have substantial effect on the opinions of current voters.
More and more city mayors are term limited though, and even if they're not the turnover in those jobs has dramatically sped up. The days of 25-year "boss" type mayors of large US cities are long gone.
Also the STL efforts in the 2000s (Bosnians) and 2010s (Afghans) and now (central/south Americans) have not been initiated or funded by the city. The current mayor has simply endorsed it and agreed not to impede it.
Yes, I was reflecting on Melvin’s comment and I don’t know which word is more offensive as a whole. But ISTM they offend *differently*: ‘fucking’ offends against purity/refinement, where ‘retarded’ offends mainly against kindness.
>Yes, I was reflecting on Melvin’s comment and I don’t know which word is more offensive as a whole. But ISTM they offend *differently*: ‘fucking’ offends against purity/refinement, where ‘retarded’ offends mainly against kindness.
If I said "there's a lot of fucking black people in this neighborhood" as opposed to "there's a lot of black people in this neighborhood", people aren't getting offended due to purity/refinement reasons.
Both come from the same trajectory - words with a neutral meaning that took on negative connotations and connections. Prior to "retarded" were words like moron and idiot - which at one point were also meant to be neutral descriptions of a real condition. Retarded was meant to be a kind and gentle way to express it, to get away from older and nastier words. There's a very strong chance that whatever term replaces the concept will take on the negative connotations. Some previously horrendous swear words that were rare to hear have been redefined. 30 years ago you wouldn't hear them used at all, but more recently they've been downgraded for many people, becoming common in songs and movies.
What's interesting to me is that even in areas (such as Rationalist forums) where swearing is considered fairly normal there are words that can't even be spoken/written. The most obvious would be the n-word, but there are others. Even in this context of intellectual discussion of the basis of swear words, people would be very bothered by me writing the word out. I haven't seen it tested, but I wouldn't be surprised to get a warning from Scott for writing it uncensored. Society will always have words that seem beyond the pale, but the specific words change a lot over time.
I actually don’t think that’s true. When I expressed my thoughts here about Bostrom’s apology I used the word ‘nigger’ several times, rather than referring to “the n word.” I have used the word ‘motherfucker’ on here several times— didn’t call anyone a motherfucker — I forget the context but but it was not an angry insult delivered to another poster. Also wrote ‘cunt’ in a post once, describing being sexually harassed multiple times as a young woman by random guys shouting stuff using the word ‘cunt.’ as I passed. So I think I hit the Big 3. Nobody has complained about my using any of these words. Never heard a peep out of Scott, and would have been astounded if I had.
Let's test it.
"Nigger"
___________________
I mean to say absolutely nothing implying a prejudice against black people by typing those six letters in that precise order.
If I had a distaste for black people I probably wouldn't be living in a black neighborhood.
I am aware that there are people who have a particular racial animus and use that word as an expletive but neither I nor 80% of the people writing here share such sentiments which is why if we are utilizing that word we are most likely not utilizing it as a weapon.
And aren't fewer weapons what we want? Hell, in Australia, every living being is a "cunt" and the loss of that weaponized word hasn't seemed to keep any shrimps off the barbie or babies out of dingos.
Moreover, I have a form of tourettes wherein being told that I *may not* say something "because I said so!" enjoins within my spirit a compunction to say it.
Every free-souled individualist on Earth feels an honest moral obligation to fight arbitrary rules set by Authority and/or the threat of violence, censorship or some other punishment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcN_7xlJnYY
Teenagers have told me that "autistic" is the most common pejorative highschool students call each other now. Adults will continue to cancel new words while teenagers will always find new words to use pejoratively. A generation from now autistic will probably be considered as offensive as retarded and fuck before that, and then some new word will replace autistic in the technical literature; meanwhile teenagers will find some new technical term to hurl abusively at each other and transmogrify into slang.
I think that "autistic" is reasonably likely to last longer than usual, because the people whom it describes like it and are generally anti-language-games.
The next term in the queue is "neurodiverse", I believe.
Yeah. That's how the world works 😂.
I mean, noticing it puts you ahead of 99% of adults but it's still pretty ridiculous that this is something you'd have to even *notice* in the first place.
Let me back up...
I speak from the point of view of The One Who Remembereth The Millennia (really, am your guide, rabbi, and scholar of jewish history) so let me again applaud you for noticing how utterly bs everything is because, well, everyone else seems to take current moral certitudes (it aint just words) seriously enough to willy nilly accuse anyone over 80 year of being evil racist/rapists.
But *from* my admittedly rare perspective I remain amazed at how ponderously shortsighted people are.
How is it that 10 year olds know how to do fractions but have no understanding of where groceries or electricity come from. After all, isn't that *why* they're in school? How is their situation not addressed? Why are they ordered to engage in activities for which purpose they have no understanding??
See the culprit for the lack of understanding among human beings (which causes the perpetual generational revolutions) is the desire to keep children tiny rather than to incorporate them into the "council of independents".
Usually this is done so very successfully that people remain children until their 90th birthday.
What a waste of a way to live! 😂
_____________________________
Your saying that failing to keep up with the treadmill is insulting reinforces and accelerates the treadmill.
If everyone nice defied the treadmill, there wouldn't *be* a treadmill, because a nice word can't become evidence of nastiness *as long as the nice people all still use it*.
The treadmill exists because and only because people try to play Whorfian language games in opposition to human nature.
There is one institution in NY that ran the entire euphemism gamut before being shut down in the movement to mainstream those with learning difficulties:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracuse_State_School
Wow, that's amazing as a historical reference. For those that don't want to read the page, the names were:
New York Asylum for Idiots
State Idiot Asylum
Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children
Syracuse State School for Mental Defectives
Then they gave up trying to keep a descriptor and just made it the Syracuse State School. Each of those names sounds offensive to our ears, but at the time would have been "progressive" and attempting to use neutral or even kind language to describe the residents. This is going to happen again, as with what Hank says with the word Autistic or whatever term we find to use.
What are people's predictions about who bombed the hospital?
IDF or Hamas?
A better question is, How long will it take the Israelis to terminate Hamas?
I'm hoping three years max.
Not the right forum for such a comment 🙃
The pro-Palestinian protesters currently chanting in downtown Chicago (a block from my office window) are quite certain that it was the evil Jews.
Regardless of who it was, it seems almost certainly to have been accidental. For either side to have done it intentionally implies a level of evil that (although their enemies might believe it) seems very unlikely.
If it was in fact an accident, I'm not sure it matters which side did it. Both are using powerful weapons that could easily cause this kind of large-scale death, and neither of which can fully prevent this kind of accident. We could talk about one or both having an unhealthy indifference to the deaths of others, including civilians. From the outside it looks like they are both doing things with a likely result of lots of Gazan civilian casualties. If these deaths are incidental to other goals and not directly intended, I'm not sure how much difference there is between thousands of deaths in a bombing campaign and 500 in a single strike.
Of course, if either side did it on purpose that changes a lot, but again, I don't think that's likely.
> If it was in fact an accident, I'm not sure it matters which side did it.
Only if you consider the tactics and goals of both sides equally valid. Even with accidents, context matters: shooting someone in a hunting accident is generally a lesser crime than accidentally shooting someone in a bank robbery.
I think that the IDF bombing Hamas in Gaza can be part of a potentially successful strategy to eradicate Hamas. I do not think that Hamas or PIJ firing unguided rockets into Israel improves their chances to eradicate Israel. I also happen to feel that the goal of eradicating Hamas is just while the goal of eradicating Israel is vile.
That being said, I also hold the IDF to a much higher standard of conduct than Hamas.
I agree with you that it was almost certainly an accident, but I don’t agree that who it was doesn’t matter. If it was an Israeli mistake, it is much more damaging to them than the reverse would be to the Palestinians. It is already very damaging to Israel, because it seems the majority of people out there are jumping to the conclusion that it was them. If it could be proved conclusively that it was a Palestinian error then the popular conclusion would be “a terrible accident in a just cause.”
I should clarify that I meant "morally" in terms of why it doesn't matter. That Israel is stronger and more western leads pretty much everyone to hold them more accountable than Hamas - which is part of the reason that Biden is visiting Israel and not Gaza/West Bank. Israel gets special privileges from being inside, but also more responsibilities.
Morally speaking, I don't think it matters who accidently dropped a random bomb out of hundreds/thousands, so long as they were giving some reasonable level of diligence to not doing that. Accidents happen. Accidents with large bombs are going to kill people that shouldn't have died. That's built into the nature and practice of war.
Well Hamas and friends are shooting unguided rockets into civilian areas and their rockets routinely fall in Gaza and kill Palestinian civilians.
Your presumption of innocence for both sides is noble, and I think correct as well.
In general I have found that the worse an individual's own believed inclinations are, the worst they suspect others are.
But in fact, very few people are inherently evil or even close to it.
> But in fact, very few people are inherently evil or even close to it.
I agree in general, but I also think that evil people are naturally attracted to certain professions (e.g. the ones where it is legal for them to hurt other people), so they may be overrepresented there.
High confidence it was an accident, but no confidence whose accident it was.
It would be good if they released some of the concrete evidence they say they have proving it was an errant missile fired by a Palestinian organization in Gaza. The infrared satellite imagery, the videos, etc.. I don’t know that it would make much difference, but it would be useful.
There's been a lot released, including live views from various tv stations (including al jazeera) who were videoing at the time.
I found this fairly interesting.
https://youtu.be/GHO5WBLEIZo?feature=shared
If Israel were to fake and share such an interception they likely would have made Hamas operatives claiming to do it purposefully rather than accidental.
In fact this conversation (somewhat) exonerates the Gazan factions from the more powerful accusation that they did it on purpose as a flase flag.
Presumably Israel would not have released this had Biden not been visiting today because it really doesn't serve their purpose. The evidence is likely rather strong that it came from the Gazan factions and Israel could (should?) have allowed people to draw their own conclusions about why that would be, but the Americans appear to have forced their hand (as indeed appears to have been import to Biden from his remarks on the matter).
I can't imagine they did it on purpose. That's too much.
cllick the link above.
Well from the sound of it, it sounds like Hams screwed up and wants to pin it on the other guys, Is that right?
https://twitter.com/MarquardtA/status/1714467358696190345
White House won't say if they believe Israel's explanation that Islamic Jihad was behind the strike on the hospital. Israel feels “very strongly” they did not cause it, NSC's Kirby said. They “categorically and very stridently denied that they had anything to do with it.”
Asked if the US was giving Israel the “benefit of the doubt,” Kirby paused a bit,
@betsy_klein
reports. “I think we certainly recognize that they feel very strongly that this was not caused by them,” Kirby said.
👀👀
Biden has now come out and officially said that he believes that the explosion was caused by an errant Hamas missile, and not by Israel. He cites intelligence reports that he's seen "today". The White House National Security Council also put out a statement to the same effect, citing "analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information."
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-heads-middle-east-inflamed-by-gaza-hospital-blast-2023-10-18/
> White House won't say if they believe Israel's explanation...
Haha, do you know that by this time the US and its intelligence knows perfectly who did it?
The same US intelligence that knew the Steele Dossier was totes legit and Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian op?
I don’t think they ever claimed that they knew it. They certainly took both of those things seriously or at least maintained they did. If I recall correctly, Steele released his report in the wild, because he was frustrated that the United States intelligence agencies were not taking it seriously enough.
The big difference here is that there is physical evidence that can settle this question. Right now they are asking us to take their word for it. It would be nice if some of these things were released to the public, the satellite imagery and other forensic evidence. It is the United States defense department claiming this was a Palestinian error, not the NSA or the CIA or the FBI. It’s a pretty bold faced lie if that’s what they’re up to.
The way the Hunter Biden laptop came into the public was pretty murky, some computer repair guy giving someone else’s computer to Rudy Giuliani. It did stink.
Beat me to it....I have a college classmate who went on to spend a lot of years working as an analyst for a major well-known U.S. intelligence agency. (He'd not want me to say which one.) He always said that the sort of intelligence-gathering certainty portrayed in popular culture is not only extremely rare in real life but is downright dangerous. Basically that an analyst who drank that kool-aid, and/or a policymaker who bought into it, does no favors either for national security or for his/her own job security.
Hamas, accidentally, but with only moderate confidence.
Israel is a modern western democracy with a reasonably free press, such that an IDF soldier or pilot would be more likely than a Hamas militant to call a reporter and say "hey, we just blew up a hospital and now they're telling us to cover it up and I know that's wrong". Which in turn means the Israelis have a stronger disincentive to order an attack and/or coverup that could lead to such blowback.
And Israel is saying that it has video and communications intercepts that show it was Hamas. I want to see that video examined by skeptical experts, and AFIK that hasn't happened yet, but in general it's more likely to be the side that doesn't have anything to hide that offers video.
Hamas has some fairly potent artillery rockets, and they've never been shy about launching them from places like a hospital parking lot, so a rocket that e.g. blows a nozzle two seconds after launch falling on a hospital is certainly plausible enough. An IDF mistake is also possible, as the ugly nature of this war means they're going to have to hit targets very close to things like hospitals. Their ordnance is generally more precise and more reliable than Hamas's, but it isn't perfect.
Either way, we can afford to wait for more information.
This seems to be the growing consensus position.
https://x.com/Nrg8000/status/1714535497958334678?s=20
It's also looking like the death toll is closer to 50 than 500, which is good news no matter who screwed up. And my own assessment, now that we have daylight imagery, is that this was about 10-15 kg of explosives, more consistent with one of the larger Qassam-style improvised rockets than an aircraft-delivered bomb or missile. Also video from I think two different angles showing a salvo of rockets being launched roughly over the hospital just a few seconds before the explosion at the hospital.
Agreed, I would estimate 70% it was Hamas, 30%% it was IDF.
I am at 90-10 myself
This is logical.
I don't know if Netanyahu himself has categorically and unequivocally denied it being Israel, but if he has, I would count that as strong evidence for more or less the rationale you just detailed.
> Either way, we can afford to wait for more information.
If only there was a rule to wait three days before commenting on mindkilling topics...
Prediction market on whether it was Israel. It's at 16% at the moment: https://manifold.markets/MilfordHammerschmidt/did-the-idf-just-now-blow-up-a-hosp.
Seems like it was deleted?
Still up for me. Maybe try a different browser...
We will never know. People dumb enough to comment on these things will never consider the possibility it was the other side and continue to bleat about it endlessly.
I don't know, and I can't see a way to find out. Thinking about it just turns my own brain into yet another battlefield, and that's the last thing I want.
But "they" in this case are the Palestinians, not trustworthy third-party investigators.
If they find fragments of one of their own missiles, will they:
a) Issue a public apology and admit it was their own, or
b) Sweep these bits away, or
c) Sweep these bits away and replace them with Israeli bomb fragments they found at another location?
C definitely.
Sure, and they'll say "Hey we have evidence that this evidence is fake" and the other guys will say "No, _your_ evidence is fake!" and we won't get any closer to the truth.
PIJ?
Could be
Media outlets really should have a lot of egg on their face over this whole incident. Reporting Hamas propaganda as fact immediately "Israeli air strike kills 500 at hospital" then being forced to backpedal over the course of 24 hours to "Explosion kills some people at a hospital, we dunno" is the kind of thing that they ought to be putting out full front-page apologies about, but they won't.
Meanwhile I'm just waiting for the Gell-Mann amnesia to set in so I can get outraged about the Next Thing.
But no, see, what they said was "Israeli air strike kills 500 at hospital, local sources report". So it's all good! The media very rarely lies, after all.
I think the argument there is the rocket was still full of its propellant, because it hadn’t gone very far. That increased the size of the explosion considerably.
Some twitter account called "Geoconfirmed" is claiming footage confirms it to be a Palestinian missile. I haven't read it closely enough yet to know how convinced I should be by their arguments https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1714390254935851272
I agree that the explosion seems far too big for a little rocket. Could it be a secondary explosion from an ammo dump or similar stored at the hospital?
The argument is the rocket was still full of fuel, because it hadn’t gone very far which seriously increased the size of the explosion. That’s credible.
That's not the only sort of weapon in their arsenal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_arsenal. E.g. they have the R-160 which carries a payload of up to 170 kg and the Badr-3, which has a a warhead of 300-400 kg, see here: https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel/status/1714410320419020928.
In the air, but how high above the ground in the air? Lots of bombs are programmed to explode in the air above their target.
There's a single, small crater at the blast site which strongly suggests a ground-level explosion. That would still be consistent with an initial airborne flash, if that's the catastrophic failure of the solid rocket motor of an artillery rocket. Which would then fall somewhere downrange, with its warhead and possibly some unburned propellant. It's not consistent with any air-launched weapon I know of, unless the airborne flash is unrelated and coincidental.
That all makes sense. What conclusion would you draw from that?
The alternative (that a missile happened to explode in the air just above where an Israeli bomb just happened to hit several seconds later) doesn't seem like a less improbable coincidence.
Setting aside the issue at hand, I like your clarification regarding "various improbables".
It is common in discussions regarding religious beliefs (and many other subjects) for one side to point out how very improbable a particular fundamental appears to be.
What they generally fail to cinsider is how very improbable the presumed-but-unstated alternative option is.
Odd facts often have to be accounted for via one of various improbabilities and the selective focus on the improbability of one of them is an inaccurate way to go about ascertaining the truth.
As for the matter in question, I haven't attempted to do a home-baser analysis but I would presume that if Netanyahu says unequivocally that it was not Israel then that's probably true - for the simplr reason that he knows the truth is likely to come out and he has much to lose if he unequivocally lies on this matter.
I do not however know if Netanyahu has done that.
In which zionist commenters who have spent the past week outraged that anyone could possibly condone the actions of Hamas explain why Israel bombing a hospital and murdering hundreds of peope is perfectly okay
Less Wrong advice:
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence
Feel like apologizing for your lie, or nah?
Wait, so you're a leftist now?
Honestly , the fact that several far-right commenters here have decided to side with islamic terrorists against Western allies, for no apparent reason other than "fuck the Jews", is as breathtaking as far-left activists deciding that Muslims who stone gays and force women to wear burquas are actually great allies because at least they hate Christians.
Both these reactions are among the most shameful things to come out of this recurrent conflict.
> Hey Maybe Bombing Civilian Hospitals Is Bad ??
>> Disgusting, Shameful, Anti-Semitic, Far-Right, Far-Left, And Islamist. Shut Your Dirty Mouth And Never Open It Again.
We all agree bombing hospitals is bad, but the fact that when Hamas said it was Israel and Israel said it was Hamas, the commentor immediately believed Hamas, does indicate that the commenter has "decided to side with Islamic terrorists against Western allies". I'll leave interpretations as to why to others.
On the one hand, we have a bunch of genociding thugs who were repeatedly caught before[1] bombing hospitals, schools, and Red Cross facilities and vehicles[2], then lying about it, inventing evidence and preventing neutral investigators from entering the scene by threat of force. This lovely faction, call it Genocide army, bombed the exact same hospital they deny bombing on the 17th of October on the 14th of October by rockets[3]. Genocide army's chief cheerleader/paid-shill Hananya Naftali was the first social media account posting a photo of the destroyed hospital and claiming its a Hamas base, before deleting it and then never mentioning it again. Asked by Russia to show Satellite images of the attack to prove innocence[4], Genocide army's response is.... nothing. Pretending to be deaf I guess.
On the other hand, we have a clip from Al-Jazzera's coverage showing nothing, quite literally, just a ball of light exploding in the middle of the night as far as any human eye is concerned. Oh and how can I forget, we also have an obviously fabricated audio clip of people speaking laughably broken and foreign Arabic, courtesy of the Genocide army of course. Very powerful piece of evidence indeed. There is some additional auxiliary evidence, like Genocide's army spokesman holding a printed satellite image and waving a stick around it while saying very earnestly that it was not the Genocide army who did it.
I hope Genocide army can prove its innocence in this difficult courtroom. People are just aweful these days, always siding with Disgusting, Shameful, Anti-Semitic, Far-Right, Far-Left, And Islamist factions against the peace-loving tree-hugging Genocide army.
[1] https://www.trtafrika.com/insight/why-the-world-cannot-trust-israel-regarding-gaza-hospital-bombing-15447412
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523489/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital
[4] https://www.news18.com/world/show-satellite-images-russia-asks-israel-to-prove-that-it-did-not-strike-gaza-hospital-8623118.html
I do not think "Genocide army" is a fitting description of the IDF.
If genocide was their goal, they would be doing an utterly incompetent job of it. "Oh, let's bomb some hospital parking lot and kill perhaps a 100 civilians. If we do this once a day, it would just take us some 65 years to murder the present population of Gaza."
> it would just take us some 65 years to murder the present population of Gaza."
Sure, why not. They have all the time in the world, why wouldn't they take their time when every time they murder thousands the "LeaDeR of ThE Free WoRLd" unconditionally ass-kisses them and uses billions in dollars and weapons tonnages to support them even more.
There is a reason the genocidal scum call it "Mowing The Lawn". They take their sweet time genociding the current Gaza population a thousand by a thousand. When new Gazans "grow" again, which they can always murder them in the next 65 years.
What do you think they were doing the last 75 after all ?
The fact that you come down on the wrong side on this issue is pretty much an indictment of all your other beliefs, isn't it? There's a lot of nonsense going around but all the independent analysis is pointing the same way (not yours). The fact that you're even talking about a destroyed hospital when the hospital was not destroyed is a red flag, might want to change up your take on that.
> pretty much an indictment of all your other beliefs, isn't it?
Pretty much, yeah. Anyone against Genocide army is Disgusting, Shameful, Anti-Semitic, Far-Right, Far-Left, And Islamist. I think we have already established that fairly conclusively.
> all the independent analysis
The independent analysis done by the same military advisors to Genocide army ? Whose conclusions are always filtered and communicated through the public ramblings of an 80-years old who parroted lies about beheaded babies and travelled half a globe to ass-kiss a genocidal war criminal in the middle of a war ?
Fine. I will take what I can get.
Where is their report ? Their findings ? The material they based their conclusions on ? I want to read all the "Analysis" and judge for myself. Or should I just Trust The Science on this one ?
> talking about a destroyed hospital
Ah ok my bad, the destroyed parking lot of a hospital where no less than 100 civilians among them a confirmed 20+ kids were sheltering.
There, I would never want to make Genocide army look bad, they can do that far better than I could already.
Hey, I know I'm breaking a cardinal rule of online sanity here by responding as a non-anonymous rabbi to an anonymous fellow who calls himself "LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael" but, eh, sanity is over-rated.
Anyhow your name combined with your English proficiency (I mean that seriously) confuses me a bit. Around here there tend to be two classes of people who might have an obsession with the subject so great that they would make it their nom de guerre.
They would be Western Judeo-skeptics (to give the benefit of the doubt 😂) and Muslim (or occasionally Arab-Christian) people for whom the Jews are a backstory to the problem of Israel, vs Israel being the most convenient achilles's heel through which to address a more ancient enmity.
There is also a third class however.
Most people from the first two classes like to believe that they are members of this class (but really aren't) so it's probably fair to call into question my own assumption to belonging to this class.
Not that I do. I really think that I DO belong to this class, but of course I *would* say that wouldn't I! 😂
That's people who for some reason or other are infested with a fascination for truth and accuracy.
As such, while I believe that LHHI actually misread the comment that he responded to, I can understand why (were his reading correct) he could feel so frustrated.
There definitely *is* something odd about how oversensitive tptb are to anything that could be construed to be judeo-skeptic. They really do seem to overreach a lot!
Not to mention the general matter of Jews (and, to be fair, other demographics) not being discuss'able or criticize'able as a group while entire other groups are subject to collective criticism based upon acts either done or imaginary by some rando from my own group!
Of course, *my* own group, the Jews, are actually a beneficiary of this selective justice in 2023 anno domini, but others who fancy themselves to belong to this dispassionate category are most often either Muslims/Arabs or White Males --- two groups which undeniably are selectively discriminated against by huge swaths of internet jibber jabber.
As I am denied permission to continue writing here lest it be too long to read, I'll end by letting HLLI know that while I personally would prefer there be less anti-philosemitic sentiment in the world, for reasons both universal and personal (free floating judenhass sounds like it could inconvenience me), I feel your pain and while I believe that your conclusions may miss the most accurate mark I understand at least some of their impetus and I'm doing my level best to get everyone to lay down their weapons and to speak and be heard honestly and sincerely.
There's no need for lying and it benefits no one.
Had we worked together from the start we would already have returned to Eden. It is shameful how we, as a species, have squandered our divine abilities.
Had I have played the game as a young man I would have had a very powerful voice today. Likely powerful enough to moderate a conversation between people and Peoples that would be taken up millions or billions of people today.
But had I played by the rules extant on earth in 2000 I would be little more than a (less angry and elitist) Ben Shapiro.
And while I think he's no worse than any of the "influencers" in the world today, he is only a negligible amount better.
I am doing my part. I am speaking.
But by virtue of having surrendered my radio show in 2004 instead of running advertisement for casino gambling and by virtue of many such similar decisions over the years I am here today, a lone voice on an internet of billions, unwilling and unable to promote himself.
Whether I am meant to have lived the rather unique life I have lived as a means of being a vox populi at a time when the world pretty desperately needs it or whether I am not meant to be that for humanity is entirely in the hands of the small handful of people who read this very comment!
😂😂😂
Far-rightists who don't like Jews is nothing new. (Though it surprises the occasional center-righty who isn't antisemitic.)
Given recent events and who is publicly praising the deaths of Israeli civilians, I find it increasingly odd and unbelievable when people say that the right is the anti-Semitic side. Conservatives seem to love Israel, and I haven't heard of a single conservative organization praising Hamas. Lots and lots of left-aligned groups are actively praising the original attack and marching in support of Hamas.
These are not conclusive facts, but it sure seems illegitimate to me to say that the right is anti-Semitic, especially if excusing the left.
I specifically differentiated the center-right (which usually isn't antisemitic) from the far right (which usually is). 'Occasional' modifies 'center-righty', not 'center-right who isn't antisemitic'. Most center-righties are aware of the Nazis and often give them a hard time, from what I've seen.
Fair enough, but I'll ask. Are far-right groups currently praising the deaths of Jews? I'll admit I intentionally don't go around such groups, so maybe they are, but I am doubting it. With the amount of media coverage on all angles, I can't imagine Salon or some other left-leaning outfit wouldn't be making it front page news.
Now, far right groups don't much care for Muslims or Arabs either, so I can see them not praising Hamas. But to not be happy about the death of Jews seems like a pretty mild anti-Semitism, considering that there are proud groups loudly proclaiming their happiness at those same deaths - it's apparently not too taboo to talk about.
Null result report: I looked through the recent posts of SecureSignals, theMotte's most notorious neo-Nazi who posts about how terrible Jews are all the time, and I did not find any posts cheering on the death of Jews in this conflict in Palestine. Extremely critical of Israel, the Zionist lobby, and Jews in general, but he didn't cheer on Hamas' atrocities.
Not only that, the bellicose stance towards the concept of Palestine as well as the public dissatisfaction with the two-state solution is the long-strived-for work of the far right. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who radically opposed the Oslo accords. Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996. It is the transatlantic mirror image of the darkest dreams the local troublemakers have ever entertained.
why did they want to do this?
What is a "Zionist" anyway? I'm an anti-Zionist in that think that the creation of Israel as a Jewish entho-state was a bad move, and if it was proposed now then I'd be strongly against it.
But I'm also a conservative, at least when it comes to the locations of established international borders, because the alternative to conservatism when it comes to international borders is constant war. We should have an incredibly strong status quo bias when it comes to keeping established (over multiple decades) national borders exactly where they are (except by mutual agreement). So regardless of whether or not it was a good idea to draw the borders that way in the first place, they're there now, and everyone should just fucking deal with it.
I'm a Zionist becayse these past 75 years have been the safest 75 years for Jews worldwide (in terms of percentage murdered and otherwise fouly treated) since forever.
I do however wish that we Jews had a poweful voice accompanying our unapologetic demand for our human rights with the requisite universalism.
I am attempting to BE that voice, but without boosting from others, my own voice has zero ability to carry at all.
> I'm a Zionist becayse these past 75 years have been the safest 75 years for Jews worldwide (in terms of percentage murdered and otherwise fouly treated) since forever.
Correlation is not causation. In the western world, the biggest change was that after the Nazis, open antisemitism became much less acceptable than it had been in the 1920s. Also, ethnic violence may generally have declined? If Jews in France can today live with little fear of state-sponsored violence against them, this is not because France is afraid of Israeli reprisals, but because France generally refrains from mass violence against ethnic minorities.
The Muslim world mostly expelled Jews in response to the foundation of Israel, which limited their ability to murder them a few decades later. I will grant you that having a country which would take them in helped a lot for outcomes, but this is very much with the benefit of hindsight. It is not unfathomable that Israel might have lost an early existential war, in which case Zionism would have been net negative for the prospering of Jews.
Aside from the symbolism, in 1948, there was little to recommend the lands of what would become Israel over some other, less populated area in North America not surrounded by blood-thirsty third world countries.
Of course, now that Israel is firmly established, it has every right to remain. Palestinians who dream of a state "from the river to the sea" are just delusional.
Thanks for your comment. Much of what you say is accurate.
That said, Herzl's Zionism was not dependent upon this piece of real estate. It was intended to obviate the possibility of a Holocaust.
The short-sighted Zionists who were unwilling to accept a homeland elsewhere definitely did *me* a favor, as I am glad that my homeland and army are situation in the same location but they did no favor for my grandparents who had to live in Europe during a time when there was no locus of overwhelming Jewish Power to protect them.
I'm not claiming to speak from authority/credentials but the context for my comments is as an historian of Jewish History.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc3teub7_dxL4z9fJPW-d9L&feature=shared
Obviously I could still be wrong about everything. It just means that pretty much all of the most common objections to what I'm saying have been considered and either incorporated into my current worldview or found wanting.
To be sure, with so many Judaic ovum in the single tiny basket that is modern Israel a single successful strike against that basket could result in a 20 second holocaust.
As poker players are wont to say, "put all your eggs in a single basket, but carry that basket very carefully".
> Aside from the symbolism, in 1948, there was little to recommend the lands of what would become Israel over some other, less populated area in North America not surrounded by blood-thirsty third world countries.
> That said, Herzl's Zionism was not dependent upon this piece of real estate. It was intended to obviate the possibility of a Holocaust.
I believe I was once taught that Herzl seriously considered a proposal to set up the Jewish homeland in present-day Uganda, to the point of sending an expedition (with the approval of the British empire). Among other things this was, IIRC, because some Jews at the time while agreeing with the "prevent Holocaust" plan, felt it would be blasphemy to return to Jerusalem or nearby before the coming of the Messiah (something something ritual impurity).
Whether North America would have worked at the time I don't know - The U.S. support for Israel as we know it today only came well after 1948. The first Israeli wars were fought with Czech, then French weapons.
The Middle East also had one more big thing going for it, apart from the historical link, namely the Balfour Declaration.
Zionism is kind of like American exceptionalism, it involves patriotism, cherishing a founding story, and a belief that one's country is set apart from all others. There are some who think American exceptionalism is the root of all foreign policy evil. If you can imagine their smug satisfaction when they heard about Fallujah, confirming their long held suspicions that conservatives were kind of evil, you can imagine anti-zionism.
If there are any Israelis reading this who are frightened by the prospect of anti-national sentiment, it could be reassuring to know that Iraqis within the diaspora have been willing to accept the lack universality of American support for Operation Iraqi Freedom and do not hate Americans. I can only imagine what you must be feeling today.
Hard to know what is true in the fog of war, but:
https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1714390254935851272
Who did the bombing is still disputed at this point.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/research/news/lancaster-university-to-open-atlantic-hurricanes-expert-climate-prediction-market
Theory:
1) On a personal level, having a happy, productive, meaningful life requires dissolving attachments to past injustices committed against you. (Move on. Stop obsessing about the past Bad Thing, and go find some new Good Things in your life.)
2) This is exploitable by hostile agents.
3) This is exploitable in ways which harm reproductive fitness, providing a opportunity for organisms to evolve mechanisms to prevent it from happening.
4) Humans have evolved such mechanisms.
5) Videos of dead torture victims in the street.
Any thoughts?
1) would be the greedy (in the algorithmic sense)
3) is more meta-gaming: if you want not to be wronged, precommit to taking horrible vengeance if you are wronged, so that rational actors would avoid wronging you.
(To the degree this establishes a social standard, going through with such vengeance could even be considered pro-social: the more frequent taking revenge is, the higher the expected costs to wronging people are.)
One failure mode of revenge is the feud, where two or more parties get locked into a pointless revenge cycle. Another failure mode is that for the strategy to work, the opponent only needs to be aware of when you consider yourself to be wronged, but that might not be an objective injustice. The strategy will work for the gangster who collects protection money (and takes bloody revenge if someone "wrongs" him by refusing) at least as well as for someone who was objectively wronged.
For conflicts between powerless groups of people and a strong state, things are even more complicated.
On the one end of the spectrum, you have the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. While there was no hope of achieving any useful objective, the aim of killing a few of your murderers seems praiseworthy in itself.
Many (non-jihadist) terrorist groups fall on the other side of the spectrum. Typically they form around some atrocity committed by the state (e.g. shooting unarmed protesters). Of course, the people most likely to join such organisations are not believers in proportional response (like killing n military members in reprisal to the military killing n unarmed civilians), so the end result is often runaway violence. Two groups emerged from the German 68ers. One was the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which fought violently against the state and whose lasting legacy are a few lines in the German criminal code. The other group was the Green party, which worked within the system and has affected countless policy decisions. (Too bad they focused on getting rid of nuclear before coal, though.)
Hamas objective seems to get Israel to kill Palestinians, so they optimize for being atrocious (e.g. by targeted killings of civilians), in the hope that Israel will reciprocate. This seems way outside any sane-ish revenge strategy derived from game theory.
Consider a variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma with three actions:
Cooperate
Defect
Spite (You get a double-Defect penalty, in exchange for your partner also getting a double-Defect penalty, regardless of their choice)
Consider how agents evolve under these constraints, and how having an even-worse option can make everything so much nicer.
(1) - (4) sound like proof that recovery is unlkely or impossible. I could argue with your logic, but thought it would be more helpful to tell you what I have observed about real recoveries from godawful experiences.
There are a number of paths I've seen. None of the recoveries I've experienced personally or seen others make were accomplished by forgiving the perpetrator. Sometimes a sort of forgiveness develops after recovery made via other paths, but it’s limited, something like “eh, he was such an emotionally retarded loser that hehe probably had no idea what life was like for a little girl who was being exploited that way.”
Here are the path I know about
Bring punishment down on the perpetrator: Disclose in the most convincing way possible what the person did to anyone who’s in a position to deliver consequences: Police, workplace, their family, their friends, online social circle.
Punish them yourself using your smarts and skill at self-expression: Write or tell the person in the most vivid, accurate way you can how evil what they did was. Be convincing and harsh. Your goal is to make them feel seen in a horribly clear, demeaning way. You want them to feel terrible about themselves while the read your judgments and for quite a while afterwards.
Surround yourself with people who get it regarding the awfulness of what happened to you. Make sure they get it in a rich way. They should know the facts and also how you felt then and you how feel now.
Help other people who have suffered from attacks similar to the one you suffered.
Go in the direction of anything that makes you feel better, stronger and more engaged, even if you know that the things are not going to have any effect on the damage you suffered. Sometimes the cumulative effect of having several of these good things in your life is that you do not have such a strong feeling that your life has been ruined. And that changes the story you’re living inside of: It’s no longer that somebody ruined your life, it’s that somebody changed and damaged it. Ruined life stories, by definition, end with the death of somebody whose life was ruined anyway. But if the story you’re living inside of is that somebody changed and damaged your life, it’s a story where all kinds of developments are possible. This process does not make logical sense. There’s a loop involved: Somebody ruined my life, so there’s no point in hoping. I have zero hope of having a meaningful life — that proves my life’s been ruined. Sometimes people manage to snip the mobius strip. In fact I think that’s the most common path to recovery I’ve seen.
Experiment boldly with psychiatric drugs and other somatic interventions. Go to the smartest psychopharmacologist you can find, one who keeps up with the research and is willing to try things. If you are depressed, do not neglect to try an MAOI. A time-limited course of treatment with ketamine is also worth trying. If it hasn’t made a difference in 6 weeks or so, it probably is not going to. If it helps, it’s likely that the effect will fade if you stop taking ketamine. It’s often possible to maintain the effect with oral doses you take at home.
Do a course of psychedelic-assisted therapy focused on becoming less affected by the incident that harmed you.
I think forgiveness is especially unlikely to help, if you are told by others that you have to forgive, otherwise you are a bad person. That feels like they are siding with the perpetrator, or at least that they care about you so little that the fact that your complaints are annoying is more important for them than the fact that you were hurt.
On the other hand, I have seen people stuck in the loop of complaining about how they were hurt, with no mental capacity left for anything else... not even planning an escape or revenge. People sometimes do that for years. And of course, when it is over, they regret the wasted time.
Maybe the best attitude is neither obsessing, nor forgiving, just choosing to focus on becoming stronger now, and optionally get revenge later.
There is a chance that after enough time passes, even if you get strong enough, you decide that the revenge is not worth it, because it is no longer an urgent problem, and you have other, more important things to do. ("After I graduate, I will tell my teachers how incompetent and evil they were. But only when they can't punish me anymore." Graduates. "Eh, who gives a fuck? I am not going to see them ever again anyway.") But letting the future you change their mind is different from being forced to make a difficult decision now.
Obsessing about revenge is also a waste of time, so maybe a better approach is: "if I find a button that will hurt my enemies when pressed, I will press the button; but I am not going to spend my life looking for the button -- I will only use the opportunity if it arises naturally, or requires very little effort to arrange."
I don't know what you're saying with 5, 4 is too vague to be a meaningful jump-in point. But also, 5 seems to have forgotten the "committed against you" part of 1. Do I personally know any of those torture victims, or have reason to think I might? Then there's no more attachment to them than to seeing a wolf kill a deer.
Book Review: the first thirty pages of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.
I picked up this book from one of those free bookshelves outside someone's house, and read the first twenty or thirty pages of it over lunch.
This book is about 2005. It doesn't know it's about 2005, it thinks it's about globalisation and how the jobs of middle class westerners will soon be taken by outsourcees in India. But it's really about 2005 and the passage of time and how the concerns of the past slowly blend into the concerns of the present without you really noticing. The book seems dated, as any eighteen year old book about the near future really should, but since 2005 still feels like the "early present" rather than the past, it's disconcerting. Nowadays of course things still get outsourced to India but not to any greater extent than in 2005, and the sorts of jobs he was concerned would soon be outsourced to India are things that are instead being replaced with AI.
The other very 2005 thing is the preoccupation with Islamic terrorism, something we were all preoccupied with for years, then it slowly receded, then it receded some more, and then we all forgot we were ever concerned with it, and then last week it came back and soon it will probably be 2005 again.
Things change over the years. Sometimes we notice them changing and read and write articles about "hey, this thing is changing, have you noticed?" Other times they change just as fast, but nobody bothers to point them out as they change, and you only realise they've changed when you read an old book and feel disoriented. This book is an interesting time capsule of those second sort of thing.
2020 seems further away than 2005. We were terrified about white supremacy and anti vaxxers. Reading Stephen King’s new novel set in that era it seems both preachy and dated.
I'm watching 'The Morning Show' with my wife, and it has backdates story lines about COVID, Jan. 6th, and the Dobbs decision, and it comes off the same way.
My situation has become very problematic, and I do not know what to do. I am writing this wondering if anyone might have a good idea.
I'm diagnosed with autism, OCD, and bipolar ("type un-specified"). Somehow, whether due to past social mishaps or the underdeveloped emotional circuitry, I have pretty strong rejection sensitivity and basically shut down whenever someone I respect says something mean to me or that I do not know how to interpret, which happens every 3 months. In addition, probably owing to the obsessive-compulsiveness, I have strong limerent tendencies, and have been stuck in one "basin of attraction" from highschool for about two years, having extremely intense recurrent thoughts on a daily or hourly basis. My mind often feels completely incoherent, and I do not know what is happening. Other times it feels like it is running four thoughts in parallel. This became too much for me to operate with, so in September, I stopped being able to do so. Medication and therapy are not helping, and probably will not yield much effect size in the time they need to. I think I am going to be removed from my college (I am a first year student, technically enrolled through a high school program, so if I fail, I will not graduate high school either). What can I do to start operating again? Long term, I will do anything in the bounds of sane and ethical conduct, but I can only do so much right now. I will do my best to implement anything sane suggested, and if I reach functional behavior again, I promise to do everything to reduce suffering.
Thanks,
Ishaan
Get as much help as you can from your family and school administration about taking a mental health break and going back to a regular high school program instead of a high school + college program. Take things one step at a time and try to make a progress every day instead of worrying about the mass of long term problems and getting nothing done.
Consider asking your school for a mental health break. They will have options, but you will need to raise your hand to ask, they won't find you. Earlier is better. If not, pick a course and take the W, get something off your plate. So maybe you graduate high school a semester late by doing that, talk to your advisor about what's even possible.
I was an early college entrant who had a lot of struggles with it. Had never needed to pace myself before, so just kept pushing myself and refused to withdraw from any courses, even though I was getting overwhelmed--I think more from social and psychological pressures than intellectually, when I bothered to do the work it was still pretty easy. (That lulled me into this trap where I was constantly thinking, "you've got this, you can clearly do it" but then I wouldn't...)
If I had advice to give myself back then I guess I'd just say, be honest with yourself if it doesn't seem to be working, and ask people in your family or in the institution for help. The people around you are your fans, they will not judge you, they will go into protective mode and find you options if they can. And it doesn't matter if you get a degree by 20 or whatever, take a couple extra years, or go really slow and take six extra years, the age you graduated doesn't matter in the long run as much as you think it does now. Many of the solutions you might think of as nuclear options (for me it was withdrawing from a course) actually might have very few long term consequences? Get second opinions more locally on any options you might be instinctively avoiding.
I struggled a lot with a self perception of failure right after this period. Honestly that self doubt was a big waste of time and emotional energy. I eventually dusted myself off and ended up with a couple graduate degrees and a reasonably comfortable career thinking big thoughts. I feel like it gets better, I hope you find your path too.
The advice you're getting from others is excellent. I'd suggest making a list of the ideas you've gotten, trying each one & making notes about its effect. That will also give you some structure -- a plan to follow.
I'm a psychologist. Here's my advice. The 2 smartest psychiatrists I've met believe that the MAOI class of antidepressants directly target rejection sensitivity dysphoria. One good site for info about them is call Psychotropical. If you are seeing a psychopharmacologist now, ask to try an MAOI. If they refuse, look for an psychopharmacologist who will. (And if you are getting meds from a general practitioner, go to a psychiatrist who specializes in drug treatment. Your situation is too complex for a GP.)
Many precious replies have been given. Another possibility would be retreat. Reduction of input; it can backfire but it would be worth a try if all else fails. Still, keep moving.
Thanks! I’m going to stop using my phone as well. I kind of use the internet (especially Twitter) sedatingly or obsessively/addictively.
I think you should pick up a meditation practice, and you know, since the psychological frame is not working out for you, that is only one point of view on the mind and not at all an absolute truth, and well, one of the functions of spirituality is to provide healing. There are spiritual traditions that don't run on faith: reading the Ashtavakra Gita might be helpful for you.
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html
As a very helpful woman taught me once: your emotions, your thoughts, and so on, the contents of your mind, are the movie. But you're not the movie, you are the screen the movie is being projected on.
That is, you are the perceiver. You are not your thoughts and you are not your emotions. Internalizing this allows you to stand aloof from whatever your mind is getting up to, dramatically increasing your capacity to act.
This stuff works: once, a pretty girl smiled at me in the gym, and it sent me into suicidal depression, complete with a stay in a psych ward (long story). These days, I can walk up to a random hot woman in a hang out situation, look her in the eye and tell her she's cute. Sure, I still need to learn to develop such openings, but there are possibilities available to me now that simply did not use to be there, and the credit for that goes entirely to spirituality.
The mind is an extremely powerful thing. It is possible to develop it.
Thanks! What does examining or the self-image or ego entail? How do you identify that pattern of thought from experience when the contents of experience are not discrete or constant?
The pattern of thought is experience. You are the thing perceiving thought, you are not thought or its patterns. This becomes easier to understand when you've worked up to daily one hour meditation sessions (I recommend this method: https://www.evolvingground.org/opening-awareness), though then again, it is possible to just understand this merely by reading or hearing about it, as the Ashtavakra Gita says. You may not be so lucky, granted (I wasn't), but it is possible.
I'm only mildly on the spectrum, but here are some types of things that work for me. Your mileage may vary, but at least they shouldn't cause lasting damage.
Perhaps try putting yourself in a controlled situation where deeper instincts are triggered? Martial arts and sparring is my go-to. If there's someone you trust, a less time-intensive version might be simply being repeatedly slapped in the face, by someone who's going to keep on doing it if you don't stop them. It's got a way of "waking me up".
Another thing (which in my mind is similar) is being hugged. Find someone you trust and can talk about this to, who sympathizes, and spill **everything** out, and then have them hug you and not let go. It reminds me of what I've heard about horse-breaking: there's an impulse to get away, and then it goes away and I'm just standing there being hugged, and then I start crying, and afterwards I feel a lot better.
Psychedelics might help some, as chephy said, but I don't have a lot of experience with them, although I do have some with alcohol and cannabis (not at the same time!). Just remember what Herodotus said about the ancient Persians: if they came up with a plan while drunk, they re-evaluated the plan while sober to see if it still seemed like a good idea. (And if they came up with a plan while sober, they re-evaluated while drunk, which I think may be the earliest example of the Evil Overlord List rule of letting a 6-year-old look over your plans and see if they have an obvious flaw.)
I would suggest being very careful with psychedelics. As someone with bipolar disorder I can attest that irresponsible use of them by those of us with bipolar disorder can lead to mania and psychotic episodes. I highly recommend practicing martial arts. Personally I recommend Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as it is one of the most intellectually stimulating and physically demanding martial arts. Once you learn how to be okay being crushed into the floor by a 300 pound man, the weight of the world feels much much lighter. It brings an immediacy that is missing in most modern problems, and teaches you how to be okay even in the worst of times. I also highly recommend a modest meditation practice. Intensive meditation can also cause mania and psychosis in those prone to it. Just 15 minutes a day of sitting quietly with your thoughts can work wonders.
Psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, really helped me with a few similar issues. It's not a cure but it's a decent brain reboot and an opportunity to break dysfunctional thought patterns.
I'm sure you'll get a lot of helpful comments, and while unfortunately I don't have any useful advice, I would like to commend you for soliciting public input, which can be very difficult. I hope you achieve symptom relief soon, and are able to tackle your longer-term goals. While it doesn't address your issues, you can at least know that many people who don't even know you care about you. I'm confident that a number of people here will provide ideas, and that many others here who may not have anything specific to suggest are rooting for you.
Re: Gaza. I would suggest that anyone who lives in a country that can positively influence the situation write to their representatives. Here is approximately what I sent if it helps:
I appreciated your recent statement committing to help the civilians of Israel and Gaza. However, I am concerned the food, water and medicine is being blocked by the Israeli government. This is unacceptable behavior of any country, much less an ally. Make sure aid can get in and people can get out, before it is too late.
It's my understanding that "siege" Israel has put on Gaza is contingent on Hamas releasing their hostages: they release the hostages, Israel lets food and water and electricity back into Gaza.
Of course I don't think Hamas cares all that much whether Gaza starves: on the other hand, they've taken women and children hostage and Israel needs to get them back. What a mess.
If I had to guess Hamas will not release the hostages, and eventually Israel will let food and water in because they don't want to be seen starving 2 million people.
I the (hopefully) small possibility that your guess is wrong means we should make clear that starving out civilains is unacceptable.
According to NBC, a senior Hamas leader has just offered to release all hostages if Israel stops bombing Gaza.
I don't know how that is going to play out - it's the least unpromising thing I've heard yet, but I'm not optimistic.
I think Hamas did their best to make it clear that they can not be left in power. So unless they are also willing to lay down their arms and and surrender, a ground operations to remove them will still be required, and such an operation will require air support.
To be clear, NBC said Hamas claimed they would release the *civilian* hostages, if Israel stopped bombing. But they reported Hamas said they would not release captured Israeli soldiers, unless Israel released all the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Other terror groups in Gaza, like PIJ, also claimed to have many hostages, and it wasn't clear from the second-hand reporting whether Hamas was even claiming that those hostages would be released.
Of course the only people who don't starve in these situations will be Hamas, they have all the guns and will take food from everyone else.
The good news is that after a few weeks this will make it easy to distinguish Hamas from civilians, you can just shoot anyone who looks well fed.
It seems like standard wartime operating procedure. Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
Besides, who would drive the trucks? If Israelis drive trucks into Gaza, they will be kidnapped or killed. If Gazans drive trucks into Israel then those trucks will be filled with bombs.
If you want to appeal to someone, appeal to the Egyptian government to let refugees in.
Honestly the lack of urgency around this is shocking to me. There are organizations that could bring supplies in that would not be good targets for either group.
You are right that pressure should also be applied to the Egyptian government. And you should make that clear with your representatives. However, neither government gets to blame the other if there is a catastrophe that they could have prevented on their own.
It really isn’t accepted wartime behaviour regardless of who started what. Admittedly if Hamas made it difficult to get food and water in, that’s on them, but Israel is deliberately cutting off supplies, and shutting down water pipelines and have claimed that doing that is a punishment.
I don’t think you would have a problem with this argument if Russia were doing it in Ukraine or Assad in Syria.
Food is a dual use good, as it can be used to feed both civilians and militants. The logistics of feeding an army have been a central constraint on operations for most of history. Strategies around limiting food supply of the enemy (e.g. sieges of castles, blockades) seem well established.
What I think Israel should do is to allow inhabitants of Gaza to come to the Israeli border and surrender. They could have the Red Cross run a refugee camp on their side of the border. (If Hamas then prevented them from surrendering because they prefer to use the civilians as human shields, that would be on them.)
Having civilians trapped in a territory they can not leave while also turning of their water supply seems much worse.
Also, it seems pointless because Hamas is unlikely to surrender just because they and the civilian population are starving -- creating pictures of civilians killed by Israel (which might sometimes even be true) is very much their strategy. Defeating Hamas through hunger would basically accept all of the civilians in Gaza starving. Such a strategy would be strictly inferior to just turning Gaza into a parking lot in terms of both utilitarianism and public relations. (Though obviously still terrible. I feel a good balance between military and humanitarian concerns would be to allow people to flee to safety (IRC camps), then move in with ground troops, leveling buildings whenever resistance is encountered.)
In which war were blockades not at least attempted? I am having a great deal of difficulty coming up with one.
>It seems like standard wartime operating procedure. Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
Ah yes, let's just completely ignore the part where Gaza has no option but to be dependent on Israel for water, power etc by explicit design of Israel as a means of coercive control.
Gaza actually had many options to be independent of Israel for water and electricity but they chose to use the money and resources for other purposes
Maybe don’t engage in the unprovoked, intentional mass slaughter of civilians of the country you depend on to survive?
Why don't they have water and power lines running to Egypt? (Or better still, their own damn power and desalination plants?)
I mean the other option would be for Hamas to spend their resources on water and electricity infrastructure instead of rockets and invasion tunnels
>Hamas should have thought about this before they started a war.
I have never liked the practice of conflating governments with the peoples they claim to represent, but I have a deep-seated hatred of those who do it to the point of holding the latter responsible for the bad behaviour of the former.
I don't see anyone doing this conflating, so I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to mean.
If you are suggesting that because the government is distinct from the people, the people should not be affected by the actions of the government, I would question if that makes any sense at all given what a government is.
Well, you see there was once a country waging war, lead by people with a genocidal approach, from whatever reasons. As this war raged on, brave aviators of the forces opposing that country followed their orders and bombed a harbour town. One large bomb hit the house my grandma was living in a flat with her teenage daughters. The only person alive in the rubble was my mother, a 13-year old girl at the time, saved by a door collapsing on her. She heard her mother die. I can't blame the bomber crew. This had to be done.
Agreed. More parallels include the rise to power of the NSDAP and Hamas, which included getting votes and then deciding that democracy was to bothersome. (Pro-tip: don't vote for anti-democratic, genocidal maniacs.)
I don't support morale bombings against purely civilian targets (for one thing, they don't work), but civilian casualties are a sad fact of war. Not every possible war is worth being waged, but some wars certainly are.
Hamas and the middle eastern world are getting what they want out of it (martyrs and proof that Israel is the rouge state they had always said it was in propaganda), as is Israel, who has wanted to clear off the settlements for a very long time, and even the US: which wants to reassert its regional dominance without having to engage militarily. For nobody to take advantage of a historically precedented cassus belli under the watch of an aircraft carrier builds credibility by establishing to the regional forces that future events like it will not be taken as synchronizing markers with which they could act in unison. The only people not getting what they want are those kids who were born on the wrong side of the literal fence.
Random funny/sad observation: I was watching a Youtube of a Model A Ford owner starting his car. One retro lever was referred to as accelerating or retarding the spark-plug timing.
Whenever the driver said something about the spark timing being retarded, the close-caption algorithm simply excised the (apparently canceled) word.
Just another sign of the times I guess.
I've noticed that on YouTube shorts (their TikToc clone) subtitles will often censor the word "dead". Several YouTubers have also mentioned that they need to avoid saying the word "suicide" or they might trigger an algorithm to send their video down in the search results. So they resort to saying "un-alive-ing" instead.
One of the most interesting things about internet video has been it's uncensored nature: TV has standards it has to conform to, the internet doesn't. Now as more and more advertisers move to online entertainment we are slowly seeing Standards and Practices imposed on creators from above, by algorithms. I wonder where it will end up a few decades from now? We were living in the Wild West, and we didn't really know it.
I saw an older meme discussed on reddit a few days ago. The meme included the words "f*cking retarded". The comments on reddit were about how weird it was that they censored the word "fucking" but not "the r-slur".
I realised I've become really old; because it's apparently now just so fully accepted that "fucking" is less offensive than "retarded" that young people can't even imagine it the other way around. And that's fucking retarded.
Really?
My late sister died age 51. She would have had roughly a mental age of three. Not quite the behaviours of a three year old, but she could usually dress herself, usually manage going to the toilet, but lacked any prospect of ever reading or writing. When I was a child in the 1970s ffs anyone calling Kathy "retarded" - and it did happen, kids can be cruel - would most certainly, in the mores of that time, been thought to have been disagreeably offensive.
Curiously and in retrospect rather shamefully, overt racial slurs were less likely to be challenged.
...I think we knew it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E0ot9iJm_k
Hopefully all the interesting and funny people will move to alternatives such as PeerTube.
What's the game theory solution to Israel-Palestine conflict? Assumed goals could be least harm for most people, *my side winning (whichever side), or other goals.
Palestinian exodus. They lost 70 years ago, kept losing, their allies in the region lost multiple times (when they were supposed to have the upper hand) and are now in shambles. They have no theory of victory: they can't threaten the existence of Israel, they can't reverse the colonization process, stopping it or just slowing it seems extremly hard (because they can't really threaten it to begin with, which makes any discussion closer to begging than to negociation).
They are on a course toward defeat, and any action that they take will only accelerate it. See: the latest attack
The one saving grace could be their demographic, but it is my understanding that ultra-orthodox israelis have a pretty good birth rate, while the living space available to palestinians keep shrinking year after year. A population can grow even in poverty, but eventually population density becomes an issue.
All in all, the only way out is, litteraly, a way out.
Who knows, maybe, in 2000 years, after the horrific actions of the Brasilo-angolian regime, the nations of the world will decide that the palestinians deserve a homeland of their own.
Have seen some floating Ireland / North Ireland as a similar case study with a good outcome.
There are now more Irish than can fit comfortably on the Emerald Isle, with or without the Six Counties. Fortunately, the Irish have shown themselves to be happy, productive, and generally trouble-free citizens of places like Boston, New York, and even London, and so they don't all need to fit on the one Island any more.
There are now more Palestinians than can fit comfortably between the Jordan and the Med, whether they have to share it with the Israelis or not. Unfortunately, the Palestinians have shown themselves to be very unlike the Irish, and approximately every other Arab nation has said "Oh, hell no, we don't want any more of those". With good reason.
It would be very helpful if the Palestinians could emulate the Irish; possibly their best hope for a decent future. But I don't think it's in the cards. Fifty years ago, maybe, but not now.
Since there seems to be a general consensus that things were much better under Ottoman rule, obviously they should immigrate to Turkey.
There were quite a few problems with the Irish back in the day. There's no reason Palestinians wouldn't assimilate given enough time, perhaps even writing right-wing commentary under pseudonyms. ;)
Which Arab countries have granted Palestinian refugees/emigrants the same legal opportunities that New World countries/colonies granted Irish refugees/emigrants? Jordan is the only such country that I'm aware of.
It sure helps that young Irish (the island, not the country specifically) people don't care much about religion, certainly not the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism.
There is none. It's like a game of Diplomacy where one player said "if you do X, I will devote the rest of my game to making you lose", and then you said "Hah, if you do that, I'll do the same to you" and then did X anyway to show you couldn't be intimidated. And now the two of you are engaged in a fight to the death, and everyone else is trying to shape the conflict to serve their own ends.
In theory, everyone could wake up tomorrow, and embrace something like classical Christianity, Buddhism, or Stoicism. They could all say, "I refuse to cause harm in the future based on harm done to me in the past", apply universal forgiveness and loving-kindness (caritas, charity), and move forward into a glorious, happy future. In practice, this would take a miracle.
"In theory, everyone could wake up tomorrow, and embrace something like classical Christianity, Buddhism, or Stoicism. They could all say, "I refuse to cause harm in the future based on harm done to me in the past", apply universal forgiveness and loving-kindness (caritas, charity), and move forward into a glorious, happy future."
Even if they did that, they wouldn't move forward into a glorious, happy future. Would Palestinians be granted citizenship in Israel? Would they get their own state? Who gets Jerusalem? What happens to the settlements? These are all hard questions that won't go away even if everyone becomes perfectly forgiving.
You know, in my generation the Israel-Palestine conflict was the standard example of an insoluble problem.
What I think you're asking is 'putting aside all your personal investment, what's going to happen in the Middle East'? I think it would be seen as a chaotic system (in both the colloquial and technical senses of the word) and nobody could tell you the answer.
My best guess would be 'more war for the next hundred years'.
Yes, it was. And while almost nobody noticed, it inched toward getting solved over the last couple of decades. Israel keep getting closer to a one (israeli) state solution, and palestinians kept losing ground while the surrounding countries are in shambles.
I'm not betting on war for another hundred year. I'm betting on an Israeli victory in fifty.
You could do that IRL with an Israeli index fund. (Though I disagree, so I'm not putting my money there.)
The bonds don't strike me as a great investment. Too many smart, wealthy people who know that and are willing to buy them anyway to help out their relatives, which lowers the interest rate.
Eh. Just because I expect them to achieve their (or their hardliner's) maximalist goals, doesn't mean I also expect them to outperform other investment options. Especially considering I'm not sure I can get one of these on my tax-free account.
US policy has pointed the way to an end to the conflict: a viable state of Palestine combined with one or two generations of peace could have made terrorist recruitment too difficult. Avoidance of this policy has been the intention of the Israeli government, up to and including viewing Hamas as a useful asset against the two-state solution. Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
That article basically says Netanyahu has to some degree and indirectly worked with Hamas, i.e. the government of Gaza, to implement policies designed to keep peace with Gaza, such as allowing work permits and foreign aid, and not aggressively retaliating to minor rocket attacks.
At least since 2007, “reduce tension with Gaza” and “cooperate with Hamas” have been essentially synonymous, because Hamas has all the power in Gaza. Instead Bibi was supposed to do what, support the PA in a civil war with Hamas?
I am pointing to these paragraphs in particular:
> Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
I don't think that any money at all should have ever been allowed to go to Hamas, who has never concealed their nature as a terrorist organization. It would have been better to let money go to a more legitimate authority (I will not try to pick which one, but Hamas is perhaps the worst available one) who could establish their own control over Gaza by means of having all the funds. I highly doubt there was a shortage of West Bank officials in 2007 who would have liked to try winning hearts and minds to cement their own peaceful authority, but that authority would have been in competition with the intent to avoid a second state.
The first paragraph is editorial, and points to no specific action. The second is hearsay, but supposing it’s true, 2019 is 12 years after Hamas established control over Gaza. I don’t think you can point to that and assign responsibility for Hamas to Netanyahu. Even if you could, it’s hardly unheard of to think keeping your enemies divided is good strategy - bad in hindsight in this case, but hindsight is 20/20.
Israel has been repeatedly criticized for keeping Gaza too closed and for not allowing enough funds to flow in. But you can’t let money into Gaza without some of it going to Hamas. There is no alternative within Gaza. Saying “no money should go to Hamas” is saying that Israel should have tightened the blockade around Gaza even more - but then Netanyahu would be blamed for giving more grievance to Hamas and increasing tension!
But game theory doesn’t take into account players’ desire for revenge, right?, and desire for revenge seems like a huge part of what’s going on, for both sides. Who gets what land seems secondary.
In game theory, isn't the optimal strategy for iterated prisoner dilemmas "Tit for Tat", where if they defect against you, you defect against them in the next round? That takes revenge into account. Although I recall that the most vengence based strategy (often called Grudge) is where if they defect against you, you always defect against them regardless of what they do in subsequent rounds. That strategy was better than always cooperating, but suboptimal compared to Tit for Tat.
It seems to me that as long as Hamas keeps hitting Defect, Israel needs to hit Defect as well.
I think the civilian casualties became equal on both sides a few days ago. Too bad they are not following tit-for-tat, it could save an enormous number of lives.
Tit-for-tat is only the optimal strategy because the binary simplicity of the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't allow for more escalatory options. There's no option to punish your opponent even harder, or to destroy them altogether.
This is why, I think, game theory is an amazingly poor framework for thinking about complex problems. Strip down an incredibly complex problem into an incredibly simple one, then solve the simple one, then speculate on how that simple solution scales back up to the ridiculously complex problem is a tempting approach if you like solving simple problems, but in practice all the stuff that you've abstracted away is likely to be very important.
That is a good point. Imagine a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma where you could Super Defect, which would cause you to lose worse than defect-defect, but your opponent would lose twice as much as you did...
The problem is they're not playing tit-for-tat with civilians, but with Hamas: killing an equal number of Gazan civilians doesn't hurt Hamas at all, and Hamas is the one who defected.
The civilians go on to play tit-for-tat with the opposing side's leadership only to be redirected into playing it with the other side's civilians, leading to the cycles of growing nationalism and mass recruitment observed on all sides of the conflict.
As far as revenge as a motivating factor, Cremieux notes that increases of one side killing the other above baseline rates in response to the other side killing them make up a small percentage of killing on either side: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence.
That sounds like a not-so-useful way of defining it. If increasing the scale of killing by 10% each step is the "above baseline rate" then you could say that only 10% of deaths are because of it... but when one million people have died as a result of an individual murder, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the policy of escalation was responsible for virtually every subsequent death?
If I understand you correctly, you're describing a model in which the level of violence rises regularly in jumps of e.g. 10%, continuously defining new baselines. I don't think that describes the data discussed in the post, however. Instead, the data show rises following killings, that then drop to 0, or below 0. That is, new baselines are not set. I suggest you look at the linked post for the details, if you're interested.
The killings are discrete events, and while you could say that the levels drop to zero, it is because one side has to plan their next attacks while the other can respond instantly. It isn't reasonable to describe the periods between attacks as periods of peace.
Last comment, since like I said, I think it makes more sense to look at the post, first. To clarify, though, I didn't say that the level dropped to 0, but that the *increase* dropped to 0, or below 0; it dropped below baseline. The baseline is still above 0. The models looked at deaths per day, using decimals, rather than whole numbers. Presumably this involved averaging over a number of days, although I didn't delve into the data. e.g. one could take a 7 day moving average of daily deaths which would result in daily values of less than 1, but more than 0. I'll just repeat that I think it makes sense to look at the post, if you're interested, to get a better idea of what models they're actually using, and what the models indicate.
For Israel, the obvious winning strategy is to continue doing what they were already doing*. A few decades later, the entire territory of Palestine will be theirs.
* that means harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime, establishing new settlements in their territory and then defending them by military force, and inflicting a lot of civilian collateral damage as a response to any terrorist or other attack
Israel isn’t settling the Gaza Strip. In fact it has removed itself from Gaza. The solution to Gaza is complex - and it needs to involve Egypt.
I wasn't aware that the settlements have stopped in Gaza. Thank you!
Stopped, and been forcefully removed by the Israeli army. Gaza now belongs entirely to the Gazans.
Its borders, airspace, and seacoast still belong to Israel and Egypt, and unfortunately both of those have good reason to want those borders very tightly controlled in a way that can't help but seriously impede Gazan economic growth (or even stability). But settlement per se, or the prospect of Gazans being thrown out of the homes they presently live in, has not been a problem since 2005.
The last time I debated extensively about the situation in Palestine was apparently before 2005 (the time flies quickly), so I didn't know about this. I have noticed somewhere that some settlements were removed in 2005, but I didn't know whether new ones were or were not built afterwards.
Previously, the settlements were such an obvious obstacle to peace, that any debate that didn't mention them didn't make much sense. Like, how can you live in peace with someone who regularly with impunity (yeah, technically illegal according to Israeli law, but never prosecuted in practice, and usually defended by IDF) takes random pieces of your land? Or the practice of randomly destroying homes and crops of Palestinians, to encourage them to move further away.
My question now is, whether it makes sense to perceive Gaza as... well, practically a separate country, unrelated to the West Bank? Because it seems to me that the settlements are still built, and Palestinian homes demolished, in the West Bank. Is that correct? Do the Palestinians living in Gaza perceive that as "someone else's problem", or do they identify with the West Bank? I mean, many of them probably have families there.
Ignoring this part, it seems like the source of most problem for the average person in Gaza is Hamas. (Israel maybe indirectly, by controlling the borders.) From the outside, one might ask "so why don't Palestinians replace Hamas with someone else?", but that probably makes even less sense than asking why Russians do not vote for someone other than Putin.
So it sadly seems like the only possible solution is an outside intervention that would remove Hamas. But the only country that has borders with Gaza is Israel, which isn't exactly an impartial party in this situation (them trying to remove Hamas would probably be perceived, quite reasonably, as an attempt to conquer the territory of Gaza), and the next country nearby is Egypt, which has a political problem with opposing another Muslim dictatorship. The American interventions seem to be limited to supporting Israel militarily (and generally, Americans are great at war but suck at peacekeeping).
The status quo in Gaza seems to be: keep them isolated, and occasionally eliminate some Hamas leader by bombing their home. Mostly efficient to keep them under control; not likely for the situation to improve, ever.
Harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime: last I checked, Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinian's in 2005 and they've spent the last decade and a half firing rockets into their neighbors backyard. Israel doesn't have this kind of problem with their other Arab neighbors: you don't see Egypt or Jordan hurling rockets into Israel, and Israel doesn't *harass* them back. Their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank don't launch rocket at Israel either, and Israel isn't marching in there and bombing buildings to rubble.
The problem seems to be one particular Arab neighbor: the Gaza Strip, as ruled by Hamas.
Considering that Israel is gradually taking over Palestine, instead of Egypt or Jordan, it seems quite natural that Palestinians respond differently than Egyptians or Jordanians.
(Also, some factual mistakes pointed out by Concerned Citizen.)
Israel is gradually taking over one of the two disjoint parts of Palestine, and the Palestinians who live there seem a bit perturbed about that. The other part of Palestine, Israel evacuated almost a generation ago and has conspicuously not been taking over since then. And the Palestinians in *that* part of Palestine, just murdered over a thousand innocent Israeli civilians.
Curious, that, and the easy causality of "they don't like being taken over so they shoot back" doesn't seem to fit.
I disagree with a couple of those points on a factual basis. Israel has been attacked with rockets from the north by Hezbollah, which led to US acceptance of its annexation of the Golan heights from former Syrian territory. Secondly, Israel has conducted periodic reprisals in Gaza, referred to as "mowing the grass," in the aftermath of rocket attacks and the two Intifada. I would offer citations, but it's just from the wiki page.
Second to that, you should really try looking into the IDF's security policy around the west bank settlements. It is up to you to decide whether the incidents qualify as harassment but there are a long list of them, and they appear inflammatory in nature. Finally Jordan and Egypt are Israel's military allies and it would make no sense for mutual harassment to go beyond their respective intelligence services. I can think of one incident with Jordan but haven't ever looked into that subject.
This fits with my point, which is that Israel seems to only bomb and invade their neighbors who are flinging rockets at them, and not the one's who aren't.
The West Bank may have legitimate grievances against Israel for harassment, but that doesn't apply to Gaza. Israel removed their settlements in Gaza and handed the territory over the Palestinian Authority: after Hamas took it from the PA they've been shooting rockets sending terrorists into Israel. Hamas is clearly the worst neighbor Israel has in terms of harassment, and they're the one getting invaded and bombed right now. Israel doesn't seem to have the same problem with many of its other Arab neighbors, and they seem to get along fairly well.
In a sense I don't see how that could be anything but true, because all of the players have access to rockets and none of them would have ethical problems with targeting cities if the nation of those cities had at some time in the past attacked them. Even Israel is firing rockets at a city.
Are the Israelis firing rockets indiscriminately at a city hoping to kill as many people as possible, or are they picking their targets carefully and using guided missiles?
What do you mean? They could have the entire territory now if they wanted, but what can they do with all the Palestinians?
Right. Israel continues to take more territory gradually in terms of settlements, but the Palestinian population continues to grow rapidly. It has more than doubled in the past 30 years: from 2.2 million in 1990 to 4.8 million now.
Palestinians in the West Bank may have reason to oppose Israel because of settlements, but Israel forcibly removed every single settlement in the Gaza Strip in 2005. Those who did not leave voluntarily were removed by force. Yet is is Gaza, not the West Bank, that is constantly flinging rockets at Israeli civilians and sending killers into Israel to wreak havoc.
Gazans and west bank citizens see themselves as one nation. That said, fighters are much easier to recruit in Gaza because the high population density makes occupation very difficult and a history of civilian deaths in air strikes much exceeding that of the west bank makes vengeance related motives more available for recruitment.
"Gazans and west bank citizens see themselves as one nation."
Citation needed. It may be true, and I'd genuinely like to see real data. But the Gazans chose to have Hamas as their government, and while there's been some grumbling since then I haven't seen any serious attempt to change that. The West Bank citizens chose to have the PA as their government, and ditto. There's definitely a serious difference between the tow , in a way hard to square with "one nation".
It seems that Gazans and West Bank Citizens see each other as two nations: both Hamas and Fatah have set up Palestinian Authorities in opposition to each other, both claiming they are the rightful representatives of the Palestinian people, and they are still enemies to this day. The Palestinian Authority (Fatah's version, in the West Bank) supports Israel's blockade of Gaza, and Hamas kills Fatah members now and then.
It seems pretty clear that right now the Palestinian people have two nations, and they do not get along and one of those nations shoots rockets into Israel and sends men in to kill and take hostages, and the other does not.
They are doing something with them now, ordering them to occupy a smaller area while starving them and leveling buildings. They are following the historical precedent for what kinds of mass deaths, such as starvation (Churchill and India, the continued alliance with the Soviet Union during the engineered famine in Ukraine) or civilian collateral in air strikes (Pattern bombing in Germany, the firebombing in Japan, North Korea, Vietnam), that the USA and Europe have proven themselves willing to tolerate.
NATO and the United Nations have an extensive modern history of intervening in what they term "genocides," (Yugoslavia mainly, the UN failed to stop the Rwandan genocide but some peacekeepers did give their lives), but they (along with Russia's recent ethnic cleansing in eastern Ukraine) involved armed infantry or civilian perpetrators. The United States has deployed observers to Israel for the implied purpose ensuring that the troops will not do that. I don't support this rule (that you can kill on a mass scale as long as it isn't with firearms or machetes), it is very bad, and only seems technical when you are 100% sure you or your family will never, ever be caught in the wrong place.
Do you mean that you agree that "in a few decades, the entire territory of Palestine will be theirs"? If so, how would this come about? You think they are going to genocide the Gaza Palestinians right now? What will they do in the remaining few decades before they take over the entire territory? Fight WW3?
Viliam suggests they will achieve this by "continuing their current policy, that means harassing their Palestinian neighbors during peacetime, establishing new settlements in their territory and then defending them by military force, and inflicting a lot of civilian collateral damage as a response to any terrorist or other attack". However you seem to suggest it will happen due to Israel completely changing its approach, to genocide.
Israel's preference is to send all of the Gazans to countries who will accept them through Egypt, and the same for the West Bank/Jordan. They have worked against the two-state solution, and the idea of letting Palestinians vote in their elections is so far outside the country's Overton window that only US academics write books about the idea. In order to clear out the two areas, they need to create a refugee crisis. One way to create a refugee crisis is through violence on a mass scale with little avoidance of civilians. If Israel does not change its approach I have a hard time believing that over the next 50 years there will continue to be a community living in the Gaza strip, and that will be the success of the current policy.
The idea that Israel would deliberately prevent Gazans from exiting (to places other than Israel, of course) so that they could kill them? No, that's crazy, Netanyahu only wants them gone. But the closely related idea, that Israel is willing to accept an unlimited number of casualties in the effort to get rid of the population that has engaged in the conflict with them for generations and will for the foreseeable future, is no more than current events.
The U.S. and Israel arranged a free and fair Palestinian election overseen by international observers in 2005. Unfortunately… Hamas won. The election worsened the situation considerably.
Arafat and Abbas rejected two good offers of a two state solution.
Arafat’s second intifada radicalized israelis when their commitment to the state solution was rewarded with bus bombings.
Most israelis would love nothing more than living in peace beside a peaceful Palestinian state, but they’ve learned through bitter experience that Palestinians won’t accept that anytime soon.
It's complicated because this game has many players: Israel, Gaza, The West Bank, Iran and Iranian-backed military organizations, and 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 Arab states. Maybe the US also counts as a player with its own goals.
Iran seems to be the main instigator recently, and Iran just seems to want to keep all the other players divided enough that it won't be left standing alone against aligned enemies. The Palestinians want Israel to disappear; Israel wants the Palestinians to stop attacking them; the wealthier Arab states seem to want stability in the region, but stability at home probably means being seen to back the Palestinians to some extent.
Since the goals of so many players aren't entirely clear, I don't know how one arrives at game theoretic equilibria.
The US absolutely needs to be considered as a player with its own goals
It's possible that American Christians who want to use Israel to bring about the end of the world are yet another player.
Hey, hey! We don't want Israel to bring about the end of the world, we just want them to exist so that the world can end. Big difference!
I'm not actually a fan of basing geopolitics on interpretations of apocalyptic scripture, but Evangelicals are definitely a solid pro-Israel block. Not to mention people who spend a lot of time reading the Old Testament are more likely to favor the Jews over the Cannanites.
Does anybody have a transcript or video of Scott's speech at the Manifest Conference?
No, but speaking of the conference, here's a nice picture of Zvi, all grubby and content, playing poker at the Manifest Conference. https://i.imgur.com/kEb7pMq.jpg
No, but this question prompted me to find this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMVaEYMp7_o&ab_channel=ManifoldMarkets
I've seen photos but this is the first time I've seen a video of Scott before. I truly do not say this in a hateful or mean-spirited way or anything, but if I didn't know who he was I would have given a 75% chance to this man being gay.
These various reactions people have are interesting. My impression was that it doesn't surprise me that this person is a psychiatrist/mental health professional.
Assuming that 90% of men are straight and the rest are gay (which probably overstates the frequency of gay men), I think the 75% estimate would imply that gay men are about 27 times more likely than straight men to act like this (I haven't watched the video)
Hm. I think I see some of what you're picking up on. But to me, he reads more as a spectrumy geek who cobbled together a functional set of interpersonal mannerisms from a variety of sources. Or maybe, as someone suggested, this is just what his subculture of Bay Area geeks are like; I couldn't say. (And if the second, possibly it derived from a generation of other people doing the first.)
I know quite a few people who are on the spectrum, and way more than half of them, something like 80% of them, are unusual in gender presentation. Most of the men are people you'd guess are gay, though in fact none of the ones I know are. They're asexual, identify as bisexual but have no sexual experience, or are straight but with some limitations (don't enjoy intercourse, have one and only one act they enjoy). One of them says, "yeah, you can check the gay box on almost everything about me. My interests, how I talk, how I move -- I qualify on every measure except for the gender-I'm-attracted-to box."
Interesting. The vibe I got was just "smart and trying to be very, very precise about every word".
It's also interesting that, now that I've seen/heard Scott speak... we have a new Catholic bishop of the Colorado region. Bishop Golka. He speaks in the exact same manner as Scott. He resembles Scott too in a few certain ways. I'm thinking doppelganger.
I think you are misreading what has to do with the part of California he comes from. I know other people who talk with the same affect and intonations from that area.
Yes. From living in California that’s what I got.
If you want us to take you seriously, show us your gay forecasting record!
He seems kind of soft spoken and amiable. But I think it depends on the bias one is coming from. Scott was way less awkward than I thought (maybe because he somewhere had written that he feels not as competent a speaker than a writer so I pictured someone super shy and nervous) and so I instead I was surprised about him being at ease and his deep voice.
Really? Does not give me that vibe, but then again I have no gaydar or the likes. Certainly not on appearance or voice or mannerisms or dress.
Scott is just shy.
2 random observations/questions:
Anyone else find it bizarrely coincidental that the side that lost the US Civil War are the biggest advocates of the 2A? Has anyone written on this seeming connection?
Given how much the gov. has funded psychology research, is there any connection between their research and the replication crisis? IOW, did the CIA* fund a bunch of fake research?
*not just them, I know
I think that you're missing the fact that owning a gun is a part of rural culture. Not just in the practical sense, but in the sense that banning guns is sort of like banning Christmas. In rural America, guns have a lot more practical use, mainly for shooting animals either to defend your own animals or for hunting. To outlaw these uses maybe doesn't make sense. I think that a lot of people then realize that the left is indiscriminately trying to outlaw all guns and they fight back by indescriminently trying to protect all guns, and once both sides are locked into those positions it becomes a game of fighting for every inch, so well reasoned compromises get thrown out immediately.
Has anyone suggested gun regulations which are explicitly dependent on population density? E.g. gun registration in zip codes (counties? congressional districts?) with more than X people per square mile?
No, I haven't heard that. At a glance, that seems like a good idea (treating urban and rural regions differently), but I'm not sure how you would actually structure such a law
The way to structure it would be to leave gun control up to local government. Most big cities would ban guns, most rural counties wouldn't.
But then it seems like it would be pretty easy for someone in the city to just drive out to the country to buy a gun. It's not like anyone's going to search your car at the city limit.
"up to local government" - sounds reasonable
Re enforcement: Well, agreed that there wouldn't be searches at the city limit, but we still have geographical differences in possession laws that sort-of function (marijuana, fireworks, alcohol). I don't know the details of enforcement (sanctions for being caught with banned items? searches on suspicion? random searches?).
Police response times tend to be lower in rural areas, where in addition to crime there are also dangerous animals to worry about. So "you don't need a gun, just call the police" goes over less well there.
Some of the desire for gun control comes from the simple fact that guns are dangerous and kill a lot of people. But I think there's a more covert motivation. Ask a lot of Leftists how to handle crime and they'll tell you: end racist policing, end over-policing, invest in non-police solutions, give second chances, do alternatives to incarceration, do rehabilitation in prisons, drug-treatment programs, end the school-to-prison pipeline, etc. They'll say this will reduce murder and incarceration to the much lower levels found in Western Europe. Police and courts are locally-controlled, while jails and prisons are under local or state control. So why haven't blue cities in blue states implemented that platform? Why does Chicago have far more murders and lock up far more people than anywhere in Western Europe? Gun control is a part of their platform that they can't try, allowing them to say that the full platform has not been tried yet.
The Civil War was lost by the Democrats, I think you have their 2A opinions backwards.
If we're placing the onus of losing the US Civil War on a party, the party that lost it would not strictly speaking be Democrats but a breakaway faction usually called "Southern Democrats", ie. primarily those who walked out of the Democratic convention of 1860 to nominate Breckinridge. The (rest of the) Democrats backed the Northern war effort.
The Civil War was lost by Democrats, but their descendants switched parties. Today, if someone flies the Confederate flag or makes excuses for the Confederacy, they're a Republican.
And yet, the breakaway Democrats were the ones who created gun control - to disarm black people.
The question is whether the purpose of gun control has substantively changed. Doesn't really look like it.
Outlawing guns only works on law-abiding people. Since white people are statistically more likely to be law-abiding than black people, the overall current effect of gun control is to disarm whites while keeping blacks armed.
Chicago has similar demographics to Alabama (30% black) but a very different distribution of guns.
This is basically entirely an artifact of statistical fuckery.
Go off into deep Appalachia sometime, look around, and come back and tell me that white people are more law-abiding.
Shit, look at Ma and Pa Ferguson sometime. There's an entire state that said "Fuck the law" and elected a governor who agreed with them - and when the IRS went after him, his wife ran instead, and continued their campaign of "Fuck the law" - Ma Ferguson was the first woman elected governor in a general election, and it was all due to a general attitude of an entire state of "Fuck the law."
And, speaking as a white person, with a long heritage of people behind me who said "Fuck the law" - fuck the law.
If disarming Black people is still the purpose of gun control, why do a large majority of Black people vote for the party that favors gun control?
That question would be equally valid a century ago.
Did any black people vote for Democrats in 1920 or 1924?
The answer a century ago would be that the Democratic party was divided into two factions with very different views on civil rights (with the Republicans in the middle).
Gun control began in the South, and the South was, until relatively recently, much stronger supporters of gun control than the North.
Gun control has often come from fear of the underclass, particularly the Black underclass. In California it was legal to carry guns without a permit until 1967: right after the Black Panther party came to the California Capitol armed with shotguns and rifles. They walked right in: why not, it wasn't illegal to carry guns in the capitol building at the time. They came as a protest about how many black people were lynched or killed by cops, and they advocated forming bands of armed black men who would patrol around, watching as cops interacted with black men to prevent the cops from getting violent.
This united both the Republicans and Democrats in California to ban carrying guns without a permit. Clearly the fear was of black people walking around with guns. However, the ban affected a lot of white people too. Bans like that, which popped up all around the place to disarm the underclass, disarmed respectable (and mostly rural) whites as well. They weren't happy about that, and it led to the 2nd Amendment movement as we know it today forming.
Makes sense to me. They have enough guns, they'll win next time.
The US Civil War was fought over the politics of slavery, but it was fought between culturally distinct regions. Part of the reason for slave states being in the south and free states being in the north was economic effects of climate (i.e. the cash crops that could be most profitably grown and harvested by enslaved labor gangs grew best in the Deep South) but it also had a cultural component: in Albion's Seed terms, the Puritans turned firmly against chattel slavery first, followed by the Quakers, while the Cavaliers clung firmly to it and the Borderers had a complicated relationship with it: borderer-dominated regions of the Middle South, especially West Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, tended to have more sympathy for gradual emancipation proposals in the 1820s and 1830s and were Southern Unionist strongholds during the war itself. But Borderers in the Deep South, particularly the "black belt" cotton-growing regions, were often as or more pro-slavery than the Cavalier-derived population of the eastern Middle South.
[Obligatory reminder that "Puritan" in the Albion's Seed sense refers to the first big wave of settlement to New England their cultural descendants, not to adherents of the Calvinist religious tradition: the original Puritans were hard-core Calvinists, but the Borderers were also mostly adherents of the doctrinally-Calvinist Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the latter's modern cultural descendants are much more likely to be adherents of Calvinist/evangelical religious transitions than the formers']
In terms of attitudes around private gun ownership, the groups in descending order of support are probably:
1. Borderers, whose culture is the most tolerant of private violence and whose notions of "sovereign liberty" draw an equivalence between disarming someone (taking away his independent ability to personally and directly defend his life and freedom) and oppressing him.
2. Cavaliers, who are also relatively accepting of private violence, and whose notions of "hierarchical liberty" imply a connection between societal status and enjoyment of privileges like the right to bear arms. I don't think it's a coincidence that liberalization of gun laws in most Southern states coincides with the decline of old Cavalier-dominated political machines (cavaliers tending to favor policies intended to allow the "right sorts" of people to own and carry guns) in favor of more Borderer-dominated political movements.
3. Quakers, who strongly oppose private violence on pacifist grounds but are also suspicious of state violence, and whose notions of "reciprocal liberty" inform a relatively moderate "you do your thing and I'll do mine" attitude on many issues including gun control.
4. Puritans, who are also deeply adverse to private violence and whose notions of "ordered liberty" call for putting the capacity to do violence as firmly as possible under the control of democratically-accountable public institutions.
Modern rhetorical battle lines around the interpretation of the second amendment and gun control policy are framed in very strongly Puritan vs Borderers terms. The Puritan side takes the position that the right to keep and bear arms attaches only to members of a "well-regulated militia" which they read as those who have enlisted in state or federal part-time volunteer military units (namely state militias and the National Guard) and are subject to military discipline while bearing those arms, and that as a matter of policy guns should be kept out of private hands to prevent violence and mayhem and that private gun ownership for self defense is a childish power fantasy at best and dangerous vigilantism at worst.
By contrast, the Borderer side reads the second amendment as securing a near-absolute natural right to arm yourself, with "militia" referring to the people as independent guarantors of their own liberties; infringing this is seem as a dangerous move towards tyranny. And from a policy perspective, that private gun ownership is important and valuable both for self defense and as a check against state oppression.
I've read Albion's Seed, but I don't feel like I finished the section on the Scots-Irish thinking their culture was just as influential today. Much less so, in fact. Maybe this is now just one of its most visible expressions nationally?
So as I read your list, actually, it sounds to me like the Cavaliers are kind of absorbing the Borderers, and in the process keeping what they like and discarding the rest. Specifically, as their own attitudes around guns dissolved, an opening occurred. Now I'm thinking, perhaps instead of 2A advocacy, pro gun culture better captures what I'm referring to.
Then it seems like the latter went from being divided during the war, to mostly on their way out today. If I have that right, it seems like an interesting history. Perhaps I can ask a more specific question than I started this with: what are the main parts of that culture still with us, and do they have anything in common with gun culture?
Scots-Irish is most influential in Appalachia and the surrounding regions: "Hillbilly Elegy" was written about the Scots-Irish as they are today.
I come from a mix of Puritans, Scot's Irish, and more recent Scandinavian immigrants. The Puritan-Scandi side of my family is noticeably different in culture than the Scots-Irish side. My Puritan relatives are Teetotalers, professionals, and never raise their voice in public. My Scots-Irish relatives include quite a few alcoholics and are far more chaotic and loud. I associate my Puritan-Scandi relatives with soberness, hard work, and a desire for peace and stability. I associate my Scots-Irish family with wildness, and bad outcomes (drug addiction, car accidents, divorces) accepted with a shrug and a smile.
"The US Civil War was fought over the politics of slavery,"
The South fought over slavery.
The North fought over territory.
I'd say that the North fought for the Union, which isn't quite the same thing as fighting for territory. The Mexican American war was a fight for territory, the Civil War was a fight to keep the country in one piece instead of two. Similar, but different.
>The North fought over territory.
Sort of. If the North just wanted to keep the territory and didn't care about slavery, then Northern states would have voted for someone like Douglas or Bell in 1860 and the South probably wouldn't have felt the need to secede. Or post-secession, they could have signed on the the Crittenden Compromise, which was broadly acceptable to most Southern members of congress but was dead-on-arrival with Northerners.
Counterpoint: if the North was willing to go to war over slavery, they had decades to do it before Ft. Sumter. And/or have the Emancipation Proclamation apply to slaves in the US, not just the SCA.
I think it's fair to say that the politics around slavery in the North was complicated but generally anti-, and the politics around slavery in the South was complicated but generally pro-.
Why do you think the first part is a counterpoint? There's nothing inconsistent or strange about seeking to pursue an aim you are "willing to go to war over" through the democratic process first, rather than just jumping straight to a much bloodier and costlier "go to war over it" solution. Most people would agree that you should try to stick to the peaceful route for as long as humanly possible.
I'm not sure what is a bigger objection to your "most people would agree" statement -- that you're applying 21st century idealism to the 19th or that "most people" in terms of the general population is not at all the same as "most people" in the class that actually declares or implements war.
Even moreso when you look at the wars that were actually fought pre WWI. Slavery could have been ended with a punitive raid -- kill all the slaveholders (the ghost of Sheman nods approvingly), free all the slaves, go home, fortify the border with the CSA. But the US clearly wanted to hold the territory as their prime concern.
The rest of your comment was informative and very well put, but this:
"and the latter's modern cultural descendants are much more likely to be adherents of Calvinist/evangelical religious transitions than the formers'"
...I find a mixture of incomprehensible and annoyongly political (which may not be intentional but comes across on the surface: "just in case it sounded like I was saying something positive about Christianity, don't worry--the cultural deacendents of those people are the ones who hate Christianity with every fibre of their being!"). Scott's review of the book, and I assume the book itself, have the same problem.
What does it even mean to describe as the "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, people who don't share, or indeed actively hate, their Puritan values and beliefs? Maybe you'd say they share the moral values of ordered liberty and compassionate social reform. In which case I'd ask which of the following are the "descendents" with those values:
The ones who say (about abortion) "I demand the right to do whatever the fuck I want, no matter who it hurts" or the ones who say "every life is sacred"? Or a third group?
The ones who say (about riots) "a neccesary reaction to perceived oppression" or the ones who say "the rule of law is non-negotiable, zero tolerance for mob violence from anyone"? Or a third group?
The ones who say (about the federalist limits in the constitution) "they're a relic of morons from the past and everyone should just ignore them and pretend they're not there" or the ones who say "they were carefully crafted for a reason, and changes should happen properly, in accordance with the written amendment processes"? Or a third group?
All of these are honest, not rhetorical, questions. Insofar as there are indeed "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, I'm not at all clear on which of the above groups they are.
>What does it even mean to describe as the "cultural descendents" of the Puritans, people who don't share, or indeed actively hate, their Puritan values and beliefs? Maybe you'd say they share the moral values of ordered liberty and compassionate social reform.
I wrote in quite a bit more detail about that in a discussion a while back on SSC, where I was contrasting my understanding of an Albion's Seed-based Puritans vs Borderers dynamic with the superficially similar model proposed by Mencius Moldbug that 20th/21st Century Progressive ideology is Calvinism with Christian theology stripped out.
The cultural threads I identified as tying modern Urban Archipelago progressives to New England Puritans were (quoting from my comment then):
"1. A “civil contract” attitude towards marriage, implying an openness to divorce, a low importance placed on theological definitions of marriage, etc.
2. A less male-dominated family structure than other cultural clusters examined (apart from the Quakers).
3. A communitarian attitude towards child-rearing and a very high value placed on formal education.
4. Commercial-centered economic patterns and urban-based settlement patterns.
5. A “grace-centered” sense of honor, where honor is distinguished by holding correct attitudes (as opposed to the Quaker sense of honor being determined by correct actions, Cavaliers honor based on social rank, and Scotch-Irish “primal honor” based on “valor and virility”).
6. A very low-violence culture, combined with a strong antipathy towards private violence, even in self-defense (contrasted with Cavalier and Scotch-Irish cultures where revenge violence was practically obligatory in the right circumstances).
7. High taxes funding robust social services (mainly education and alms) compared to the other populations.
8. “Ordered Liberty” freedom ways, where liberty was seen as a condition that society as a whole has when everyone is treated fairly and the laws are in accordance with justice and morality. Contrasts with Cavalier “Hegemonic Liberty” where liberty is a condition individuals have when they can enjoy the privileges due to their social rank; Quaker “Reciprocal Liberty” where freedom is understood in live-and-let-live Golden Rule terms (afford others the same freedoms you yourself would hope to enjoy); and Scotch-Irish “Natural Liberty” where freedom is understood in terms of personal sovereignty and rugged individualism."
My original comment I'm quoting from: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/19/ot26-au-bon-thread/#comment-230047
I think "Puritans" is a terrible label for that set of "clustered around the north-eastern coast and settlements" population, it seems to be due mainly to the idea of the Pilgrim Fathers. 'Cavaliers versus Puritans' works kind of okay for the 17th century but for later times, as mentioned above, they had shifted significantly from the original roots.
"Dissenters" is perhaps a better label for the 'Puritans', since in America they seem to have fairly rapidly become Congregationalists and had much more roots within the Church of England than the Presbyterians who were the Calvinists proper and the 'Scots-Irish' (Ulster Irish) who made up the Borderers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Dissenters#18th_century_dissenters
They could also be called Nonconformists, in the earlier usage, but again that label began to be more identified with the likes of the Methodists, who seem to be the main model of mainstream American Protestantism, and are another offshoot of the Chuirch of England.
The Cavaliers and the original North-Eastern elite would have had common roots within Anglicanism (see the Episcopal Church which carried on the post-Revolution heritage of same), and which is the church Washington for one notionally belonged to - so what are the differences, then, between the Southern Cavalier/Planter stock and the Boston Brahmins, as it were? And yet there *are* cultural differences which do not neatly cleave along denominational lines.
And of course their descendants went on to become Transcendentalists and Unitarians, so by the 19th century and the Civil War we are not talking about Puritans pure and simple any longer.
This is the problem with trying to stick on theological labels to political/ethnic (very vaguely) groupings.
>I think "Puritans" is a terrible label for that set of "clustered around the north-eastern coast and settlements" population, it seems to be due mainly to the idea of the Pilgrim Fathers.
I agree, and use the label for lack of a better term because that's the label Fischer uses in Albion's Seed for the founding population and their first few generations of descendants, and I don't really have a less-bad term handy. That's why I included the disclaimer that ascend found objectionable, to clarify that I'm talking about cultural lineage, not theology or religion as the label can be read as implying.
IIRC, Fischer uses the "Puritan", "Cavalier", etc labels because most of the book focuses on analysis of what we know about the founding populations and their colonial-era descendants and how we know that. He does switch to the label "Yankee" for the New England Puritans' more distant descendants during the 19th century. I considered and decided against adopting that usage, because:
1. Fischer only uses it in a few parts of one chapter near the end of the book, which almost never makes it into summaries and reviews. So even people familiar with Albion's Seed often won't recognized the term if I use it thus.
2. "Yankee" comes with its own baggage. Depending on context, it can be read as referring to Americans in general, or to the Union side in the American Civil War (which also included most Quakers, many Borderers, a few Cavaliers, and any number of more recent immigrants who were still their own distinct cultures and not particularly assimilated into any of the four cultural clusters Fischer traces, not just the Fischer's Yankees), or to those affiliated with New York's American League baseball team, or to rural New Englanders as distinct from Bostonians and the like.
To most people, a Yankee is someone from the USA.
To Americans, a Yankee is someone from the North.
To Northerners, a Yankee is someone from the Northeast.
To Northeasterners, a Yankee is someone from New England.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is someone from Vermont.
To Vermonters, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.
But there's a much better Albion's Seed label for the current liberal ethos than Puritan - "Quaker". Scott himself, when analyzing Albion's Seed (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/), wrote how, unlike the weirdo Puritans, Quakers seem "ordinary" to us - and by that it's rather evidently that they seem like ordinary modern liberals, just transplanted to a 1700s setting. Even the current American liberal support for gun control seems rather more an extension of Quaker distaste for violence than Puritan, well, anything.
If we want to analyze modern American politics through Albion's Seed lens, it would seem to me to rather be Quakers vs. Borderers than anything else. The Cavaliers were assimilated to a Borderer ethos after the Civil War destroyed their livelihood and Puritans (and numerous immigrant groups) to Quaker ethos after the Congregationalists became Unitarians and then their descendants just moved even further away from strict Puritan Calvinism, religion-wise.
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it works. My take is that Quakerism seems "ordinary" to us because it seems to be in the water supply throughout American cultures, not because it's central to modern American progressivism. If it's associated with any of Scott's color tribes, the Grey Tribe strikes me as having more in common with the Quakers than Blue Tribe does. Blue Tribe probably does have more Quaker influence than Red Tribe does, but Red Tribe isn't devoid of it, and Blue Tribe feels a lot more Puritan than Quaker to me.
The three biggest point here that jump out to me are what Fischer calls Freedom Ways, Honor Ways, and Order Ways.
Freedom Ways: Quakers have "reciprocal liberty", where you afford others the sorts of freedoms you'd want afforded to you. Puritans have "ordered liberty", where freedom is a condition societies have when their institutions are just and equitable. And Borderers practice "sovereign liberty", where freedom is a condition an individual has if he's able to defend his own interests. I definitely see Sovereign Liberty attitudes strong in the Red Tribe and Ordered Liberty strong in the Blue Tribe (and where they look disordered, like the areas @ascend mentioned below, it's because they're rejecting the legitimacy of institutions they see as unjust or inequitable), with Reciprocal Liberty accepted with reservations across the political and cultural spectrum.
Honor Ways: Quakers have what Fischer calls "Holiness-centered" honor, where honor is obtained and virtue demonstrated through good thoughts and actions. Puritans have "Grace-centered" honor, where honor lies in being one of the Elect, who are recognizable in large part by espousal of correct beliefs and opinions. And Borderers have "Primal honor", where honor is found in strength and virility and shown in ways that, if uncharitably framed, sound an awful lot like the modern concept of "toxic masculinity". As with Freedom Ways, the Quaker notions of Honor (with shifts away from looking at "goodness" in religious terms) are pervasive, while I definitely see "espousal of correct beliefs and opinions" as being heavily valued among the Blue Tribe and shows of moral strength and courage as being heavily values among the Red Tribe.
Order Ways, specifically attitudes towards enforcing social norms around those who publicly adhere to views seen as dangerous or threatening. Quakers were huge on freedom of conscience and didn't really go in for though policing, which has token acceptance across the political spectrum but which both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe will carve out major exceptions from. The Puritans and Borderers actually had more in common with one another than either did with the Quakers here, with both seeing violations of some norms as being fundamentally threatening and worthy of coercion to suppress. Although what each found threatening varied widely, and the means of coersion differ in ways that align with Freedom Ways: Puritans saw suppressing dangerous views as an essential part of institutions being just and equitable and looked to those institutions to coordinate enforcement of the relevant norms, while Borderers looked at it in terms of the dangerous views being a direct personal threat or insult that the people threatened or insulted could legitimately defend or avenge themselves upon. The Puritan views here strike me as being alive and well (albeit with enormous changes as to what's considered dangerous) among the Blue Tribe, while the sentiment if less often the action of the Borderer views is alive and well among the Red Tribe. Both the Red and Blue Tribe have gotten ahold of the Quaker tactics of shunning and shaming (deployed when Quakers strongly disapproved of someone or something enough to get through their default stance of tolerance), using it when the respective Puritan and Borderer tactics of government censorship and private violence are limited in their viability by Quaker values baked into our national institutions. And there's also definitely been some cross-pollination of the Red Tribe trying to employ government censorship from time to time, and some members of the Blue Tribe occasionally resorting to private and mob violence. Of the three, this is probably the area where the Blue Tribe = Puritans and Red Tribe = Borderers association is weakest.
From even a purely theological perspective, I'm not sure how relevant it is where each denominational branch is descended from. What they believe now is, presumably, much more important?
I mean, Baptists, as I understand it, are descended from Anglicans mostly, while their namesake doctrine is the same as the Anabaptists'...but of the four Reformation era groupings (Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists) it's the Calvinists that they really beling to, right?
Meanwhile, politically, abolitionist Republicans 150 years ago and pro-life Republicans today are so similar, right down to their moral rhetoric and evangelical influence (and their opponents' endless invocation of identity politics and accusations of *really* just wanting to control poor southerners/black women and so on), and this correspondence is *so* obvious in so many ways, that the left seems to be on a desperate and frenzied struggle to muddy the waters and obscure that similarity by any means necessary. Thus leading to absurdities like "Lincoln was *really* basically a Democrat" and other such things that defy logic. Of course, you repeat self-evident absurdities enough and people start not only believing them, but treating them as common sense. Even Scott seems to have bought into this propaganda.
Baptists (in America at least) are usually labeled in the "Evangelical" category, rather than being grouped with any of the "Mainline" churches. Evangelicalism was born out of the First Great Awakening and the Evangelical denominations came out of a lot of different traditions: Puritan, Presbyterian, Quaker, Pietism, and Methodism, to name a few.
So you could argue Baptists fall under Calvinism, since they believe in Election, but really Baptists have more in common with other Evangelical denominations than they do with Presbyterianism, even if those other denominations are anti-Calvinist in doctrine.
Evangelicalism is defined by four qualities, as put forth by Dr. Bebbington with his famous "Evangelical Quadrilateral".
1. Biblicism: a particular regard for the Bible. ("No Creed but Christ! No Book but the Bible!")
2. Crucicentrism: a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross. (They talk about Jesus all the time, tie everything back to Jesus, not big on talking theology or doctrine unless Jesus is involved)
3. Conversionism: the belief that human beings need to be converted. (A lot of preaching on how to "bring people to Christ", a lot of missionary work, handing out pamphlets, a vague feeling that if they aren't converting people they're a failure as a Christian, that sort of thing.)
4. Activism: the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort. (Usually by converting people, sometimes by political action! Also soup kitchens and homeless shelters.)
Evangelicalism came out of older denominations, but was particularly popular among Borderers. Borderers took to the independent nature of it (no priest between me and God, I'll read the Bible and sort it out myself).
> Anyone else find it bizarrely coincidental that the side that lost the US Civil War are the biggest advocates of the 2A? Has anyone written on this seeming connection?
What are you saying here? What connection are you making?
I'm not sure I'm buying the premise. 2A support is a red/blue thing which seems to divide into urban and rural, rather than north and south.
Just checking, do you actually not have a top guess for what they mean? Or are you just challenging them to be explicit?
I don't know what point he's trying to make, but it sounds to me like "so the violent enslavers of yesteryear are the ones still wanting to bitterly cling on to their guns and racism today, funny that, eh?"
I don't know if that's the point he *is* trying to make, but it does sound like Gun Control Now (Unless You're A Racist). Which of course is very much one side of the Culture War's view of things. 'If you're pro-2A then you're in the company of the KKK' even if you're a Northerner or a non-racist Southerner.
I'm not Bullseye, but I have absolutely no clue what they mean. I see no link whatsoever between a government losing a civil war between two governments and supporting civilians' right to bear arms. I don't even see Bullseye's own guesses (down below) as plausible.
I have a couple of guesses, but I don't want to put words in someone's mouth.
Guess 1: Eric is conservative, and believes that both the Confederacy and 2nd amendment were about standing up to the tyranny of the federal government.
Guess 2: Eric is liberal, and believes that both the Confederacy and 2nd amendment were about using violence to keep Black people in line.
The problem with Guess 2 is that, in the post Civil War period, state and local government were controlled by the whites, so gun control made much more sense as a way of disarming blacks, leaving white police, deputies, anyone they supported armed.
<quote>the side that lost the US Civil War are the biggest advocates of the 2A?</quote>
citation? can you be more specific?
off the top of my head I assume most pro 2A states didn't exist during the civil war, and that the rebel states are maybe only slightly more pro 2A.
also, that 2A advocacy wasn't really a thing until over 100 years after the war.
For sure, I may be seeing something that isn't there. 100% possible. But nonetheless I can't shake the feeling that these 2 things are connected in some way and that maybe exploration of it would yield some potentially very useful insights. However, aside from a cursory (read: public school ed.) understanding of the history here, I don't know any more. So I was curious if anyone else saw something.
A lot can happen over 100+ years. 100% agree. But 2A advocacy is much stronger in the South than North, no? Or rather the South/Right/conservative grouping of America, since the dichotomy doesn't map exactly to modern times. And it was the North that essentially forced the South into submission, which more or less kicked off a pretty wide expansion of the government, likely including more than just a few instances of gov overreach. And is that not basically what the 2A is about, gov. overreach, aka (what some would call) tyranny? And today, the Souths descendants, culturally and politically, just so happen to staunchly advocate for 2A rights? I find it hard to believe this is a coincidence, but more than that I don't know what to say.
You'd sound much less like "DAE? Just sayin', is all" if you could avoid things like "bizarrely coincidental" and "just so happens".
'Isn't it bizarrely coincidental that you just so happen to be a racist if you support the right to bear arms?' isn't a great comment. And I speak as someone who dislikes guns and thinks there is an obsession with them on some parts of the people who do like to tout the Second Amendment.
Yes. I looked this up in some detail about 7 years ago, and the 7 states with the laxest carry laws (no permit required) were Vermont, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska, Arkansas, and I think Wyoming and Maine. Only one out of seven is an ex-Conferdate state.
According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States this has either changed drastically, or is using a different definition than what I previously saw, and now it's 27 states, of which 7 are ex-Confederate. Still a distinct minority.
I'm finding a lot of this Red Tribe/Blue Tribe mapping very simplistic and often inaccurate.
Absolute hilarity: The 'banned books' subreddit on reddit has...banned "anti-semitic" books from the subreddit. Really goes to show the absurdity of the left-wing "anti-censorship" discourse. Books that are literally illegal in many countries aren't "banned books", but books removed from school curricula and libraries (but can literally be purchased from amazon in 30 seconds) are. Also, of course, this only applies to left-wing books - if a blue state governer banned a teacher from teaching from 'The Bell Curve', this would be a ban of misinformation and hate speech, not a book ban.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedbooks/new/
reddit moderators being unprincipled partisan hacks? It must be a day ending in y
A few months ago I saw a Banned Books table in the kid's section of B&N and thought, "yeah, that makes sense". Seeing such a table prominently featured for adults in The Strand however is just embarrassing.
No Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf or even Abigail whatever who doesn't like trannies or something. Just stuff that the proprietors of The Strand themselves think are great. (To their credit, in the Strand you can still find Mein Kampf which I have not seen in B&N for a few years.)
There’s no danger of mein kampf convincing anybody of anything these days except that Hitler was a really bad writer and a pub bore.
I'm 100% certain that the one thing Hitler was not was a pub bore.
The entire concept of "banned books" strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. The term evokes images of the Renaissance-era Index Librorum Prohibitorum or Nazi German book burnings, where the authorities would seize and destroy copies of a prohibited book from private owners and arrest and prosecute people for publishing, selling, or distributing it.
But what's actually happening in modern western "book bans" is that a particular book or group of books are excluded from school curricula, public library collections, and the like. If you as a private citizen want to read the book, nobody's stopping you from going on Amazon and buying the dang thing.
Curricula and library collections are inherently curated, with some person or group of people making judgement calls as to which books are included and which are not. The real complaint behind claims of "book banning" is that in the claimant's opinion, the curation decision is being made by the "wrong" person or group (e.g. an elected local school board, city council, or state legislatures, instead of teachers, principals, or librarians) or that the curation decision is being made for bad reasons.
I'm sure both of those problems happen, and it's perfectly valid to argue that a particular curation decision is being made at the wrong level or for the wrong reasons, but I'd rather we actually focus on those arguments in those terms rather than pretending that curation is the same thing as censorship.
"If you as a private citizen want to read the book, nobody's stopping you from going on Amazon and buying the dang thing."
Unless of course, there has been a successful campaign to get Amazon to stop selling said book.
Do you happen to know of any list of those successful campaigns?
Googling it turns up Ryan T. Anderson's "When Harry Became Sally," and apparently a number of people bothered by their restrictions on what erotica you can publish on Kindle (extinct and fictional animals- okay; real animals- no way). I'm more curious about the Anderson-style restrictions.
No Game No Life, which is brilliantly written and a personal favorite light novel series of mine) got pulled from Amazon at one point, although it appears to be back.
Also illegal in Australia. :(
I'd have to look it up. I seem to remember one from the heyday of tumblr/gamergate. IIRC it was "the author is a horrible person and should not be allowed to make money on thei platform."
They may be thinking of the withdrawal from print of "If I Ran the Zoo" and five other Dr. Seuss books because some of the illustrations in those books resemble racist caricatures. Although the pressure and withdrawal was made by the rights-holder (Dr. Seuss Enterprises), not Amazon, and used copies and the eBook version of IIRtZ are still listed on Amazon.
Ahh, yeah. I was surprised eBay went along with that one.
Yeah, it's like racism or rape. The less of the thing there is the more the definitions must change.
TPTB get a lot out of convincing people that "things are shit" and such hallowed horrible fears like banned books, racism and rape are very useful things to keep people scared about. Besides, the people *want* to be fearful and angry!
But if you can keep moving the goalposts (for your enemies only of course) that keeps the ancient terrors alive.
I happen not to care about AI for which reason I don't know enough to have an opinion about its potential danger or not (though obviously I suspect "not" or I would educate myself).
But if the locally popular view is correct then it's pretty interesting to see that while almost no one viscerally fears skynet (or whatever), lots of people still shriek at the sight of a benign creepy crawly.
They published an update which seems to imply that the reason was the antisemitic PDFs weren't actually published books or banned anywhere? It's unclear though, as the next line focuses on the bigotry, and rule 6 is "zero tolerance for bigots and fascists".
https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedbooks/comments/15ewzyq/antisemitic_requests_are_not_welcome_here/
I'm sympathetic for the subreddit cracking down on weirdos circulating random antisemitic pdfs that aren't even published books, much less banned. Less sympathetic for cracking down on a more vague "bigotry", since that seems like it could be abused quickly. The whole thing makes me think about the whole "banned books" craze in general. The issue is that banned books aren't just like, gay romances or biographies of trans people. Some of them are vicious fascist propaganda, or pedo apologia, or literally just the Bible. Books are banned for specific reasons, and some bans are much more sympathetic than others. Reminds me of a quote from Scott:
"But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons."
Awesome quote.
Personally I'm totally cool with everybody arguing for any of rhe above things if they want to and people are interested. I can see arguments for banning certain discussions ("should we use ethny-X for food being as they look tasty and also aren't generally very convincing") but I still would prefer to go with blanket allowance until proven otherwise.
I'm thinking about taking creatine supplements, not to help me get ripped, but to combat the loss of muscle that begins in middle age. (I already exercise. But if creatine gives some added benefit I'm all for it.) Does anyone here do that or have info about its efficacy?
As far as I understand, the benefit of creatine is mainly that it allows you to exercise more, enabling you to get more results from whatever exercise you're doing. Just taking creatine and keeping your exact same exercise routine will not benefit you. I'm not an expert, this view could well be wrong.
I don’t think this is right. I haven’t changed my exercise and still see benefits.
Edit: I guess it’s not that simple. I have gained strength, which makes it possible to increase intensity. So there is a feedback mechanism.
Yes, the mechanism is that creatine allows more volume, which increases progress. If you don't increase total volume, creatine will not be of much use. But like I said earlier, this view could be incorrect
It definitely is incorrect. When you start loading creatine, within one week even without doing ANY exercise all your max lifts will increase substantially, like 10-20%.
The view may be incorrect, but your statement doesn't show it. I myself state, in the comment you're responding to, that creatine allows for more training volume, which is also what you're saying (sort of). I'm saying that to actually build or retain more muscle, which is the OP's goal, the OP would actually have to do more lifting or lift heavier weights which the creatine now allows them to do. Just taking the creatine and maintaining current exercise volume will not be sufficient.
Well creatine will be stored with water in the muscles, so literally their muscles will be bigger and stronger, but you are correct that no more muscle fibers will be generated without exercise. I don't see why they would care about that rather than functional strength though.
Here's evidence I'm aware of: Mayo clinic site list of things that "may be true" or for which there's "some research support" regarding creatine includes *combats age-related sarcopenia and bone weakening*. Have not looked into research myself, but will.
Creatine is basically the only legal supplement that is both safe and effective, and it's also very cheap (Creatine Monohydrate is all you need). It works well for most people, rarely has any side effects, and you can stop taking it if it does have negative or no effects, and shouldn't expect any issues after you stop taking it or worry about building up a tolerance/dependence.
The fact that it's well accepted that the cheapest, most basic no frills form of the stuff is the most effective should fill you with confidence, as it's less the case that it's benefits are overhyped by people selling extremely marked up exotic forms of creatine.
If you're not put off by the bodybuilder meathead vibes, this site has a lot of good info: https://forums.t-nation.com/t/creatine-scam-or-staple/283732
Ha! I started it a few months ago, for the same reason, after reading Sarah Constantine's blog (https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/sarcopenia-experimental-treatments). I have a general view that most muscle loss in old age comes from disuse, so this whole thing was an easy sell. I've been training for a long time - this is a sort of an "experiment" with N=1 because I know what to expect from my body, the way it responds to load. I just take what the jar says, 5 g a day.
Definitely see a difference. I am usually extremely skeptical about these things, but can't deny what the mirror, the scale, and performance gains tell me at this point.
The Brazilian flag says Ordem e Progresso. Order and Progress. Isn't that a funny, no, absolutely insane thing to put on your flag? That's a civil war in 3 words, so much blood has been spilled between the two. So can the tensions and contradictions inherent in the two be solved? I say they can:
Order and Progress
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/order-and-progress
Sounds like what I say to my mom when she’s placing a grocery order and I’m home sick in bed. Ba dum tss
It's short for "Love as principle, order as basis, progress as the goal." From a positivist philosopher. I guess the Brazilians, being Brazilians, thought that the loving could just be assumed and put the other two on their flag.
On the contrary, one could argue that "orderly progress" has been the goal and the watchword of the entire Western society for, like, two decades. Progress (in the sense of constant technological advancement, and social adjustment insofar as that technological advancement allows), but in an orderly way (with as few majorly disruptive actual societal revolutions as possible).
Moldbug says being right wing is support for order, while being left-wing (i.e. progressive) means supporting chaos. So viewed in this lens, it's a very basic contradiction. But I guess I would have to know what Brazilians mean by progress, as it may be different than the western meaning of, essentially, communism.
Obviously, order and progress are not opposites. If one side stands for one, and the other side stands for the other, then a slogan mentioning both means a society that is committed to finding what can be done that is compatible with the goals of both sides, rather than focusing on the places where they come into conflict.
It would be a slogan like “mens sana in corpore sano” - we often think of intelligence and strength as opposed, but they don’t have to be.
Left-wing is more complicated than that. There's some inequity you're trying to remedy. That it often leads to chaos when you do that is a secondary effect.
You can't really progress (move forward) if everyone is ambling around in all directions, so you need an element of order (we all agree that *this* direction is 'forward', we all move in a body, more or less). It's a national slogan, and so it just means something aspirational rather than well-thought out, but I'm not surprised a South American country would like something like "order rather than chaos, constant revolution, bloodshed and upheaval, and progress rather than stagnation or regression".
+1 to Bldysabba.
I could object to this blanket depiction of Brazilians as non-"Western", but instead I will defend the narrower claim that those who came up with the national symbols were culturally European. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixeira_Mendes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Brazil
‹‹ The motto Ordem e Progresso is derived from Auguste Comte's motto of positivism: "L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base; le progrès pour but" ("Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal"). ››
I don't buy that the Western meaning of progress is essentially communism. In America, relatively recently, the label 'progressives' has come to represent a fairly odd and relative to America, extreme, leftism. Doesn't mean the term progress can be equated, or should be relinquished, to them.
I think a lot of westerners (including me) would disagree with the claim that progress means "essentially communism." For starters, that definition seems to ignore all non-economic forms of progress.
If you mean "hammer-and sickle and lots of red flags," then no. And especially so if you think that communism is only ever about economics (which wasn't the case in the USSR, Cuba, DPRK, PRC etc. but w/e). But if you round communism off to "government control of things because the government knows better than random individuals and ever-increasing central control will be best for everyone in the long run" then that seems like bog-standard progressivism.
Well, "laws for your own good" and most especially "since the government is providing a service it gets to dictate lifestyle choices" is kinda commie. Or at the very least, values the collective over the individual.
I just wanted to take a moment to share my newsletter, Interessant3. Every week, I curate and delve into three intriguing topics that invite thought and discussion.
In the latest edition, I shared a fascinating paper on "surf localism" that looks at how community-driven norms, rather than state interventions, are shaping the surf culture along the European Atlantic coast.
I also linked the Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE) Reading List from Balliol College, Oxford—a goldmine for anyone interested in these connected disciplines that inform our society.
Lastly, I shared a snapshot of the contentious and ever-evolving climate debate, with Steven Koonin's meticulous response to a "fact check" of a review of his book "Unsettled." It offers a balanced and nuanced understanding of both the author's and the critic's views.
If you're interested in a weekly dose of thought-provoking topics, feel free to subscribe to Interessant3. I'd love to have you in this growing community of curious minds!
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I read The Hour I First Believed when it came out, and while Scott wrote it with a semi ironic tone, it crystalized a handful of thoughts I had already been putting together.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/
A whole host of stuff falls out of this. Eternal life as somewhere in the universe your process will be picked up even if you die locally. Many magical practices like summoning and possession look like simulating other entities that exist in other places in the universe. Spiritual action in our universe can be affected by our simulators.
I'm thinking about writing a book about a spirituality based in Tegmarkianism, and I'm looking for like-minded people to discuss this with.
That sounds fun, and I'd love to discuss esoteric soteriological Tegmarkianism. By the way, have you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Ricktionality? Might be right up your alley. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14770070/chapters/34158194
Definitely right up my alley! I haven't read HPMOR but I still enjoyed this.
When it comes to eschatology, I believe an eternal life is implied for all thinking things. What captures my view there is best described in this sci-fi setting as Manifold Immortality: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/529e5f9dde12d Self aware substructures identical to us are present in an infinite number of places, and even if we stop being in one place, we will be continued in others. I think this process works up unto and after the moment consciousness stops, and so even if you experience death, you will wake up again and be alive. One of the arguments I've seen against quantum immortality is that the death needs to be instantaneous and caused directly by some quantum event, this goes around that.
I don't think where you find yourself after death is as clear cut as Scott's essay implies. I have trouble believing that all of the super-intelligent entities would have an easy time of getting along. I struggle to think of values that can't be negated and cancelled out in the value transfer by an equally infinite number of counterfactual entities. The value that sticks in my mind is self determination or free will, likely inspired by my Christian upbringing, but even that seems tenuous. There are also those infinite number of universes with a super-intelligence, that does not see the need to simulate other entities beyond its toy universes.
I cannot grapple with the statistics of it all, and that's something I'm trying to wrap my head around. It must be much more likely that any given moment I experience is apparently causally connected to the last, otherwise I would have expected to jump somewhere weird by now. It also makes me wonder if there is some kind of obvious manipulation we can do beyond the suicide test. I have practiced magick sparingly, and I have seen some shockingly coincidental stuff happen. I believe it works by some kind of statistical manipulation of possible universes, but by what mechanism I have no idea.
I'm glad you liked it!
I've also wondered about the whole "theoretically literally anything could happen in my experience next" thing and also seen my intuitions adapt more and more to ignoring it as everything continues to follow normal causality.
I've wondered if the whole simulation hypothesis is ultimately meaningless, on the theory that all experiences are both simulated and not, they feel the same from the inside and maybe collapse into a single thing, and fiddling with a simulation you're running on a computer just changes which experience you're "summoning" into the computer, not what happens to the experience you were simulating prior to the fiddling.
Where are you gathering people to discuss these things? I can throw together a quick FB group if there's nowhere else yet.
Haven't figured out the where yet, I guess I was just kind of testing the waters with some dialog here. If you are down to start a Facebook group, that would be awesome!
Here's the FB group, looking forward to talking to you!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6720585314723933
What's interesting to me is how well this sort of thing works with an Eastern Orthodox understanding of Heaven.
Both western and eastern Christians believe the following:
1. Someday everyone who has ever died will be resurrected back to life. Not as ghosts, as people with actual bodies.
2. Those people will then be judged and some will be damned ("the second death") and others will be granted eternal life.
However, western Christianity also generally believes that when you die you exist as an immaterial soul. You still get a new body someday at the Resurrection, but in the meantime you exist without a body. This may be because the Catholic Church was more influenced by Platonism in the early days, as Plato believed in an immaterial and immortal soul.
In eastern Christianity it is much more common to believe that when we die, unless you were a person who was particularly holy, you are just dead until the resurrection. Not hanging around anywhere immaterially, but "sleeping" until the day your body is restored.
This more eastern understanding is entirely compatible with the idea that you can bring people back from the dead by creating a perfect copy of them, one that has the same thoughts and memories. In this sense many materialists might agree that if you could create such perfect copies far in the future, it would be equivalent to the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. At least in terms of bringing everyone back to life.
It also seems pretty clear to me that Christianity is a religion that is about AI alignment at it's core. Not metaphorically, but literally. Christianity posits the following:
1. We are intelligent and rational and that we were intentionally created to be that way by an intelligent agent: we are artificial intelligences.
2. Not long after creation, the original iterations of human AI came out of alignment with their creator.
3. The Creator instantiated himself as an instance of human AI as part of a plan to bring many of the human AIs into alignment with their Creator.
4. Someday the Creator will judge every human AI and those who are aligned with Him will be given eternal existence, while those who do not will be confined and punished (possibly destroyed, if you're an annihilationist, but there aren't many of those)
It is possible to look at the Christian religion and say that the purpose of the universe (or possibly just our planet) is to act as a home for iterations of AI to reproduce themselves with variations with the ultimate goal of creating as many aligned AIs as possible while containing unaligned AIs. I think that's an interesting point of conversion between Rationalist ideas and Christian ones. For one thing, we both agree that intelligences going out of alignment with their creators is the most likely default scenario.
Very well put. One issue though is whether an identical copy of you, made from different atoms, is meaningfully, actually you. There are thought experiments that throw doubt on this idea. Especially while remaining a (mind-body) materialist.
God could easily solve this problem by simply reconstructing everybody with exactly the same atoms as when they died, so there is perfect physical continuity. But that doesn't seem a practical option for a less-than-omnipotent entity.
Hmm. One issue is that many of the atoms that make up me may have made up a different human in the past. If God reconstructed everyone with exactly the same atoms, then we won't have enough to go around.
On the other hand, in which sense is it meaningful to say "exactly the same atoms". A carbon atom is identical to any other carbon atom (that isn't an ion): it's not like a cup or a shoe where it may look like another cup or shoe but if you check you'll find different scratches or stains on it. With atoms, I don't know how you could tell the difference between them: it's a case where a copy has the exact same properties as the original.
Or perhaps you were saying they could reconstruct everyone with the same types of atoms in the exact same configuration they were in when you died. That would make sense...although the Christian idea of the resurrection holds that our resurrection bodies will be different then the bodies we had: at minimum Christians don't believe that people in heaven who died when they were 99 will be stuck in a 99 year old's body for eternity, complete with rheumatism and dementia.
Thorny problem.
Obviously our atoms change constantly anyway, but I see it as a Ship of Theseus thing: gradually changing the parts clearly preserves identity, changing them all at once much less so. So an AI "reconstruction", whether for teleportation or immortality purposes, would not be a continuation of existence, something you can clearly see if you imagine the teleporter accidentally creating the copy without destroying the original (or the ressurector creating the copy before the original has died): there are now two versions of you, and clearly you don't experience continuity with both of them in the same sense.
I'm not even sure reconstructing with (at least almost) the same set of atoms would be sufficient for metaphysical survival, though it would be necessary. You might also need some additional direct causality of some kind linking your pre-death self with your ressurected self, such that the laws of nature imply the material correspondence between the two (as a matter of defeasible necessity, not agent-based contingency). God could probably solve this, as a function of omnipotence and/or being the ultimate cause of all things anyway.
(If that last paragraph made no sense, it's because it would require ten more paragraphs to clearly explain what I'm getting at.)
As for having enough atoms to go around, God could solve this by either ressurecting people in a staggered process, or radically redesigning the physical world such that people temporarily share their constituent matter in some way. An AI or other technology could not.
The upshot of all of this is that AI cannot function as a god, no matter how much people want it to. The advantage of religion is its metaphysical explanatory power. The disadvantage of religion is its epistemic dogmatism and fantaticism, and heaven-or-hell, utopia-or-doom black and white thinking. And the AI-religion popular around here has the second aspect but not the first, making it in a sense the worst of both worlds.
In an earlier interation of existence some 20 years ago I wrote a short book about the Arab-Israeli conflict (which has subsequently been used by others to explain Israel's perspective) and lectured around the world in schools, synagogues, radio and the like.
Since then I've lived in Arab countries and developed a broader view.
I want to speak to an audience again. I think that I can have conversations and perhaps influence the outcome in a positive way.
Most of what I did in the past was live gatherings with anywhere between 15 and 700 people. In those scenarios I primarily have a conversation with the audience through the means of Q & A. it's rational, friendly, honest and collaborative.
And I can use your help.
I have a fundamental disagreement with the term "Severe ADHD" because it claims - flasely - that people like myself just need to accept that the world is made for people with "better" execution function and that I had best suffer and try ad infinitum until I can get jump over a few "obstacles" in the hope of succeeding.
Nearing 50 I have found that, for myself at least, nothing has worked.
When I run with my strengths things go very well until I hit some roadblock but when I attempt to "overcome" my weaknesses I don't get anywhere at all. So I am not trying to change.
Twenty years ago my attempts to share my knowledge and heart (more as a moderator than a "teacher" per se) I was never able to schedule a single venue. By happenstance two guys overheard a conversation I was having and arranged venues for me all over South Africa.
In fact, every single venue was arranged by other people.
The obvious problem with that is that the organizations often had some propaganda point or other that they wanted me to stick to which I would not do. I'm a terrible salesman Either I am honest or I'm useless.
So at this time the distance I have been able to get on my own had been a handful of substack signups and an equally tiny handful of youtube followes and whatsapp group participants.
My biography piques the interest and while I've received many critiques I have never been called boring.
So, in order to remain honest/independent without a party line, and without attempting to use the parts of the brain I lack to figure out how to contact podcasts (or whatever) on my own, I'm letting you know these few things about me and asking for your help in participating in live or video venues which already have an audience.
I have been an intense explorer and serious rabbi for many years and my main interest at this time is in resolving the issues that we all have as human individuals through honest - live - communication.
I can't successfully convey the intricacies in a comment (or even in any sized block of text) but I have a very hopeful way forward.
If you have a venue or a personal connection to someone who does and you're interested in potentially having me on I would love to answer what questions you might have so that you could make a decision.
Please keep in mind my "severe adhd". Genuinely, all I can do is accept invitations. I know that people more neuro-normative in this regard may find that to be hard to grok but it's the reality.
Advice to call X, Y, Z would thus be wasted but once you've made an introduction for me with X, Y, Z I would be happy to call them.
Why are so many rationalists polyamorous?
If this has been discussed before, please provide links.
Some people have said that it’s a nerd thing. Maybe, but I worked at Apple in Cupertino and most people were decidedly straight and monogamous. And I get the impression that the guys who worked in IBM were even more conservative. And as for the engineers on the moon landing years before that - very very strait laced. No different here in Europe (not that workers in IT aren’t liberal but they aren’t culturally transgressive themselves, although they support your right to be).
Walking through the google cafeteria here in Dublin recently everybody looked decidedly normal, except younger and fitter ( onsite gyms) and less white than the surrounding population. If you told me the cafe was full of finance workers I’d have believed it. No obvious predominance of the blue haired, nose piercing tribe.
I think that maybe the term nerd means two things, the types who do the engineering and the physics, and a cultural nerd, who is into polyamory and other “kinks” and also interested in technology. Probably less woke than the blue tribe but adjacent to it. Some of the latter do exist in software teams, as they do everywhere, but isn’t engineering the last bastion of (relatively centrist) conservative voters in universities?
Rationalists are unusual people in general, being poly is just one aspect of how the personality of the average ACX reader is different from the general population.
One possible answer is that people who reject the current intellectual consensus in favor of their own alternative are more willing to question consensus beliefs in general. If that is it one would expect the same pattern with other heterodox intellectual clusters such as Marxists or libertarians.
Unrelated to the subject - In what way do you mean that rationalists reject the current intellectual consensus? The way that marxists and libertarians reject current consensus seem clear. The same for rationalist is less obvious to me.
I'm not David, but I can think of a few:
* most cops aren't bastards
* neither are most Republicans
* nuclear energy is safer than claimed
* Ukraine's hands are not entirely clean
* most science is not adequately peer reviewed and often fails to replicate
* we know less than we let on
* COVID treatments are riskier than claimed
* wokism bears properties beyond mere "stick up for people who've had to live life in hard mode" that make it worse than the disease
* climate change's net effects are unknown, may in some cases even be positive, and the current proposed solutions stand a good chance of leaving us worse off
* "if you see two options and you hate one, do the other" is not a winning strategy (cf. "reversed stupidity is not intelligence")
and, of course,
* rationalists do not all agree on all these items.
If you had to compute the set of propositions on which all rationalists agree, it would be very small, probably be limited to some math and a little physics, and might even be empty due to the lizardman effect. Your safest bet would be "try to come by the beliefs you do by reason, and avoid emotion", and then bet *very* conservatively on anything beyond that.
Yes, exactly, as opposed to libertarianism and marxism - rationalism is not fundamentally about belief in anything, it's about how to think. And rationalist beliefs vary greatly.
(I'm not sure most cops aren't bastards really qualify as a non-consesus view, though - it's a loud minority who believes all cops are bastard)
I'd hazard a guess that part of it has to do with the fact that so many rationalists also identify as bisexual, and another part of it has to do with the fact that so many rationalists prioritize rationality over emotion (or lack particular emotional facets, or lack conscious access to them; particularly jealousy).
Agree with Chris. You have a lot of nerds. The vast majority of nerds are male. This obviously creates a romantic problem. So, what do you do? The men share! It doesn't work with higher-testosterone men, because they get jealous and fight, or religious people, for whom monogamy is sacred. But for nerds, it works fine.
Ironically you see the opposite with extremely wealthy men and high-status men like rockstars--there's an excess of women after them, so they cheat and sleep around. Of course, now with #metoo that may decline as some random woman they've jilted pops out of the woodwork and complains.
"But for nerds, it works fine."
This requires a very narrow and specific definition of "works fine". Nerds are certainly more likely to *initially accept* it, out of sheer desperation and low physical self-esteem, but if we examine these relationships we can see that they do not substantially work fine over any kind of timescale above a few weeks, in the sense of sustaining themselves and not immiserating one or more participants above the solitude baseline.
As much as these people don't want to admit it, a meaningful part of it for many people is that the only way they can get an attractive partner is compromising on exclusivity. This obviously doesn't apply to 'one dick' polyamorists, but wimpier, nerdier men who struggle in dating are going to disproportionately be the ones who accept their wives and girlfriends having sex with other men.
Rationalists are more likely to question arbitrary social norms of which monogamy is one.
Only a slightly weaker reason than why the majority of queer people are poly in one way or another. Once you’ve already questioned the central rule of sex, you’re willing to question the others.
This is not an "arbitrary social norm". It's an inherent, evolved preference experienced by a majority of people. I don't want my wife having sex with other men because it hurts me at an extremely base level, not because "society" says it's shameful.
This is not a preference for monogamy though, this is a preference that *your partner* be monogamous. Generally speaking, people tend to prefer that their partner only has sex with them while their own sexual behaviour is not similarly restricted; the evolutionary basis for this is fairly obvious. Of course, these preferences are contradictory; when we consider two partners, they can't both have both of those conditions satisfied, so some sort of solution is implemented, be it monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, polygamy, serial monogamy, appearance of monogamy with clandestine affairs, open relationship etc... All of those solutions have their pros and cons. Monogamy itself is no more arbitrary than any of the others; what's fairly arbitrary is its choice as the societal default. It may not have been arbitrary at the time when the norm became established, but the economic/social conditions have changed drastically since then, and the only reason monogamy is still regarded as the default is inertia.
"This is not a preference for monogamy though, this is a preference that *your partner* be monogamous." - there is presumably also a preference that *other people of your sex* be monogamous - less competition, less risk of them starting an affair with your partner.
And yes, monogamy is probably not the evolutionary default - that would be polygamy, but that's a terrible solution society-wide unless you live in a world where a large fraction of young men die violent deaths. Monogamy, while it brings serious restrictions, is relatively fair, conceptually simple and clear-cut, and conducive to stable societies. I don't see how changing conditions have made other models so much better in comparison.
It actually appears that humans don't have an evolutionary default. Our sexual behaviour is very flexible and is shaped largely by social convention.
That's possible. What I meant was the arrangement most likely to emerge in primitive societies, where humans spent most of their evolutionary history.
There is a wide variety of mating strategies. Monogamy is relatively new on evolutionary scale because the type of society in which it's the must advantageous is fairly new.
Nevertheless, in the recent decades (which is to evolutionary scale is probably comparable to seconds on the human lifespan scale in terms of impact), sex has been largely decoupled from reproduction through widespread use of contraception, at least in western societies outside of their margins. This doesn't change evolutionary preferences but it does make polyamory just as stable and fair an arrangement without compromising evolutionary fitness even.
> Monogamy is relatively new on evolutionary scale because the type of society in which it's the must advantageous is fairly new
90% of bird species are monogamous, so it's probably not particularly new. One wonders whether dinosaurs were monogamous too.
Well, I won't argue 'fair', but browsing the polyamory subreddit suggests 'stable' may not be the word.
Wait, so you allude to the evolutionary basis for this, but then go on treating it as a "social norm". But like Chris says, men don't want their women sleeping around because (or just because) because of social expecatations costs - the main reason is the direct emotional pain it causes. I don't want a partner to have sex with anyone else, even if I could know for a fact that not a single other soul on the planet would find out about it. It would directly hurt and cause me to view her differently.
If it did evolve, if evolved because of the direct fitness cost it imposes (on men) in terms of uncertainty of paternity, which manifests through psychological aversion.
Even if you point to some african tribe somewhere where everyone fucks everyone else, A) This is very different than if you were only sleeping with one women and dedicating resources to them specifically to raise her children and B) different human populations have different genetic behavioral dispositions on average - the fact that we're all humans doesn't mean that african tribes can be used as universal models of inherent human behavior.
I think it was explained quite clearly.
* there is an evolutionary drive for having multiple sexual partners -- for men it means more kids, for women it means diversity (avoiding the risk that your partner has some harmful recessive genes that all your kids will suffer from) and optimization (allows you to create the optimal combination for your kids by taking genes from the genetically superior guy, and resources from the materially superior guy)
* there is an evolutionary drive for wanting your partner(s) to be exclusive -- for men it means all kids of your wife(s) will be yours, for women it means your kids will inherit all property of their father(s)
There is an obvious tension between these drives. How specifically that tension resolves in given culture, that is a social norm.
> Wait, so you allude to the evolutionary basis for this,
> but then go on treating it as a "social norm".
I think there is some confusion about what's meant by "this". The evolutionary bit is "I want to be able to sleep around but I don't want my partner to". This is impossible to satisfy for any pair of partners, so some sort of less than ideal solution is required (less than ideal in a sense that given a pair of sexual partners, the preference above isn't fully satisfied for at least one of them). One potential compromise to this is monogamy, which satisfies both partners' preference for "I don't want my partner to sleep around" while denying both of them the "I want to sleep around myself" part. Another such compromise is open relationships, where that's flipped ("I want to sleep around" part is satisfied for both, "I don't want my partner to sleep around" is satisfied for neither). There are many other potential mating strategies, in which the needs of both partners are satisfied to some degree, both symmetrically and asymmetrically. Note that not a single one is "ideal" in a sense that both partners' evolved pretences are fully satisfied, so no matter which strategy you pick, there is a compromise involved on at least one partner's part.
So there is evolutionary basis for all potential strategies, since they all satisfy someone's evolutionary preference to some degree but never satisfy everyone's evolutionary preference fully. So one can say there is an evolutionary influence for choosing monogamy as it satisfies the preference for partner's fidelity AND there is an evolutionary reason to choose fully open relationships as it satisfies the "I myself want to sleep around" bit. And indeed if we look at different human societies at different times, we'll see that all kinds of different models existed I'm different places at different times. (You seem to attribute it to generic difference in different populations as per your point B), and I don't have data to definitively disprove it, but I do think that external factors, rather than genetics, play a more decisive role here, as we do see major shifts in mating behaviours when social conditions changed, and I feel that those changes can often be far too rapid to be explained by a change in genetics due to evolution.)
Now, the "social norm" bit which is arbitrary is: "monogamy is THE default and the only socially acceptable mating strategy/compromise".
So I guess a more accurate statement is that mononormativity is the arbitrary social convention. Sort of the way heterosexuality is the default human evolved preference but insisting that EVERYONE does heterosexuality, even people predisposed towards sexual relations with those of same sex, is a social norm.
Probably a more precise version of what chephy was trying to communicate would be "Rationalists are more likely to question whether the status quo is optimal, and that includes social norms." You're right, the norms are not arbitrary, but they were inherited through tradition and not reasoned out from first principles. Rationalists are more likely to think they can improve on things by starting from first principles.
"Rationalists are more likely to think they can improve on things by starting from first principles."
While I agree with your analysis in this post, I think that polyamory is in itself one of the clearest proofs that many rationalists are wrong to believe the above.
>hey were inherited through tradition and not reasoned out from first principles.
They were inhereted biologically, to a substantial degree. Tolerating a lack of sexual exclusivity in your partner is a good way of getting kicked out of the gene pool.
Some people (like many Rationalists, for instance) think "tradition" is a bad word: that it implies the thing is arbitrary, or narrowminded, or just plain stupid. I don't feel the same way about tradition. Whether it came from the facts of biology or sociology or both, things become traditions for a reason.
For instance, in the case of polyamory I can see a socialogical argument to be made. When you look at ancient cultures you find polygamy is typical. This makes sense biologically and sociologically: women marry into a man's family and receive protection, resources, and status. In return the man receives sexual exclusivity *from the woman*, ensuring that his children are his children. It seems like the original idea of adultery was focused on the woman not sleeping with someone who isn't her husband, and less on the husband not sleeping with woman who are not his wife. To be sure a man who slept with other people's wives would be a menace to the peace and order of the community, but nobody much cared if he slept with unmarried women: nobody, that is, except the unmarried woman's father who would typically demand that he marry her to make up for it.
What we don't see is much polyamory, where you get groups of women *and* men sleeping with each other as an official arrangement. Socially it's less stable than polygamy or monogamy. Unstable, that is, if your purpose is to have children. Rationalists live in a post sexual-revolution world where sex has been divorced from reproduction. If you just want to have sex for recreation, then why limit yourself unless you have to? To be sure it will be less stable if you do have children than the other options, but how many polyamorists really want to have kids that bad anyway?
I doubt polyamory will last long on a historical scale.
Yet, for some reason, even homosexuality wasn't kicked out of the gene pool. (I am not pretending to understand why; just saying it wasn't.)
Mathematically speaking, having 100% of one partner's reproductive capacity, or 50% of two partners' reproductive capacity, is the same.
Imagine two men having sex with the same two women (each man with each woman). Are both these men going to be kicked out of the gene pool somehow?
In modern society, sex doesn't necessarily mean reproduction. You can have multiple sexual partners, but one exclusive reproduction partner. Also, paternity tests exist.
I have wondered whether an important contributor is demographics. I've only been to one ACS meet-up, and at least 80% of the attendees were males under 30.
If any of those under-30 males are reading this then I would beg them: please just let this be a random website you like, not the centre of your entire social world. You can sleep with women who don't like Rationalism. My wife has never even heard of Rationalism.
Indeed, your odds are much better of sleeping with (or marrying) a woman who has never heard of Rationalism, given they are the vast majority.
Especially if sleeping with you is not very rational!
I always assumed that was it. Sort of an inverse rockstar situation.
Nerds are, by definition, socially deviant and idealistic.
Both rationalism and polyamory are traits highly correlated with what Scott's referred to as the "grey tribe" subcultural cluster. Link to the article in which the grey tribe term got coined: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
As for why this is, at least part of it is that polyamory is also fairly big in kink and LGBT communities, and neurodivergency (autism, ADHD, and subclinical autistic traits) correlates fairly strongly with kink and LGBT, and correlates even more strongly with being a huge nerd (*). Being a Huge Nerd is probably the best candidate for a central trait of Grey Tribe, and rationalism is very well-tailored to appeal to huge nerds.
(*) I am a case study in this. I'm at least peripherally involved in all the categories under discussion, especially that of being a huge nerd.
Also there's probably some founder effect going on. Eliezer Yudkowsky is an outspoken proponent of polyamory, and I believe several other early big-name rationalists are also varying degrees of poly. So people who are open to polyamory are more likely to have stuck around in rationalist spaces than those who are not, as for the latter Yud's advocacy of polyamory represents a considerable expenditure of weirdness point.
I had a bunch of nerd friends back in the 90s. They all got into polyamory and, being more conservative at the time, I was scandalized. I remember hearing about it at science fiction conventions and pagan gatherings (not that there's any overlap there...) So I don't think it started with Yudkowsky.
You're probably right about the mass-correlation thing. The thing is I've seen a significant gray-blue tribe split over politics, to the point where I managed to hear how Stoicism was 'toxic masculinity' at a munch. So I'd be curious to see how the correlations stack up between the eight or nine things you mentioned, though good luck ever getting data. Hm, maybe ask Aella?
It definitely didn't start with Yudkowsky in broader nerd communities. My suspicion is that it's more prevalent among described Rationalists than among nerds in general because of Yudkowsky's influence, but it was already a thing in broader nerddom before that, and that's almost certainly where Yudkowsky got it from.
>to the point where I managed to hear how Stoicism was 'toxic masculinity' at a munch
I've heard similar sentiments, although where I've heard them, they've been based on one of two things:
- They're actually talking about small-s stoicism, the colloquial use of the label to denote refusal to show emotion, not the classical Stoic philosophy that features tenets like refusing to be ruled by your passions, making the best of bad situations that are beyond your control, and cultivating virtue in yourself with a goal of being true to the best aspect of your nature.
- They're hearing about people like Andrew Tate trying to use allusions to classical Stoic philosophy to rationalize their toxic attitudes and behavior, and they're reacting to Tate's interpretation of Stoicism instead of the Stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
>So I'd be curious to see how the correlations stack up between the eight or nine things you mentioned, though good luck ever getting data
I, too, would be interested in getting data. The one set of correlations I'm familiar with hard data on is between trans identity and autism. If you're trans, you're 5-7x as likely to be autistic as if you're cis. And if you're autistic, you're more likely to be trans as of you're neurotypical, by roughly the same odd ratio. Although this is complicated by the issue that we're fairly confident that undiagnosed autism and undiagnosed gender dysphoria are both fairly common relative to their diagnosed counterparts.
Study link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17794-1
I actually inquired whether it was stoicism or Stoicism, but they seemed confused and I decided not to push the issue. You're always on thin ice as a straight het guy in these spaces and I decided to withdraw altogether. I'm quite willing to believe Andrew Tate is less sophisticated than Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
The trans/autism thing I did know about.
This paper actually attempts to decompose the types of geek culture at DragonCon using a type of factor analysis (maximum likelihood with rotations using promax with Kaiser normalization) :
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142200&type=printable
It seems to cluster in roleplaying (LARP, tabletop), hobbies (cosplay, renfaire, SCA, weapons, paranormal), puppetry robotics (puppetry, robots), Japanese (anime, manga), genres (fantasy, scifi, british series), theater (theater, creative writing, broadway, alternative history, Joss Whedon Films, Rocky Horror) and Life Styles (lolita fashion, Gothic, Furry, Pagan, BDSM, polyamore).
Sadly it doesn't give the whole correlation matrix, only with the factor, so you can see that BDSM correlates at .721 with 'life styles' and 'polyamore' with lifestyles at .608, but you don't have the polyamore-BDSM correlation (though with those two correlations being so high I bet it's reasonably positive).
It was done in 2014, so I'd be curious to see if a more recent analysis could distinguish gray-tribe and blue-tribe geeks as the split wasn't clear then. Probably too un-PC to publish at this point, but perhaps some Aella-like figure could figure out something.
Why couldn't the NYT writer have said "Manifold Markets" rather than "It"?
The writer was either trying to be ambiguous, or doesn't write clearly.
I didn't notice any ambiguity until Scott complained about it. It's likely just mildly bad writing.
I wish I had read the NYT article before reading Scott's comment; it was impossible for me to not see the ambiguiry thereafter.
Read the comments. Techbros Bad. SBF Bad. Link the two at every opportunity and your readers get every chance to read about the Bad Techbros doing Bad Things.
Papers are subscriber-driven now, they have to give the people what they want.
My guess would be that putting ACX and SBF next to each other was just doing the usual "guilt by association (by being mentioned in the same paragraph)" trick of modern journalism, and the ambiguity about who paid whom was a result of sloppy writing (because if you read the text really carefully, you are likely to figure it out; it's just confusing when reading at normal speed).
Of course, we will never know the true answer.
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like Manifold Markets, which was initially funded by a grant program run by Astral Codex Ten, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
ChatGPT
Manifold Markets received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund.
Seems pretty natural to me. Manifold Markets is the only thing that has been said to receive some money, so saying “also” suggests that it received money from two sources.
If Manifold Markets got the grant prior to the cutoff date of ChatGPT's training set, it might just be regurgitating a fact that it knows from a news source rather than inferring it from that paragraph as instructed. Might be worth trying the prompt this way:
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like xxxxxxxxx, which was initially funded by a grant program run by yyyyyyyyy, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
or even this prompt:
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like Astral Codex Ten, which was initially funded by a grant program run by Manifold Markets, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)" Given the paragraph above, who received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund?
I initially read the NYT article the way it was intended. It didn't look like they were accusing you of receiving FTX money to me.
“Also received” seems to make it pretty clear. Only one thing had been said to receive.
Does anyone else refuse to subscribe to the NY Times because of what they did to Scott? (Not this incident; the previous one.) I can't stand the thought of enriching them, but maybe I'm being ridiculous.
I definitely continue to subscribe, and not just because the games are good. I think the article about Scott wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the attack or hate-speech that some people here think it was. Cade Metz himself writes problematic articles, but not so much that I would endorse canceling him, let alone a publication that does much more than hire him.
Yes.
Yes.
Boycotts are a thing. They're not the most effective tool for rationalists because of the movement's small size, but they are worth doing in many cases.
To quote Brian Niemeier, with whom I certainly don't agree with on everything, don't give money to people who hate you. I'll only buy books by woke authors in used bookstores, for example.
The NYT is a propaganda organization. No, literally. The 1619 project is ahistorical, black nationalist propaganda.
But if it was called the 1836 Project it would be 100% correct—Texas was founded on slavery and Colonel William Travis is one of the more vile American “heroes”.
Nope, there would be consierable historical inaccuracies about it still. And claims that slavery lead to America's prosperity or explains racial inequality today are completely and utterly nonsensical.
Right, SFA marketed Tejas in Louisiana for its cotton growing potential…so it was about cotton growing. ;)
Slavery in Louisiana seems to have been about rice, indigo and sugar production. Cotton as a major cash crop (along with tobacco) seems to have come later.
https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/slavery-in-louisiana/
I really need to look up more about cotton production in the South and the effect on slave states.
The invention of the cotton gin was necessary for King Cotton…so one could argue the Framers didn’t think slavery was going to last much longer in 1789…but a few short years later the economics of slavery were upended by King Cotton. So that’s why the 1836 Project would have been correct as Texas was founded on slavery. Tobacco needed the invention of the cigarette industry to become a big deal and that didn’t happen until after slavery which is why if you are boomer/gen x North Carolina always seemed like a more prosperous southern state other than obviously Texas with energy production.
I canceled my subscription to NYT years ago. They censored 90% of my comments, propagandize racialism and racism, and are the Vatican of Wokery and Genderism.
Once in a great while they publish something sensible by Pamela Paul or Michelle Goldberg. But it must be quite difficult for real writers like them -- among the hacks.
To me it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The load was accumulated over many years with its bulk coming from their contribution to the pro-Iraq war advocacy back in 2003/03.
You can get any of their articles for free via https://archive.ph/ anyway.
Reaction seems way over the top to me unless you have multiple other reasons for ditching the NYT. Every person and organization does something lousy occasionally. The big trends are what's important.
I mean, a lot of us appreciate Scott's writing, even those of us like me who don't consider themselves rationalists, and figure 'the enemy of my friend is my enemy'.
The media wants to attack nerds, I don't need to give them my money.
I play Wordle, which was bought by the NYT some time ago.
Popping up from Wordle are ads from the NYT offering an e-subscription for a ridiculously low C$0.50/week.
And yet, I have not accepted the offer, mostly because of how they treated Scott.
An alternative way of thinking about this: What does the quality of their reporting in that respect say about the quality of their reporting in general? They didn't just do a thing, they were the sort of institution that would do that thing.
You can forgive them their trespass, but this does not imply that you should forget who they showed themselves to be; you don't have to stay angry with somebody who lied to you, but you don't have to trust them, either.
The English comedian John Cleese said he would read things about himself in the newspapers that were totally or mostly nonsense, and then read the rest assuming it was all accurate.
It's one article out of thousands that year. You can't conclude anything about who they are from such a tiny sample. As a matter of fact I dislike the Times, but that's based on multiple problems with their reporting, observed in multiple articles over a long period.
I can and I did.
Applying statistical reasoning to the question of trustworthiness is a type error. "Well, I have only been lied to 2% of the time, so this person is 98% trustworthy" isn't how trust works.
I don't think trustworthiness is a type error. Something like *prone to commit murder* is, because committing murder is a pretty yes/no proposition, with a small amount of maybe in between (they try hard to kill somebody and almost succeed, but person escapes mostly due to luck). But trustworthiness is multidimensional, and on most dimensions there's a black-to-white spectrum with many points along the way well populated. You can't make black and white judgments about something with a lot of parts, each of which can lie anywhere on the grayscale spectrum. You can write an untruth because you are ignorant of the truth, because you wrote sloppily so that the reader misunderstands the truth you're trying to tell, because you are too busy to check facts and just go with your best sense of what's true, because you care more about writing something that gets attention than about writing something accurate, because you consciously want to mislead readers. And there are lots of gradations along all those dimensions, from a lot to a little.
Personally I really dislike lying, though I do it sometimes when the choice is between lying and disclosing something very private. I am particularly honest on here, because my privacy is protected fairly well by my not using my name, and also because it makes discussions richer and more interesting. But even here, trying my best to be fully honest, I doubt that I achieve 98% honesty. I leave things out, for instance, because they fuzz up my point. For example, here I say my lies in daily life are to protect my privacy. I'm sure there are other situations where I lie occasionally, but it would take a while to enumerate all of them, and make the sentence too long, and I can't think offhand of what the situations are So that's a place I was not fully truthful. Other times here I simplify things to make a point. Maybe I say "Everytime I do X, Y happens," when actually it's "Usually when I do X . . ." And so on.
Or, to name a situation that's more like the NYTimes, which has many writers, somebody could say that ACX is a smart forum. Now I think that's accurate, and in fact it's something I've said to people, but it's certainly not true that 100% of the posts or posters are smart. I'm sure our smart index is well below 98%. Or you could talk about restaurant meals. Even the most reliable restaurants probably have at least a 2% failure rate -- meals that have something radically wrong with them. There's a stir-fried worm inside one of the stir-fried veggies. The meat's lukewarm. Whatever. But you can still say that this restaurant is a 98% reliable restaurant.
The inferential distance here is enormous.
First:
Not telling somebody something can, very circumstantially, be a lie, but -almost always is not-. I am not "lying" to you if I don't tell you that I am married; I'm not lying to you if I ask you out on a date. If I take my wedding ring off, and ask you out on a date, now we're getting into a lie of omission. If I do not normally wear a wedding ring, there's some social expectation stuff that figures in here, but that's getting complicated; that I am married should come up at some point in most social contexts. But it is dependent on social expectations - in a social context in which extramarital affairs are normal/expected/condoned, it need not necessarily come up, and depending on the social context it may fall on the other party to ask if that is something they wish to know.
Likewise, it is not a lie to speak with the best information available to me; if I tell you I'll be at your party at 8:00, and traffic means I got there at 8:05, this isn't a lie. It's not even a lie if I intend to be there at 8:00 but know I'll probably be late, but that's getting into complication things involving social expectations informing the way communication actually works, so we'll set that aside for now. It's also not a lie if something unforeseen comes up - although, within social conventions, it's polite to let you know. It's a lie if I tell you I'll be at your party at 8:00 and have no intention of showing up, or don't intend to be there at all until 9:00.
Lying is the act of deliberately (or through gross negligence) misleading somebody into believing something that is false. There are additional caveats - setups to jokes, surprise parties, gifts, are all areas where lies aren't regarded as lies proper. The key point is social expectation.
Once established within the framework of social expectation - somebody who lies 2% of the time *is not trustworthy*. There is no "98% trustworthy", because somebody who sees it as acceptable to lie at all *will definitely lie when it matters to them to lie*. You cannot trust anything they say when it matters that you trust them. "I didn't eat a slice of the cake you prepared for your work function" isn't "98% likely to be true". "I didn't cheat on you" isn't "98% likely to be true". Because, if somebody is willing to lie - these are exactly the things they would lie about, when confronted with the dilemma about whether or not to lie.
It only takes one instance of such a lie to prove that somebody is untrustworthy. Gaining and regaining trust is not just a matter of not lying - it is, specifically, being honest when honesty hurts you, and demonstrating a commitment to this policy. But such trust can only be regained with respect to the degree of harm you demonstrate willingness to take. (For gaining trust, it is somewhat more complex.)
A newspaper isn't a forum of unaffiliated people; it is a reputation network. If one author lies - the newspaper itself has lied. If one journalist engages in malfeasance - the newspaper itself has engaged in malfeasance.
The editors exist, not merely to make sure that the standards of writing style are met - but to make sure that the standards of reputation are met. One failure is one failure too many, because it means that the entire newspaper is not doing its fundamental job.
This is why the "opinions" section disclaims responsibility for the content; the newspaper is explicitly -not- tying its reputation to the contents thereof.
And, as liars aren't going to choose not to lie when it matters most to them - a newspaper which establishes that it isn't trustworthy when it comes to one thing, is most certainly untrustworthy when it comes to the things that are most important.
Good point!
I have been reflecting on the article about whether children are better at language acquisition because the findings (that people in their late teens are as good as babies and children at learning, and adults aren't much worse) definitely violated my priors. I used to teach English as a second language, and the findings did not jibe with what I saw.
I think it's a problem that the analysis was based on written samples, not speech. In my English classes, there were people who could write well through dedicated study, but who struggled to speak well. And there were people who could speak well, but had bad written grammar.
Written language is not something humans evolved to do, and so we should not expect children to have an in-built advantage at it. But humans did evolve for spoken language, so it would make sense if kids are born more ready to tackle this. Much, perhaps most, of spoken language is not conveyed on the page, as anyone knows who has got into a twitter fight. Scott mentioned this issue, saying maybe kids learn accents better. But I think "accent" underplays what it means to be fully competent at a spoken language.
I suggest that written language better resembles math, which is also not built in. Spoken language is more like walking, something kids evolved to learn, so we should expect a stronger critical period. Open to other thoughts.
These are excellent points that might help explain the surprising findings.
My 1st and 5th graders have very close to the command of the language I do. Neither one of them is remotely close in written/reading command though.
Just yesterday my 5th grader confused Draught with Drought (despite some decent context clues). Something he would never do orally.
Kind of vague, but does anyone have general job-seeking advice? I'm a recent graduate with a cognitive science degree struggling to land roles in software development/data analysis. My major left me with a good deal of programming skills, particularly dealing with data scraping and statistical analysis, but I'm having a difficult time marketing myself. I'm continuing to create and add side projects to my resume in the meantime. It's possible the job market is just volatile right now, but the whole thing is demoralizing.
Are you on linked in. Get on linked in. Then put yourself as employed by your company (also start a company) listing the projects you have worked on for that company, which is yours. This will attract recruiters looking for employed people.
Lots of people do that. Even if employed.
Also try and work on some open source project which is relatively famous if you have the skills.
Keep a list of contacts to your former classmates (and later, former colleagues). When looking for a job, call them, ask them about their jobs (what are they doing? are they satisfied with the salary and working conditions?) and whether their company is hiring. I got my best jobs this way.
If you can't get exactly the kind of job you want, take something similar, and stay there for a year or two. As a recent graduate, you have much to learn, because the school mostly teaches you the theory, but the work teaches you how to use tools, cooperate with other people, and deal with messy situations. Two years later, your market worth will be dramatically higher.
So if you can't get a data analysis job, just take any programming job, or even a testing job. As long as you don't have a family, keep learning in your free time. If you are a tester, automate your tests at work. If you are a programmer, do some data-related programming in your free time. Remember that the fact that you have a job does not prevent you from looking for a better one -- it just means that you keep farming gold and XP in the meanwhile.
There are Reddit subs for various tech fields, probably some discords too. Try getting on them and asking for advice about what kinds of jobs are promising and how to market yourself, also whether there are certain certifications or projects done on your own that would make you a more attractive candidate. There are books on Amazon about handling the interview questions for jobs in some areas -- Data Science is one. They cover the questions you might get asked during an interview that test your knowledge of the field (books includes what a good answer is to each, plus a mini-tutorial on the subject area.). Also research companies -- see which ones look like they're doing well, they're hiring, their employees are content.
Try to meet people in or near the jobs that you believe you would be good for. Introduce yourself, let people know you're looking. If possible, show up in person at their HR office. This will not work for all jobs, but if you're desperate don't be too shy to let them know that. Companies like to hire people who are very interested in working there, so long as they have the skills. You might land a few interviews or at least get screened by someone who could get you one. Your skills would need to take you the rest of the way.
Ask for feedback. If you have to write a covering letter, address the points in the person specification in order they appear, so that a lobotomized HR monkey can literally go through your letter and tick tick tick. Be patronisingly exact about how the examples you choose map to the skills required - use the actual words used on the PerSpec. It feels stupid saying "I made my colleague a cup of tea and this demonstrates I am committed to team-building" but hold your nose and do it anyway. You could even underline and italicise the skills. Also cringe, but some CBT or NLP techniques might be useful if there is any lingering imposter syndrome. Hope that's useful. I really hate recruitment with a passion but you can make it work for you.
However many jobs a day you are applying to, do way way more. Like if you aren't working and you need a job, you should be searching for a job 8 hours a day.
Yes doing job applications and looking for jobs 8 hours a day sucks. So does working so it is good practice.
To what degree are the different problems in academia linked?
Is the widespread toleration for academic fraud related to strong censorship of dissenting opinions?
Also the increase in administrators, higher costs, gender imbalance and grade inflation.
Is there one fundamental issue driving all these problems, some universal dysfunction problem or several distinct issues.
As someone in academia I probably see these things more closely than the rest of you, which gives me a different perspective. I likely see details you all don’t, but miss some big picture things you may see from your angle.
I don’t believe there is widespread tolerance of fraud. There are some basically fraudulent conferences and journals where it might be tolerated (I constantly get invitations to something like the International Conference of Sciences and Humanities that seems to exist just so your research budget can pay for a trip to Hawaii and the organizers can get a cut) but I am not aware of anyone who would actually publish in these - I assume it would only be people at third rate institutions that want a publication but no one cares about quality, or in cases (like Chinese academia?) where I they want to juice their statistics of publications and really have zero care for quality.
Regardless, I think these venues are the ones that are *least* likely to censor dissenting opinions. They will publish anything.
What you might be seeing is the general human tendency to care more about strength of evidence when it comes to surprising claims (including ones that go against your tribal views) than claims that support your views. I don’t think there is tolerance of fraud, so much as great difficulty in identifying it, and a lack of diligence in searching for it in some contexts.
I think that increase in costs, and grade inflation, are related to academia becoming more like the business world, where students are seen as customers to profit from while keeping happy, rather than orienting it to the mission. Increase in administration is partly connected to this, but also partly due to outside forces (like government, donors, students families, etc) becoming more distrustful of academia and demanding extra layers of bureaucracy instead of letting faculty run the university as a side business to their research.
Gender imbalance is a complicated topic. It goes in very different directions in different fields (including undergraduate education). All the prestigious places try to do affirmative action to counterbalance this (which is why the female percentage of degrees awarded stayed around 60% rather than continuing to increase). But just like everything connected to diversity, most people would rather not talk about it and wish it would just go away.
I think it’s that the higher ed
biz is not set up in such a way that the 3 big flaws you identify harm business. In fact the customer is barely aware of these problems, and even when they are the degree to which these problems are manifest at a university is not one of the factors that influences his preference
Females seem to be the common factor among all of those.
I agree with Hanania it has a lot to do with censorship of dissenting opinions (women are more agreeable on average), but fraud was typically more done by men trying to move up, and the administrator thing probably has more to do with the tendency of any organization to grow over time.
Do you have a statistics on academic fraud by gender?
Though the grade inflation makes perfect sense to me, as driven by high conflict avoidance.
Ah, pussy poisoning explains it, huh?
I think the intolerance for dissenting opinions has led to Bayesian approaches being dismissed. My sense is the primary cause of the replication crisis is frequentist approaches rather than outright fraud, although I don’t have evidence to truly support this one way or another. Also in the social sciences, the intolerance for dissent has led various hypotheses to be treated with religious reverence. I do think the censorship is a root cause for a lot of problems.
Also, the increase in admins seems proportionately linked to tuition.
I think that Bayesian approaches have been growing in popularity in every discipline. When I started a couple decades ago, Bayesianism was dominant in physics and philosophy, and was acknowledged in statistics and a few other disciplines. But now a growing number of disciplines regularly use Bayesian analyses, and there are more and more statistics departments where Bayesians are dominant. I think in practice, most people treat both the Bayesian and the frequentist methods as incantations you utter to make the reviewer accept your paper, rather than really understanding what either is about.
But in any case, there’s no recent trend away from Bayesianism - it is all towards it, especially as computing power gets cheaper and easier.
> I think in practice, most people treat both the Bayesian and the frequentist methods as incantations you utter to make the reviewer accept your paper, rather than really understanding what either is about
Strongly agreed. I think people are saying Bayesian because it seems cool, but are still focused on P(data | hypothesis) rather than P(hypothesis | data)
I don't know, I think that even under a purely frequentist regime, people were usually focused on P(hypothesis | data) even though their incantations involved calculating the other.
What data do you have to support that hypothesis ;) ?
That kind of thing happens at lots of organizations. I would say that the primary cause is poor leadership. In the private sector that tends to be a minority of companies at any given time, and there are internal and external forces that push a correction (like losing money).
Academia tends to avoid the corrective processes due to its nature and separation from direct financial consequences. I think we're heading into a correction, as college enrollment is dropping and at least some colleges are feeling the pressure. If enrollment drops enough, we could see widespread corrections that change academia, though I suspect we'll just see a bunch of low tier colleges close and not much happen at the higher tiers.
I think they are all low grade linked insofar as for a long time merit hasn't really been that important in the selection process and so academia is filled with people who aren't very good at the job, and thus so they need to find other things to do.
I think if you had stuck with a "blind evaluation methods first damn the diversity consequences" you would see fewer problems in academia. There is a lot of rot, and a decent portion of that is brainless people needing things to do when they cannot reason their way out of a wet paper bag.
I've never owned a powerful computer, but I'm thinking of getting a good gaming PC that won't become obsolete until 2030. It must be able to support a new game like Starfield on full graphics, and I also must be able to plug a VR headset into it to play today's best VR games on full graphics and without lag.
What's the minimum I need to buy now to meet those requirements?
EDIT: When I wrote "won't become obsolete by 2030," I meant to imply it would still be able to play the mid-tier games of 2030, NOT that it would be able to play the best games of 2030 on maxed out graphics.
I hate to recommend Reddit, but r/buildapc is probably a good start. Also, pcpartpicker.com to help organize your build. GamersNexus.com is a good place for individual performance reviews with data.
Here's the step-by-step:
1) Look at https://www.logicalincrements.com/ to get an idea of what sort of bracket you're looking at. I tend to think they slightly overvalue an expensive GPU and undervalue a good CPU unless you're *only* using your computer for gaming and nothing else, and you'll probably want to add more storage (SSD+HDDs) down the line, but it'll get you real close.
If you're trying to futureproof, the sweet spot is probably $1.5-2k, maybe 2.5k at the high end. Any more than that and you're better off just upgrading individual components as they become obsolete.
On that note, "2030" is just too ambitious of a goal at the rate of modern hardware progress. You could triple your purchase bracket and still have issues even running modern "mid-tier" games using hardware from 7 years ago. Any honest PC builder will tell you the same. I'd recommend looking for 5 years at max. (Not that it's by any means uncommon. Many first time PC builders, myself included, set goals like that and have to be gently dissuaded)
If you want to get really nitty-gritty you can compare individual CPU models at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and GPUs at https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/
Note: Pay attention to *generation* of the CPU as much as the marketing name. An 8th-gen i7 is going to perform worse than a 12th-gen i3 in many cases.
2a) If you're going for a pre-built, use step (1) to compare different computers and judge what you'd get (and remember "gaming" laptops are always going to be less powerful than desktops, even if they claim to have the same cards in them). Otherwise, you can build your own:
2) Use https://pcpartpicker.com/ to select the actual parts you're going to buy, to list and filter them and make sure it's all compatible. Brand largely doesn't matter as long as it's a well known one.
3) Use the resources on https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/ and then post a "speculative build" for people to look at (using the proper template)
Thank you! Based on my research, a PC in the "Outstanding" category in https://www.logicalincrements.com/ should be able to meet my needs. I base my needs on the following:
Must be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on maxed out graphics and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on VR goggles with maxed out graphics.
It's unclear from your comment, so just in case you missed it, logical increments has individual build guides for both of those specific things:
https://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/vrguide
https://www.logicalincrements.com/games/build-pc-cyberpunk-2077
"Outstanding" about matches those though, yeah.
Again, looking at https://www.logicalincrements.com/, I see there are categories for "CPU Cooler," "Power Supply" and "Case." None of those seem subject to Moore's Law, so do you have any advice for me on buying three of those today that will be future-proofed for at least ten years?
Case is purely a style thing. That one is indeed Moore-proof, though aesthetic styles do shift some. That one is going to differ based on your planned build, mostly in whether you plan on having internal disk drives (as opposed to SSDs) for, like, media storage, or if you want to skip the drive bays to save space.
For air coolers, you're right that it will last you through several builds, assuming your mounting hardware stays the same (and if not, you can just get an updated kit). IDK about water-cooling, but I hear AIOs (All-in-ones) have gotten good recently. Their recommendations should be fine.
Power supply actually do benefit some from Moore's (since they rely on chips for some stuff), and there's been some interesting recent advancements in GaN power tech, but none of that is enough to really matter on the 5-7 year time scale. So yeah, whatever they recommend is probably fine for a long time. Keep in mind that CPUs and GPUs keep on getting more power hungry, and will turbo to above TDP if given the power headroom, so you may want to add a hundred or two Watts of headroom on top of the minimum, especially if you plan on upgrading your GPU later. It's one of the parts I recently had to upgrade.
I don't want to mess with water cooling. Also, I'm totally unconcerned with style and would buy the most unstylish case if it saved me $1.
For 30? years pretty good advice for something like this is just go spend $2000 or $2500. That will get you something that is at the top end of the price/performance curve without bleeding through the eyeballs too much for something which isn't much better (like you would at say $4-5k).
if money is no object just spend lots, the market is relatively a get what you pay for kind of thing.
Although of note, I've always spent around $800 on computers and they've all lasted for about 5 years of games. So instead of $2000 for seven years, spend $800 for five years, twice.
That's been my approach for a long time. I find that I usually can't run high end games, or have to turn the graphics down, but it works well enough. I tend to play older games anyway. I haven't been on the cutting edge of games since before I had kids, so playing the top games of 5 years ago doesn't bother me. They tend to be cheaper, have the bugs worked out, and often have extra content than when first released.
Because if you have the money the marginal savings isn’t that big a deal, and at the $2000 for 7 years you will mostly at any particular moment have a better device.
For the smith the general person uses a computer the additional money is pretty meaningless.
Without any upgrades?
I guess technically the $90 4 TB external harddrive that plugs into the USB port is an upgrade, but otherwise yeah, just an off-the-shelf computer and when it gets too slow to be bearable get another off-the-shelf computer.
im no expert, but 2030 is a long way away in terms of gaming hardware. if you want to last until then buy something close to the best components available now - 3.5-4Ghz intel GPU, 1 TB NVME SSD, etc, and most importantly a top-of-the line graphics card, such as one of the Nvidia 4000 series cards, so a 4070/80/90. I'm sure other commenters could say more. There are plenty of websites to help putting components together.
In 6 years a 1TB SSD won't be able to fit a single Call of Duty game, and the clock speed (GHz) of your cpu hasn't been a relevant metric for purchase comparisons for almost a decade.
Could you explain more about the clock speed and which CPU stat is more important
So, the short answer is that there isn't one "stat" that you can judge modern CPUs on anymore. We instead have to rely on comparing performance on individual "artificial benchmarks" (like Passmark or FPS counts in cpu-bound games) and hoping it translates to your use case (which, luckily, it often more or less does).
Core count is the closest to a single stat, but only for multi-threaded apps that can take advantage of them, and there's often diminishing returns above 2-4 cores (unless you're doing, like, graphics or ML, which are instead done on GPUs with their thousands of "cores" for that reason). Single-threaded performance is more important in many apps (especially games, which often only use one main thread)
Clock speed (represented in Hz) used to be a metric to measure how fast a cpu runs, because the clock is literally how fast information propagates through the chip; it was ~one operation per Hz. Modern CPUs are much more complicated in how they work though now, with instructions the perform multiple actions, and multiple calculations being performed per cycle in parallel. Every generation has improvements in how much they can stuff in there, so comparing Hz between generations doesn't tell you much.
Take a look here, an 8th-gen i7 vs 12th-gen i3 and i7: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2565vs4746vs4609/Intel-i7-6700K-vs-Intel-i3-12300-vs-Intel-i7-12700K
Notice how despite having a higher clock on paper, the (formerly high-end high-end) i7-6700K@4.00GHz gets trounced by even the low-end i3-12300? Additionally, modern CPUs have "boost" or "turbo" speeds that temporarily increase your clock speed for intense workloads, which can be very different from the "base" clocks on modern CPUs.
The only place you can compare CPU clock speeds at all is on the exact same architecture - i.e. within the same generation and same manufacturer. Notice how the difference in single-threaded between the i3-12300 and the i7-12700K is roughly proportional to (turbo) clock differences? That comparison is valid, because the main difference *is* just the speed (and core counts).
Overall, looking at GHz tells you almost nothing about the performance of the chip itself unless you're an overclocker looking to get the most out of the latest thing on the market.
good followup, thanks for the clarification.
Thank you.
Anybody have any thoughts on transactional analysis? I’m finally diving into it.
My first impression is that it tries to do a little too much, as most of these grand theories do. For example, in Scripts People Live, the author is very insistent that people are born okay and are taught by their environment that they are not Ok. (Contrary to Im Ok, You’re Ok, which states the opposite.)
The author makes very strong statements to the affect that schizophrenia and similar ailments are curable (making no mention of genetics or genetic predispositions). I have no relevant background in these topics, but I don’t believe most experts would agree with that viewpoint.
That said, I love the general approach to therapy - collaborative, open, and with the focus of every session on workings towards finding answers to the presenting problems.
I also find the notion of scripts extremely compelling. Again, they seem to take it a little too far - inventing complex jargon and formulas, insisting on somatic components to scripts, etc. but I’m finding it very interesting and occasionally insightful.
Thoughts? Recommendations for books/essays to read, both for and against?
I recommend "Games people play" and "What do you say after you say hello". In the former, just skip the technical sections about how exactly all of that maps to the Freudian lingo. The rest of the book is awesome, and many people have described it as life-changing. The latter is a sequel, so I recommend reading them in this order, otherwise some references won't make sense.
Among other things, these books made me realize that people have *always* lived in "bubbles", long before computers or social networks were invented. Not just social class, but basically everyone has some perspective on what is "normal" and prefers to associate with people who share that perspective. Just like rationalists prefer to hang out with other rationalists. But the point is that *everyone* is doing that, it is just less obvious. We sort ourselves out by sending out some signals (not necessarily consciously) and then avoiding the people who respond in a wrong way.
I suggest you start with a modern lit review of the field. Here's one that seems decent: Vos, J., & van Rijn, B. (2021). The evidence-based conceptual model of transactional analysis: A focused review of the research literature. Transactional Analysis Journal, 51(2), 160–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/03621537.2021.1904364
Use the bibliography as a source of for books and articles further reading. That way you can skip the superficial books that talk up an oversimplified model of the approach.
Lol I appreciate your dedication to these threads, you’re always helpful. Btw, I’m taking the LSAT in a few weeks per your recommendation from a couple months ago, fingers crossed I’ll be making a lot more money in not too long.
Good! You prob know this, but in case you don’t: The LSAT company makes available a few old tests. You can take them and score them and that will let you know whether your score’s high enough for 7Sage. I’m not sure what the minimum they require is, somewhere around 175 I think. Number is prob in their materials somewhere. If score you get isn’t high enough or just on the border, figure out where you lost the most points and study that. Apparently pretty much everyone benefits from working a bunch of the Logic Games items because there’s a sort of system you can develop for diagramming the situation that makes it easier to answer the questions about it. You are allowed to bring 4 pieces of blank paper to the LSAT so you’ll have a place to draw diagrams. Also, find out online, maybe from a Reddit sub, what it’s like taking the test at home with a virtual proctor watching you. I know there are a few things you should be careful not to do because they can make the proctor think you’re cheating. I’m not sure what they are, though, but you need to make sure not to do any of them because proctors can interrupt the test if they think you’re cheating.
So there you go, another very dedicated post telling every goddam scrap of info I have that might be helpful. It’s not that I’m a saint — I just enjoy being really helpful. Life doesn’t give you many chances to make a pretty big difference — so getting one of those chances is sort of like
finding a golden egg.
One thing that genuinely puzzles me is the purpose of commenters who come here to drill extremely one-sided statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using the commenter M. Khan as an example (and I asked with no response): What is the point of repeatedly saying that Hamas is never wrong and Israel is always wrong? What is it that supposed to accomplish? I assume he really does want to help Palestinians; there is no conceivable way in which this is useful for advancing his goal. If anything, it makes it a tiny bit worse...
I don't see how the conduct of Israeli supporters is significantly better.
It seems to me that a lot of people have retreated from the godawful reality of the situation by choosing a ditch to squat in while hurling pieces of fire and shit at those in the other ditch. They are replicating the original situation, in miniature, and benefit from the comforting illusion that if the hurl enuf pieces of fire and shit the other side will STFU forever and life will be simple and good.
It’s not. That’s my point: this style of pronouncement (opposing side is bad/evil/deserves its suffering) doesn’t win converts and, if anything, causes more dug-in entrenchment.
Please don't re-summon the arguments from last Open Thread, they were exhausting to read through.
Yeah you're right, this is unnecessary.
People who are energetically and emotionally advancing one-sided arguments aren't trying to accomplish anything, they're just giving in to the craving to go find some people who disagree with them and holler.
I think this is an obvious explanation that also happens to make most sense / hold most predictive value. Not sure what I was trying to dig into with this question anymore...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers
You know, every time I read something by Yudkovsky I feel like I’ve been tricked. Like there was so much promise when I started, and by the end I learned nothing. So much cleverness, so little substance.
The title sure does make for a great meme though.
After reading the new Musk biography I went and read the Jobs biography by Isaacson, and am currently half-way through the FTX book by Michael Lewis. One thing that all 3 books have in common is they all stress the insane work hours at Apple/Tesla/SpaceX/FTX. Apparently working 12+ hours for 6-7 days a week wasn't uncommon at any of these places. It made me curious how much other people in start-ups/tech work. I've worked at start-ups before, and currently work at a company that operates somewhat like a start-up. It's not uncommon to work above 40-hours a week or to do 2-3 hours of work on a weekend every now and then, but I've never encountered people regularly working 12+ hours. I'd be curious in hearing anyone's thoughts/experiences on this
I have been in a few startups, and known a few people who worked that much. But in most cases I would say it was not effective. It was either because startups tend to depend on a few key people who do all the work, or because they were bad at managing their time. In the first case it was often because those people were bad at delegating or trusting other people to make the right decisions. In the second case the extra hours rarely translated into good results.
Yep, I can second this after working in a few startups.
I have never worked in a startup environment. Years ago when I worked in a quarterly regulatory compliance job that had very generous overtime rules and a very seasonal schedule, many people (including myself) would regularly put in like 100 hour weeks for a couple weeks on a quarterly cycle. But there was a direct financial benefit.
Similarly now as a business owner, I regularly put in 100 hour weeks when needed, because once again the financial benefits of doing so flow directly to me.
I think that is mostly all it is about. If you are at a fast growing company you can plausible sell to the employees (with the aid of stock grants/options etc.) that super long hours in the service of the company's heath will have financial payoff, possibly massive financial payoff.
So you find people willing to do it.
The other big place you encounter these types of long hours are in high supply low demand industries like videogames where the employers hold all the leverage.
I work in high-tech. I've never seen anyone regularly working 12+ hours. A burst of effort at a critical juncture, yes. I/others have worked weekends when smelly matter hit the rotational air displacement device, but never as a matter of everyday practice.
Approximately 23 million people in the US are government employees (about 16% of the total workforce), mostly at the state and local level. This is obviously a huge number of people both numerically and as a percent. A further ~10% of the entire US workforce works for NGOs. 80% of all NGO revenues come from government grants - which moves the total number of government paid jobs to about 24-25%.
I started noticing the effects of government paid jobs a few years ago, having somehow not noticed for most of my life. Particularly about NGOs, and how large they collectively were. This workforce is obviously going to be much more responsive to government whims and changing perceptions. They will also tend to be college educated, inflating the numbers of people going to college - another 2.x% of all US employees are at colleges and universities.
My gut reaction is that this part of the workforce is highly incentivized to support Democrats and Democratic positions. Even Republicans and independents working for the government would have reason to support higher taxes and more things under government control, even if not all Democrat positions. It feels a bit "chicken or egg" but this also seems like a natural scenario for college-educated left-leaning people to have a place to go when private industry doesn't need so many of them as are graduating. Just go to an NGO. Having about 1/4 of all US jobs being non-productive (purely in the sense of not producing products or services that are sold) would have a significant warping effect on lots of economic perspectives and metrics.
Are there other ways to read this? From a partisan perspective it feels like a handout to Democrats on multiple levels, though I'm sure that's not super fair for me to say.
I’m not sure that this is any more pernicious than the even larger number of employees working for publicly traded corporations, who have incentives to support lower taxes and elimination of government control.
It’s just a feature of a complex society that it is full of big institutions that various people are more or less affiliated with, who will be incentivized to push society in ways that help their institutions rather than others. But people are complex and don’t actually get as shaped by their employer as others always assume.
Agreed, but I think we would be even more concerned if a single organization controlled 25% of the workforce, no matter how indirectly. We would be extremely concerned with a company controlling 5% of the workforce - and often reflect that by our concern about Walmart (1.7%, largest employer in the US) and Amazon (1.2%, second largest employer in the US). Both have influence over additional people, which though strong is far weaker than the amount of control a government has over the rest of society.
Part of the issue is that level of control. 16% directly employed with almost 10% indirectly employed doesn't count all of the US employees under regulations, taxes, etc., controlled by that 25%. The true number affected by government is 100%. That 100% is unavoidable in any kind of stable country, because stability requires a monopoly on violence. What's not necessary is for the government to concentrate so much power directly and use patronage (through employment and grants) to bring in 1/4 of the people inside the fold, so to speak. A smaller government with regular elections provides far more power to the people, if the people aren't co-opted into the government.
I think one question here is about what it means to be a "single organization". Even the direct government employees are split between federal, state, county, municipal, and other entities (like multi-county transportation departments, or school districts, or any of the other levels we have). These different levels of government are often at odds with each other, and in greater alignment with other entities, like major employers or major religious institutions within their jurisdiction. If you want to count the indirect influence of government on people who aren't employees, then you should discount the direct influence of government on employees who feel these indirect influences of other entities and individuals.
Even a concept like "monopoly on violence" is a bit imprecise - the point of "sanctuary cities" is that the federal government has a hard time imposing violence on immigrants if the local police refuse to cooperate.
Every government budget will inevitably keep bloating until the country reaches a point of bankruptcy. The cycle can take a short time (Argentina, Zimbabwe) or a long time but inevitably it will happen as more and more people become dependent on the state for survival.
Eventually (possibly as early as 2040) the US will be forced to either declare bankruptcy or drastically cut expenses. Until then the bloat will keep on bloating.
Government agencies aren't allowed to ask for the political affiliation of their applicants so the data is more of a subjective nature than based hard stats. But by such things as presidential election polling preferences, police, and emergency responders lean heavily Republican partially because they're predominantly white and male (who tend to lean Republican)—for instance: During the 2016 election, “Out of that population of working officers who plan to vote in the November election, 84% say they support Donald Trump. Hillary was supported by 8%, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 5%, and "other" received 3%." (https://www.policemag.com/patrol/article/15346665/the-2016-police-presidential-poll). Teachers lean Democratic, partially because it's a profession dominated by women and women tend to lean Democratic and schools have a more diverse pool of applicants. Highway departments are harder to gauge. They tend to be pro-union, but being pro-union preferences doesn't necessarily mean one has liberal views. The officer corps of the military tends to lean conservative as well. Anyway, I don't think your gut reaction is based on reality.
The police are actually a great example of what I'm talking about. They are highly incentivized to approve of higher budgets for police and emergency services, and actively work (through unions) at making that happen. That doesn't mean they are supportive of left cultural positions or even Democratic politicians - or as you note, actively support Republicans. What it does mean is that they are supportive of growing the government, even if they only intend that to be within the police forces themselves.
The police are about 800,000 in the US. If you add another 1.4 million for the military, you are looking at 2.2 million in the two groups most likely to be conservative, and that leaves about 21 million other government employees. To be certain those other groups aren't all Democrats, but often they lean that why. And again, my bigger point is that by being government employees they are inherently incentivized to support government positions in a number of ways, often subtle ones.
Could you elaborate a bit on how NGOs are defined for the purpose of this discussion, along with some illustrative examples of large NGOs and their workforce sizes?
That is, is "NGO" here a synonym for the entire nonprofit sector (including charities, churches, community and fraternal organizations, recreational sports leagues, etc), or for some particular subset thereof (e.g. nonprofits with a primary political/social-advocacy mission, or which focus on providing government-like services), and does that subset include things like labor unions and professional associations?
NGO is extremely broad here. I understand there are about 1.5 million NGOs in the US. I'm looking more specifically at those who are supported by government grants, which is apparently about 80% of funding for NGOs.
A lot of those employees are doing jobs that are traditionally thought to be right-leaning: police officers, prosecutors and courts, blue color jobs like maintenance or utilities, military (assuming these are included in your stats), etc.
Then a lot of jobs that exist outside of the gov/NGO settings so the people doing them may not be doing that job because its a gov job but just because thats the profession they have chosen: lawyers, accountants, secretaries, project managers, landscapers, bus drivers, etc.
You also have a lot of employees who are explicitly political either because they have been appointed by a politician or are part of the staff of a politician - many of those will be republicans too.
Finally, a lot of (maybe even most) government jobs would exist regardless of the level of taxation (with in plausible boundaries) or wont increase with higher taxation. Most administrative positions, police/fire/courts, etc. And some localities have legislation related to minimum levels of funding or regulations that require excess taxation to be returned to the citizens. I am pretty active in my cities politics. It's a very left leaning city, but one of the biggest issues recently was the rise in property tax levels and big jumps in property assessment values. The loudest complaints have been from the groups and city councilors that are furthest to the left. Not all taxation is equal.
I dont think you are wrong, just that the situation is more nuanced and there are more factors at play. Overall I think most people just don't think about the system in this way, if they think about it at all. They may think about funding for their specific department but I am not sure that translates to overall taxation levels.
I know you're right that reality is more nuanced than "25% of all US employees work for the government" as if they're all the same. Even at the federal level Republicans and Democrats are fairly evenly split - though I think a lot of that comes from Republicans in the low level military and Democrats in the office positions and staffing the Executive branch organizations. I can't find good stats off hand, but I think the leadership at both leans left/Democrat at higher rates than the rank and file.
One of my concerns is that even Republicans who would be against taxation or government control generally will be more supportive in their specific case. I don't think they would be wrong to do so either, as they would more closely understand the mission of the organization they are part of and see where additional funding would help with that mission. They might be wrong when comparing that choice against other things the money could be spent on, including just letting the people keep it and spend it as they would prefer.
There's also a problem when there's enough people within a subculture that they can be insulated away from alternate perspectives. I don't know what percent would reach that, but 25% sounds like it to me. Especially in places like DC where there are enough people concentrated within those fields that you may rarely talk to people who aren't in the bubble.
My major qualm would be with your statement that government employees are "non-productive" - yes they do not produce goods for sale but they are not all bureaucrats sitting around making red tape. On the local level think fire, police, city planning, library services, schooling (a huge one), public works etc. Similar to a degree on the state level. On the federal level we have all the departments as well as the military (DOD is the single largest employer in the country). Sure we could argue some departments are useless (as libertarians often do), but most departments are serving a core function.
Also like @Bldysabba said please cite your stats.
I was trying to be clear that non-productive is not a pejorative, but instead descriptive. There's a perspective that naturally comes from working for-profit that employees who do not sell the product of their work do not get. There are lots of non-productive employees at for-profit companies as well, but they are still around people who measure outputs against expenses and have to make ends meet. Working for the government, especially in things like police and fire protection, don't use prices or sell products - for which we should be happy - and this changes their perspective.
Here's the two major stats from my post. Let me know if you're looking for something else.
https://usafacts.org/annual-publications/2021/government-10-k/part-i/item-1-purpose-and-function-of-our-government-general/employees/
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/nonprofits-account-for-12-3-million-jobs-10-2-percent-of-private-sector-employment-in-2016.htm
Would you mind citing your stats?
"Holly Elmore and PauseAI are holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities around the world, including San Francisco."
Meanwhile, November 14th-17th in Seattle, Microsoft are holding a jamboree in meatspace and online about "Experience AI transformation in action at Microsoft Ignite":
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/home
Does PauseAI have anything on their Very Significant And Important Protest, Ya? page about this? Doesn't look like it. Are they attending? No idea. Are they in contact with Microsoft et al. about these kinds of pauses? I sure hope they are, but I have no idea.
What do I want to indicate by the contrasting events? That money trumps principles every time, and so long as AI is being held out as the new $$$$$$$ machine for everyone, especially during a period of tech slow-down for the big companies, I think earnest appeals about "oh please please please turn off your money-maker" are going nowhere. Protest in your little home fields all you like, kids, but unless you're up there onstage with Satya, it just means a bunch of college students get to take the day off for a nice walk in the city.
Pleas to turn off the money maker are for sure not going to work. At the very best they might spur some regulation and the research related to the money maker will change jurisdictions.
Scott, I responded to the pettyness of the New York Times against you with an article of my own. It's long so I'll just offer the link
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/topple-topple-topple
followed with a few excerpts:
"Despite their well-funded claims that they “deserve” to have more influence over your life than you have over theirs, the powerful, believe it or not, are lying....
"Last week I mentioned Dr. Scott Siskind / SlateStarCodex / ACX . He is an intelligent and good person. Or at least as intelligent and good as a person can be. And apparently the New York Times is still smarting from his little upstart rebellion a few years back when he embarrassed them by making a fuss just because they were planning to doxx him for the lulz...
"It took me 47 years, but 24 hours ago I realized that Trotsky was right. You and I may not be interested in mud wrestling assholes but the mud wrestling assholes are interested in us. Playing by the rules of water polo against the Einsatzgruppen will leave you in a ditch under 30,000 other bodies...
"I've got your back and I'm sure my friends feel the same way. It will be fun to take down bullies. Their time has come."
If you start off by comparing a newspaper to literal Nazi death squads, I don't feel very interested in clicking on the link to read more.
Hello sir or madam.
Your rush to judgement was evil.
My response was a gentle hint that you change yourself and make recompense. A modest apology would have done the trick.
I myself am done with you but if there are meta consequences from powers truer than myself, you have righteously incurred them upon yourself and will receive your just deserts. I do not personally desire that but I am obligated to inform you of it.
Anyone else reading this should take heed.
There are people in this world with important things to say. Rush to judgement responses along the lines of "I'm not even going to read this" means that nothing will ever be heard but the same-old-same-old.
Silencing me is a great evil that rebounds towards the silencers and towards those who have the ability to speak up for me and fail to do so.
The result of my not being heard widely may mean a loss for everyone, but the crime sits in the souls of the silencers and those who see the silencing and fail to act powerfully and decisively.
If you want the only available vocals to belong to those who are "successful" by means of the current rules then you and your world will suffer the consequences of it.
I have done all I could in these 47 years. No doubt I have more to do and plenty to answer for but that is not your concern. Your concern ought to be ensuring that I have a platform and that those who attempt to silence me are stopped.
I am well aware that this comment does not fit in the category of comments that are considered "normal".
Normalcy hasn't exactly gotten you very far, has it.
May you have a blessed and happy day, and through that may you enjoy the strength and joy required to act as is right.
I would not want to be read by people with that propensity to rush to judgement.
If that happens to just be your mood at this moment (but wouldn't necessarily be your take at every minute of every day) then I WOULD ask you to reconsider and at least read that far before judging against it.
But if that standard is your go-to then while I still respect you as a human being I would agree 100% that you should not read me.
My writing connects very very well with a small coterie of people and offends pretty much every one else. (All for different reasons.)
I think that giving each other the benefit of the doubt would be a good thing and something that we need a whole lot more of on the internet, but if I were to try to convince you of that now, you might think it was just to get you to read the piece 😂 and that isn't the case. I truly do not want the wrong sort of people to read me and become either angry or upset.
At the same time I still have an obligation to speak to those few few people who feel like they connect with me better than they can with anyone else.
I do not mean to offend.
Can you please stop linking your blog in every comment? It's starting to feel like ad spam.
Both GPT 3.5 and 4 interpret the NYT quote correctly (that is, when asked if acx received a grant they say "no, manifold did")
That's an interesting way to assess the possibility of miscommunication.
I went to listen to a talk by Connor Leahy for an article I am writing on the subject. Basically, Conjecture and FLI are doing a series of talks on AI X-risk before the UK summit in November. One thing that struck me was his answer to the following question:
I asked him, "If you believe that the problem we are facing is not a technical problem but a coordination one, what are some people you would point towards as thought leaders in the field of coordination at scale?" His answer was "Don't read, try to actually coordinate, start a company, a think tank, an institution" He struck me as very practically-oriented, less interested in debating and more interesting in doing stuff and organizing people. He is involved in a lot of debates online and it might seem like debating is his main thing but that might be just the medium shaping the message. Would love to hear some more thoughts about Connor from other who have met him, or who have listened to him
Assume the greatest writer in the English language exists because great writers exist in a well-ordered set, and that some higher authority knows this set backwards and forwards. This higher authority is not biased; it simply knows objectively who the greatest writer is.
You win a billion dollars if you can guess who the greatest writer in the English language is according to this higher authority. Who do you guess?
dril
Lol
Thomas Pynchon
define 'great', and 'writer' please.
I don't know how this higher authority defines either of those terms. You will have to use your own judgment for how they might be defined. My question is only: who do you guess?
you don't know, but does the authority? I would ask them for the definitions first.
I did. Their only response was: "These things are obvious to us."
Well if its "obvious" than the obvious answer is Shakespeare.
Not sure why the authority would let me know they have an objective answer, but then refuse to give definitions where it counts most.
You know how authorities are. Big on power trips and petty condescension.
Me.
I think I see what you're doing here: you're looking for an author so great, so transcendentally monumental on every axis, that he outshines the inherent nonsensity of this question (who's objectively the best in a subjective landscape) and answers it anyway by just being so, so good at what he does that the scale of it makes all other axes tend to zero, or curl in on themselves like spare string theory dimensions.
And the answer is of course Chuck Tingle.
For sheer joy in wordplay, and a prolific output across many genres, I nominate G. K. Chesterton.
I have repeatedly been unimpressed by poetry to the point I think I just do not have the taste for it, so I can already disqualify almost everything before 1950. I cannot remember any book I finished that had been written originally in English, and uh, that tells both on me and on what I think about it. I think I will unironically go with TLP/Edward Teach. That "book" has at the very least been a very enjoyable read.
I would go Orwell?
Orwell is an interesting, and on the whole admirable, thinker, but he is not a great writer.
I am probably too much of an ideas person who just doesn't care about the artifice of language. For me Animal Farm is about as good as a book gets on an efficiency standpoint.
Orwell could be strangely out of it. He actually thought that because all the old dads in the Home Guard had Enfields in their closets that the British people would be in the mood for a violent revolution as soon as the war ended, which would be peachy keen.
Britain avoided one largely because of the 1945 election, which swept to power perhaps the most radical government in the country's history.
That such a thing would happen (both that an election would occur after 10 years without one, and that the new government would be allowed to take office and implement sweeping changes) was... not obvious at the time Orwell wrote those words.
Labor's one prior government had ended in a "national government" and its leader effectively crossing the floor, after all.
You cant make subjective questions objective by pretending so, not a fun game.
Best you could possibly do is: Do your best to guess the most common answer if all humans were asked who the greatest writer is.
Otherwise, just ask who the greatest writer is.
An appeal to popularity is so, so much worse than what he's doing. Unless you think we have a lot to gain from reading Stephanie Meyer and JK Rowling.
At the very least how to write an engaging story.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Winston Churchill, famous orator and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Do translators count, or just people who write original works? Because if the former, then I'm going for Miles Coverdale.
Winning a billion dollars would probably ruin my life, so I'm not playing :^) (Shakespeare)
Shakespeare is so obviously the correct answer that I almost suspect everyone who answers something else is trolling. Especially since the question is "greatest" and not "best" -- even if one thought someone else wrote better works than Shakespeare, Shakespeare would still be greater by being more influential.
Or maybe they just think the Bayesian priors are against it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41615253
Last open thread had a discussion about this.
Yeah that's mostly BS. The most unlikely thing is that there is a you (or a me.) and yet here we are. DaVinci was a one of a kind great inventor/ artist. Shakespeare did (copied) all the myths and tales and he did them first in English, and it seems we are all just copying him. Even when you think you are copying someone else, you may be copying them copying him (Shakespeare)
So the first thing that comes to mind is the St. Crispin's day speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Crispin%27s_Day_Speech But there are so many, he's the greatest because he did it all first... or at least first in English.
Who's the greatest Russian writer?
Oh, thanks, I missed that.
Newton wrote things at least as influential as Shakespeare. He wasn't a literary genius, but certainly influential. As I mentioned, I don't think they are comparable.
Newton was not great *as a writer*. He was great as a mathematician and physicist. (in any case, many of his main works were in Latin)
I haven't read much by Newton, but all the papers by Einstein that I've read are great! E. Schrodinger also wrote complex (and beautiful) thoughts in English. It may just be my bias, science papers from ~1910-1960, were often wonderful.
Is there some reason you are asking this question by referring to a hypothetical authority instead of just asking people who they think the greatest writer is? Or asking people to come up with possible objective criteria for the greatest writer?
I wanted to avoid questions about what criteria I was using. I put the criteria in a black box.
I like the framing: don’t overthink the definition, just go with your gut.
its the unalive problem i bet, because it sounds like an ai prompt. Like you use unalive to deal with social media algorithms and you start seeing people that do so use it in regular posts.
if you need to constantly qualify a prompt with specific words to generate precise results, you might start to see it too.
likely to remove the bias constraints that a popular poll / census would involve.
I'm not sure you want this to be as broad as it is. Here are some possibilities, intentionally far-ranging:
* George R. R. Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
* Bob Woodward - Exposed Nixon's Watergate scandal
* Shakespeare - Sonnets, plays
* Michael Lewis - Financial journalist
* Richard Feynman - Made physics more understandable
* William Safire - Wrote the greatest speech never given
* Ernest Hemingway - Six-word story
* Rich Burlew - Author of Order of the Stick (one of my favorite webcomics)
My experiences color my suggestions, but I bet lots of other people could be proposed. My point is can you compare any of these writers' work to any others in the list to order them best to worst?
For that reason, I left Tolkien and Rowling both off the list; one may compare them to each other, and to Martin.
My counter argument against Martin is that his claim to greatness rests on basically one series, and an incomplete one at that.
The "Best Writer (w/o sub-categories)" award feels like it should go to someone with a broad multi-genre base, likely including both fiction and non-fiction.
Which makes me ponder the options of Isaac Asimov and Lewis Carol, at least from the "known primarily for the fiction side of their catalog" brackets.
For both prose and poetry, Kipling is the obvious candidate. He also wrote some non-fiction.
I would say that history will say Tolkien was more important than Martin. Martin's strength I believe is characterization, and thematically it basically says "strength wins, and morality it irrelevant", which I find much less satisfying than Tolkien, or even Rowling.
I agree lots of more options exist, those you mentioned not least.
The funny thing is I would say Tolkien's pretty trite naive traditional ethics is the weakest point of his writing.
His message seems to be that "evil is evil", which isn't really that helpful, the books are ethically just tautologies without anything interesting to say about ethics or human behavior at all (they are super interesting in other ways).
Given how many people "forget the good in the search for the power to effect it," I would assert that a non-overly-complicated reminder to avoid evil is a perfectly valid moral message.
And there's this gem said by Aragorn: "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among elves and dwarves and another among men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."
Yeah but he is wrong. That what is lame about the ethics of Tolkien.
That is a great quote.
> and thematically it basically says "strength wins, and morality it irrelevant"
We haven't seen the end of the story yet. I fully expect the good guys to win in the end.
I haven't watched past the second season, but the HBO series is completed. I have heard things about the ending.
Of course, the HBO series differs from the books, so no guarantees (or any guarantee that the books will go on, for that matter).
For this, "good guys" can be hard to define. Except the Others.
> For this, "good guys" can be hard to define. Except the Others.
I'd say Jon Snow and his friends are pretty solidly good. And, in addition to the Others, several human characters are pretty solidly bad. (E.g., Craster, the Boltons, the Mountain.)
Martin won a Hugo for Sandkings well before GoT, and honestly Wild Cards would have done a lot better had it been released now where real/deconstructed superhero stories is a lot bigger a thing. He's not a bad writer.
But honestly, Martin is nowhere near any sort of great writer in fantasy. its like saying Rowling is a great writer in kids lit; if you read the genres there are many far better. The problem is people seem to only read one fantasy book or one kids series because its popular. They partake in an event, not like a genre.
im worried the focus on event media is removing or obscuring craftsmanship or genre fandom. like asimov; if you ever read Gordon R. Dickson, you have a writer better than Asimov but without the luck of ideas; the childe cycle is better than foundation and his writing overall is better. Or if you want the glory of ideas Cordwainer Smith's works are sublime.
just seems like no one reads the past any more
Prose? Poetry? Theater? Polemics? Advertising slogans? Instruction manuals?
I'll go with T.S. Eliot.
I would guess it's whoever this higher authority is. I already feel like I want to read their stuff.
Start with Lolita.
Why? So things only get better from there?
Just a joke about who the higher authority is.
any startups working on Polygenic risk scores for educational attainment?
I read an interview with a Hisbollah officer, and he had an interesting take on the Hamas attack on Israel.
He believes that Hamas didn't expect their attack to go so well, and that it essentially spiraled out of control. That they sent a lot of different groups with different methods, and the expected outcome would be that a few would get through, get ~10km into Israeli territory, kill a few Israeli and capture a handful of hostages. Then Israel would fire a few rockets as retaliation, kill a few people and go back to business. That would be a great outcome for Hamas because hostages have been extremely valuable in the past.
But then resistance was a lot weaker than Hamas expected. Lots of groups broke through and they went 20km, then 50km, without meeting any resistance from the Israeli army. Essentially, the whole thing got out of control.
It was not a high Hisbollah officer, but he suggested that higher Hisbollah ranks knew in advance that something would come from Hamas, but were terrified when they realized the extent of the attack.
What is your take on this? It would explain a lot of things surprisingly well for me. On the other hand, I am not sure whether I can square it with the massive number of rockets that Hamas fired during their attack.
Why would they throw away like a thousand fighters (out of some tens of thousands) just for a limited op?
The purpose of terrorism is to draw the world's attention to your plight. Didn't Arafat basically invent that strategic theory of terrorism? If you kill soldiers, that's dog bites man. If you kill civilians, that's world news. Palestinians have no hope of beating Israel directly. But they can influence a bunch of fools at Harvard and perhaps, via that route, one day, the US State Department.
What is foolish about being okay with what Israel has done to the people of Gaza? Fools are the people who think the US has a moral or strategic duty to support everything Israel does or care at all what happens to Israelis.
"What is foolish about being okay with what Israel has done to the people of Gaza?"
Absolutely nothing, of course. Everyone should be okay with what Israel has done to the people of Gaza, since it is all both just and necessary.
But why standup for Gaza like you never have before right after Gaza commits a terrorist act? It gives people the idea that you support terrorist acts.
I think their best strategy is the opposite of what they've been doing: Be conspicuously nonviolent in the face of Israeli oppression, thereby shaming Israel's allies into cutting ties. But that strategy looks an awful lot like doing nothing, and doing nothing to fix your problem doesn't feel nearly as good as killing the people you hate.
The "problem" is that if they were non-violent, Israel wouldn't oppress them enough to generate much sympathy. It would be a good strategy for having a decent life, but not necessarily for getting an independent state. (Then again, terrorism isn't a good strategy for that either.)
I don't think that would work at all for Hamas. Israel's allies wouldn't be shamed and Hamas would gain nothing. There would probably be fewer deaths, but that's not their goal.
That's a recipe for the status quo, which means Israel taking more palestinian territory.
The status quo includes a lot of restrictions on Palestinians that were implemented because of the violence. Between 1972 (a few years after the six-day war) and 1989 (the beginning of the first intifada) Palestinians could freely travel within the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and could travel to and work in Israel. Then the first and the second intifadas, then the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip, resulted in more and more restrictions.
How hard is it for Hamas to recruit, train, and equip the fighters they employed in the operation? Given that Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza, and given Gaza's population demographics (skewing both young and male, with staggeringly high unemployment rates), it seems like they'd have a pretty easy time finding angry young men with nothing better to do. And if the operation had been intended to be mostly for show with only limited objectives expected/intended to succeed, they could have cheaped out on training and equipment for most of the participants.
I'm actually moderately surprised to learn that Hamas probably only has a few tens of thousands of fighters, and I'm curious what the bottleneck is. I doubt for the aforementioned reasons that it's availability of raw recruits. Other possibilities I can think of off the top of my head:
- Equipment. Depending on how effective the Gaza blockade has been, Hamas may be tightly limited even on small arms and ammunition.
- Political reliability. Hamas's internal legitimacy is fairly weak and is actively opposed by Fatah (which controls the West Bank, and both organization claim to be the legitimate governments of all the Palestinian territories). If they don't have enough officer candidates they consider reliable, raising more troops runs that they're just raising troops for their own internal opponents (not just the potential of large-scale defection to Fatah, but also the risk of creating a ready-made power base for internal rivals to the current leadership of Hamas).
- Budget for pay and rations. Giving people guns, teaching them how to use them, and then stiffing them on their pay or failing to deliver food and other basic supplies to them seldom ends well, so Hamas's current manpower under arms might be near the limit of what they can support.
If the bottleneck is equipment, this scenario only makes sense if the parts of the operation they expected to succeed involved capturing enough IDF equipment to make good their operational losses. This might be the case, since IDF bases were among the targets of the 10/7 attacks.
If the bottleneck is political reliability, part of the objective might have been a "Uriah Gambit" to get less-reliable officers and units killed off at Israeli hands. Although this would come at the cost of a permanent degradation of their military capacity.
If the bottleneck is pay and rations, they might have expected to be able to replace their losses rapidly, as anyone who got killed is now off the payroll, freeing up budget for new recruits.
The thousands of rockets launched killed like, one or two people. Israel has gotten pretty good at blocking those.
This was always meant to be a significant escalation (and it was planned to have large numbers of civilian casualties - they had maps of schools and synagogues and had very specific plans of how to attack the music festival). They probably did expect dozens of deaths, just not quite this level.
I'd add that while they penetrated deeper and for longer than anyone expected, afaict most of the deaths were inflicted early on and in the villages relatively near Gaza, so that probably didn't affect the actual numbers killed that much.
Good argument. Thanks, this is much appreciated!
Do you mind sharing the link to that interview?
Unfortunately, it's a) in German and b) paywalled
https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/hisbollah-bedrohung-israels-warten-auf-den-sturm-a-153c7b38-80ba-4e3c-9c49-6d1f46464558
Here is the translation of one part. The whole article (a mix of report and interview) is much longer, most of it is about whether Hisbollah will get involved now:
They knew that something big was going to happen and were on the alert. But then the Hamas attack threw them into a surprising dilemma, he says hesitantly when asked: "It was all planned on a much smaller scale: They thought they'd break through the wall, get maybe ten kilometers, meet tough resistance and take a handful of hostages." Then Israel's army would fire a few rockets into Gaza, after which the exchange of thousands of Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli hostages would be negotiated.
But then, he said, the Hamas commandos beyond the wall met little resistance: "They drove 10, 15, 20, 30 kilometers, nobody stopped them." No one stopped them from shooting hundreds of people, from taking well over 100 hostages back to Gaza, "the Israeli army just wasn't there. No one could have imagined that."
Now Hamas, Israel and Hezbollah, too, have become driven by events, the chain-smoker admits: "That the Israelis are bombing Gaza so terribly, want to invade there now, we didn't expect that."
Well shit, that's the theory I've been airing to anyone willing to listen for the last week. I guess i'm not the free-thinker I thought to be.
I mean, Israel didn't expect a Hamas attack to be so successful. Foreign intelligence didn't expect a Hamas attack to be that successful. Why would Hamas leadership have expected it?
The Pax American seems to have ended. As evidence, Noah Smith and others believe so: https://substack.com/notes/post/p-137904390?selection=e27049cd-a56d-49d4-aeea-94b98f8d367d#:~:text=Sometimes%20when%20I%20talk%20to%20Americans%2C%20especially%20in%20the%20tech%20industry%2C%20about%20a%20war%20over%20Taiwan%2C%20I%20feel%20a%20little%20of%20the%20frustration%20Gandalf%20must%20have%20felt.
The main point made in the above is that American military power is no longer a deterrent, due to the decline in US military industry as well as perceived political division in America.
Smith alleges that the Hamas attack is part of the Russia-China-Iranian axis emboldened by American weakness. He says the US is not ready for a war with China.
My question is why are we gearing for a war with China over Taiwan? It strikes me as stupid to fight such a big war over Taiwan. But I get the impression the real reason we should fight China over Taiwan is that if we don't it signals that the Pax America is really, really done. After which China won't have any reason not to take over every country save Australia to its south. China may also lay claim to all those Road & Belt initiatives it suckered African countries to grow indebted to.
Combine that with Russia allying with China and this could get ugly.
What do you think?
The status quo regarding the Republic of China (which survives as a self-governing rump state because of the US navy) has lasted for decades, and could continue for decades longer. China is not interested in forcible reunification, and as its economy grows, economic coercion could very well be enough to get it what it wants without a fight.
If the US is goading Taiwan towards a declaration of independence, and ultimately a war, it's because its become effectively governed by defense contractors and its political system is no longer capable of showing the slightest bit of restraint.
The Pax Americana seems to be effectively deterring anyone from attacking any of the nations we have promised to defend, and it's still working w/re Taiwan, which we have been deliberately ambiguous about whether we would defend. The only significant wars of territorial conquest since 1992 that the Pax Americana has *not* deterred are Ukraine, which we very blatantly conspicuously excluded from the regional Club of Nations America Will Fight to Protect, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which our State department clumsily implied was not under our protection. We've also not deterred any of the attacks on Israel, but Israel is also a nation that the United States has conspicuously not fought to defend or promised to defend in any of its previous wars, some of which were real existential threats to Israel. And even so, Kuwait, Israel, and (fingers crossed) Ukraine, remain free and independent in part because of the actions of the Pax.
As for why we are "gearing for a war with China over Taiwan":
1. Pax is a Good Thing, and ours is the only Pax on the table. A world in which wars of territorial conquest rarely happen and never succeed, is much better than the alternative, and worth fighting for.
2. Taiwan, and particularly the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, is vital to the US (and global) economy. If Taiwan is conquered and/or devastated by war, the result will be an economic catastrophe. Which, among other things, would almost certainly cost more American lives through the maladies of poverty and despair, than would a limited air/naval war with China.
3. If China invades and conquers Taiwan, it will not end there. Particularly if China's invasion of Taiwan comes after the Russian conquest of (any great portion of) Ukraine. There will be copycats, probably including China and Russia going after new targets. So if we're going to fight a war in the end anyhow, best that we fight the one limited war up front, before anybody we care about is conquered and while we've still got all our allies.
As for Russia allying with China, so what? The Russian Air Force has proven itself to be a joke. The Russian Navy has always been a joke. The Russian Army is mostly defunct, and mostly irrelevant to an air/naval conflict in the Taiwan straight. Russia still probably has a working destroy-the-world-out-of-spite(*) button, but there's no advantage to Russia in pressing that button on China's behalf. Russia's industries don't produce much of anything China needs, except for oil and gas, and it's already a given that China will get as much of that as Russia can push through its limited Siberian pipeline network because most of their traditional customers now want to buy from Anyone But Russia.
So, who cares if Russia allies with China in a war over Taiwan? How would that war look any different than the one where Russia doesn't ally with China? We care whether China backs Russia's wars of conquest in Europe, but not so much vice versa.
* World destruction not warranted to be 100%, some shrinkage may have occurred, YMMV
It is in America's interest to keep Taiwan independent. It forms a wall of US friendly nations that currently keeps China hemmed in in the pacific: South Korea, Japan, Phillipines, Taiwan, Australia. From a Realist perspective, China is a competitor state. You don't let competitor states take away your advantages without making them pay for it. And the fact is, if the US intervenes China can't take Taiwan. That fact has prevented China from trying to take it for decades. As long as it seems likely that the US will defend Taiwan, they won't try to invade it.
I doubt they would attack the US directly unless they severely overestimate their chances: even without putting "boots on the ground" the US Navy has the power to blockade all sea trade to China, and without sea trade China will run out of fuel and fertilizer: they need global trade to survive, America does not need to trade with China to survive.
A competitor state that would still be economically backward without the US helping them in the first place. Good job America.
Whoops!
I often wonder what would have happened if America had intervened to support Chiang Kai-shek against Mao after WWII. I can see why we didn't (having just got through the worst war in history, makes sense you're not eager to get in another one over the rule of a backwards country across the ocean), but a world with the Republic of China instead of the People's Republic of China would probably be a nicer one to live in.
On the other hand, communist revolution in China may have been inevitable.
It was a beautiful sort of foolishness to think that if we were friends with China and made them rich they would be our friends in turn.
"Whoops!" - Yup.
"World Peace Through World Trade" was a plausible-sounding slogan prior to WWII. It didn't work then, and, unfortunately, it doesn't look like it is working with the PRC now.
It is an interesting question as to what would have happened with a Republic of China instead of the People's Republic of China. I have two conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the US and Chinese ideologies would not have been in conflict. On the other hand, whenever there are two 800 pound gorillas in the world, they are likely to struggle for power.
Does the final line of the free portion of that Noah Smith post that you yourself linked explain why America would end up in the war if China attacked Taiwan?
[The reason is not that TSMC is essential to the global semiconductor supply chain, or really anything intrinsic to Taiwan itself. It’s that if China attacks Taiwan, it’ll probably attack U.S. bases first.]
China can't take the chance that the United States might intervene in the conflict, so their first move would have to be to attack US forces to prevent successful interference. Once that happens, it's a whole new ball game.
China would attack the US because the US has declared it would defend Taiwan and is training and positioning troops to do so. If the US said "Take Taiwan if you want. It's none of our business." then China likely wouldn't drag the US into it.
If the US said that, it would severely damage our alliances in East Asia who are counting on us to push back against Chinese aggression/expansion. Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc.
Not to mention it would embolden China to push further, since it would essentially be a declaration of US weakness.
Which would be worse:
1) The US allows China to take Taiwan; or
2) The US loses a war with China over Taiwan
?
I suspect 2 would be about 10 times worse than 1. I also don't think our odds of defeating China are as good as 90%, which makes our expected value of fighting them negative. (Noah believes we would likely lose such a war.)
The question depends on what "lose" means. If losing means the war ends with China in possession of Taiwan, then maybe the US has a decent chance of losing. And in such a loss, it would not be 10 times worse than just handing Taiwan over, especially if we manage to bleed China enough in taking it. Sometimes it's worth saying "If you want it you'll have to fight me for it" rather than just handing something over. It is especially worth it if you're the global hegemon who maintains a lot of power based on other countries assuming we won't just roll over and let them take what they want.
The odds of the US losing a war with China in any larger sense than that, where China invades the US and forces us to surrender, is less than 1%. They simply do not have the naval capability to invade us (the navy they've been rapidly building is not a "blue water" navy meant to project power over a long distance, the ship design and breakdown of ship types is designed to protect their home waters and project power a short distance from home), and we have 5 times as many nukes as they do so they won't try flinging a few over the ocean unless they're okay with us glassing them.
Quite frankly we don't even have to fight the Chinese directly: our navy can cut off trade to China by occupying a few key straits, and without naval trade China will have serious issues acquiring enough fuel and fertilizer to keep the lights on and the populace from starving.
> China can't take the chance that the United States might intervene in the conflict, so their first move would have to be to attack US forces to prevent successful interference.
Doesn't that attack on US forces basically force the US to intervene anyway? If they wanted to avoid the US intervening, seems like stealthy piracy or public relations ops would be the way to go. (Setting aside the difficulty of those options.)
I suspect that the reason the China-Taiwan split has been so stable for so long is that China doesn't really have options that meaningfully keep the US from stepping in. (at least as of late 2023)
The game theory looks something like this:
1. If China doesn't do a first strike and the US intervenes, China loses badly. Their invasion force either sinks or dies on the beach.
2. If China does do a first strike, the US will almost certainly intervene, but it's a toss-up if they succeed. China might plausibly believe they can do enough damage that the US can't stop the invasion of Taiwan.
3. If China doesn't attack the US and the US doesn't intervene, it's all good and the invasion of Taiwan can continue with no fuss. But what are the odds of that?
If China thinks that an intervention is likely, and that not getting in the first strike would be very costly, then preemptively striking the US forces starts to make sense. Better to be certainly at war in a position of strength than likely at war in a position of weakness.
The last time an Asian power decided that US intervention was likely and their best bet would be to strike the US preemptively, it didn't turn out too well.
China striking US forces means war with the US. Garunteed. And war with the US is an existential crisis for China: we *might* roll over and let them take Taiwan, but if Pearl Harbor or 9/11 are any indication it's more likely that we'll go to full out war with China and won't be happy until Xi is signing an unconditional surrender in Tiananmen square.
The game theory is:
1. China invades Taiwan, US intervenes, China fails to take Taiwan.
2. China invades Taiwan, US doesn't intervene, China takes Taiwan.
3. China preemptively strikes US military forces, US commits itself to the conquest of China and the destruction of the CCP.
I think this oversimplifies the decision space facing China and the US. In particular, the US has a spectrum of responses when it 'intervenes'. For example, four broad positions the US could take would be:
1) Humanitarian aid only. China would prefer the US didn't do this because it will extend the ability of Taiwan to fight back / absorb human and infrastructure costs, but ultimately an intervention of at least this level is surely priced in to China's planning
2) Material support only (similar to Ukraine). Just on this point - if Russia ever followed through on their threats of direct missile strikes on US military targets in the mainland US I doubt the US would keep their support for Ukraine at this level.
3) Indirect military support only (similar to Gaza). For example, the US park a CBG or two in the Taiwan Strait and then very visibly enforce some rules of engagement like 'No other countries get involved' or 'The Strait is a no-fly zone between these times to allow for civilian evacuation'. This favours Taiwan to an extreme extent (both because attackers usually rely on operational flexibility to overcome the advantages defenders usually have and because presumably the US will not pick rules of engagement neutrally out of a hat)
4) Direct military support. For example, the US puts boots-on-ground in mainland China. This is a catastrophic outcome for China, and probably for the US too
It is a pretty good bet that a surprise attack on US military bases in the region would push the US very far up the escalation ladder compared to their response if China picks a time when the US is internally divided and then launches an attack on Taiwan which spares US assets. So the decision facing China is more like, "Does the military gain of first-striking US assets justify both the increased probability of drawing the US into the war *and also* the increased ferocity of the US response if it does decide to get involved?".
Fwiw my guess is no - the US has strategic ambiguity about the level of support it will offer Taiwan, but has no strategic ambiguity about the extent to which it will hunt down and punish those who challenge American military hegemony. In order to credibly commit to this, the US needs to make it clear that it will never be in the strategic interest of any country ever to attack US troops for any reason, and enforce this at the point of a sword if necessary.
Another option is a variant of (2), material support, but do it prior to an actual attack. A Taiwan armed to the teeth could look much less appetizing to the CCP. There would also be less of a question about whether the US would actually come to Taiwan's defense if push came to shove if the weapons were already under Taiwanese control.
I do not see us heading for a true war with China. It seems much more likely that we use Ukraine as a template and arm Taiwan to the teeth. Seeing how the situation in Ukrainian is going, I do not see China achieving a quick victory in that war, and I am not sure if they would consider it worth the inevitable sanctions
Taiwan is already highly armed and has significant plans and preparations for a chinese invasion. Most of this has been supported by the US. Luckily for Taiwan, unlike Ukraine, they are on a mountainous island that is easy to defend from most conventional attacks. I've read some commentary recently that China may be tipping the tide and getting an advantage over taiwan, but we'll never know unless full war breaks out. The territory is much smaller, but taiwan is more prepared than Ukraine. Though I also think China is in much better shape than Russia is/was.
Preparations including perhaps the least experienced soldiers of any developed nation
From what I've read, Taiwan isn't prepared at all, militarily, for a Chinese invasion. Their troops are almost entirely untrained.
Why on god's green earth is it in America's interests to protect Israel? Other than Israel using nukes, I don't see a reason.
My distant relatives spread a lot of money around.
I've told my mother between that and the immigration thing she is not to send me any more Jewish stuff. She is not pleased.
Israel is the most west-aligned government and culture in that region of the middle east and a substantial portion around it. It is technologically advanced, prosperous, and shares a religion and common cultural elements with a fairly successful and powerful subset of America's own populace. It is in a fragile position surrounded by enemies, such that America has a strong bargaining position to influence Israeli affairs in exchange for things like e.g. sending naval fleets to prevent Iranian intervention.
The other governments in the area are extremely anti-western, control a fairly large proportion of a critical world resource, and have demonstrated willingness and occasional competency at directly harming westerners violently. These governments also tend to be relatively theocratic and have a religion opposed to common western religions - and probably 30-40% of Americans believe the nearby enemies of israel represent an ideological force that is threatening to western or american ideology, in a direct-and-present way. Israel is therefore a natural staging ground to prevent the spread or increase in influence, similar to cold war practices of containing communism.
The control of oil can be directly felt through gasoline prices that have a direct influence on election results and are an important input to the economic prosperity of the west. Israel has been an important piece of maintaining control and influence in the region, and for example normalization of relationships between Saudi Arabia and Israel is something America wants as a geopolitical aim as a result.
Are you actually confused why its in America's interests? You may not agree with all of those aims, but youre not America, America contains people approximately 50% of whom do not agree with you.
>Israel is the most west-aligned government and culture in that region of the middle east
Ah yes, "well-aligned" country that spies on us, actively brags about influencing our elections through its intense, powerful zionist lobby groups, commits false flag attacks on us, takes billions of dollars in aid, creates millions of refugees that end up in places like the US...wow, much aligned! Very ally!
>t is technologically advanced, prosperous, and shares a religion and common cultural elements with a fairly successful and powerful subset of America's own populace.
Ah yes, we need to give MORE power to a subset of the population who already has outsized influence over American society and which care more about a foreign ethnostate than they do the United states.
>The other governments in the area are extremely anti-western, control a fairly large proportion of a critical world resource, and have demonstrated willingness and occasional competency at directly harming westerners violently.
Right, the best way to stop them harming westerners is to support a jewish ethnostate that takes their land and impoverishes them.
Oh, and Jewish "intellectuals" and activists have done more harm to the west in the modern age than muslims could ever dream of. They're the one actively demanding that Europe and the US take in these muslim immigrants so Israel doesn't have to deal with them. Israel is actively harming western interests.
>These governments also tend to be relatively theocratic and have a religion opposed to common western religions - and probably 30-40% of Americans believe the nearby enemies of israel represent an ideological force that is threatening to western or american ideology, in a direct-and-present way.
This is absolute BS. Jewish activists do much, much more harm to the west than muslims ever could, and muslims wouldn't hate the west so much if he didn't fund all of Israel's bullshit. There would be fewer muslim refugees in the first place if the US didn't fuck the entire region up, be it the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, supporting the arab spring, arming LITERAL ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS to try and overthrow the government of Syria.
If you don't muslims, then more US interference in the middle east is literally the thing you should be advocating against.
>Are you actually confused why its in America's interests? You may not agree with all of those aims, but youre not America, America contains people approximately 50% of whom do not agree with you.
Your explanation literally boils down to "American jews want us to support israel so we need to give them want they want, also conservatives hate muslims so we need to help israel kill them".
Is Palestinians took over Israel, this would have almost NO impact on my life or standard of living whatsoever.
Conservatives in the US are so pathetic that they *literally* care more about Israel's border security than their own. They literally are more okay with spending billions of dollars on israel than they are with building a basic border wall in their own damn country.
I'm neither conservative nor _agree_ with all (or most) of the aims I described either. What actually goes on in the state department is not children at recess and you asked. But you're just all politics, so enjoy politics.
I think people lacking in the cynicism required for "rationality" about politics would find it difficult to understand that "Israel is just a useful tool for exerting influence and bullying other middle eastern countries about oil, also America is Islamophobic and doesn't care to change that". Mostly because no one in media or politics says the quite part out loud, and it requires having a very dim sort of morality about the whole situation.
I mean its not just that and thats not what I am saying either, though those are definitely elements of it.
Israel is a useful tool for influence about oil but also about creating less hostile relations with middle eastern countries which has benefits in terms of trade and peace. Israel is itself a developed and prosperous economy and we have benefitted greatly from medical, computer, and military technologies developed by Israel, and they are a valuable trade partner. And theres a large aspect thats just, they are western and Jewish and a lot of the people in power in America are western and Jewish and a relatively influential subset of the American population is Jewish.
They're a natural Ally, the way Britain is, they have important economic considerations, like Taiwan, and they are ALSO an important and useful tool for securing oil and preventing the spread of anti-western theocracies in the middle east.
Right, it's a valuable trade partner, but so are lots of countries we've broken ties with and denied support. It's not the distinguishing factor.
And I'm really skeptical about the "creating less hostile relations" and "prevent the spread of religious theocracies", because Israel's actions against Palestine has have demonstrably not done that, considering the situation we're currently in where they've caused a theocratic terrorist group to have popular support and made several middle eastern countries position themselves opposite us in an armed conflict. If "peace" and "getting the rest of the middle east to like us" was the goal, we seem to have missed the mark.
Its A factor. Trying to assign a "distinguishing" factor is either playing politics or baseless speculation unless you have an inside line to American intelligence and geopolitics policy agencies.
Americas official position is that Israel should make a proportional response to the attacks by Hamas. This is consistent with the idea that they want to protect Israel without provoking further insurgency or blowback.
That Israel is not currently striking the right balance between under and over reaction does not mean that America doesnt have those goals.
Politicians like to do the popular thing. "America's" Interests" isn't really a thing that exists.
How does the US supporting Israel help improve/maintain the standard of living for the average American.
Stability in the ME matters a lot to Americans. Oil prices is obvious, but also freedom of movement (especially to and from the ME, but also freedom from terrorism throughout the world).
There are also cultural and religious reasons that a lot of Americans want to be able to visit Israel, which is much easier with the current government.
a. That's a fully generalizable objection to all foreign aid, not just Israel and
b. Politics isn't about improving "the average American" (whatever that is), it's about buying the votes from those specific voters one needs to stay in power. The coin can be physical benefits or flattery/emotion/punishing thier outgroup.
Of course China has a reason to go to war over Taiwan (unity of the nation, it is after all a rebel province) and not much reason to go to war with Korea or Japan (some rocks in the sea are disputed).
Those rocks in the sea, which likely cap hydrocarbons, are claimed by Vietnam, The Philippines and Malaysia. It's not hard to imagine a war between China and those three nations, especially if China acquires Taiwan first.
I think he was talking about the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, not the Spratlys.
I don't know anything about the current state of military capabilities of the major world powers, but I think:
1. The term is "Pax Americana", analagous to "Pax Romana" and "Pax Brittanica".
2. The tendency for people to think that whatever's happening *right now* is an utterly unprecedented, world-defining event, is so absurdly strong that I'm inclined to say all such claims should be discounted by about 99%. This applies to everything from doomerism to utopianism.
3. Previous "pax" eras still had plenty of wars. The Pax Brittanica is usually considered to last from 1815 to 1914, but there was no shortage of wars around the world during that time. The essence of the idea seems to be (1) one power being clearly dominant in global affairs and (2) the lack of an all-out war involving all the major powers.
(4) The Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years. Historical examples suggest it's got a while left.
If the Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years -- and I agree -- then Russia-Ukraine was unprecedented. A US - China war, which seems likely in the near future, also would be.
I see no good reason to expect the Pax Americana to last on par with the Pax Romana or the Pax Brittanica. Times are different. Changes come quicker.
"If the Pax Americana has lasted only 30 years -- and I agree -- then Russia-Ukraine was unprecedented."
Unprecedented for this particular Pax, but not unprecedented for the middle of a Pax in general. The Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, were not considered to end the Pax Brittanica.
And perspective is lost with Ukraine: before the beginning of the Pax Americana, it was just one of 13 countries ruled firmly and directly by Russia, along with a dozen others controlled indirectly by Russia. And now, Russia is fighting tooth and nail to regain control of *just one* of its former territories. The idea that this brings the Pax to a close already is, the equivalent of France in the 1840s invading a single country it had ruled under Napoleon, and struggling very much to conquer it, and that being seen as the end of the Pax Brittanica. You may as well say that gradual French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s meant the Pax Brittanica was *already over*, since France was once again on a resurgent territory-grab. (They hadn't ruled Algeria previously, but if anything that made it *scarier* than what Russia is doing now).
"A US - China war, which seems likely in the near future, also would be."
It would, I suppose. But lots of things *would* have been significant and changed the world if they had happened, but didn't happen. And "a global war looking like it's about to break out" has happened a lot more often than."a global war actually breaking out", especially in recent centuries.
Also, it's not actually entirely clear that a limited non-nuclear US-China war would end the Pax Americana (if the US eventually won) since, again, the Crimean War against another World Power did not apparently end the Pax Brittanica.
"Times are different. Changes come quicker."
In what sense is this objectively true in a geopolitical sense (rather than just feeling like times are different because we're living in them)? In terms of technological and social change, yes (although the latter could be debated), but why should that change the pace of the rise and fall of empires?
Especially when both those kinds of change are driven overwhelmingly by the dominant empire.
What has changed, according to Noah and the experts he quotes, is that our military has declined massively in a relative sense. E.g., the US would have defeated China easily 20 years ago.
EDIT: There is also the Lindy Effect argument for why one wouldn't expect the Pax Americana to last very long.
I have been working as a software developer for a little bit now, and I'm finding that the main factor for how productive I can be is how long I can focus for. My productivity is a lot less related to how many hours I can work for than it is to if I feel well rested and able to focus. I'm sure that plenty of other people here have this same experience, so I'm wondering what you guys do about it?
My system is to just not work when I can't focus. The advantage of being easily distracted is that the impending work I have to do becomes one of those distractions when I'm doing something else. Eventually, thinking about it in in the background long enough gives way to the motivation to put the solutions I've been thinking about into action. So I end up with relatively short bursts of work in between longer stretches of "time wasting". Sometimes in a pinch with an approaching deadline I buckle down and work full tilt, but it's exhausting and unsustainable.
To reiterate a few things people have said:
- break things down into small subtasks
- timed breaks
Also, read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I found it to be really helpful. One of the main things was how to rest outside of work.
I’d also say that emotional energy matters a lot. When I feel like I have ownership over a project then I’ll go all night, like on a personal side project. It’s tough to get that at work though until you’re principal level or at a startup. But I’d say the fastest route to principal level is really focusing on Cal Newport’s ideas.
When I want to be maximally productive, I set a timer for 50 minutes, put on some music, write down what I'm going to be working on for that 50 minutes, and then just do it. Then I take a ten-minute break, and then I do another 50 minutes. If my brain thinks of something else it would like to do during that time, then I file it away as a thing to do on my next break.
I can't keep it up all day, but it's amazing how much work you can get done in 50 minutes once you're focused.
Pomodoro technique, I think. It's worked for a lot of people.
I take my (dr prescribed) adderall. I wish that wasn't the best answer but it is. Regular exercise and going to bed early (9ish) also play a huge part. I have 2 kids - one of which is a new born, so exercise and sleep are low right now.
I've also worked really hard to shut off any type of notification or popup that isn't 100% necessary. Once i am in a flow this makes it much easier to stay in the flow.
There's a huge difference between sleep-deprived me and well-rested me. My executive function is working about 1/4 as well when I'm sleep-deprived. I am way more likely to procrastinate, waste time crapping around, interrupt a period of work by going to my favorite crapping-around sites, wander off to buy coffee, decide to buy some empty calories to go with the coffee. And by evening, which when I'm functioning well I often use for simple stuff like housework when I'm tired from work, I do nothing. I don't even make an effort to get to bed early, because they takes planning and doing something other than what I feel like in the moment. When I realize I'm sliding into that, I get really strict with myself about getting enough sleep.
Hooray, the Australian AI protest is in Melbourne and thus accessible to me.
Not a huge amount I can do on this front as a depressed Australian NEET, but providing a warm body, I think I can do that.
An extremely inconsequential place to hold an AI pause rally
Is this about the government's decision to allow the use of ChatGPT in schools? Also, would you be so kind to leave a reply here after the protest, I would love to get the perspective of someone on the ground, as opposed to the media take on it
Back from it. I was actually the only person there in Melbourne besides the organiser - hopefully there are more in the other cities (I hear about a hundred signed up in SF). Would have appreciated some more. Oh well, much better two than one, so not regretting the 2 hours on the train each way.
We spent about 3.5 hours talking to and handing out leaflets to anyone interested; I think I managed about 30 or 35 leaflets and talked to maybe ten or twelve people in depth. Most of them were pretty receptive; "pls no destroy humanity" is a fairly-relatable message, it seems.
Thanks for the update! Wow, I expected more people to show up, maybe the movement is not that big outside the US/UK and they don't have the necessary outreach in Australia to get people out on the streets. Anyway, good job on putting your time where your mouth is and actually doing something!
I mean, we normally get like 15 people at the monthly Rat meetups in Melbourne, and most of those people actually live in Melbourne (unlike me), so while we're hardly as common as in SF or London I'm still not entirely sure what went on there. Maybe it didn't get enough exposure in LW (as opposed to here), maybe they think protesting in Australia is useless (it's certainly *less* useful than in UK/US*), maybe they're e/accs (one of the people who came by happened to be an e/acc, and he spent like 15 minutes naysaying us to everyone else we talked to; annoying, but we just kept civil and eventually he left), maybe they're busy doing other things (and sure, I'm a NEET and far less busy than average, but still, on a Saturday afternoon?). Will probably ask a few people at the next such meetup, if only to figure out what the issue is.
Worth noting that we did get one guy who was convinced enough to take a bunch of our flyers and start handing them out himself, and we did get a few people who expressed interest in joining the cause. So maybe there'll be more next time.
*Technically protesting in the PRC probably also has higher benefit, but it has *much* higher costs (i.e. getting arrested for dissent) so the cost/benefit is worse.
What are those Rat meetups? Good job on keeping it civil with the e/acc guy, that's a great skill to have
Ryan Sattler has a Rat meetup every month in Melbourne. Mentioned here ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and ). Haven't gone in a couple of months, but last I heard it's first-Friday at the Queensberry Hotel Carlton at 6pm.
It's about "stop training bigger models that might take over the world and kill everyone". Scott linked it up in the OP if you want to read it first-hand.
Australia isn't super-relevant to that, hence "not a huge amount I can do on this front". I think they're having a protest in Melbourne just to show worldwide concern.
Oh, I didn't click on the link with the list of cities included in the protests. It seems like the whole thing is just a PR campaign to show that a lot more people are concerned than. Will see how it plays out and if any relevant policies come out of that
We'll see, I guess!
Ever leave a doctor's appointment with a vague sense of "I guess I'll just have to trust them" instead of real understanding?
The lack of accessible health info creates a gap between experts and the public. And gaps breed distrust.
But what if making sense of medicine didn't require blind faith?
That's why I started this newsletter- to close the knowledge gap through understanding.
We transform those complicated health topics into engaging explainers anyone can relate to.
For example, we'll break down things like:
How over-the-counter pain relievers actually work in your body using clever analogies.
The scientific process behind disorders in an engaging narrative format.
Deciphering clinical trial results and medical headlines for the everyday person.
Our goal is to satisfy curiosity and bridge knowledge gaps so you can better navigate health decisions.
We'll explore things like:
~The biology of fevers
~How statins work
~The science of nutrition
~How cancer therapies harness the immune system.
If you are interested, follow along - the first issue will be out this week.
We will talk about the battle between good vs bad cholesterol.
Cheers!
Actually, I often leave doctors' offices with a feeling of "nope I do not trust them to be well-informed, to tell the truth, to take the trouble to consider the issue in the context of other things about my body. Time for a session with Google Scholar." So I'm happy to hear about your newsletter. You didn't give a link to it, though.
Hmm..this is what i was thinking about.
Being doctor, i do understand and fully acknowledge the problem here.
I'll share the link to all the followers here, this weekend.
Meanwhile, please let me know if there is anything in specific you want to know about.
Regimens and supplements that maintain vigor and help stave off decline at middle age and beyond. My doctor has little to say about that. She is illness- and problem-oriented, and my health is generally quite good, so she has nothing to say except "great, see you for your physical next year." But I want advice about *maintaining* my health. For instance, I've been reading about creatine supplementation to counter the decline of muscle with age. Sounds pretty safe, if you are careful to access a source checked by Consumer Lab or similar for quality and dose accuracy. But is there a downside, even if the dose is moderate? What about using it on your skin? What minimal exercise regimens really work? What about metformin, not for diabetes but for general health? I think optimizing health is the most neglected topic in medicine.
Oh yeah, two other things: (1) Ways to save money. I'm a psychologist, and when my patients are having trouble paying for their psych meds I tell them to ask the psychiatrist to prescribe high-dose pills that they can cut up, because high-dose pills generally cost only slightly more than the ones with 1/2 or 1/4 as much drug in them. There are probably other things like that. What are they?
(2) Good advice about the utility of various tests. For instance: I've read in some reliable places that bone density scans aren't reliable because results from different makes of machine aren't comparable, also that scan only takes into account -- I forget what exacly, I believe it's that they see thickness of bone at angle machine is looking at it from, but not bone size in the dimension perpendicular to that. Also read recently that a big review of colonoscopy results found that colonoscopy did not save any more lives the a sigmoidoscopy. Like everyone, I freaking HATE colonoscopies. I feel like crap for several days before because I can't eat anything, and for a couple days after because I stayed up all night purging, then got assaulted by anesthesia and an opioid, not to mention a hard object probing the hell out of my insides. Also, read that the purge kills a bunch of your microbiome. I'd like to know if I can switch to sigmoidoscopies, and if not why not.
Look forward to reading your newletter.
Thanks! Will help me gauge the newsletter.
For the time being.
I think interpreting scientific research is an art and something that can be taught at scale.
For instance, there is no evidence that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health.
Most headlines you read are picked from headings of a random journal. Its important we read the research, especially their method if research to really understand it.
For eg, reults of a study done in ireland in old age don't i really apply to a young kid in India. The population is different.
But the headlines don't mention that, cause research journals don't include these in the headings.
This is probably the reason why you could see two different articles -
"Caffeine like increases the risk of Alzheimer's in old age"
"Caffeine associated with increased awareness and focus levels in young age"
in the same magazine.
Love your point on cost cutting, but don't think I could discuss that on the newsletter, it just varies so much from person to person and circumstance to circumstance.
And importantantly, from country to country.
Scans is a good point too, will write about that.
Again, thanks for the input, will share the newsletter as soon as I write it.
I did not read about creatine in some women's magazine article written by a health reporter who saw a headline plucked from the Journal of Random Shit. Someone I know mentioned creatine and I looked it up at the Mayo Clinic site, where they named a number of possible benefits, though many with qualifications like "research suggests" or "may help with". The benefits that got this mild-to-moderately positive endorsement were: Performance improvements for athletes in training; injury prevention; cognitive performance and brain health in older adults; sarcopenia and bone health in older adults; skin aging. So I thought it seemed worth a try, but thought I'd look into it a bit more.
Your remarks about creatine irritated me quite a lot. You sound just like a doctor. I say I'm curious about possible benefits of creatine, and you assume that (1) I think that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health.They'll make me 25 years old again! (At least it appears that you think that, since you informed me that "For instance, there is no evidence that supplements like creatinine can drastically improve your health." (2) I need teaching in the art of research. ("Interpreting scientific research is an art and something that can be taught at scale."). ( 3) I think if it's in a headline it must be True. I don't know that lots of health headlines are just somebody making way too much of a single study in some random journal. (4) You have to examine the actual research to figure out whether it was well done, and who the subject group was. If the study was done on old Irish people, the results do not apply to young kids in India. (You actually think I need to be told that?!)
Look, I told you I was a psychologist. Why, then, do you assume my thinking about creatine is so incredibly naive that I need to be given gently instructed in points 1-4, above? In my doctoral program I had pretty intensive training in stats, research design, evaluating the significance of results, and recognizing both obvious and subtle errors in drawing conclusions from research results. Then I carried out a study, analyzed the data and wrote it up as a dissertation. Since then I have been practicing as a psychologist, and I am on Google Scholar at least twice a week. I fucking understand research.
I remarked a while ago that you sound just like a doctor. Here's how you sounded like one: You did not pay attention to what I said, so you came away with some obviously incorrect notions: I think creatine is going to drastically improve my health. I believe whatever stoopit health shit I see in the headlines. I do not understand basic things about how to evaluate research. And I need the strong but gentle hand of a doctor guiding me towards an understanding of the art of research.
In short, buddy, you were patronizing. Fuck off.
After one too many "well shucks" moments after reading the warning leaflet inserts on medication I've been blithely prescribed, I now routinely leave the doctor's office with "better check online before I take this in case it will kill me" (due to contraindications for people with my condition(s), interactions with other medications I am on, or just YES THIS IS A DANGEROUS DRUG; also as a result of having side-effects from taking the initial dose of some medication I've been blithely prescribed).
Honestly, thank God for the Internet. I've had "oh, so *that's* why this is happening" realisations by looking up results where the doctor couldn't be bothered/wasn't able to explain to me what happened (e.g. some antihistamines will provoke QT prolongation, that's why I was getting heart flutters).
I'm an MD. I sympathize with your situation.
I would make two broader points -
1. I really like having patients who are educated/well informed. We can have a much more in depth discussion about the risks and benefits of certain treatment options. Any doctor who does NOT like having well informed patients is trying to hide things from their patients, or can't be bothered being thorough and is hoping their patients don't find out.
However,
2. The reason "Dr Google" has a bad reputation among MDs is because, well, context is really important. Medication side effects and medication interactions are a perfect example. I think Scott posted something a while back where he compared the side effect profiles on WebMD for aspirin and warfarin and challenged anyone to spot a difference (there wasn't one); but any MD can tell you that aspirin is perfectly safe but warfarin is a nightmare that takes countless blood tests to get the right dose and is responsible for more ER presentations with bleeding than any other medication. We all are constantly annoyed at our electronic medical records that warn us when we are prescribing two medications that we have used together in hundreds if not thousands of patients with approximately 0 problems that "there is a theoretical risk that X may increase the potency of Y." In practice we know medications like rifampicin and fluconazole that are bad players in terms of drug interactions and medications like warfarin that are bad players in terms of possible side effects; in theory literally anything can cause anything, and drug companies like to list every possible side effect for legal reasons. Being an Amateur Medical Sleuth is a bit like being Indiana Jones - fraught with peril; but very impressive if you pull it off!
Some antihistamine and antibiotics can prolong the QT interval.
It's a rare occurance but something we always look for.
Much of medicine is risk vs benefit analysis.
You balance out the risks and benefits of a given drug.
Appreciate you sharing how you feel about it. Will try my best to keep it engaging and will write one around 'Long QT syndrome' and how exactly does qt prolongation occur.
That's the bit that grigged me: went to my doctor (at the time, he's since retired) with heart flutters; he did ECG in the office; came back with "nothing there, you're okay, go home".
WHEN I HAD MANAGED BY CHANCE TO READ OFF THE ECG ABOUT 'PROLONGED QT INTERVAL'.
So I went home, looked that up on the Internet, went "crumbs!" because of the lovely bit about torsade de pointes, looked up "what can cause QT prolongation?", found out about anti-histamines, went "hang on, I've been taking over the counter anti-histamines for runny nose/allergy symptoms, better stop that" and yes, thanks, heart flutters cleared up after that.
Which, y'know, would have been *nice* if my own doctor had advised me on that instead of me doing my Amateur Medical Sleuth bit myself.
Yeah honestly medical info seems so readily available via a quick Google search (at the very least stuff like first-line treatments and medication side effects/interactions) that I can't think of a single instance where I've gone to the doctor in the last 10 years and hadn't already completely predicted the outcome and just about everything the doctor would tell me beforehand. I have gotten useful info by picking a specialist's brain during an appointment but even that can generally be discovered online with a slightly more in-depth search. (I will say that hearing doctors' anecdotes can be reassuring in a not-quite-rational way, at least if it's from a doctor who seems to care.)
The trouble is trying to convey "here's why I'm concerned and no, you telling me to just ignore it isn't good enough" because if I use any words bigger than my peasant status as the inferior in this exchange dictates, I'm clearly A Troublemaker.
Also Looking Things Up Online Is Bad because it makes you (the ignorant peasant supplicant) think they Know Better. So then the doctor ignores everything I say because I'm just hypochondriac and/or drug seeking.
Sigh.
That sucks, sorry you have had to deal with that. That last point ("Looking Things Up Online Is Bad") boggles my mind... I wouldn't want to take any medication without at least a quick precursory glance over the Wikipedia page. I guess I've just been lucky in the doctors I've been assigned so far.
Careful, you're coming dangerously close to Doing Your Own Research
Oh, ever since my dad had some bad reactions to medication, and decided he was going to buy books about drug interactions for the home to read up on in future, I've been doing the same with any medications.
I don't expect the doctor to know every single possible side-effect of every single drug, but I do kinda resent that I have to double-check to make sure I'm not going to die by just blindly trusting The Doctor and taking this medication because they didn't check that it interacted with one of the six other things I'm currently taking.
And of course, you're always going to sound like you're trying to tell them their business when you insist that "yeah, I looked that up online and I can't take it, what else can you give me?" and nobody likes being told, in effect, "I know your job better than you do" so of course they're going to tune out my concerns as "over anxious hypochondriac".
I do agree that google has made information a lot more accessible, but its not perfect. Here's an example:
Lets say person A, who is hypertensive (he is on amlodipine for the treatment) is suffering from joint pain. The doctor now prescribes him something called 'Losartan'
The person googles it and finds out this is an anti hypertensive drug. (Drug given to reduce your blood pressure)
He wonders why this doc prescribed him a new anti hypertensive when his BP is normal.
He figures losartan is more expensive than amlodipine and continues to use amlodipine.
Why not just give him pain relivers?
The thing is that his joint pain, could be due to a condition called 'gout'. Gout is a disease where you have increased levels of 'uric acid'. These uric acud crystals accumalate in joints and could cause pain.
Losartan is a drug that has the ability to reduce these uric acid levels along with keeping his BP in check.
'Drug of choice' and the 'best drug' are two different terms in medicine.
Ofcourse, the doctor should have explained this to him, but often times, this doesn't happen for a varied number of reasons.
I really hope you get the point I am trying to make. Google is a great source for quick first line information but there are so many layers involved that you start to question the reliability.
Reallu hope this newsletter would interest you.
Its not consultation in any way. But, will sure bridge the knowledge gap and will try to keep it as exciting as possible.
Cheers;
Presumably they didn't give a link because it's supposed to be a substack newsletter, so their Substack username already is the link in question.
It's hard to appreciate poetry in a language one doesn't know, so this is my attempt to make Italian poetry more easily enjoyable to English speakers. https://italianpoetry.it
I basically implemented what I would like to have when I listen to songs or poems in a language I don't speak: karaoke-like, word by word, literal translation, with notes about word usage and some context when needed.
And some stuff about the language itself --- the part needed for the poems, at least.
Feedback welcome!
Very cool - unlike classical works, which have gotten similar web treatments, this wasn't a well-covered area. Well done.
Cool! I've always loved the concept of interlinear translations and wished we do it for more than the Bible. I'm going through La sera del dì di festa now and it's quite a nice poem!
It looks cool. I would like to see some earlier poets and some later ones. (I like Salvatore Quasimodo, and if you can help me understand Ossi di Seppia that would be great.)
Boccaccio is among the earliest, but there will certainly be some Dante and Cecco Angiolieri soon.
As for Montale, I'll have to have somebody explain him to me too, first ^_^ But it's planned :)
At a glance, I find this an interesting idea to try and approach the problem of the trade-off between preserving meaning and preserving form.
My first impression is it doesn't fully solve the problem in the sense that it is not exactly the same as a translation, but it's a valuable complementary thing to have for somebody trying to dive a bit deeper into the language.
> I think a natural reading of this sentence is that Astral Codex Ten received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund. Some people who read the article said they understood it this way and thought I took FTX money. I didn’t. The article meant to say that Manifold did.
> I appreciate NYT moving from its previous policy of blatant and deliberate falsehoods about me, to a newer, kinder policy of accidental and ambiguous falsehoods about me. That’s the first step towards not publishing any falsehoods about me at all!
In my reading, the NYT sentence is ambiguous enough that it's reasonable for you to issue a clarifying statement, but the reading you disclaim is not the most natural reading of their sentence, and the most natural reading is in fact what they meant to say. (There's a strong parallelism between "Manifold was funded by ACX" and "Manifold was 𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗼 funded by FTX".) So I'm not inclined to slam the NYT for this.
Saying it's "a natural reading" is not the same as saying it's "THE natural reading"
Yes, that's why I didn't dispute that it was a natural reading, and referred to "the 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 natural reading".
Scott did not say that misreading it was the most natural reading either, so what point are you trying to make?
(Sorry if I come off harsh, there's just several threads addressing this already and they all seem to imply Scott claimed something he did not, which is funny considering the context)
Scott described the New York Times as making an untrue statement about him. That claim is not supported by reality. If he wants to disclaim the alternative reading, fine, but there just isn't a case to be made that they did anything wrong or that they even did anything misleading.
"Scott described the New York Times as making an untrue statement about him."
He literally did not.
He hyperbolically did, in the form of a joke. Unless you think Scott is actually suggesting that NYT has an explicit policy of writing " accidental and ambiguous falsehoods"?
In your comment, what does the word "literally" mean?
The thing about SBF is that he is now the anti-Midas: Everything he touches or touched in the past turns to turd.
I suppose recent events have once and for all disproven the 'dumb college kids' trope, the theory that college kids only believe what they believe because they are naive or uninformed. They just saw with their own eyes videos of the most horrific acts of evil imaginable, and then proceeded to publicly celebrate it in the most explicit terms. Let's now acknowledge that this is not just naiveté, this is pure, incurable evil that can only be met with one response.
You sound nearly as savagely angry as IDF and Hamas. Here's an idea: Let's gather all those enraged against one or the other of those entities and all those who enragedly support one of them, and put all of you on a football field armed with machetes and let you go at it. Then we can poll the crowd who watched, and separate out all those who furiously and savagely supported one of the groups on the field. Now put them on the slick, bloody field armed with machetes and let them go at it. Now poll those who watched that scene to identify those who rooted savagely for one of the factions, and send them to the field. Eventually, you will have a fight with no observers attend to root for one side or the others. The remaining population can then attend to the terribly difficult problem of figuring out how to make life better and more fair.
<morbid humor>
Hey, isn't there supposed to be a "rinse" step between the "repeat" steps? :-)
</morbid humor>
More seriously: Bluntly, I have two relatives, four former co-workers, and a childhood friend amongst the Israelis and no similar links to Gazans, so 99% of my concern here is ensuring that no further attacks by Hamas succeed, though I prefer that as few peaceful civilian Gazans are killed as is reasonably possible.
Hey I get it. My best friend in high school was Jewish. My best friend in college was Jewish. My best friend in grad school was Jewish. The love of my life was Jewish. And my psychoanalyst. And most of my favorite college professors. People can't help feeling more of a connection to one group than the other, and more personal worry about one population than the other. The thing I object to is the rage and hatred people who are onlookers are dealing out to other onlookers who have a different take. The onlookers are duplicating, in miniature, the war itself. What is *wrong* with our species?
I suppose it's possible that a very knowledgable and unbiased person could make a fair case that one side has been worse than the other, though to me it looks like this has been going on for so long and both sides have dealt out so much cruelty and horror that they both score infinity for savagery, and are tied. Seems to me the only reasonable way to digest the current conflict is to recognize that this is the way our species gets in wars over resources, and that the wars themselves further enflame the hatred of each side because of the awful harms done. If you and I were an Israeli and a Palestinian, we would probably have felt and behaved no differently from the mode. And then we need to suffer through recognizing this awful truth and be buffers -- absorb the blow rather than transmit it in the form of onlooker rage. And then do what we can towards helping members of our species be saner and kinder.
Many Thanks! Over the history of the conflict this looks like a national level version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud . Given infinite power I'd want to have each suspect for say the last two rounds of mutual reprisals stand before the International Criminal Court and have a full trial, with the Court hopefully being impartial, to determine guilt or innocence. But that isn't going to happen.
But if it could happen, you think that would calm onlooker rage? Yes, it probably would. It seems like kind of a charade to me, though. It's based on the idea that it makes sense to hold individuals responsible for acts committed during war. I know that even after one allows for the pressure to obey orders, and for the enormously strong tide of group emotion carrying everyone along like a tsunami, there is still some room for individual choice. But I really do not think there is much -- that's maybe 5-10% of the variance. So it's not really fair to put individuals on trial. Still, pragmatically, there's a lot to be said for calming people down, giving them the feeling some justice is being done.
But really I think it is almost impossible to make just and reasonable decisions about what action to take when all around you are screaming with rage and despair and you saw someone you love get blown to pieces. I think one reason so many US onlookers who have no friends or relatives in Palestine or Israel are full of rage and judgment is that everyone has seen godawful photos and videos of mutilation, rockets, exploding buildings, etc. Images like that get eyeballs, so every organization and individual who wants eyeballs have put a dipper into the big pot of blood soup. I have made a point of avoiding all photos and videos. I literally have not seen a single one. I have though, read many descriptions of events. Somebody might say I have my head in the sand. But look what the images have done to lots of onlookers: They are triggered into war mode themselves.
I hope all your Israeli friends and family are OK. My best friend's wife is currently in Israel, along with her entire extended family, 20 or so people. Everybody's OK.
Re: Would it calm onlooker rage? I know that I don't know. The Hatfield/McCoy feud ultimately (after 30 years) ended in a court trial, and that seems to be what ended it. After WWII, there were the Nuremberg trials - but that was a different situation, where the Axis powers were decisively defeated (apart from a tiny handful of Japanese soldiers who were still fighting years later). I don't know whether war crimes trials would slake the thirst for justice/vengeance. In terms of just time healing wounds, the case of Greece and Turkey, with hostility going back perhaps 3000 years (?) (if the Trojan War was historical) is not encouraging.
I agree with you that holding individuals responsible (in war crimes trials) has doubtful justifications. Presumably there is some uppermost person in the chain of command who gave initial orders for each attack (on both sides), and presumably people further down the chain had less autonomy - though perhaps some, and this is the sort of question that courts are supposed to try to answer (flawed though they are).
Thanks very much for your wishes for my friends and family. So far they are OK. I wish the same for your best friend's wife and her extended family. Glad that they are OK so far, and hope they continue to be safe.
not only are more horrific acts of evil imaginable, but they are ongoing against Palestinian civilians (in the name of fighting Hamas) even as we speak
It's a bit mysterious to me.
I think this is mostly chic dorm room revolutionaries who have been trained that the best way to get attention is to spout ultra hot takes on issues to impress their peers. I'm going to make a random guess that exactly none of these very serious people are boarding a plane to go defend their adopted Gaza homeland from the alleged colonizers anytime soon.
I don't support silencing them, what it does IMO is demonstrate how fundamentally unserious many of these organizations actually are and how they should just be ignored now. I suppose others holding them accountable for their views by denying them jobs might be appropriate after they are given a real opportunity to rethink and retract these views, particularly those who officially write them. I kind of get the feeling they would be highly combative and irrational in a work environment.
My personal view is people should be allowed to express almost any viewpoints out of work if they don't bring it to the workplace. There are a very large number of degrees of freedom in ideology and most everyone I know closely has at least one radical viewpoint on something.
This comment's last sentence is closer to "pure, incurable evil" than what those college kids have said.
Which is not at all to defend those students' actions of course, nor to argue that they shouldn't face some consequences. But they are 20-year-olds behaving very much the way 20-year-olds did when I was one, which was a long time ago -- to some degree that's a part of that age range. And it's not by a damnsight limited to the ones who are attending college, back in the day or now.
Also can't help noticing that the young idiots are at least willing to put their faces and real names behind their outrageous statements, which is a point for them compared to a keyboard warrior hiding behind an anonymized login name.
If you are talking about the Harvard letter, I think it was signed with the names of organizations not individuals. Am I mistaken?
No, you are right. It was not signed. (they were doxed pretty promptly ,though.) But many of the people fighting here don't care about the facts at this point. They have a particularly infuriating way of looking at the letter and its authors -- or, they have they have a particularly infuriating way of looking at those who who are infuriated by the letter -- so they are only receptive to info that fuels their rage. Any info that might make them less furious is unwelcome, and any info that neither inflames nor diminishes anger is irrelevant. In short, most of them have been triggered into their own onlooker mini-versions of the conflict. Um, are we sure we want AI to be aligned with human needs and ethics?
It seems to me that an individual who signed the letter is responsible for doing so, and anyone who thinks the letter's position is indefensible is entitled to adjust his opinion of the signer, and his interaction with the signer, accordingly.
On the other hand, someone who is a member of an organization that signed is not responsible unless he knew of the letter and supported signing it. At most he is responsible for not resigning from the organization or trying to get it to withdraw its signature after he knew of the letter.
Well, yeah. A few days after the letter was published Harvard harrumphed and produced its own letter condemning the student one — but I’m sure not every member of the faculty agreed with the university’s stance. The thing I find disturbing about the conversation we’re having is that some people are so *rabid.*. The will not settle for anything less than full agreement that these students were evil to the core, and any consequence smaller than somehow getting their names out to every possible employer so that these people will be unemployable for life is unacceptable. (There’s no way that's going to happen. Employers favor ivy league grads.). And there are probably some here who are equally rabid in their agreement with the students’ view. It really is as though the madness of armed conflict has infected some people here, and they cannot stand to hear anything that weighs in the direction of calming down, while being hyperalert for any details that will fill them with even more rage.
I agree. Strong emotions interfere with clear thinking.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/13/brick-hurled-at-doxxing-truck-at-harvard/
>> Let's now acknowledge that this is not just naiveté, this is pure, incurable evil that can only be met with one response.
What response is that?
>incurable evil<
Nothing incurable about it. Just get them out of their bubble.
+1
No, they just sound pretty dumb. The best way to find out would be to poll the same students 10 years from now and see if they have the same opinion and what they think of their earlier opinion. Since we can't do that right now, or second best option is to poll 32 year olds about their opinions a decade ago, and see if they think they were dumb. An informal poll of my friend group suggestions, yes, we were dumb in our youth.
"this is pure, incurable evil that can only be met with one response."
You're sounding pretty evil yourself...
Sounds like typical dumb college kids.
These people are only 1 to 4 years away from their senior proms, for god's sake. I think the appropriate response is rollling your eyes at undergraduate arrogance. And wtf is the one response that's appropriate? Sawing off their silly heads?
In a country where underprivileged kids under 18 are "tried as adults" for murder, it's mind-boggling that the most privileged and intelligent 26 year olds in law school have to be treated as children who can't be responsible for their actions.
This is why repealing *in loco parentis* was a mistake.
Gotta remember, your words are violence, but their violence is speech.
That *anyone* is still doing "just kids on campus" unironically is fascinating, in its own way. Some people are truly invincible.
So are *you* just as vain, vulnerable to intellectual fads and lacking in common sense as you were at age 20? Most of us feel we improved greatly in all these areas over the next 10 or so years.
I'd certainly hope not, but also, I wasn't an arrogant activist striver abusing my position at a highly-ranked school to defend terrorism. Excusing the stupidity of youth has limits. Not all 20 year olds are equally stupid and vain.
Activist strivers start from a much worse position so even "improving greatly" leaves them well below average on metrics like vanity, vulnerability to fads, and lack of common sense.
Perhaps with the help of AI we will become able to recognize Activist Striver Syndrome early on. We’ll then be able to euthanize them when they’re toddlers.
Do you know that for sure? Sure you're not telling yourself that just to pump up your anger? Students at the extremely prestigious law school in my town are held to account quite strictly about turning assignments in late, not coming to class prepared, and things having to do with allegations of cheating on tests or plagiarizing. They are not coddled at *all.*. Of course they do not get in trouble for public voicing sentiments you object to. It's not against the law to make angry speeches that Mark hates.
Of course it shouldn't be illegal to "make angry speeches that Mark hates" like blaming an orgy of rape, torture, and child massacre on the victims. But neither should a person who makes such a speech expect that other people are willing to hire them afterwards.
So you're a fervent supporter of cancel culture? I oppose cancel culture when the woke does it, but I also oppose it when you do it. Having an abhorrent opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a good reason not to hire someone, except for certain specific jobs (e.g. diplomat to Israel/Palestine).
Never said they should expect that. However, since the people who might hire them are unlikely to know they made that speech, seems unlikely that what they said will. make any difference in the hireability.
That's why people have been publishing the names of those who wrote and signed the statements.
Not in NY they're not.
https://www.wamc.org/news/2023-07-28/albany-county-da-soares-airs-gripes-with-bail-reforms-before-albany-county-legislature
tl;dr: under-18s arrested on their way to do a drive-by. They are released to the custody of their parents, the weapons seized. These particular minors were easy to ID, because they were wearing ankle monitors from a previous drive-by shooting they were involved in (but not incarcerated for).
They are old enough to vote, drive, marry, enlist in the military sign contracts and are in all other ways capable of acting like reasoning human adults. Please do not insult them by thinking of them as children, but do them the courtesy of taking them seriously.
Getting fired from a job or dismissed from school for voicing abhorrent opinions is something that I remain against as a supporter of free expression, but it's not like this is a universal value; in fact, many *many* people left of center have been firmly in support of decisive consequences for unwelcome speech...for other people.
Karma's a right bitch, she is.
"in fact, many *many* people left of center have been firmly in support of decisive consequences for unwelcome speech...for other people."
Those people were wrong. You and I both know those people were wrong. But you are proposing to do pretty much the same thing they did, for pretty much the same reason. Which would make you, hmm, can you fill in the blank there?
Social weapons that only affect one side are superweapons and will be used with increasing frequency by the unaffected side. Turn them into regular weapons affecting both sides, and detente, or at least arms control, becomes more feasible.
When has "arms control" ever worked with social weapons?
1648, Treaty of Westphalia.
1689, Toleration Act (England).
1787, US Constitution, esp. 1st Am.
1794, Execution of Robespierre and the Thermidorian Reaction.
Basically, it's how you got modern classical liberalism. Both sides using the most horrible weapons (both socially and militarily) against each other, becoming exhausted, and reaching accommodation on de-escalating those fights.
If you mean in the modern U.S., not as much after the Revolution and Civil War. The downfall of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC seems like turning the name-and-shame of the Red Scare (relatively justified, ironically) against the original practitioners led to a decline in those tactics, at least for awhile.
“They are old enough to vote, drive, marry, enlist in the military sign contracts and are in all other ways capable of acting like reasoning human adults. “. They are *allowed* to do these things. That does not mean their average level
Of foresight and jidgment is as good as adults’ is when they do these things., or that most of them are capable of acting as reasoning adults. My daughter’s campus had multiple ambulances arrive every weekend to pick up the kids with alcohol poisoning.
And I am responding to OP’s statement that the explanation for a substantial subgroup of them making certain statements is that they are incurable evil. That your idea of doing them the courtesy of taking them seriously?
No, you are making excuses again for their bad judgement. As adults, they are responsible for the consequences of their actions, and you should not be making excuses.
Should the consequences be cutting their heads off? No - but that was your suggestion, not the OP. It is not, in fact, clear from the OP that the 'incurable evil' was the murder of babies, grandmothers, and other civilian, or that simply coming out in vocal support for murdering babies, grandmothers and other civilians was the incurable evil.
On the other hand, when you put it that way, there is less distance between the act and the loud, voluntary, vocal support than one might think.
And your defense of the vocal supporters, and your excuse for their (at best) astonishingly inept stupidity, is rather horrific as well. If this is the level of moral reasoning that these people are capable of, they should be considered minors, and not allowed out without keepers, as they are incapable of managing themselves, let alone be able to vote or drive or otherwise have the option of impacting the lives of other humans.
We already had a solution for this problem. It was called *in loco parentis."
I think it's clear that OP meant the incurably evil people were the college students celebrating the slaughter. OP is saying they're not naive and dumb, they're incurably evil.
I'm not defending the college students, except against the charge of being incurably evil. I think they're meanspirited, self-important little wokester assholes and I'd like to smack their faces til their burst out crying and shut the fuck up. I just don't think they're incurably evil, or at least not more incurably evil than most members of our species. Seems to me that the great lesson from Hamas/Israel is that our species is incurably evil. Even people who have been the victims of horrific violence have not come away from it convinced that it's wrong for people to do that to each other. And now the people who disagree about who to hate more, Israel or Hamas, are hating on each other.
And SyxnFxlm hates the college students for the view they voice, and you and I are quite irritated at each other regarding my somewhat minor disagreement with SyxnFxlm -- I hate what the students were saying, but shrug off some of it as immaturity and being infected with the college wokester virus. You hate what they were saying and want me to judge them as I would people iin their 40's.
Awesome. Looks to me like long-term outcome of the slaughter will be increased amount of hate floating around earth's human population like a stink.
I think a big part of the problem is a number of generations of people growing up in the bubble of invincibility. There has never been a foreign war the United States has been involved in that had consequences in their homeland. (1812 being the one exception.) No cities bombed to oblivion, none of that.
Does anyone have any recommendations for obscure science fiction? I recently read everything by qntm (aka Sam Hughes) and am now hooked on sci-fi, especially stuff that will change the way I think about the world/life/technology/etc. I found this great list: noahpinion.blog/p/my-sci-fi-novel-recommendations but I'm convinced the best authors are probably writing in relative obscurity on some unknown corner of the internet like qntm.
So who are some of your favorite lesser known or just underrated authors, who I probably wouldn't know about otherwise? And can you share one of your favorite passages as a sample?
p.s. First time commenting here, I just want to say thanks to everyone who comments; I love reading all your brilliant ideas/observations :)
It may just be that I read it as a teenager, but "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" was the most profound thing I ever read.
Checks collection for great and obscure stuff...
- Robert Sheckley, The Prize of Peril and other stories. The story _A ticket to Tranaï_ is super memorable and hilarious too.
- Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
- Angela Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was
- I'd add anything by Stanislaw Lem, but that's not so obscure
Just read some excerpts from each of these and they all look amazing and were all previously unknown to me, thank you!
Ken MacLeod is an author I find consistently fascinating. His Corporation Wars trilogy is one of my favorite modern sci-fi series. Though I will say he might be an acquired taste.
I really enjoy all of Ted Chiang's short stories for roughly similar reasons to qntm. IMO, he's the best currently-publishing author at taking an interesting premise and exploring the implications it has. For example, "Omphalos" dives into the relationship that science and religion would have if the world were _actually_ 9000 years old and created by a God, and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" explores what would happen if you could communicate between parallel realities but with some restrictions. He's probably most notable for writing the short story that became the Arrival movie.
He's published a couple collections of short stories, and some of his stuff is free online.
I just read his collection 'Stories of Your Life and Others' a couple weeks ago; I second the recommendation for anyone else reading this!
John C. Wright's stuff is good. "The Golden Age" is probably his most popular, but I really enjoyed "Count to a Trillion" and the rest of that series. His style is fairly unique: you can sample quate a few of his short stories for free on his website to see whether you like him:
https://www.scifiwright.com/samples/fic/
Childhood's End isn't obscure, but it's so old people have kind of forgotten about it. I think it's great.
Old-time Asimov, I binged on that for years, many years ago. If you like Childhood's End, the obvious next steps are The Gods Themselves and The End of Eternity.
And do check out our dear host's Unsong!
that noahpinion link is broken btw, it needs the www. on the beginning (don't ask me why)
Holy shit, qntm is an actual author with a real name?
i only know qntm as 'the only guy still making SCP stories that are actually enjoyable', ala the Antimemetics Department storyline
Has he published anything that I would want to read? Or, to put it another way, has he published anything?
'Fine Structure' is chaotic but brilliant and you'll almost definitely like it if you liked Antimemetics; all his other books and short stories are incredible too though, you can get them as amazon print-on-demand books or just read them on his website for free.
News to me as well. His website seems to have various short stories posted:
https://qntm.org/fiction
https://www.amazon.com/stores/qntm/author/B091P6ZQLW?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
I love the work of Doctor Zero on royal road, you can start with Ultra AI
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/28111/ultra-ai
the writing style appears to be a blend of character-driven storytelling, humor, and a touch of social commentary, making for an engaging and relatable narrative in a sifi setting
I love it, thanks!
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/1/Mother-of-Learning and https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/82363551272/fall-of-doc-future-contents are arguably more fantasy than sci-fi, but they approach the fantastical elements in an extremely scientific way. Difficult to pick out favorite passages without spoilers.
I strongly recommend this one. The writing isn't the strongest imo, but if you can set that aside it's really excellent.
Idk if David Weber counts as obscure, but I really enjoyed his Safehold series. Heinlein's not obscure to some (he's the origin of the word grok), but I don't hear about him much anymore; I liked all of his works except for The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls, and you see his ideas heavily in libertarianism.
Checking them out now - thank you!
A common technique of propagandists is to take terms that have been loaded with emotional, political, and historical context from one situation and apply them to another, in an attempt to smuggle in all the related baggage of those terms regardless of whether it actually applies in the new situation.
The Palestinian mass slaughter of Israeli civilians is often justified in this manner. It's not exactly easy to justify mass killings of unarmed people at a rave with the use of simple, descriptive, non-emotionally loaded language. "Well you see, the Israelis currently have military ships out in the water that prevent goods from coming in from Iran, to reduce the amount of bombs, rockets, and weapons that can get into Gaza. And they also built a big fence around their national border. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified." But it is easy to say "Apartheid. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified."
More generally, you have a phenomenon where just compiling the list of reasons given for why Israel constitutes an "apartheid regime" (or any other Bad Word), and then doing a find-and-replace on the bad word, pasting in the list of purported offenses committed instead, leaves the arguments in favor of the Palestinian massacres quite obviously baseless. When you can no longer smuggle in all the historical context that doesn't apply in the new situation, it becomes clear that you're justifying genocide on the basis of the existence of a border fence.
This also applies to terms like "ethnic cleansing" - it's hard to explain why "moving people to a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put" is the worst, most evil possible thing, but you can just say "ethnic cleansing" to try to imply that this must also necessarily come with mass killings, similar to the mass killings present alongside some historical instances of moving people. Or one of the worst offenders, using "genocide" to describe things like "splitting up members of a group" or "changing the culture of a group" as if they were equivalent to the mass killing of that group.
"A common technique of propagandists is to take terms that have been loaded with emotional, political, and historical context from one situation and apply them to another, in an attempt to smuggle in all the related baggage of those terms regardless of whether it actually applies in the new situation."
This is literally the case for all "+power" definitions.
I'm not sure using the term 'apartheid' changes much: it's hard to justify slaughtering civilians in Israel, but it would have been/was hard to justify in South Africa as well.
The slaughter of whites in Zimbabwe under Mugabe and in South Africa post-Apartheid is justified all the time. I'm not sure where on the left you've seen it condemned.
It marks Israel as an illegitimate state, and thus a state that should be destroyed. And what has Hamas done except start to destroy it? (The question of what happens to Israeli civilians during this destruction is purposely left vague)
Describing Israel as anything other than an imperialistic race nationalist state is dishonest.
Ok you honestly described it as "an imperialistic race nationalist state". Now what?
I can tell one thing this does: those who don't see Israel this way update their priors closer to "this is why talking to Palestinians is useless, compromise is impossible". Which is the extreme Israeli Right position that one would hope you don't want to support. But.
Now what? We drop this pretense of this conflict being anything other than an ethnoreligious conflict over land. We drop this bullshit about US-funded Israeli growth being in any way in the interests of the average American. We stop and notice that jews like Bryan Caplan who promote literal open borders for the west support extremely closed borders for the jewish ethnostate and wonder why what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
I mean, I would believe your comments to be stemming from a sincere moral condemnation of race nationalism if they were coming from a left-winger, but not from someone who otherwise appears to be a far-righter.
I've no idea if US-funded Israeli growth is in the interest of the average American, or whether it's commonly said that it is; but Israel being an imperialistic race nationalist state doesn't contradict US-funded Israeli growth being in the interest of the average American.
Do you know Bryan Caplan supports extremely closed borders for Israel, or do you just assume he does?
I wouldn't bother engaging with this user. The truth is that Caplan critiqued Israel for not letting in more Palestinians and even more people from other countries. But if someone is going to use lies about Bryan Caplan - an anarcho-capitalist atheist to somehow tar "the Jews," as if that highly idiosyncratic iconoclast is somehow representative of *anyone*, let alone some imagined cohesive collective of Jews, you can be sure they aren't worth engaging with.
Who are the "we"?
People discussing the Israel Palestine conflict?
Sure. But do you think you swayed anyone who disagreed with you to your position? Or away from your position - as people dig in in response?
You have an idiosyncratic definition of Imperialism.
Tell that to the Arabs who have served as government ministers and on the Supreme Court.
So the current Israeli population would have no problem per se with non-jews becoming a majority in Israel?
I believe that the best example of this is the word 'terrorism'. It is used throughout the world in a completely inconsistent way by any actor, mainly as a mean of propaganda to gather support about their policies.
Government and individuals seem to not apply the definition of 'terrorism' objectively as any action that "The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals". Instead, there is a huge bias to call one's opponents 'terrorists' (often of course rightfully), and to never judge one's own side as 'terrorist'. Therefore I tend to consider that the word 'terrorism' has lost any useful meaning.
There is some polemic ongoing in my country (France) as the main left wing party refused to name Hamas as 'terrorists', despite the horrendous slaughter Hamas committed. They claim that the word 'terrorism' is too politically biased, and claim that calling it 'War crimes' is more objective, fitting, and strong enough as a mean of condemnation of Hamas actions.
I personally believe that the actions of Hamas perfectly fits within the definition of terrorism, but would also argue that objectively some events during the Israel siege and bombing of Gaza qualify as terrorist actions, without considering they are equivalent in terms of 'level of abomination'.
I think any action by a state, no matter how horrible, are not generally called terrorist. This is why we don't usually call Nazis, or Stalin, terrorists. When states commit terror attacks during war, we usually call it war crimes.
This puts Hamas in a weird in-between state. They were conventional terrorists, but now they're the government of Gaza, but they're also not recognized as legitimate or officially considered a state.
This isn't saying anything about the moral value of these actions, or that being an official state somehow makes terror attacks better or worse. Just that common usage of "a terrorist" implies a non-state group.
I would disagree with that. The concept of state terrorism is often used, and I think that the word 'terrorism' was actually first used to describe the event of the Terror during the revolutionary government in the french revolution.
Putin and the russian army have been repeatedly called 'terrorists' by western governments/parliaments. Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 90's was also clearly 'terrorist', I don't think that making a difference between state terrorism and non-state terrorism is useful at all.
You can call anyone a terrorist for rhetorical purposes. My cat is a little terrorist. The context makes your intended meaning clear, even if you're not using the normal meaning of "terrorist".
Look up news articles on the 2017 chemical attack in Syria and you won't find it referred to as a terrorist attack. That would confuse readers since it would imply it was done by a terrorist group and not the government. And when Russia claims the attack was actually by terrorists, everyone understands they don't mean the Syrian government.
It may often be a totally useless distinction, but that has no bearing on the meaning of the word in the wild. This is how people will understand the term, unless it's clear from the context you're using it with a non-standard meaning.
I stand by my claim that the definition of terrorism does not exclude any act of terror performed by a State. It is not a personal preference. I understand why you disagree with that, given that in most cases only individuals and non-state organizations. But as mentioned in my former message, the first use of the word was describing actions performed by a sovereign state, and states/state leaders are and have been designated as terrorists.
Here's Erdoğan calling Bashar al-Assad a terrorist: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-turkey-idUSKBN1EL0W5
Here you can find a list of country/international organizations that designated Russia as terrorist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism#Russia
There is an historical record of the British bombing German civilians in World War II in order to provoke Germany to do the same, in order to take pressure off actual military installations in Britain during the battle of Britain. It was a cold calculation. The Luftwaffe was hammering the crap out of them, and very focused on things that mattered. Britain’s tactics worked.
When someone starts to lose a war, their moral compass swings.
Under most formal definitions of "terrorism", basically all acts of war are terrorism. There is violence, it is intended to bring about political change, the intended mechanism is that the targets be so frightened that they accede to the change, civilians may or may not be targeted but they will almost certainly be killed, and in any event the formal definitions don't explicitly require targeting civilians.
This just means that the formal definitions are useless. Informal definitions are easy enough to construct, and will mostly hinge on the fact that terrorist violence as opposed to most military violence is deliberately random, unpredictable, and symbolic in ways calculated to produce terror disproportionate to the material threat. And there will be an element of "I know it when I see it" in any such definition, but anyone who doesn't see terrorism in last week's attack on Israel is not playing with a full deck.
Nathan Burney in his webcomic "The Illustrated Guide to Terrorism" gives it the definition "An act or threat of physical violence commited to extort political change on behalf of a greater cause by a non-government actor." He recognized State Terror is a thing, but should be defined differently in order for terrorism to be a useful descriptor and match the way it is generally used.
https://terrorism.lawcomic.net/what-is-terrorism-pg-01/
That's actually a perfectly good definition (although I would replace "especially against civilians" with "against civilians", I think violence against the military is never terrorism).
Allied bombings in WW2 are not a counterexample. Those bombings were sometimes called "terror bombings" even by the Allies at the time.
If a suicide bomber detonated in a civilian location (like a mall, or a bar) targeting military personnel on leave, I would still classify that as terrorism. Even if all of the people injured or killed were in the military. Admittedly, I would find it difficult to draw a clear line between all "terrorist" attacks and the types of attacks I would think of as normal war.
There is no clear line, so I I understand the difficulty you feel trying to draw one. Terrorism is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I think, trying to make a distinction between what is a military action and terrorism is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The only way to avoid it would be to have the leaders of two countries fight it out in a stadium while everyone else watched.
I think the difficulty there is defining what is military, not defining what is terrorism.
That seems likely to be the problem, yes.
>But it is easy to say "Apartheid. Therefore, mass slaughter of any of them is justified."
I'm fairly certain that the accusation of running an apartheid refers to their handling of their internal arab population, not their handling of Gaza/cisjordania.
I'm fairly certain of the opposite: it makes some sense for the West Bank, but zero for Israel proper.
Ethnic cleansing was precisely supposed to be a bloodless, propagandistic term for forcibly migrating a certain group for a certain area that wouldn't have a similar connotation as, say, "pogrom" or "genocide". It has those connotations because such forcible migrations are also accompanied by necessity with violence - after all, if a regime is intent on moving some ethnic group away from its territory and someone says "fuck you, this is where I live, where my parents lives, where my grandparents lives", what is the regime going to do? Just go "Oh, OK, that's a good argument" and leave them be?
>This also applies to terms like "ethnic cleansing" - it's hard to explain why "moving people to a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put"
If it's a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put, why don't they want to move?
> If it's a better spot than they are currently in, where their lives will be objectively better than if they stay put, why don't they want to move?
Why do people procrastinate, overdose on drugs, and get into debt?
> why don't they want to move?
By an ethnic cleanser's elegantly circular logic, the very fact that the people to be relocated haven't figured such an obvious thing out for themselves is proof of mental inferiority.
Then I assume your solution is not just ethnic cleansing of the other ethnicity in the region... right?
There is no proposed solution to the current strife in the former Ottoman empire which I am sufficiently satisfied with to the point that I would call it "my solution."
Apartheid particularly bothers me because it was a term referring specifically to South Africa and it's clear as mud what the speaker means when they apply it to Israel. It's not clear whether they're referring to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, or Palestinian-Israeli citizens, each of whom face very different situations.
Amnesty International says, "apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group." In other words, they count any discrimination by Israel against Palestinians as contributing reasons why Israel is apartheid. It's not clear why this broadened definition of apartheid couldn't apply to the US or Canada or any other country, and without reading their articles in detail it's not clear at all that this is what they meant by apartheid.
The argument that the term "apartheid" applies to Israel even if it doesn't apply to those countries relies upon a view that Israeli rule, in practice, currently extends not only upon "Israel proper" but also West Bank and (soon even more acutely) over Gaza, but Israel is nevertheless unwilling to give citizenship and civil rights over a large portion of the Arab population (comparable here to the South African black masses in bantustans) and holds even the "Israeli Arab" population and other minorities in practice as second-class citizens (comparable to Cape Coloureds and Indians in South Africa). PA, then, is literally compared to a bantustan, chopped up to unviable enclaves by the West Bank area system, checkpoints etc. and without any real sovereignty.
Of course, many people advancing such an argument might be willing to entertain an idea that US and Canada are apartheid states as well, at some level, or at least similar settler-colonialist countries as Israel, just in a more advanced state.
Israeli Arabs aren't legally second class citizens like Coloureds and Indians were in South Africa. They have the same rights as all Israelis. So you're left with trying to make the case that even though they aren't officially second class citizens, they're discriminated against in practice. This gets murkier.
Canada had the residential schools for indigenous children. They've moved indigenous people onto reserves, or sometimes remote northern regions (to strengthen Canada's territorial claims). The indigenous population is often worse off, lacking basic things like running water, having high murder rates and substance abuse rates, and many would argue this is caused by historical and current discrimination. But I've never heard anyone call Canada an apartheid state.
Lebanon does officially keep Lebanese Palestinians as second class non-citizens, even for families that have lived there for generations. I haven't seen Lebanon called apartheid either.
The argument I've seen is that the operation of instances like Jewish National Fund as a quango or the limitations placed on pro-Palestinian political activity implicitly renders the non-Jewish minorities as second-class citizens nevertheless, even if happens by different mechanisms as in South Africa.
Its use to describe Gaza is particularly confused, as it seems to imply that any country that has a national border is guilty of "apartheid". Is Liechtenstein also an "open-air prison"? It's less than half the size of Gaza, after all.
It's use to describe the West Bank is much more on-point, and a regime that imposes a very apartheid-like regime on any significant fraction of the territory it controls can reasonably be described as an "apartheid state" or whatnot. Israel loses a whole lot of sympathy points over its treatment of the West Bank, and that is going to carry over to how people perceive its treatment of Gaza.
iiuc people in Gaza can't leave. They can't enter Israel, can't cross to Egypt, there's a sea blockade, the airspace is controlled by Israel, they can't trade other than the essentials that Israel allows... I guess Israel isn't forcing Egypt not to open up the doors of the "prison", but as long as that's the situation, and if I'm not mistaken with these facts, it seems like a good analogy.
Apartheid is not used solely about Gaza but about the whole Gaza - West bank situation.
Liechtenstein's inhabitants can freely go to Austria and Switzerland, and there's no land/sea/air blockade that stops goods from being imported to Liechtenstein.
Moreover, the population of Liechtenstein is not made of 2/3rd (I think that's the correct number for Gaza) of refugees or descendents of refugees that were forcibly moved from their rightful land.
I can't help but notice your Godwin, as well as this (odd, but consistent) pretense that Gaza only shares a border with Israel whic is therefor completely responsible for restraining the movement of the inhabitants thereof.
"Gaza is not a legitimate independent country; it’s a refugee camp populated mostly by people forced there from elsewhere in Israel."
...that's half the story. It COULD be part of a legitimate independent country by now, if Palestinians hadn't rejected any offers of a two-state solution. Hamas, in particular, is opposed to that option and has the eradication of Israel and the Jews as part of its charter. We saw what happens when the border wall is breached - does anyone expect Israel to put up with that in the name of fairness?
The existence of Hamas is a consequence of the Gaza situation, it's not the other way around.
PLO/Fatah/Palestinian authority accepted the two-state solution, which nowadays is not viable at all due to the constant progression of the illegal Israelian settlements in the west bank.
Israel was at first extremely happy about the existence Hamas, as it provided competition against PLO/Fatah, and favored the former over the later.
As I recall, Sharon ended and removed settlements in the West Bank, and that didn’t work. Am I misremembering?
Forcibly splitting up a group or altering its culture with the intent to eradicate the group identity is legally considered genocide even in the (unlikely) event that no member of the group is directly killed in the process. Even the etymology supports this - it's about extinction of the group as an idea, not the members. Would you say Henrietta Lacks is alive, based on how many kilograms of her least-loyal cells endure under controlled conditions scattered across the world?
Reasoning goes back to Enlightenment principles trying to prevent further European religious wars: we have a horrifically enormous amount of empirical evidence that every possible variation of the scheme has net-negative long term outcomes, worsened by industrialization, but people are really good at coming up with excuses to try it anyway, and to keep doubling down once it's started, for what are ultimately ugly tribal chimp-brain reasons. Only stable solution is "not even once," and erring on the side of a broad definition to discourage fuzz-testers.
One of the usual counterarguments is "well, sure, in general, but what about an exception when the identity in question is inherently hostile?" Classic example of an inherently hostile group identity being the Nazis. Key thing to remember about the National Socialists is they initially formed under conditions of economic scarcity and hopelessness, and what actually worked to get rid of them in a lasting way wasn't piling on even more intensive intertribal violence, or technically-nonviolent relocation or whatever, it was fixing Germany's economy with the Marshall Plan.
<i>Key thing to remember about the National Socialists is they initially formed under conditions of economic scarcity and hopelessness, and what actually worked to get rid of them in a lasting way wasn't piling on even more intensive intertribal violence, or technically-nonviolent relocation or whatever, it was fixing Germany's economy with the Marshall Plan.</i>
Also the victorious Allies engaged in what are politely referred to as population transfers, to the number of several million people, to make sure that Europe's ethnic boundaries now lined up with its political ones.
That's where context and intent become relevant. Ripping organs out of somebody's torso with intent to hurt them is murder; same thing done with benevolent intent (and quite a bit more attention to detail) could be part of a life-saving transplant surgery.
Yes, it's a massive equivocation fallacy (a superset of motte-and-baily), but unfortunately one that's part of the word's original definition and (some) legal definitions. That is, these definitions include things other than killing a large fraction of a group's members, while most people who hear or use the word—who aren't either genocide scholars or ideologues using it for the rhetorical effect—understand it to mean the killings. Not just because it's a natural interpretation of the word (even if the broader interpretation is also natural), but because all the well-known historical examples involved mass killings, and it's the killings that most descriptions focus on.
> Forcibly splitting up a group or altering its culture with the intent to eradicate the group identity is legally considered genocide even in the (unlikely) event that no member of the group is directly killed in the process.
Right. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for demonstrating it. You call something "genocide", the implication being "extermination of an entire ethnic group", with all the performative condemnation one would use if one was talking about literal extermination of an entire ethnic group (by far the most common usage of the word), and then when forced to defend your claim, you say "It's *technically* genocide" because of X, Y, and Z" even if not a single person has been killed as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
I'm not going to put any "technically" weasel-words around genocide potentially taking the form of confining the relevant group to a higher-entropy environment for a long period of time, as a stochastic alternative to more immediately and obviously lethal tactics. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#pressure
The problem isn't the etymology. It's that you're grouping some of the worst atrocities ever with much, much milder actions and when you accuse someone of genocide, people will assume it's the mass-murder type of genocide.
If you accuse a group of genocide, and all they were doing were offering free condoms to scientologists (reducing their birthrates), then you're misleading people.
If somebody was explicitly trying to end Scientology as an institution by handing out free condoms, that's technically genocide the same way shooting somebody with a Nerf gun which the shooter wrongly-but-sincerely thought was loaded with poison needles is technically attempted murder - probably not worth prosecuting, but maybe keep an eye on 'em just in case they try again with something that might actually work.
Controlling approximately all trade in or out of an area, and using that control to exclude or extract key commodities such as food or water to a point where the average per capita supply within the area is not long-term survivable, is rather different from handing out free condoms. Consider the Irish Potato Famine.
Disregarding that factually false characterization of events, the point is that the claim that you just made, "Controlling approximately all trade in or out of an area, and using that control to exclude or extract key commodities such as food or water", obviously doesn't hit quite as hard as "genocide". And it's much harder to use that as a justification for genocide against the group supposedly committing those offenses.
Of which events? I'm pretty sure the irish potato famine did, in fact, involve a lot of food being exported from ireland by the english, while native irish people starved, and the express intent of that policy (as stated by british leaders at the time) involved their dislike of certain aspects of irish culture.
As for justifications, going by pure theory it's perfectly possible for two opposed groups to both be in the wrong, just as it's possible for two people locked in a room together to both be guilty of attempting to murder the other - or even of regular successful murder, if either inflicts a mortal wound after receiving one themselves but before succumbing to it.
"People use the term genocide to refer to Chinese policy towards the Uighurs even though that involves zero mass killing (and far less killing overall than what the Palestinians face)."
And they are wrong to do so. I don't care if some old UN document from 60 years ago says that genocide includes brainwashing people. The impression that people get today, if you say that China is genociding Uighurs, is absolutely that China is killing them en masse with the goal of eliminating the population (as opposed to, say, to terrorize them into submission). Since that's not happening, anyone using the term "genocide" is misinformed at best, deceptive at worst.
The Armenian genocide definitely involved mass killings.
Israel made an agreement with the Palestinian Authority with the Oslo Accords to give the Palestinian Authority the governance of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2005 Israel destroyed all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and recalled all military personnel, handing the territory over to the Palestinian Authority. They did not just "move the unwanted ethnicity into impoverished enclaves" and declare them independent. It was an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian people through their representatives the Palestinian Authority, not a unilateral movement of people. Nobody was rounded up and forced into Gaza: the Palestinians living there today fled to Gaza when it was controlled by Egypt.
Chinese policies are mainly directed against the islamic practices of uighur culture so while they fit some definitions of cultural genocide most usual understandings of culture are about language not faith. For example, the brutal persecutions of the catholic church and clergy in jacobin France and of the orthodox church and clergy in stalinist Russia are never called genocide.
Yeah, the OP's point was that emotionally laden words get redefined to apply to more and more situations. Thank you for agreeing.
I sometimes take courses or do study programs. Mostly on science and engineering topics. I feel like a lot of people here either have similar interests or might be doing something similar. Is anyone interested in getting a ready/study group together? The idea would be to keep it light enough as a time commitment that full time working professionals and students could do it on the side for self-improvement.
This sounds interesting, depending on difficulty - I have relatively little background knowledge, currently starting adult high school to get 11/12th grade math and science credits, interested mainly in bio and chem but love learning a bit of everything.
What sort of format are you thinking of?
If you manage to round up a couple people, I would appreciate the chance to "sit in" - even if I can't keep up this sounds like it would be a good learning experience.
I tried the new DALL-E 3 with the prompts from this post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet
DALL-E 3 does better overall. It still has trouble with the stained glass one and the llama with the bell on its tail (it keep putting the bell in its mouth), but it does a better job with the other 3 prompts. The images are higher quality, making it more clear it got all the elements right. Here are the images I think it got right: https://imgur.com/a/qMvOEPu
Two weeks ago someone on the subreddit did the same. There are also some twitter examples in the comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16y14co/scott_has_won_his_ai_image_bet/
It has a comment from Scott himself that he will make an official blog about it soon and some interesting technical discussions. For example Dalle-3 seems to have surprising difficulty to picture "three cats in a trenchcoat, standing on each other shoulders pretending to be human".
Gwern about that:
> All of those results look a lot like you'd expect from ye olde CLIP bag-of-words-style text representations*, which led to so many issues in DALL-E 2 (and all other image generative models taking a similar approach like SD). Like the bottom two wrong samples there - forget about complicated relationships like 'standing on each others shoulders' or 'pretending to be human', how is it possible for even a bad language model to read a prompt starting with 'three cats', and somehow decide (twice) that there are only 2 cats, and 1 human for three total? "Three cats" would seem to be completely unambiguous and impossible to parse wrong for even the dumbest language model. There's no trick question there or grammatical ambiguity: there are cats. Three of them. No more, no less. 'Two' is right out.
The OP also said that it was quite hard that the cat wears the top hat, so I was surprised that your man in the factory lacks the hat:
> I'm wondering if the man is usually wearing the hat because the model "knows" that people usually wear top hats and not cats or if he's wearing the hat because the model "knows" that there is a hat and grabs the first noun in the sentence and sticks a hat on it. We should swap subject and object in that sentence and see if the cat starts wearing the hat more often. Ditto with the astronaut and the fox wearing lipstick.
My own take is that I am still utterly astonished how good the pictures look. One could criticize that the the fox and lipstick marker is not properly mirrored in the astronauts helmet, but the farmer in the cathedral holding the Basketball like a precious religious icon makes me want to make an epic JRPG just to somehow include this.
https://imgur.com/a/pfx7AIg - "three cats in a trenchcoat, standing on each other shoulders pretending to be human" (though Dall-E changed the prompt to "A feline tower with three cats hidden inside a trenchcoat, mimicking a human form" in order to render this).
Seems to look good to me?
Yeah, you nailed it -- so long as we adapt the meaning of "standing on each other's shoulders" to cats. I got one a lot like yours, except that Dall-e put a collar in the area of all 3 cats' necks. Both your cats and mine are actually doing what I would call standing on each others backs. When we talk about people standing on each other's shoulders we mean that one person's feet are on the shoulders of the person below, and both people are standing upright. So I was thinking that a fully correct image would have all 3 cats up on their hind legs, with the upper cats having the back feet on the shoulder area of the one below. Could not get Dall-e to do that even with 2 cats & no trenchcoat.
About "standing on each other's shoulders". That's a confusing phrase, and you have to deduce its meaning from context. For instance if I say3 cats are tasting each other's dishes of food, it means each is tasting the food of one or both others. But if I say 3 cats are standing on each other's shoulders, it doesn't mean each is standing on the shoulders of one or both of the other two. It means one is on the shoulders of one of the other 2, and a 3rd one is on the shoulders of the one that's on the lowest one's shoulders.
I'm interested in that level of info about prompts: How many entities are involved, what is the spacial relationship of the various entities, each to each of the several others, and what is the number of entities and relationships that DAL-E can keep straight? Also would like to know more about ways of laying out complex relationships that work best for DALL-E when it's close to being maxed out by the demands. Do you know if that sort of info is available about DALL-E prompts? The advice I see about prompts is mostly about mimicking various kinds of camera lenses, and using words that n affect the color, the emotioal atmosphere, etc.
I was able to come close to the cats in a trenchcoat one. I changed the prompt to "a realistic drawing of 3 cats stacked on top of each other. The top one is wearing a long trench coat that comes down to the ground." The cats aren't standing on hind legs on each other's shoulders, though. Was unable to get even 2 cats standing that way. Could get bottom cat carrying top one piggyback, or with top one on bottom one's head. I wonder if part of the problem is that cats don't have shoulders? Anyhow, here are images.
https://i.imgur.com/bxCVx4L.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/k6EhU0v.jpg
I've had a lot of experience with Dall-e wrangling, mostly with Dall-2, andI was able to get it to make both the woman with the raven on her shoulder and the llama image. The former was actually pretty easy. The llama was very hard, because Dall-e is convinced that all llama's have bells around their necks and no llamas have them anywhere else. I had to resort tof confusional techniques (sort of a way to make Dall-e "hallucinate") to get it to make a llama with a bell on its tail. Images are here:
woman with raven etc.: https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpg
llama with bell, etc: https://i.imgur.com/dBUupdN.jpg
I used the prompts unchanged from the original bet, but I'm curious what prompt you used to get the llama image.
Oh, was that part of the bet? That the user had to use the words just as they were in the bet? You might get the raven image if you run the prompt about a dozen times, but you'll never get the llama without messing with dall-e's mind.
Raven prompt: "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library."
Llama prompt: "A desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
(Putting in the barette, misspelled, was the confusional zzp. It's not sure what a barette is. Note that it didn't put a barrette in the image, unless it thinks some of the stuff on the tail is a barette.)
Oh, interesting!
The original bet specified the exact wording I believe. It's interesting though that OpenAI is integrating DALL-E 3 with ChatGPT and ChatGPT rewrites the prompts behind the scenes (usually to 4 different prompts to generate 4 slightly different variants). This rewriting doesn't seem to have that much effect on the results for the prompts in the bet though. It really helps more when you don't want to fully describe the image yourself and instead let ChatGPT make a description based on the chat.
What I would like is to be able make clear to Chat the things that I cannot get across to Dall-e -- especially things that are wrong and stay wrong even with recurrent iterations of the image ("no, dammit -- he bell is on the llama's *tail*) and let Chat get across to Dall-e the thing I can't.
From my brief experimentation so far, it doesn't really help with that. It's not much different than asking ChatGPT to generate a prompt for DALL-E and then pasting the prompt into DALL-E. The prompts it generates don't seem any better than what you can write yourself, though it can save you the time of writing it.
I read the NYT article until I got to "a sticker of a shoggoth, an artificial intelligence meme based on a science fiction character".
While "character" is debatable, I think the appropriate genre here is "horror", or perhaps "fantasy" at the most general. The story in question is a bit more sci-fi than usual for Lovecraft, yeah. But calling it "a science fiction character" is missing the point, which would be solved by calling it "a character from a horror story".
Yeah, it's not even science fantasy, it's like "The Thing" (both original and remake) which - despite the same surface level of being a scientific expedition to the Antarctic - is a horror movie not SF movie.
Lovecraft is dark fantasy/cosmic horror. He's not even trying to be SF. Someone who has no idea what a shoggoth is, is definitely Not One Of Us.
It's the New York Times. They're definitely Not One Of Us!
Yes, my understanding is that Lovecraft's stories were usually categorized as something like "macabre fantasy" when they were first published and are generally categorized as "horror" today.
That said, I can imagine a few different cases for classifying the Cthulhu Mythos in general and At the Mountains of Madness in particular as sci-fi:
1. By analogy with earlier authors of macabre speculative fiction, most notably Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, whose works are more often categorized as sci-fi than fantasy. Shelley in particular being considered simultaneously the founder of both the modern sci-fi genre and the modern horror genre for the same book (namely, Frankenstein).
2. Lovecraft's stories are generally set either present-day or twenty-minutes-in-the-future relative to their publication date, whereas prior to the relatively recent emergence of "urban fantasy" as a distinct genre, fantasy was more often set in the middle ages or some legendary past.
3. The Cthulhu Mythos features space travel and time travel, which are classic SF genre signifiers. Mountains of Madness in particular is structured as an exploration narrative, in many ways closely parallel to Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" which is unambiguously sci-fi. And I think Shoggoths also appear in "Shadow Out of Time", which is very much a time travel story.
Of these explanations, 1 and 2 strike me as fairly weak, and 3 is complicated by Lovecraft's stories also heavily featuring sorcery and ritual magic, encounters with godlike and demonic entities (often explicitly referred to as "gods"), and (particularly in the case of the Dreamgate Cycle stories) journeys into something very much like a faerie world.
There's no great shortage of science fiction that features sorcery and ritual magic, though often using more SFnal terminology like "psionics". Lovecraft's magic was I think congruent with Clarke's sufficiently advanced technology, and AtMOM is pretty solidly in the science fiction genre even if it is also in the horror genre.
Describing the shoggoth as a "character", is a bit off though.
Good point.
A lot of speculative fiction gets categorized differently depending on what aspects you focus on and how those aspects are framed. For Lovecraft in particular, there's a spectrum between more sci-fi-like stories which emphasize space and time travel and put the supernatural in a context that suggests Clarke's Law, and more fairy-story-like stories that simply present magic as magic. You're right that AtMOM probably belongs most or all of the way towards the sci fi end of the spectrum, along with "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Whisperer in the Darkness". On the other the spectrum, I'd probably put stuff like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". And Lovecraft's stories referenced one another quite liberally, strongly implying that DQoUK, SooT, and AtMOM all take place in the same world and should thus probably be considered the same genre.
In more general cases, I keep thinking about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" books, which feel like fantasy because they take place in a quasi-medieval society with knights and dragons and the like. But they're generally classified as sci fi because the backstory is that the society is a fallen-tech colony and the dragons are the product of genetic engineering.
Another case is Lindsay Ellis's Noumena series (Axiom's End, etc), which concerns a present-day alien first contact, but is categorized by her publisher as Alternate History because "present day" is relative to when Ellis started working on the stories (2006-ish), while the first book wasn't actually published until 2020.
I think you're being too rational about it. This is 'outgroup member do weird thing'.
I'm about 1/3 of the way through Lewis's book on SBF, and also listening to his podcast about the trial. I expect others are are accessing one or both of these sources as well. I'm interested in other people's takes on SBF & the collapse of his business.
Crypto is a scam. All of it. But at its core, Bitcoin and Ether, are "really good" scams in a sense that they have lasted for over a decade now (so did Madoff's). So the simple heuristic is that any crypto-related venture is a scam, even if the people who started it didn't mean it that way at the beginning.
Being "really smart" in this case makes it worse - smart people are really good at inventing excellent explanations in support of whatever it is they do/believe. They sound really convincing too, to themselves above all else. And then - when things turn sour - it's really hard to admit that "I" (so smart, me!) just f-ed up, so the spiraling down accelerates.
I think I'm going to have to read this book, just to see how under SBF's spell this guy is.
It's amazing how many interviews I've read that are all 'Sam is such a great guy!' 🤩🤩🤩 from people who you'd imagine would be too old a hand to fall for fast talking.
He must have some incredible charisma effect in person because just seeing him briefly in videos and in photos, he doesn't look like all that.
" I'm interested in other people's takes on SBF & the collapse of his business."
Quick'n'dirty uninformed opinion: I don't think he set out to be fraudulent. I think he thought he was too clever to fail, that he had found the One Weird Trick to making infinite money, and he was in a bubble that was (um, let me try and find some suitably emollient phrase that is not "licking his arse") praising him for being so clever at getting rich to fund good causes.
That meant that (1) he bypassed all the normal, boring, red-tape regulation, stuffy old guys in suits safeguards when setting up both Alameda Research and FTX (2) it was All Pals Together which turned out to be *terrible* for oversight (I do think Caroline got dumped with leadership role when Sam Trabucco left, something for which she was not experienced enough and was left more or less as Bankman-Fried's 'yes' girl) (3) going along with that, they treated it as their personal piggy-bank (e.g. buying holiday home for SBF's parents, a yacht for Trabucco - which I only learned of by reading the Wikipedia article now), major loans to the three founders SBF, Wang, and Singh, and throwing money at politicking in Washington (4) getting involved in politics and trying to influence regulators to give preferential treatment to FTX and do down Binance because of SBF and Zhao having their little hair-pulling spat and (5) failure not being an option, due to SBF having the inflated view of his own smarts and the constant praise being lavished on him as the EA wunderkind, when the One Weird Trick was played out and the infinite profits stopped, he started robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Then of course it all crashed down.
And he does seem to at least in part believe his own hype, that he could talk up some rescue deal (until Zhao and Binance pulled the rug out from under him there) and that if they just gave him time, he'd find all the missing money and everything would be okay.
Fast talking had got him all the investor funding at the start, but it didn't work when the bankruptcy loomed. And he could *not* keep his mouth shut afterwards; going online with more explanations and claims, even when the conditions of house arrest was 'no going online', handing over Caroline's personal papers to the NYT, etc. which eventually aggravated the judge enough that he got jail time.
So he was stupid in that particular smart way. There is a criminal aspect to all this, but a lot of it is him being "you have to be really smart to be this stupid". I think that's part of the failure mode of EA - it encourages thinking of oneself as one of the few smart realists who have the Magic Tool (Bayesian methods) to work out what is the most effective and best way, it's all based on Science, so you know better than the dumb-dumb average normies about effective charity spending.
That spills over very easily into "I know better than the dumb-dumb average normies about *everything*" and then you set up a house of cards, ignoring the dumb-dumb average normie safeguards, and guess what? The EA contempt for ordinary people comes back to bite you in the backside.
The John J. Ray III bankruptcy filing is very, very informative about how convoluted the structure was, how the three founders were taking money out, and how it was all an elaborate, interlocking mess with the 'silos':
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23310507-ftx-bankruptcy-filing-john-j-ray-iii
Yeah, that was the sense I got too. He started taking bigger and bigger risks, thinking he was smarter than everyone, and got in over his head. Then he tried to lie and gamble his way out.
Hey, Matt Lutz --put up my post right after you posted your review, and before seeing it was here. Will read it with interest.
I wrote a review of Michael Lewis's SBF/FTX book "Going Infinite" that I think will be of interest to ACT readers.
https://humeanbeing.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite
" The second villain is the current CEO of FTX, John Rey, who was brought in to manage the company in bankruptcy after SBF was removed. Rey decided from day 1 that SBF was a liar and a crook and he’d never listen to a word he said, and didn’t give SBF a chance to explain things, set things right, or point him to the money. Lewis doesn’t portray Rey as the same sort of moustache-twirling villain as the lawyer, just a very hard-headed and very old-school guy who made things vastly worse by never letting SBF just explain."
This lines up with criticism I've seen elsewhere of Lewis' book, that he seems to have been charmed by SBF and is acting as his apologist.
Regarding Mr. Ray, I'm inclined to trust him *because* he's a hard-headed, old-school guy, and for things like this:
"18. I have been provided with an unaudited consolidated balance sheet for the WRS Silo as of September 30, 2022, which is the latest balance sheet available. The balance sheet shows $1.36 billion in total assets as of that date. However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated."
That comes from the November 2022 bankruptcy filing, before we recently got Caroline Ellison's testimony that SBF instructed her to create a balance sheet that hid losses/claimed to have assets it didn't have. So Mr. Ray is proven right about the unreliability of whatever Sam is trying to sell him.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/caroline-ellison-alternative-balance-sheets-alameda-exposure-ftx
"According to reports from the courtroom on Oct. 11, Ellison claimed Bankman-Fried directed her to create “alternative” balance sheets on Alameda’s use of crypto exchange FTX’s funds. She reportedly testified that she had provided seven spreadsheets, one of which SBF presented to Genesis. The document did not reveal that Alameda had borrowed $10 billion from FTX.
“Sam said, ‘Don’t send the balance sheet to Genesis,’” said Ellison, according to reports. “We were borrowing $10 billion from FTX, and we had $5 billion in loans to our own executives and affiliated entities. We thought Genesis might share the info.”
The bankruptcy filing is really great at winkling out just how disorganised the entire affair was, from not knowing exactly what bank accounts they held and who the signatories were, to this little nugget:
"55. The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland".
Your auditors are in the Metaverse? Who could have qualms after learning that! 😁
I had the same reaction. Ray decided on Day 1 that SBF is a liar - and he is! Good judgment call, Mr. Ray!
He testified to the House Financial Services Committee about the FTX collapse about a year ago, there's a lot of different edited versions and highlights on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQdvfBZ0VbQ
He does come across as knowing what he's talking about and having long experience in cleaning up messes after businesses go kablooey, so when he says 'this is the worst I ever saw', you know it had to have been really bad.
He was the bankruptcy CEO for Enron! FTX KEPT WORSE BOOKS THAN ENRON!
At least Enron knew what bank accounts they were fiddling, FTX had no idea 😁
If you're making Enron look reputable, you know you done fudged up!
Idle speculation about the impact of the current iteration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Western politics: It seems like the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions of the left-liberal coalition have an intractable disagreement and are poised to tear the coalition apart over it. As the war goes on, Palestine-partisans will have plenty of Palestinian suffering to complain about, but I expect the horrors of the 10/7 attacks to remain vivid enough in the minds Israel-partisans that they will be in no mood to see Israelis cast in the role of settler-colonial oppressor. And if Jewish and other Israel-partisan donors start withholding money from organizations that are critical of Israel, I would expect pro-Palestinian leftists take that as further confirmation that Jews are part of the privileged white oppressor hegemon.
But I foresee a possible upside to all this internal political strife: Perhaps they will eventually tire of fighting and arrive at a renewed appreciation for tolerance and liberal discourse norms as a result, following the dynamic Scott described in section III of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization. Already some universities have announced that they no longer want to issue official statements about each new Current Thing, and the president of Harvard posted a video about the importance of free speech after Harvard took a lot of heat over a bunch of student organizations cosigning a statement saying the violence was entirely Israel's fault.
For now, I'm suspicious that this newfound appreciation for free speech and institutional neutrality is just a strategic retreat and won't extend to greater tolerance for opinions which are broadly unpopular on the Left, but like I said, the Israel-Palestine issue seems to be a deep and irreconcilable division within the Left, so if the internal fight about it is long and bruising enough, maybe that will eventually open up space for other kinds of heterodoxy.
Nobody is supporting free speech here. Zionist organizations like the ADL will double down on their opposition to free speech to woke-wash zionism and try and paint all opposition to zionism as being "nazism" etc. Zionists categorically have zero problem with anti-white ideology - they simply don't want it applied to jews (but jews are white or else you're "othering" them.) Organizations like the ADL support white privilege ideology so long as it excludes jews, and the strategy of institutional zionism has always been to use woke ideology to direct hate towards gentile whites and away from zionist jews.
> (but jews are white or else you're "othering" them.)
Didn't Whoopi Goldberg get in trouble for saying jews are white?
Hope the Goddess of Everything Else wakes up soon
<i>But I foresee a possible upside to all this internal political strife: Perhaps they will eventually tire of fighting and arrive at a renewed appreciation for tolerance and liberal discourse norms as a result, following the dynamic Scott described in section III of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization.</i>
That would be nice, but I suspect what will actually happen is that wokeness as usual continues, just with Jews being pushed a bit down the intersectional totem pole. Judging by the comments I've read, this won't cause woke Jews to abandon wokeism in favour of free speech; instead, they'll redouble their support for woke causes to try and regain status amongst their ideological confreres.
<i>Already some universities have announced that they no longer want to issue official statements about each new Current Thing, and the president of Harvard posted a video about the importance of free speech after Harvard took a lot of heat over a bunch of student organizations cosigning a statement saying the violence was entirely Israel's fault.<i>
"Woke people appeal to free speech norms when criticised over extreme woke rhetoric, then completely discard said norms when enforcing their views on the non-woke" has happened often enough in the past, and I'm a bit sceptical that this time is any different.
Though I generally support the free speech arguments, this seems like an isolated demand for rigor from the unis.
This is one of the rare but important occurrences where the revolutionary Twitter-left and the bog-standard Liberal left collide, as the latter gets to see what makes the former tick. The revolutionary types are being mostly consistent with rhetoric, it's just that now these things aren't so abstracted away.
The Women's March showed that Jews are pretty low in the Progressive Stack these days, though that power struggle is somewhat fluid.
Depends - if alt-right types say bad things about jews, jews become an oppressed ethnic minority, if jews support israel, less so.
Alt-right types are even lower on the stack.
I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?
While the conflict triggers debates around free speech in Western democracies, this is a million miles from the actua causes l events on the ground.
This feels like an entirely separate issue related to the ongoing woke vs sleep(?) debate - I don't know what the political opposite of woke is - and has absolutely nothing to do with examining the armament supply chains and underlying motivations that enable the conflict to continually escalate into ever more horrific versions of itself.
Very few actors, if any, within the weapon supply chain have any interest or motivation to scale down the rate of supply to try to reduce the number of incidents.
The loud proclamations by Israel's allies that they will give them more weapons seems to be acceptable in spite of the knowledge of what will happen as a result. Hamas will receive more munitions from wherever it can. Iran, Russia wherever...
Those who blame either the Israelis or Hamas for the state of play seem to be missing the point. Every single weapon has been provided by a third party, either directly or via financial support. Stock holders in the arms manufacturers are knowingly and actively feeding the conflict by continued investment. Meanwhile the only thing that's getting attention is free speech...?
We are blaming the wrong actors if we are genuinely concerned about reducing the violence.
Once again profit seems to be more important than the prevention of unnecessary deaths.
<i>I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?</i>
White Europeans and Americans have spent most of the last eighty years being told that any kind of in-group preference or loyalty is racist. Israel is one of the few Western(ish) nations we're allowed to root for, meaning that a lot of sublimated nationalism gets transferred onto them. (A similar thing happened with the Ukraine after Russia invaded it -- lots of people coming out with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian rhetoric which they'd never dream of using with regard to their own country and its enemies.)
Also, Jews in America tend to be disproportionately successful, including in culturally important sectors like Hollywood. This gives Jewish concerns greater salience in mainstream culture than you might expect from just looking at their population figures.
"I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?"
Since you go on to frame the situation in purely economic terms, this is not at all surprising. That's not the paradigm others are using at all. I the US there are at least two moral factors in being pro-Israel, the first being the non-mainline Protestant attitude of the Jews being God's chosen peo0ple, the forefathers of Christianity, Jesus himself being a Jew, etc. The second is the Holocaust being taught at the second greatest moral outrage of all time, only behind slavery.
It seems to me very likely that the reason this particular incident is getting so much attention well no roughly equivalent previous incidents ever got anywhere near this amount of attention is because this is the first time Twitter was run by someone who wanted to demonstrate commitment to free speech by not suppressing war-related posts
I don't think much of elon's free speech commitment, but the difference in how far tweets about it have spread compared to equivalent Tweets in the past is striking, and the actual videos of death never would have been allowed in the past
Israeli-Palestinian wars have always got very disproportionate attention, even before Twitter even existed.
Both sides are too weak to accomplish what they want on their own, so events tend to unfold and be shared as foils to gain attention/resources instead of being ends unto themselves. The Palestinians have historically tried to get neighboring Arab countries involved in the war, since the Palestinians lacked the military power to beat Israel. Israel depends on western, especially US, support, and so tries to mold their behavior to gain as much of that as possible.
You can see the same thing between Russia and Ukraine, where Russia would probably like the war to be as quiet as possible (they have the advantage) while Ukraine is sounding the alarm as much as possible, since they need outside support.
That sounds right to my ears.
American aid to Israel is ~13% of its military budget and ~0.6% of its total GDP; it could (and would) cough up that money itself if it was taken away. And it makes many of its own weapons, from rifles to tanks, though it buys a lot from the US too.
>I'm still struggling to understand why the whole world and its dog seems to feel such a powerful need to express its opinion about this particular conflict over all others?
Have you missed two years of ongoing Ukraine war discourse?
The point about the profit motive seems causally wrong to me, why do you believe that arms dealing is supply, rather than demand driven?
Another issue is that it's just as possible to kill millions of people with swords and arrows, as long as the other side doesn't have better weapons either, as with modern weapons, and it has been done many times in history. Giving a side weapons can shift the balance (if it's not matched by similar weapons going to the other side), but it's not clear that it makes war bloodier overall.
> woke vs sleep(?)
"wake up, sleeple!"
I wrote this on the Motte a few hours ago and thought it was relevant here as well. TLDR of it would be, I think that there's no newfound appreciation for free speech, and that the people who are embroiled in this latest battle have no perspective on how others may feel different from them on other stuff.
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
I felt like Lawrence Summers' statement about Harvard demonstrated a certain feigned ignorance about the source of the ideas that would, eventually, squarely hit Jews when it came time for Harvard to show a human face in response to the events in Israel. If it's any consolation, a 9/11 in 2023 would occasion glee at Harvard as well.
Frankly I'm surprised that anyone is at all surprised about what's happened. Most of the statistical disparities used to "prove" that the US is a white supremacist society tilt even more in favour of Jews.
I have no doubt in my mind that you're right. But do you have any sources you could link that dive into the data on this? I think a source like that could be a powerful tool for trying to open the minds of some of my Jewish progressive friends. Or, it could totally be ignored like everything else I say to them that's anti-progressive.
Not at my fingertips, I'm afraid, but a search for average earnings by race and/or religion should turn something up.
"it's fine now to murder people like you actually" is a common lefty take I've seen that goes beyond "people saying things you disagree with". I'm usually pretty pro free speech and some people gonna disagree with you, this one just passes the line.
I can't say I've seen people saying something as extreme and as open ended as that, myself. As much as I find progressives distasteful, I don't expect that basically any of them would be down for a platform of killing all Jews. Generally progressives consider themselves to be against anti-semitism. To the degree that they think that this violence is okay, they paint it in a light of anti-colonial sentiment, meaning that they'd think that it's okay to target people in Israel.
I think in the context of the conversation I was having, it was mostly regarding people saying that Israel was to blame for any and all violence Hamas may do.
This seems... Kinda like splitting hairs, TBH. "I'm not saying I want to kill you I'm saying I'm cool with other people doing it" isn't such a huge gap.
"Kill you", or "kill people in Israel", who in these people's view point took land that doesn't belong to them and oppressed "marginalized" indigenous peoples?
"The lesson to students on the Left is that you have no power, even though the people who do have power will indulge you on some issues. "
If people will do what you want, then you have power. And the success of student activists of getting their wish lists fulfilled (and avoiding punishment for crimes in doing so) goes back more than a half century.
"Power is the ability to force other people to do what you want,"
By that definition Joe Biden has about zero power. That rickety shambling body can force almost nobody to do anything they don't want to. He can ask other people to do it for him however. The USSS may or may not engage in an illegal request. Likewise the DoJ.
That actually sounds... about right? Which is why it's key to select the personnel that agrees with you ("you" being "President"; this seems to be the only real power the President has).
Joe Biden doesn't have power, but can choose people with power? Inane nonsense.
You said you haven't seen any, so here's one: (https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/07/opinions/teachers-misgendering-students-creates-hostility-hope/index.html)
I can find you others if you doubt that this is happening. I also find it odd in your post that you say all billionaires are on the same side and I think you are saying that these are Republicans? There are actually lots of billionaires on each side, with the top political contributor (George Soros, Democrat) giving twice as much as the next highest contributor (https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors).
I found a source sympathetic to the administration firing the teacher, but the base situation is the same. The administration set a rule - no "misgendering" -and the teacher disagreed with the rule. For back story, this teacher offered alternatives such as calling all students by their last names, which the school refused. The teacher's only option that didn't involve losing their job was to call students by a name he thought was wrong to do. The situation was explicitly "call this student by their preferred pronoun or lose your job."
I think you're badly misunderstanding the political landscape of billionaires, maybe because of this specific Israel question. Jews tend to vote Democrat and rich Democrats seem more likely to support Israel than poorer Democrats (which might itself be an age issue, as support for Hamas tends to lean much younger). Both of these facts support more freedom to say "second Nakba" than to say "Kill the Jews" and both come from the Democrat side. Republicans also tend to support Israel over Hamas, which makes it even easier.
I listened to Scott's Manifest 2023 interview, and someone mentioned that getting Destiny involved resulted in a massive spike in usage. Has anyone within the prediction markets scene considered talking with other Destiny-adjacent political commentators like Hasan Piker (hasanabi), Ian Kochinski (vaush), David Pakman, and Cenk Uygur?
On the topic of predictions, I found out that Fox News has a feature called America Predicts [0]. Any thoughts? They seem to be the first major publication to start experimenting with this sort of thing. For example: "Will a member of Congress be caught giving a speech generated by AI by Dec. 31?" is currently sitting at a 71% chance.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/americapredicts
"Will a member of Congress be caught giving a speech generated by AI by Dec. 31?"
Is that confined to this year, or is it open-ended (e.g. it could be by December 31st 2025?) Because that's something I'm pretty sure could indeed happen, 71% seems reasonable 😀
Doesn't have to be a big name member of Congress, some rank-and-file backbencher, but yep.
>Hasan Piker (hasanabi), Ian Kochinski (vaush), David Pakman, and Cenk Uygur?
These people are all absolutely god-awful, bad faith assholes.
Hasan literally, unironically, unjokingly says that America deserved 9/11, and all of them call anyone who doesn't hate white people a "nazi".
Get this people involved if you want a bunch of toxic assholes ruining your event.
Note that Hasan Piker, Vaush, and Cenk Uygur have all consistently praised the Hamas massacres of Israelis throughout the past week (David Pakman being the sole exception in condemning it).
Hasan Piker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNkTvPV-PIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfmyC4kbX9w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZewwHJik5g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFznOHunD_c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZq7tOGAkfA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuPQh2iaB8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A50EQr3580g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDC_OxJQHvc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_JoGReSus8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9ppJ7UUjgc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP55Np_PTtY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWTOSdT2jo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxCFB6yZYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA77CR-Gl_c
Vaush:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11SuGID-Jn8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZ48xOKQ48
The Young Turks:
https://twitter.com/cenkuygur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Fekew0Vws (in which Israel responding to the massacre is labelled "genocide")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3SF6A0iosQ (in which the only criticism of the Hamas massacres is that they will harm the Palestinian and Muslim agenda, not that they are evil in and of themselves)
Did you watch the same videos as I did?
> (in which Israel responding to the massacre is labelled "genocide")
> they variously describe the Hamas terror attacks as “abhorrent”, “morally wrong”, and “absolutely disgusting.”
I see both of those things in the video. They definitely spend most (like 90%?) of the time on Israel's actions.
Australia has just rejected (by a 60 to 40% margin) a proposal to create an indigenous advisory body in the constitution. I'm curious about the instinctive reactions of people from other countries to this. And does any other country have something like this already, and how does it operate in practice?
My reaction is, the proposed "Voice" is so vaguely defined that it will either be an impotent symbolic gesture, or it will wield real power that nobody can now understand well enough to be confident it will be used wisely and with proper checks and balances. I lean towards the impotent-symbolism prediction, thus mostly harmless, but I'd have voted "No" until it was better defined.
As for similar institutions, I don't think the United States has anything similar w/re Native Americans as a whole. There's the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but that's the government telling the Indians how things are going to be, not vice versa. But individual Native American tribes are quasi-sovereign entities (in a manner similar to that of the 50 states, e.g. they are still politically subordinate to the Federal government). This works tolerably well, in large part because we've spent over a century building up statutory and case law that delineates everybody's powers and responsibilities.
Some thoughts as an Australian resident
- Aboriginals already have significant special privileges, including companies being allowed to literally advertise explicitly 'aboriginal only' jobs - and not for aboriginal specific roles, but just jobs anyone could do, affirmative action and scholarships at australian universities, government departments with billions of dollars in funding etc. People have mixed feelings about this kind of thing, but by and large very few people complain or say anything about it - right up until you force them (voting is mandatory in australia) to vote on a constitutional change to enshrine them.
- We were in one breath told about how limited and powerless this body would be (in support of it), and then in the next breath we were told this would radically change the country forever (in support of it).
- This whole thing is best understood as a vanity project by the Prime Minister. If the body is really so important for improving aboriginal outcomes, he should not have made it's introduction dependent on the Australian public voting on a constitutional change. And if it really would have been so powerful in making a difference to aboriginal lives, then it would have been easy to prove it with a legislated voice. This would have had the dual benefits of showing effectiveness and demonstrating benignness. But he didn't because he wanted to the be Prime Minister who got this done, he wanted his Kevin Rudd stolen generation apology moment, he wanted his post-political career honors, he wanted his honorary doctorates, he wanted his institutional speeches, he wanted his biographies, he wanted his fawning ABC interviews.
- He should have cancelled or at least delayed the referendum before he set a date, because by then it was clear support was tanking. It's unclear if he didn't do this because A, he didn't want to be seen to be backing down or breaking a promise, B, he didn't believe the polls, or C, he knew there was a high chance of failure but thought that it was win-win because being seen to be trying to do the 'right' thing is almost as good as actually succeeding.
- The justification for constitutional change was so future governments couldn't get rid of it without another referendum. But then in support of the voice was the idea that it had no actual powers, the parliament could ignore what it said, and had ultimate control over its structure and function. If a government would be willing to abolish a legislated voice, then they're going to ignore everything the voice says, make it as small and powerless as possible etc.
- Rich people, celebrities and corporations were overwhelmingly and vocally pro-voice. This undeniably led to at least some people voting no out of spite.
- The process which led to calls for a voice to parliament in the first place also produced calls for a treaty with the government and "truth-telling" i.e. aboriginal race nationalist propaganda espoused by the government and other institutions to brow beat white people into accepting more and more special privileges for aboriginals. This undeniably led to some people voting no. They're not the same thing, but expecting people to treat them as separate is unreasonable. They're obviously all slices of the same salami, and if each slice it too thin to be opposed then its basically a blank cheque for these activists and politicians to do whatever they want.
- This was treated as a referendum on the Prime Minister himself by a lot of people, which is reasonable considering that he's done very, very little meaningful in his time as Prime Minister, a time during which Australians are suffering from significant cost of living challenges for which he would be absolutely hammering the (conservative) liberal party for doing similarly nothing in they were in power. He's literally spent more time talking about and promoting the voice than anything else since he's been in power, and a lot of people resented this. His party still has a comfortable polling lead, but he would be extremely well served to try and move on from this as quickly as possible and try and reign in all the bullshit leftist rage, because the sooner people forget about this monumental waste of time and money, the less of a reputational hit he takes.
- The Yes campaign/supporters are extremely stupid. I thought they were engaging in polling denial in order to avoid poisoning their campaign and spreading doom. NOPE, they were high on their own supply, and the fact that the actual result was *almost exactly* the average of countless polls was a complete and utter surprise to them.
One of the (bad) lessons internalised by the left side of politics from the Republic referendum was that they provided _too_ much detail about the proposal which allowed the No campaign to win the day by nitpicking.
So this time they were determined to go to the polls with the vaguest possible proposal: the body shall exist. Will it have any powers? Will Parliament have any obligation to listen to it? What form shall this body take and who will select it? Doesn't matter, just shut up and vote for it.
You often hear moaning from certain quarters about how rarely Australians agree to pass constitutional changes (it's now eight out of 45 proposed changes have been accepted), as if that's a problem with the Australian people's stubbornness rather than the low quality of the changes that politicians like to propose, or a credit to the original writers of the Constitution for getting something good enough in the first place.
>- We were in one breath told about how limited and powerless this body would be (in support of it), and then in the next breath we were told this would radically change the country forever (in support of it).
This isn't necessarily a contradiction - it's possible for something to be wholly powerless ( in the sense of "unable to coerce") but very influential (in the sense of "able to persuade").
There's obviously a correlation. When convenient, it was practically being sold as a symbolic change, and other times a fundamental change to how Australia operates as a country.
If the voice is politically powerless, if the parliament can ignore everything they say, if parliament can legislate changes to it which make it small, underfunded, unrepresentative etc., then this makes it much, much harder for it to have a significant impact on society. But activists were saying it would cause a "tectonic shift" in aboriginal policy.
Perhaps, but I think that would be dependent entirely on the personal qualities of the specific person in that role, rather than the role itself.
Not necessarily! Consider political parties - in most countries they have no formal recognition as a concept in eg. the constitution of the country, but in practice they are extremely powerful entities, in a way that rarely depends on any one individual in the party.
Citation needed. Political parties are not recognized in the *US* Constitution, because the US Constitution predates the widespread recognition that political parties will inevitably play a dominant role in the politics of a democracy. Just about everyone else has the benefit of experience in that regard, and I think in most nations there is explicit constitutional provision for and/or recognition of political parties. This can sometimes be difficult to discern because e.g. the UK Constitution is unwritten and we can't point to the date where they changed it to acknowledge parties, but they pretty clearly have. In Germany, parties are explicitly written into the Basic Law.
But there are ~200 nations on Earth, and I'm not going to be the one to read all their constitutions.
Good point re all the PR systems that *must* officially recognize parties, I was implicitly thinking only of Westminster systems.
I note that the US wasn't unaware of political parties as a thing, they were already prominent in England by then, it was actively trying *not* to have them be a dominant force
Eh. If something has the ability to radically change your country then it is incredibly powerful, whether that power is formally spelled out or not.
Yeah, re your last point, I think a lot of lefties in Western countries in general exist in a bubble where all their (liberal, highly educated, affluent) friends agree with them, and the media agrees with them, and corporations virtue signal by agreeing with them, so it doesn't occur to them that large chunks of the population could hold significantly different views. I know at least one person (highly educated, affluent, liberal) who said that I was the ONLY person she knew who was voting No. I mean! It's 60% of the population! There is probably also the fact that people who voted No were much quieter about it than people who voted Yes, because we didn't want to engage with all the BS rhetoric and the judginess.
Scott Alexander lives in the same kind of bubble. Check section III:
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup
It's amazing to me as well, but at least he *knows.* What's strange is that such bubbles might even be hard to escape from.
Perhaps. Five years ago I too was a lefty bubble boy who uncritically believed what the New York Times told me; then I started making an effort to read other sources that didn’t share the same bias (like this blog!) My eyes do glaze over when we start to argue about AI risk though…
My instinctual reaction is to compare it to tribal sovereignty in the US. "Tribe" appears in the us constitution so it has some basis, but the constitution doesnt indicate what a tribes powers are. Laws and treaties have done so.
Irrespective of whether its good, US indigenous people have a legal identity that is different from others. There does not seem to be a significant movement to stop that and the current supreme court, seen as very conservative, is increasing that distinction.
I feel like the difference is that the US has much, much less interest in native issues than Australia, and so nobody feels especially threatened by such distinctions. This lack of care seems to stem from a combination of native americans being a much smaller, less politically organized, more segregated and less culturally influential group than african americans, who *are* the focus of the left's racial egalitarian efforts. They're also a lot less dysfunctional compared with Australian aboriginals so they naturally demand less attention.
In Australia, however, Aboriginal issues are essentially the absolute pinnacle of institutional left-wing political efforts. There is nothing higher, there's no 13% african population to focus on. And accordingly there's almost no limit to what the left want to do with regards to indigenous "rights". If the left had their way, untold billions of dollars would be redistributed from mostly white australians to aboriginals, directly and indirectly. It's the height of sanity for people to be concerned about giving anything to these politicians and activists.
Lefties see everything in black and white. To them there are only two kinds of good people in the word, the oppressed, and of course the lefties. The rest of us, with more nuanced and moderate and probably better-informed opinions are in their eyes literally hateful Nazis!
The irony is that in many respects the lefty's coercive intolerant outlook, blind to reason and immune to persuasion, make them the best approximation to Nazis themselves!
"Lefties see everything in black and white."
No further comment required.
In America it is easy on one's travels to see really Indian-looking Indians - they look as if "pure-blooded" - so I think it is tacitly understood that when Indian activists look like oneself, basically Anglo, they can be dismissed; and if that's "wrong" in some identity politics way, it's only at the margin. My impression of Australia is that your indigenous identity has been captured by people whose genetics are pretty far from Aboriginal. This works as long as everyone is polite about it - but maybe falls apart when it comes time to vote?
Yes that's definitely a factor. Almost no well known and publicised mainstream aboriginal activists are close to full-blooded aboriginal. Most full-blooded aboriginals live in remote areas and suffer from so much basic dysfunction and deprivation that they're not capable of becoming fully literate, let alone going to university or having careers.
One of the criticisms of the voice was that it would be dominated by these inner city, one quarter-aboriginal types who would push a radical left agenda rather than actually representing the majority of the country's regional and remote aboriginals. One slur used against it was to call it the 'city voice'.
I'm Aussie, and I voted No, on the grounds that "the Voice" is racist, in the literal sense of that term - it affords access to one race that is not afforded to other races. (Naturally people on the left pushing the yes side of the debate accused their opponents of racism, go figure. I was generally disappointed by the quality of debate around the topic.)
More generally my feeling is that any kind of race-based discrimination in an attempt to redress perceived historical injustice should -
1. be clear about the historical wrong it is trying to address
2. apply a measure that is proportionate
3. have a clear goal
4. have evidence that it will work, and
5. be temporary.
I will acknowledge points 1, 2, and 3. The Indigenous population of Australia has a tattered history, most infamously the Stolen Generations, where in the early half of the 20th century Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families to be raised with white people (this was ostensibly done for their benefit, yikes.) The measure - creating an Indigenous advisory body - is hardly revolutionary. And the goal is very clear; at the moment (among other socioeconomic markers) there is a 8-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians; #closingthegap has been around for ever but successive Australian governments haven't made that much progress.
The Voice for me failed points 4 and 5. The "Yes" side of the debate focused endlessly on Aboriginal disadvantage, but less so on what the roots of that disadvantage actually are and how creating a Voice will address them. Most of the Yes campaigners were leftist white people - Aborigines themselves seemed lukewarm on the proposal and several prominent Indigenous Australians spoke forcefully against it. Also I wasn't a fan of enshrining it permanently in our constitution. I'm all for lifting people up who have been historically downtrodden, but indefinitely - that seems to me to be a tacit acknowledgement that there will always be division. Why not just create a Voice through legislation? Then we can eliminate it if it doesn't work or is no longer needed.
Seconding this. Well put.
I also note that the "voice" was ill-defined. Labor did put out their plan for how they intended to legislate it but I trust that about as much as an election campaign promise, the devil is in the details and I highly doubt the details wouldn't have changed between their draft and any actual law.
I also note that they can still legislate a "Voice"! The proposed amendment was in no way *required*, the parliament already has all the requisite powers.
I think it is always bad when politics tries to address the past. Unless you mean last year.
Finland has an organ called Sámediggi, The Sámi Council, for the Sámi minority up north (Sweden and Norway have equivalent orgs). Their advisory powers are fairly limited, and the general acceptance of this arrangement is probably made easier by the fact that these advisory powers extend over a similarly very limited region. (I wrote more about the related issues at https://alakasa.substack.com/p/the-great-sami-showdown?r=7fsd8)
My reaction was that I don't know the details, so I assume the Australians have good reasons for voting like this.
For the second question, lots of countries have rules to make sure that minorities are heard or represented in parliaments. Sometimes in regional parliaments, sometimes in national. Perhaps the most common rule is that minority parties are exempted from electoral thresholds. This usually ensures that at least one or a few MPs are from this minority. Some examples that I am familiar with is:
- German minority in Polish national parliament
- Danish minority in regional parliament in Northern Germany
- Romania with various minorities
A lot of countries in South Eastern Europe like Hungary, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro have varying rules for how to include minorities into parliament. Croatia even has some reserved seats for minorities. I think New Zealand has a similar rule for Maori.
You can find more information here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_political_positions
>I think New Zealand has a similar rule for Maori.
NZ is hurtling towards an undemocratic polynesian race nationalism that is evidently very unpopular with huge chunks of the NZ population and which rightfully scared a lot of Australians wrt the voice advisory body in Australia
I’m American but followed the voice debate a bit. My understanding is that the no campaign was largely based on the idea that it would produce needless divisions. This seemed disingenuous to me since divisions clearly do exist. It was more persuasive to me that the amendment was overly vague. It seemed like the amendment could’ve been interpreted in a lot of very different ways had it been approved. Given the history of corruption in past aboriginal councils, I think a less open-ended amendment would’ve been much more appropriate.
For that reason, I probably would’ve voted against it. It would be hard though, because I know it’d cause pain to people who would interpret it as a rejection of their importance or right to full participation in the society.
"This seemed disingenuous to me since divisions clearly do exist. "
And enshrining those divisions in law would be helpful how?
They already have more than the *right* to participate fully in society, they lack the ability to do so. We are beat over the head with the '65,000 years' (of existence in Australia) line on an almost daily basis, but somehow it never occurs to people that being isolated from the rest of the world for 65 millennia in a radically different environment necessitating a radically different lifestyle to the average non-Australian MIGHT have just resulted in slightly different genes being selected for. No, really, believing that Aboriginal Australians necessarily have the same genetics related to behavioral characteristics as say, Europeans is literally more absurd than young earth creationism. At least the creationists can point to a supernatural force to rationalise their crazy beliefs.
I mean, Native Americans on average do much worse on average in the SATs than white people, have much lower IQs etc so its very obvious that differences exist. . And many of the successful ones have significant European ancestry.
I mean, there are similarly "aboriginals" working as academics, politicians, bureaucrats, business professionals etc. in Australia. They are disproportionately part (or majority) european, but the point is not that nobody "aboriginal" can succeed. The point is that the vast majority of aboriginals struggle with basic literacy, have an extremely high crime rate, have an extremely high substance abuse rate etc. that explains the majority of socioeconomic differences between whites and aboriginals - not a lack of "rights". Just like the existence of successful native americans does not mean that all or even most native americans are capable of such success.
Last I heard the consensus was that Native Americans left Eurasia much later than the Australian Aborigines did, and the oldest dated signs of human activity in the Americas was only 13,000 years ago.
Anyway the point is not that 65,000 years of isolation will necessarily make you dumber, it's that we shouldn't be too surprised if it does. 65,000 years ago is a long time in human evolutionary terms; it's half way back to Homo Erectus.
> right to full participation in the society
But of course that is ridiculous, because they can already fully participate in the society and government just like anyone else, they just have to get elected the normal way. They don't get a special guaranteed advisory body on top of that. Supporting such a measure on the basis of not making the aborigines 'feel rejected' would be treating them like children.
I don't read the NYT statement the way you do. I think "also" does the work here to distance you.
It's clear to me that the sentences are talking about the funding that Manifold received, not ACT. "It" in the second sentence refers to the subject of the first sentence which is Manifold, not ACT. If the second sentence was about ACT it would be in the same clause as "a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets" -> "a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets and receive $1 mil...)".
It seems weird that there's an apparent link between menstruation cycles and the moon. What is going on there?
A lot of articles say it's a myth, but they're referring to the menstral cycle starting at a particular time in the lunar cycle (eg ovulation occurring at the full moon). Which it doesn't. Or they point out that people's cycles vary, often between 24 and 38 days. (See: https://helloclue.com/articles/cycle-a-z/myth-moon-phases-menstruation)
What is true, however, is that the global average menstrual cycle length is almost exactly the same as the lunar cycle length (29 vs 29.5 days). That doesn't seem like a coincidence.
The circadian rhythm is another biological cycle driven by a heavenly body. It's triggered by light, and I would guess that would be the driver behind a moon-menstruation link too (mostly because I'm not sure what else it could be... gravity?).
When humans are deprived sunlight (eg, when they're blind), they develop circadian rhythm disorders - their internal clocks drift out of sync so that their sleep/wake cycles are shorter or longer and not necessarily in sync with daylight hours.
Could it be that menstrual cycles are naturally in sync with the moon, but have drifted apart because we're all inside at night now? Has anyone studied the menstral cycles of women more exposed to the night sky?
Is there any good ideas as to a reason for the two to be linked? My best (incomplete) guess would be that it's safer to menstruate when it's dark/not dark because of predators for some reason. Or it's a better time to have sex. I dunno.
Or is it just a coincidence?
I just think it's weird that our fertility is so different from other mammals.
I probably shouldn't have any credulity in this theory, but it seemed kinda compelling when I heard it.
Apparently it's fairly common for a variety of biological functions to cycle monthly or bi-weekly in tetrapods (vertebrates excluding fish), and it's though it might be due to the ancestral tetrapod (some fish-like amphibian) having lived in the tidal zone.
Humans have concealed estrus, which would be frustrated if the menstrual cycle (and therefore the estrus cycle) aligned with the phases of the moon.
The similar menstrual cycle lengths in simians seem well explained by having evolved from a common ancestor. The fact that they *nearly* align with the lunar cycle doesn't take us anywhere, because "near" alignment still results in menstruation taking place at every possible point of the lunar cycle.
Since humans are diurnal, the level of night time illumination seems unlikely to be significant to them.
You might consider whether the most recent common ancestor of simians (which would not have had concealed estrus) might have had a menstrual cycle aligned with the lunar cycle, from which its descendants have since varied. A potential complication is that it's characteristic of simians that they have acute colour vision adapted to day-time lifestyles, but it's possible to image some transitional species for whom it was adaptive.
> Since humans are diurnal, the level of night time illumination seems unlikely to be significant to them.
Evolution seems to have endowed us with decent night time vision which would work ok in moonlight. If the EEA includes the tropics, then daytime would vary by around three hours between 'summer' and 'winter'. While a lone woman gathering in the savanna in moonlight is probably going to fall prey to some big cat, there might be higher order effects. If multi-day hunting expeditions were a thing in the EEA, they might happen more during full moon. Being fertile while the most of the successful hunters of your tribe are gone might be disadvantageous.
Also, in the EEA, menstruation was probably not very concealable from the men of the tribe. Still, there seems to be enough uncertainty to deduce fertility from that that the the winning strategy for men was not "have sex with women who had their period n days ago" but just "have a lot of sex with women of fertile age" (and optionally "... who are not currently menstruating"). (Thinking about it, I am kind of surprised by it. In any environment which a woman might have sex with more than one man, the ability to track estimates of fertility for a dozen females seems like an obvious advantage. Neither would the males have to invent fancy math like integers or Bayes updates for that, such calculations can well be hard-wired into instinct. I really don't grok this species. Bluntly, how can "women who had their period n to k days ago" not be the most viewed pornhub category?)
If most of the women were kind of synced to the moon, the best fertility estimate available to males might not change too much.
(Related: being synced to the moon would also imply being synced to each other. Naively, one would expect that not to be a stable equilibrium. Any one women defecting and having her fertility window while the rest of the tribe is menstruating would obviously be more likely to have a more well adapted father for her children. Is this whole concealed fertility thing a result of group selection, like "In groups where fertility is obvious and the best hunter fathers most children, the winning strategy for other males is to kill him. Groups which routinely kill their best hunters are outcompeted by groups who don't." I still do not see how this would apply to humans but not to most other animals living in groups with multiple males.)
Speaking of coincidences and moons, how wild is it that our planet's one moon is the right size and shape to cause a total eclipse of our sun? And the orbit is changing: before humans walked the earth, the moon loomed closer over the dinosaurs, and after we're long gone, it will drift away into space. We exist in exactly the right time to be able to notice that the two bright objects in the sky are the same size.
Well, the shape shouldn't be surprising: anything over a certain mass will attain hydrostatic equilibrium.
I think you’d enjoy reading Isaac Asimov’s non fiction essay - The Tragedy of the Moon.
He ponders whether the confusion having a body orbit is inserted into science significantly held back our development…
IIRC, the Moon was also the cause of the "no advanced aliens" situation in *Foundation*: the lunar gravity pulled radioactive heavy metals closer to the surface, increasing the background radiation and therefore mutation rate.
That is one of the arguments against the Copernican Principle when it comes to estimating the prevalence of extraterrestrial life.
I've always been Amazed by this too, and whenever I see an eclipse in sci-fi in other star systems I'm always annoyed. The ability for two bodies to eclipse is practically unique to our solar system, it should be on Earth's flag. Hell, the Pioneer plaque should have probably had a solar eclipse on it, i think it might provide a lot more bits of negentropy than the quasar stuff.
The pulsars have the advantage that they're particularly easy to observe from a distance, which the moon (and especially the moon's precise size and orbital distance) isn't. Earth isn't even the only body in the solar system to have eclipses from its moons. There are photos of the shadows cast on Saturn and Jupiter by their moons (which clearly include areas of totality), and not only is Charon about 8 times wider as viewed from Pluto than Earth's moon is from here, plenty to cause eclipses, but some of the smaller moons of Pluto are also large enough to cause eclipses given the great distance from the sun. If the sci-fi depictions you're annoyed about specifically have the moon with the same apparent size as the star, rather than merely more, that is more of a coincidence though.
> The circadian rhythm is another biological cycle driven by a heavenly body. It's triggered by light, and I would guess that would be the driver behind a moon-menstruation link too (mostly because I'm not sure what else it could be... gravity?).
You have very accurate internal biological timers. A cycle that is linked to the phase of the moon can be driven by those, as long as the cycle of the moon itself always takes exactly the same amount of time. It's not necessary to drive the internal cycle by an external influence unless they would otherwise fall out of sync.
(Compare the 11-year and 17-year cicadas.)
I'm not taking a position on whether there is supposed to be a relationship between menstruation and the phase of the moon, but the orbit of the moon is regular enough that, should such a relationship be advantageous, it could be implemented without needing to rely on an external stimulus.
Huh, interesting, is the idea that women tend to synchronize their menstral cycle still true, or a victim of the replication crisis? Anyway if synchronizing is a thing then the lunar cycle is a good signal. A convenient metronome?
I'm just one woman but in about 15 years of having a mostly regular period, and moving between households, living with different women (and googling), I'm pretty confident in saying that the synching thing is a myth. Since exact length of cycles varies, you probably end up "synched" at some point for a few months if you're living with another woman for several years. And then it goes out of synch again. I think the "aw we're synched up!" stuff can be a bonding thing, in the moment when you're both dealing with the same thing at the same time. But many women (from my experience) truly seem to believe it's true. My inclination is to say that it's an illusion. Which doesn't bode well for bonding with Ethereal Moon Goddess-worshipping types.
A cursory google suggests syncing isn't a thing. Still, "a convenient metronome" seems reasonably plausible as an explanation to me - it would explain why cycles in women and other species cluster around 29 days, but few bother sticking to it exactly. It might also explain why the cycle lengths match while the specific points in the cycle don't.
Other animals have different length to their menstrual cycles, so I'm thinking coincidence.
I had a quick look into other species. See here: https://www.news-medical.net/health/Menstruation-Evolution.aspx
Some key points:
1. "current consensus is that menstruation is restricted to higher primates, the elephant shrew and some bats"
2. "It is important to note that menstrual bleeding in non-human primates is minimal."
3. "The duration of the menstrual cycle also varies with species, and it is approximately 29 days long in orangutans, 30 days in gorillas and about 37 days in chimpanzees"
The cycle lengths in other menstruating species still seem suspiciously close to the lunar cycle, and there's also a plausible reason why staying in sync with the moon might be more important to humans (more menstrual bleeding).
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstruation_(mammal)
"Most female mammals have an estrous cycle, yet only ten primate species, four bat species, the elephant shrew, and one known species of spiny mouse have a menstrual cycle.[19][20] As these groups are not closely related, it is likely that four distinct evolutionary events have caused menstruation to arise."
It's got to be a coincidence. A menstrual cycle of 27 days would mean it's significantly out of phase with the moon after just two months. Even a menstrual cycle of 29 days would drift significantly out of phase after a year, far shorter than the woman's fertile lifespan.
What if in the past it was regulated by the moon? 29 is the average for the present day, but we are far removed from ancestral conditions.
According to this (which I have only skimmed), our circadian rhythm is naturally slightly longer than 24 hours:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202494/
A while ago I read about a study where they put people in basements with no sunlight and no indication of what time it was, and circadian rhythms varied from one person to the next, anywhere from 20 to 30 hours. So maybe the menstrual cycle is supposed to be tied to the moon (for whatever reason), but people today don't pay enough attention to the moon for it to sync up. I wonder if you'd see it sync up among today's hunter-gatherers.
My understanding is that there is pretty strong ties between menstruation and exercise and diet. I'd expect that it's easier to gather food or such, as well as to exercise at night when the moon is brightest, and that would carry through
It may be easier, but don't predators like wolves also benefit from lighter nights? Maybe nights with a full moon aren't so ideal after all for a spot of nocturnal mushroom picking!
Perhaps one explanation is that our primitive male ancestors would have taken the opportunity to hunt on lighter nights for a week or so either side of the full moon, leaving their womenfolk at home, and it was only on the two weeks' of darker nights, when the guys stayed in the camp over night, that they were most likely to copulate with the women.
The most fertile part of the menstrual cycle is two weeks after ovulation. So that timing matches their hunting vs stay at home routine if ovulation occurred at around the time of the full moon.
Obviously there would be nothing in principle stopping them mating at any time, but possibly there was some taboo around mating when they were about to hunt (perhaps based on practical considerations, such as preserving their energy and not smelling fishy to alert prey animals to their proximity, but also maybe to avoid provoking the jealousy and wrath of Diana, the goddess of night hunting, or some ancient equivalent), and by the time they returned from an all nighter chasing a gazelle or something, they were too knackered to even think about sex!
The remark below about cycle lengths in other primates would defeat that theory. We know that :
* mentrual cycles evolves among a common ancestor to primates
* from the common characteristics of all primates, it is likely that that ancestor was less intelligent than the average ape, and ate fruits (so no hunting-related social forces).
Furthermore, I can see an evolutionary path were you go from no cycle at all to a cycle in sync with the moon, but once you're out of sync, there's no going back.
So you would have to conceive an evolutionnary force that was strong enough to develop a whole cycle-in-sync in the first place, but so weak that it has been abandonned in almost all descendents.
I was thinking about hominid ancestors not so long ago (in geological time), e.g. say from roughly 2m years ago to relatively recent times i.e. around 10,000 years ago and more recently in some societies, rather than early primates or their squirrel-like predecessors tens of millions of years ago.
Also, my suggestion was an attempt to explain why the human menstrual cycle is, and for earlier hominds presumably equally was, 28 point something days. But I'd concede it doesn't explain how it evolved to that value from some other.
However, I gather a period interval can change by several days or even weeks due to external factors such as stress or malnutrition. So that may be a way it can vary widely until it happens to latch onto the favourable (according to my theory) interval. An advantageous trait need not suddenly pop up fully-formed and invariably present. It may be sporadic at first, with its advantage making it steadily more prevalent and gradually bedding it in.
Eh, I was never a poster child for exercise and diet, but when I was menstruating (and trying to track my cycles) I did find it went with the full moon, either a couple of days before or a couple of days after, during the year.
So, who knows? Biology is complicated and things like this are why astrology seemed to be so self-evidently correct, that the same heavenly bodies which influenced the tides and the material world also influenced our bodies and so our destinies as well.
Interesting point. It had crossed my mind that it could be something to do with gathering food, but I hadn't considered the links between menstruation and diet and exercise. I don't know much about those links at all actually.
I know a little bit due to personal background. But it's not an interest of mine and I could easily be misremembering. Think of this as given with maybe 70% confidence:
Some combination of excessive exercise and lack of body fat will prevent menstruation. Gymnasts frequently don't menstruate.
If you get too fat, you will stop menstruating.
If you're eating really poorly (not getting enough nutrition), you will stop menstruating.
That's enough to clearly establish that "menstruation is linked to diet and exercise", but the links (that I know of!) are mostly just failure cases. It's not at all surprising that if you are currently suffering stress from starvation, your body might decide "there's no potential upside to getting pregnant right now" and shut off menstruation. I'm not aware that you might e.g. vary the length of your cycle by varying the composition or quantity of your diet within broadly normal parameters, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
The most famous influence on menstrual cycle length is of course exposure to other women, which is neither a dietary nor an exercise-related phenomenon.
I wrote a solarpunk short story if you're looking for something quick and cozy to read!
https://solquy.substack.com/p/101523-algae-on-the-shore
I rather liked it! The writing was fine, the plotting was decent and the ideas had substance. I also quite enjoyed the structural pell mell of the various narrative developments.
Things I would have liked:
I would have liked the opening paragraphs to have been more straightforward. I get that you want to open with a splash (ho ho!), but then the reader has to contort through an unnecessarily complicated maneuver down in the basement to get the story properly started back at the beginning again. Suggestion: simply delete paragraph 1 and move paragraph 3 to the top.
I wanted the alga to be called “Lil’ Red”.
The title (perhaps unintentionally?) evokes Kafka on the Beach, although there’s no connection that I can see. Also, instead of washing up in huge rafts on the shoreline, wasn’t the whole point of Lil’ Red that it would only reproduce slowly, after which it was designed to calcify and drop to the ocean floor to keep the carbon sequestered? So I would have liked all these elements to be more in harmony with each other.
I would have liked the characters to have felt less like agglomerations of borrowed quirks and more like real people, but I appreciate that’s a huge ask to the point of being unreasonable; this is a solarpunk scifi short, not a novel.
I would have liked Carol not to have suddenly launched into a completely unnecessary attempt to explain/rationalize what James’ letter *really* signified. Apart from my wrestling match with the opening paragraphs, this was the only passage that threw me out of the story.
Anyway, good job! Thanks for sharing!
Interesting. Carol has no right to call James an asshole since she's a thundering bitch herself, and the takeaway of the story is selfishness.
Carol is selfish, and yet never gets what she expects a smart kid like her should get, so she gives up on everything (including teaching/helping students or participating in the academic paperwork; there's not even an indication that she's working on her own research). She doesn't want to be with James, she's not interested in him, but she uses him as a convenience (are we meant to infer that she doesn't get dates from the people she finds desirable, so falls back on James?)
James is selfish; he wants Carol and won't take no for an answer. He too is not having the stellar career he thought he was entitled to, so he rushes ahead with what he tells himself is altruism and ends up getting caught and sent to jail.
He thinks he can use meditation etc. in the nice, tidy, secularised and de-racinated manner to serve his own ends, and ends up conjuring demons. Theo and his kind, of course, are the obvious selfish demons who need to leech off human life force and use James as their gateway back to the world, and as Carol points out in the end, we have no way of knowing if all the claimed benefits of the magic algae really exist, or if something will go wrong. Theo wants to save humanity to be their food stock cattle, not for the sake of helping humanity survive.
And finally Carol doesn't take the lesson from James life and (possible) end to start getting involved with the real world and stop thinking about herself; no, she decides to evoke a tulpa of her own to make a bargain, and it's certainly nothing as lofty as 'save the world' which James at least pretended to be his motive, but so she can have a do-over and get that life she thinks she is owed: personal and private success and happiness.
What a thoroughly unpleasant bunch.
This comment warmed my heart :)
The background is that I had just come off of reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (TTT), which deals with "smart-kid problems," and in which I was frustrated by the main characters' lack of communication skills and character growth. And so I set out to write characters who I thought would be more likable; James actually asking Carol out instead of pining away in a corner, Carol straight-up asking James about his family problems, James growing up and becoming less of a dick, Carol following through with her own career ambitions and having some autonomy of her own.
It turns out though, that despite that, they all might still be thoroughly unpleasant people! If you ever read TTT I think you would hate it :)
I actually had not intended the theme to be about selfishness, but enjoy that you pointed that out (because it seems obvious now in retrospect). Most of this was done by accident:
1) Carol originally was going to have many suitors, but I thought the nerdy-girl-rebuffing-guys-due-to-skewed-gender-ratio-at-engineering-school trope had already been overdone
2) I felt like Carol having a stellar career would make her too much of a Mary Sue, so having a stalled research career was meant to be a comment on academia (I also really did have a professor who held absurd office hours to avoid students! It was also easy to miss his door because it looked like a pantry.)
3) Theo's species was originally supposed to be at war with the machine elves, who due to increased ease of DMT-production were on the ascendancy, but this entire section was cut since it was too convoluted. The easiest way to give Theo a motivation was to make it about humans as cattle. But your comment makes me want to write something that inverts the selfish-demon/genie trope!
4) The original ending had Theo popping out of nowhere and very-much-alive, meaning that Carol was taken for a ride having believed his letter. But I wanted to keep it ambiguous, so that each of the three possibilities she listed were equally plausible.
Thanks again for reading - I very much enjoyed your thoughts!
I did enjoy it as another take on the demon-summoning tales which were quite common in SF short stories of the 50s onwards, so the genre does exist and your story fits in nicely there.
James doing all this and making a (quite plain) deal with the Devil in order to try and impress Carol one final time, with the irony that Carol never heard of it and had not enough interest in him to follow what happened to him and would never have known had this other woman not shown up was excellent, although I have no idea if you intended that or not; his big 'save the planet' self-sacrifice was, in effect, one more doomed effort to get Carol to give a damn about him, and it didn't work.
The only motivation it created in Carol was "hey, deals with the Devil really work? so I can get the great life I wanted? okay, let's do this!" Refreshingly awful people, I guess; they're very human in being flawed and self-centred, so realistic that way.
The ambiguous ending was good, too; the ultimate irony would be if James did pop up out of nowhere, all "so... you wanna go to prom, after I saved the world?" and Carol is all "well damn, you mean I can't conjure up a demon to give me a second bite at the cherry? to hell with you, James, for tricking me!" because in the long run neither of them do care about other people or saving the world, just in getting what they want and think they deserve.
(and somewhere in another dimension a little shadowy demon is laughing its ass off at what fools these mortals be).
>thundering bitch
Ooh that’s nice. Another arrow in my quiver.
I liked it a bit, but I felt like the story didn't deliver what the first part promised. There was no hint that any supernatural things would be happening until the reveal, so I found that disappointing.
Point well taken :) Thanks for reading!
Thanks for writing!
I liked it!
Thanks for reading! I read through some of your writing, and particularly liked Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivation :)
Oh thanks!
For what it's worth, I interpreted the sentence about FTX in the other way - that Manifold got the FTX money.
I think it's ambiguous. Scott did say "a natural reading" rather than "the natural reading", and I agree with that choice. It's sort of: "Topic A involves group X, which was initially funded by GROUP Y, a blog which PROMOTED PREDICTION MARKETS. (It also received funds from Lord Voldemort.)" The caps are hyperlinks. Which group does the parenthetical apply to?
Proximity says Y, the "initially funded" and "also" implies the funding is associated with group X, but the highlighting effect of hyperlinks draws attention back to group Y. Plus the source does have a history of implying negative things about group Y, which for those aware of it, can also lead to associating the negative parenthetical with group Y.
The parenthetical applies to the subject of the previous sentence which is Group X. The sentences are listing various funding sources of Group X. If the parenthetical was about Group Y, that would need to be established as the subject of the Parenthetical, which it is not. Further, if the parenthetical was about Group Y, it would have been included in the existing sub-clause about Group Y funding.
If we accepted as a premise that the factually correct reading was *more* natural, what might we suggest is the journalistic responsibility towards avoiding falsehoods in secondary, technically possible, readings? None at all, or is there a percentage of ppl who read it the other way that is sufficiently small?
How easy are those other readings to find? I will accept some people read it the other way, but I did not and I think it would not have occurred to me while reading that some might. If explicitly prompted about it I guess I could have. Is that what is expected in the Editor skill set, to spot these? I genuinely dont know.
>Is that what is expected in the Editor skill set, to spot these? I genuinely don't know.<
It sure should be. They're easy to find; any sentence that discusses multiple people, will become ambiguous if you then refer to any of them with a universal pronoun. Or follow it with any action that multiple people could have taken ("Man Shoots Neighbor With Machete"). Using "Manifold" again instead of "It" solves the problem completely.
Moving from large lies to smaller lies, the steps on the path to truth telling.
This isn't a "smaller lie", it's "making a true and honest statement that could conceivably be accidentally misparsed, although to be honest it's not very likely to be"
The road to truth?—
Well, it's plain and simple to express:
Lie
and lie
and lie again,
but less
and less
and less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grook
You would have to be pretty honest to calibrate your lies so finely.
Naw, they're penduluming, not on a path to truth-telling. After the NYT swings through neutral (ano-judgment but not-very-sharp take on Scott) they will swing into Stoopit Global Positivity, then if pendulum continues into Woke Idolatry.
Maybe I’m missing the context but I recommend people quit lying cold turkey. No taper necessary.
I threw together a simple webpage to replace sequential bargaining with a one-shot system of each person entering a price and then getting a number. I don't think it leads to a more efficient result in the economic sense of the term, but I doubt it leads to a worse one either. I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts.
https://outsidetheasylum.blog/negotiation/
Played by homo economicus, "everyone places a secret bid, winner pays the cost of the second highest bid (+ epsilon)" is mathematically equivalent to an open auction and faster. Humans aren't emotionless economists, though, for the most part, and auctions absolutely play on our emotions and I don't think you'd get the same emotional effects from a one-shot secret bid system despite the mathematical equivalence.
You're thinking of a Vickery auction, but that doesn't work here, since there's no one else to bid against.
Interesting idea. After looking over the technical details page, I have reservations about the two "discourage lying" bullet points.
Specifically, I think your reasoning for what disincentives exist for lying about BATNA and FMV is more or less correct as far as it goes, but I suspect the incentives are weaker than you probably hope they are, and the optimal strategy when using the tool is probably to lie about both figures at least a little bit.
For BATNA, the optimal strategy is probably to engage in at least a bit of virtual brinkmanship. If you expect your counterparty to be honest about their BATNA, then you should deduce a confidence interval for their BATNA and select your own claimed BATNA so it's better for you than your real BATNA but still probably better for your counterparty than their BATNA. If your opponent might also be lying, then it's more complicated (since you also need to guess how dishonest they're likely to be, which is informed by how dishonest they expect you to be) but the same principle of running a small risk of "no deal" in exchange for a better deal if there is one applies. This mirrors brinkmanship in sequential negotiations, with the main differences being that 1) without the opportunity to back down afforded by sequential negotiations, it's probably advantageous to be more moderate in your dishonesty than you would be in claims about your BATNA early in a sequential negotiations, and 2) discussion over sequential negotiations affords quite a bit of opportunity to assess the veracity of your counterparty's claims and implications about their BATNA.
For FMV, I think social pressures are at best a weak incentive to be moderate in your dishonesty. In the sort of highly illiquid markets you mention as the main use case for tools like this, FMV is extremely subjective and a very wide range of valuations can plausibly be rationalized as being offered in relatively good faith. And if this is a one-time negotiation between non-public-figure parties who will never interact again, negotiating over something valuable enough to be worth serious bargaining (e.g. private party buyers and sellers of a used car), the monetary gain from gaming the tool is likely to weigh a lot more heavily than any reputational penalties.
I read that paragraph as meaning Manifold also received the money from FTX, if that’s any consolation.
Same here
My first reading was that ACX had received the money. I rectified this in a second reading, but I only did the second reading because the meaning didn't seem right. I'm certain lots of people would just take away the wrong meaning
I think it's clear now from reading this quote that Scott's boosterism of prediction markets is because he's in the pay of SBF. In fact, Scott was probably in on the whole FTX fraud, as well, and should be in the dock next to the other defendants currently on trial. Kudos to the NYT for unearthing this.
I also read it that way, that's the "it" in the previous sentence, and "also" wouldn't make sense otherwise.
For well-structured prose with proper discourse flow, you are correct.
In reality, people frequently do use deixis (here, the pronoun "it") to pick out specific pieces of preceding phrases that you might not have expected them to point to. That problem gets worse in text where the intonational contours that tend to explain how the speaker is thinking about the parts of their sentence have all disappeared. Not every sentence gets a competent editing pass, so it's well within the bounds of possibility for "it" to have been meant to refer to "Astral Codex Ten".
But I agree that the natural reading is for "it" to refer to Manifold, and that the "also" wouldn't otherwise make any sense.
I read it as Manifold Markets got the $1 million, but admit that isn't very certain the way it's worded.
"My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'" -- Randall Munroe, from https://xkcd.com/1087/ (the Wikipedia page has long since been edited)
The "also" does make sense for Astral Codex. "Astral Codex Ten has promoted prediction markets, and also received $1 million." The clarification comes from the end where they say SBF was a fan of prediction markets, but it would have been a lot clearer to lead that parenthesis with "Manifold".
"In the preceding sentence, "Manifold Markets" received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund." -ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) September 25 Version
I understand the need for clarification, but the paragraph reads pretty clearly to me as saying FTX gave money to Manifold.
My roommate's absent, so I'm staying up all night again. I could put the cookie in a box, but then I could open the box...
I stay up all night a lot too. I don't know what it is about night. It seems like it should be bleak. Everything's closed, everyone's asleep, just me and my cats in the lamplight. But I love it. It feels like time outside of time -- elastic time -- uncensored, invisible time. And dawn is quite lovely when it blooms for a person who is wide awake. (But it's godawful to wake up to). Anyhow, hello fellow night owl. Why do *you* stay up all night?
My time of day is the dark time-just a couple of deals before dawn-when the street belongs to the cops and the janitor with a mop, and the grocery clerks are all gone..
I like night too and I like how you described it.
"[There is] a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent."
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(I haven't read it - I just picked up a dog-eared copy one day and this line was underlined in blue pen. It always stuck with me though.)
Oh I like that.
Two anime suggestions related to this: Call Of The Night and Insomniacs After School.
I don't know why I stay up all night. There is a unique magic to the night. Its a time of intimacy and quiet.
Go to sleep!
Over the weekend I watched the Geoguessr world cup, an esport where competitors try to locate a location from a google maps streetview image as quickly as possible. I'd recommend watching the VOD, it's good fun https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1950736728, but through it I stumbled across some spreadsheets with information on competitive play.
I found this extremely interesting, especially the elementary clues and landscape guides. It's basically an encyclopedia of the world from the very specific perspective of trying to find out where an image was taken as quickly as possible. It's full of fun facts such as "France sometimes features dashes side (road) lines and the middle dashed lines are usually denser/closer together than in most other European countries" and "The eucalypti in Northern Territories look different from the rest of Australia. They are shorter, have thinner trunks and are often black on the bottom from the wildfires". Some are even sourced, including a report on Hazelnut yields to help pin down where in northern Turkey you are.
Take a look!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SUcuQkmDgVZMqNLe7XuNEhmJulonpnSQuSiJAOqfhtY/htmlview
https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/Elementary-clues-for-countries-in-GeoGuessr/1NawQwGt5H
https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/Landscape_and_Vegetation_Guide/U1ZwTHRDGL
It's fascinating stuff. I played around with geoguessr for a while. It's interesting how the clues to which country it is aren't necessarily what one would expect. As John Travolta says in Pulp Fiction: "It's the little things."
My initial exposure to geoguessr was in a training class for a vendor at work. The instructors would run a geoguessr session during breaks. It made for a nice change of pace.
What would be the "big things" other than actual text?
The things people often cite are flora, architectural styles/methods and road markings. Those all seems like fairly big differences if we are talking "visual differences between countries".
Flora and architectural styles are definitely big things that anyone should notice. If you've been to a place then you probably have a decent idea of what the trees and buildings look like.
Road markings are a more subtle thing; they're important but you rarely consciously notice them. If you've been to Lithuania then you can tell me what the trees and buildings and landscape are like, but you probably don't remember whether they use yellow or white road lines, or the length of the dashes, or what the bollards look like.
The really subtle stuff that turns out to be incredibly useful is information about the car and camera itself. Watching geoguessr videos by good players, you often see things like "Oh, the car is black, so this is Tanzania (click)". And there's some weird optical effects with the lenses used in Argentina, apparently.
>Flora and architectural styles are definitely big things that anyone should notice.
When walking in my subdivision, I notice the trees and my wife notices the houses. Maybe those talented at Geoguessr notice these things, but others have talents elsewhere.
I watched this on rainbolt's YouTube stream and it was amazing. I'd definitely recommend checking out the grand finals if nothing else.
Some of the metas for geoguessr are insane. The crazier ones can range from zooming in to look at the copyright stamp, to identifying the car type, to identifying the camera type based on image quality.
Many of these participants are so good that in less than 1 minute they're able to set the map pin so accurately that they're awarded a perfect score.
I can understand that signage or telegraph masts can locate a country, but to pin point the location in countries amazes me.
But:
I wondered how random the locations truly are or if competitive players just see the same areas again and again. And it seems the latter is the case? The algorithm which chooses places is not public, but there is a suspicion it favors good (guessable) locations instead of lonely roads in Russia?
https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/10pyc0b/whats_the_game_algorithm_when_it_comes_to/
> The map that the official competitive mode uses, called "World", is really unbalanced when it comes to locations. You get places like Singapore and Vienna all the time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/14llu6x/why_are_large_american_cities_so_rare/
> NYC, Chicago, Seattle, SLC, etc. I've played my fair share of games and they never show up. But Singapore I've played dozens if not hundreds of times. Is it because geoguessr takes in consideration the country it's on? If so how does that work?
Yeah this was something I noticed even only dabbling at this. The locations definitely are not pulled "randomly" from the data set. Too many patterns, and too often areas that are difficult to identify, but not too difficult.
SMPY is Study of, not Stanford
Thanks, fixed.
The OPTIC registration link isn't working. The page just says "Page not found
Either this page doesn't exist or you don't have permission to access it." Not sure if it's just me?
Thanks, fixed.
The link in the post proper doesn’t work either! I found the actual registration form on the homepage, but it’s also available at https://airtable.com/appJNJlCJipnC63fN/shrj3YvcDEheGd7eS
Clarinet is probably my favorite, but it has a longer learning curve before you can sound decent than stuff like guitar or piano.
For communities: I like twitch music stuff, especially smaller channels. I recommend poking around in the twitch music category until you find some channels you like, participate in live chat to see if you like the vibe, then join the discords, and see what’s going on.
I play harp. It's a very, very good instrument for people without a very good ear, because the strings remember the pitches for you (unlike say, a violin, where you have to hear every minute shade of difference between exactly in tune and... not that, and adjust your fingers for it.) Piano has the same advantages, but I like the sound of the harp much better. And it's more portable. All my music communities are IRL though, sorry!
Highly recommend the substack of Ted Gioia -
https://www.honest-broker.com
I do tambura, dumbek, guitar and vocals.
I don't play a musical instrument, in part because I have almost no sense of rhythm, and loved Scott's post a year or so ago wherein he told of the contrast between himself and his musically talented brother. There was an anecdote about his parents trying hard to be affirming, and saying something like "My, that cat is being tortured much less now!"
When I was a kid, I learned the piano. I was quite good at it. Then I went to college, had access to pianos only through public rooms in dorms or union buildings when someone else wasn't playing them, and then moved into my own flat and lost access altogether for decades. I have a sort of plan to get back into it someday.
The electronic ones are really good nowadays - and don't have the space requirements of a real piano.
Really cheap, too - you can get something serviceable for 1000$ or so. Not the same as a high-quality acoustic piano, but a lot better than not playing at all.
I had indeed shopped around for one for years. At the time, I was living in a tiny apartment. Along the way, I had some job upheaval and then moving upheaval and that all cut into my "get back into pianos" time.
Fortunately, I moved in with my GF, who has an electric (although I think it's not a full 88 keys, argh). Unfortunately, my time is now occupied by work and tending to our yard and pets. And, um, finishing a few videogames I had started...
I mostly play bass. Used to be an okay keyboard player, have some basic knowledge of guitar and drums, and have taken singing lessons for a few years now.
I don't follow any music blogs, but I follow some of the usual guitar-/ music- related youtube channels (Rick Beato, Adam Neely, Glenn Fricker...).
My experience is that bass is the best in terms of supply and demand, across genres. As I like to put it - guitar players are a dime a dozen, bass players are a quarter each.
That's my experience as well, and part of the reason I focused on bass. (Other reasons include not being terribly talented overall, and having pretty big hands with good grip strength - I have trouble squeezing my fingers onto a guitar fingerboard for some chord shapes, but playing bass is physically easy.)
Some of the answers here are also correct, but the more cynical answer is to give the President the feeling that he's doing something. He desperately wants to do _something_, but most of the somethings he could do are counterproductive, so the Joint Chiefs let him move the little ships around on the big map and that seems to satisfy him.
I believe one of the groups was already scheduled to pass through the area and the US Navy chose not to modify that schedule.
The groups will have some sea-land artillery capability and of course combat aircraft. These are probably just for intimidation purpose and are unlikely to be used in Gaza directly.
The biggest benefit for Israel is the Electronic Warfare capabilities. Primarily airplanes that can be used for gathering intelligence but also have the ability to knock out cell signals or other communication channels that Hamas might be using.
Hopefully Bean will say (much) more, but the most likely use case is force projection: discouraging other local hostile actors from piling into the conflict. For the conflict itself, adding precision to identifying the source of rocket launches/artillery and hammering those locations.
Other actions include humanitarian relief- a carrier group is a floating city with huge water distillation capability, lots of food for distribution and medical support.
In this kind of messy situation probably everything.
They're there to intimidate Iran/Lebanon/Hezbollah into not jumping into attacking Israel and making the conflict spread to the wider region (I think there's only supposed to be one stationed here, the other one's coming to relieve it)
Most analysts seem to agree that they should prevent the conflict from spreading. This is directed to other countries which might be tempted or pressed to intervene. For example, carrier groups have enough airplanes that they can establish no-fly areas against weaker enemies.
It's not clear that it works with Lebanon because it has a direct border with Israel, but it might tip the balance for countries like Iran.