This article by Freddie deBoer is a nice and eloquent summing up of my position on Israel, and how seriously I take accusations of Anti-Semitism that is entirely founded on my supposedly unfair criticism of the Zionist state : https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose
> [Title] I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States
> [subtitle] even one that's very very important to you
> I am and must be an anti-Zionist for reasons that precede any particular opinion about Israel or the Palestinians. I am opposed to religious characters for states, whether actively theocratic or not; I am opposed to ethnonationalism specifically; I am opposed to nationalism generally. None of these beliefs stem from a rejection of Jews or the Jewish religion or Israel
> These ever-expanding definitions of anti-Semitism, now codified by government (and, I assure you, Republicans and their liberal Zionist enablers will work tirelessly to make criticism of Israel actively illegal) would prohibit all manner of basic philosophical and political positions that should be protected speech under any definition. The religious opposition to the modern state of Israel found in some Hasidic sects, orthodox Marxism, all manner of libertarian and anarchist conceptions of a righteous future, every impulse that opposes the modern fiction of the nation-state - all ground up, rendered impermissible, under the insistence that to oppose the governmental body that is the modern state of Israel is in and of itself a form of interpersonal bigotry. It’s a casual, incidental destruction of the entire philosophical world of internationalism.
> I’m not going to give you a discount argument against the nation-state in this space; you can, and should, read entire books about the subject.
> But historical arguments are not a requirement of anti-nationalist sentiment. All that’s required is to recognize that nations are literal fictions, invented by human beings with no transcendent or permanent reality, and that in a few hundred years nationalism has been responsible for more bloodshed and misery than any other human belief.
> For the record, many Marxists and other forms of internationalists often take pains to distinguish the nation from the nation-state, national identity from nationalism [... :] A nation is a people, while a state is a governmental body
> the question of Israel’s basic nature - again, leaving all concerns for the Palestinians aside - is complicated by its status as an ethnostate.
> “Jewish” famously denotes both a religion and an ethnic group; a Jewish state must therefore have an ethnic and Jewish character. And this has obvious and ugly consequences for Israel’s essential being.
> So many of the basic ugly realities of what Israel is, beneath the surface of “the only democracy in the Middle East,” stem from the fact that an ethnostate cannot help but discriminate, cannot help but create second-class citizens. It’s common for defenders of Israel to point out that there is a sizable minority of Arab Israeli citizens within the country, but they’re much less likely to acknowledge that those citizens face systemic discrimination, which has intensified since the start of the latest conflict. But what did you expect? That an ethnonationalist project wouldn’t result in people pursuing ethnic supremacy?
> Which brings us to the notion of a double standard. I’m not sure why people think this is all such a gotcha - yes, I do oppose all ethnonationalism! I do not recognize any state’s “right to exist,” given that rights accrue to human beings and not to violent abstractions like states.
> So why all the focus on Israel? Because Israel is different
> [Because] Zionists constantly step from one foot to another when it comes to the basic question of whether Israel is exceptional or not, special or not. When justifying 75 years of dispossession for the Palestinian people, they say of course Israel is exceptional, of course Israel is special. The Jews were promised the land by God, they have been expelled from country after country, they endured the Holocaust, they are a wholly unique case for which we must permit every exception. This exceptional status holds precisely as long as it takes us to get to the supposedly unfair fixation on Israel’s crimes, at which point we are to understand that Israel is a wholly unexceptional country and that there is no legitimate reason that an American would focus particularly on its sins. You can’t have it both ways! If you insist that Israel’s very existence is in some sense special, you cannot then rage out whenever people focus on Israel to a special degree. Every year, each and every American has more than 4 billion ironclad reasons to pay special attention to Israel.
> I could also point out that if the status of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” means anything at all, it must entail special attention. If you want to be shielded for supposedly embodying those ideals, you must be ready to be harshly criticized on the grounds that you aren’t embodying them.
> Let me add the part which will surely inspire yet-more lazy accusations of anti-Semitism: among the most tiresome and insulting elements of this whole debate lies this insistence that Israel and Zionism must be the exception to every rule.
> I am an internationalist; I reject ethnonationalism; I think religion should have no part in government; therefore I must be an anti-Zionist.
And since I can't reply there I'll write here some of my thoughts on the subject. First of all - I agree with almost everything Freddie deBoer wrote, but it's far from a summing up of the subject. That criticism of Zionism shouldn't be considered antisemitism ought to be trivial. One of the other facets to consider is what it means to "oppose" a state.
In theory I oppose the existence of States in general and Nation-States in particular, in practice my level and mode of opposition is dependant on the particulars of the situation.
For example, I oppose a Trump-led U.S. or generally the existance of such a racist country where the disenfeanchised include 0.7% of the population which is imprisoned, another measly 0.2% residents of D.C. and another 3 million citizens of Puerto Rico. (I might be exposing some ignorance here). Where AIAK the gerrymanderng, mostly on an ethnic level, is still quite bad (quick google search seems to suppor but has outdated data). And with a baffeling two-house system with a clearly un-democratic senate.
But that won't be cause for me to support the organizations like Al-Qaeda or Nation od Islam, nor will it make me in any way oppose the existence of the U.S.A. It would not stop me from supporting the U.S.A against forces that seek to harm it. What it does is make me criticize the U.S. and support positive change from within in the hopes of short-term improvements and an eventual peaceful transition to a post-state world society.
Zionism is inherintly racist, there is some defence to it (It claims the idea of liberal democracy is unsound and insuffcient to protect minorities), I used to be staunchly anti-zionist and I will wait until the overwhelming pain around the recent events will subside before reassesing my position. But Israel is not much more inherintly Zionist than the U.S. is inherintly pro-slavery or prone to violently subjucating Native-Americans. It *is* a democracy where Zionism could be excised from the inside without violent revolution.
I have British citizenship, I have the option to say the hell with Israel and its murderous and racist behaviours, to pack my things and go. I live with the knowledge that if I and every reasonable person with that capacity will do so we will be dooming our family, friends, and enemies to unimaginable slaughter. So in the day-to-day I oppose the existance of Israel as a Zionist subjugating State but I support the existance of Israel as a democratic state.
(In the meta-level I am making the case that "opposing" something is meaningless without stating what you support in its place)
I don't understand that "One of the only 2 comments" bit, is this mis-phrased ? It seems to imply that the post has only 2 comments, but it has 500+. I think you meant one of the only 2 that you agree with (and you're probably only counting top-level comments as "comments".)
Unfortunately, the equivalence between Israel and Jews has been dug rather deep, so for huge swaths of the Pro-Israel camp, Anti-Zionism **IS** Anti-Semitism, the negation of that is inconceivable, ridiculous on its face, and perhaps a sign of bad faith malicious deceit to them. I still don't understand Hebrew remotely enough to do anything interesting with Hebrew sources and I have never visited Israel, but it appears from where I am that Israelis don't even consider "Zionism" to be a distinct category from "Jewish Israeli", witness this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_qqphDurQ where most of the people interviewed either stare in confusion or just outright deny the existence of Anti-Zionist Jews. You could even say that, and I'm aware of how deeply ironic that would be, Israel is using its Jews as "Human Shields" : Ah you want to destroy Israel, but - you see - you first have to know what to do with 7 million Jews, ehhhh, are you a Nazi, Mr. Want-To-Destroy-Israel, would you want to kill 7 million Jews ?
On top of those ontological issues, there are several epistemological issues making things worse. It doesn't help that some Israeli critics are - indeed - just plain anti-Semites who love the new cover. How many ? I don't know, but they exist. There is no reason in existence one can be dumb enough to think that Jewish students or restaurant owners in America or France are responsible for what Israel does, or that harassing them will have any weight on the matter, it has to be malice. It also doesn't help that Israel employs dedicated propaganda units just for the express purpose of spreading this very same perception of Anti-Zionists, and that even if every single Anti-Zionist is a card-carrying philo-semite fluent in Hebrew, they would still have this perception around them just from the effect of Israeli propaganda.
The conundrum you present features in every discussion about a corrupt and rotten institution or organization, the conundrum of whether to reform or erase. Whether to fix or start anew, whether to go slow and cut a thousand cuts or go fast and burn the whole thing to the ground. I don't have a strong feeling either way on the particular instance of Israel, I just think that (A) Humans have a huge blindspot in favor of systems and structures that will never be fixed, because they (quite rationally) fear abrupt change, they also want to honor past investment in the systems and the structures (sunk cost fallacy), so there is a huge hazard of motivated reasoning here where you convince yourself that Reform will save the day even though it's not going to realistically do it, (B) I tend to have an opposite bias towards radical and ground-up restructuring on other issues, subject to a strict and cynical realization that Utopia is not guaranteed and that the end doesn't justify the means under any conditions.
I'm not the brightest bulb when it comes to American history, but as far as I'm aware, America giving its black population rights happened only as an unintended side-effect of (A) Industrialization, which makes Slave Labor a net-negative paradigm (B) a failed compromise, the south could have kept its slaves if they were more willing to meet the north in the middle on some issues related to voting rights of the blacks and stuff. As for the indigenous population, they were given rights after the vast majority of them were extinct. I'm sure that if Palestinians were to decrease to 100K, the Israeli right-wing would rejoice much and give the surviving Palestinains all they want up to and including token representation in the government.
Destroying (the zionist, racist) Israel from within Israel is not impossible, I'm just urging caution against underestimating how difficult it would be. The Hawks are cunning, close associates to Ariel Sharon are literally on tape saying that the entire de-settlement of Gaza is just a ploy to freeze the peace process until Palestinans are genocided enough that peace is automatically achieved. They look like they were right.
The spectrum of Anti-Israel positions is also far wider than what you present it to be, there are more internally-consistent positons than just (1) Pro-Hamas (2) Pro-Israel and thinks it's perfect as it is (3) Pro-Israel and thinks it's flawed but that its flaws can be neutralized through the democratic process.
Re: Your meta point. I don't know, should 1200s Atheists know about Evolution ? They would have to know Evolution in order to present a viable alternative against the Abrahamic story of creation, but that wouldn't exist yet for the next 700 years. It's the greatest trick the status quo ever pulled on people, to convince them that "Status Quo sucks, What's the Alternative ? No Viable Alternative ? Therefore, every opposition to the Status Quo sucks and is meaningless" is a useful chain of reasoning.
I agree that an opposition that has a realistic and actionable alternative is much much better and much much more likely to succeed than an opposition that simply refuses and elaborates no further, but I disagree that the latter form of opposition is meaningless or is equivalent to the null action.
A side issue, but all slavery was abolished (in theory, but at least a lot fewer people were enslaved) at least in part because slavery became a less efficient way of using labor, but slavery for domestic labor seems at least as economically efficient as it ever was, and it's also abolished.
Re 2 comments... I was refering to top level, and I only see two (appreantly unless I click on one of them... there is no other button which displays the rest), which seemed reasonable since it also showed making further comments as disabled. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
I was agreeing about how Anti-Zionism == Anti-Semitism is wrong, so you're preaching to the choir. If your point is about how entrentched that claim is, then yeah - I concur.
Living in Israel, I don't need the video, the concept of Anti-Zionist Jews exist but under harsh attack (and some religious people here don't believe atheists actually exist), I can't tell how much of the proper political left (5-10% of voters?) ascribes to that since some pay lip service to Zionism. The concept of Anti-Zionist citizens though is a large minority represented in the Knesset.
So your point about slavery is... that one would have been right in destroying the U.S. at the time? I don't care much about history, I was bringing it up regarding to what it is now.
I think I understand and symphasize with your ironic claim, but as you present it it's just... reality? there are millions of jews, hostages of circumstance, living in israel due to choices of their parents, who will die if Israel stops existing. That's not being used as human shields, it's just life. I addition to that the danger to their life is leverged to get concessions, which is in a way being used as human shields.
Your bias towards (B) might be the crux of our disagreement, I am always leery of radical and ground-up restructuring when it includes high possibilty of death, but especially so when the death toll would include me, my family, and my friends. This makes the matter hard for me to discuss without bias. So yeah... sorry to get emotional about this but feeling powerless about my government killing thousands of civillians on the one hand and everything else on the other is stressfull.
A second crux might be that I obessed too much about opposition to existence rather than taken things are more general opposition, this probably invalidates most of my arguments? I still really don't like the phrasing, but I understand the framework it comes from.
I'm not sure what your point about The spectrum of Anti-Israel positions. All positions are wider than 3 possiblities, and I don't think I used the framing which you do. In particular I think that using Pro-Hamas or Pro-Israel at all is reductive and way too prevalent as terms and ways of thought.
Your analogy to 1200s Atheists is... bad? they say that they don't know where life originated from, nothing nothing is a valid alternative to the Abrahamic story of creation because it has no direct effect on anything. Waving shiny alternatives and causing widespread death is the greatest trick of radicalism... destroying things without a plan or with a bad one is kinda a good way to make everything worse. Not that anyone *here* is arguing for Status Quo.
I don't think opposition without alternative is meaningless or is equivalent to the null action, I think it can be actively harmful. I'm not asking for a realistic and actionable alternative, but for some vague gesture of in what direction the alternative is being looked at.
Obviously the first step should be saying "this is wrong" and no alternative is needed at that stage.
I'm not disagreeing (that much) by the way, emotions are hard to convey through emoji-less text but I'm actually overjoyed whenever I find Israelis like you. I'm just probing your views further because I'm interested in the general topic of discussion and all the myriad angles it can be viewed from. (And by the way, sorry for my username, I don't intend most Israelis with it or even a hypothetical sane Israel that doesn't kill the innocent Palestinians.)
> I was referring to top level, and I only see two
I see, that wasn't the case when the article still had comments enabled, but I can see it now. You can still defeat it by (1) Clicking on the replies of one of the 2 comments you can see (2) Click "Return To Thread" on the top, beneath the "Commenting has been turned off" grey text. You will return to the original thread where several, about 40+ or 50+, top-level comments are present.
I know you agree that Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism in the absolute, I'm grateful and a bit surprised you do, I'm just explaining why this isn't my prior about an arbitrary Israeli. Zionism to Israelis is like water to fish.
> The concept of Anti-Zionist citizens is represented in the Knesset
Because of the Heredim right ?
> that one would have been right in destroying the U.S. at the time?
Obviously, I can't make a sweeping moral claim about something that happened in 1860. For all I know, destroying the US in 1860 might have been the turning point that would allow the resurgence of slavery elsewhere. For all I know, no US or a worse US in the 1930s could have meant that Nazi Germany is a WW2 victor, imposing fates far worse than chattel slavery on multiple tens of millions of non-Germans in Europe alone. I don't believe anybody has the compute necessary to convincingly simulate 160 years of no US, certainly not the 80+ years from 1941 till now, certainly not in their head.
All I'm saying is that history can be deceiving, that it walks with atrociously slow steps and occasionally backtracks, that it walks in paths that make no sense from any human standpoint, any more than the coast of Norway makes sense to an urban road planner. It can be easy and tempting to look from your current vantage point and say "Phew, it's a good thing that we didn't destroy the US when it was a slaver nation, look at where we're now", but this is a fallacy, it's not like you visited other timelines and saw that every single alternative beginning with destroying the US ends badly, maybe some of them do, maybe the majority of them, but you have no reason to believe that all of them do.
> I think I understand and sympathize with your ironic claim, but as you present it it's just... reality
Oh I don't think that Israel is exceptional at all, at the very least its human shields enjoy high standards of living. The exact same about being used as human shields minus the standards of living can be said about my own native Egypt under the Al-Sisi regime or (in the horrifying extreme) North Korea. I'm an Anarchist for a reason.
> there are millions of jews, hostages of circumstance, living in israel due to choices of their parents
I hold not a single planck mass of hatred or blame towards them, they're the reason I don't want to see Israel destroyed by force. They're the reason my face falls when I hear about Israeli casualties, even the military ones.
> [All those Jews] will die if Israel stops existing
Ehhh, I can see where this is coming from and I sympathize hugely with it, but it's not that black and white. I'm not asking any Jew to take their chances, I'm just saying those chances are more like 50% to 60% at the worst rather than 90% to 99%, and they can get as low as 20% to 30% on good days.
Again, I personally wouldn't risk my family on death odds as low as 10% to 5%, so I'm not implying that those Jews are being unreasonable in fearing for their lives if Israel no longer exists, I'm just against inflating already bad odds to be worse.
> sorry to get emotional about this
Any Arab or Jew is plenty emotional about this, and that's an understatement. So don't apologize for being human !
> I'm not sure what your point about the spectrum of Anti-Israel positions
I was specifically reacting to the bit where you said "Although I don't like the US, that still wouldn't get me to support Al Qaeda or Nation of Islam". This might not have been intended on your part, but to me this has the implication that a person can only either (1) Support Al Qaeda (2) Support America and think it needs change from within (3) Support America and think it's perfect. The gap between (1) and (2) is massive, and includes lots of positions that are more hostile and violence-y than (2) but still nowhere near close to (1).
> In particular I think that using Pro-Hamas or Pro-Israel at all is reductive and way too prevalent as terms and ways of thought.
I very much agree. I use Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine/Pro-Hamas in the same sense as "Northern Hemisphere" and "Southern Hemishpere", very rough grouping of whole swaths of territories.
My point about 1200s atheists is just that people are too harsh on radical alternatives. People are harsh on anyone who wants to abolish capitalism (please ignore how extremely vague this is for now), abolish meat-eating, perform various ground-up restructuring of society and/or family. This makes sense from a certain point of view, otherwise any rando will just dream up 100s of ill-thought-out scenarios and spam their society with them until one of them hits and becomes a disaster. But, this also sometimes blinds people to how utterly the status quo sucks, and how some of the alternatives are only weak and badly-thought because very few embrace them, they are literally being run on less minds, so of course they will be unsatisfying and low-resolution (unless lying and false promises are used, which is a whole other can of worms).
As a vague gesture towards alternatives, what I would personally ask out of a genie if I found a magic lamp is the following :
1- The US stops supporting Israel with tanks and Iron Dome missiles, stops sending aircraft carriers for them, leaves BDS alone, AIPAC becomes well known and US politicians under their influence become less legitimate
2- The entire Arab/Muslim world becomes simultaneously more harsh and less harsh on Israel :
2--a) More : No trade relations, military coordination, or intelligence coordination. Sanctions, Oil embargos, etc... The countries that are still making their peace with Israel or haven't yet, make peace conditional on Palestinians being treated better.
2--b) Less : Hebrew is taught in schools alongside Arabic (or the other dominant language in non-Arabic cases like Indonesia and Pakistan), the pro-Jew POV becomes more prevalent and socially acceptable, the Israeli POV and the catastrophic failures of Arab leaders of the 1950s-1980s are focused more during history classes. Student exchanges, joint cultural works (jointly-produced movies and TV series, music, etc...), tourism and so on.
By the way, sorry for dropping off from the conversatoin - had to go to sleep and then life distracted me. I can try to write full replies if you find this conversation fruitful-in-potential and don't mind long lulls.
I just noticed that what I know about HSV-1 (herpes) don't make sense:
1- A large majority of the population carry the virus (per internet & common knowledge)
2- But only a minority sometimes get blisters (per internet & common knowledge)
3- Active blisters are highly contagious (per my physician)
4- But asymptomatic carriers still shed virus 20% of the time (less if they're under antiviral treatment) (per wikipedia)
5- During a blister episode, I should avoid touching it, or wash my hands thorougly afterward, especially before touching any other mucosa (eye, lips, genitals) (per my physician)
From 5-, I assume that a given HSV-1 infection is localized, and that I could get multiple ones if I were careless. But for someone in his 30's who never developed any, is the precaution actually relevant? The odds are high that they're asymptomatic carriers, would a different source of HSV-1 risk causing episodes when the previous one(s?) didn't? And if asymptomatic carriers shed viruses 20% of the time, any time I shake hands with someone, and we don't have super rigorous hand-mouth hygiene, and I rub my eyes afterward, shouldn't I risk getting an infection in the eye?
And if each infection is independent from each other, and asymptomatic carriers shed virus 20% of the time, then shouldn't any unprotected oral sex involve a ~20% (a bit less, for those that aren't carriers) risk of getting a genital infection?
There's something that is wrong, either from the bits I got from wikipedia, from those I got from my physician 20 years ago, or from those I infer.
There's a video making rounds of various university presidents refusing to outright say that calling for a genocide of Jews violates campus policies on bullying and harassment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuTfzcNIeDI if you haven't seen it and want to). My question is, if you're a president of a major US university being asked this question in those words, why do you not give a passionate speech about how of course calling for genocide (of anyone) is bullying and harassment, but by the way, that isn't actually happening? What do you stand to gain by equivocating?
>Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A generous interpretation — a credulous one — would be that the hearing was designed to inquire why colleges aren’t protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial primarily intended to convey that a wide variety of dissenting speech about Israel is inherently antisemitic, that American colleges are shitholes of evil liberalism, and that Democrats suck. Since Democrats do suck, they mostly cooperated.
>The core Two-Minute Hate of this carnival was Rep. Elise Stefanik’s demand for yes-or-no answers to questions about whether policies at Harvard, Penn, and MIT would prohibit calling for the genocide of Jews. You might think Elise Stefanik is an unlikely standard-bearer for a crusade against antisemitism, given that she’s a repeat promoter of Great Replacement Theory, the antisemitic trope that Jews are bringing foreigners into America to undermine it. But if you bought Stefanik’s bullshit, you probably didn’t think that far. The college presidents did a rather clumsy job of saying, accurately but unconvincingly, that the answer depends on the context. Stefanik and every politician our loudmouth who wants you to hate and distrust college education and Palestinians pounced on it. And many of you fell for it. You — and I say this with love — absolute fucking dupes.
I did *not* enjoy that analysis. That it's a show trial is obvious; the defendant at a show trial can still acquit themselves better or worse before losing.
Put differently -- let's say I personally am failing to get outraged (mostly because I'm not prone to outrage), but have friends who are getting outraged. Telling them that they are "absolute fucking dupes" does not advance the cause of conveying to them how it's possible to both be a decent human being and not be outraged.
It's not even a show trial, it's just a show. And yes, it's stupid for the Senate to force a bunch of university presidents to star in such a show, but yeah, if you have to do it, do it better than that.
I don't know the first thing about Ivy League politics and the labyrinthian machination concocted by the army of lawyers that those schools have on call, who no doubt advised each of those presidents.
But if **I** was questioned in that session, I imagine I would be tempted to not say a straightforward "Yes" in order to :
1- Refuse to give the obviously performative shrill congresswoman an easy answer she can tout on twitter. If I rip into her, I will be punished because she's Mrs. Congresswoman (or will I ?). If I give a passionate speech about how calling for the genocide of Jews is of course wrong and reprehensible, but is not happening, she will cut the part that she likes and tout it to her twitter hordes anyway. If she can't, she will keep pressing for an easy answer, "Yes or No Mrs. President, Yes or No, I want a single bit answer because I can't fit anything bigger into my brain."
Yes Or No questions are rhetorical tricks when asked from positions of imbalanced power, like debates with hostile audiences and heated formal hearings. When someone replies with a straightforward Yes or No, they're agreeing to every single word, premise, and phrasing in the question. "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife by lightly kissing her neck even though she's not in the mood for sex ? YES OR NO ?".
Yes Or No questions are good in high-trust environments where the majority of the audience can be trusted to know rhetorical manipulation tactics like the above and not fall for it, the questions can be used to establish common ground quickly and efficiently and dispel baileys advanced by other members of the ingroup at the outset : "As a Pro-Palestinian, I will agree that yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is utterly reprehensible and has no place in any sane stand for Palestine."
2- Building on 1, if I answer yes, the obvious next 2 lines of inquiry is establishing whether calls for genocide of Jews happened in my university and whether I'm blamable for it. The Congresswoman already hinted at what kind of evidence she will use to establish the first :
->- [0:21 in the video]
> [MIT president] I have not heard any chants calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus
>> [Congresswoman] But you have heard chants for Intifada
But those are already 2 very different things, the 2 Intifidas weren't a genocide of Jews by any sane measure, the ratio of Israelis vs Palestinians killed in the first Intifada is something like 200 to 2000, no genocider ever accepts those KD ratios. This doesn't mean the Intifada is a good or neutral thing, it has burned immense amounts of goodwill and the second one is probably the reason why the peace process halted dead in its tracks. But it was no genocide, and establishing this requires a lot of argument in front of the scary big camera while Mr. Shrill Congresswoman says "I WILL GIVE YOU ONE LAST CHANCE FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO KNOW YOUR TESTIMONY : BABIES SHOULD NOT BE KILLED, YAY OR NAY ?"
So it's extremely tempting to not cede any ground at all in the face of such an opponent, any one moment or the other the dramatic showdown will happen anyway, the opponent WILL "win" anyway because she has the privilege to ask questions and her post-production will have a field day with the answers one way or the other, so it better happens when I'm in the strong position and my opponent is still exhausting her voice just trying to get me to agree with the beachhead she will launch her next attack from.
Now obviously, this is all a Machiavellian analysis that I'm not agreeing with or saying is remotely good or acceptable, and staying silent in the face of such a question while potentially millions of Jews watch is not even a good strategy for anyone remotely Pro-Palestinian in the sane secular human-rights-based way, besides being morally icky of course. The best solution is to not get myself in such incredibly hostile debate environments to begin with, the second best solution is to phrase my response as a hostile counter-question :
> What are you implying with this question ? We all know that nobody decent would stand silently while someone is chanting for the genocide of anybody, so the real question is why you thought it would be useful to imply with an indisdious phrasing of the question that I do not have this common decency, and do you agree that calling for the genocide of Palestinians is an immoral thing to do ? Do you agree that the current Israeli military response has claimed the lives of 16000+ Palestinian civilians ?
Ceding ground, but hiding the ceded ground in between 2 or more questions, the more questions making more assumptions about her the merrier. She now have 2 choices, either accepting the ceded ground and continuing on from it, opening herself to repeated counter attacks based from the questions "Are you refusing to say whether chanting for the death of Palestinians is wrong, Congresswoman ?", or getting distracted by the counter-questions, forgetting the ceded ground and not developing the original attack. This has to be done carefully within the confines of whatever etiquettes I'm expected to follow, so that she doesn't abort the whole episode and declare victory when she remembers she's the one who asks questions. The bet is that she gets distracted by the questions that she forgets she has the option of not answering them. That's why more questions hiding more outrageous assumptions about her is better.
Again, all of this is very Machia-villain and against the spirit of good and honest debates of the kind that enlightens, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.
I disagree with your "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife by lightly kissing her neck even though she's not in the mood for sex ? YES OR NO ?" example. That is, in practice I agree that you'd end up with a disagreement over what constitutes rape / genocide, but the question being asked in the video is the straightforward "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife?". It seems to me to be *incredibly* bad optics to be equivocating on that phrasing, as opposed to equivocating on what exactly "rape" is. Though I suppose this is the strategy that Bill Clinton tried, and it didn't work great for him.
Well I agree, the initial question by the Congresswoman didn't smuggle a lot of assumption on the surface.
But I'm judging by her considering the Intifada to be a genocide, if she had won that concession from the presidents she would have probably kept pushing it till the point where saying "Ceasefire NOW" is now genocide against Jews. The presidents didn't handle it well but if I were in their shoes I wouldn't have given her a straightforward 1-bit answer either.
I agree that one should ignore the 1-bit constraint and give a longer response; my own knee-jerk reaction is "why are you asking about genocide *of the Jews* as if that was important, are you implying that calling for a genocide of someone else would be just fine?" It's just, I'm desperately confused by why they didn't in fact answer that "of course we wouldn't stand idly by if anyone were calling for a genocide on our campus, BUT" and instead went with a "maybe" to the entire thing.
Because their first duty as officers of their respective institutions is to protect them from liability. That's far more important than answering a "gotcha" question.
I'm still confused by how any of this incurs liability for the institution. Wouldn't that have to go something like this? "My client was disciplined for harassment because they were calling for the genocide of the Jews. We concede that they were calling for the genocide, but hold that the disciplinary action violated Harvard's harassment policy." That seems like an extremely unsympathetic case to make.
You other point, that actually it *might not be* a violation of the policy, and therefore unconditionally saying that it *is* would be lying, makes a lot more sense to me.
What we're looking at is a clash between two orthogonal moral systems. The first, is "normie morality" in which the good or bad of an act depends on the nature of the act itself without regard for who is doing it. The second is what we could call "social justice morality", and in that system the moral value of an act is determined primarily by its alignment towards redressing socio-economic imbalances between large groups of people.
The University Presidents are stuck in a difficult position where they are forced, in front of congress and on live TV, to choose between the two moral systems. I think deep down they don't actually agree with social justice morality, but they are dependent on a large group of people who actually do. Of course they're also subject to an even larger and more economically influential (though less violent) group of people who believe in normie morality. All you can do in this situation is waffle, say something contradictory and non-committal, and hope that one of the other university presidents screws up even worse so that they'll get all the heat, not you.
I was born in the USSR, and absorbed at least some of the mindset through osmosis. My impression was that modeling things in terms of class was conceptually similar to the SJW framework, and also that it was flexible enough for responses along the lines of "of course we don't condone calling for genocide, but we fully support the offers of our downtrodden and oppressed brethren to shake off the shackles of their oppressors". I am surprised that the SJW-inspired crowd instead bites the bullet of continuing to be wishy-washy, even when literally asked about "calling for genocide of the Jews".
They can't give that reply because that isn't an official policy position of any of their respective schools. I'm not convinced that it should be. As for the substance of the question, not a lawyer but I would imagine that calls for non-specific acts of violence are protected speech in the US, or at least the legal status is murky enough that we shouldn't be asking a college president to opine about it.
I would be happier with the video if the university professors were asked what sort of context or actions they had in mind. This being said, I'm not pleased at all that they're so wishy-washy on the subject.
I listened to the second half, and it's a bit clearer. Threats against individuals are taken seriously, threats against the whole group is no-never-mind.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that individuals have rights in a way that groups don't, but it seems incredibly *stupid* to explicitly say that literally calling for the final solution would be fine depending on context.
As I said above, I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is that calling for the final solution, in a general nonspecific way, is protected speech in the US. This may be good or bad depending, but there isn't much a university can do about that.
Harvard and MIT are private universities, and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action. Or not, as they chose.
And yes, "We should exterminate the Jews", as a general and nospecific threat, is protected against government interference. So is "We should reinstitute Negro slavery" or "we should round up all the Muslims and put them in camps" or "we should forcibly detransition all the transgender people". A private university is free to say that they value academic freedom enough to allow all of those. Or to say that they value civility enough to kick you out for saying any of those.
Or to say "No on the slavery, concentration camps, forced detransitions and all that, but advocating the Final Solution for the Jewish Problem is just fine". But if that's their position, it's not freedom of speech, it's plain antisemitism and should be called out as such. Also, there are legal issues with expressing official antisemitism (or anti-any-protected-group-ism) while taking federal money for e.g. research projects.
I wish that, instead of speculating what the presidents *would* say *if* they were asked about calling for mass lynchings, Elise Stefanik just *did* ask. Not necessarily because I expect to like the outcome, but I don't like speculating about "what would they say if X, huh? huh?!" when there was an excellent opportunity to test it.
>and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action.<
Of course this hearing is government action, and the Congresswoman here should not be allowed to pressure private institutions to apply stronger restrictions than the government can apply directly. It's gross.
"Harvard and MIT are private universities, and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action. Or not, as they chose."
I don't think that this is true. I don't lose my free speech rights by simply walking into a shopping mall, or a corporate headquarters, or a private campground, all private institutions. Of course, they can regulate behavior that interferes with the normal course of activities there, as can a private university, but that has nothing to do with the content of the speech.
"Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups. That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct. As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”"
I was confused by why lawyers would find it objectionable to, again, denounce the literal phrase "calling for a genocide of the Jews" in abritrarily strong terms. Someone I talked to pointed out that Elise Stefanik wasn't interested in getting the presidents to denounce it, she wanted them to specifically declare that it would violate their bullying and harassment policy. Their point was that, if the university president were to concede that it would violate the harassment policy, then the university would go up for a harassment lawsuit (and a university administrator who allows that is clearly no longer employable as a university administrator). I'm not entirely sure I follow the implication "president concedes that something is a violation of the internal harassment policy" => "university gets sued" (doesn't it follow that the university should just not have an internal harassment policy?), but it does at least explain why everyone was so committed to particular formulations of their question / answer.
That, plus the fact that it in all liklihood *doesn't* violate their bullying and harassment policies (because they likely do not meet the legal criteria for bullying or harassment). Once again, I am not a lawyer, so someone should fact check me. But can you imagine the publicity storm that would erupt if one of them admitted that?
Ah. Yeah, ok, the fact that they could go up for perjury if they unconditionally said it *did* violate it is a good point. (Also not a lawyer, but having looked through Harvard's bullying and harassment policy, I am also not convinced it would violate it.)
Very much true, though it does open them up to charges of hypocrisy and in the court of public opinion. Neither of those things are controlled by lawyers (though good PR people might have some thoughts) and don't directly lead to monetary damages.
Conservatives, whose opinions they clearly did not care about already, have more reason to dislike them and more ammunition to post on right-leaning news sources that Ivy League universities don't care about. This kind of concern has a very low natural ceiling for these schools.
I think what it really comes down to is if rich Jews are willing to pull donations from these schools more than replacement donors come in, we might see some action. Otherwise their testimony was the best of a group of bad options for them.
Scott, if you're willing to, would you share some information about prerequisites and timelines for applying to medical school in Ireland? I'm considering it because applying to medical school in the US would take me ~3 years, which seems absurd (I'm only missing 5 courses, but they mostly have to be taken in sequence.)
Four hours! by hbomberguy about the plagiarism by James Somerton on youtube. I've been told by a number of people that it's both meticulous and engaging, and I might watch it.
Almost two hours by Todd in the Shadows about how Somerton was talking utter nonsense, and yet had a substantial reputation until hbomberguy documented the plagiarism. I watched this one and I recommend it.
Somerton's youtube presence is toast. I'm interested to see that youtube posters have done a better job of opposing plagiarism than the government has.
I watched both videos: Todd's is more bang for your buck (in terms of watch time) but Hbomber's is thorough and engaging. Hbomber spends the first hour or so talking about other YouTubers who have plagiarized, and then spends the rest of the video on Somerton.
It's not the government's job to oppose plagiarism at all, let alone on YouTube. It's not even a tort like copyright infringement, unless it actually rises to that level.
"The ETHZ researchers got the robot to reliably perform these complex behaviors using a kind of reinforcement learning called ‘curiosity driven’ learning. In simulation, the robot is given a goal that it needs to achieve—in this case, the robot is rewarded for achieving the goal of passing through a doorway, or for getting a package into a box. These are very high-level goals (also called “sparse rewards”), and the robot doesn’t get any encouragement along the way. Instead, it has to figure out how to complete the entire task from scratch."
The number 1 song on Israel's spotify and YouTube is a genocidal rap that compares Palestinians to Amalek, celebrates the destruction of Gaza as the righteous revenge for Gaza's envelope's Kibbutz children, and - for some reason - mentions Mia Khalifa and Bela Hadid on the same footing as Hamas and Hezbollah leadership.
The Song's name, Harbu Darbu, is a corruption of the Syrian Arabic dialect colloquial expression حرب و ضرب, meaning literally "War and Striking". It's a Hebrew slang in the criminal underworld for "Swords and Destruction"[3].
Making fun of Palestine supporters, the lyrics likens "Free Palestine" to a holiday sale, utilizing the English double entendre of "Free" as in "The IDF will take Palestine for free".
On YouTube, the official upload has 5.3 million views in 3 weeks.
Nice. Israel has more confidence in itself than the West does. I don't remember songs like this after 9/11. Well, maybe a few country ones, but not rap ones.
It will never cease to be hilarious or ironic when Pro Genociders rationalize Israel's military response by drawing parallels to 9/11, forgetting how did that work out for them.
You've mistranslated the lyric you find damning. It is not a play on the English equivocation between 'free' (as in not requiring payment) and 'free' (as in liberty). The line is making fun of Palestinians who claim to speak Hebrew but make exactly the mistake you just did. The line is: "They shout 'Free Palestine' but it sounds like a holiday sale to me." The immediate joke is the (imagined) Palestinian chose the wrong word for 'free', the one that means 'sale' and not 'liberty.' It's a very rudimentary mistake because even the grammar is wrong. (Your Arabic, however, is correct.)
It doesn't directly celebrate destruction in Gaza in the name of Kibbutz children. It says to write the names of victims of the attack on the guns and the shells of IDF soldiers. Your interpretation that any reference to weapons of the IDF is a reference to Gaza's destruction is an interpretation, not plainly in the song. The only other references to Gaza are a call to make war and generically to shoot at it as well as associating it with places like the Golan heights.
The line about Mia Khalifa is a claim that God's vengeance will come on anyone who supported the October 7th attacks or Hamas. They are not mentioned 'on the same footing' but a dozen lines later. There's about ten lines from most to least serious and Mia Khalifa/Bella Hadid are at the very end.
Lastly, of the five million views the vast majority of them come from the Arab world with Israel registering about 1.2 million of them. The other millions are mostly from the rest of the Middle East. Because, and I suspect this is not a coincidence, it's become a common cause on Arabic social media and a lot of bad translations are floating around that either purposefully or due to lack of Hebrew knowledge mistranslate the lyrics. And they make many of the claims you do.
(Of course there's something of an asymmetry here due to the number of Arabs in the region vs the number of Jews where 1 million Jews is a huge proportion of the Jewish population while 4 million Arabs is a small percentage.)
Please try to be better about your contributions on this topic. If you are (as there are now numerous signs) someone who doesn't speak Hebrew very well and who hates Israel you will be respected more for making your honest case than pretending. And you should generally be more careful of anti-Israeli news articles because you should, if you want an accurate model of the world, be especially sharp eyed about anything that reinforces your worldview to avoid confirmation bias.
I didn't translate any Hebrew myself, as a matter of fact. I just read the English lyrics I posted in [2].
When I first read the line making fun of 'Free Palestine' I didn't actually understand what's the connection between holiday sales and the slogan, one of the sources I read about the song suggested this interpretation and it made sense to me, so I included it.
> Your Arabic, however, is correct
There would have to be something very wrong with me to be bad at my native tongue.
> It doesn't directly celebrate destruction in Gaza in the name of Kibbutz children. [...] It says to write the names of victims of the attack on the guns and the shells of IDF soldiers.
Uhmm okay, and what are the guns and the shells of the IDF doing right now ? What is the only use of guns and shells ?
Counterfactual : let's say I sing about writing the names of Gaza's children on the guns and rockets of Hamas. Does this count as a celebration of the destruction of Israel or nah ? If yes, what's different when I switch it to Israeli children and Israeli weapons ?
And What about comparing Gazans to Amalek ?
> The line about Mia Khalifa is a claim that God's vengeance
Just God's revenge ? Isn't this line right there after mentioning Bella, Dua and Mia :
>> All the IDF units are coming, to put the heat of the sword
>> on their heads, woe woe
Ten lines in a rap song doesn't seem like too much of a distance to me. Especially when most of them are 1 catch phrase repeated.
Just the mere fact that they mention the name of a model, a porn star and a singer next to the names of Islamist organizations' leaders is an indicator there is an astonishing amount of confused victimhood and misguided radicalization where that came from.
> the five million views the vast majority of them come from the Arab world with Israel registering about 1.2 million of them.
As far as I know you can't be sourcing this claim from the YouTube UI shown to ordinary viewers, I have also seen the first 3 pages of google search results for this song before making the post and I have never seen this claim referenced. So unless you have the credentials of the uploader account or a YouTube-internal database, I want to know who you are quoting this number from please.
> making your honest case than pretending.
Pretending to be what ? This is my honest case. Are you saying I don't believe what I'm writing ?
> you should generally be more careful of anti-Israeli news articles because you should, if you want an accurate model of the world, be especially sharp eyed about anything that reinforces your worldview to avoid confirmation bias
A thing I'm already taking into account as much as I can, in proportion to the counter-signal that Israel has spent 70 years and billions of dollars openly injecting propaganda in the western and the global info stream, to the point where the AIPAC annual policy conference is second only to the State of the Union in how many US feds eyeballs it captures.
Anti-Israel news sources are, quite trivially, the only place where I will find facts and interpretations suppressed by this vast propaganda machine. I also see a fair amount of pro-Israel news sources, take the diff, and reach my best-effort view.
> Uhmm okay, and what are the guns and the shells of the IDF doing right now ? What is the only use of guns and shells ?
To wage war. No one disputes that Israel is waging war in Gaza. The immediate interpretation that anything Israel does in Gaza is automatically destroying Gaza is certainly an interpretation people push. But it's an interpretation and your original claim was not, "I interpret X to mean Y." It was that the song directly called for the destruction of Gaza.
> Counterfactual : let's say I sing about writing the names of Gaza's children on the guns and rockets of Hamas. Does this count as a celebration of the destruction of Israel or nah ? If yes, what's different when I switch it to Israeli children and Israeli weapons ?
No counterfactual necessary, such songs exist. They generally don't come under such scrutiny though. And I do distinguish between the ones that directly call for the destruction of Israel or killing of Jews and those that say something general like 'remember the martyrs'.
> I want to know who you are quoting this number from please.
From the music charts. 1.2 million in Israel, 6 million on the regional charts. Unless you think it's a bunch of Assyrian Christians I think it's fair to assume the other 5 million-ish are Muslims of various kinds.
> Pretending to be what ? This is my honest case. Are you saying I don't believe what I'm writing ?
You have claimed that you have knowledge of Hebrew and studied Israel and so your hatred of Israel is justified. I take you about as seriously as I'd take an Israeli who went by the name "LearnedArabicHatesPalestinians" and who constantly posted things about how Arabs are awful and Hamas is barbaric. Which is to say, not very.
I also don't believe you are making a genuine effort to do anything more than propagandize on behalf of your preferred side. I'd prefer you put more effort into actually thinking about the situation and delivering your point of view with more heat and less light. Because, unfortunately, the quality of pro-Palestinian commentators here is quite low and I'd love to have a high quality one around. You clearly want to be that and feel passionately about this. But you're not really contributing so far. As it is right now you're almost certainly violating the rules and saying untrue things.
> A thing I'm already taking into account as much as I can, in proportion to the counter-signal that Israel has spent 70 years and billions of dollars openly injecting propaganda in the western and the global info stream, to the point where the AIPAC annual policy conference is second only to the State of the Union in how many US feds eyeballs it captures.
The Muslim world spends more money influencing American policy and news than Israel does. Muslims have more influence than Israel does by simple virtue of size. Both economically and population-wise Now, a lot of that goes to propping up Gulf State monarchies rather than advocating for support for Palestine. But I'm not sure if that's your point. If you just do an accounting the Egyptians are the ones who recently had their hooks in a Senator that headed foreign relations. I can't think of anything comparable Israel has.
Also: Do you have a source about how AIPAC is the second most watched speech by Federal policymakers and employees? In general it's accepted that the oil states, most of which are Muslim, have more outsized influence.
> Anti-Israel news sources are, quite trivially, the only place where I will find facts and interpretations suppressed by this vast propaganda machine. I also see a fair amount of pro-Israel news sources, take the diff, and reach my best-effort view.
Is this because they're pro-Israel or because you're so anti-Israel that neutrality feels pro-Israel to you? Put another way, I hear this same charge from the extreme pro-Israel side.
No 1.8 million Palestinians displaced and 15000+ killed ?
> such songs exist.
Please post some.
> I do distinguish between the ones that directly call for the destruction of Israel or killing of Jews and those that say something general like 'remember the martyrs'.
So according to you, a song that compares Palestinians to Amalek belongs to the second category and not the first ?
> From the music charts. 1.2 million in Israel, 6 million on the regional charts.
Where are those charts/statistics you're getting those numbers from ? According to the song's wikipedia article :
>> As of December 2023, "Harbu Darbu" had received almost 3.5 million listens and views.
No mention of 1.2 million views/listens in Israel, no mention that the total number of 5 on YouTube is mostly from the Middle East instead of globally.
> You have claimed that you have knowledge of Hebrew and studied Israel
I have claimed absolutely no such thing. I have been pretty honest about my level of Hebrew knowledge since day 1, about 7 or 8 open threads ago. Just last thread I was replying to Nancy Lebovitz saying that I still find it difficult to tell Hebrew letters apart by name. My username begins with "Learns" not "Learned", it's an ongoing thing that's sadly not going to finish in time for me to have the pleasure of seeing some natives calling for the genocide of my ethnic group.
I have never actually claimed that I hate Israelis in the absolute, only Israel. Not being able to distinguish between a state and a population already makes you not the greatest paragon of neutrality. That's the difference between the Russian state and the Russian people, Putin vs. Dostoevsky.
> I also don't believe you are making a genuine effort to do anything more than propagandize on behalf of your preferred side.
What examples of effort that you would like to see me do ? Agree with you ? Something else ? Mention some concrete things that I can put on a checklist.
> the quality of pro-Palestinian commentators here is quite low
It's pretty insulting to say that the quality of **people**, not comments, are low. I will chalk this up to a slip on your part.
No hard feelings my man, but I do not exist to please you. You're not the sole arbiter of what passes as a high quality comment vs. a low quality one. If you have specific complaints about my views or how I express them that don't boil down to just "I don't like them and I don't like you", I'm all ears, **everyone** can use a little bit of criticism even if it's harsh and coming from a hostile place. But I don't find your complaints very actionable to be honest, they are all variations on "You're a liar, You're bigoted against Israelis, You're misguided/propagandized/stupid/low-quality, etc...", and even if I were all of these things, which is possible, you have to be more specific if your goal is anything but simply dunking on me for the entertainment or catharsis value.
> right now you're almost certainly violating the rules
Do you mean the "Kind Necessary True" rule ? Kind is kinda out of the window because there is nothing kind you can say about a war where one side is annihilating the civilian population of a city with more bombs in a month than what was dropped on Afghanistan in a year. True ? Not a single word out of my original comment was factually false to the best of my knowledge when I posted it, the mistranslation about 'Free Palestine' is out of my hands (and it's not independently confirmed, I'm merely taking your word for it.)
Necessary ? I would say yes, people should know that the state incessantly claiming to be a victim and denying it's doing a genocide has people who produced a hugely-watched and hugely-listened-to song comparing the civilians of their enemies to Amalek, who in the Bible are people that God orders the Jews to genocide and kill to the last child.
Ultimately, if you think I'm such a rule violator, you can report me and move on. There is no point to debating the True/Necessary conditions because you're almost guaranteed to view anything that paints Israel in a bad light as noise, misinformation or outliers. Signals and Correctives https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-corrective/
> The Muslim world spends more money
I don't believe this is true until I see numbers. And I'm atheist so I don't get your point, so what that the Muslim world spends more money on bribes and lobbying ? I have a finite brain that can only get mad about so many things, right now there are 15000+ innocents dying in front of the cameras, so I'm mad about that. When this ends, I will get back to being mad about Islam buying legitimacy it doesn't deserve with petrodollars. Sometimes the 2 things intersect when some idiot on one side or the other islamizes the conflict, and then I'm the first one who gets mad.
> Do you have a source about how AIPAC is the second most watched speech by Federal policymakers and employees?
3- Doesn't distinguish between Arabs and Muslims, thinks Arabs are inherently more prone to violence and peace-rejectionism and that every single thing Israel ever did was reacting to them
4- Emotional blackmail using the historical anti-semitism of several societies that hosted Jews (the Arab ones were the least among them by the way)
5- Uses Judaism and the Bible as a serious argument that the Israel has a legitimate right to the land
I suspect that part of how Israel got into this situation is excessive attention to how much it's been hurt and not enough attention on how it can hurt people.
I believe the song is pro killing Gazans though I admit I'm going by a version with English sub-titles that doesn't seem to be on youtube any more. It was the one where the translator said there was so much slang they weren't sure they got all of it.
In recent years, many sci-fi and fantasy fans have groused that classic literature is considered a higher art than those genres. No doubt that classic literature has taken a cultural beating over the past decade or two. For instance, in the '90s, Ernest Hemingway was still considered to be one of the greatest American authors of all time. Now he has been relegated to the old white racist league, never to be mentioned in print.
Meanwhile Tolkien has replaced Tolstoy as the great, old, wise author, at least online.
I consider this to be a bad turn of events.
The main theme of classic literature is mortality, death. It's something we all must confront, and it is worthwhile to think about, to meditate upon, to read about.
Sci-fi, fantasy and other genre fiction have deservedly been held in lesser esteem than Literature.
Mortality and death tend to be incredibly dull subjects. Oh boy, another book about how we're all going to die. I'm sure the latest justification for why this is a good thing will be absolutely riveting. Give me stories of heroes with the actual power to change things, please. Reality is grim enough as it is, and no amount of "Literature" about the poetry of futility will improve matters.
>I'm sure the latest justification for why this is a good thing will be absolutely riveting. Give me stories of heroes with the actual power to change things, please<
The cultural beating classic literature has taken over the past couple of decades has nothing to do with science fiction and fantasy. You allude to the actual cause when you mention the 'old white racist league'. The cultural elite, unlike the actual consumer audience, wants to promote diversity over quality, which means tearing down the great and old in favor of the mediocre, new and diverse. This is not confined to classic literature, nor even literature in general. You can see the same effect in almost any field of art, though the more the art tends towards the populist the slower the disease spreads.
Tolkien has survived where a lot of classic 'great, old, wise' sci-fi and fantasy authors have fallen victim to the same forces that took down Tolstoy because blockbuster movies are a much more populist media due to the need to actually earn at least a portion of their tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar budgets from the wallets of the public. If Tolkien hadn't been brought to film, he would have been shoved aside like the others. And we've seen efforts to shove Tolkien into the mediocre diversity mold, which have produced predictably mediocre results, though ones labeled 'Tolkien' to try to convince the mass public that they still had some of the 'great, old wisdom' left.
As far as genres go, fantasy is specifically a genre that is optimized for telling stories. Just about any theme can be done well in fantasy.
"Ernest Hemingway...has been relegated to the old white racist league, never to be mentioned in print."
That statement is false. I read it to my elder son whose bachelor's degree from an American liberal-arts college is in literature and who recently completed a master's at one of the nation's elite arts schools located in a large "blue" city; he LOLed.
Ken Burns' 6-hour documentary mini-series "Hemingway" debuted on PBS in 2021; I watched all of it. It accurately described the racial attitudes that were reflected in Hemingway's writing and in his life, which didn't at all distract or detract from the series' portrayal of Hemingway.
i think Tolkien, if he has, only has become prominent due to the generations that grew up on the incredibly popular movies. I used to read SF heavily in the 80s, and fans wpuld have thought of him as one of many delights.
I mean Anne McCaffrey for example was a huge popular success; there were 24 pern novels and she wrote a lot of other series; i liked The Ship who Sang and the novels she wrote in that world. She's not alone though; if you want someone as a literary replacement i think a sf fan would argue Gene Wolfe over Tolkien, or if earlier Samuel Delany. R.A. Lafferty or Tom Disch or Barry Malzberg as well. A SF fan woukd say "yeah Tolkien is great but i really love..."
i think the issue is people read less overall though and read based on movies.
i think in the old days i'd agree but now its too much of a monkey's paw to gamble. Even then though.
There are some older things that aren't good adaptations but are valuable because that the only ones they'll ever get. The old cartoon The Flight of Dragons is an okay watch, but its very precious to me because it's actually Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon Knight, in part. Or the old TV movie "The People" which was based on Zenna Henderson's stories and the People.
i think sometimes a bad adaptation can be a remembrance at least.
I'm not saying you're wrong about any of this, but I find grand and vague pronouncements about "how the culture has changed" on some issue to be overdone and often unconvincing. And even when they're true at the time, most "permanent cultural shifts" only last for a few years. So can I ask how you quantify claims like "Tolkien has replaced Tolstoy" online? Is this just an impression or measured in some way? Do you mean among media outlets or among random commenters? If the latter, are you sure there's a meaningful difference between "opinions of random people on Twitter" now and "opinions of random people at the bar (or on Usenet)" thirty years ago? That you're not just comparing elite opinions in the past with popular opinions now and saying opinions have become more populist?
Again, not saying you're wrong, just that I find claims like this suspicious.
And as for Hemingway, are you talking more "a few NYT #cancelHemingway articles" or "routine removal of Hemingway from hundreds of school/university curricula"? If the latter, I wouldn't find *this* claim suspicious at all, just incredibly depressing.
Dante's depiction of the afterlife includes a number of monsters from Greek mythology in addition to the Christian stuff, so I think he'd still qualify as a fantasy writer even by that definition.
1- Something about you lumping together sci-fi and fantasy both in one fist tells me you're an outsider to both, as those 2 from the inside have vast differences and readers/fans of one might not be readers/fans of the other.
2- Refusing to read older works entirely because of the supposed moral deficiencies of the author is precisely the kind of narrow-minded, black-and-white, fight-or-flight, simplistic behaviour that reading a lot of sci-fi is supposed to free you from. It's not apriori wrong to say an author was racist, neither is saying that a popular work by said author is an expression of racism. Only censorship as a response to said perceived moral deficiencies is wrong, but I struggle to see how sci-fi or fantasy played a part in this unfortunate turn of events.
3-(a) Is Death and Mortality the main theme of **all** of classic literature ? Charles Dickens ? Jane Austen ? Oscar Wilde ?
3-(b) Is Death and Mortality not featured prominently in sci-fi ? To pick the latest 2 novels I read, Titanium Noir and Venomous Lumpsucker, one of them is about Death, the other about Extinction. They both, in their own way, satirize the repeated and ultimately ineffective human half-measures against Death, which distract humans from enjoying life.
4- Older storytelling being gradually displaced by newer forms is a tale literally older than writing. Wasn't the Novel itself a radically modern reinvention of storytelling that only happened in the 19th century ? Didn't it displace older storytelling mediums like the folktale and the theatre play ? One component of this is indeed fashion and status games, the hot new thing eventually becomes not as hot anymore. But another component is that every art form assumes cultural context, and at some point the distance between the reader's cultural context and the writer's is simply too vast to be fun to bridge. Eventually all truisms either become too true or too taboo to agree with, all character names become too funny-sounding and hard to remember, all the in-jokes and subtle subtext become too obscure to not fly right past the head of most readers.
5- I'm of the opinion that if a man wants to enjoy shit, I will fight to the death for his right to enjoy shit. I don't give a shit if people think sci-fi is "childish" or whatever 1950s wrong cached opinion they hold about the genre that imagined Space Travel before they were in the womb. Their loss. I'm going to read it and enjoy it anyway. Similarly, I don't think fans of classic literature should really care about whether people keep holding them in high regard or not, many great authors weren't held in high regard in their own times. The apex of wisdom is this : Status Games Are For Losers, and their winners are losers. Seek wisdom wherever you find it, and don't forget to enjoy yourself a little in the process.
Why can't sci-fi and fantasy deal with mortality and death?
I'd argue that given the past century of average lifespan and post retirement quality of life advances, speculative fiction is an avenue that is more than appropriate to consider it.
My current thoughts on why speculative literature is currently so esteemed is the fact that everything is changing so fast, our understanding of the world is more enormous than ever, and the setting of classical literature - relatively static worlds limited in scope - no longer resonate.
And also, Orwell's Big Brother is literally real now. Moby Dick seems fantastical to me - just randomly quit my job and get hired as a shiphand when I feel like going to sea?? In this economy? Without union membership?
Granted, some stuff still holds - Tale of Two Cities probably still holds up.
> The main theme of classic literature is mortality, death. It's something we all must confront, and it is worthwhile to think about, to meditate upon, to read about.
There are diminishing returns to everything, including contemplating death.
Many Sci-fi, fantasy and other genre fictions also have deep themes they deal with (and yeah, some are just "cool spaceship battle pew pew"). And some are in the middle.
OTOH I also don't think classical literature is as consistently deep as people claim - I like some of the classical books I read but a lot of them are closer to "pew pew" adventure stories (except in real life and without the space battles) than people want to admit.
In reality it’s not just the story but the writing. Jane Austen is regarded as a classic because of her writing skills, the stories are Rom coms. Well without the comedy, except a bit of snark.
On the one hand this is true, and if I jump from reading trashy 80s fantasy to Jane Austen I notice a jump in writing quality.
On the other hand, classics writers don't have categorically better writing - I think e.g. Susanna Clarke or has even better writing skill than Jane Austen. And classics often fall short on writing structure issues that modern writers would learn not to do (Jane Eyre is well written but has huge streches of random rambling that you'd only see in webfics today, not in anything actually published somewhere that has an editor).
Mortality/death is cool and important but not by any means the most important topic to contemplate and learn about. Good sci-fi and fantasy appeals to me because it explores many cool and important topics, not just one.
I've been learning to salsa dance, and I'm definitely not a natural at this, but a big issue I'm having is dancing in time with the clave. Surely someone can dance here, as we're a diverse bunch. Any tips for keeping the salsa beat?
It might be helpful to pinpoint where the difficulty lies. Is it perceiving and orienting to the rhythm in the first place? Losing track of it as your attention is taken away? Hearing how the rhythm of your steps sits inside the rhythm of the clave? Physically moving your limbs in sync with it? Shifting your weight to where it needs to be ahead of the step you need to take?
How long has it been? The reason I ask is that there’s a great variability in people’s rhythm sense and control, and it’s possible you may be on the lower end of it. Which means you just need more time to practice.
If there’s one suggestion, it’s to be “loose”, relax and don’t worry about perfection. I know it is kind of obvious, but it is helpful to try. I still remember my MMA coach reminding me to relax during sparring, and eventually it worked.
Oh, one more thing: if you have a good dancer in mind whom you like, try mimicking him. Like literally, pretend you’re him, adopt his manners and facial expressions. It is weirdly helpful. I had a “role model” like that in the MMA class, and I adopted his utterly relaxed facial expression while sparring. He looked like he wasn’t even there, utterly relaxed and unbothered. Mimicking his slacked face helped me to relax.
Oh, it’s fine then. Everyone’s different. Some of these fast progressers may just be better-coordinated, some may have music or athletic background, etc. I was like that with MMA - I’m not athletically gifted so I kept watching others get much better while I struggled (music was the opposite). But I stuck with it and slowly got better. I’ll never be UFC material, but that’s an insanely high standard to judge yourself by.
Tyler Cowen claims that top athletes are cognitive elites because being a top athlete requires a lot of intelligence, both in the knowing what to do on the field in real time sense but also in the training requires passing a bunch of marshmallow tests way.
Yet, c'mon, we also know that a lot of top athletes are really dumb. They aren't all Charles Barkley.
My question has to do with the General Intelligence Hypothesis. If human intelligence is really a general thing, with high intelligence in one field bleeding into others, then Tyler is obviously right. But it doesn't seem likely, does it? Why is there a pop culture dichotomy between jocks and nerds? Is the dichotomy false? Why do nerds look so much like nerds and why do jocks look so much like jocks? Is it all a phony social construct?
>One of my core views is that the most successful performers in most (not all) areas are extremely smart and talented. So if you are one of the (let’s say) top fifty global performers in an area, you are likely to be one sharp cookie, even if the form of your intelligence is quite different from that in say academia or the tech world.
You might that a sport such as basketball selects for height, and thus its top performers are not all that mentally impressive. But I’ve spent a lot of time consuming the words of Lebron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (including a podcast and a dinner with the latter), and I am firmly convinced they are all extremely intelligent.
Looking at the quote, Cowen's actual claim is somewhat limited, and his examples are even more limited. He is speaking of the 50 top global performers in an area, which is very narrow - much more narrow than e.g. being an NBA player, although players in the NBA are surely already in the hyper elite of the population as far as basketball performance.
So they're basically examples of people who are the absolute best in the whole world at their performance (arguably, even better than that).
Furthermore, I suspect Cowen is overstating their intelligences. I doubt that even the people he lists would be considered extremely intelligent. Perhaps the one most known as an intellectual is Abdul Jabbar and from what I've seen, he's reasonably intelligent and curious / thoughtful, but shows little sign of brilliance or extreme intelligence. You can check out his Substack here: https://kareem.substack.com/ and evaluate him for yourself.
Even if what he were saying were true, though, it wouldn't be because basketball prowess is particularly g-loaded. Even if g only has a tiny positive impact on basketball prowess one could still find that the GOATs in that field tend to have relatively high g, since they need every edge over their competitors, including cognitive skill.
Still, an IQ of e.g. 120 might render someone smarter than 99% of professional basketball players, which might give him such an edge over the competition without being a genius. Such a player would likely come off as smarter than IQ 120, given people's expectations.
I’ve said this before, but Ronnie O‘Sullivan who just won his 8th UK Championship in snooker, is a mathematical genius of sorts though he may not be able to solve an equation.
In general terms although I’m not a fan of soccer in general I occasionally watch the Monday night games on Sky under duress. The analysis by former players is very articulate, precise and comprehensive. Meanwhile when I listen to top politicians I don’t get that.
> I’ve said this before, but Ronnie O‘Sullivan who just won his 8th UK Championship in snooker, is a mathematical genius of sorts though he may not be able to solve an equation.
Why would that be? Because he's good at estimating angles, momentum, and the effect of two-body collisions? That doesn't make him a "mathematical genius", but a great signal processor. My smartphone is mind-bogglingly efficient and fast at signal processing, but it won't solve the Collatz conjecture anytime soon.
I have a hypothesis that a lot of late career athletes have minor to severe brain damage, depending on how much potential head impact the sport involves. This suggests that a runner, a high jumper, and an archer might have different outcomes at varying points of their career, re: intelligence.
IQ may be general, but time is limited, and your skills require both.
It may be true that a baby born with genes for high intelligence and height has a *potential* to become a math whiz or an Olympic-level basketball player. But each of that requires spending a lot of time developing specific skills, and the kid who spends afternoons readings books is probably not going to be great at sports, and the kid who spends afternoons in a gym is probably not going to be great academically.
Once in a while there will be such kid who does both and excels at both, but that is probably rare. It is not just a question of possibility, but also of preferences and social reinforcement. You can be intellectually able to do something and yet find it boring. Or you can try something first, get good at it, and then find it socially more rewarding to continue doing what you are already good at rather than becoming a beginner at something else. Or you can simply have friends who have a hobby, so when you are with them, you do that thing instead of other possible things.
You can also have things correlate strongly and yet come apart at the extremes. You can have a group of great basketball players with high IQ each, but the one who will be best at basketball is not necessarily the one with the highest IQ among them, but the one with best muscles and joints. Even if IQ is useful in general, it is not so useful that 1 extra point would overcome literally everything else. See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
> Why is there a pop culture dichotomy between jocks and nerds?
The difference is mostly about preferences and spending their time. Those differences are a result of different traits (e.g. extraversion vs introversion) and random influences (what their friends are doing, what their parents told them to do, etc.). It is not like people are measured for their innate potential and trained to develop their skills accordingly.
Also, to be a jock or a nerd at school you only need to be slightly jock-ier or nerd-ier than the local average. Then it becomes about what you do and who you hang out with.
> Why do nerds look so much like nerds and why do jocks look so much like jocks?
How much time do they spend exercising their muscles vs sitting in a chair reading? How much time do they spend outside vs inside? The body reflects how you treat it for years.
All good points. I had forgotten about that tails coming apart post. It fascinating me when I first read it, but now I'm thinking: "Of course the tails come apart; the sample size drops to 1 at the tail."
a) the dichotomy is at least somewhat false (when I was in high school, a lot of the people in national long-distance running competitions were the same ones you'd see at math contests. Relatedly, top hedge funds end up employing a surprising number of former olympians).
b) general factor of intelligence holds somewhat at the statistical level but on an individual level you expect significant mean-reversion - even if engineering and people skils are both heavily g-loaded, someone who's best in the world at engineering would probably only be a couple of standard deviations above average in social skills (fairly charismatic but not the life of the party).
c) you expect this to look weaker at lower levels - olympic athletes are probably pretty smart, but your high school sports team is probably mostly selected on being into sports and willing to spend time training rather than being inherently supertalented.
d) In sports where head injuries are common (including both football and soccer), you expect athletes to become dumb over time just due to concussions, even if they started out smart.
I want to add to my question, not what I might say, but what Steve Sailer might say. Blacks are overrepresented in American sports yet underrepresented in the field of physics. Does this make sense if the primary component in both is high G?
Yes, and this is the question that interests me. Isn't AI used in robotics and self-driving cars and other things which attempt to manipulate the physical world, as say an athlete might? Is that type of AI not considered part of general intelligence when we talk about AGI? I'm getting the sense that it is not. Which makes me think that General Intelligence just has to do with verbal and logical intelligence.
It is "intelligence" when you think of it as "cognitive power" I.e. the skill of "moving yourself well under given constraints" can be optimized for by throwing better thinking at it, in the context of robots, is a thing, but it's not clear if IQ tests test for skills necessary for doing sports, even though for humans that's "general" intelligence. And even if it turns out that doing well at sports is more a matter of say, your nervous system rather than your brain, that just means other humans can't easily learn it NOT that it would be unlearnable for all intelligences.
Aka
"General Intelligence" descrived different things for humans than it does for AGI, because we're not just birthing another human for AGI.
Which undermines the notion we can create an ASI, because that is just a suped up AGI. Maybe we can create an Artificial Human Intelligence by training it on all the things humans can do, but there's nowhere else to go except maybe other animals if Intelligence isn't general.
The easy answer, cribbing off TLP, is that humans have a strong tendency towards psychic inertia, “if I do not change I will not die.”
But when one is confronted with evidence of one’s inferiority, say, in physical ability, one is thrown off balance. The mind wants to come up with narratives to justify the current state of affairs and protect against the impetus to change. Natural candidates for these narratives for the nerds-in-becoming include “well, I may not be X but I am more righteous than those Xers” or “I’m smarter and that’s what matters”. Groups form to reinforce these narratives.
So, in persona as TLP, we would say the answer is narcissism. As it usually turns out to be.
Of course, this whole thing never happens for someone who never feels that inferiority at all because he or she is smart and strong. But the mechanism works for almost anyone who feels left out of any group in any way and can be adapted endlessly. I’m open to hear criticism of it but the general idea is one of the good insights from the TLP blog.
A neural net can be superhuman at classifying dog breeds and not be anywhere close to generally intelligent. Given a task of enough complexity, like playing a sport at the highest level, the size of the neural net required might be quite large. Does a large enough neural net start naturally showing hints of being generally smart, or does that just happen for LLMs? My guess is that yes, as a game reaches a certain level of complexity, the abstractions learned by the DNN will start to be generally applicable to many cognitive tasks. But my guess is also that LLMs might converge faster. What I am saying is that there is probably a lot of neural complexity involved in being a top athlete, but it probably isn't as transferable to other domains, than the same size network applied to learning physics.
Important qualifier to "doxxing is bad": I think that if someone is /already/ a public figure then it is legitimate to connect other anonymous public personas to them, at least if those personas are doing anything in any way related to whatever they're famous for.
I absolutely don't want politicians to be able to comment on politics anonymously, or CEOs to be able to talk anonymously about anything related to their industry.
"Famous pseudonym is real person X" is not usually legitimate journalism if X isn't a name that will mean anything else to the reader, and hence the only value will be to harass them, but "Famous person X has been doing ... under an anonymous pseudonym" often is.
(I have no idea if this applies to the "Beff Jezos" case Scott is talking about above - I intentionally haven't looked up the details before writing this, because I don't want my views on the general principal biased by one case).
A non-political example that comes to my mind is a famous writer Stephen King publishing a few books under a pen name Richard Bachman.
Among other reasons, he made a new pseudonym as an experiment to find out how much of his recent books' popularity and sales was because of their quality and how much because of his accumulated fame as an author. So he wrote books under a new name and published them with no marketing. Unfortunately, the experiment was cut short by doxing (Wikipedia does not provide details).
In this specific case, I think the doxing was bad.
James Tiptree was a famous science fiction writer who was never seen, and was eventually doxxed, just as a matter of curiosity. "He" turned out to be Alice Sheldon.
She was very upset at the loss of privacy, and in my opinion, the later fiction wasn't as good.
Basically Thinner read too much like Stephen King. So, mission complete I suppose; it's not just the name, his writing is unique enough to recognize in the wild.
There's probably a weird edge case where someone has two famous anonymous accounts but isn't themselves a public figure, where you could argue that connecting the two public faces is legitimate but providing the real identity is not, but I doubt this ever comes up.
There might be a difference between theory of mind and theory of emotion.
People generally are fairly good at believing that other people know different facts-- the classic even if you know what's in the box, will people who haven't looked in the box know what you know? test.
People seem to be generally bad at having a gut understanding that other people have different preferences from one's own.
Understanding one's own preferences is so complex, and what we prefer is constantly changing, even within the span of a few minutes. And we tend to rely on others to help us figure out what we really want, so we are used to commenting on what we think others should do. With theory of mind I get immediate feedback when I mansplain something to somebody who already knows it, but when it comes to preferences I can't really test my hypothesis about things like "she would really be happier (ie prefer) if she drank less."
Here’s a good one: Charles Cornell reviews a new Jacob Collier song that I’ll probably still be listening to in fifty years if I live that long. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdstfRN6cQs (Listen to the song before this review, you don’t want to miss the chance to hear it for the first time. )
Not sure if Todd in the Shadows counts. His One-Hit Wonderland series is more of a career retrospective with some song reviews in the middle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqE9B1_9TpQ
I answered your survey first before reading the linked Yud article, and I don't think your question formulation captures expected grief.
The way I look at life insurance is the same way I look at most other insurance: it's a hedge against a financial risk, allowing you to turn a small chance of a catastrophic loss into a predictable regular expense. And since it's priced so the insurance company makes money on average, you shouldn't hedge more risk than you have, and moreover should consider self-insuring losses that you can afford to eat.
For life insurance, the financial loss you're hedging is 1) funeral costs and other final expenses, and 2) loss of the insured person's income and other material contribution to the household's finances. In most cases in rich countries, minor children are a net loss in terms of 2, bringing in little or no income and probably not carrying the rest of the family in terms of chores, so you should probably only buy life insurance for your children of you need it to cover final expenses. And the correct amount of insurance to carry would be enough to cover a funeral minus what you can cover out of pocket without undue hardship. Losing a child would be emotionally devastating, yes, but grief is independent of financial considerations here.
I agree that most people don't/won't translate grief into cash (especially when money effects utility on the log scale {citation needed}).
I think the survey could still stand if people treated life insurance the way that EA's would. If a poor person in sub-saharan Africa can have their life saved for ~$5K then EA's should buy any life insurance policies for poor sub-saharan Africans if they are cheaper than $5K. We aren't trying to save utility in the same way that EA's do (I would value my children at way more than $5K) but I think the framework still stands?
I am confused on whether it really is a zero-sum game with insurance companies, even if they have all the same information as me (they assign the same probability to insured event).
seems to argue that if we both value money on the log scale and use Kelly criterion that both the insurer and insuree could benefit from the transaction (given it has the right price). Though I also believe that many insurance prices currently are priced only to benefit insurer.
Strong agree. I filled out the survey with $0 for all categories. I didn't have children to support me financially. Getting money from their death would make me feel terrible in a way I can't describe. I would burn any check I got.
Yep, this is the rational approach to life insurance.
Most "financial advisors" will of course try to convince you otherwise; basically that you should maximize life insurance (and thus their bonus for making you buy it) for everyone.
Emotionally, not having life insurance may feel like "tempting fate"; as if you are telling the gods that you are pretty sure that X will not die anytime soon, and therefore the gods will obviously kill X at the next opportunity, just to teach you a lesson on humility. A possible financial impact is one thing, but if you are superstitious (most people are, to some degree, especially when you start talking about a possible death of their loved ones), it may feel like refusing to buy life insurance somehow *increases the probability* of someone's death.
I agree that many financial advisors play on ignorance and (comparative) irrationality. I am still confused on whether all insurance coverage is zero-sum, this article seems to argue that if we are using Kelly criterion for our money there are insurance policies that benefit both parties: https://blog.paulhankin.net/kellycriterion/
Otherwise I don't know how I would explain why companies that understand expected value calculations would ever make institutional decisions to insure projects.
Yeah, insurance doesn't necessarily have to be zero-sum.
But average people buying life insurance (the original topic) usually do not know how to calculate the optimal amount, and the people selling the insurance (or recommending someone else's insurance, and getting paid for successful recommendations) have an obvious incentive to sell as much as possible.
I thought that every life insurance salesman had a few stories ready of people who merely procrastinated on buying life insurance and died the next week. Is it just my luck to meet them?
I was a bit obsessed with checking this paper around 10 years ago, to the point where I bought and read Nancy Howell's _Demography of the Dobe !Kung_, the book from which the raw data on demography was taken for the paper. I think I've lost the writeup where I argued why the paper was terrible, but I see that this analysis, linked from the comments, seems concinving and pulls no punches: https://scienceisshiny.wordpress.com/2020/09/11/everything-wrong-with-the-paper-human-grief-is-its-intensity-related-to-the-reproductive-value-of-the-deceased/. I believe I reached about the same conclusion w.r.t. the correlation - that what we really see here is that "the RV and grief timeseries both have a rising, a level and a falling bit", and once you postulate that, any reasonable RV series subject to that will correlate really high with the grief timeseries - without having the stats knowledge to explain why they shouldn't have done what they did.
But I do very much recommend the Howell book, you get to see how real messy science is made in an environment of imperfect - oh so much imperfect - information. For example, how do you actually build an age-based population model or RV-by-age curve in a population which is not tracked by government statistics and the people have no idea what their ages are? I wrote a post about how Howell did it: https://avva.livejournal.com/2412457.html (it's in Russian, but just ChatGPT it if you're interested).
Most people who criticize Yudkowsky do so via low content drivebys, so this is already much better.
I suspect that if you got into contact with Eliezer, he even might signal boost it himself.
Unfortunately, I can't answer the survey since all answers I **want** to give would be the explicit result of a calculation that would prove EY's point (the perils of knowing AMF QALY estimates for children....)
New here and not sure if this is a good topic for this forum, but something I've always wanted to discuss, so why not.
Suppose I eat one cow's worth of beef per year. If I stop eating beef, how many fewer cows would be slaughtered?
I think the EV is one, right? Something like a 99.9% chance that this would save zero cows, and 0.1% chance it would save 1000 cows.
I'm assuming that there must be some feedback loop. Everywhere along the pipeline from cattle ranch to plate, each entity has to decide whether to order more burgers based on demand, or open another cattle ranch based on demand, etc. There's an incredibly tiny chance that one of those demand numbers is *right* on the edge, and my choice will tip it, creating a very large effect.
I think we should also consider your social impact.
Do you share meals with someone regularly? If so, you've displaced beef from someone else's plate, as well (the logistics of cooking 2 separate meals just to accommodate a dietary preference is often too much, so in practice in a lot of long term partners and families, 1 person becoming a vegetarian often has a knock on effect on everyone else's diet since most people don't order out that much - to be clear, everyone else still eats meat, but often less than the counterfactual).
Do you often go to social gatherings where you share a meal? Are your friends willing to accommodate you? In those situations, your more restrictive dietary preference is going to displace some beef off the group choice too. When having meals with my vegetarian friend, we typically don't opt for a steakhouse, and when we get pizza, it'll be vegetarian (or something like 1 or 2 out of the 3 we order will be vegetarian). Having a vegetarian option on the table displaces some of the meat, unless it's one of those 1 plate per person kind of situations (burgers, sandwiches). But simply influencing choice of venue is probably important.
I guess it's possible that you are totally isolated and will never influence someone else's dietary decisions ever, but that seems unlikely.
Will it be massive? Hard to say. Are you attending a large family dinner every week? Do you regularly cook for 2 - 5 people? How often do you share meals with people? On the low end it might be like 1.2 cows. On the high end it might be like 5 - 10 cows. It's still not necessarily going to massively thin the herds, but it is an effect.
A curious other effect could happen if you host the dinners (i.e dictate the contents of the meal). That way, you get to displace meat off someone's plate. Each of us don't have infinite capacity for food, so any share you can win is yours to keep. This implies that effective meat displacement involves going out and feeding other people, which has much more potential effect than just feeding yourself. Doing stuff like telling your friends you're bringing samosas (detering someone else from bringing, idk, meat pies).
(Feeding, not converting. Lots of people are averse to lifestyle conversion efforts, but few people will turn down free food unless it's bad, and displacing meat calories helps).
Suppose you're a New World slave owner in the 18th century, and you buy one slave per year on average. If you stopped buying new slaves, how many fewer slaves would be brought from Africa to the New World ?
Depends on what you eat instead, and what the people who would otherwise have eaten the food you actually eat end up eating, ad infinitum.
Minimal example: imagine you & I both regularly eat at the same restaurant. At current prices (with you eating beef), I just barely prefer the chicken to a steak; once you start ordering chicken instead, the price of the chicken goes up and that of the steak goes down, so I switch to steak. The same amount of the same food is being eaten as before, we've just swapped which.
I think it's probably more like 1.001, because some meat goes to waste - I guess that if people eat n cows worth of beef, the amount of beef produced is well-approximated be (1+epsilon)n for some small positive epsilon governing efficiency.
There's also going to be an economic effect from efficiencies of scale and supply and demand - whether you eat beef or not probably has a marginal second-order effect on the price of beef for other people, but I'm not not sure what the sign is.
Cattle ranches aren't stomped out of the ground and then converted into burgers in one indivisible step. The decision is less "do we build one new ranch or not", but rather "do we slaughter 75 or 76 cows today" and "do we inseminate 450 or 451 cows this week".
So yes, there are still discrete step functions at work - not eating meat for one day won't save 0.0075 cows - but they're more fine granular than "1000 cows are killed or not".
Even in the presence of step functions, expected value works that way when you don't know where in the step you are.
Example: Trains come every ten minutes, I don't know when the next one will come. I can walk to the train station, or run, getting there two minutes faster. What is the effect of this on the expected time I reach my destination? Running will get me there two minutes faster on average. Similar reasoning works for speeding, even if you might get stopped by a stoplight and lose all the time you gained.
You probably had a small effect, such that if you were alone it probably wasn't enough to change the menu, but as part of a group they might decide to add more options.
Can anyone more knowledgeable on the Jezos comment on what exactly is the schtick with the crypto bro esque twitter postings?
The fluff regarding his startup is also absolutely insufferable yet the founders seem in theory to be technically competent people(I would also argue that working on TF Quantum is a completely misguided effort with no real use case at all in the near term).
A datum for the "are we past Peak Woke?" discussion. NIH, the National Institutes of Health, proposes to change its mission statement to remove "reduce disability" as a goal. This is in the name of disability equity and inclusivity, as proposed by a committee for diversity.
Instead of "To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability."
the new proposed mission statement is "To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and to apply that knowledge to optimize health and prevent or reduce illness for all people."
If I was disabled, the current debates surrounding the Canadian MAID euthanasia system might make me a bit tetchy about unspecified goals to "reduce disability".
Actually, what inerests me more is the removal of the goal to "lengthen life", especially considering the major drops in life expectancy recently.
Depends which science you ask. I did a quick survey of reputable tertiary sources I could find with a quick googling and came up with "yes" (Mayo Clinc), "no, or at least not enough to be worth mentioning" (NiH, NHS, and WebMD), and "maybe/probably" (Cleveland Clinic). The Cleveland Clinic answer goes into a bit more detail about what we do know, that melatonin does increase REM sleep, plus some preliminary evidence that melatonin's metabolites may improve memory and thus make us remember dreams more intensely, but the overall effect of melatonin on dreams doesn't appear to have been rigorously studied.
Before reading Scott's article on melatonin (wherein he recommended 0.3 mg to be the optimum dose), I tried one of the standard commercial doses - likely 5 mg.
I experienced an erratic heartbeat and, if not full-blown nightmares, very vivid and disturbing dreams.
Why does Substack show people's likes (on their profile) but not their comments? Is it a programming thing? Or an ethical thing, making it harder to stalk someone, and/or get them cancelled?
Since likes are basically votes, I'd have thought they're more naturally deserving of secrecy than comments (which, to continue the analogy, are more like campaign speeches or media endorsements). Both secret, both displayed, and comments displayed but likes secret would all make sense, but I find this combination odd.
I once had a dream in which I opened Substack and, in the corner next to my profile picture, saw a lot of information about me inferred by some algorithm from my comments, with confidence estimates next to each piece of information - plenty of demographic data and some psychological traits, all inferred correctly albeit with different confidence.
Maybe I'm not the only one who's had this nightmare.
I, on the other hand, have been continually disappointed by how *BAD* most FAAMG inferences are. With the literally tens of thousands of Phd's and data scientists they have working on your digital cookie and behavior trail, they should literally know you better than you know yourself. As in, you go to a new part of downtown for a meeting, and they should be able to predict with high accuracy which lunch place you'll end up going to "serendipitously" and with no planning aforethought.
If FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should literally be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
And yet, with the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy. And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
I wonder if this is an ethics thing, because like most Linux / tech-savvy folk, I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix and Ghostery and things like that. I opt out of profiling and cookies where I can. But I know the data is still there, with certainty. Unblockable pixel trackers, using Chrome browser, using Google search, proximity and network analysis, Google (and FB via proximity and network analysis and pixel trackers and deals with every top 1k website) definitely HAS the info, even with the privacy measures I take. They just don't use it, and I wonder if it's because they have ethically decided that I seem to by trying to avoid profiling with the various browser add-ons.
But then we're talking about Goog and FB - making a non-regulatory decision to make less money for the sake of "ethics??" It is to laugh. So, a bit of a mystery to me, why all these data harvesters suck so badly at targeting with their inferences, when the data is certainly there to be inferred.
On the plus side, in the iOS app today I clicked a notification for a comment and it actually took me to the comment instead of the top of the whole thread, so maybe there is some improvement going on.
Scott, you asked for other suggestions on ways to protest Forbes' doxxing of somebody: How about writing EAT SHIT AND DIE on a brick and throwing it through their window? A bit too crass?
That seems about the right level of crass, actually. It conveys contempt without implying future violence. As opposed to tossing a brick that said, for example, "by any means necessary", or simply posting the address online with no commentary whatsoever. Those wouldn't be crass at all.
I expect there’s a substantial coprophile presence at Forbes. In fact you’ve now got me worried that brick will mistaken for a generic Happy Holidays message. Thanks a shit.
On the subject of predictive processing in the human brain, this has probably been said before but it only hit me recently that nocturnal dreams are likely just what happens when predictive processing happens while all the external stimuli are off.
I think there’s a lot to that idea. I think the way dreams are shaped is that a bunch
of stuff from the day is getting dumped and sorted through and tagged and stored in memory, but the predictive processing part of the mind keeps getting glimpses of the stuff and trying to work with it in the usual way, and that’s
what gives dreams a certain story-like quality. I could say more but I’m sitting up in bed and very sleepy. So I’m off to dream my brains out.
Dreams seem too random and incoherent to be explained by just predictive processing.
My favored theory is that this is a biological analog of the practice of randomly shuffling the data set while training neural nets in order to prevent overfitting.
It's not completely random. The dreams often include something that happened recently, or something traumatizing. So perhaps random weighted by some combination of recency and/or emotional impact.
I recently stumbled on an interesting factionalization within antisemitic circles. One group hates the Jews but thinks they're smart and accomplished, the other hates the Jews but thinks they're credit-stealing charlatans.
How did that work out for Adolf? One genius Aryan physicist vs a boatload of genius Jews:
"According to a May 1945 roster, Jews made up about two-thirds of the leadership in the Manhattan Project's Theoretical Division (T-Division) — the group tasked with calculating critical mass and modeling implosions — which is still operating today as the only division with an uninterrupted history since Project Y."
They don't think the Jews did anything. They think that all supposed Jewish accomplishment are really nefarious credit-stealing from good hardworking gentiles.
My friend says our knowledge of physics will never reach an end because physics is the study of the laws that govern the physical universe, but we can only see a small fraction of the universe, so there's always a chance that the laws as we understand them might not apply to parts of the universe we can't see.
For example, thanks to the limited speed of light, we can't see objects that are more than 46.1 billion light years away. If you were an astronomer watching the very edge of our visible bubble of the universe, it's always possible that suddenly, a new part of the universe could emerge into your view where gravity obviously worked in reverse. The possibility of such a thing occurring means physics can never reach its end.
Going to say, no. Physics will never reach an end, not because there is always something new to discover, but because there is always someone trying to discover something new. Even if everything is perfectly explained, physics will continue, as people try ever more novel attempts to crack the consensus.
In the sense that physics describes the way nature fundamentally works around us, it could concievably reach an end at some point; where we have discovered an ultimate underlying theory and explained all the constants and terms involved. Whether this is possible or not is unknown, and I would say it is more a question of philosophy than physics.
Your friend's argument is a bit different, since they are saying we cannot see everything, so we cannot know the same laws hold everywhere. This is akin to some theories that say multiple universes exist, within which the laws of physics are difference. Many people will tell you that such ideas are not really physics - since for it to be physics, we need to be able to conduct an experiment to prove or disprove the idea. As we have no ability to know what lies beyond the visible universe, any speculation about different laws of physics there is not physics but rather religion or philosophy (the same holds for other regions we cannot access, like the time before the Big Bang or other universes).
I would point out, as well, that for all we know the laws of physics could completely change tomorrow. That could always be true, and so by the same argument you can say physics will never be complete until we can definitely rule out that they won't change at some arbitary point in space or time.
I think so far the universe seems homogeneous at a very large scale. Under that assumption, the parts we do not see follow the same laws as the parts we see. Perhaps one day we will find a reason why it is so.
> a new part of the universe could emerge into your view where gravity obviously worked in reverse.
I guess this is the difference between philosophy and science. Such thing is very unlikely to happen, to the degree that no one reasonably expects it to happen, but I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life playing verbal games against the philosophers, which means that philosophers win this debate.
Physics “never reaching its end” is awkwardly phrased, but essentially correct. However, his reasoning is naively constrained, and wholly unneeded. The simplest way to understand this is that we have no way of knowing if/when we reach the “end of physics”. No one left a marker there for us to declare a finish line.
By "the end" I mean a point where every observable phenomenon can be perfectly explained by the laws of physics as we know them, and where none of the laws contradict each other. In such a condition, the behavior of every subatomic particle, black hole, and distant galaxy could be totally explained by physics calculations.
I think this is the crux of the problem though. Back in late 1800's there was this strong consensus that "physics was over", things were well-explained. Yet here we are. I suspect the future will be no different: as soon as we get complacent with our understanding of the universe, an Einstein will show up with a paper opening a new frontier.
She does agree with what you say, but argues that the remaining problems in physics might be too difficult for humanity to solve -- at least, not without some kind of a radical increase in our collective intelligence, which would be technologically impossible to achieve without first solving those very same problems in physics.
This is just me talking, but I don't think that AI is going to be some kind of a magic bullet. AI is great if you already know most of the answer and want to save time (to be fair, a lot of time !) on calculations; it's not so great if you want to develop entirely new physics (which is what most of the outstanding problems in physics are about, AFAIK).
Many subfields of physics have ended already (see e.g. electromagnetism - pretty much a solved problem now, or at least handed off to the engineers). And high energy physics might be drawing to a different kind of end. But there are plenty of others which are nowhere near ending.
*Haven't actually watched the video. Am responding to what I think she would have said (based on what people from her background usually say).
I think it might be helpful to watch her video, perhaps ?
In general, unlike the claim you're arguing against in your linked post (*), she is not claiming that all available problems in physics have been solved or are close to a solution; rather, she's claiming that the remaining problems could be too difficult for humans to ever solve, and will thus remain unsolved forever.
(*) I have not read your linked post, I'm just responding to what people on your side of the debate usually say. :-)
>> that the remaining problems could be too difficult for humans to ever solve, and will thus remain unsolved forever.
This seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be true, unless you are defining physics = high energy physics, which is what people with Sabine's background usually do. In that case it might be true. But that's precisely the definition I am objecting to.
I doubt you have ever heard anyone on `my side of the debate' (that being the side that `there is more to physics than HEP'). The high energy physicists tend to monopolize the public conversation. Unless you are thinking of prior discussion with me. Or unless you tend to hang out with practicing physicists.
ETA: If you can link me to a text transcript of Sabine's, I will read it.
This article by Freddie deBoer is a nice and eloquent summing up of my position on Israel, and how seriously I take accusations of Anti-Semitism that is entirely founded on my supposedly unfair criticism of the Zionist state : https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose
> [Title] I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States
> [subtitle] even one that's very very important to you
> I am and must be an anti-Zionist for reasons that precede any particular opinion about Israel or the Palestinians. I am opposed to religious characters for states, whether actively theocratic or not; I am opposed to ethnonationalism specifically; I am opposed to nationalism generally. None of these beliefs stem from a rejection of Jews or the Jewish religion or Israel
> These ever-expanding definitions of anti-Semitism, now codified by government (and, I assure you, Republicans and their liberal Zionist enablers will work tirelessly to make criticism of Israel actively illegal) would prohibit all manner of basic philosophical and political positions that should be protected speech under any definition. The religious opposition to the modern state of Israel found in some Hasidic sects, orthodox Marxism, all manner of libertarian and anarchist conceptions of a righteous future, every impulse that opposes the modern fiction of the nation-state - all ground up, rendered impermissible, under the insistence that to oppose the governmental body that is the modern state of Israel is in and of itself a form of interpersonal bigotry. It’s a casual, incidental destruction of the entire philosophical world of internationalism.
> I’m not going to give you a discount argument against the nation-state in this space; you can, and should, read entire books about the subject.
> But historical arguments are not a requirement of anti-nationalist sentiment. All that’s required is to recognize that nations are literal fictions, invented by human beings with no transcendent or permanent reality, and that in a few hundred years nationalism has been responsible for more bloodshed and misery than any other human belief.
> For the record, many Marxists and other forms of internationalists often take pains to distinguish the nation from the nation-state, national identity from nationalism [... :] A nation is a people, while a state is a governmental body
> the question of Israel’s basic nature - again, leaving all concerns for the Palestinians aside - is complicated by its status as an ethnostate.
> “Jewish” famously denotes both a religion and an ethnic group; a Jewish state must therefore have an ethnic and Jewish character. And this has obvious and ugly consequences for Israel’s essential being.
> So many of the basic ugly realities of what Israel is, beneath the surface of “the only democracy in the Middle East,” stem from the fact that an ethnostate cannot help but discriminate, cannot help but create second-class citizens. It’s common for defenders of Israel to point out that there is a sizable minority of Arab Israeli citizens within the country, but they’re much less likely to acknowledge that those citizens face systemic discrimination, which has intensified since the start of the latest conflict. But what did you expect? That an ethnonationalist project wouldn’t result in people pursuing ethnic supremacy?
> Which brings us to the notion of a double standard. I’m not sure why people think this is all such a gotcha - yes, I do oppose all ethnonationalism! I do not recognize any state’s “right to exist,” given that rights accrue to human beings and not to violent abstractions like states.
> So why all the focus on Israel? Because Israel is different
> [Because] Zionists constantly step from one foot to another when it comes to the basic question of whether Israel is exceptional or not, special or not. When justifying 75 years of dispossession for the Palestinian people, they say of course Israel is exceptional, of course Israel is special. The Jews were promised the land by God, they have been expelled from country after country, they endured the Holocaust, they are a wholly unique case for which we must permit every exception. This exceptional status holds precisely as long as it takes us to get to the supposedly unfair fixation on Israel’s crimes, at which point we are to understand that Israel is a wholly unexceptional country and that there is no legitimate reason that an American would focus particularly on its sins. You can’t have it both ways! If you insist that Israel’s very existence is in some sense special, you cannot then rage out whenever people focus on Israel to a special degree. Every year, each and every American has more than 4 billion ironclad reasons to pay special attention to Israel.
> I could also point out that if the status of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” means anything at all, it must entail special attention. If you want to be shielded for supposedly embodying those ideals, you must be ready to be harshly criticized on the grounds that you aren’t embodying them.
> Let me add the part which will surely inspire yet-more lazy accusations of anti-Semitism: among the most tiresome and insulting elements of this whole debate lies this insistence that Israel and Zionism must be the exception to every rule.
> I am an internationalist; I reject ethnonationalism; I think religion should have no part in government; therefore I must be an anti-Zionist.
One of the only two comments on the post sums up a small part of what I feel https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose?&comments=true&commentId=44905611
And since I can't reply there I'll write here some of my thoughts on the subject. First of all - I agree with almost everything Freddie deBoer wrote, but it's far from a summing up of the subject. That criticism of Zionism shouldn't be considered antisemitism ought to be trivial. One of the other facets to consider is what it means to "oppose" a state.
In theory I oppose the existence of States in general and Nation-States in particular, in practice my level and mode of opposition is dependant on the particulars of the situation.
For example, I oppose a Trump-led U.S. or generally the existance of such a racist country where the disenfeanchised include 0.7% of the population which is imprisoned, another measly 0.2% residents of D.C. and another 3 million citizens of Puerto Rico. (I might be exposing some ignorance here). Where AIAK the gerrymanderng, mostly on an ethnic level, is still quite bad (quick google search seems to suppor but has outdated data). And with a baffeling two-house system with a clearly un-democratic senate.
But that won't be cause for me to support the organizations like Al-Qaeda or Nation od Islam, nor will it make me in any way oppose the existence of the U.S.A. It would not stop me from supporting the U.S.A against forces that seek to harm it. What it does is make me criticize the U.S. and support positive change from within in the hopes of short-term improvements and an eventual peaceful transition to a post-state world society.
Zionism is inherintly racist, there is some defence to it (It claims the idea of liberal democracy is unsound and insuffcient to protect minorities), I used to be staunchly anti-zionist and I will wait until the overwhelming pain around the recent events will subside before reassesing my position. But Israel is not much more inherintly Zionist than the U.S. is inherintly pro-slavery or prone to violently subjucating Native-Americans. It *is* a democracy where Zionism could be excised from the inside without violent revolution.
I have British citizenship, I have the option to say the hell with Israel and its murderous and racist behaviours, to pack my things and go. I live with the knowledge that if I and every reasonable person with that capacity will do so we will be dooming our family, friends, and enemies to unimaginable slaughter. So in the day-to-day I oppose the existance of Israel as a Zionist subjugating State but I support the existance of Israel as a democratic state.
(In the meta-level I am making the case that "opposing" something is meaningless without stating what you support in its place)
I don't understand that "One of the only 2 comments" bit, is this mis-phrased ? It seems to imply that the post has only 2 comments, but it has 500+. I think you meant one of the only 2 that you agree with (and you're probably only counting top-level comments as "comments".)
Unfortunately, the equivalence between Israel and Jews has been dug rather deep, so for huge swaths of the Pro-Israel camp, Anti-Zionism **IS** Anti-Semitism, the negation of that is inconceivable, ridiculous on its face, and perhaps a sign of bad faith malicious deceit to them. I still don't understand Hebrew remotely enough to do anything interesting with Hebrew sources and I have never visited Israel, but it appears from where I am that Israelis don't even consider "Zionism" to be a distinct category from "Jewish Israeli", witness this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_qqphDurQ where most of the people interviewed either stare in confusion or just outright deny the existence of Anti-Zionist Jews. You could even say that, and I'm aware of how deeply ironic that would be, Israel is using its Jews as "Human Shields" : Ah you want to destroy Israel, but - you see - you first have to know what to do with 7 million Jews, ehhhh, are you a Nazi, Mr. Want-To-Destroy-Israel, would you want to kill 7 million Jews ?
On top of those ontological issues, there are several epistemological issues making things worse. It doesn't help that some Israeli critics are - indeed - just plain anti-Semites who love the new cover. How many ? I don't know, but they exist. There is no reason in existence one can be dumb enough to think that Jewish students or restaurant owners in America or France are responsible for what Israel does, or that harassing them will have any weight on the matter, it has to be malice. It also doesn't help that Israel employs dedicated propaganda units just for the express purpose of spreading this very same perception of Anti-Zionists, and that even if every single Anti-Zionist is a card-carrying philo-semite fluent in Hebrew, they would still have this perception around them just from the effect of Israeli propaganda.
The conundrum you present features in every discussion about a corrupt and rotten institution or organization, the conundrum of whether to reform or erase. Whether to fix or start anew, whether to go slow and cut a thousand cuts or go fast and burn the whole thing to the ground. I don't have a strong feeling either way on the particular instance of Israel, I just think that (A) Humans have a huge blindspot in favor of systems and structures that will never be fixed, because they (quite rationally) fear abrupt change, they also want to honor past investment in the systems and the structures (sunk cost fallacy), so there is a huge hazard of motivated reasoning here where you convince yourself that Reform will save the day even though it's not going to realistically do it, (B) I tend to have an opposite bias towards radical and ground-up restructuring on other issues, subject to a strict and cynical realization that Utopia is not guaranteed and that the end doesn't justify the means under any conditions.
I'm not the brightest bulb when it comes to American history, but as far as I'm aware, America giving its black population rights happened only as an unintended side-effect of (A) Industrialization, which makes Slave Labor a net-negative paradigm (B) a failed compromise, the south could have kept its slaves if they were more willing to meet the north in the middle on some issues related to voting rights of the blacks and stuff. As for the indigenous population, they were given rights after the vast majority of them were extinct. I'm sure that if Palestinians were to decrease to 100K, the Israeli right-wing would rejoice much and give the surviving Palestinains all they want up to and including token representation in the government.
Destroying (the zionist, racist) Israel from within Israel is not impossible, I'm just urging caution against underestimating how difficult it would be. The Hawks are cunning, close associates to Ariel Sharon are literally on tape saying that the entire de-settlement of Gaza is just a ploy to freeze the peace process until Palestinans are genocided enough that peace is automatically achieved. They look like they were right.
The spectrum of Anti-Israel positions is also far wider than what you present it to be, there are more internally-consistent positons than just (1) Pro-Hamas (2) Pro-Israel and thinks it's perfect as it is (3) Pro-Israel and thinks it's flawed but that its flaws can be neutralized through the democratic process.
Re: Your meta point. I don't know, should 1200s Atheists know about Evolution ? They would have to know Evolution in order to present a viable alternative against the Abrahamic story of creation, but that wouldn't exist yet for the next 700 years. It's the greatest trick the status quo ever pulled on people, to convince them that "Status Quo sucks, What's the Alternative ? No Viable Alternative ? Therefore, every opposition to the Status Quo sucks and is meaningless" is a useful chain of reasoning.
I agree that an opposition that has a realistic and actionable alternative is much much better and much much more likely to succeed than an opposition that simply refuses and elaborates no further, but I disagree that the latter form of opposition is meaningless or is equivalent to the null action.
A side issue, but all slavery was abolished (in theory, but at least a lot fewer people were enslaved) at least in part because slavery became a less efficient way of using labor, but slavery for domestic labor seems at least as economically efficient as it ever was, and it's also abolished.
Re 2 comments... I was refering to top level, and I only see two (appreantly unless I click on one of them... there is no other button which displays the rest), which seemed reasonable since it also showed making further comments as disabled. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
I was agreeing about how Anti-Zionism == Anti-Semitism is wrong, so you're preaching to the choir. If your point is about how entrentched that claim is, then yeah - I concur.
Living in Israel, I don't need the video, the concept of Anti-Zionist Jews exist but under harsh attack (and some religious people here don't believe atheists actually exist), I can't tell how much of the proper political left (5-10% of voters?) ascribes to that since some pay lip service to Zionism. The concept of Anti-Zionist citizens though is a large minority represented in the Knesset.
So your point about slavery is... that one would have been right in destroying the U.S. at the time? I don't care much about history, I was bringing it up regarding to what it is now.
I think I understand and symphasize with your ironic claim, but as you present it it's just... reality? there are millions of jews, hostages of circumstance, living in israel due to choices of their parents, who will die if Israel stops existing. That's not being used as human shields, it's just life. I addition to that the danger to their life is leverged to get concessions, which is in a way being used as human shields.
Your bias towards (B) might be the crux of our disagreement, I am always leery of radical and ground-up restructuring when it includes high possibilty of death, but especially so when the death toll would include me, my family, and my friends. This makes the matter hard for me to discuss without bias. So yeah... sorry to get emotional about this but feeling powerless about my government killing thousands of civillians on the one hand and everything else on the other is stressfull.
A second crux might be that I obessed too much about opposition to existence rather than taken things are more general opposition, this probably invalidates most of my arguments? I still really don't like the phrasing, but I understand the framework it comes from.
I'm not sure what your point about The spectrum of Anti-Israel positions. All positions are wider than 3 possiblities, and I don't think I used the framing which you do. In particular I think that using Pro-Hamas or Pro-Israel at all is reductive and way too prevalent as terms and ways of thought.
Your analogy to 1200s Atheists is... bad? they say that they don't know where life originated from, nothing nothing is a valid alternative to the Abrahamic story of creation because it has no direct effect on anything. Waving shiny alternatives and causing widespread death is the greatest trick of radicalism... destroying things without a plan or with a bad one is kinda a good way to make everything worse. Not that anyone *here* is arguing for Status Quo.
I don't think opposition without alternative is meaningless or is equivalent to the null action, I think it can be actively harmful. I'm not asking for a realistic and actionable alternative, but for some vague gesture of in what direction the alternative is being looked at.
Obviously the first step should be saying "this is wrong" and no alternative is needed at that stage.
I'm not disagreeing (that much) by the way, emotions are hard to convey through emoji-less text but I'm actually overjoyed whenever I find Israelis like you. I'm just probing your views further because I'm interested in the general topic of discussion and all the myriad angles it can be viewed from. (And by the way, sorry for my username, I don't intend most Israelis with it or even a hypothetical sane Israel that doesn't kill the innocent Palestinians.)
> I was referring to top level, and I only see two
I see, that wasn't the case when the article still had comments enabled, but I can see it now. You can still defeat it by (1) Clicking on the replies of one of the 2 comments you can see (2) Click "Return To Thread" on the top, beneath the "Commenting has been turned off" grey text. You will return to the original thread where several, about 40+ or 50+, top-level comments are present.
I know you agree that Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism in the absolute, I'm grateful and a bit surprised you do, I'm just explaining why this isn't my prior about an arbitrary Israeli. Zionism to Israelis is like water to fish.
> The concept of Anti-Zionist citizens is represented in the Knesset
Because of the Heredim right ?
> that one would have been right in destroying the U.S. at the time?
Obviously, I can't make a sweeping moral claim about something that happened in 1860. For all I know, destroying the US in 1860 might have been the turning point that would allow the resurgence of slavery elsewhere. For all I know, no US or a worse US in the 1930s could have meant that Nazi Germany is a WW2 victor, imposing fates far worse than chattel slavery on multiple tens of millions of non-Germans in Europe alone. I don't believe anybody has the compute necessary to convincingly simulate 160 years of no US, certainly not the 80+ years from 1941 till now, certainly not in their head.
All I'm saying is that history can be deceiving, that it walks with atrociously slow steps and occasionally backtracks, that it walks in paths that make no sense from any human standpoint, any more than the coast of Norway makes sense to an urban road planner. It can be easy and tempting to look from your current vantage point and say "Phew, it's a good thing that we didn't destroy the US when it was a slaver nation, look at where we're now", but this is a fallacy, it's not like you visited other timelines and saw that every single alternative beginning with destroying the US ends badly, maybe some of them do, maybe the majority of them, but you have no reason to believe that all of them do.
> I think I understand and sympathize with your ironic claim, but as you present it it's just... reality
Oh I don't think that Israel is exceptional at all, at the very least its human shields enjoy high standards of living. The exact same about being used as human shields minus the standards of living can be said about my own native Egypt under the Al-Sisi regime or (in the horrifying extreme) North Korea. I'm an Anarchist for a reason.
> there are millions of jews, hostages of circumstance, living in israel due to choices of their parents
I hold not a single planck mass of hatred or blame towards them, they're the reason I don't want to see Israel destroyed by force. They're the reason my face falls when I hear about Israeli casualties, even the military ones.
> [All those Jews] will die if Israel stops existing
Ehhh, I can see where this is coming from and I sympathize hugely with it, but it's not that black and white. I'm not asking any Jew to take their chances, I'm just saying those chances are more like 50% to 60% at the worst rather than 90% to 99%, and they can get as low as 20% to 30% on good days.
Again, I personally wouldn't risk my family on death odds as low as 10% to 5%, so I'm not implying that those Jews are being unreasonable in fearing for their lives if Israel no longer exists, I'm just against inflating already bad odds to be worse.
> sorry to get emotional about this
Any Arab or Jew is plenty emotional about this, and that's an understatement. So don't apologize for being human !
> I'm not sure what your point about the spectrum of Anti-Israel positions
I was specifically reacting to the bit where you said "Although I don't like the US, that still wouldn't get me to support Al Qaeda or Nation of Islam". This might not have been intended on your part, but to me this has the implication that a person can only either (1) Support Al Qaeda (2) Support America and think it needs change from within (3) Support America and think it's perfect. The gap between (1) and (2) is massive, and includes lots of positions that are more hostile and violence-y than (2) but still nowhere near close to (1).
> In particular I think that using Pro-Hamas or Pro-Israel at all is reductive and way too prevalent as terms and ways of thought.
I very much agree. I use Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine/Pro-Hamas in the same sense as "Northern Hemisphere" and "Southern Hemishpere", very rough grouping of whole swaths of territories.
My point about 1200s atheists is just that people are too harsh on radical alternatives. People are harsh on anyone who wants to abolish capitalism (please ignore how extremely vague this is for now), abolish meat-eating, perform various ground-up restructuring of society and/or family. This makes sense from a certain point of view, otherwise any rando will just dream up 100s of ill-thought-out scenarios and spam their society with them until one of them hits and becomes a disaster. But, this also sometimes blinds people to how utterly the status quo sucks, and how some of the alternatives are only weak and badly-thought because very few embrace them, they are literally being run on less minds, so of course they will be unsatisfying and low-resolution (unless lying and false promises are used, which is a whole other can of worms).
As a vague gesture towards alternatives, what I would personally ask out of a genie if I found a magic lamp is the following :
1- The US stops supporting Israel with tanks and Iron Dome missiles, stops sending aircraft carriers for them, leaves BDS alone, AIPAC becomes well known and US politicians under their influence become less legitimate
2- The entire Arab/Muslim world becomes simultaneously more harsh and less harsh on Israel :
2--a) More : No trade relations, military coordination, or intelligence coordination. Sanctions, Oil embargos, etc... The countries that are still making their peace with Israel or haven't yet, make peace conditional on Palestinians being treated better.
2--b) Less : Hebrew is taught in schools alongside Arabic (or the other dominant language in non-Arabic cases like Indonesia and Pakistan), the pro-Jew POV becomes more prevalent and socially acceptable, the Israeli POV and the catastrophic failures of Arab leaders of the 1950s-1980s are focused more during history classes. Student exchanges, joint cultural works (jointly-produced movies and TV series, music, etc...), tourism and so on.
By the way, sorry for dropping off from the conversatoin - had to go to sleep and then life distracted me. I can try to write full replies if you find this conversation fruitful-in-potential and don't mind long lulls.
He has a previous article on a similar topic, so his subscribers would read them in this order:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-israel-is-different
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose
I just noticed that what I know about HSV-1 (herpes) don't make sense:
1- A large majority of the population carry the virus (per internet & common knowledge)
2- But only a minority sometimes get blisters (per internet & common knowledge)
3- Active blisters are highly contagious (per my physician)
4- But asymptomatic carriers still shed virus 20% of the time (less if they're under antiviral treatment) (per wikipedia)
5- During a blister episode, I should avoid touching it, or wash my hands thorougly afterward, especially before touching any other mucosa (eye, lips, genitals) (per my physician)
From 5-, I assume that a given HSV-1 infection is localized, and that I could get multiple ones if I were careless. But for someone in his 30's who never developed any, is the precaution actually relevant? The odds are high that they're asymptomatic carriers, would a different source of HSV-1 risk causing episodes when the previous one(s?) didn't? And if asymptomatic carriers shed viruses 20% of the time, any time I shake hands with someone, and we don't have super rigorous hand-mouth hygiene, and I rub my eyes afterward, shouldn't I risk getting an infection in the eye?
And if each infection is independent from each other, and asymptomatic carriers shed virus 20% of the time, then shouldn't any unprotected oral sex involve a ~20% (a bit less, for those that aren't carriers) risk of getting a genital infection?
There's something that is wrong, either from the bits I got from wikipedia, from those I got from my physician 20 years ago, or from those I infer.
Organs don't age at the same rate.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03821-w
Previous discussion: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-304/comment/44384289
I'm amazed. I think this is the first time I've raised a theoretical/intuitive question and had some plausible science show up so fast.
There's a video making rounds of various university presidents refusing to outright say that calling for a genocide of Jews violates campus policies on bullying and harassment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuTfzcNIeDI if you haven't seen it and want to). My question is, if you're a president of a major US university being asked this question in those words, why do you not give a passionate speech about how of course calling for genocide (of anyone) is bullying and harassment, but by the way, that isn't actually happening? What do you stand to gain by equivocating?
I haven't watched the video but I did enjoy Ken White's analysis of the dynamics around it: https://popehat.substack.com/p/stop-demanding-dumb-answers-to-hard
>Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A generous interpretation — a credulous one — would be that the hearing was designed to inquire why colleges aren’t protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial primarily intended to convey that a wide variety of dissenting speech about Israel is inherently antisemitic, that American colleges are shitholes of evil liberalism, and that Democrats suck. Since Democrats do suck, they mostly cooperated.
>The core Two-Minute Hate of this carnival was Rep. Elise Stefanik’s demand for yes-or-no answers to questions about whether policies at Harvard, Penn, and MIT would prohibit calling for the genocide of Jews. You might think Elise Stefanik is an unlikely standard-bearer for a crusade against antisemitism, given that she’s a repeat promoter of Great Replacement Theory, the antisemitic trope that Jews are bringing foreigners into America to undermine it. But if you bought Stefanik’s bullshit, you probably didn’t think that far. The college presidents did a rather clumsy job of saying, accurately but unconvincingly, that the answer depends on the context. Stefanik and every politician our loudmouth who wants you to hate and distrust college education and Palestinians pounced on it. And many of you fell for it. You — and I say this with love — absolute fucking dupes.
I did *not* enjoy that analysis. That it's a show trial is obvious; the defendant at a show trial can still acquit themselves better or worse before losing.
Put differently -- let's say I personally am failing to get outraged (mostly because I'm not prone to outrage), but have friends who are getting outraged. Telling them that they are "absolute fucking dupes" does not advance the cause of conveying to them how it's possible to both be a decent human being and not be outraged.
It's not even a show trial, it's just a show. And yes, it's stupid for the Senate to force a bunch of university presidents to star in such a show, but yeah, if you have to do it, do it better than that.
I don't know the first thing about Ivy League politics and the labyrinthian machination concocted by the army of lawyers that those schools have on call, who no doubt advised each of those presidents.
But if **I** was questioned in that session, I imagine I would be tempted to not say a straightforward "Yes" in order to :
1- Refuse to give the obviously performative shrill congresswoman an easy answer she can tout on twitter. If I rip into her, I will be punished because she's Mrs. Congresswoman (or will I ?). If I give a passionate speech about how calling for the genocide of Jews is of course wrong and reprehensible, but is not happening, she will cut the part that she likes and tout it to her twitter hordes anyway. If she can't, she will keep pressing for an easy answer, "Yes or No Mrs. President, Yes or No, I want a single bit answer because I can't fit anything bigger into my brain."
Yes Or No questions are rhetorical tricks when asked from positions of imbalanced power, like debates with hostile audiences and heated formal hearings. When someone replies with a straightforward Yes or No, they're agreeing to every single word, premise, and phrasing in the question. "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife by lightly kissing her neck even though she's not in the mood for sex ? YES OR NO ?".
Yes Or No questions are good in high-trust environments where the majority of the audience can be trusted to know rhetorical manipulation tactics like the above and not fall for it, the questions can be used to establish common ground quickly and efficiently and dispel baileys advanced by other members of the ingroup at the outset : "As a Pro-Palestinian, I will agree that yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is utterly reprehensible and has no place in any sane stand for Palestine."
2- Building on 1, if I answer yes, the obvious next 2 lines of inquiry is establishing whether calls for genocide of Jews happened in my university and whether I'm blamable for it. The Congresswoman already hinted at what kind of evidence she will use to establish the first :
->- [0:21 in the video]
> [MIT president] I have not heard any chants calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus
>> [Congresswoman] But you have heard chants for Intifada
But those are already 2 very different things, the 2 Intifidas weren't a genocide of Jews by any sane measure, the ratio of Israelis vs Palestinians killed in the first Intifada is something like 200 to 2000, no genocider ever accepts those KD ratios. This doesn't mean the Intifada is a good or neutral thing, it has burned immense amounts of goodwill and the second one is probably the reason why the peace process halted dead in its tracks. But it was no genocide, and establishing this requires a lot of argument in front of the scary big camera while Mr. Shrill Congresswoman says "I WILL GIVE YOU ONE LAST CHANCE FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO KNOW YOUR TESTIMONY : BABIES SHOULD NOT BE KILLED, YAY OR NAY ?"
So it's extremely tempting to not cede any ground at all in the face of such an opponent, any one moment or the other the dramatic showdown will happen anyway, the opponent WILL "win" anyway because she has the privilege to ask questions and her post-production will have a field day with the answers one way or the other, so it better happens when I'm in the strong position and my opponent is still exhausting her voice just trying to get me to agree with the beachhead she will launch her next attack from.
Now obviously, this is all a Machiavellian analysis that I'm not agreeing with or saying is remotely good or acceptable, and staying silent in the face of such a question while potentially millions of Jews watch is not even a good strategy for anyone remotely Pro-Palestinian in the sane secular human-rights-based way, besides being morally icky of course. The best solution is to not get myself in such incredibly hostile debate environments to begin with, the second best solution is to phrase my response as a hostile counter-question :
> What are you implying with this question ? We all know that nobody decent would stand silently while someone is chanting for the genocide of anybody, so the real question is why you thought it would be useful to imply with an indisdious phrasing of the question that I do not have this common decency, and do you agree that calling for the genocide of Palestinians is an immoral thing to do ? Do you agree that the current Israeli military response has claimed the lives of 16000+ Palestinian civilians ?
Ceding ground, but hiding the ceded ground in between 2 or more questions, the more questions making more assumptions about her the merrier. She now have 2 choices, either accepting the ceded ground and continuing on from it, opening herself to repeated counter attacks based from the questions "Are you refusing to say whether chanting for the death of Palestinians is wrong, Congresswoman ?", or getting distracted by the counter-questions, forgetting the ceded ground and not developing the original attack. This has to be done carefully within the confines of whatever etiquettes I'm expected to follow, so that she doesn't abort the whole episode and declare victory when she remembers she's the one who asks questions. The bet is that she gets distracted by the questions that she forgets she has the option of not answering them. That's why more questions hiding more outrageous assumptions about her is better.
Again, all of this is very Machia-villain and against the spirit of good and honest debates of the kind that enlightens, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.
I disagree with your "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife by lightly kissing her neck even though she's not in the mood for sex ? YES OR NO ?" example. That is, in practice I agree that you'd end up with a disagreement over what constitutes rape / genocide, but the question being asked in the video is the straightforward "Mr. Husband, do you rape your wife?". It seems to me to be *incredibly* bad optics to be equivocating on that phrasing, as opposed to equivocating on what exactly "rape" is. Though I suppose this is the strategy that Bill Clinton tried, and it didn't work great for him.
Well I agree, the initial question by the Congresswoman didn't smuggle a lot of assumption on the surface.
But I'm judging by her considering the Intifada to be a genocide, if she had won that concession from the presidents she would have probably kept pushing it till the point where saying "Ceasefire NOW" is now genocide against Jews. The presidents didn't handle it well but if I were in their shoes I wouldn't have given her a straightforward 1-bit answer either.
I agree that one should ignore the 1-bit constraint and give a longer response; my own knee-jerk reaction is "why are you asking about genocide *of the Jews* as if that was important, are you implying that calling for a genocide of someone else would be just fine?" It's just, I'm desperately confused by why they didn't in fact answer that "of course we wouldn't stand idly by if anyone were calling for a genocide on our campus, BUT" and instead went with a "maybe" to the entire thing.
Because their first duty as officers of their respective institutions is to protect them from liability. That's far more important than answering a "gotcha" question.
I'm still confused by how any of this incurs liability for the institution. Wouldn't that have to go something like this? "My client was disciplined for harassment because they were calling for the genocide of the Jews. We concede that they were calling for the genocide, but hold that the disciplinary action violated Harvard's harassment policy." That seems like an extremely unsympathetic case to make.
You other point, that actually it *might not be* a violation of the policy, and therefore unconditionally saying that it *is* would be lying, makes a lot more sense to me.
What we're looking at is a clash between two orthogonal moral systems. The first, is "normie morality" in which the good or bad of an act depends on the nature of the act itself without regard for who is doing it. The second is what we could call "social justice morality", and in that system the moral value of an act is determined primarily by its alignment towards redressing socio-economic imbalances between large groups of people.
The University Presidents are stuck in a difficult position where they are forced, in front of congress and on live TV, to choose between the two moral systems. I think deep down they don't actually agree with social justice morality, but they are dependent on a large group of people who actually do. Of course they're also subject to an even larger and more economically influential (though less violent) group of people who believe in normie morality. All you can do in this situation is waffle, say something contradictory and non-committal, and hope that one of the other university presidents screws up even worse so that they'll get all the heat, not you.
I was born in the USSR, and absorbed at least some of the mindset through osmosis. My impression was that modeling things in terms of class was conceptually similar to the SJW framework, and also that it was flexible enough for responses along the lines of "of course we don't condone calling for genocide, but we fully support the offers of our downtrodden and oppressed brethren to shake off the shackles of their oppressors". I am surprised that the SJW-inspired crowd instead bites the bullet of continuing to be wishy-washy, even when literally asked about "calling for genocide of the Jews".
They can't give that reply because that isn't an official policy position of any of their respective schools. I'm not convinced that it should be. As for the substance of the question, not a lawyer but I would imagine that calls for non-specific acts of violence are protected speech in the US, or at least the legal status is murky enough that we shouldn't be asking a college president to opine about it.
I would be happier with the video if the university professors were asked what sort of context or actions they had in mind. This being said, I'm not pleased at all that they're so wishy-washy on the subject.
I listened to the second half, and it's a bit clearer. Threats against individuals are taken seriously, threats against the whole group is no-never-mind.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that individuals have rights in a way that groups don't, but it seems incredibly *stupid* to explicitly say that literally calling for the final solution would be fine depending on context.
As I said above, I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is that calling for the final solution, in a general nonspecific way, is protected speech in the US. This may be good or bad depending, but there isn't much a university can do about that.
Harvard and MIT are private universities, and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action. Or not, as they chose.
And yes, "We should exterminate the Jews", as a general and nospecific threat, is protected against government interference. So is "We should reinstitute Negro slavery" or "we should round up all the Muslims and put them in camps" or "we should forcibly detransition all the transgender people". A private university is free to say that they value academic freedom enough to allow all of those. Or to say that they value civility enough to kick you out for saying any of those.
Or to say "No on the slavery, concentration camps, forced detransitions and all that, but advocating the Final Solution for the Jewish Problem is just fine". But if that's their position, it's not freedom of speech, it's plain antisemitism and should be called out as such. Also, there are legal issues with expressing official antisemitism (or anti-any-protected-group-ism) while taking federal money for e.g. research projects.
I wish that, instead of speculating what the presidents *would* say *if* they were asked about calling for mass lynchings, Elise Stefanik just *did* ask. Not necessarily because I expect to like the outcome, but I don't like speculating about "what would they say if X, huh? huh?!" when there was an excellent opportunity to test it.
>and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action.<
Of course this hearing is government action, and the Congresswoman here should not be allowed to pressure private institutions to apply stronger restrictions than the government can apply directly. It's gross.
"Harvard and MIT are private universities, and as such can have speech codes stronger than would be allowed by the 1st Amendment's restriction on government action. Or not, as they chose."
I don't think that this is true. I don't lose my free speech rights by simply walking into a shopping mall, or a corporate headquarters, or a private campground, all private institutions. Of course, they can regulate behavior that interferes with the normal course of activities there, as can a private university, but that has nothing to do with the content of the speech.
According to Tyler: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/the-university-presidents.html their equivocating prevents lawsuits.
"Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups. That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct. As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”"
I was confused by why lawyers would find it objectionable to, again, denounce the literal phrase "calling for a genocide of the Jews" in abritrarily strong terms. Someone I talked to pointed out that Elise Stefanik wasn't interested in getting the presidents to denounce it, she wanted them to specifically declare that it would violate their bullying and harassment policy. Their point was that, if the university president were to concede that it would violate the harassment policy, then the university would go up for a harassment lawsuit (and a university administrator who allows that is clearly no longer employable as a university administrator). I'm not entirely sure I follow the implication "president concedes that something is a violation of the internal harassment policy" => "university gets sued" (doesn't it follow that the university should just not have an internal harassment policy?), but it does at least explain why everyone was so committed to particular formulations of their question / answer.
That, plus the fact that it in all liklihood *doesn't* violate their bullying and harassment policies (because they likely do not meet the legal criteria for bullying or harassment). Once again, I am not a lawyer, so someone should fact check me. But can you imagine the publicity storm that would erupt if one of them admitted that?
Ah. Yeah, ok, the fact that they could go up for perjury if they unconditionally said it *did* violate it is a good point. (Also not a lawyer, but having looked through Harvard's bullying and harassment policy, I am also not convinced it would violate it.)
Very much true, though it does open them up to charges of hypocrisy and in the court of public opinion. Neither of those things are controlled by lawyers (though good PR people might have some thoughts) and don't directly lead to monetary damages.
Conservatives, whose opinions they clearly did not care about already, have more reason to dislike them and more ammunition to post on right-leaning news sources that Ivy League universities don't care about. This kind of concern has a very low natural ceiling for these schools.
I think what it really comes down to is if rich Jews are willing to pull donations from these schools more than replacement donors come in, we might see some action. Otherwise their testimony was the best of a group of bad options for them.
Scott, if you're willing to, would you share some information about prerequisites and timelines for applying to medical school in Ireland? I'm considering it because applying to medical school in the US would take me ~3 years, which seems absurd (I'm only missing 5 courses, but they mostly have to be taken in sequence.)
I know about the issues with match rates and all that – but I want to check if applying is worthwhile before I think about that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ
Four hours! by hbomberguy about the plagiarism by James Somerton on youtube. I've been told by a number of people that it's both meticulous and engaging, and I might watch it.
https://youtu.be/A6_LW1PkmnY?feature=shared
Almost two hours by Todd in the Shadows about how Somerton was talking utter nonsense, and yet had a substantial reputation until hbomberguy documented the plagiarism. I watched this one and I recommend it.
Somerton's youtube presence is toast. I'm interested to see that youtube posters have done a better job of opposing plagiarism than the government has.
I watched both videos: Todd's is more bang for your buck (in terms of watch time) but Hbomber's is thorough and engaging. Hbomber spends the first hour or so talking about other YouTubers who have plagiarized, and then spends the rest of the video on Somerton.
It's not the government's job to oppose plagiarism at all, let alone on YouTube. It's not even a tort like copyright infringement, unless it actually rises to that level.
Robot with wheels on all four limbs.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/quadruped-robot-wheels
"The ETHZ researchers got the robot to reliably perform these complex behaviors using a kind of reinforcement learning called ‘curiosity driven’ learning. In simulation, the robot is given a goal that it needs to achieve—in this case, the robot is rewarded for achieving the goal of passing through a doorway, or for getting a package into a box. These are very high-level goals (also called “sparse rewards”), and the robot doesn’t get any encouragement along the way. Instead, it has to figure out how to complete the entire task from scratch."
The number 1 song on Israel's spotify and YouTube is a genocidal rap that compares Palestinians to Amalek, celebrates the destruction of Gaza as the righteous revenge for Gaza's envelope's Kibbutz children, and - for some reason - mentions Mia Khalifa and Bela Hadid on the same footing as Hamas and Hezbollah leadership.
The Song's name, Harbu Darbu, is a corruption of the Syrian Arabic dialect colloquial expression حرب و ضرب, meaning literally "War and Striking". It's a Hebrew slang in the criminal underworld for "Swords and Destruction"[3].
Making fun of Palestine supporters, the lyrics likens "Free Palestine" to a holiday sale, utilizing the English double entendre of "Free" as in "The IDF will take Palestine for free".
On YouTube, the official upload has 5.3 million views in 3 weeks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rk3n9V-aQs
[2] https://lyricstranslate.com/en/harbudarbu-charbu-darbu.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbu_Darbu
Nice. Israel has more confidence in itself than the West does. I don't remember songs like this after 9/11. Well, maybe a few country ones, but not rap ones.
It will never cease to be hilarious or ironic when Pro Genociders rationalize Israel's military response by drawing parallels to 9/11, forgetting how did that work out for them.
You've mistranslated the lyric you find damning. It is not a play on the English equivocation between 'free' (as in not requiring payment) and 'free' (as in liberty). The line is making fun of Palestinians who claim to speak Hebrew but make exactly the mistake you just did. The line is: "They shout 'Free Palestine' but it sounds like a holiday sale to me." The immediate joke is the (imagined) Palestinian chose the wrong word for 'free', the one that means 'sale' and not 'liberty.' It's a very rudimentary mistake because even the grammar is wrong. (Your Arabic, however, is correct.)
It doesn't directly celebrate destruction in Gaza in the name of Kibbutz children. It says to write the names of victims of the attack on the guns and the shells of IDF soldiers. Your interpretation that any reference to weapons of the IDF is a reference to Gaza's destruction is an interpretation, not plainly in the song. The only other references to Gaza are a call to make war and generically to shoot at it as well as associating it with places like the Golan heights.
The line about Mia Khalifa is a claim that God's vengeance will come on anyone who supported the October 7th attacks or Hamas. They are not mentioned 'on the same footing' but a dozen lines later. There's about ten lines from most to least serious and Mia Khalifa/Bella Hadid are at the very end.
Lastly, of the five million views the vast majority of them come from the Arab world with Israel registering about 1.2 million of them. The other millions are mostly from the rest of the Middle East. Because, and I suspect this is not a coincidence, it's become a common cause on Arabic social media and a lot of bad translations are floating around that either purposefully or due to lack of Hebrew knowledge mistranslate the lyrics. And they make many of the claims you do.
(Of course there's something of an asymmetry here due to the number of Arabs in the region vs the number of Jews where 1 million Jews is a huge proportion of the Jewish population while 4 million Arabs is a small percentage.)
Please try to be better about your contributions on this topic. If you are (as there are now numerous signs) someone who doesn't speak Hebrew very well and who hates Israel you will be respected more for making your honest case than pretending. And you should generally be more careful of anti-Israeli news articles because you should, if you want an accurate model of the world, be especially sharp eyed about anything that reinforces your worldview to avoid confirmation bias.
> You've mistranslated
I didn't translate any Hebrew myself, as a matter of fact. I just read the English lyrics I posted in [2].
When I first read the line making fun of 'Free Palestine' I didn't actually understand what's the connection between holiday sales and the slogan, one of the sources I read about the song suggested this interpretation and it made sense to me, so I included it.
> Your Arabic, however, is correct
There would have to be something very wrong with me to be bad at my native tongue.
> It doesn't directly celebrate destruction in Gaza in the name of Kibbutz children. [...] It says to write the names of victims of the attack on the guns and the shells of IDF soldiers.
Uhmm okay, and what are the guns and the shells of the IDF doing right now ? What is the only use of guns and shells ?
Counterfactual : let's say I sing about writing the names of Gaza's children on the guns and rockets of Hamas. Does this count as a celebration of the destruction of Israel or nah ? If yes, what's different when I switch it to Israeli children and Israeli weapons ?
And What about comparing Gazans to Amalek ?
> The line about Mia Khalifa is a claim that God's vengeance
Just God's revenge ? Isn't this line right there after mentioning Bella, Dua and Mia :
>> All the IDF units are coming, to put the heat of the sword
>> on their heads, woe woe
Ten lines in a rap song doesn't seem like too much of a distance to me. Especially when most of them are 1 catch phrase repeated.
Just the mere fact that they mention the name of a model, a porn star and a singer next to the names of Islamist organizations' leaders is an indicator there is an astonishing amount of confused victimhood and misguided radicalization where that came from.
> the five million views the vast majority of them come from the Arab world with Israel registering about 1.2 million of them.
As far as I know you can't be sourcing this claim from the YouTube UI shown to ordinary viewers, I have also seen the first 3 pages of google search results for this song before making the post and I have never seen this claim referenced. So unless you have the credentials of the uploader account or a YouTube-internal database, I want to know who you are quoting this number from please.
> making your honest case than pretending.
Pretending to be what ? This is my honest case. Are you saying I don't believe what I'm writing ?
> you should generally be more careful of anti-Israeli news articles because you should, if you want an accurate model of the world, be especially sharp eyed about anything that reinforces your worldview to avoid confirmation bias
A thing I'm already taking into account as much as I can, in proportion to the counter-signal that Israel has spent 70 years and billions of dollars openly injecting propaganda in the western and the global info stream, to the point where the AIPAC annual policy conference is second only to the State of the Union in how many US feds eyeballs it captures.
Anti-Israel news sources are, quite trivially, the only place where I will find facts and interpretations suppressed by this vast propaganda machine. I also see a fair amount of pro-Israel news sources, take the diff, and reach my best-effort view.
> Uhmm okay, and what are the guns and the shells of the IDF doing right now ? What is the only use of guns and shells ?
To wage war. No one disputes that Israel is waging war in Gaza. The immediate interpretation that anything Israel does in Gaza is automatically destroying Gaza is certainly an interpretation people push. But it's an interpretation and your original claim was not, "I interpret X to mean Y." It was that the song directly called for the destruction of Gaza.
> Counterfactual : let's say I sing about writing the names of Gaza's children on the guns and rockets of Hamas. Does this count as a celebration of the destruction of Israel or nah ? If yes, what's different when I switch it to Israeli children and Israeli weapons ?
No counterfactual necessary, such songs exist. They generally don't come under such scrutiny though. And I do distinguish between the ones that directly call for the destruction of Israel or killing of Jews and those that say something general like 'remember the martyrs'.
> I want to know who you are quoting this number from please.
From the music charts. 1.2 million in Israel, 6 million on the regional charts. Unless you think it's a bunch of Assyrian Christians I think it's fair to assume the other 5 million-ish are Muslims of various kinds.
> Pretending to be what ? This is my honest case. Are you saying I don't believe what I'm writing ?
You have claimed that you have knowledge of Hebrew and studied Israel and so your hatred of Israel is justified. I take you about as seriously as I'd take an Israeli who went by the name "LearnedArabicHatesPalestinians" and who constantly posted things about how Arabs are awful and Hamas is barbaric. Which is to say, not very.
I also don't believe you are making a genuine effort to do anything more than propagandize on behalf of your preferred side. I'd prefer you put more effort into actually thinking about the situation and delivering your point of view with more heat and less light. Because, unfortunately, the quality of pro-Palestinian commentators here is quite low and I'd love to have a high quality one around. You clearly want to be that and feel passionately about this. But you're not really contributing so far. As it is right now you're almost certainly violating the rules and saying untrue things.
> A thing I'm already taking into account as much as I can, in proportion to the counter-signal that Israel has spent 70 years and billions of dollars openly injecting propaganda in the western and the global info stream, to the point where the AIPAC annual policy conference is second only to the State of the Union in how many US feds eyeballs it captures.
The Muslim world spends more money influencing American policy and news than Israel does. Muslims have more influence than Israel does by simple virtue of size. Both economically and population-wise Now, a lot of that goes to propping up Gulf State monarchies rather than advocating for support for Palestine. But I'm not sure if that's your point. If you just do an accounting the Egyptians are the ones who recently had their hooks in a Senator that headed foreign relations. I can't think of anything comparable Israel has.
Also: Do you have a source about how AIPAC is the second most watched speech by Federal policymakers and employees? In general it's accepted that the oil states, most of which are Muslim, have more outsized influence.
> Anti-Israel news sources are, quite trivially, the only place where I will find facts and interpretations suppressed by this vast propaganda machine. I also see a fair amount of pro-Israel news sources, take the diff, and reach my best-effort view.
Is this because they're pro-Israel or because you're so anti-Israel that neutrality feels pro-Israel to you? Put another way, I hear this same charge from the extreme pro-Israel side.
> The immediate interpretation that anything Israel does in Gaza is automatically destroying Gaza
So Israel is not destroying Gaza ? What, It's waging war in it purely using the power of friendship and love ? No 50% of urban areas made one with the ground https://apnews.com/article/palestinians-gaza-israel-bombing-destruction-hamas-reconstruction-f299a28410b70ee05dd764df97d8d3a0 ?
No 1.8 million Palestinians displaced and 15000+ killed ?
> such songs exist.
Please post some.
> I do distinguish between the ones that directly call for the destruction of Israel or killing of Jews and those that say something general like 'remember the martyrs'.
So according to you, a song that compares Palestinians to Amalek belongs to the second category and not the first ?
> From the music charts. 1.2 million in Israel, 6 million on the regional charts.
Where are those charts/statistics you're getting those numbers from ? According to the song's wikipedia article :
>> As of December 2023, "Harbu Darbu" had received almost 3.5 million listens and views.
No mention of 1.2 million views/listens in Israel, no mention that the total number of 5 on YouTube is mostly from the Middle East instead of globally.
> You have claimed that you have knowledge of Hebrew and studied Israel
I have claimed absolutely no such thing. I have been pretty honest about my level of Hebrew knowledge since day 1, about 7 or 8 open threads ago. Just last thread I was replying to Nancy Lebovitz saying that I still find it difficult to tell Hebrew letters apart by name. My username begins with "Learns" not "Learned", it's an ongoing thing that's sadly not going to finish in time for me to have the pleasure of seeing some natives calling for the genocide of my ethnic group.
I have never actually claimed that I hate Israelis in the absolute, only Israel. Not being able to distinguish between a state and a population already makes you not the greatest paragon of neutrality. That's the difference between the Russian state and the Russian people, Putin vs. Dostoevsky.
> I also don't believe you are making a genuine effort to do anything more than propagandize on behalf of your preferred side.
What examples of effort that you would like to see me do ? Agree with you ? Something else ? Mention some concrete things that I can put on a checklist.
> the quality of pro-Palestinian commentators here is quite low
It's pretty insulting to say that the quality of **people**, not comments, are low. I will chalk this up to a slip on your part.
No hard feelings my man, but I do not exist to please you. You're not the sole arbiter of what passes as a high quality comment vs. a low quality one. If you have specific complaints about my views or how I express them that don't boil down to just "I don't like them and I don't like you", I'm all ears, **everyone** can use a little bit of criticism even if it's harsh and coming from a hostile place. But I don't find your complaints very actionable to be honest, they are all variations on "You're a liar, You're bigoted against Israelis, You're misguided/propagandized/stupid/low-quality, etc...", and even if I were all of these things, which is possible, you have to be more specific if your goal is anything but simply dunking on me for the entertainment or catharsis value.
> right now you're almost certainly violating the rules
Do you mean the "Kind Necessary True" rule ? Kind is kinda out of the window because there is nothing kind you can say about a war where one side is annihilating the civilian population of a city with more bombs in a month than what was dropped on Afghanistan in a year. True ? Not a single word out of my original comment was factually false to the best of my knowledge when I posted it, the mistranslation about 'Free Palestine' is out of my hands (and it's not independently confirmed, I'm merely taking your word for it.)
Necessary ? I would say yes, people should know that the state incessantly claiming to be a victim and denying it's doing a genocide has people who produced a hugely-watched and hugely-listened-to song comparing the civilians of their enemies to Amalek, who in the Bible are people that God orders the Jews to genocide and kill to the last child.
Ultimately, if you think I'm such a rule violator, you can report me and move on. There is no point to debating the True/Necessary conditions because you're almost guaranteed to view anything that paints Israel in a bad light as noise, misinformation or outliers. Signals and Correctives https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-corrective/
> The Muslim world spends more money
I don't believe this is true until I see numbers. And I'm atheist so I don't get your point, so what that the Muslim world spends more money on bribes and lobbying ? I have a finite brain that can only get mad about so many things, right now there are 15000+ innocents dying in front of the cameras, so I'm mad about that. When this ends, I will get back to being mad about Islam buying legitimacy it doesn't deserve with petrodollars. Sometimes the 2 things intersect when some idiot on one side or the other islamizes the conflict, and then I'm the first one who gets mad.
> Do you have a source about how AIPAC is the second most watched speech by Federal policymakers and employees?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee#Supporters
> Is this because they're pro-Israel or because you're so anti-Israel that neutrality feels pro-Israel to you?
I have several heuristics to judge someone or some source as "Pro-Israel", some of those are :
1- Doesn't recognize that Palestinians have a right to the land, views them as guests
2- Doesn't mention anything about myriad of Israeli genocides of Palestinians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusation
3- Doesn't distinguish between Arabs and Muslims, thinks Arabs are inherently more prone to violence and peace-rejectionism and that every single thing Israel ever did was reacting to them
4- Emotional blackmail using the historical anti-semitism of several societies that hosted Jews (the Arab ones were the least among them by the way)
5- Uses Judaism and the Bible as a serious argument that the Israel has a legitimate right to the land
I suspect that part of how Israel got into this situation is excessive attention to how much it's been hurt and not enough attention on how it can hurt people.
This is a hint.
Are you indirectly saying that Palestinians do the same thing ?
I believe the song is pro killing Gazans though I admit I'm going by a version with English sub-titles that doesn't seem to be on youtube any more. It was the one where the translator said there was so much slang they weren't sure they got all of it.
In recent years, many sci-fi and fantasy fans have groused that classic literature is considered a higher art than those genres. No doubt that classic literature has taken a cultural beating over the past decade or two. For instance, in the '90s, Ernest Hemingway was still considered to be one of the greatest American authors of all time. Now he has been relegated to the old white racist league, never to be mentioned in print.
Meanwhile Tolkien has replaced Tolstoy as the great, old, wise author, at least online.
I consider this to be a bad turn of events.
The main theme of classic literature is mortality, death. It's something we all must confront, and it is worthwhile to think about, to meditate upon, to read about.
Sci-fi, fantasy and other genre fiction have deservedly been held in lesser esteem than Literature.
"The main theme of classic literature is mortality, death "
That's called damning with feint praise. Classical literature is, luckily for us, way wider than that.
Mortality and death tend to be incredibly dull subjects. Oh boy, another book about how we're all going to die. I'm sure the latest justification for why this is a good thing will be absolutely riveting. Give me stories of heroes with the actual power to change things, please. Reality is grim enough as it is, and no amount of "Literature" about the poetry of futility will improve matters.
>I'm sure the latest justification for why this is a good thing will be absolutely riveting. Give me stories of heroes with the actual power to change things, please<
Why not both? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngGede_9hAE
...oh wait that one's still fantasy.
Also spoilers I guess.
The cultural beating classic literature has taken over the past couple of decades has nothing to do with science fiction and fantasy. You allude to the actual cause when you mention the 'old white racist league'. The cultural elite, unlike the actual consumer audience, wants to promote diversity over quality, which means tearing down the great and old in favor of the mediocre, new and diverse. This is not confined to classic literature, nor even literature in general. You can see the same effect in almost any field of art, though the more the art tends towards the populist the slower the disease spreads.
Tolkien has survived where a lot of classic 'great, old, wise' sci-fi and fantasy authors have fallen victim to the same forces that took down Tolstoy because blockbuster movies are a much more populist media due to the need to actually earn at least a portion of their tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar budgets from the wallets of the public. If Tolkien hadn't been brought to film, he would have been shoved aside like the others. And we've seen efforts to shove Tolkien into the mediocre diversity mold, which have produced predictably mediocre results, though ones labeled 'Tolkien' to try to convince the mass public that they still had some of the 'great, old wisdom' left.
As far as genres go, fantasy is specifically a genre that is optimized for telling stories. Just about any theme can be done well in fantasy.
"Ernest Hemingway...has been relegated to the old white racist league, never to be mentioned in print."
That statement is false. I read it to my elder son whose bachelor's degree from an American liberal-arts college is in literature and who recently completed a master's at one of the nation's elite arts schools located in a large "blue" city; he LOLed.
Ken Burns' 6-hour documentary mini-series "Hemingway" debuted on PBS in 2021; I watched all of it. It accurately described the racial attitudes that were reflected in Hemingway's writing and in his life, which didn't at all distract or detract from the series' portrayal of Hemingway.
I would actually not be *too* sure if this is the case. At least the 4chan /lit/ charts (ie. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/4chanlit/images/2/27/Top100lit2014.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20160102025035) have tended to be quite heavy on classic (or "modern classic") literature, eschewing SF/fantasy, and 4chan considers to be a major culture former among the younger generations, at least from what I've understood.
4chan has been slowly dying for years and /lit/ isn't one of the bigger boards. I wouldn't take them as a barometer of the younger generations at all.
i think Tolkien, if he has, only has become prominent due to the generations that grew up on the incredibly popular movies. I used to read SF heavily in the 80s, and fans wpuld have thought of him as one of many delights.
I mean Anne McCaffrey for example was a huge popular success; there were 24 pern novels and she wrote a lot of other series; i liked The Ship who Sang and the novels she wrote in that world. She's not alone though; if you want someone as a literary replacement i think a sf fan would argue Gene Wolfe over Tolkien, or if earlier Samuel Delany. R.A. Lafferty or Tom Disch or Barry Malzberg as well. A SF fan woukd say "yeah Tolkien is great but i really love..."
i think the issue is people read less overall though and read based on movies.
i think in the old days i'd agree but now its too much of a monkey's paw to gamble. Even then though.
There are some older things that aren't good adaptations but are valuable because that the only ones they'll ever get. The old cartoon The Flight of Dragons is an okay watch, but its very precious to me because it's actually Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon Knight, in part. Or the old TV movie "The People" which was based on Zenna Henderson's stories and the People.
i think sometimes a bad adaptation can be a remembrance at least.
I'm not saying you're wrong about any of this, but I find grand and vague pronouncements about "how the culture has changed" on some issue to be overdone and often unconvincing. And even when they're true at the time, most "permanent cultural shifts" only last for a few years. So can I ask how you quantify claims like "Tolkien has replaced Tolstoy" online? Is this just an impression or measured in some way? Do you mean among media outlets or among random commenters? If the latter, are you sure there's a meaningful difference between "opinions of random people on Twitter" now and "opinions of random people at the bar (or on Usenet)" thirty years ago? That you're not just comparing elite opinions in the past with popular opinions now and saying opinions have become more populist?
Again, not saying you're wrong, just that I find claims like this suspicious.
And as for Hemingway, are you talking more "a few NYT #cancelHemingway articles" or "routine removal of Hemingway from hundreds of school/university curricula"? If the latter, I wouldn't find *this* claim suspicious at all, just incredibly depressing.
A great deal of classic literature is fantasy or sf. Consider Gulliver's Travels and the Divine Comedy, for example.
LOTR has a tremendous amount about death and loss.
There's more to life and literature than contemplating death.
See also Peter Beagle. One of his big themes is "Accept death. The acceptance is good for you."
Ray Bradbury is a modern example. If you expand it to horror, Shirley Jackson is too. Neither seem to be considered only genre fiction.
A Christmas Carol came to mind for me!
(I'm not sure if Divine Comedy counts, though. I'd have thought fantasy is reserved for things practically no one believes are real.)
Dante's depiction of the afterlife includes a number of monsters from Greek mythology in addition to the Christian stuff, so I think he'd still qualify as a fantasy writer even by that definition.
1- Something about you lumping together sci-fi and fantasy both in one fist tells me you're an outsider to both, as those 2 from the inside have vast differences and readers/fans of one might not be readers/fans of the other.
2- Refusing to read older works entirely because of the supposed moral deficiencies of the author is precisely the kind of narrow-minded, black-and-white, fight-or-flight, simplistic behaviour that reading a lot of sci-fi is supposed to free you from. It's not apriori wrong to say an author was racist, neither is saying that a popular work by said author is an expression of racism. Only censorship as a response to said perceived moral deficiencies is wrong, but I struggle to see how sci-fi or fantasy played a part in this unfortunate turn of events.
3-(a) Is Death and Mortality the main theme of **all** of classic literature ? Charles Dickens ? Jane Austen ? Oscar Wilde ?
3-(b) Is Death and Mortality not featured prominently in sci-fi ? To pick the latest 2 novels I read, Titanium Noir and Venomous Lumpsucker, one of them is about Death, the other about Extinction. They both, in their own way, satirize the repeated and ultimately ineffective human half-measures against Death, which distract humans from enjoying life.
4- Older storytelling being gradually displaced by newer forms is a tale literally older than writing. Wasn't the Novel itself a radically modern reinvention of storytelling that only happened in the 19th century ? Didn't it displace older storytelling mediums like the folktale and the theatre play ? One component of this is indeed fashion and status games, the hot new thing eventually becomes not as hot anymore. But another component is that every art form assumes cultural context, and at some point the distance between the reader's cultural context and the writer's is simply too vast to be fun to bridge. Eventually all truisms either become too true or too taboo to agree with, all character names become too funny-sounding and hard to remember, all the in-jokes and subtle subtext become too obscure to not fly right past the head of most readers.
5- I'm of the opinion that if a man wants to enjoy shit, I will fight to the death for his right to enjoy shit. I don't give a shit if people think sci-fi is "childish" or whatever 1950s wrong cached opinion they hold about the genre that imagined Space Travel before they were in the womb. Their loss. I'm going to read it and enjoy it anyway. Similarly, I don't think fans of classic literature should really care about whether people keep holding them in high regard or not, many great authors weren't held in high regard in their own times. The apex of wisdom is this : Status Games Are For Losers, and their winners are losers. Seek wisdom wherever you find it, and don't forget to enjoy yourself a little in the process.
Why can't sci-fi and fantasy deal with mortality and death?
I'd argue that given the past century of average lifespan and post retirement quality of life advances, speculative fiction is an avenue that is more than appropriate to consider it.
My current thoughts on why speculative literature is currently so esteemed is the fact that everything is changing so fast, our understanding of the world is more enormous than ever, and the setting of classical literature - relatively static worlds limited in scope - no longer resonate.
And also, Orwell's Big Brother is literally real now. Moby Dick seems fantastical to me - just randomly quit my job and get hired as a shiphand when I feel like going to sea?? In this economy? Without union membership?
Granted, some stuff still holds - Tale of Two Cities probably still holds up.
> The main theme of classic literature is mortality, death. It's something we all must confront, and it is worthwhile to think about, to meditate upon, to read about.
There are diminishing returns to everything, including contemplating death.
You can also contemplate death from a sci-fi perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJNta-okRw
Many Sci-fi, fantasy and other genre fictions also have deep themes they deal with (and yeah, some are just "cool spaceship battle pew pew"). And some are in the middle.
OTOH I also don't think classical literature is as consistently deep as people claim - I like some of the classical books I read but a lot of them are closer to "pew pew" adventure stories (except in real life and without the space battles) than people want to admit.
In reality it’s not just the story but the writing. Jane Austen is regarded as a classic because of her writing skills, the stories are Rom coms. Well without the comedy, except a bit of snark.
On the one hand this is true, and if I jump from reading trashy 80s fantasy to Jane Austen I notice a jump in writing quality.
On the other hand, classics writers don't have categorically better writing - I think e.g. Susanna Clarke or has even better writing skill than Jane Austen. And classics often fall short on writing structure issues that modern writers would learn not to do (Jane Eyre is well written but has huge streches of random rambling that you'd only see in webfics today, not in anything actually published somewhere that has an editor).
Mortality/death is cool and important but not by any means the most important topic to contemplate and learn about. Good sci-fi and fantasy appeals to me because it explores many cool and important topics, not just one.
I've been learning to salsa dance, and I'm definitely not a natural at this, but a big issue I'm having is dancing in time with the clave. Surely someone can dance here, as we're a diverse bunch. Any tips for keeping the salsa beat?
It might be helpful to pinpoint where the difficulty lies. Is it perceiving and orienting to the rhythm in the first place? Losing track of it as your attention is taken away? Hearing how the rhythm of your steps sits inside the rhythm of the clave? Physically moving your limbs in sync with it? Shifting your weight to where it needs to be ahead of the step you need to take?
All of them. The last question isn't even a concept I was aware of.
How long has it been? The reason I ask is that there’s a great variability in people’s rhythm sense and control, and it’s possible you may be on the lower end of it. Which means you just need more time to practice.
If there’s one suggestion, it’s to be “loose”, relax and don’t worry about perfection. I know it is kind of obvious, but it is helpful to try. I still remember my MMA coach reminding me to relax during sparring, and eventually it worked.
I started taking it seriously this August. It's just that I have seen some make serious progress in that time.
Oh, one more thing: if you have a good dancer in mind whom you like, try mimicking him. Like literally, pretend you’re him, adopt his manners and facial expressions. It is weirdly helpful. I had a “role model” like that in the MMA class, and I adopted his utterly relaxed facial expression while sparring. He looked like he wasn’t even there, utterly relaxed and unbothered. Mimicking his slacked face helped me to relax.
Oh, it’s fine then. Everyone’s different. Some of these fast progressers may just be better-coordinated, some may have music or athletic background, etc. I was like that with MMA - I’m not athletically gifted so I kept watching others get much better while I struggled (music was the opposite). But I stuck with it and slowly got better. I’ll never be UFC material, but that’s an insanely high standard to judge yourself by.
Tyler Cowen claims that top athletes are cognitive elites because being a top athlete requires a lot of intelligence, both in the knowing what to do on the field in real time sense but also in the training requires passing a bunch of marshmallow tests way.
Yet, c'mon, we also know that a lot of top athletes are really dumb. They aren't all Charles Barkley.
My question has to do with the General Intelligence Hypothesis. If human intelligence is really a general thing, with high intelligence in one field bleeding into others, then Tyler is obviously right. But it doesn't seem likely, does it? Why is there a pop culture dichotomy between jocks and nerds? Is the dichotomy false? Why do nerds look so much like nerds and why do jocks look so much like jocks? Is it all a phony social construct?
Citing Cowen would make it easier to evaluate the claim.
He has said this in various places. A search turned up this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/in-which-sector-are-the-top-performers-stupidest.html
>One of my core views is that the most successful performers in most (not all) areas are extremely smart and talented. So if you are one of the (let’s say) top fifty global performers in an area, you are likely to be one sharp cookie, even if the form of your intelligence is quite different from that in say academia or the tech world.
You might that a sport such as basketball selects for height, and thus its top performers are not all that mentally impressive. But I’ve spent a lot of time consuming the words of Lebron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (including a podcast and a dinner with the latter), and I am firmly convinced they are all extremely intelligent.
Looking at the quote, Cowen's actual claim is somewhat limited, and his examples are even more limited. He is speaking of the 50 top global performers in an area, which is very narrow - much more narrow than e.g. being an NBA player, although players in the NBA are surely already in the hyper elite of the population as far as basketball performance.
His 4 examples, though, of top 50 performance, are somehow all in the top 5 of this list of greatest basketball players of all time (https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/top-15-players-in-nba-history-cbs-sports-ranks-the-greatest-of-all-time-from-west-and-steph-to-lebron-and-mj/).
So they're basically examples of people who are the absolute best in the whole world at their performance (arguably, even better than that).
Furthermore, I suspect Cowen is overstating their intelligences. I doubt that even the people he lists would be considered extremely intelligent. Perhaps the one most known as an intellectual is Abdul Jabbar and from what I've seen, he's reasonably intelligent and curious / thoughtful, but shows little sign of brilliance or extreme intelligence. You can check out his Substack here: https://kareem.substack.com/ and evaluate him for yourself.
Even if what he were saying were true, though, it wouldn't be because basketball prowess is particularly g-loaded. Even if g only has a tiny positive impact on basketball prowess one could still find that the GOATs in that field tend to have relatively high g, since they need every edge over their competitors, including cognitive skill.
Still, an IQ of e.g. 120 might render someone smarter than 99% of professional basketball players, which might give him such an edge over the competition without being a genius. Such a player would likely come off as smarter than IQ 120, given people's expectations.
I’ve said this before, but Ronnie O‘Sullivan who just won his 8th UK Championship in snooker, is a mathematical genius of sorts though he may not be able to solve an equation.
In general terms although I’m not a fan of soccer in general I occasionally watch the Monday night games on Sky under duress. The analysis by former players is very articulate, precise and comprehensive. Meanwhile when I listen to top politicians I don’t get that.
> I’ve said this before, but Ronnie O‘Sullivan who just won his 8th UK Championship in snooker, is a mathematical genius of sorts though he may not be able to solve an equation.
Why would that be? Because he's good at estimating angles, momentum, and the effect of two-body collisions? That doesn't make him a "mathematical genius", but a great signal processor. My smartphone is mind-bogglingly efficient and fast at signal processing, but it won't solve the Collatz conjecture anytime soon.
I have a hypothesis that a lot of late career athletes have minor to severe brain damage, depending on how much potential head impact the sport involves. This suggests that a runner, a high jumper, and an archer might have different outcomes at varying points of their career, re: intelligence.
IQ may be general, but time is limited, and your skills require both.
It may be true that a baby born with genes for high intelligence and height has a *potential* to become a math whiz or an Olympic-level basketball player. But each of that requires spending a lot of time developing specific skills, and the kid who spends afternoons readings books is probably not going to be great at sports, and the kid who spends afternoons in a gym is probably not going to be great academically.
Once in a while there will be such kid who does both and excels at both, but that is probably rare. It is not just a question of possibility, but also of preferences and social reinforcement. You can be intellectually able to do something and yet find it boring. Or you can try something first, get good at it, and then find it socially more rewarding to continue doing what you are already good at rather than becoming a beginner at something else. Or you can simply have friends who have a hobby, so when you are with them, you do that thing instead of other possible things.
You can also have things correlate strongly and yet come apart at the extremes. You can have a group of great basketball players with high IQ each, but the one who will be best at basketball is not necessarily the one with the highest IQ among them, but the one with best muscles and joints. Even if IQ is useful in general, it is not so useful that 1 extra point would overcome literally everything else. See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
> Why is there a pop culture dichotomy between jocks and nerds?
The difference is mostly about preferences and spending their time. Those differences are a result of different traits (e.g. extraversion vs introversion) and random influences (what their friends are doing, what their parents told them to do, etc.). It is not like people are measured for their innate potential and trained to develop their skills accordingly.
Also, to be a jock or a nerd at school you only need to be slightly jock-ier or nerd-ier than the local average. Then it becomes about what you do and who you hang out with.
> Why do nerds look so much like nerds and why do jocks look so much like jocks?
How much time do they spend exercising their muscles vs sitting in a chair reading? How much time do they spend outside vs inside? The body reflects how you treat it for years.
All good points. I had forgotten about that tails coming apart post. It fascinating me when I first read it, but now I'm thinking: "Of course the tails come apart; the sample size drops to 1 at the tail."
a) the dichotomy is at least somewhat false (when I was in high school, a lot of the people in national long-distance running competitions were the same ones you'd see at math contests. Relatedly, top hedge funds end up employing a surprising number of former olympians).
b) general factor of intelligence holds somewhat at the statistical level but on an individual level you expect significant mean-reversion - even if engineering and people skils are both heavily g-loaded, someone who's best in the world at engineering would probably only be a couple of standard deviations above average in social skills (fairly charismatic but not the life of the party).
c) you expect this to look weaker at lower levels - olympic athletes are probably pretty smart, but your high school sports team is probably mostly selected on being into sports and willing to spend time training rather than being inherently supertalented.
d) In sports where head injuries are common (including both football and soccer), you expect athletes to become dumb over time just due to concussions, even if they started out smart.
This is a good answer.
I want to add to my question, not what I might say, but what Steve Sailer might say. Blacks are overrepresented in American sports yet underrepresented in the field of physics. Does this make sense if the primary component in both is high G?
I think the answer is: Athletics and maths require different kinds of intelligences. But doesn't that refute the General Intelligence Hypothesis?
>Athletics and maths require different kinds of intelligences. But doesn't that refute the General Intelligence Hypothesis?
Only if you choose to call the skills required by athletics "intelligence".
Yes, and this is the question that interests me. Isn't AI used in robotics and self-driving cars and other things which attempt to manipulate the physical world, as say an athlete might? Is that type of AI not considered part of general intelligence when we talk about AGI? I'm getting the sense that it is not. Which makes me think that General Intelligence just has to do with verbal and logical intelligence.
It is "intelligence" when you think of it as "cognitive power" I.e. the skill of "moving yourself well under given constraints" can be optimized for by throwing better thinking at it, in the context of robots, is a thing, but it's not clear if IQ tests test for skills necessary for doing sports, even though for humans that's "general" intelligence. And even if it turns out that doing well at sports is more a matter of say, your nervous system rather than your brain, that just means other humans can't easily learn it NOT that it would be unlearnable for all intelligences.
Aka
"General Intelligence" descrived different things for humans than it does for AGI, because we're not just birthing another human for AGI.
Which undermines the notion we can create an ASI, because that is just a suped up AGI. Maybe we can create an Artificial Human Intelligence by training it on all the things humans can do, but there's nowhere else to go except maybe other animals if Intelligence isn't general.
The easy answer, cribbing off TLP, is that humans have a strong tendency towards psychic inertia, “if I do not change I will not die.”
But when one is confronted with evidence of one’s inferiority, say, in physical ability, one is thrown off balance. The mind wants to come up with narratives to justify the current state of affairs and protect against the impetus to change. Natural candidates for these narratives for the nerds-in-becoming include “well, I may not be X but I am more righteous than those Xers” or “I’m smarter and that’s what matters”. Groups form to reinforce these narratives.
So, in persona as TLP, we would say the answer is narcissism. As it usually turns out to be.
Of course, this whole thing never happens for someone who never feels that inferiority at all because he or she is smart and strong. But the mechanism works for almost anyone who feels left out of any group in any way and can be adapted endlessly. I’m open to hear criticism of it but the general idea is one of the good insights from the TLP blog.
A neural net can be superhuman at classifying dog breeds and not be anywhere close to generally intelligent. Given a task of enough complexity, like playing a sport at the highest level, the size of the neural net required might be quite large. Does a large enough neural net start naturally showing hints of being generally smart, or does that just happen for LLMs? My guess is that yes, as a game reaches a certain level of complexity, the abstractions learned by the DNN will start to be generally applicable to many cognitive tasks. But my guess is also that LLMs might converge faster. What I am saying is that there is probably a lot of neural complexity involved in being a top athlete, but it probably isn't as transferable to other domains, than the same size network applied to learning physics.
https://x.com/RepStefanik/status/1732138663608271149?s=20. Am i missing something why didn't they just say "Yes"? if they were asked about calling for the genocide of black people would they have responded the same?
If they say "yes" then they are implicitly committing to taking disciplinary action that they're too scared to go through with.
Remember Charlie Hebdo.
Important qualifier to "doxxing is bad": I think that if someone is /already/ a public figure then it is legitimate to connect other anonymous public personas to them, at least if those personas are doing anything in any way related to whatever they're famous for.
I absolutely don't want politicians to be able to comment on politics anonymously, or CEOs to be able to talk anonymously about anything related to their industry.
"Famous pseudonym is real person X" is not usually legitimate journalism if X isn't a name that will mean anything else to the reader, and hence the only value will be to harass them, but "Famous person X has been doing ... under an anonymous pseudonym" often is.
(I have no idea if this applies to the "Beff Jezos" case Scott is talking about above - I intentionally haven't looked up the details before writing this, because I don't want my views on the general principal biased by one case).
A non-political example that comes to my mind is a famous writer Stephen King publishing a few books under a pen name Richard Bachman.
Among other reasons, he made a new pseudonym as an experiment to find out how much of his recent books' popularity and sales was because of their quality and how much because of his accumulated fame as an author. So he wrote books under a new name and published them with no marketing. Unfortunately, the experiment was cut short by doxing (Wikipedia does not provide details).
In this specific case, I think the doxing was bad.
James Tiptree was a famous science fiction writer who was never seen, and was eventually doxxed, just as a matter of curiosity. "He" turned out to be Alice Sheldon.
She was very upset at the loss of privacy, and in my opinion, the later fiction wasn't as good.
Rowling did the same thing, successfully.
The wiki page for Richard Bachman has citations to the guy who broke the story.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1985/04/09/steven-king-shining-through/eaf662da-e9eb-4aba-9eb9-217826684ab6/
Basically Thinner read too much like Stephen King. So, mission complete I suppose; it's not just the name, his writing is unique enough to recognize in the wild.
There's probably a weird edge case where someone has two famous anonymous accounts but isn't themselves a public figure, where you could argue that connecting the two public faces is legitimate but providing the real identity is not, but I doubt this ever comes up.
There might be a difference between theory of mind and theory of emotion.
People generally are fairly good at believing that other people know different facts-- the classic even if you know what's in the box, will people who haven't looked in the box know what you know? test.
People seem to be generally bad at having a gut understanding that other people have different preferences from one's own.
Sounds correct.
A lot of advice consists of: "stop doing the things you like, and start doing the things *I* like".
Understanding one's own preferences is so complex, and what we prefer is constantly changing, even within the span of a few minutes. And we tend to rely on others to help us figure out what we really want, so we are used to commenting on what we think others should do. With theory of mind I get immediate feedback when I mansplain something to somebody who already knows it, but when it comes to preferences I can't really test my hypothesis about things like "she would really be happier (ie prefer) if she drank less."
Do you know any reviews of songs? Not of full albums, just single songs / pieces.
Not quite reviews, but Song Exploder podcast
There’s a lot of analysis of songs on YouTube, e.g. Rick Beato. A couple of his recent single-song videos: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7PAkVIFUZPQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QMfchuNAvH4
Here’s a good one: Charles Cornell reviews a new Jacob Collier song that I’ll probably still be listening to in fifty years if I live that long. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdstfRN6cQs (Listen to the song before this review, you don’t want to miss the chance to hear it for the first time. )
Not sure if Todd in the Shadows counts. His One-Hit Wonderland series is more of a career retrospective with some song reviews in the middle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqE9B1_9TpQ
I have been rereading the sequences and I am not super impressed with the methodology of the paper Yud's praising here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J4vdsSKB7LzAvaAMB/an-especially-elegant-evpsych-experiment
I came up with an alternative hypothesis that might explain the results. So I am trying my own version of the experiment.
If you wouldn't mind taking this 5 min Google Forms survey, I will be able to justify looking into this more: https://forms.gle/4kR8EVw7f3RJaci86
Obviously, I might be shooting my results in the foot, with a lot of people already having seen Yud's piece: hindsight bias... etc.
I answered your survey first before reading the linked Yud article, and I don't think your question formulation captures expected grief.
The way I look at life insurance is the same way I look at most other insurance: it's a hedge against a financial risk, allowing you to turn a small chance of a catastrophic loss into a predictable regular expense. And since it's priced so the insurance company makes money on average, you shouldn't hedge more risk than you have, and moreover should consider self-insuring losses that you can afford to eat.
For life insurance, the financial loss you're hedging is 1) funeral costs and other final expenses, and 2) loss of the insured person's income and other material contribution to the household's finances. In most cases in rich countries, minor children are a net loss in terms of 2, bringing in little or no income and probably not carrying the rest of the family in terms of chores, so you should probably only buy life insurance for your children of you need it to cover final expenses. And the correct amount of insurance to carry would be enough to cover a funeral minus what you can cover out of pocket without undue hardship. Losing a child would be emotionally devastating, yes, but grief is independent of financial considerations here.
I agree that most people don't/won't translate grief into cash (especially when money effects utility on the log scale {citation needed}).
I think the survey could still stand if people treated life insurance the way that EA's would. If a poor person in sub-saharan Africa can have their life saved for ~$5K then EA's should buy any life insurance policies for poor sub-saharan Africans if they are cheaper than $5K. We aren't trying to save utility in the same way that EA's do (I would value my children at way more than $5K) but I think the framework still stands?
I am confused on whether it really is a zero-sum game with insurance companies, even if they have all the same information as me (they assign the same probability to insured event).
This article: https://blog.paulhankin.net/kellycriterion/
seems to argue that if we both value money on the log scale and use Kelly criterion that both the insurer and insuree could benefit from the transaction (given it has the right price). Though I also believe that many insurance prices currently are priced only to benefit insurer.
Strong agree. I filled out the survey with $0 for all categories. I didn't have children to support me financially. Getting money from their death would make me feel terrible in a way I can't describe. I would burn any check I got.
Yep, this is the rational approach to life insurance.
Most "financial advisors" will of course try to convince you otherwise; basically that you should maximize life insurance (and thus their bonus for making you buy it) for everyone.
Emotionally, not having life insurance may feel like "tempting fate"; as if you are telling the gods that you are pretty sure that X will not die anytime soon, and therefore the gods will obviously kill X at the next opportunity, just to teach you a lesson on humility. A possible financial impact is one thing, but if you are superstitious (most people are, to some degree, especially when you start talking about a possible death of their loved ones), it may feel like refusing to buy life insurance somehow *increases the probability* of someone's death.
I agree that many financial advisors play on ignorance and (comparative) irrationality. I am still confused on whether all insurance coverage is zero-sum, this article seems to argue that if we are using Kelly criterion for our money there are insurance policies that benefit both parties: https://blog.paulhankin.net/kellycriterion/
Otherwise I don't know how I would explain why companies that understand expected value calculations would ever make institutional decisions to insure projects.
Yeah, insurance doesn't necessarily have to be zero-sum.
But average people buying life insurance (the original topic) usually do not know how to calculate the optimal amount, and the people selling the insurance (or recommending someone else's insurance, and getting paid for successful recommendations) have an obvious incentive to sell as much as possible.
I've honestly never encountered that framing. I've only seen people apply the reasoning of the poster above.
I thought that every life insurance salesman had a few stories ready of people who merely procrastinated on buying life insurance and died the next week. Is it just my luck to meet them?
I was a bit obsessed with checking this paper around 10 years ago, to the point where I bought and read Nancy Howell's _Demography of the Dobe !Kung_, the book from which the raw data on demography was taken for the paper. I think I've lost the writeup where I argued why the paper was terrible, but I see that this analysis, linked from the comments, seems concinving and pulls no punches: https://scienceisshiny.wordpress.com/2020/09/11/everything-wrong-with-the-paper-human-grief-is-its-intensity-related-to-the-reproductive-value-of-the-deceased/. I believe I reached about the same conclusion w.r.t. the correlation - that what we really see here is that "the RV and grief timeseries both have a rising, a level and a falling bit", and once you postulate that, any reasonable RV series subject to that will correlate really high with the grief timeseries - without having the stats knowledge to explain why they shouldn't have done what they did.
But I do very much recommend the Howell book, you get to see how real messy science is made in an environment of imperfect - oh so much imperfect - information. For example, how do you actually build an age-based population model or RV-by-age curve in a population which is not tracked by government statistics and the people have no idea what their ages are? I wrote a post about how Howell did it: https://avva.livejournal.com/2412457.html (it's in Russian, but just ChatGPT it if you're interested).
Most people who criticize Yudkowsky do so via low content drivebys, so this is already much better.
I suspect that if you got into contact with Eliezer, he even might signal boost it himself.
Unfortunately, I can't answer the survey since all answers I **want** to give would be the explicit result of a calculation that would prove EY's point (the perils of knowing AMF QALY estimates for children....)
New here and not sure if this is a good topic for this forum, but something I've always wanted to discuss, so why not.
Suppose I eat one cow's worth of beef per year. If I stop eating beef, how many fewer cows would be slaughtered?
I think the EV is one, right? Something like a 99.9% chance that this would save zero cows, and 0.1% chance it would save 1000 cows.
I'm assuming that there must be some feedback loop. Everywhere along the pipeline from cattle ranch to plate, each entity has to decide whether to order more burgers based on demand, or open another cattle ranch based on demand, etc. There's an incredibly tiny chance that one of those demand numbers is *right* on the edge, and my choice will tip it, creating a very large effect.
Am I in the right ballpark?
Yep, a tiny chance of a large effect, and a large chance of zero effect, on average what you would expect. (Plus all the second-order effects.)
I think we should also consider your social impact.
Do you share meals with someone regularly? If so, you've displaced beef from someone else's plate, as well (the logistics of cooking 2 separate meals just to accommodate a dietary preference is often too much, so in practice in a lot of long term partners and families, 1 person becoming a vegetarian often has a knock on effect on everyone else's diet since most people don't order out that much - to be clear, everyone else still eats meat, but often less than the counterfactual).
Do you often go to social gatherings where you share a meal? Are your friends willing to accommodate you? In those situations, your more restrictive dietary preference is going to displace some beef off the group choice too. When having meals with my vegetarian friend, we typically don't opt for a steakhouse, and when we get pizza, it'll be vegetarian (or something like 1 or 2 out of the 3 we order will be vegetarian). Having a vegetarian option on the table displaces some of the meat, unless it's one of those 1 plate per person kind of situations (burgers, sandwiches). But simply influencing choice of venue is probably important.
I guess it's possible that you are totally isolated and will never influence someone else's dietary decisions ever, but that seems unlikely.
Will it be massive? Hard to say. Are you attending a large family dinner every week? Do you regularly cook for 2 - 5 people? How often do you share meals with people? On the low end it might be like 1.2 cows. On the high end it might be like 5 - 10 cows. It's still not necessarily going to massively thin the herds, but it is an effect.
A curious other effect could happen if you host the dinners (i.e dictate the contents of the meal). That way, you get to displace meat off someone's plate. Each of us don't have infinite capacity for food, so any share you can win is yours to keep. This implies that effective meat displacement involves going out and feeding other people, which has much more potential effect than just feeding yourself. Doing stuff like telling your friends you're bringing samosas (detering someone else from bringing, idk, meat pies).
(Feeding, not converting. Lots of people are averse to lifestyle conversion efforts, but few people will turn down free food unless it's bad, and displacing meat calories helps).
Moral of the story: invite 6 friends to a vegetarian meal once per week and you can eat steaks guilt free for the next six days.
Suppose you're a New World slave owner in the 18th century, and you buy one slave per year on average. If you stopped buying new slaves, how many fewer slaves would be brought from Africa to the New World ?
Depends on what you eat instead, and what the people who would otherwise have eaten the food you actually eat end up eating, ad infinitum.
Minimal example: imagine you & I both regularly eat at the same restaurant. At current prices (with you eating beef), I just barely prefer the chicken to a steak; once you start ordering chicken instead, the price of the chicken goes up and that of the steak goes down, so I switch to steak. The same amount of the same food is being eaten as before, we've just swapped which.
I think it's probably more like 1.001, because some meat goes to waste - I guess that if people eat n cows worth of beef, the amount of beef produced is well-approximated be (1+epsilon)n for some small positive epsilon governing efficiency.
There's also going to be an economic effect from efficiencies of scale and supply and demand - whether you eat beef or not probably has a marginal second-order effect on the price of beef for other people, but I'm not not sure what the sign is.
Cattle ranches aren't stomped out of the ground and then converted into burgers in one indivisible step. The decision is less "do we build one new ranch or not", but rather "do we slaughter 75 or 76 cows today" and "do we inseminate 450 or 451 cows this week".
So yes, there are still discrete step functions at work - not eating meat for one day won't save 0.0075 cows - but they're more fine granular than "1000 cows are killed or not".
Even in the presence of step functions, expected value works that way when you don't know where in the step you are.
Example: Trains come every ten minutes, I don't know when the next one will come. I can walk to the train station, or run, getting there two minutes faster. What is the effect of this on the expected time I reach my destination? Running will get me there two minutes faster on average. Similar reasoning works for speeding, even if you might get stopped by a stoplight and lose all the time you gained.
You probably had a small effect, such that if you were alone it probably wasn't enough to change the menu, but as part of a group they might decide to add more options.
Can anyone more knowledgeable on the Jezos comment on what exactly is the schtick with the crypto bro esque twitter postings?
The fluff regarding his startup is also absolutely insufferable yet the founders seem in theory to be technically competent people(I would also argue that working on TF Quantum is a completely misguided effort with no real use case at all in the near term).
A datum for the "are we past Peak Woke?" discussion. NIH, the National Institutes of Health, proposes to change its mission statement to remove "reduce disability" as a goal. This is in the name of disability equity and inclusivity, as proposed by a committee for diversity.
Instead of "To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability."
the new proposed mission statement is "To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and to apply that knowledge to optimize health and prevent or reduce illness for all people."
https://diversity.nih.gov/blog/2023-10-11-share-your-thoughts-nihs-mission-statement
The period for public comment ended recently. I guess the decision will come in the next few months.
If I was disabled, the current debates surrounding the Canadian MAID euthanasia system might make me a bit tetchy about unspecified goals to "reduce disability".
Actually, what inerests me more is the removal of the goal to "lengthen life", especially considering the major drops in life expectancy recently.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/
He loses. It's ugly, but it isn't a Christmas sweater due to being red, white and black with no green.
I think this is funny, but possibly in too poor taste for my facebook feed.
Santa's suit is also red, white and black with no green.
Santa is hearby kicked out of Christmas
Does science know melatonin to sometimes cause nightmares?
Anecdotally, I've never noticed melatonin causing me to remember nightmares, but exercise sure does.
Same. I had a lot of nightmares when I was younger, I've been taking melatonin for some time and have had a very low number of them.
Eating late definitely causes me vivid dreams at least.
Depends which science you ask. I did a quick survey of reputable tertiary sources I could find with a quick googling and came up with "yes" (Mayo Clinc), "no, or at least not enough to be worth mentioning" (NiH, NHS, and WebMD), and "maybe/probably" (Cleveland Clinic). The Cleveland Clinic answer goes into a bit more detail about what we do know, that melatonin does increase REM sleep, plus some preliminary evidence that melatonin's metabolites may improve memory and thus make us remember dreams more intensely, but the overall effect of melatonin on dreams doesn't appear to have been rigorously studied.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/does-melatonin-cause-bad-dreams
Before reading Scott's article on melatonin (wherein he recommended 0.3 mg to be the optimum dose), I tried one of the standard commercial doses - likely 5 mg.
I experienced an erratic heartbeat and, if not full-blown nightmares, very vivid and disturbing dreams.
Why does Substack show people's likes (on their profile) but not their comments? Is it a programming thing? Or an ethical thing, making it harder to stalk someone, and/or get them cancelled?
Since likes are basically votes, I'd have thought they're more naturally deserving of secrecy than comments (which, to continue the analogy, are more like campaign speeches or media endorsements). Both secret, both displayed, and comments displayed but likes secret would all make sense, but I find this combination odd.
I once had a dream in which I opened Substack and, in the corner next to my profile picture, saw a lot of information about me inferred by some algorithm from my comments, with confidence estimates next to each piece of information - plenty of demographic data and some psychological traits, all inferred correctly albeit with different confidence.
Maybe I'm not the only one who's had this nightmare.
I, on the other hand, have been continually disappointed by how *BAD* most FAAMG inferences are. With the literally tens of thousands of Phd's and data scientists they have working on your digital cookie and behavior trail, they should literally know you better than you know yourself. As in, you go to a new part of downtown for a meeting, and they should be able to predict with high accuracy which lunch place you'll end up going to "serendipitously" and with no planning aforethought.
If FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should literally be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
And yet, with the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy. And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
I wonder if this is an ethics thing, because like most Linux / tech-savvy folk, I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix and Ghostery and things like that. I opt out of profiling and cookies where I can. But I know the data is still there, with certainty. Unblockable pixel trackers, using Chrome browser, using Google search, proximity and network analysis, Google (and FB via proximity and network analysis and pixel trackers and deals with every top 1k website) definitely HAS the info, even with the privacy measures I take. They just don't use it, and I wonder if it's because they have ethically decided that I seem to by trying to avoid profiling with the various browser add-ons.
But then we're talking about Goog and FB - making a non-regulatory decision to make less money for the sake of "ethics??" It is to laugh. So, a bit of a mystery to me, why all these data harvesters suck so badly at targeting with their inferences, when the data is certainly there to be inferred.
On the plus side, in the iOS app today I clicked a notification for a comment and it actually took me to the comment instead of the top of the whole thread, so maybe there is some improvement going on.
This seems insane to me as well.
Scott, you asked for other suggestions on ways to protest Forbes' doxxing of somebody: How about writing EAT SHIT AND DIE on a brick and throwing it through their window? A bit too crass?
That seems about the right level of crass, actually. It conveys contempt without implying future violence. As opposed to tossing a brick that said, for example, "by any means necessary", or simply posting the address online with no commentary whatsoever. Those wouldn't be crass at all.
Possibly deemed offensive to coprophiles and scat enthusiasts, kink-shaming is bad no-no thing.
I expect there’s a substantial coprophile presence at Forbes. In fact you’ve now got me worried that brick will mistaken for a generic Happy Holidays message. Thanks a shit.
Wouldn't work, they've got those industrial windows.
I really hope you're joking.
On the subject of predictive processing in the human brain, this has probably been said before but it only hit me recently that nocturnal dreams are likely just what happens when predictive processing happens while all the external stimuli are off.
Is this just the activation-synthesis hypothesis but in contemporary jargon?
Can't say because I don't know your old jargon.
I think there’s a lot to that idea. I think the way dreams are shaped is that a bunch
of stuff from the day is getting dumped and sorted through and tagged and stored in memory, but the predictive processing part of the mind keeps getting glimpses of the stuff and trying to work with it in the usual way, and that’s
what gives dreams a certain story-like quality. I could say more but I’m sitting up in bed and very sleepy. So I’m off to dream my brains out.
Dreams seem too random and incoherent to be explained by just predictive processing.
My favored theory is that this is a biological analog of the practice of randomly shuffling the data set while training neural nets in order to prevent overfitting.
It's not completely random. The dreams often include something that happened recently, or something traumatizing. So perhaps random weighted by some combination of recency and/or emotional impact.
I recently stumbled on an interesting factionalization within antisemitic circles. One group hates the Jews but thinks they're smart and accomplished, the other hates the Jews but thinks they're credit-stealing charlatans.
Watch the fun ensue when they meet https://twitter.com/MatthewParrott/status/1730671822323282417
Can't they imagine them to be smart, accomplished, and unethical?
That's the first group. The second group is more old school nazi purists who think Aryans are the only smart/capable race.
> think Aryans are the only smart/capable race.
How did that work out for Adolf? One genius Aryan physicist vs a boatload of genius Jews:
"According to a May 1945 roster, Jews made up about two-thirds of the leadership in the Manhattan Project's Theoretical Division (T-Division) — the group tasked with calculating critical mass and modeling implosions — which is still operating today as the only division with an uninterrupted history since Project Y."
They don't think the Jews did anything. They think that all supposed Jewish accomplishment are really nefarious credit-stealing from good hardworking gentiles.
My friend says our knowledge of physics will never reach an end because physics is the study of the laws that govern the physical universe, but we can only see a small fraction of the universe, so there's always a chance that the laws as we understand them might not apply to parts of the universe we can't see.
For example, thanks to the limited speed of light, we can't see objects that are more than 46.1 billion light years away. If you were an astronomer watching the very edge of our visible bubble of the universe, it's always possible that suddenly, a new part of the universe could emerge into your view where gravity obviously worked in reverse. The possibility of such a thing occurring means physics can never reach its end.
Is my friend right?
Note that point-of-view invariance is a powerful principle in ph ysics, and it implies universality.
Why yes, yes of course your friend is right, he reinvented Hume's Problem of Induction.
Nobody reinventing Hume is ever wrong.
Going to say, no. Physics will never reach an end, not because there is always something new to discover, but because there is always someone trying to discover something new. Even if everything is perfectly explained, physics will continue, as people try ever more novel attempts to crack the consensus.
In the sense that physics describes the way nature fundamentally works around us, it could concievably reach an end at some point; where we have discovered an ultimate underlying theory and explained all the constants and terms involved. Whether this is possible or not is unknown, and I would say it is more a question of philosophy than physics.
Your friend's argument is a bit different, since they are saying we cannot see everything, so we cannot know the same laws hold everywhere. This is akin to some theories that say multiple universes exist, within which the laws of physics are difference. Many people will tell you that such ideas are not really physics - since for it to be physics, we need to be able to conduct an experiment to prove or disprove the idea. As we have no ability to know what lies beyond the visible universe, any speculation about different laws of physics there is not physics but rather religion or philosophy (the same holds for other regions we cannot access, like the time before the Big Bang or other universes).
I would point out, as well, that for all we know the laws of physics could completely change tomorrow. That could always be true, and so by the same argument you can say physics will never be complete until we can definitely rule out that they won't change at some arbitary point in space or time.
I think so far the universe seems homogeneous at a very large scale. Under that assumption, the parts we do not see follow the same laws as the parts we see. Perhaps one day we will find a reason why it is so.
> a new part of the universe could emerge into your view where gravity obviously worked in reverse.
I guess this is the difference between philosophy and science. Such thing is very unlikely to happen, to the degree that no one reasonably expects it to happen, but I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life playing verbal games against the philosophers, which means that philosophers win this debate.
Physics “never reaching its end” is awkwardly phrased, but essentially correct. However, his reasoning is naively constrained, and wholly unneeded. The simplest way to understand this is that we have no way of knowing if/when we reach the “end of physics”. No one left a marker there for us to declare a finish line.
By "the end" I mean a point where every observable phenomenon can be perfectly explained by the laws of physics as we know them, and where none of the laws contradict each other. In such a condition, the behavior of every subatomic particle, black hole, and distant galaxy could be totally explained by physics calculations.
I think this is the crux of the problem though. Back in late 1800's there was this strong consensus that "physics was over", things were well-explained. Yet here we are. I suspect the future will be no different: as soon as we get complacent with our understanding of the universe, an Einstein will show up with a paper opening a new frontier.
Sabine Hossenfelder disagrees:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW4yBSV4U38
She does agree with what you say, but argues that the remaining problems in physics might be too difficult for humanity to solve -- at least, not without some kind of a radical increase in our collective intelligence, which would be technologically impossible to achieve without first solving those very same problems in physics.
> which would be technologically impossible to achieve without first solving those very same problems in physics.
This is the part where she seems to just be completely wrong. AI is advancing quickly without requiring new physics
This is just me talking, but I don't think that AI is going to be some kind of a magic bullet. AI is great if you already know most of the answer and want to save time (to be fair, a lot of time !) on calculations; it's not so great if you want to develop entirely new physics (which is what most of the outstanding problems in physics are about, AFAIK).
Sabine makes the error* (standard among practitioners of high energy physics, broadly defined), of assuming that her subfield is all of physics. I refer you to https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3007.msg91383.html#msg91383 for a broader perspective.
Many subfields of physics have ended already (see e.g. electromagnetism - pretty much a solved problem now, or at least handed off to the engineers). And high energy physics might be drawing to a different kind of end. But there are plenty of others which are nowhere near ending.
*Haven't actually watched the video. Am responding to what I think she would have said (based on what people from her background usually say).
I think it might be helpful to watch her video, perhaps ?
In general, unlike the claim you're arguing against in your linked post (*), she is not claiming that all available problems in physics have been solved or are close to a solution; rather, she's claiming that the remaining problems could be too difficult for humans to ever solve, and will thus remain unsolved forever.
(*) I have not read your linked post, I'm just responding to what people on your side of the debate usually say. :-)
>> that the remaining problems could be too difficult for humans to ever solve, and will thus remain unsolved forever.
This seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be true, unless you are defining physics = high energy physics, which is what people with Sabine's background usually do. In that case it might be true. But that's precisely the definition I am objecting to.
I doubt you have ever heard anyone on `my side of the debate' (that being the side that `there is more to physics than HEP'). The high energy physicists tend to monopolize the public conversation. Unless you are thinking of prior discussion with me. Or unless you tend to hang out with practicing physicists.
ETA: If you can link me to a text transcript of Sabine's, I will read it.
Sorry, I don't have a transcript, but I sympathize with you -- I also prefer reading to watching.
IIUC this study claims 7.18 / 1000 = 1 / 139 boys born in the USA recently have developed profound autism. Any good reasons to doubt this?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370128310_The_Prevalence_and_Characteristics_of_Children_With_Profound_Autism_15_Sites_United_States_2000-2016
Just read abstract and skimmed study. St