RE #4: I strongly prefer reading via email because Substack is slow and unresponsive (scrolling down has a lag of 1-3 seconds, and as I'm writing this comment, the letters don't appear until 3 seconds after I've typed them).
I just talked to someone I know who's a long time employee of the CDC (nothing COVID related). He said that the leadership was clearly clueless and that morale was low and that everyone he knew who was old enough to retire was planning to retire soon. I'd heard him gripe about work before, but never anything like this, and it was pretty depressing to hear.
Most of it sounded like regular office politics and bureaucratic nonsense, but at one point he also said "It's clearly coming from the White House". And he's a Democrat, so this isn't just Gray Man Bad either.
I work for a different part of the federal government.
Before COVID we were working from home two or three days a week. Then they switched us to full-time working from home. Last month we switched back. No one's happy about it. Rumor has it that big-city majors pressured Biden into doing it so they'd have people downtown again.
Apart from that I haven't seen any major changes since I started work about ten years ago.
One story he mentioned was that they had a great candidate who's in Brussels, but HR is insisting that there can't be any remote hires and they'd have to go into the office 4 days a week, which is especially stupid because the people they'd work with are never in the office anyway.
Apparently, everyone is nominally supposed to be going into the office three days a week right now, but a lot of high level employees live in different states and only visit the office once every other week (and so lower level employees obviously feel no need to go to the office either), and RTO is not enforced at all.
He's also skeptical that RTO is even a good idea in the first place, complaining about HR just doing what they feel like with no good justification, but that's a separate discussion.
I'm an Israeli, and there's a prevalent belief here that's encoded in our country's narrative - There's no other place for Jews to live since the world is rife with antisemites who hate us. Granted, this was an understandable attitude in the 40s when the country was born.
This is obviously an oversimplification that has varied over time and between different groups within the country, but you'll find it all over the place. Since the start of the war, given the massive criticism against Israel, this idea has become stronger even among the more leftist/liberal Israelis I know. In my own social circle nowadays, I barely know anyone other than myself who doesn't think that moving abroad would be problematic/dangerous due to rampant antisemitism everywhere. The claim is that the anti-Israel sentiment is just a thin facade covering a deep-seated hatred of Jews.
This view doesn't fit my model of the world at all. It seems that all minorities in all countries deal with at least some form of prejudice, and being Jewish abroad is probably no different. If I look at the USA, it's probably one of the easier minority experiences, all things considered. Moreover, in most cases where I see Israelis accuse others of antisemitism, they are really just pointing to cases of political opinions with which they disagree. I see this as just another case of Jewish exceptionalism: believing that there is something unique about us and that the world (a pretty big place!) just won't let us be. An understandable collective trauma following the holocaust, but one that I don't think is relevant today.
But this view is so widely held all around me, and actively affects people who might otherwise have chosen to move abroad, that I would like to critically investigate it. There does seem to be a rise in blatant antisemitism, although I again don't really trust the sources to distinguish between actual racism and just people who don't agree with us: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-reports-unprecedented-rise-antisemitic-incidents-post-oct-7
I also heard from Israeli friends living in the USA that they feel unsafe since the beginning of the war, and are sometimes harassed for speaking Hebrew. So maybe there is some grain of truth to this whole belief.
I'd be happy to hear from rationalist Israelis (and anyone else) their thoughts on the subject, as well as suggestions on how to test the hypothesis that it's dangerous/unpleasant for Jews and Israelis to live outside Israel.
Not a Jew, but I do think there's a lot more volatility in antisemitism than there is in most other sorts of anti-minority sentiment. In the United States, there's a lot of people who really don't like e.g. Hispanic immigrants and wish there were a lot less of them around. But that's a constant baseline; it may become more or less politically salient at any time, but the raw numbers don't change very much. Which means that while there are political fights about border control, there's no significant consistency for "round them all up, even the 2nd-generation citizens", and send them home / to the camps" and there's not going to be.
Antisemitism has a much higher variance, as your US friends have noticed. And that's not just the United States. Germany in the late 19th / early 20th century was a pretty good place to be a Jew. And then there's this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jews ; I don't think many other ethnicities could come up with anything like it. Places where Jews were welcome, until suddenly they weren't.
I have some somewhat speculative guesses as to why that may be. But regardless, if the discrimination against your ethnicity is characterized by low baseline but high variance, that's going to be a rational argument for having your "go bag" constantly at the ready. And having to have a "go bag", is a rational argument for wanting there to be a place you can reliably go and not have to worry about whether they also are due for an outbreak of Maximum Antisemitism when you show up.
For something I am writing, I'm looking for examples of poems set to music where the words have been tweaked to change the message. The example I started with was a setting of Kipling's "A Pilgrim's Way" where the refrain line has been changed from "Thy people, Lord, thy people, are good enough for me" to "The people, oh the people, are good enough for me," thus eliminating the religious reference. I disapprove of that, have been thinking of why, and am looking for more examples.
Compare Carter Family songs with Woody Guthrie songs.
Carter Family - Storms are on the Ocean (1927) --> Woody Guthrie - Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Feet (1944)
Carter Family - When the World's On Fire (1930) --> Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land (1944)
Just two that I happened to notice. With old folk songs, sometimes the originals are lost to history, so it's hard to know who changed the lyrics. Maybe there was some original version that Woody Guthrie copied faithfully, and the Carter Family had changed it to be more religious? But it seems more likely that Guthrie took old religious folk songs and updated them to fit his message.
I guess there's the opposite direction, where Johnny Cash covered "Hurt" and changed "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns", adding a religious reference where there wasn't one before.
Not actually a poem, but there was talk around the Grammys about Luke Combs changing Tracy Chapman's lyrics to "Fast Car" ever so slightly at the end, from:
> You got a fast car
> Is it fast enough so you can fly away?
to:
> You got a fast car
> Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
Although he did keep unaltered the line about "I work in a market as a checkout girl".
There is also a large stream of evidence that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, and fights from among civilians while wearing civilian clothing. Between Hamas's inhuman combat doctrine, and the gigantic anti-Israel propaganda machine that wants to portray Israel as targeting civilians, I am not surprised that there is such a large stream of evidence. I still think most of it should be discounted, at least until further investigation sheds light on which parts are true and which parts are fake. Otherwise, you end up with more cases like the media frenzy from the Gaza hospital explosion in mid-October.
This is not to deny the genuine violations of protocol by soldiers on hair-trigger alert (and a few extremists out for revenge for Oct. 7). To me, the most tragic such case was when IDF soldiers shot three escaped hostages by mistake. I think that the IDF does actually investigate such cases, and not just for PR.
More evidence in general that Israel does not have a policy of targeting civilians: the order to evacuate northern Gaza, the fact that well over 99% of the Gazan population is alive even after months of fighting, and the fact that Israel has the capabilities to kill many more Gazans and it refrained from using them. There is also the fact that Israel opened Gaza's borders for humanitarian aid. Admittedly, this involved international pressure, but consider that similar pressure was exerted on Israel for more militarily important concessions like a ceasefire, and Israel refused to budge. If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in.
Setting up a new Windows laptop. Open Edge to download Chrome and Bing search says I don't need another browser. I think I'll download it anyway. Duckduckgo too.
I finally gave up on Windows and went completely over to Linux when I got a new laptop last year. It's still clunky, although that's partly my fault for using an out-of-the-way distro, and at least I don't have to put up with any of that kind of *%#$%*#.
What about Teams, the Window which refuses to be closed or even minimised when Windows 11 starts? Microsoft are obviously trying to push Teams literally in our face. But using it with multiple sites is like trying to knit chain mail, in that one must painstakingly log out of one session and into another, which then fails as often as as not because it obstinately remembers the previous one via its ham-fisted use of cookies. Give me Zoom or Slack any day!
Talking about PC frustrations, another of my major issues with Substack is that one can't save a comment page to disk. Something stops it in its tracks, and the save fails, on both Firefox and Chrome.
I have to go to a city office in person because they are being utterly non-communicative about some confusing utility bills. The website says that they are committed to giving easy access to information. Well, frankly that feels insulting given that I will probably have to walk through the rain and then wait in line to speak to a surly bureaucrat.
Naturally this got me thinking about charter cities and special economic zones. So anyway, why wasn't anyone talking about Pronomos Capital in the recent posts on charity vs capitalism? They funded Prôspera, and have a portfolio of several charter cities and SEZs. When I searched those pages for the terms "Pronomos" and "Prospera" I found no hits for the former and very little discussion of the latter.
Is this because Pronomos is not investing well and everyone already knows it? Are they getting beaten by competitors? Is there some other major problem with them?
Because if the answers are all no, then I'm surprised that there has been almost no mention of them in 1000 comments comprising 45,000 words.
Personally, I'm feeling the temptation to start advertising Pronomos to my EA friends unless and until someone talks me out of it.
I'm not culturally libertarian, but this is my take: none of these charter cities promise to me the full muscular backing of rule of law through an impartial court system. As a human being who has been the victim of at least one violent crime and one white-collar scam in my life, from what I have read (including official material that might count as an advertisement), I *am not convinced* that it is worth risking my life or livelihood by living in such a place.
Keep in mind I'm a college-educated STEMlord. I have it pretty fucking good in the US as a normal citizen. I understand the problems these charter cities purport to solve, but *those problems do not affect me* and I don't see how they are ever going to succeed without buy-in from comfortably normal people.
The ironic part is that any place which is desperate enough to try a charter city is also a place desperate enough that you wouldn't want to live there.
There's something to this sentiment--isn't Honduras one of the most murder-heavy countries in the world? But IIRC, the beach resorts neighboring Prospera don't have too much trouble attracting customers, even though their crime rate is not 0. Point taken about the white collar crime though. Seems reasonable to worry about the lack of court precedence. Perhaps the next step would be for Pronomos to somehow learn this and make an attempt to solve the issue.
The amount of discussion about Pronomos & Prospera (again, out of 1000 comments!) still seems low to me.
Wouldn't it make sense to make it actually tangential, so the existing one could get particles up to high speed and then route them onto the new one to boost their speed further?
In view of Melvin's plausible objection, I guess one would need at the very least a spiral path, of decreasing curvature, from the smaller ring to the larger. So it might be more trouble and expense than it is worth!
Couldn't it be a straight line along a common tangent? Curvature is sort of the enemy in these kinds of installations. It's why they make them so big in the first place.
The entire point of competition is that they can't charge just what the customer is willing to pay, because their competitor is charging that minus a few cents. So you end up pricing the thing lower than people would pay in a vacuum, because people don't aim to pay the value of the product they aim to pay as little as they can.
Worth to the end user is highly ambiguous. That sounds like an emotional attachment.
The use of Capitalism rather than market muddies the waters - meaning that many left leaning people will just assume they are being fleeced by capitalists, which to be fair is true in near monopoly conditions.
On the other side pro capitalists might want to credit capitalism with producing goods very efficiently and other people are reading worth as being the value to the consumer being greater than the price.
It might be ok to say that people misunderstood the question, but... they tend to use the same heuristic when doing a bunch of other stuff as well, some of them with a bit more consequence than a twitter poll. Voting, for example.
At which point we're not talking about an excuse, but about the mechanics of the error. They answer wrongly because they do pattern completion on the word "Capitalism", or because they don't have a good enough concept of "worth", or because they never spent any time ever thinking about demand and supply curves so they simply don't know the answer etc. These are all reasons they answer wrongly, and it's a good idea to think/talk about them. Doesn't make their answer any less of a mistake, or any less grave.
I’m not that impressed with supply and demand curves myself. Not as presented anyway. Mathematically they are highly suspect.
> Doesn't make their answer any less of a mistake, or any less grave.
Of course it does. In any case the general assumption amongst economists that we are never screwed by capitalists because supply and demand always give the correct price signal is belied in many cases, admittedly most in non competitive markets.
There’s no all that interesting in price theory. Stuff sells at a price or you reduce the price. More demand than expected and you increase the price. This doesn’t mean people aren’t being gouged - see housing and Nimbyism.
What’s mathematically suspect about the standard econ101 supply demand graphs - amongst other things - is that the magical lines seem to stick to the positive axis. Mathematical lines don’t do that.
How many widgets would I buy for $100 trillion each? About 0. How many widgets would I sell for -$25 each? Idk probably 0. In both cases I wouldn’t go negative. That’s why the graphs are positive.
In some dystopia where unemployed people are executed, I could see wages going negative occasionally. In the real world, there's a bunch of factors outside the formal economy that keep this from happening.
It doesn't seem a particularly basic question to me. I suppose there's an introduction to microeconomics answer which is obvious and definitional, but that's as far as it goes. "Capitalism" perhaps muddies the waters here. One might think of the question differently if "in a competitive or ideal market" is substituted perhaps.
There is the cynical perspective that due to information asymmetry, psychological manipulation, monopolization, and/or genuine stupidity, consumers do often end up paying more than what the item is worth to them in practice. Look at it this way: do you trust the 60% that failed that question to make accurate judgements about what something is worth to them?
Yes! Of course I trust them. Most people in a supermajority of contexts do reasonably sane things. Could they be "better" on a number of metrics? Of course. But in a common sense understanding of the word, most people don't regret most transactions on a daily basis.
Exactly. It's a basic question to people who have taken Econ 101; to pretty much everyone else it's a trick question because there are several common colloquial definitions of "worth" or "value" that do not match the Econ 101 version.
So, 60% of Americans have never taken Econ 101 (or read an equivalent text). No surprise there.
And those who have taken Econ 101 will then rightly ask: but is the world like that? Because I don't immediately recognise myself or the businesses and markets I know in these abstractions and these accounts of people who are posited not real. Their teachers will then tell them no, the world isn't always like that but here is a useful framework to think about the complex mesh of reality
Use pizza slices to explain marginal utility and I’ll tell you I like cold pizza. Use sodas and I’ll tell you I’m prone to kidney stones so I always order ‘best value’.
Oh yeah, Bluesky is open to the general public now. With Twitter kinda going to shit with all the bots everywhere and accounts getting frozen (Elon doing hard drugs doesn't help either), all the artists I follow seem to have collectively decided to evacuate to Bluesky.
Trying it out myself... well, it certainly looks like Twitter. Not sure what I expected. The whole Feeds system is very interesting though, basically giving you multiple customizable timelines. And the rules seem to be pretty lax: don't break the law, don't commit hate crimes, don't tell people to kill themselves.
I have no idea what they're trying to do with the whole decentralized protocol thing though. Are they trying to make some sort of super social media network that connects a bunch of different sites together...? Does anyone even want that?
All in all, Bluesky does seem like a decent replacement, and I do hope it succeeds. Mostly because the prospect of a moron buying a company only for its previous CEO to immediately make a competitor that bankrupts his old company is really, really funny.
>I have no idea what they're trying to do with the whole decentralized protocol thing though.
I can't speak for everyone, but the purpose of decentralised protocols for me and many others is 1) the ability to choose the servers you use and therefore the rules you post under and 2) end-to-end security; Bluesky runs under the AT Protocol[1], which stands for "Authenticated Transfer" and does what the name suggests; everything is verified using asymmetric cryptography and hashes.
Bluesky/ATProto seems like you can achieve #1 if you self-host everything. But most people don't self host even DIDs[2], preferring to use their completely centralised did:plc (literally stands for "placeholder" but it's now permanent), and the dev team admit that it will be hard to host the "relay" component in particular.
>Are they trying to make some sort of super social media network that connects a bunch of different sites together...? Does anyone even want that?
The irony is ruined somewhat by the fact that Dorsey was a big investor in Musk's takeover as well though.
Unrelated: I just looked up Jack Dorsey and wow does he look different than I imagined. I always imagined him as looking like Alec Baldwin for some reason.
I've tried BlueSky a bit, but it just seems like a more boring version of Twitter.
Let's face it - whatever Elon says or does, or however much more the user experience undergoes enshittification, the reason people use Twitter is that they want the drama and the crazy stuff - to wallow in it, in fact - and thus any attempt to establish a "Twitter, expect without that" (either specifically through rules, or by attempting to cultivate a different user base) will eventually fail.
...Is Bluesky even designed to get rid of drama? It's not like there's any rules against it. The site just fully launched yesterday, there just hasn't been enough time for any drama to happen.
Again, the reason people are leaving Twitter (or at least the people I follow) is because of all the "impression zombie" bots, the fact that people's accounts randomly get suspended for posting porn, and also because Elon is an unstable maniac that can't be trusted to keep the site functional.
Not *designed*, but much of the crowd that I've seen leave specifically for Bluesky want a polite, drama-free experience, according to their own words.
If a big chunk of the audience goes to Bluesky, sure, the rest have to follow. Will it? Even in the category of "people searching for a Twitter alternative", there are other options, ie. Threads (seems to be more active re: Finnish ex-Twitter community than Bluesky) and Mastodon. Others, too, probably.
So maybe all of those get a share of drama-fleeing Twitter refugees, and a proportionate share of Dramatic Tweeters seeking an audience. Then what? I'm not seeing a plausible mechanism to bring in the former without the latter following in trail.
The dark upside of centralization and platform dominance is that they obey an important rule of the internet: no one wants to post on a dead board. Twitter will continue in some (more deranged) form for years, because traffic is still massive, if somewhat diminished from its peak. The comparative network effects (vs Bluesky) for creators still make X the more economical choice for a distribution channel.
TBH I was disappointed that it doesn’t actually plan the board for me.
Let me input just the number of people, maybe a couple of general preferences and the rest should be automatic. Why do I need to pick actual cheese types? I don’t know the first thing about cheese, I just know I want to impress my guests 😅
Thanks for your helpful feedback. There is no wrong cheese. All selections are right. Factors such as cost, availability and personal preference are hard to take into account. I suppose I could add pictures and descriptions of cheeses.
For everyone who responded to my previous comment re: Anime Girl Profile Picture: I carefully considered my options, then started over when I learned about Statue Profile Pictures and decided I wanted some of that energy. Opting to split the difference, I made the only rational choice and selected Centurii-chan as my avatar. (In her maximally psychotic appearance, of course.)
I say there's no free will and I also have tips for optimizing productivity: Paradox? Not at all!
"Free will denial is almost a movement now," said Scott Galloway--the famous investor, NYU marketing professor, and frequent guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher--on his November 3, 2023 podcast
It is a movement. There's Sam Harris--celebrity atheist, meditation advocate, neuroscience PhD--who published Free Will in 2012, and there's Robert Sapolsky--primatologist, stress hormones expert, Stanford professor, and author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and of the bestselling, encyclopedic Behave--who has a new book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, which came out in October 2023.
And there's me.
Arrayed against us is probably 95% of Americans and the vast majority of philosophers too. According to a 2020 survey of more than 1700 philosophy professors, only 11% denied free will. Daniel Dennett--another celebrity atheist--is probably the biggest defender of free will.
And yet...
Free will is an illusion.
"So what? What difference does it make?" you say. Here's why it's interesting.
Forget for the moment the potentially soporific arguments for and against free will. There is a different angle on this. I've been researching and writing up the psychological effects of denying free will on the person who denies it. Yes, that's right. You might prefer they'd spend their time curing cancer, but some scientists have conducted experiments to see how people's behavior changes when you "prime" them with a text denying free will.
These studies as a group overwhelmingly show (or seem to show) that if you "prime" experimental subjects with free will denial by having them read a deterministic argument, they are more likely--to a degree that was statistically significant--to lie, cheat, and steal in subsequent lab games or observed situations.
I can argue with you about whether or not we have free will. I'm prepared with all the arguments against and I know all the arguments for, which I'd have to rebut. Send them to me. But I'm already moving on--because it is interesting and is our future--to consider what free will denial would be like.
Since you're an actual philosopher and know all the arguments for and against, I'll tell you mine, and you can tell me its proper name!
Materialism posits that internal experience (including the experience of making free choices) is generated mechanistically by the body. My experience of being myself is a mere mechanical effect of the machine of my body interacting with the world.
Now imagine an identical copy of my body, perfectly the same, down to the atomic level. It's put in an environment identical to mine, a million miles away from me. Identical machines, given identical inputs, produce identical effects.
The effect in question is my feeling of what it's like to be myself right now. So materialism is obligated to make two statements about this thought experiment. First: My feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is generated mechanistically by my body. Second: My feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is generated mechanistically by a different body, a million miles away.
Under materialism, it's emphatically _not_ the case that the distant identical body produces somebody else's feeling of what it's like to be that other person right now. That's a different effect altogether. Somebody else's awareness is not what my body generates. Materialism's claim is that my specific, actual, subjective feeling of being myself is generated mechanistically by my body. Well, if it's generated mechanistically in one place, it can be generated mechanistically in two places.
This seems like a pretty hard bullet for a materialist to bite. "Yes, your experience of being yourself could be caused by a different body from yours, a million miles away." It's a little weird, and feels non-Newtonian, to assert that there exists an effect which can be produced by multiple distinct mechanical causes at the same time, at any distance whatsoever from each other. Yet, that seems to be precisely what materialism obligates itself to when it asserts that my feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is produced mechanically by my body.
But the alternative is that the different body _doesn't_ produce my consciousness; it produces somebody else's consciousness. In that case, you've lost causality, and opened the door to every spooky phenomenon. Identical mechanical causes producing different mechanical effects. Free will is no longer off the table, then.
There's also the possibility that I've tied myself up in language game knots. Like, maybe there's some internal incoherence in the idea behind the word "me" or "feeling", which a true materialist would deny. The materialist who wanted to make me aware of this would, of course, be able to substitute an alternative to that word, which more exactly matches the phenomena and doesn't permit dualist sleight-of-hand like what I'm trying to pull.
Am I copying somebody else's ideas, without knowing it?
1. You keep eqiovocating between "free will" and "libertarian free will" and opposing free will to determinism. Thus ignoring compatibilism. Last I saw, the majority of philosophers were compatibilists, and the "libertarian" position wasn't much larger than the "no free will" one.
2. You also seem to be saying determinism is incompatible with moral judgement and blame, when I (and many compatibilists) would say it's necessary for it. See my reply to Deiseach.
3. Were the subjects in those experiments primed with "determinism" or "free will doesn't exist"? If the latter, you're basically just giving them an excuse to act immorally by telling them morality doesn't exist. It says nothing whatsoever about the benefits of believing in libertarian vs compatibilist freedom.
(And has anyone tested how people behave when primed with each of the latter two? I wonder if compatibilism properly described would make people more moral than libertarianism, since if they act badly it's not "I did a bad thing today" but "I am a bad sort of person".)
Is free will a concept we should delete from our toolbox, like "phlogiston," or does it, like "life," point to a real underlying phenomenon despite being deeply misunderstood?
What Sam Harris says may be relevant. Starting with the libertarian definition that free will means you could have done otherwise than you in fact did do. If causal determinism is true (and even if we build in some randomness metaphysically not epistemologically because of quantum mechanics) then the LIB def of FW is false.
We might still want to keep the concept. It is understandable, where being nonsensical is often a main reason to revise a term out of existence. Also, we might keep it because so many people aver to experiencing free will even if it's non-veridical and actually an illusion.
But what Harris says--still with me?--what Harris says is that if we do not actually ever have the experience of "I could have done otherwise". He says this because of, well, meditation. He says if we pay proper or sufficient attention to experience we will see that we are not the author of our thoughts.
Now I need to do some more thinking since that is not necessarily equivalent to "coulda-done-otherwise". But if he's right and we do not even experience the so-called illusion then it would be up there with phlogiston perhaps.
BTW, Harris says he himself no longer feels like he could have done otherwise. This is in contrast, I'd say, to Sapolsky who admits that he quite often "regresses" and accidentally acts as if FW were true, as if he believed in it.
I describe it in a way philosophers won't like: he knows there's no free will but he does not always believe there's none. But that is because actually disbelieving free will is quite a strange experience. It's uncanny. It's dizzying. But it doesn't last. Our natural credence takes over as soon as we are no longer willfully keeping the thought in front of our minds that there's no free will.
The dizziness is for real but temporary and caused by thinking, so i call it "armchair vertigo". Except for Harris's professed experience it goes away as soon as we get out of the armchair so to speak and engage in the world of praise and blame and agency and voluntary action.
Try to think about what "could-ness" actually means as part of human descision making algorithm. For what our minds actually use such category? There has to be some evolutionary reason why we have free will/illusion of free will/illusion of illusion of free will/etc, no matter how long you are going to pass the illusionary buck.
"Try to think about what "could-ness" actually means as part of human descision making algorithm. For what our minds actually use such category? There has to be some evolutionary reason why we have free will/illusion of free will/illusion of illusion of free will/etc,"
And it could be that it's real. Yudkowsky's approach just doesn't show that the sense of free will is necessarily an illusion, only potentially.
IMO there's a useful abstraction that it's pointing to, a certain shard of consciousness, but once the concept has been reified people use it in ways that can be outright counterproductive. E.g. crime and punishment, moral desert, etc.
For moral realism you mean, yes? Antirealism still needs moral agents in order to be meaningful, but there aren't a lot of preconditions on what that might minimally require.
Thanks for the comment. But, I'm not sure I follow. Can you expand on the point you are trying to make please? The denial of free will needs God doing what and why?
Many religions believe in determinism. Only the elect are chosen, but being part of the elect (the religious group which doesn’t believe in free will) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. If you are even inclined to sin, or engage in it, then you are proving that you weren’t chosen. So obviously this form of determinism will not lead to people abandoning morality - or at least morality from the point of view of their religious beliefs. The opposite more likely.
This guy expressed the objection better than I could:
"In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind. This is startlingly the reverse of the truth. It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before. But obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation. That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment."
The over-excessively 'kind' reaction to offenders (he can't help it, he's a victim of society and his genes and systemic racism and is not personally responsible for being a violent thug, abolish the school to prison pipeline!) will mean a reaction in the opposite direction, and if the idea is believed that "he can't help it, it's deterministic that he will be a violent thug" then of course you can't make any appeals to his 'free will' to consciously change. But you can be as harsh and even cruel in punishment as you like, along the lines of "this is how we train animals/we can condition a response of fear and aversion to doing crime for this as the punishment to crime".
I don't think that's better for us, as a society, in the long run to take on a model of excusing our vindictiveness and vengefulness as 'it's the only language they understand', even if we too can't help being vindictive and vengeful, it's all determinism.
See the discussion about genes versus environment on this very site with Scott's posts on schizophrenia etc. Even with the nice, poverty and stressor-free environment envisaged by Sapolsky after government intervenes to end all childhood poverty, there will still be people with genes selecting for more violent behaviour, less impulse control, and so forth. Those genes may not be expressed in an environment that represses them, but maybe they will break out in some cases. So if there's no free will, and we can no longer shift the blame onto "If you see someone with poor emotional regulation, deficits in executive function, and poor impulse control, you might be looking at someone in prison. And you might conclude they had an impoverished childhood... through no fault of their own" because Government Intervention Works, then what do we do with the people who do the naughty no-no things? What do we do with the future SBFs? After we've dismantled the criminal justice system root and branch?
I think we'd see the increase in vigilante justice, or the use of the mental health system as per the Soviet dissident treatment model: we can't put Sam in prison because prison is a no-no place that doesn't exist any longer, but Sam is a swindler and fraudster. Sam can't help being a swindler and fraudster so we can't ask Sam to stop doing that. We don't want to be swindled and defrauded either, though, so.... we dose Sam up on medication à la the 'chemical cosh' and/or lock him away in a nice (we're so nice, all things will be nice) 'treatment centre' where he will be so zombified, he hasn't the capacity to swindle and defraud.
Yes, so much more humane. Bring on the boiling oil.
I'll confess to finding it odd how many people think morality, blame and punishment (and in your argument, persuasion and encouragement)* are incompaitible with determinism. The more normal assumption is that those things are incompatible with *indeterminism*. If determinism is true, then everything people do is reducible in theory to a set of intelligible reasons and conditions. And if people are doing bad things, we can improve their behaviour by altering those reasons and conditions: raising them well, providing peaceful means of resolving their grievances in society, encouraging them to act morally, and as a last resort using force or threat of force to scare them into acting morally.
But if things aren't determined, why bother with any of these things? You could raise someone perfectly, encourage good behaviours, reward good and punish evil etc, and they could still do bad actions for...no reason at all. And you could punish good and reward evil and they could still do good just because. It's all random, it's all unintelligable, there are no actual reducible *reasons* for why they act. So why bother with any of it?
And how does it make sense to "blame" someone for an evil act, if indeterministic (libertarian) free will is true? What does it *mean* that person A did an evil act? On libertarianism, it means that some irreducible, unexplainable..."fact"...occured, some incomprehensible "choice". "Mere hap" as I think Elizabeth Anscombe put it. There's no *reason* why they chose one way or another. They just did! What judgement can you make from this irreducible "choice" that happened because it did?
But on (compatibilist) determinism, person A acted freely if they acted according to their character, and not external compulsion. Simple. So if they were uncoerced and they did an evil act, you can judge them as having a bad, evil character. You can justify exiling or executing them, since their character is inferior and they don't belong in your community. You can rationally hate them and want to punish them for their evil character. And of course you can try to *improve* their character, teach them they did wrong and punish them to make them feel the harm they inflicted on another if they're unable to understand it. That's the theory and it's logical, even if it doesn't always work.
But all that only makes if people act for intelligible reasons, i.e. determined reasons.
(*And the same is true of God: incompaible with *indeterminism*, not with determinism as some people weirdly think.)
"If determinism is true, then everything people do is reducible in theory to a set of intelligible reasons and conditions."
This is, if you will pardon the candour, why I think your entire argument is stupid. If we perfectly knew everything - but we don't. This is the old 50s SF argument about "now that we have the science of psychiatry, crime and mental disease will no longer exist in the Society of the Future".
Well, this *is* the future, and we've still got crime and mental illness, because people are not simply meat puppets. Why does one person in one environment turn to crime, and someone in the same environment does not? If it comes down to the determined "just a shift of inches in space makes a difference", then in order to perfectly understand the programming of the particular meat puppet we will need to understand the position of every particle in the Universe first, so we can perfectly plot out all the influences.
This is astrology by the back door.
"You could raise someone perfectly, encourage good behaviours, reward good and punish evil etc, and they could still do bad actions for...no reason at all."
People do bad things for reasons. Maybe the reasons are stupid, but they very seldom are "for no reason at all".
"And if people are doing bad things, we can improve their behaviour by altering those reasons and conditions: raising them well, providing peaceful means of resolving their grievances in society, encouraging them to act morally, and as a last resort using force or threat of force to scare them into acting morally."
And that last is the problem with the "no such thing as free will". We can't encourage anyone, since their character is fixed and unalterable. We can only coerce. It's a beautifully neat theory, but it will have problems when it comes to practice. Because if we don't fully understand the "set of intelligible reasons and conditions" as to why Rich, Well-Raised Johnny stole money and Poor, Badly-Raised Billy didn't, then how do we go about reforming Johnny? Anything we do may be useless, because if we don't have the entire chain figured out, then treating Johnny with method A may be as bootless as treating cancer like a migraine.
We can't blame Johnny for being a thief, because the dominoes that fell in orderly rows from the instant of the Big Bang meant that everything was pre-ordained to happen as it did and Johnny was foredoomed from the creation of existence to be a thief. This is as bad as Calvinism.
If we can't blame Johnny, then by what right do we punish him? Hatred alone - "You can rationally hate them and want to punish them for their evil character" - because we can't improve them. How can there be improvement, to a fixed chain of conditions? It's like saying we'll "improve" a mountain by getting it to stop being made of rock.
Your model of "improvement" involves a lot of force and coercion - the boiling oil environment, after all. "punish them to make them feel the harm they inflicted on another if they're unable to understand it". You talk about "Another good result of society-wide recognition that there's no free will would be that the criminal justice system would have to be dismantled root and branch" and then conclude here that if all else fails, eh, exile or punishment or lock them up forever. Just like the old ways and the old days, before the enlightened view of "there is no free will so there is no blame", then?
Of course they can't understand it because they're not capable of understanding it because they are not wired up to understand it; if they understood it, they would not have committed the offences in the first place. At least, that is the conclusion determinism comes to, so far as I can see.
You're making a very unwarranted distinction between "determinism means intelligible reasons and conditions for actions, indeterminism means doing things for no reason at all and we can never understand why". Holding to free will, I say we can understand why people do things, and why they don't run along grooves like a tram or trolley, and how it is possible to get people to change, to improve, to teach them better.
"What does it *mean* that person A did an evil act?"
It means A chose to do that act, for reasons which may indeed include how their character was formed by the environment and influences around them, and the way they were raised, and their particular genetics expressed in the shape of their intellect and mind. But at the end, they *chose* to do this thing; there is no 'since they are formed in this way, like a machine set up to do one action, they could not have done otherwise, they have no will and no choice'.
Determinism to me *is* the argument about external compulsion, because it postulates that there is no way of acting outside of the set of conditions that came about in a particular way because this is how the laws of nature work out because this is the long chain of causation from the Big Bang on down.
"If that is your question, I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine. We quarantine and try real rehabilitation but if rehabilitation is unsuccessful we continue with quarantine. Free will deniers like Sapolsky and especially Greg Caruso have explicitly analogized to public health, where we do not necessarily blame people who are disease vectors but we nevertheless are occasionally justified in quarantining them perhaps against their will."
'Against their will'? I thought you had done away with the idea of "will". But how does Sapolsky reconcile rehabilitation (that is, getting people to shift grooves from 'do bad things' to 'do good things' or 'refrain from doing bad things') with his belief that he can't even choose his own shirt?
From your original piece:
"someone says to him, "You're dressed nice today," and, as Sapolsky tells it, "I say 'Thank you,' as if I had anything to do with it."
So a man who thinks he can't even make a choice of his own about what clothes he wears is going to sit down opposite a bank robber, murderer, or rapist, and rehabilitate them by teaching and persuading them to behave in better ways as though they could 'choose' to do this. Mm-hmm. Yes, I'm sure that will work.
"This is, if you will pardon the candour, why I think your entire argument is stupid. If we perfectly knew everything - but we don't. This is the old 50s SF argument about "now that we have the science of psychiatry, crime and mental disease will no longer exist in the Society of the Future"."
I guess I should have emphasised the "in theory" part more. I'm not implying in any way that we can actually discover those reasons and causes in practice. To clarify, my argument is (practically) an entirely conservative one: all the stuff we're doing, like moral judgement, exhortation, blame and punishment makes sense and we should continue to do it (subject to minor arguments over how the details could be improved). Only as a matter of philosophical theory am I challenging the common belief that this is continuation in our practices requires us to disbelieve determinism. (And this is a somewhat conservative argument as well; as you observed, it's the Calvinist position).
With that clarified, what exactly do you object to in my position?
"People do bad things for reasons. Maybe the reasons are stupid, but they very seldom are "for no reason at all"."
This is...just restating determinism. If I act the way I do for a set of reasons, such that if those reasons were not present I would not act that way, then my act is determined by those reasons. No matter how stupid or sensible the reasons, they determine my act as long as they are a necessary and sufficient condition, i.e. a full explanation of my action.
The libertarian's challenge is to explain what it even *means* to act for reasons that are not determinative. How this differs from the act being ultimately random, and thus meaningless.
"And that last is the problem with the "no such thing as free will". We can't encourage anyone, since their character is fixed and unalterable. We can only coerce."
No, no, no, no, no! Determinism means your act is constrained by your character (as it is at the time of your act). It does NOT mean your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed. Your character can absolutely change, and will change according to meaningful reasons. This is a common misunderstanding it seems.
Determinism says you could (in fact would) have done otherwise *if the state of the world and yourself had been different*. It only denies that you could have done otherwise even if everything antecedent was exactly the same. Which, I contend, is not even a logically coherent concept.
"We can't blame Johnny for being a thief, because the dominoes that fell in orderly rows from the instant of the Big Bang meant that everything was pre-ordained to happen as it did and Johnny was foredoomed from the creation of existence to be a thief. "
Yes. We. Can. On determinism, we can blame Johnny for thieving, *because of what it shows about his character*: the reason he thieves is his thieving character, thus his act of thieving causes us to rationally attach the predicate of blame *to him* (not just to his act), and to attach the description of "thief" to him (meaning not just the trivial "one who has thieved" but also "one who is inclined to thieve"). On libertarianism, his act of thieving is an unexplained fact, with no necessary condition to who he is, and so what justifies attaching blame to *him* rather than just his act?
Just to hammer home the point: imagine Johnny grows up and cheats on his wife one time. If his wife is a libertarian, he can say say to her "hey honey, it's not that I don't love you, it doesn't say anything about me at all! It's just that the cosmic dice happened fall one way and I cheated; they could just as well have fallen the other way. Don't blame *me*, I had nothing to do with it!" Wheras if she's a determinist, she's not buying it. "No Johnny," she says, "your cheating proceeded from your character, which was a necessary and sufficient cause for it. By definition, either you don't love me, or your idea of 'love' does not involve the comittment I thought it did."
Determinist!Wife has eminently rational logic for either a divorce, or a "change your character, or we divorce" ultimatum. Libertarian!Wife gets stuck in a philosophical hole if she tries to reason this out. Or so it seems to me.
"This is as bad as Calvinism."
Well, without trying to re-litigate the Reformation...what's wrong with Calvinism? It has some huge theological and moral issues (but only, it would seem, because of the doctrine of damnation; that's the doctrine from which the moral horrors arise, not the metaphysical framework), but it's the only really coherent account of God's omnipotence and human action. Aside maybe, from atemporalism (God is outside time), which raises further major paradoxes. Otherwise, you either dispense with God, dispense with free will, or juggle metaphysical contradictions just out of sight (i.e. Molinism). Do you have an alternative?
First, I think that the definitions of Determinism and Non-Determinism/Free Will we are using are talking past each other, and I think this is a large part of the difficulty.
"Determinism means your act is constrained by your character (as it is at the time of your act). It does NOT mean your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed."
Well, neither does free will think your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed, that's the whole point of it. You can make choices, you can change your mind, you can make decisions, you can alter behaviour by effort. The version of Free Will that other comments are going by, that "poof! out of nowhere!" people do things for no reason at all is not free will, and I think it's sort of a strawman in order to let the determinist principle stand as more logically consistent.
I'll also have to hold my hands up (and apologise to Doctor Dave the PhD in Phil) that the version of free will definitions I'm using are largely to solely based on religious principles, I'm not arguing the philosophical version which may be totally different (indeed, I think it must be). So that's another morass to bog down in.
Now, let's take Cheating Johnny. His determinist wife can indeed blame him, but she also then has to decide that if this is the way Johnny's character is formed, he's likely to cheat again, and so is it a good idea for her to continue with the marriage? If soft determinism* says that character can be changed, in response to circumstances - well, here I say "but that's free will in action". Johnny can choose "do I love my wife enough to accept the ultimatum to stop cheating or else she'll divorce me, or do I prefer to get novel sex where I can and so I'll accept the divorce?" The Determinist says "the external conditions have now changed; now Johnny's wife knows, where before she didn't, now there's the threat of divorce, where before there wasn't" and I agree with that. The crux of the disagreement here is "by what mechanism does Johnny choose?" How is he able to decide to change behaviour by going against (immutable, fixed, if we go the hard determinist/physicalist view) character? I say "he exercises the freedom of his will to choose because his character is not immutably fixed since the creation of the universe", you say - what?
*I'm imagining there must be a hard version of determinism, if that Sapolsky dude is joking about how he has nothing to do with the way he dresses, it's the cosmic pixies that pick out his clothes for him or something.
"What's wrong with Calvinism?"
Ah, here we get into the religious angle! 😀 Double predestination, as a defence of and consequence of, absolute Divine sovereignty is - as you say - a moral horror. It makes a mockery of the possibility of salvation, because that has already been decided. If you obey the evangelical command to "go make disciples of all nations", then you are only preaching to the already converted (and I think that it does involve a contradiction: if they are saved already and preaching the Gospel only gives them the opportunity to hear of their salvation, what happens if they are not preached to? Do they lose their salvation? Well, some strands of "eternal assurance" say that can't happen. Does God change His mind? Again, that's a problem there for foreknowledge because if God changes His mind then He can't know the future and that's a knock against omniscience).
Worse than that, God has chosen *you* to be damned and there's nothing you can do about it, even if you live what is considered a godly life and think you have saving faith, that is all illusion. No wonder James Hogg wrote "Confessions of a Justified Sinner".
EDIT: I agree that Calvin's views are beautifully logical, but he was so stuck on creating the beautiful logical clockwork mechanism that he didn't recognise he had turned God into a tyrannical sadist. Even the God of the Old Testament is willing to be bargained down to "but will you destroy Sodom and all in it if there are only fifty - forty - thirty - twenty - ten righteous men in it?" by Abraham.
That's the God that wants to exercise mercy if we only give Him the slightest chink to do so. As for absolute Divine sovereignty, He emptied Himself and assumed the form of a slave by taking on our mortal flesh, so I don't think is as bothered about His prestige as Calvin thought.
The Catholic view is different. Our will suffers, like all our faculties and powers, from the effects of Original Sin and the Fall, so that it is weakened and no longer rules our appetites perfectly. But we still have a will, and can exercise it, and can choose salvation or damnation:
"God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. "God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him."
Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.
...Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts.
Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.
1736 Every act directly willed is imputable to its author:
'Thus the Lord asked Eve after the sin in the garden: "What is this that you have done?" He asked Cain the same question. The prophet Nathan questioned David in the same way after he committed adultery with the wife of Uriah and had him murdered.'
An action can be indirectly voluntary when it results from negligence regarding something one should have known or done: for example, an accident arising from ignorance of traffic laws.
An effect can be tolerated without being willed by its agent; for instance, a mother's exhaustion from tending her sick child. A bad effect is not imputable if it was not willed either as an end or as a means of an action, e.g., a death a person incurs in aiding someone in danger. For a bad effect to be imputable it must be foreseeable and the agent must have the possibility of avoiding it, as in the case of manslaughter caused by a drunken driver."
I think the part about 'responsibility can be diminished by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors' is where Determinism (or soft determinism) and Free Will meet on common ground. These are the external factors which influence Cheating Johnny's character, says Determinism. As long as Johnny is operating under duress about not cheating or else divorce, he is less responsible if he lies about 'sure darling' in agreement, says Free Will, but he's still responsible for his actions if he then goes off to see his girlfriend afterwards.
"Article 6. Whether man chooses of necessity or freely?
Objection 1. It would seem that man chooses of necessity. For the end stands in relation to the object of choice, as the principle of that which follows from the principles, as declared in Ethic. vii, 8. But conclusions follow of necessity from their principles. Therefore man is moved of necessity from (willing) the end of the choice (of the means).
Objection 2. Further, as stated above (Article 1, Reply to Objection 2), choice follows the reason's judgment of what is to be done. But reason judges of necessity about some things: on account of the necessity of the premises. Therefore it seems that choice also follows of necessity.
Objection 3. Further, if two things are absolutely equal, man is not moved to one more than to the other; thus if a hungry man, as Plato says (Cf. De Coelo ii, 13), be confronted on either side with two portions of food equally appetizing and at an equal distance, he is not moved towards one more than to the other; and he finds the reason of this in the immobility of the earth in the middle of the world. Now, if that which is equally (eligible) with something else cannot be chosen, much less can that be chosen which appears as less (eligible). Therefore if two or more things are available, of which one appears to be more (eligible), it is impossible to choose any of the others. Therefore that which appears to hold the first place is chosen of necessity. But every act of choosing is in regard to something that seems in some way better. Therefore every choice is made necessarily.
On the contrary, Choice is an act of a rational power; which according to the Philosopher (Metaph. ix, 2) stands in relation to opposites.
I answer that, Man does not choose of necessity. And this is because that which is possible not to be, is not of necessity. Now the reason why it is possible not to choose, or to choose, may be gathered from a twofold power in man. For man can will and not will, act and not act; again, he can will this or that, and do this or that. The reason of this is seated in the very power of the reason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as good. Now the reason can apprehend as good, not only this, viz. "to will" or "to act," but also this, viz. "not to will" or "not to act." Again, in all particular goods, the reason can consider an aspect of some good, and the lack of some good, which has the aspect of evil: and in this respect, it can apprehend any single one of such goods as to be chosen or to be avoided. The perfect good alone, which is Happiness, cannot be apprehended by the reason as an evil, or as lacking in any way. Consequently man wills Happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to be happy, or to be unhappy. Now since choice is not of the end, but of the means, as stated above (Article 3); it is not of the perfect good, which is Happiness, but of other particular goods. Therefore man chooses not of necessity, but freely.
Reply to Objection 1. The conclusion does not always of necessity follow from the principles, but only when the principles cannot be true if the conclusion is not true. In like manner, the end does not always necessitate in man the choosing of the means, because the means are not always such that the end cannot be gained without them; or, if they be such, they are not always considered in that light.
Reply to Objection 2. The reason's decision or judgment of what is to be done is about things that are contingent and possible to us. In such matters the conclusions do not follow of necessity from principles that are absolutely necessary, but from such as are so conditionally; as, for instance, "If he runs, he is in motion."
Reply to Objection 3. If two things be proposed as equal under one aspect, nothing hinders us from considering in one of them some particular point of superiority, so that the will has a bent towards that one rather than towards the other."
Hang on a second, I think you're mixing me up with "Dr. Dave F. Davidson". You're replying to things I said and things he said in the same comment, and I'm not sure if the replies to me are actually directed at me.
I'm a compatibilist, saying free will (along with moral agency, blame, punishment) is compatibile with, and in fact probably requires, determinism. He's saying free will doesn't exist (because it's *incompatible* with determinism) and that we should never punish people for anything, which I criticised above.
Yeah, I realised that about half way through but I was so BEFOGGED IN A CLOUD OF EMOTIONALISM that I didn't want to stop and sort it all out.
Apologies to all concerned. I still think your "prison is horrible, death is better" stance and his "quarantine them and punish them to force to behave" stance are not reconcilable as to how to treat the irredeemable who, despite all the nice shiny clean no more poverty environment and Bestest Childraising Educating Methods still go out and do naughty things.
You're more reasonable to talk to, Doctor Dave The PhD in Philosophy is heavy on the theory and "leave us be ever so rational" but not so great about what will the theory look like once translated into practice.
"I still think your "prison is horrible, death is better" stance"
Um, that wasn't me either that was anomie. I'll accept the blame for that since "I criticised above" could mean in reply to your second-level comment OR in reply to Davidsin's top-level comment (I meant the latter). And it could mean earlier or later depending on the comments are set to Newest or Chronological.
Now having cleared that up, I need to go to bed as it's 4 am in Victoria. I'll reply to the parts of your comment directed at me when I can.
That long quotation from whomever that was was very hard to understand, ie unclear. But you made some interesting and good points after that. I will re-read and reply later. But the first thought that came to mind is we must make an effort not to be emotional about the imagined end of free will. It will be very tempting to defend free will merely because our emotions in favor of justice (and even revenge) and our emotions that want to punish bad deeds rise up and motivate our reasoning in favor of free will. "What are we going to do about XYZ terrible thing?!" That is a bit of evidence that emotions are at work and we ought to look again. More soon. Thanks!
You don't understand clear English? I thought that passage was easy enough to follow. But then again, I'm not pretending to be any more elevated than I am as an ordinary person.
Doctor Dave, PhD. In Philosophy. Kind of you to slap your qualifications down on the table like that, so we lesser mortals can be properly put in our places.
You wrote: "Even with the nice, poverty and stressor-free environment envisaged by Sapolsky after government intervenes to end all childhood poverty, there will still be people with genes selecting for more violent behaviour, less impulse control, and so forth. Those genes may not be expressed in an environment that represses them, but maybe they will break out in some cases" .... And then you wonder what will we do then? Do you mean "how will we punish them if there's no FW and no MR?" If that is your question, I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine. We quarantine and try real rehabilitation but if rehabilitation is unsuccessful we continue with quarantine. Free will deniers like Sapolsky and especially Greg Caruso have explicitly analogized to public health, where we do not necessarily blame people who are disease vectors but we nevertheless are occasionally justified in quarantining them perhaps against their will. (Although if they were rational they would see the merits in them being quarantined if they are disease vectors.)
" I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine."
Quarantine is being forced to live somewhere you don;t want to, and so is jail. The problem with the Harri/Sapolsky approach is that the resulting approach to criminal justice isnt different enough from a typical western society.
Do you think locking people up in solitary confinement is any more humane? The system we have right now is that we put petty criminals in prison, knowing full damn well that prison is not going to magically rehabilitate them, and then let them out an arbitrary amount of time later, only for them to commit the same crime again (or worse) and they end up back in prison. This isn't about being "nice", this is about making the system actually work.
And free will not existing doesn't mean persuasion doesn't work, it obviously does. Humans clearly have agency, but there are clear limits to it. Reasonable people do not not commit crime because society is set up in a way so that there is a massive incentive not to commit crime. The people who commit crime anyways are either 1. stupid enough to think they can get away with it, 2. stupid enough to not even realize it's a crime, or 3. smart enough to see that the system is flawed enough that they actually can get away with it. The last one has the obvious fix of improving the system so that it isn't possible to get away with it, and the second one you might be able to fix by teaching civics better in school (though you can't expect all the kids to actually learn), but the first one doesn't have any obvious solution. Threatening greater punishment doesn't matter because the punishment isn't even being considered by them in the first place. And we currently do not have the means to cure stupidity. They are always just going to be a liability.
So what can we even do about this? Well, locking them up permanently is the usual solution, but that's both a waste of resources and needlessly cruel. Using them as slave labor is a bit more productive (and something the US does already). But the most ethical solution is just to put them out of their misery. The dead cannot suffer, after all.
You've gotten a lot of pushback, particularly on your final two sentences, but I see the logic in the overall message, particularly in your description of the criminal mindset.
I even see the logic in your final paragraph, with a caveat that the "we" you mention should not be the state, but rather the individual targets of criminal attempts. There is no better time to permanently end the suffering of a criminal than *while he is actively engaged in crime* and there can be no possible mistake about it.
I think one of the issues in this thread is that most of the highly intelligent people who post on ACX are too intelligent to *accurately* imagine what it's like to be the kind of stupid that leads to criminal acts.
It's not their fault; the people writing comments here are almost universally living in highly intelligent "social bubbles" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/). They tend to have highly intelligent family, seek highly intelligent friends, and end up in careers which expose them to highly intelligent peers. They might not *consider* themselves to be highly intelligent - because they tend to socialize with highly intelligent people, they know people who are even smarter than they are - but nevertheless, they're highly intelligent and everyone they know pretty well is highly intelligent, and thus they instinctively model the minds of *everyone* from this perspective.
They can't *fully* model what it's like to be truly stupid; unobservant, incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, unable to accurately predict the consequences of a given action, unable to absorb information, unable to update priors. They can't model what it's like to have an entirely different set of motivational priorities based on an *inability* to think, and that's why so many of their suggestions about how to help and/or manage stupid criminals are ultimately unsuccessful.
I'm not nearly as intelligent as some folk here, but I'm (deliberately) underemployed in a job which provides long-term exposure to not only different classes, but wildly different levels of intelligence. I worked closely with a few low-IQ people for *years,* people who were only *just* intelligent enough to have a fairly simple job, and it took me years and *years* to fully understand and accept that they weren't merely under-educated or emotionally unbalanced, problems which might be corrected with enough resources.
No.
They're simply...
Stupid.
Too stupid to choose to do better.
And these were stupid people who were just smart enough to be capable of keeping a job for multiple years! There's a whole bubble of people under them who are too stupid to even want to keep a job, much less actually manage to keep one.
You're right when you say, "Threatening greater punishment doesn't matter because the punishment isn't even being considered by them in the first place." I've seen that demonstrated over and over; my stupid coworkers would be confronted with a relatively simple problem, either at work or in their personal lives, and simply *could not solve it,* no matter how much informal education they received from me or others about it.
There is no cure for stupidity, and it is a liability, and woe unto the society who cannot recognize it.
"The system we have right now is that we put petty criminals in prison, knowing full damn well that prison is not going to magically rehabilitate them, and then let them out an arbitrary amount of time later, only for them to commit the same crime again (or worse) and they end up back in prison"
That depends on who "we" are -- some systems are morerehabilitative than others.
Well, what are you going to do with them? In the bright shiny 'no free will it's all determinism' future, we've done away with prisons and nobody is raised in a bad environment anymore.
And yet, oddly enough, there will be criminals still - since we have plenty of people raised in good environments today who engage in crime.
But they can't help it, poor dears, it's their genes and they can't even choose to change their behaviour, no more than Sapolsky can choose which pair of socks he puts on in the morning*
So. What. Then. Do. You. Do. With. Them?
I think the "poor dear" approach will fall out of favour as criminals continue to crim, and the "put 'em in boiling oil" element will predominate. Drugging people into zombies is as bad as solitary confinement. If we agreed even to pretend that people had free goddamn will, maybe we could do something to help them change, but since we're going to treat everyone as meat robots, there is no "helping" or "change", there is only "put the shock collar on them and jolt them with volts when they offend". That's a better outcome? I don't want to live in that world, thanks all the same.
Yes, let's just kill the inconvenient. Who would possibly object to the death penalty for "hmm, don't like the face he makes"? And when you yourself are judged inconvenient for someone or other, just step into the disintegration booth, there's a good meat robot.
Lord God in Heaven, I don't even support execution for murderers, but for "you can't help your genes, and you certainly can't do anything to fight against them because free will is an illusion, so we're going to kill you"?
*'He likes to tell a story about how, immediately after finishing a syllogism concluding in the falsity of free will, someone says to him, "You're dressed nice today," and, as Sapolsky tells it, "I say 'Thank you,' as if I had anything to do with it."'
You wrote: "So. What. Then. Do. You. Do. With. Them? I think the "poor dear" approach will fall out of favour as criminals continue to crim, and the "put 'em in boiling oil" element will predominate. " I responded to someone else a few minutes ago in a way that I think is a good response to your point just quoted too. First, emotion seems to be in control of your reasoning (see an even earlier post tonight). Second, quarantine along the public health model. Not backwards looking deontological deserved blame-y punishment, but utilitarian forward looking harm preventing not based in desert/blame quarantine. Quarantine . That's what we do with them then.
If you put a bunch of people with criminal tendencies into the same place, they are going to attack each other. If you allow it to happen, that makes it even more of a punishment; if you prevent it with solitary confinement, that makes it even more of a punishment; if you prevent it by hiring guards to keep order, you have reinvented prison.
Just like a woman with her empty little head which can't handle anything like cool, calm reason and logic of men, yes?
As you may gather from the rather heavy-handed sarcasm there, I gave up being terribly, terribly impressed by the "you're being emotional" argument a long time ago. I think that emotion does have a place in this discussion, when we are talking about people as meat puppets.
" Quarantine . That's what we do with them then."
So, prison, then. Nice prison, kind prison even, but still prison. So you and OP need to argue that one out (so logically and reasonably and non-emotionally) because they want to do away with prison entirely and would prefer to execute the offenders rather than confine them.
If blame is not deserved, then punishment is not deserved, either. We don't blame an oak tree for not being a willow. And undeserved punishment has no limits as to cruelty or how long it is inflicted.
...It's just so sad. In an effort to appear "moral" and "humane", people end up creating a system that perpetuates far more suffering than one that simply operates pragmatically. Yes, of course there is genetic variance, the people who claim it doesn't exist are insane. And that ultimately means there are always going to be people born whose existence cannot be tolerated by society. It's obviously not their fault, but the reality is that they are going to cause more harm than good if they're allowed to walk free.
In a perfect world, gene editing would allow everyone to be made compatible with society, but that world doesn't exist yet. Civilization's existence is conditional on people actively working to perpetuate it, and some are just physically unable to do so. There is only so much slack that can be tolerated before everything falls apart. And for the record, if I am ever deemed a liability... I'm not going to complain. I don't particularly value my own life.
"In a perfect world, gene editing would allow everyone to be made compatible with society, but that world doesn't exist yet."
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
This is a perfect example of how sentimentality leads to cruelty. Prison is so horrible! Let's avoid having to put people in prison by.... murdering them, the same way unwanted puppies are drowned. Except *shudder* drowning puppies? How barbaric! Getting rid of human dross, that's just hygienic, on the other hand.
I don't know whether to pray for Paperclip AI to come fast or not, before we get the post-free will 'utopia'.
Anything non-blocky is not really compatible with relativity, spatially separated observers have different future lightcones, and the union of all of them is basically the block universe.
You are supporting a branched cosmos as well, but you have no reason to believe that branching, by some QM mechanism, is compatible with GR .QM assumes a flat spacetime, GW assumes the opposite.
Also, the block universe thing isn't a straightforward implication of GR, as Rovelli argues here:-
If find this interesting and intriguing but you'll forgive me if I don't understand. Could you humor me and explain how relativity can be glossed as "spatially separate observers have different future lightcones" and also how all of them unified is the block universe? The block universe in my laymen's understanding was, I thought, a way of characterizing our universe as it would look to a being capable of standing outside of it, outside of space-time. Thanks!
Sure, I'll try to explain it the way I understand it. So, relativity, among other things, means relativity of simultaneity. That is, at any spacetime point the spatial "slice", the surface in space where t=const depends on the observer's direction and velocity. If we take all possible directions and velocities at a given point, the union of these t=const surfaces will cover the spacelike separated parts of the observer's lightcone. So, imagine that X is the union of the past and future lightcones, and the observer is in the middle, then the constant time surfaces cover all but the top and bottom part of the X. Now, for a set of observers at a slightly different spatial point it will be a different lightcone, something like XX. With the lines, of course, extending infinitely far into the past and the future. If you take all possible observers, then the union of all the XXXXXXXX.... covers the whole spacetime, present, past and future. This is different from Galilean relativity, where all observers agree on the t=const slice, and you can have a Growing block universe rather than eternalist universe. Not so in Einstein's relativity, where there is no preferred spatial slice that can grow the universe from the past into the future. You are basically stuck with eternalism.
The situation is more complicated in quantum mechanics, especially if one subscribes to the version of it with unitary evolution without collapse (usually leading to the Many Worlds emergent branching due to decoherence and einselection). So the eternal universe is not just one connected block, but more of a tree, with infinitely many branches sticking out everywhere. But "from the outside" it still looks like a static object, just a rather intricately shaped.
Hope it makes sense. Please feel free to point out any errors you may notice.
I don't think it's misleading. But yes there are two different definitions of free will. Together they comprise 89% of philosophers. And while they both endorse "free will" they mean rather different things by it.
I think both above comments are a mistake. Compatibilists and libertarians don't (in general) mean different things by "free will" - if that were the case they would not be competing views, which they are. They mean the same thing by "free will", but have different beliefs about it - in particular, about its relation to determinism.
I do not agree. I read you saying X but I do not see a separate idea Y on offer as support for X.
They have two diff definitions. I laid them out. LIB is you could have done otherwise which is contravened by causal determinism. (This framing, by the way, is recognized as accurate by as disparate participants as Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Josh Greene and co-author Cohen, most textbooks etc.) COMP says you COULD NOT have done otherwise because you are part of the causal chain, the casual chain of causal determinism, but you are free if you are caused in the right way, in a special way .(And then various COMPs have various descriptions of what kinds of causes are "constraining" and make us unfree and which kind of causes allow for free will of this COMP sort.
Could you expand please on what those beliefs are? Those about FW's relation to CD?
Here is how my framing goes.
The problem of FW is a prima facie conflict between an intuitive (inchoate and undefined) sense of FW and the truth of causal determinism. The various psble positions in logical space can be found by two questions.
1) Are FW and CD incompatible?
2)) If yes, which one obtains and which one doesn't?
You can answer #1 yes or no and then if yes we have one more degree of articulation to specify.
A. Incompatibilist Hard Determinism answers yes they are incompatible and the one that obtains is CD, FW is false. As a deductive argument for HD it's this.
P1. If CD then not-FW
P2. CD
Conclusion: Therefore, not-FW.
B. Incompatibilist Libertarianism says yes they are incompatible and then FW (defined as "could have done otherwise") obtains, CD is false. As an argument it's
P1. If CD then not-FW
P2. Not CD
Conclusion: Therefore FW is not ruled out.
Finally there is the position that says NO they are not incompatible, they're compatible. COMP does not have to answer which obtains as it says both do. But it is a sleight of hand (or "wretched subterfuge" as Kant put it) because while it says "both obtain" it has changed the definition of FW that obtains. How so? Because COMP affirms CD it thereby denies LIBFW. Because LIBFW contravenes CD. Interestingly, COMP agrees that LIBFW is contravened CD, so they are "incompatibilists" too. What they have done is say, like AJ Ayer does in Freedom and Necessity: LIBFW was always a dumb definition of FW, FW ought to mean not uncaused, but caused in the right way.
". LIB is you could have done otherwise which is contravened by causal determinism. "
Which would be contravened by casual determinism *if it were true*. You keep taking the hypothetical to be categorical.
"COMP says you COULD NOT have done otherwise because you are part of the causal chain, the casual chain of causal determinism, but you are free if you are caused in the right way, in a special way ."
"Special" doesn't mean anything mysterious -- it's pretty much the legal definition of responsibility -- you are and adult, yo have a normally functioning brain, and you are not under external duress.
"But it is a sleight of hand (or "wretched subterfuge" as Kant put it) because while it says "both obtain" it has changed the definition of FW that obtains."
It changes the definition if the LIB definition was clearly the definition, but earlier you said the definition was "inchoate". ...so maybe it just was never clear.
1) Compatibilists often do not agree that being part of a deterministic causal chain means you could not have done otherwise. One area on which there is debate is what the "ability to do otherwise" amounts to, and there are both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of this ability (See for example this section of the Stanford encyclopedia article on compatibilism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#CompAbouFreeDoOthe)
2) Your final paragraph is very confusing. It looks to me like you are making the mistake of inferring from the fact that compatibilists and libertarians disagree about what is included in or entailed by some concept (in this case FW), they are using the term "free will" with different meanings. That's a bad inference. In both the mouth of the libertarian and in the mouth of the compatibilist, "free will" can mean what you call FW, and their views are competing views about FW. Don't conflate people having different theories about some concept with them using a term with different meanings. By analogy, utilitarians and kantians do not (necessarily) mean something different by "right" - they are both using "right" with its ordinary meaning. They just have different theories about rightness.
The literature is of course a little messier than this, but I think the best way to understand the debate between libertarians and compatibilists is that they (and ordinary people as well) use "free will" with more or less the shared meaning "the kind of control over one's action necessary for moral responsibility and desert". Then they have substantive (not verbal!) disagreements about what this kind of control involves.
"4.1 Compatibilism about the Freedom to Do Otherwise
The Consequence Argument (section 3.1) makes a strong case for the incompatibility of determinism and the freedom to do otherwise. Assuming that determinism is true, it states that:
No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.
Compatibilists who accept that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility must show what is wrong with this powerful argument. They also should offer some account of what John Martin Fischer (1994) has called regulative control—a form of control agents possess when they can bring about X and can refrain from bringing about X— that makes clear how it is possible even at a determined world. We will first consider three different compatibilist attempts to unseat the Consequence Argument. Then we will consider how some compatibilists, the so-called New Dispositionalists, explain regulative control, that is, how they might explain the freedom to do otherwise in a way that is compatible with causal determinism."
I have a job. Two actually. Where do you all find the time?! I will respond to all comments as soon as I can. This is fun. (Except getting screamed at. That gives me a stomach ache and is not appreciated.) But for now here is what I can say about that passage from SEP.
They need to show that CD does not contravene couldadoneotherwise.
But what Frankfurt shows is that “FW” (the intuitive folk notion, invariant necessary and sufficient conditions of proper use for which philosophers tease out the contours via thought experiment and the method of cases (I say all this because later I will say something about kludged concepts and experimental philosophy and Knobe/Doris's "variantism")) does not require that you could have done otherwise.
In other words and without that distracting paranthetical, all that Frankfurt shows is that the folk concept of FW does not turn, as some had thought, on couldadoneotherwise, it turns on whether or not the action was caused in the right way.
Frankfurt shows that what matters (ie what the folk concept of FW has built into it) is the nature of the causal chain leading up to the given action, ie was it your intention that caused you or was it the brain control chip).
This is still a version of what I’ve called COMP which is folks who endorse CD and endorse that CD contravenes “couldadoneotherwise/LIBFW” and thereby endorse that people could *not* do otherwise and yet might have “free will”... But by this account “free will” here no longer means “could have done otherwise” it means “caused in the right way” thus...as I've been saying... there are two definitions of FW out there. LIB and COMP.
I wonder if I think this because (or if those who disagree disagree because) of a take on stuff in the ballpark of experimental philosophy's attack on philosophical methodology. Ex-Phi has shown that people will say XYZ is a case of free will and ABC is not a case of moral responsibility etc depending on various experimentally manipulatable features of the case(s) like the extremity of violence in the act or the abstract discussion of causation or about norms like who gets to take pens for free and who doesn't.
Having reflected on that stuff I do not think there is a stable folk concept of FW to be discovered (there is not a description of it as necessary and sufficient conditions of its application across all possible scenarios). Thinking that there is nec-and-suff-cond etc is what Knobe/Doris call invariantism and it is classic in philosophy. But it's more likely that we have a kludged together set of propositions that could not be made internally consistent without "revising" away one of the intuitive judgments on edge cases.
But Frankfurt et alia are still going on as if the task is to tease out the true folk concept. So, right, they might not like to hear or not accept that there are two definitions out there LIB and COMP. .... Thanks! More soon as I can.
I prefer to read on web, and the current emails don't even have a link to the website anywhere on them. I end up having to go search for the article from scratch. That seems broken too, and is a baffling choice.
The first half of the or returns 0 only if the number in binary ends with 001 followed by any number of trailing zeroes. So 1,9,17,25,33... as well as any of those multiplied by a power of 2 (1,2,4,8..., 17,34,68..., 25,50,100...). Otherwise, it returns the last three digits before the trailing zeroes. The second half returns 0 if there's an even number of trailing zeroes (meaning the number is a power of 4), 1 otherwise.
So, it identifies numbers that are not powers of 4 or 1 more than a multiple of 8? I have no idea what that would be for.
Hm, so... chop off all the trailing zeros, flip the lowest (and possibly only) 1 to be a 0, and then ... bitwise-and the last three bits with 111? Why not bitwise-and with 110? I'm probably misunderstanding something; it's been quite a while since I worked at this level. Then return it if it's non-zero, or else return ... whether there was an odd number of trailing zeros? But why go base-16 for &0x7 but not for &1? I could easily be forgetting some arcane C behavior.
Anyway, I'm coming up blank. Probably I'm too rusty to figure it out.
(Did you mean "__builtin_ctz", with no 'g'? And is there a missing open-paren in the first half of the return? Also, since there's no explicit check, it's probably worth noting that this could have undefined behavior if the argument is 0.)
[Edit to remove rot13 since no one else is doing it.]
Is this the first step in testing if a positive integer is a square? If x is a square, then f(x) is zero, and this lets you efficiently rule out most numbers. But that seems too trivial to be the actual use.
Spot on. If, for example, someone sent you two files of numbers, one of which was mostly square, and you somehow garbled the top bits of each number, this would let you tell which were candidates for low bits of squares.
If we write x = 2^n * b, where b is odd, the function is zero iff n is even and b is 1 mod 8. x is a square iff b is a square and n is even. If b is a square, then b is 1 mod 8 (since it's the square of an odd number), so if x is a square, then the function is zero.
I'm interested to know your opinions on the recent ruling by Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick rescinding Elon Musk's last compensation deal with Tesla. I'm particularly interested in the opinion of anyone with no particular opinion of Mr. Musk himself (if such exist).
The ruling in full can be found here (https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=359340), and there are plenty of media summaries out there, but briefly, as I understand it: this compensation deal was quite unusual in that it made very high compensation contingent on achieving commensurately difficult milestones. The deal was voted on and approved by the shareholders, but a lawsuit was filed (nominally by a shareholder) shortly thereafter, challenging that the shareholders had been misled and the deal was unfair to them. This ruling rescinds this deal six years later, after all the specified milestones have been achieved. It finds that the company had described members of the company's board as independent, who were too closely affilliated with Mr. Musk to be described that way. Consequently (based on Delaware law), the deal would have to be "entirely fair", and the defendants could not meet the burden of showing this.
It's important to note that all payments were contingent on large increases to the stock price, so there was no way for shareholders to lose money on this.
"The deal was voted on and approved by the shareholders, but a lawsuit was filed (nominally by a shareholder) shortly thereafter, challenging that the shareholders had been misled and the deal was unfair to them. "
The shareholders voted on the measures, but the proposal did not (according to judgement) include relevant and important details. This is tantamount to misleading shareholders . That's an enormously big sticking point, and is why the deal was later amended and struck down as unfair in this judgement. By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair" which means "agreed to in premise on mutual understanding of all concerns.
There is nothing particularly incorrect about compensating people involved in a business.
There is something incorrect about the means to doing so being pushed through by misguiding the shareholders of a public company by not informing them of the relevant factors behind a proposal. It fundamentally undermines the logic of shareholder capitalism.
There are other reasons why the deal in particular is dubious and certainly questionable, but the core logic of the ruling is simply the above[1, 2]. Any inquiry which finds that shareholders agreed to a proposal which was later found to have been submited for consideration on flawed premises is generally something the securites regulators of the largest financial market in the world takes rather seriously. It is more or less, err, the only way to have a functioning investment world.
[1] one example: Musk' compensation was based on market capitalization, not share price, and much of Tesla's gains has come from issuing vast amounts of new shares profitably scooped up by various interested parties which hae all been interested due to the high flying antics of Mr. Musk. This inflates the market cap, but might not be in keeping with the interests of any actual shareholders. There's dubious economic merit to the figurhead repeating that the company could be the most profitable one in the world and then pushing through issuing more shares. One might reasonably wonder if he means what he is saying, or if he is doing it because he knows that if it works, his gain will be enormous. It misaligns shareholder incentives with that of the figurehead.
[2] Logically, the proposal has an issue of coherency. Musk already owns and owned significant shares of Tesla at the time of the proposal. What further incentive is gained by paying him more money if the value of the enormous percentage of the company he already owns from increases in value? Significantly, a value that is so high as to be the highest in literal history? His increase in payout comes at the cost of non-controlling shareholders. In all senses of the word, that's their money too. Musk' proposal stipulates the ability to cash out in terms which will directly influence their share value. It misaligns the incentives of the shareholder and the figurehead.
2. Re your second footnote: "Logically, the proposal has an issue of coherency. Musk already owns and owned significant shares of Tesla at the time of the proposal. What further incentive is gained by paying him more money if the value of the enormous percentage of the company he already owns from increases in value? Significantly, a value that is so high as to be the highest in literal history? His increase in payout comes at the cost of non-controlling shareholders. In all senses of the word, that's their money too."
Counterpoint: All the shareholders (himself certainly included) stand to gain from the work Mr. Musk puts into the company, but only he bears the cost of putting in this work. In all senses of the word, that labour is his. Why should he not be compensated for this investment into the company?
There's an appealingly precise and natural way to resolve the tension between these two points: given a figure that we could agree upon as a "fair price" for Mr. Musk's service as C. E. O. of the company had he no prior equity in it, we should then be able to multiply that figure by whatever share of the company he in fact does not own, to arrive at a similarly fair price for the case where he has an ownership stake. For instance, if he owned around 20% of the company (as was approximately the case in real life), it would be fair to pay him 80% of what he would be paid if he owned 0% of it. The increased value of the 20% share of the company he owns accounts for 20% of the value yielded by his efforts and 20% of his compensation therefor; the increased value of the remaining 80% of the company, which accrues to the other shareholders, is accounted for by 80% of the "fair" compensation were he not an owner at all.
To be sure, agreeing on said hypothetical price would be no trivial thing. Still, at least in principle, the breakdown I've outlined seems to me like the logically fair one. It sounds like you (and the judge) are suggesting, in principle, that the returns of a 20% stake in a company constitute 100% compensation for an investment in that company, which doesn't seem right to me.
Your hypothethical here illustrates the point rather well. As you write, agreeing on it would be no trivial thing.
As demonstrated by the court proceedings extensive interviews with several of the board members involved in the negotiations with Musk, they did not even engage in an untrivial amount of things. The point of the argument against it isn't that people cannot agree to a process by which Musk is paid for his services. The point is that there was no such negotiation honestly taking place.
The whole grant lacks logical coherency. If Musk is sworn to stay with Tesla, for life, as he says, and he owns a significant fraction of Tesla, as he does, and he makes vast sums of money from Tesla increasing in share value, as he does, then what is gained by Teslas as an entity in paying Elon even more money, above and beyond the enormous amounts of money he would already be getting for doing the thing he says he is going to be doing?
Any negotiation based on these premises should account for those facts. But in this case, it seems this did not happen. To wit:
" The defendants also point to the duration of the process (nine months) and the number of board and committee meetings (ten) as evidence that the process was thorough and extensive. The defendants’ statistics, however, elide the lack of substantive work. Time spent only matters when well spent. Plus, most of the work on the compensation plan occurred during small segments of those nine months and under significant time pressure imposed by Musk. Musk dictated the timing of the process, making last-minute changes to the timeline or altering substantive terms immediately prior to six out of the ten board or compensation committee meetings during which the plan was discussed." (p5)
And
" That timeline envisioned that on July 7, the Compensation Committee would “[g]ain agreement on proposed approach, award size and metrics/goals” and “[g]ain preliminary approval of grant agreement[.]”208
The timeline reflected a reckless approach to a fiduciary process, given that the Compensation Committee had not yet discussed any substantive terms nor met concerning the Grant. Despite the break-neck speed contemplated by the timeline, Maron reported to counsel on June 18 that Ehrenpreis was “aligned on the plan and timing." (p41)
and
" Defendants emphasize that nine months passed after the initial April 9 call between Musk and Ehrenpreis until the Board approved the Grant. In reality, however, most of the work on the Grant occurred during small segments of that nine- month timeline and under significant time pressure imposed by Musk " (p129).
--
There's a lot of other general descriptions of a rushed negotation process, a lack of oversight and a seeming total inability to engage in the very thing your hypothethical requires: Negotiation as to a fair compensation for services rendered.
By not even engaging in the trivial things, let alone the non-trivial, the board directors in charge of working out the grant demonstrate a lack of fiduciarcy duty and basic governing competence.
So in that sense, the ruling is pretty spot on. That's why I brought up that that from any reading of the agreement, it's pretty understandable why a Court ruling would rule that there's some vast amounts of corporate government failures here.
I disagree with you on a number of points. I believe that dealing with them in separate replies will be easier for both of us.
1. On the issue of fairness, before taking issue with your position, I'd like to make sure I've correctly understood it:
On the one hand, you write:
'By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair" which means "agreed to in premise on mutual understanding of all concerns.'
On the other hand, you describe the shareholders as "misguided" by the omission of "relevant and important details", and later describe the proposal as "submit[t]ed for consideration on flawed premises".
If the shareholders had an "understanding of all concerns", surely it follows that they were not ignorant of any details relevant to, let alone premises of, their approval! From your careful wording ("submitted for consideration" rather than "approved"), I infer that your position is as follows:
1. We can safely take it that the shareholders were aware of all relevant concerns, not withstanding any shortcomings in the presentation of the proposed compensation.
2. Nonetheless, the presentation *depicted* certain concerns as possibly relevant factors and mischaracterized those.
3. Even though this mischaracterization did not in practice affect the outcome of the shareholder vote, because it represented a bad practice that, if generally followed, would tend to harm shareholder interests, the vote based on this mischaracterization must be nullified.
Fairness in these corporate rulings is a procedural and legal principle. This is why the ruling overview references "entire fairness". The ruling also goes to the length of specifying what fairness means in this legal context.
As the ruling states, the proposal put to vote ommited several key details. This makes it, by its nature as judged by the court, not fair to the shareholders. And is the grounds for its suggested recession of the deal at this time. One can probably appeal this ruling, though do note the ruling also notes that perhaps other options are available.
I think you have inferred a position quite... oddly. I don't really know how to respond to you in a way that is coherent, sorry. Without in any way wanting to be rude your 1) is nonsense and 2) and 3) are strange. I am not sure who you are talking to, what that position would even be, or how it makes sense.
Shareholders cannot be aware of all relevant concerns and simultaneously be subject to relevant information being withheld, omitted and not presented. That would make them, errr, unaware of relevant concerns.
Especially not when those same concerns make a vote on a proposal materially quite different. The ruling (you have linked!) makes the argument that had these concerns been presented to the shareholders, the deal struck with Musk would have been quite differently. Namely, it might not have been agreed upon, because materially relevant information was omitted.
It also comes within close distance of insinuating that Tesla's board of directors completely bungled the barest semblance of competent corporate governance, which, okay, yeah, I can see that. Like, I knew some details before reading this ruling but it's also kind of incredible what level of tomfoolery was going on, if we take the ruling as God's honest truth. But since that's not entirely what the ruling is about, its not so relevant at present.
You wanted an opinion, this is that. It looks like fairly standard corporate governance legal proceedings to me, made interesting by the involvement of Musk, the sheer amount of money involved and because the legal ruling makes the single greatest logical inference of all time:
" Colonizing Mars is an expensive endeavor." (p15)
I'm sorry for inferring so oddly, but I couldn't make any better sense of your words than that. At any rate, now I say the key point where I misunderstood you. You wrote, "'By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair"..." which I read as something like "...conforms to the strict meaning of fair".
Now that you alerted me that you meant nothing of the sort, I've reread that bit more closely and realized those words meant "it was and is [unfair], per the strict meaning of fair". Sorry for misunderstanding at first.
I saw where someone looked at it, and they thought the sticking point was the lack of negotiation. Like, just for example, even assuming the sheer amount of money is legit, and it quite well could be, wouldn't it be in Tesla's interest to at least **try** to get Musk to stop getting into Twitter fights? Which is to say, devote more attention to Tesla, but not at the expense of anything else actually useful like SpaceX. There's really nothing more that the board could ask of Elon Musk other than "keep up the good work"? They don't have any ideas themselves, and only rubber-stamp the deal that Elon Musk himself proposed?
I highly object to any law that requires people to play more politics in business settings. Don't require companies to fight themselves, you'll just end up with stupid "queen's duck" chicanery. https://www.simplethread.com/looks-great-lose-the-duck/
I believe that was also Musk and the board's argument, that they don't do that type of politics-for-show at Tesla. Alas, it may be required by Deleware corporate law, and I can't really argue against that because they've seen more corporate malfeasance than I ever will. And it's not like the whole "largest compensation package in history" thing wouldn't attract a bit of scrutiny no matter what.
Highly uninformed on the issue, and Musk in general. Having said that, sounds dumb on Delaware's part.
At a core level, this seems like a really big deal for Tesla and Musk and 99% of the people involved were happy with the outcome given how well Tesla's stock did. Seems really dumb to mess with core features of a major company without, like, a good reason and it's not clear there was one.
Kinda curious whether the investors decide to reincorporate in Texas. I mean, ignore Musk, if you had a significant amount of money in Tesla, would you be happier in Delaware or some place like Texas or Nevada where the courts would have probably left this alone? And if the investors think their money is safer/better under Texas than Delaware for Musk, does that extend to their other investments.
But, honest, my gut says this was an iffy case that the judge decided based on CW stuff and if I was an active investor, that's...there's a risk there that's probably not worth the marginal benefit of incorporating in one state vs another. But I'm not an active investor and I'm curious what people with skin in the game do.
If I read everything correctly, the argument comes down to:
Musk made $110 billion dollars from Tesla's increased market valuation, and an additional $50 billion dollars would be unfair to other stockholders, because Tesla got nothing extra for offering that additional $50 billion (as the $110 billion he gets regardless would be incentive enough).
Because this incentive is high enough, the plan is unfair to other stockholders, as Musk's behavior would not substantively change had the compensation plan not been in place - basically a counterfactual which, at its core, is saying what Musk's behavior would have been, had things been different. Which seems, uh, dubious. Relative to that counterfactual, the other shareholders do lose money - but I don't know that that is actually a reasonable counterfactual to stake a legal case on. (I'm not a lawyer, maybe this is standard practice, but I regard all rescission cases with a certain degree of skepticism - because they are almost always decided after new information has arisen, and you can't actually return the parties to their prior state, because the new information changes their relevant stakes - for example, would the case have even proceeded had Tesla begun losing value, instead of increasing twelvefold? Seems like there's no point in pursuing the case at that point - that there is even a case for rescission means that rescission cannot actually return the parties to their prior state)
That all said - the shareholder in question did raise the lawsuit almost immediately, and it's been going through the legal process over the relevant timeframe, so in a sense, Musk, being aware that the case might be lost, should have priced the possibility of losing into his personal investment in the company. So, in the universe we actually live in, as opposed to the counterfactual universes - Musk did choose to do whatever Musk chose to do with the knowledge that the compensation package might get struck down.
There are some legal particulars I'd be vaguely interested in, such as whether there was a shift in a disposition of the court at any point but most particularly as benchmark targets were met (that is, if there is meaningful evidence that the court's attitude towards the fairness of the compensation package depended on how it played out), but I expect they'll be raised in appeal, and if they aren't, well, I don't care that much.
Not a lawyer, and the opinions I've read were not in this field. On the one hand, if the deal really was 33 times larger than the largest deal ever completed (which was to Musk, meaning he's previously agreed to a smaller package), I can understand ruling it unfair. On the other hand, with Musk controlling what I'm reading as only 21% of the company's voting power I think it's a stretch to say he strong-armed everyone in an unfair manner. And the guy who filed apparently had 9 shares of stock, that's ludicrous that he can bring a case like this. They're right to stop being incorporated in Delaware.
Otherwise, I'm amused by the footnotes including a citation of Star Trek. I've seen judges quote pop culture before but I don't think I've seen them cite it.
"It's important to note that all payments were contingent on large increases to the stock price, so there was no way for shareholders to lose money on this."
How not? By the terms of the deal, if any money were paid to Mr. Musk, it would mean that the value of the company's shares had risen, hence the shareholders would have made money, not lost it.
The value of the shares *in total* would have increased, but that doesn't mean that the value per share has increased and so it doesn't mean that any stockholder has seen a net gain.
Hypothetical, making up numbers out of thin air: There are a billion shares of Tesla each with a market value of $500. Tesla then issues 250 million new shares, also selling at $500 because everybody thinks they're buying in to what will soon be a 25% larger company with 25% more factories, etc. Tesla sees that its market cap has increased by $125 billion, and therefore pays Elon a $25 billion bonus.
The market notices that the company they were expecting to be 25% bigger on account of all that new capital is really only positioned to be 20% bigger. And nobody's sure what Elon will do next except that it probably has more to do with Twitter than Tesla, so maybe they hedge and assume a 15% larger Tesla with 25% more outstanding shares.
TSLA now sells at $460/share. Every Tesla stockholder has lost 8% of their investment, a total of fifty billion dollars. Elon got half of that, and probably a bunch of short-sellers got the other half.
You can understand why a Tesla shareholder would call shenanigans if that happened. Or even if it looked like Elon was setting up for that to happen and lying to them about it.
Wouldn't diluting equity like that itself require approval by a vote of existing shareholders? If not, surely that would be the real root problem of the hypothetical you're describing, and it would be a problem with or without the compensation plan in question.
Not going to dig into the Delaware Civil Code directly, put per an SEC summary there is not a general requirement under Delaware law for shareholder approval to issue new shares. It can be required in some circumstances, and of course a company can put such a requirement in its own bylaws - which would seem sensible but I'm guessing that Tesla specifically is structured to "Let Elon be Elon" to the maximum extent allowed by law.
But even if a shareholder vote is required, "Vote for this new stock issuance and we'll put the money into new Tesla factories, moar profitz for all!" while hiding the gargantuan cut Elon will take off the top, seems like it would be fraudulent and/or lawsuit-inducing even if the shareholders do vote Yes.
Well, my narrow response to your example would be that if the compensation deal at issue damages shareholder interests only in case of a later "fraudulent and/or lawsuit-inducing event" damaging shareholder interests then it doesn't really damage shareholder interests in itself, and any damage you attribute to it should be incidental to the lawsuit resulting from that later event.
Still, you've helped me see that in principle, at some later point it might be in shareholder interests to issue new stock, diluting their ownership, so that the market cap target governing the C.E.O.'s compensation is hit, even if the shareholders have lost money. I don't know how likely a scenario it is, but I concede it's a possible one. Thanks!
My take on rulings like this in general - that is, "rulings dealing with things that only high-profile public figures are able to do, so that a) there is very little precedent and b) there's high emotional/political valence" is that they are a weak spot of the western "frame laws in broad generalities and then leave it to judges to disambiguate them" model of jurisprudence.
I don't know enough of the details of this case to have an informed opinion either way, and it would be quite hard for anyone claiming to do so that they genuinely were motivated by knowledge of and concern for the law rather than strong pro/anti Musk feelings.
But I'd be surprised if the law and existing precedent were unambiguous enough that it wasn't possible to make plausible-looking cases in either direction, and if that's true then a) the judge will have essentially pulled this ruling out of her arse, b) that would be just as true if she'd ruled in the other direction, and c) pulling a ruling out of her arse was her official judicial responsibility, because there was no-where else to get one from.
(Of course, this is just idle speculation. It's entirely possible that there really is detailed enough law to resolve this one way or another. But the two ways I could come to know that are "read a vast amount of Delaware case law" (too much like hard work) or "trust experts on Delaware case law who are not letting their partisanship overrule their expertise" (I don't know how to distinguish them from the ones who are), so I'm afraid idle speculation is all I have to offer.)
Just noticed Substack decided that new paragraphs in comments don't get spaces anymore. What a terrible decision. Especially since all these programs love to just chomp out empty spaces so you can't mitigate the damage they're doing. Change it back, idiots.
"It's that uppity bunch that write a million comments of 10,000 words each instead of being happy consumers on the mobile app just replying 'so insightful, dude, take my subscription', let's get 'em!" 😁
I recently watched a video essay on Youtube in which it was asserted that fourth-wave (current) feminism has morphed into a binary ideology of victim and oppressor. Either you are a victim (good), or you are not-a-victim, which equals oppressor (bad). There is no middle ground, and no agency.
I found the argument compelling. It explains such phenomena as university professors wearing face-masks, long after everyone else has given up. By wearing a mask, a professor is signalling that he is a victim, and therefore not an oppressor. By this means he hopes to avoid being cancelled, which is a salient risk for all authority figures these days, particularly those who work in universities.
Nth wave sticks around until it's popular (Time featuring an article is a sure symptom) and then it's off to N+1th wave (which contradicts Nth wave in a number of ways, how important those are is up to the viewer).
This is sloppy thinking. You need to define the group more carefully. Do you mean members of NOW? Women's studies professors? And then you need to figure out what the claim is precisely. Ideally in a way that's falsifiable. Do they exhibit significantly different behavior from professors in comparable disciplines? If they do, what is the cause? How do you know this? Etc.
There's a certain kind of explanation that works by making something similar to the other group and explains what their beliefs are to you. This inoculates you against directly interacting with them. It's very effective politically (and used by both sides) but not a good way to actually model the world. In a practical sense it degrades your ability to predict what that faction will do.
While I tend to agree with you, sometimes that approach actually works. You start looking at a group through a particular lens, and all of a sudden their previously-inexplicable behaviors make sense, and your predictions get a lot better. Although of course it doesn't remove the need for individual analysis of individual cases.
In this case, I'm kind of skeptical of the concept of "fourth-wave feminism" itself, although I admit that that's probably because I've been living under a rock and this is the first time I've heard the term. I'd tend to classify the phenomenon as a limb of "woke ideology", or whatever it's being called these days. It's like a borg drone, or maybe one of the lions that make up Voltron. Or better yet, one of the independent states that formed a union, and has been discovering that the feds keep gaining power, that more and more of their resources are sucked out and returned with federal strings attached, and that the very mention of "state's rights" is now anathema.
Here's a really good rule for life: never base your ideas about how a group of people think on what people who dislike them say about them.
If you want to understand contemporary feminism and you're not spending at least as much time - and probably quite a lot more - listening to, reading and engaging with contemporary feminists as you are to summaries of their beliefs by people who don't share them, you're going to fail.
This kind of silliness is a classic example of why. Yes, it gestures - very, very broadly, with massive, uncharitable, misrepresentations and oversimplifications - at a genuine trend, but overall it's going to hamper rather than help your understanding.
Contemporary feminists whom I personally read regularly include a bunch of authors at Vox (which I generally think quite highly of even when I disagree with it, although slightly less so for its arts/culture coverage) or the Guardian (good news coverage, lousy comment and analysis), or the twitter feeds of Helen Pluckrose and Emma Pierson.
But those very much aren't a representative sample of contemporary feminism, and probably won't give you a good understanding of the distribution of opinions and ways of thinking therein. If you want that, I'm afraid I'm not in a position to offer well-informed advice.
> Here's a really good rule for life: never base your ideas about how a group of people think on what people who dislike them say about them.
I agree you shouldn't entirely. But do you actually apply this standard or is it special pleading for a group you're sympathetic to? For example, do you primarily base your view of pro-life groups on pro-life writings without significant reference to pro-choice writings? Do you spend at least as much time, if not more, reading and engaging with contemporary pro-lifers?
I don't do that with many groups. But I also wouldn't say that there's a general obligation to primarily base your opinions of a group on what their self-identification. Plenty of groups are highly self-deceived about what they actually are. You need to understand what a group believes they are. But you also need to accept those beliefs might have little, or no, basis in reality and privileging that self-conception reflexively is not a generalizable policy.
>I agree you shouldn't entirely. But do you actually apply this standard or is it special pleading for a group you're sympathetic to? For example, do you primarily base your view of pro-life groups on pro-life writings without significant reference to pro-choice writings? Do you spend at least as much time, if not more, reading and engaging with contemporary pro-lifers?
Yes, yes, and no respectively. I read more pro-choice than pro-life articles, (although not that many of either - it's much less of a live topic here in the UK) but I attach very little weight to what they have to say about the motivations of those who disagree with them (for example, I don't believe for a second that the desire to control women is a major part of the motivation of most anti-abortion activists). If I cared more about the motivations of anti-abortion activists, I would read more of what they have to say.
I guess if I were trying to convict myself of special pleading, you could point to the fact that I do attach at least some weight to Matthew Yglesias's suggestion that a big part of the motivation of CEOs hyping up immigration as a crisis is that they want to help Republicans win election and get tax cuts, not just because they care about immigration, despite not having listened to many CEOs. But even there, while this seems plausible (but far from proven) in the case of e.g. Jamie Dimon, I have a harder time believing it of Elon Musk.
I absolutely agree that many groups misunderstand their own motivations, and present unduly charitable self-images, so you certainly shouldn't take their claims at face value. But I think that practically *every* group understands its opponents motivations worse, and is unduly uncharitable by a greater margin. I think the best way to get a picture of how people think is to listen to them, but with an ultra-critical, ultra-cynical mindset. Where arguments from people's adversaries come in valuable is in highlighting gaps in the logic of their arguments, not it identifying flaws in their motivations.
> If you want to understand contemporary feminism and you're not spending at least as much time - and probably quite a lot more - listening to, reading and engaging with contemporary feminists as you are to summaries of their beliefs by people who don't share them, you're going to fail
Possibly, although contemporary feminists don't have much of an understanding of their own ideology either. Certain ideologies are so complex, ill-defined and all-encompassing that from inside it you can't see out. You ask a contemporary feminist to characterise an opposing position and you just get something like "Women should be rape-slaves". The ideology is an insatiable egregore (I only learned that word yesterday, I'm gonna overuse it this week) with a solid diamond motte every five feet and a bailey encompassing the entire universe. They can't characterise their own position because they think their own position is everything and everywhere.
Not every ideology is like that. If you ask a disestablishmentarianist and an antidisestablishmentarianist to characterise each others' positions on the relationship between the Church and the Crown then they can do it pretty well even if they disagree. A Sunni and a Shia can explain the difference between their beliefs much better than I can, even if they want to kill each other over it.
I see a fairly common misuse motte and bailey where people call a more extreme argument from one person the motte and a more reasonable argument from a different person the bailey. They then use this to dismiss the more reasonable argument as though the existence of a more extreme argument undermines it despite no one retreating from one argument to another.
As I recall, the essay was by a Frenchwoman who called herself a feminist, but disliked another prominent French feminist's characterisation of rioting Arab youths as members of the patriarchy. "They are male; therefore they are oppressors" rather than powerless and frustrated. Certainly a good part of the essay was orthodox doctrine.
That's interesting, but it still falls into the category "person attributing beliefs they disagree with to third parties", not "person describing their beliefs".
And obviously, the former is also very valuable, but to form an opinion of a group you do need lots of the latter first, and your summary makes me think you're probably missing it.
This sounds like a vast oversimplification of a genuine phenomenon. Directionally correct, but not necessarily all that much use in explaining why people think the way they do.
Left-wing politics has always been about dividing people up into "oppressor" and "oppressed" groups and attempting to build a coalition of "oppressed" that you, as a leader, can ride into power. That's just leftism 101, but there's plenty of other bells and whistles you can add which are probably worth understanding.
I am not convinced that this explains mask-wearing professors (if indeed those are still a thing, I haven't been to the US recently). That's just in-group signalling; at some point wearing a mask or not became a culture war thing in the US and he's still trying to display his allegiance. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative universe in which wearing a mask became right-coded instead (it's like a wall for your mouth designed to keep filthy foreigners out!) depending on exactly who was in power at which moment.
It started in China as a way to keep the smog out of your mouth. It had previous history where the lower rank would stuff paper in their mouth as a way to purify their breath when speaking to a higher rank.
That doesn't really sound like something the American right would adopt.
My wife and I I, between us, spend lots of time in the company of academics and we live deep in the heart of "blue" America. I'm struggling right now to even remember the last person I saw wearing a mask...somebody in line at a local 7-11 the other week was. And when we flew to/from Scotland over the holidays I saw a scattering of masks in the airports that we passed through. That's all that are coming to mind.
Isn't this just ingroup / outgroup signaling? There's an ideological gloss, fine, but I'm not sure it explains much more than the running model of "fourth-wave feminism is collectivist, similar to second-wave (but with different boundries) and in contrast to the more individualistic third-wave".
Zero of the authority figures in *my* life wear masks, except in specific instances of sickness or high-exposure travel (Honolulu airport is a biological minefield). It sounds like you're extrapolating from a peculiar experience, one that you might be reporting secondhand if not largely theoretical?
The last person I personally interacted with on a daily basis who regularly wore a mask was the longtime colleague and friend who, in December 2022, abruptly died at age 61 of "long-COVID" symptoms. (The virus attacked her neurological system which she had never previously had any issues with.) Her masking had become less consistent during 2022, which became a point of self-recrimination that fall as her doctors struggled to counteract the escalating random failures of various nerve centers in her body.
Recently I've been watching Succession clips on youtube. It looks like a really well written, well acted show with a whole lot of compelling and interesting characters, and I'm considering sitting down to watch the whole series (which would involve signing up for a whole new streaming service, but not a particularly big deal).
The only thing that gives me pause is the show's politics, which are not so much opposed to mine, but incoherently spaced across a gulf of misunderstanding from mine. It's a show where everybody is a conservative, but nobody is _really_ a conservative (because the writers can't even understand that as a coherent world view)... everyone is either cynically exploiting the conservative dum-dums to make money, or else they're pretending to be conservative while secretly being a crypto-fascist who wants to be bad and do fascist things because fascism. The right side of politics seems to be treated more or less like the dark side of the force, a seductive evil influence that corrupts everyone it touches. I feel like watching this show as a rightie or even a moderate would be an incredibly frustrating experience.
Can anyone who has seen the whole show tell me if I'm right or wrong?
You're incorrect. The show is about a malignant psychopath and how his relationship with his children shapes them into narcissists of different varieties, stunting them as people and crippling their abilities to achieve the goals he wants for them.
Any stuff about red team / blue team politics is just details. The patriarch of the show is indeed inspired by Rupert Murdoch, but he really only cares about the influence he can wield *for himself* with his right wing news network. He isn't a passionate conservative and isn't interested in shaping civilization with red team values, or anything like that. The little people that are impacted by the red team / blue team power struggle are beneath him.
The show also introduces a blue team version of the Roys and mercilessly skewers them, as well.
Don't worry about the politics. Just watch the show. I'm politically non-binary and I was delighted with it. I'm hard to please, so that's really saying something.
Edit: This ticker on Logan Roy's network is quietly one of my favorite jokes of a very, very funny show. No one who doesn't understand both teams could have written it. https://youtu.be/gW4ckooQngA?si=2O_qBflB1CbQZzwz&t=59
I'm just going to say it, forget "Succession", watch "The Wire" if you haven't already. It's a little bit longer, but it's the best TV series I've ever seen. If you do, I'd be interested to hear your reactions, especially given that our political views are a bit different.
The Wire has its merits and was groundbreaking at the time, but isn't remotely as witty, nuanced, and self-disciplined as Succession.
I say that as a Peak TV connoisseur who procrastinated watching The Wire until 2021 because it felt like homework. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't as grim and onerous as I'd been expecting, but I was also thoroughly underwhelmed after all the hype, and then later outraged when it beclowned itself with silly like excesses McNulty's faked serial killer, Hampsterdam, and its increasing reverence for Omar as a legendary figure.
I won't deny that there's been 15 years of refinement in the production of prestige TV, and The Wire shows its age. And it's always possible to hype things too much, leading to disappointment. But I would argue that in a lot of ways, Succession is **too** slick and *"too** tidy. The Wire is more like a Japanese brush painting where there's little ink blots and imperfections everywhere, where the circles aren't quite round and the lines aren't quite straight. Perhaps we simply have different tastes.
I'll push back a little on Omar; among other things, the last season should have deconstructed the myth. And some of the things in the show were toned down. In real life, the spiderman jump was from 2 floors higher, and the guy walked away with nothing broken.
As for Hamsterdam... I'm 99% sure we live in the same city, and I just don't see how you can say that! I was down there on a regular basis. IMO, the most unlikely part was the lack of guns. And some of the rest draws from the history of Kurt Schmoke, who I am reliably informed is a great guy, and who showed up as an extra in the show, and who "donated" the quote about being "the most dangerous man in America".
I watched the show and enjoyed it (although it does become repetitive). Realistically, you're not going to have your brand of "conservatism" represented unless you're a media billionaire but don't think it's particularly necessary. You probably won't enjoy it if you spend too much time worrying about whether a fictional character is a "true" conservative.
The politics mostly serve as an explanation of the characters (spoilers). One character, Conner, runs for president as a libertarian, despite having no political experience. Or really any sort of experience at all-he's spent most of his time managing a ranch that's paid for by family money and he becomes overwhelmed by even minor jobs like organizing catering. When he talks politics, it's vague non-sequitur and bizarre gotchas, similar to the canned arguments you'd see online. Sometimes he "debates" someone that is actually active in politics but they just roll their eyes and politely change the subject which he interprets as a victory.
While he fancies himself a serious political thinker and actor, he seems like he's just repeating the last thing he heard on a podcast. Or maybe a pop history book. But this sort of superficiality extends to every part of his life. He also "hyperdecants" wine and try to hack his sleep schedule. All off Conner's behavior is dictated by an insecurity that leads to hyperfixating on details without doing the actual work of a project. You can interpret his shallow libertarian tendencies as a criticism of libertarianism or as a continuation of his character's inability to seriously engage with anything, whether it's politics or home decoration. Personally, I viewed it more of a statement about Connor than about libertarians.
> Personally, I viewed it more of a statement about Connor than about libertarians.
Yeah, he's an interesting character:
"You're needy love sponges. And I'm a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn't come back that's fine. Because I don't need love. It's a like a superpower. And if she comes back and doesn't love me, that's okay too, 'cause I don't need it."
The Roys are Blue Tribe, and are rich enough that their practical politics are largely about what benefit them, and they happen to own chunks of alternate-reality Fox News. They in no way should be considered "conservative" or "Red Tribe", but they fund their lifestyle by selling stuff to people who are, and not the smart ones at that. And that's where they get their view of the Red Tribe. TLDR, they're capitalists.
There **is** actually a legit crypto-fascist in later seasons, but I'd say about 95-99% of the people on the show are not portrayed as having well-thought-out, consistent principles. And the ones who do, tend to avoid the Roys, because the current generation of Roys are "not serious people" (to steal a quote from the show). They're horrible people who attract other horrible people to them.
But, it's a really good show. You can look at it as an examination of how power warps people who come in contact to it, much like comic book radiation or mutagens. Or as an occasionally Shakespearean drama. Or as wealth porn. And there's some brilliant acting and writing.
And hey, if you splurge for Max, and "Succession" doesn't work out, you can always check out "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" and "Veep".
I think they tried to paint the whole right wing spectrum: uncle Ewan is the old archetype: no fun allowed, hard work, don't waste your food, small time farmer. Logan Roy is the boomer capitalist: greedy, shameless. The children are molded by their desire to be seen as cool by their own and younger generations, specially Kendall. Connor is the clueless libertarian trying to convince anybody that he is self-made. Siobhan tries to make it into the progressive elite with her NGO sting, fails and goes back into the staunch old media family empire. And Roman is the hedonistic true cynic.
Ewan wasn't really right-wing. What about the lawyer he got Greg? In the first meeting, he started talking about the structural contradictions of capitalism. Ewan's planning to give his money to Greenpeace. I think he's best characterized as an old-school leftie, familiar with anyone that has read Howard Zinn.
An attempt at colloquial English? Droppin’ the ŋ‘s of gerunds? Like us regular folk?
I shouldn’t really make fun. Unless I speak slowly and concentrate I tend to pronounce them as hard g’s. Got a lot of [See me]’s in phonology class IPA homework.
Yeah, it was damn right bizarre seeing him play a clumsy bumbling fool. You were always imagining he was running some op, and was about to snap out of it, which come to think of it…
From what I can tell the show-writers are dirt-bag left types of the sort that are anti-woke enough to hang out with us reactionaries* in the NY art world's reactionary adjacent scene.
I personally found their depiction very gratifying, even if I'm sure it was calculated to send shivers down the spine of normie liberals; but then again my version of right wing politics might be more extreme than yours. Take a victory speech they write for a gubernatorial candidate for example:
"To my critics, I am not a demagogue. I am a defender of democracy. But democracy, it has this tendency that we have to beware to become mere transaction. You give me this, I give you that. I come begging for your vote. Welfare checkbook out. Crowning the welfare kings and queens, till everyone has become a little tyrant, crowned by the state. The model that I follow isn’t from the scorched marketplace, where cunning men haggle for the best price.
That’s not me. The democracy I believe in is where a leader emerges from the people, willed almost, into being, brought forth by the great sweetness of the virtue of the combined wisdom of the good people of this republic.
Don’t we long sometimes for something clean once in this polluted land? That’s what I hope to bring. Not something grubby with compromise. Something clean and true and refreshing. Something proud and pure... "
Added: * I'm more reactionary adjacent than reactionary myself.
I'm not surprised it's like that. Nobody likes an antagonist who's just stupid. They need to have some coherent motivation to actually be interesting and seem like a threat. And while fascism is still really stupid, it's still far more threatening than run-of-the-mill conservatism.
RE: I recently saw someone recommend only including the first paragraph of a post in emails, then including a “go to website” link afterwards.
I like the idea. Large post load slowly to my phone. Having links would improve this so that I pay the download cost (time) only for those posts I want to read. After all, substack archives the entirety of every daily post so I can always go there to search for things I am interested in later.
Two factors contributing to me enjoying having the entire post in my email.
1) Easier to read and load. My recent email pulls automatically to my phone and I can read it without consistent network access, eg while flying.
2) I actively enjoy having my email as a repository of the initial text. I understand this one is probably a niche preference and can be solved by, eg, wayback machine.
Where do y'all store your old substack and newsletter emails?
I *don't* want to delete them (well, most of them); I enjoy the option of searching in a curated archive of interesting material, particularly some that I no longer have access to otherwise. But it's straddling the 17GB limit of my Gmail. Obviously, this is not what an online mailbox should be used for. But Thunderbird doesn't seem to be the tool for the job, unless the job is heating my room through overwhelming my CPU with its attempts to sync what has already been synced. In theory, I can download my email archive from GMail and throw Thunderbird at that static "mailbox", but it feels... not quite right, and besides, I want to be able to update it.
I'm looking at its website and I have no clue what it actually does. Is it a "media library" for HTML files? Are they stored online? Synced across devices? Does it offer search over the library?
I wrote a piece last week that I think might be of interest to ACX readers. In it, I try to come up with a speculative definition of social status based on what others like Tyler Cowen and Rob Henderson have written. I've always found the concept of social status a bit hand-wavey and this is my attempt to make sense of it.
I'd appreciate if there was more discussion of how this particular model of power and status differs from others. Reading that essay just now, I just kept thinking "this is just repackaging Machiavelli's notions of fear and love, through an evolutionary lens, right?". And in the end there was no mention of Machiavelli, or any explanation of whether this model differs from his and how.
So, does it differ? If "dominance" is a different word for fear, and "prestige" a different word for love, is it still the case that (1) it's best to be both feared and loved, (2) if you have to choose, fear is more effective than love, and (3) it's essential to avoid being hated? The end of the essay seems to imply that *love* is more effective for maintaining power, but gives little explanation for this highly surprising (given most historical and contemporary political examples) claim.
It is probably a similar model, with more technical detail.
What exactly did Machiavelli mean by "love"? Do people "love" Einstein? Not sure. But he definitely has "prestige".
I understood the end as a claim that for humans it is impossible to rule using fear *alone*; you must also demonstrate some skills (e.g. social skills, strategy). If you were a 3 meter tall giant with sharp claws, someone would simply stab you in your sleep.
Disagree with point 3 and with the eventual conclusion. Status might be addictive, but not corrosively so; plenty of people throw away their status for the sake of whatever else they want to do (drunk-driving celebrities, Kanye-West-style rants, and such), and that's selecting from the people who cared enough to gain it in the first place.
I think you can replace the word 'status' with the word 'gravity', and the idea becomes clearer; social status is making people want to be around you, and at higher levels making them want to be you. That's part of why social gravity increases by attacking the larger bodies; you have to break people away from their gravity before they'll enter yours. People like social status because they like having people like them. People who don't like people let others have the gravity.
(Maybe Magnetism works better; then you can have high magnetism inside a group that magnetically repels other groups.)
Thanks for the thoughts. There's plenty more room for disambiguation in the concept of status, and I like the physical metaphors you brought up. Of the two, I think I prefer social gravity, simply because it brings to mind a kind of social Lagrange point where people achieve an equilibrium between granting status to multiple groups. I'm not sure whether the repulsive aspect of magnetism maps cleanly onto people who are very widely liked.
I think you're too quick to dismiss the relationship between status and reproductive success. It's a mistake to take modern failures of status to track reproductive success as definitive against the association. Another example of this kind of failure is our desire for sex as a proxy for promoting reproduction. In modern times we've largely decoupled sex from reproduction, but this in no way counts against the idea that the historical association explains our modern desires. Civilization is unnatural, and the products of civilization result in failures of various traits and proxies to result in reproductive success. But this doesn't mean the associations never held true.
It's also a mistake to focus on reproductive success in absolute terms. Evolution is statistical, and so as long as a trait is beneficial to some degree more often than not, we will see the trait selected for. While an old person may not reproduce, their legacy is relevant to their reproductive success; their kids' success is their own success. This is one of the core benefits of our finely-tuned sensitivity to status as proxy for reproductive success, it ensures we reproduce with people who are likely to have reproductively successful kids. It does your genes no good to reproduce with a low status partner who then has reproductively unsuccessful kids. Your genes still reach a dead end. This is also why women are far more sensitive to the status of their sexual partners. Their investment (historically) in each child was much higher and so were the risks of a bad mate choice. The association between status and sexual attraction is strong and must be well explained by any proposed concept of social status.
Your capitalize on play idea has merit, but I feel like it is another avenue for modern humans to demonstrate their reproductive fitness. As humans advanced towards modernity, our behavior expanded from narrowly focused on survival into creative avenues like art and other artifacts of modern minds that aren't directly relevant to reproductive fitness. These traits surely have evolutionary value, although its harder to pinpoint exactly what it is. Perhaps they are ways to strengthen group cohesion. Play is a relevant dimension of creativity and so could be taken as an independent signal for reproductive success. But all paths seem to lead back to reproductive success.
I agree that I was a little dismissive of the link between status and reproductive success. If I were to rewrite that section, I think I'd say something to the effect that, with a little ingenuity, reproductive success can be used to explain almost any facet of the human experience. This is by its nature hard to verify as an explanation for any specific phenomenon, and I don't think we should take for granted that every phenomenon is traceable to reproductive fitness. Our intelligence gives us a lot of leeway, and there's likely room for cultural behavior that's irrelevant or even wasteful from a reproductive fitness POV.
For that reason, I think it's productive to try to think of alternative explanations. And if these don't stand up to challenges from reproductive fitness arguments, they can be thought of as analyses at intermediate levels. These intermediate analyses can be useful in themselves, just because they're closer to our everyday experience and a bit easier to reason with.
I liked it overall! Since you asked, Writing feedback:
Positives: The idea is pretty interesting and you make some good points about it, and the general structure is good.
Negatives: try to use fewer words, especially in the opening paragraphs where your goal is to grab the readers' attention. I think you could improve a lot by having a habit of rereading the last few paragraphs each time and thinking if you could have said it more clearly in fewer sentences. Same goes for idea clarity - e.g. your axioms there are good, but I think you could have gotten them to be more clear by reviewing and condensing them a bit.
Thanks! I appreciate it. Some of my favorite writers are Henry James and David Foster Wallace, so it’s always a battle with myself not to imitate them ;-)
Hm yeah, I should specify that it's not that using more words is never good, just be careful about only doing it when it adds something and doesn't reduce clarity
(It's been a while since I read DFW but from what I remember he actually is pretty good at this - he writes a lot of words, but each specific point or anecdote is pretty simple and condensed)
Actually I asked gpt to give me an example wordy DFW quote and he gave this
> "And but so the point here is that the best way to do this, to allow your deformed infant son to lead a somewhat normal life, is you first need to make your peace with the fact that your son, no matter how many cute little hats you put on him to disguise the fact, is, and forever will be, deformed
Which is a really good example. It's a long sprawling complex sentence, but each part of it is simple and necessary to the overall structure
I'm looking for academic papers, or books, or blogposts about basic child rearing practices somewhere in rural Africa*. For example at what age babies start to be carried on the mother's back, and when they stop. What time babies are put to bed every night, and how they are put to bed. Who can be trusted with small children. What are the disciplining practices. Etc.
Any references? The more accessible the better.
* I don't mean to imply that the answers to these questions across all of Africa are the same. I know Africa pretty well actually, well enough to say that almost anywhere I pick in rural Africa will have answers that are different from the practices in the West, and closer to answers for other places in rural Africa.
A quick search through google scholar using the search terms "child rearing practices rural Kwazulu Natal" pulls up thousands of articles, a good chunk of which look directly relevant.
I'd strongly suggest picking a specific area or ethnic group and then going with that, because practices can vary wildly even inside specific countries.
Incidentally I've been reading Mr and Mrs Psmith's book review substack recently after it got added to Scott's blogroll, and it really is some top notch stuff. Highly recommended for anyone looking for more substack stuff to read.
"The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings" is all about differences in how children are viewed and reared in different societies around the world. It's not only about Africa, but a lot of examples there are.
#4 - prefer current situation - choice is good! I sometimes click through and sometimes not, even though I know there are edits.
I like that I have the full version in my inbox both for convenience (reading without the comments and the lags of substack on Chrome, or offline) and to later be able to search terms and things I remember from the posts.
Is there a term for a non-reductionist physicalism?
The people who debate meta physics they either seems to be super reductionist (if viruses exist we can make nano bots, if brains exist we can make super human ai in 10 years, if we can simulate physics we can simulate the whole universe and we are in an finite chain of stimulated universes) or they get incredulous at these claim throw out everything and claim panpychism. I'm not seeing a middle ground term.
Strong panpsychism: Rocks have something like an evolving mental process, and can do something like ponder being a rock, and may have emotions or values or similar things pertaining to the state of being a rock. A rock can be self-aware.
Weak panpsychism: The experience of being a rock, insofar as we can discuss the experience of being a rock, is fundamentally static and unchanging, and is represented in the physical state of the rock at any given time. A rock does not have emotions, values, or variable states-of-being it cycles through on a regular basis, excepting insofar as the physical structure of the rock itself varies, and this experience-of-being-a-rock is fundamentally rooted in the physical configuration of the rock at any given time. Although we can ascribe consciousness to a rock, it is a mistake to treat this consciousness as similar to the consciousness that we would ascribe to an animal, and it is certainly incorrect to treat this consciousness as being fundamentally capable of things like self-awareness - it has consciousness, but it does not have something we would recognize as thoughts, or a mind, or even anything resembling awareness. Its consciousness, much like the rock itself, simply is.
Weak panpsychism is not saying anything about the rock, that is, but rather simply treating "consciousness" as a non-special property which is not unique to things we would identify as minds. I'd analogize weak panpsychism to "A rock is an analog simulation of a rock".
Or, alternatively, we could analogize to radio; radio waves are everywhere, but they only seem to do anything interesting when you put matter together in particular patterns.
Emergentism/Emergent physicalism is one. It's the idea that the physical grounds all of reality, but that mental properties "emerge" from the physical in such a way as to make them not reducible to physical properties. It has it's adherents, but I don't give the idea much credence. The problem is that "emergence" is more of an explanatory placeholder rather than an explanation in its own right. There is no "emergence relation" with which one can explain the origin of some substance from a supposedly categorically dissimilar substance. Any theory that successfully fills in the emergence promissory note will just be a kind of reduction.
Perhaps your resistance to reduction is thinking that reduction means that we are nothing "over and above" merely particles following Schrodinger. This tends to deflate what it means to be human in a way that will be extremely off-putting for most people. But I don't think this is the correct way to view reduction. Another way to view reduction is that the physical grounds all higher structures and concepts, and that these higher level structures are existing entities in good standing. So all the features of the human experience, e.g., desires, happiness, love, etc exist, they just don't exist fundamentally. A good concept to look into is the concept of levels. The fundamental level grounds higher levels; and each level has a certain explanatory autonomy such that we can speak of tables, chairs, desires, love, etc as proper features of our ontology without compromises. I think this is the way to go to get a satisfying understanding of the mind in relation to the physical world. Further reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levels-org-biology/
Physicalism is a view that there is nothing beyond the physical world, that is it. Non-reductive physicalism is a view that some observables, e.g. mental states, cannot be reduced to physical states, without necessarily specifying the reason why. One reason I can see that is perfectly compatible with physicalism is that mental processes are perfectly physical, but so complex, reproducing them requires simulating or recreating all or a big chunk of the universe, and so in that sense they are non-reductive.
The example I like to use is traffic: nobody thinks there's anything dualistic about traffic, and it clearly supervenes on the set of cars on a road. But the bounds of any particular traffic jam are fuzzy and hard to locate, there's a steady turnover of which cars are caught at any moment, and an identifiable traffic jam can even migrate up or down a road network given certain conditions. In some ways it's a system property that we can point to and care about, but at the same time it's not a specific physical thing per se.
Tractability of simulation is a slippery distinction to make, and IMO doesn't survive the kind of changes in intuition that follow a few more order of magnitude improvement in hardware. Beyond that, it's hard to hold that mental states are in principle *impossible* to simulate without pulling in one form of property dualism or another.
As I said, I can believe that some observations happen to be too hard to simulate without faithfully simulating a big chunk of the universe. Traffic patterns are not like that. I do not expect mental states to require simulating the universe, but since we have zero clue about qualia beyond that we perceive it, I withhold judgment until we have a better idea.
Oh, I'm an eliminative materialist: I think we have far more than zero insight into mental states, and I don't particularly feel the need to withhold judgement until that prophesied day when there's a consensus definition of qualia.
I feel like the words don't follow the battle lines of the debate
I'm the far side of the anti-scientism debate and I look around and see peterson(who literally lecters from the bible) formscapes(who claims memory is in nature and rituals can make you have memory's from your blood line) etc.
and... ugh, why.
Like I dont see claims about the moral authority of the bible as worse then simulation theory; but I'd like articulated terms to navigate this space.
How can I clearly state, I think gobels incompleteness and evidence of non neodarwin generics, should move the metaphysics of society's towards epistemological anarchism; without you know, someone looking up those 3 magic words and needing to win 3 debates before stating an axiom.
1. the food in your stomach is broken down by your micro-biome
2. your micro-boime comes from your environment or from your mother pooping in your mouth during child birth(FUN FACT), never you father sprem(it just doesn't carry enough dna)
3(1+2). nutrition studies controlling factors genetic factors based on race(rather then a theory based on mircoboime lineage) is obviously stupid
4. I've never seen a diet study that wasn't based on race or country
5(3+4). all nutritional science is therefore obviously stupid.
This is rejecting neo-darwinism and current science and I'm pretty sure 100% correct; god help me if try to suggest its a pattern.
I don't see how any of those statements have to do with reductionism? All of those are statements that can just be proven true or false, and the straw man hasn't given any evidence that they're true.
If you can reduce the brain to mathematical model, and you are a reductionist; you put that model on a computer and expect a prefect emulation.
It's like >90% rationalist who seems to think the specific nn's we have are good models for brains and ai is X years away; and you can read any simulated universe argument it will assume if we just make a big enough computer simulating atoms will be good enough, its not a strawman.
> All of those are statements that can just be proven true or false
I would also label this line of reasoning as reductionist
> Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. -wikipedia
If you believe all statements can be proven true or false; I would suggest you have a poor answer to lairs paradoxes and incompleteness. (and if you then respond there 3 possible answers true, false,unproven/invalid/stupid/paradox; that will ALSO be a minimal number)
> I would also label this line of reasoning as reductionist
So, if in ten years, there was superhuman AI, this would not prove that we will have superhuman AI in ten years? If there was not superhuman AI in 2034, that would not disprove that we would have superhuman AI?
I suppose we could have AI like current AI (i.e. superhuman in some tasks, subhuman in others), and then there's ambiguity on whether we should call it "superhuman," but I doubt that's what you or anybody else is talking about.
There's a difference between even full AGI and human. A non-reductionist view could still see something unique about human thinking even if an AI is able to perform most or all "mental" tasks faster/better.
The existence of AGI or superhuman AGI doesn't actually answer the core question. For instance, I would consider a paperclip maximizer willing to exterminate humanity in favor of paperclips to be missing something fundamental about human thinking even if it's "smarter" than any and all humans. I think most people would agree with me, even if they have a materialist outlook. To my mind, it's similar to the difference between a human arm and a robotic arm - they might do similar functions but are clearly not the same.
That would prove it true, but I offered 3 statements (and I dont think ai is impossible, just that nn's airnt going to do it)
I believe saying simulation theory is true or false is very reductionist; its unfalsfable as its about, an infinite chain of universe we cant visit. And its about infinitely and self referential reasoning (if we can simulate a universe, its likely we are in a simulated universe is selfreferencal) so liar's paradoxes are relevant. And its obliviously logically false as to make a single bit of information in a computer you needs 1000's of atoms in the right place.
and for completeness I believe nano machines will have the goal posts moved, and when playing at that scale water tension and immune system attacks will make artificial grey goo, look alot like an mold and not the artist renderings of metal, gear like motion, thats next to a ruler saying its small.
Nr 4: TLDR: Substituting the text with a link would break the reason I get the emails.
The only time I read blogs through my email is when I only have satphone or SSB connection at sea, and cannot browse the web in a standard fashion. The emails that I get to my SailMail account are stripped of pictures, formatting, and reply-history, and held in a server that will drip-feed them to me over extremely slow connections (sometimes <100 b/s. One text-only email can take several minutes to download). No normal web server has the patience for clients like that, and will assume the connection has dropped long before I get the text.
I've done this with other psychedelics, including those most fêted in studies - it definitely works for mild depression. Deep depression takes many very heavy sessions to do anything about.
I tried self medicating lots "over the counter" things
I suggest rhodiola rosea, avoid using it daily or mixing it with other serotonin sources(i.e. most anti depressants) until you know what it does so you dont get serotonin sickness
The reason I dont think its uses by mainstream medicine is that the "half life" seems to be a day and a half and its is two psychoactive compounds thats probably not well controlled the ratio by random vitamin companies grinding up leafs
I've been wondering recently what happened to people like Tracy Chapman and Joan Armatrading! Good songs from the 80s (though I think "Nothing Compared To You" is overdone, I've heard it about 20 times too many recently), can this finally be a Grammys for the Gen X generation? 😀
I saw Joan Armatrading in college at the campus auditorium. Front row seats. My wife gave me a funny look when Joan looked down at us and returned my little wave.
Could you please remove the first sentence, or edit it to something that isn't so spiteful? There's plenty of ways to express an appreciation of collaboration over conflict, which don't themselves leak conflict into the thread.
I’ve often wished I had a longitudinal study of my own political views/leanings… like a yearly survey of what I think about various things.
Does anyone know if something like this exists? I’m thinking of building some kinda thing that emails you once a year to fill out a survey…
I enjoyed this survey (https://pluralpolitics.com/) albeit a bit US-focused. If anyone has pointers or ideas or dis/encouragement I’d appreciate it! I don’t think I have the expertise on surveys and whatnot to do the non-tech parts alone.
Interesting and more multidimensional politics quiz than most, so that was nice, but many questions felt like, "Do you agree with this straw man of your views?" I was unsure what disagreement meant for those questions.
SSC's remains the undefeated champion of these in my view, though not really fit to your purpose:
As I look back, the areas where I've changed my viewpoint were in response to specific learned facts about history of government, not about just growing older or vague feelings. A study would be especially good if you could track the things that influenced your views as well, but that's hard to do outside long form answers, which undermines your desire for data. Maybe a new year's reflection on the things that most impacted your thinking that year on most topics, including an addendum on what "tribe" you feel most closely aligned to, if any. Then have something score it in post processing using sentiment analysis, you might even be able to get AI to do that, feed it the essay, then ask it to predict where the person fell on an imaginary political spectrum quiz.
That SSC quiz is nice, but basically only has a single axis (object-meta).
I think getting some AI involved is not a bad idea: take a nice survey but add some freeform text to each answer (eg why you answered this way) plus some kind of what impacted you the most, or something. Orrr, where your answers/LLM encodings significantly differ from the previous year, prompt you to describe how/why.
More writing from me that I wanted to share. For those of you who have seen my stuff and have found it too technical, these two pieces are not technical at all.
The first is essentially just musing on my experience as a 3rd year psychiatry resident:
The second is an essay that would be most interesting to people who work in hospitals, especially on consulting services, in which I argue that rejecting consults is an important part of resident education and part of good professional practice overall (as long as you're not a dick when you do it).
Leftist learns to empathize with other people's perspectives and value civilized discussion after frequenting SSC culture war thread, realizes that almost everyone else on the subreddit didn't get the memo and they suck even more now.
Wow, that really was a good read. Though, it is depressing that the only thing all this "debate" ended up accomplishing was make a tiny group of people a bit more emotionally intelligent.
> We can’t survive, as a society, without finding ways to talk to each other that can make the participants better people, rather than worse.
Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that. It just always ends in blood. Turns out "the strong eat the weak" is a perfectly viable ethos for sustaining society, which should have been obvious considering that's how the rest of nature works.
>> We can’t survive, as a society, without finding ways to talk to each other that can make the participants better people, rather than worse.
>Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that.
I agree with you. (Certainly way more than I agree with Gemmae M.)
I think artifex0 also has a valid point about social technologies, but I think that it is important to be clear on plausible expectations for those technologies. It is useful, for instance, to have vast disputes, e.g. between billion dollar corporations, settled by catapulting lawyers at each other rather than by armed warfare. This does not require that the people involved become "better people", that they adopt the ideology of the winning side, or that they stop holding grudges. It suffices for them to just grit their teeth and agree that their particular dispute will be resolved in a courtroom rather than a battlefield.
Human civilization wasn't even civilized until extremely recently, and it certainly wasn't doing "just fine" up until about 5 minutes ago, and you'd be hard pressed to even make that argument. A few wealthy places in the world are doing just fine. That's about it. "The strong eat the weak" is *not* a society that's doing just fine. Good societies are places we design explicitly *not* to be that way.
>Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that. It just always ends in blood. Turns out "the strong eat the weak" is a perfectly viable ethos for sustaining society, which should have been obvious considering that's how the rest of nature works.
I'm not sure I agree. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity had modern brains and knew about cultivating plants and crafting tools, but the global population was stuck at under a million. Then, something changed and the population exploded into an exponential trend. I think that something was probably the invention of social technologies that promote coordination- things like morality, culture and governance.
We used to be a species where tiny bands would regularly raid their neighbors to rape and pillage- and while that dynamic still exists at the largest scale, we've almost entirely fixed it on the small scale because of those social technologies. Even nation states have been getting measurably more coordinated.
I think those social technologies have been becoming steadily more advanced- more effective at solving coordination problems and unlocking comparative advantage- and I think we should expect that trend to continue.
Japan's population boom didn't really have anything to do with morality, it mostly happened because one group took power and stopped everyone else from killing each other. Morality and culture is just a means to an end for the sake of promoting collectivization. The global rise of nation states has less to do with humanity advancing culturally and more that it became impossible to survive unless you were part of a large collective. Just look at what happened to American natives for example.
If this trend does continue... don't expect anything resembling humanity to continue being a part of it for long. Humans simply aren't optimized for this sort of large scale collectivism, and looking at the current progress of AI, they have the potential to be much, much better at this than we are.
My mental health is terrible. (Seriously - I've had at least a dozen temper tantrums since last October, maybe almost two dozen - despite trying to log them all, I've lost count.) Any suggestions?
(Scott, this may be something that might actually be up your alley!)
>(Seriously - I've had at least a dozen temper tantrums since last October, maybe almost two dozen - despite trying to log them all, I've lost count.)
Under what conditions?
Food and drink (and medication) can cause anger directly; if these bouts are common enough to need logging, then pay attention to what you ate beforehand. Anything that consistently shows up, cut back on.
Work sucks and bad jobs suck harder. Get enough money saved up that you can leave, and let that option comfort you even when you aren't doing it.
Being overweight stresses the body, and a stressed body is a stressed you. Get an exercise routine set up. The classic is Push-ups and Sit-ups which need no equipment or space to perform. Once those are easy you can expand to whatever's most fun.
From the Gunflint reply; look at screens less, relax more. Don't worry about Meditating or Setting Goals;, they're overrated. Do worry about sleep; turns out sleep is necessary for digestion too, and likely a slew of other health bits. A stressed body is a stressed you.
Blocking Twitter from my devices has been good for me and I recommend it. If you have social media or other habits that make you unreasonably angry or interfere with your sleep, blocking them is good.
1. Eat good food (look up macros and micros, lots of good explanations online)
2. Lose weight till you hit a BMI of 23 or less
3. Walk at least 7000 steps a day, every day
4. Spend at least 30 minutes a day, 4 days a week at the gym lifting weights
5. Lookup the Novos Protocol, take the supplements on their list
If the above fails to solve it after 90 days, I’d look into therapy and/or various prescribed pills for treating conditions similar to yours. But most likely the above routine would solve it for you.
They tend to have relatively trivial causes (eg I once had a tantrum upon waking from an hour missed of sleep, and another when I realized I was on the verge of missing dinner).
Each one tends to last several minutes(?), though it takes me an hour at the very least to recover from one. They're irregularly spaced, on average once every few days but occasionally I'll have them two days in a row or even twice on the same day.
As for what happens in them, they often involve me throwing around random objects that happen to be nearby. I've broken two iPhones that way. (Once was in an isolated incident in 2022, though in retrospect it's similar to the rash of incidents I've been having now.)
Oh, when you said terrible mental health, I (and apparently everyone else) assumed it was depression. From the sounds of it, it might be some kind of behavioral disorder. I really do recommend talking to a doctor or mental health professional about this. Though their competence is... variable, they're all far more qualified than most people here to help you figure out if there's any underlying cause for these events. And who knows, maybe it's a condition that medication can actually alleviate.
There’s the anger over a trivial irritation. The shame of being angered over something trivial. Then the anger over the initial cause of the irritation that caused shame. Lather rinse and repeat.
...You haven't really given us much information to work with. If it is the "I literally do not have any energy to do anything and existence is pure suffering" kind of depression, I highly recommend seeing a doctor and getting anti-depressants prescribed, or switching medications if you're on one already. If it isn't like that, well... talking to people might help. I know therapists are kind of a crapshoot, but a good one can help you figure out what's behind the distress. Of course, if you do know what's causing the problem, you can always try to fix that.
Re the last question: No. Last night I slept from 1 to 3 and then from 6 to 9.
I don't think that's all to it though. I spend far too much time looking at screens and far too little relaxing or meditating or Setting Goals™, which I think may also be a major component.
Also, Gunflint, you got my age down to the year; congrats I guess?
Sleep deprivation not be "all" of it, but I would think it's a much higher component than you're giving it credit for, likely overshadowing the sum of "relaxing or meditating or Setting Goals™". There's a reason Maslow's hierarchy of needs is structured the way it is. Don't let a focus on higher-order needs act as an excuse to ignore your lower-level ones.
As far as screen time, your devices probably have options to lock down functionality during "bedtime" hours (I understand iOS is particularly aggressive in this regard), you might do well to use that.
What about physical activity? Do you engage in group activities that leave you exhausted and barely capable of standing? If not, I highly recommend them. Followed by stretching, eating protein, taking a hot shower or bath, and if it's in the evening, getting to bed.
Confirming the other advice: make a harsh priority out of sleeping more and screensing less.
Twenty one years ago, *when I was your age 👴🏻🦯* I was studying in England, and I sent my laptop battery home to the United States for the last two months of school. If I needed computers, and I did, I went to the computer lab.
This sucked very much but fixed my sleep and screens problems for a good while.
"relaxing, meditating and Setting Goals" sounds like serious stuff, the kind the brain loves to procrastinate. If I may offer two simpler suggestions instead:
- go take a stupid walk for your stupid mental health. just do it.
- best goal-setting combo for depression is exercise-related stuff. Both because exercise is good for your brain, and also because it tends to be easily measurable, and thus goal-fulfilling. I suggest applying Tiny Habits here.
Sounds like a miserable life. Wake up, work, do all of the horrible exercising recommended in this thread, take your endless supplements, go to bed. Do it again the next day. All in the hopes of... living longer to continue doing that? But with good mental health!
Actual Zen story: a student asked a master, "How do we free ourselves from the daily bondage of dressing in clothing and eating food?" The master responded, "We dress, we eat." The student said, "I don't understand." The master said, "If you don't understand, put on your clothes and eat breakfast."
Oh yes, what a miserable life of psychological health, physical health, feeling well-rested, and having the mental capacity to be productive during the day. The horror! I'd rather feel anxious, irritable, sleep-deprived, and unsatisfied with my life while doom-scrolling Twitter all day.
There are too many replies to look through them all, so apologies if this (rather obvious) solution has already been suggested: You can get the best of both worlds by posting the full text in the email, but right at the start of the email you put a link to the latest version on your website.
Re. "Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails?" -
I almost didn't reply, because I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all, and thus didn't care. But it occurred to me that that mean lots of people who wouldn't mind, wouldn't reply; and Scott would get a heavily biased set of answers. Which it appears he already has.
Suggestion to Scott: When you ask a question, post a comment to which everyone can answer with their reply, so the replies aren't spread all thru the comments.
Please continue to include the whole text in your e-mails. My email client forwards it to my note-taking app and I read it there. Just including the opening paragraph would make the system worse.
Please keep full text emails. I am aware that the online version may contain corrections, and I check it when relevant, but having the full text in email is very convenient to me.
I prefer full text emails BUT almost never go to the actual page and thus never observe the edits. Depending on frequency, I would be ok with follow up emails, but will navigate to the page if on desktop in future.
Does anyone here have a post explaining the dopamine transporter hijacking by SSRI theory in depth for a layperson?
I always have very mild side effects when I start on SSRIs; rapidly show improvements and then get extreme agitation and restlessness side effects around 2 month mark. Tapering off and stopping medication improves symptoms. I suspect the dopamine transport to fire serotonin which takes a few weeks is leading to sudden high concentrations of serotonin around 6-8 weeks which is triggering a mild form of hypomania. The DSM criteria for mixed depression feels very rigid. But some other articles I read have a broader definition of mixed depression which includes the irritability, anxiety and restlessness I feel. My symptoms get worse late evening which I feel may be related to dopamine circadian rhythm. No bipolar family history. An example of my extreme restlessness - my Fitbit shows over 15000 steps even on days I work from home and do not leave the house for any purpose like errands or walks.
Well damn, I might be going through the same thing. That really does explain a lot. Though, the only reason I started taking venlafaxine (better known as Effexor™) last year was because I tapered off of my old SNRI, which ended up resulting in massive physical depressive symptoms a few months later, which the venlafaxine quickly cured... Now that I think of it, I never really had this level of anxiety back when I was taking my old medications, and that might be because I was taking gabapentin alongside duloxetine and clonidine (the last of which I'm still taking). So maybe consider getting gabapentin or some other anti-anxiety medication prescribed?
Funnily enough, the gabapentin+fluoxetine combo does seem to be a popular prescription for shelter dogs and cats. Maybe that's proof that it's quite effective?
I prefer full-text emails. I usually click through to read the latest version of the post. If I'm catching up somewhere that's not feasible (e.g., a plane), I settle for reading the original version and figure any particularly important correction will show up as a follow-up post or in an open thread.
If my methodology is flawed, perhaps breaking it with teaser-emails is a good thing.
I started vaguely watching Critical Drinker and various other film critic Youtube channels, who have a common theme of jeering at Disney/Marvel/DC/the BBC/whoever and glorying in their misfortune.
.
These channels are pretty low status, and should be, because they're critics who add nothing, as opposed to original content creators who could output new films and stories that might enrich my life. I gain entertainment from them, but most often it's a mean spirited kind of entertainment.
.
If you consider something like Dr Who, there were a lot of us who used to enjoy that programme, and who enjoyed talking about it afterwards, to the point that it formed a kind of community. Then the BBC came in and said, "Fuck you, we're taking your toys and calling you a dickhead on the way out. Oh yeah - and if you want to talk about the same stuff you used to enjoy talking about, I'm gonna make it so half the people you're talking with are fat soys or anaemic purple haired wretches and I'm gonna make sure to tell them you suck."
.
So you know what, if you and all the old crowd can find a channel of people who get together just to say, "You know that guy who stole our toys? That guy sucks." - I don't care if it's not the highest form of wit, it's cathartic and it feels good. I think people like Critical Drinker are doing useful work by being the lynch pins around which these old, displaced communities can re-coalesce.
.
But I'm not sure that a community built on such a negative premise can/should survive long term. It would be better if people in said community were to start creating new, original stories of their own and we could all spend our time talking and thinking more about that, and forget Disney/the BBC entirely.
.
I keep waiting for this to happen, but it doesn't seem in any hurry.
"These channels are pretty low status, and should be, because they're critics who add nothing, as opposed to original content creators who could output new films and stories that might enrich my life. "
-
You have a very odd definition of "status", because to pretty much the entire rest of the world a reliably good critic has pretty high status - e.g. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, when we still had them. Critics provide real value, first by matching content with the proper audience, and second by highlighting aspects the audience might not have noticed in a casual viewing.
-
And I don't know about "various other film critic Youtube channels", but Critical Drinker does a lot more than just trash-talk Hollywood Wokies(tm) or whatever so like-minded people can commiserate with him. He provides positive reviews for good movies and TV shows, including "woke" ones when they are actually good. And, e.g., after describing how "Captain Marvel" was turned into crap by what might be described as excessive wokeness, offered a way the movie could have been made without sucking but also without compromising the producers' intent and message. That is what a good critic can do, and it's worth doing.
-
If it were just the trash-talk, CD would be a guilty pleasure that would wear thin real fast.
I have a pretty clear idea of what I mean by low status, which is that when I find more and more Critical Drinker et al turning up in Youtube's recommendations, I know it's time to close out and open up Youtube again in a fresh Private Browsing window.
.
If left unattended, the natural path is a spiral into more and more gossipy, people- and drama-focussed content, which is not a good diet and not the way I want to be spending my time.
.
There's probably a better word than "status" for what I'm talking about but I don't know what I'd use instead.
.
And yes, I like all the good things Drinker does. But I don't feel that all his counterparts do the same. I didn't think making a distinction between him and them would add much to the post, apart from luring fellow fans out of the woodwork.
I'd be very careful with this sort of seething tribal contempt- it will break your epistemology and make you more easy to manipulate politically.
The more fury and fear that we feel toward an outgroup, the more power we're willing to give to the people who position themselves in opposition to it- so people who want lots of power are strongly incentivized to push those feelings as far as they can go. The usual way of doing that is to get your political group to collect cherrypicked examples of the craziest members of the outgroup going too far, present that as representative of the outgroup's ideology, present milder aspects of the outgroup's culture as secretly supportive of that ideology, blame a bunch of major problems on that secret support, and then explain the entire thing as an attack on the cultural status of ingroup members. This happens, of course, on both the left and the right.
It's something that works particularly well online because tribal fury and fear are incredibly effective at driving engagement- so there's a symbiotic relationship between political groups and content creators; political groups churn up the emotions, and content creators capitalize on them.
I think The Critical Drinker and other anti-woke media critics are an example of that.
It's definitely true that art is harder to make when you're trying to conform to political ideals or include political signifiers of something like wokeness. Ideally, art should approach politics by exploring political themes rather than just signaling support- but doing the latter only introduces a constraint to the art. It makes the art harder, but art under those constraints can still be done well. Take, say, Bojack Horseman- that show had a lot of leftist things that were more about signaling support than exploring themes, but it managed to weave them into the art rather than letting them interfere with it, and the result was great.
Of course, it's also true that when lazy, uncreative writing teams are influenced by leftism, they will insert signifiers of support for leftist ideals in a way that's lazy and uncreative. This deserves criticism, but the problem with how Youtubers like TCD do it is that they too often blame the politics rather than the artistry- tapping into outgroup hate to drive engagement. More clear-headed media critics are often a lot more boring, and don't get the numbers that someone like TCD does- but I think the way he gets those numbers is culturally unhealthy.
I said, "I think people like Critical Drinker are doing useful work by being the lynch pins around which these old, displaced communities can re-coalesce."
.
Without the tribalism and gossip-mongering, they would not be able to do that job. The ill-feeling is not made up, it comes from actual territory that was taken by an outgroup that already exists and is aggressing.
.
The result of high minded virtue instead would have been Disney/the BBC coming in and enshittening our entertainment to no "organised" outcry at all. Certainly nowhere for the old, rejected fans to congregate afterwards.
.
The idea of culturally healthy vs unhealthy is exactly what I was driving at in my post though. I would like to see the group perform a sort of "import replacement" on the cultural assets it values. That is what I would call healthy.
.
> Take, say, Bojack Horseman ... that was great.
.
Bojack Horseman was an amazing technical achievement, in that someone managed to create a form of malware that perched on every platform and streaming site and detected whether a client device was owned by me, personally, or by anyone else in the world. Then it apparently showed everyone else a funny, clever and deep comedy of some kind. What it showed me was hours and hours of a whiny horse with some camp friends and a shitty attitude.
> hen the BBC came in and said, "Fuck you, we're taking your toys and calling you a dickhead on the way out. Oh yeah - and if you want to talk about the same stuff you used to enjoy talking about, I'm gonna make it so half the people you're talking with are fat soys or anaemic purple haired wretches and I'm gonna make sure to tell them you suck."
I don't know what a "soy" is, and it seems unnecessarily rude anyway. Could you edit to explain the actual problem?
Obviously they know what you might be insinuating by "soy," but they're not rude enough to immediately jump to the least charitable conclusion. Other people aren't going to be so charitable, so I would recommend clarifying what you meant by that.
You're able to read the subtext in Geek's comment well enough. So why couldn't you read the subtext of my reply, which was, "I'm not editing my post to suit your sensibilities, sod off and don't try policing my tone."?
I provided a characterisation of the BBC that a lot of people agree with. I did this in a post about the social function of rage youtube channels, and how they provide a community for those who got displaced by expansionist forces of political correctness, and who now have very hard feelings towards those tactics and agendas.
Can you see the irony in my getting rid of it because people decided to be offended?
>"I provided a characterisation of the BBC that a lot of people agree with" Also, disagree with. You're not supporting your point... because you never supported your claim.
.
You disagree that other people agree with something? Okay, sure, disagree away. I'm not interested in providing sources and citations to justify to your satisfaction why I'm allowed to feel a certain way about events that happened.
.
You're coming at me with the language of pedantic debate and trying to argue points, and I'm here for a casual discussion with people who want to exchange ideas.
.
> This blog has rules.
.
If you want to come into the thread I started and make a fuss about it to our host, when everyone else either contributed positively or skipped quietly because it wasn't for them, then go right ahead.
.
You can go away and get into the philosophical weeds about whether an accurate description of the perspective of a group of people can ever count as "necessary" or "true", but forgive me if I'm not interested in joining you.
.
Heckler's veto is at least as destructive to good conversation as more explicit forms of rudeness, and that's what you're doing by butting in here. You have shown zero interest in talking about Youtube channels, fandom behaviour or Dr Who with me.
This is tangential, but, what point in time were you referring to here?
> Then the BBC came in and said
I don't follow Dr. Who, but I watched a bunch of people get obsessed with "new Who", and I was wondering if it was the entire run, or a specific point in it, or a more general trend?
I bet people could debate it. What's hopefully uncontroversial is that by the time of Girl Doctor, the show was unwatchable.
.
The most obvious point before that was when they brought in the lesbian companion halfway through Capaldi's term. Things got pretty lamentable after that.
.
But drawing the line there would mean leaving Clara Oswald on the other side of it, which is an indefensible omission.
.
Personally I'd go right back and excise River Song and the latter half of Matt Smith's reign, for several reasons.
.
The first is that giving the Doctor a wife is the same kind of meddling that later turns into Timeless Children style bullshit, and I basically don't think the writers had the skill to be making huge changes like that. (Which isn't the same thing as saying there should never be dramatic changes to the canon - I just should think they should be done by writers who aren't dribbling imbeciles.)
.
Secondly, the Doctor's wife just wasn't very good. It was a lazy rip off of The Time Traveller's Wife, itself a damp squib of a book that had one good premise and no idea what to do with it. And River Song herself was just universe-fillingly smug as a character.
.
Thirdly, that was when the quality of the writing really began to suck as far as I'm concerned. Maybe not overtly woke suckery, just the the-writers-are-dumber-than-you-and-don't-realise-it kind.
.
But most importantly, if you cut things off there, you skip the bit where Matt Smith gets magically handed all those extra lives. (The Doctor only has thirteen lives, everyone knows this is the limit, the showrunners back in the day had no idea the show would continue on long enough to actually run into that limit, but now it has: what are they going to do about it?) This should have been a multi-series, multi-Doctor long epic arc, one that brought in all the lore from Old Who and kept everyone guessing til the last minute as the "deadline" drew closer. Instead the showrunners took half an episode to shit out what we would now call a Rian Johnson manouevre. This was a criminal waste of potential!
.
> I don't follow Dr. Who
.
Ah. Then you will find the above answer of no earthly use whatsoever.
>The most obvious point before that was when they brought in the lesbian companion halfway through Capaldi's term. Things got pretty lamentable after that.
I semi-regularly see left-wingers alleging that people who complain about "wokeness" are using the term to mean "doesn't pretend that black/gay/trans/etc people don't exist".
I would like to be able to tell them that they are wrong, but sadly all that I can tell them is that they are overgeneralising.
It may well be used that way, but my objections are not to "here's our lesbian starship engineer, now we tell the tale of adventure in space", it's the hit-you-over-the-head "Hello, I am the new LESBIAN engineer, did you know I am LESBIAN, let me tell you all about how I'm LESBIAN and while we're at it, let's have a couple of episodes per season about The Planet Where Gays and LESBIANS Are Oppressed, the Allegory For LGBT+ Oppression, The One Where I'm Persecuted After First Contact With Crazy Religious Zealots Because I'm LESBIAN, and the fun comedy one about Go To The Planet of LESBIANS Where The Cis Hets Get The Tables Turned On Them. Oh, and by the way, did you know I'm LESBIAN?" type of introducing diverse characters.
Like "Rings of Power" which made such a big deal out of DIVERSE CHARACTERS and then RACIST BACKLASH, and finally gave us:
One (1) black Dwarf, antecedents unexplained
One (1) black Elf, antecedents unexplained
Some (didn't bother to count them) black Hobbits, sorry Harfoots not Hobbits
Rest of main cast and majority of everybody else: white
Uh-huh. Really. 'The mountains labour and bring forth a mouse'. I didn't care about race-swapping Tar-Míriel, she's human and you can fill in the plot holes there without too much effort. But not even bothering to give one sentence in the script to deliver a line about where black Elf and black Dwarf came from? But they *were* able to fit in Sauron/Galadriel, enemies to lovers, slow-burn, their kids will be so cute *and* The Knife Ears Are Taking Our Jerbs.
But go on, I'm just pretending black people don't exist, right?
"Thirdly, that was when the quality of the writing really began to suck as far as I'm concerned. Maybe not overtly woke suckery, just the the-writers-are-dumber-than-you-and-don't-realise-it kind."
.
. (nice trick with the dots, thanks)
.
You've just described what's the problem with basically all TV and movies post 2019 or so.
.
Through the whole "writer's strike against AI" I was genuinely wondering why ANYONE was on the writer's side at all. I think the AI will do a MUCH better job, even at today's capabilities!
.
Writers of the last few years literally write at a 5 year old level - like, I wouldn't be surprised if their actual method was that they put a bunch of sets and action figures pertaining to the show in a room with a 5 year old, and then, fingers eagerly poised, they just transcribe whatever said 5 year old comes up with over the next hour. That's E3 of season 2, post it!
.
GPT-4 sucks at continuity and long continuous story arcs, and it STILL writes about 2-5x times better than any writer on any show after 2020.
.
I mean sure, supply and demand - streaming exploded, those writers had to come from somewhere, and in the streaming company's bottomless need to feed the ever-multiplying coal-furnaces of episode narrations, they started giving near-illiterate 18 years olds fresh out of high school writer jobs or something.
.
Why did it happen so universally though? What happened to that cache of writers pre-2018 that was actually talented enough to connect a season's narrative arc in a way that wasn't blatantly simple-minded or wrong?
I wonder if it's a matter of money. There were a handful of places, like HBO (RIP?), which would happily invest in quality programming, but most everything else after 2005ish seemed to be "let's make as much stuff as we can, as cheaply as we can, and hope that lightning strikes". Hiring experienced writers and showrunners seems like it could be viewed as an unnecessary expense.
I watched the Twilight film back in the day and it was fantastic for self-confidence. I thought: if this can make a million pounds then I, too, can make a film if I tried.
.
What I don't understand is why more people aren't coming forward with their own creations. Look at the competition, guys. Now is the time!
I am also very interested to hear this as someone who got obsessed with new Who when it first came on, then fell off after a while (around the time a lot of others did, anecdotally, for reasons entirely unrelated to wokeness) and is trying to get back into it because I heard it got good again.
I hadn't really heard that it got good again, from anyone I trust on the whole good/bad thing.
As for it getting bad, there was a clear drop in quality when Russel T. Davies left for the first time. But that's because RTD Who was really amazingly good and post-RTD reverted to the mean of "pretty good". Moffat et al could tell some very good stories, even if they didn't do great story arcs,
It did not, for me, become unwatchably bad until partway through the Peter Capaldi era. Not because of the show's politics, which had started shifting but not to an overwhelming degree, but because Capaldi's doctor was kind of pretentiously dark in his outlook. That's not a good fit for The Doctor. It's also not a good fit for anyone's politics, because for those of us on the outside we'd rather hear about the good things you plan to do than the great evils you attribute to your outgroup.
Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams were able to keep me semi-interested for a while, but it didn't last.
I checked out a few Jodie Whittaker episodes, and actually found *her* to be an improvement on Capaldi. But by that point the show had veered unbearably into being a political tract with at least every second episode. Also, while Whittaker's doctor was fine, her Companions were dull and boring.
OK, the bit with a female doctor wasn't *completely* fine. Obviously it shouldn't be out of the question for a Time Lord to gender-swap on regeneration, but after thirteen consecutive male Doctors it's pretty clear that this *particular* Time Lord is a cis male. And from his taste in and occasional flirtations with companions, probably straight or straight-ish even if not actively so. Still, that alone wouldn't have been enough to sink it for me.
Now we've got Russel T. Davies back, and even David Tennant back for a bit, and that *should* be an indication of some very good Dr. Who to come. But the reviews and clips I have seen suggest that maybe some alien time traveler has swapped our RTD with one from a much less appealing parallel universe. I haven't yet dared to look myself (in part because I'd now have to pay real money for the privilege).
As an old crone, here is my unreliable impression of it (I never got into Doctor Who even though it would have been precisely what I liked, because we didn't get the "foreign channels" on our TV where I lived, and the national broadcaster didn't show it for those of us not living on the east coast who could get the signals overspill from the UK, so I never got to see it - yes, dinosaurs walked the earth still in those days). I'll also be helping out my memory by looking up Wikipedia as to when Doctors changed.
It was always considered a kids' show, even with the veneer of "no this is educational actually it will teach the little tykes about science and history in a fun learning way!", and thus something of a slight embarrassment to the BBC due to its long-running popularity over decades. There were certainly elements that were played for laughs (think of Pertwee's Doctor and things like his car, Bessie) but that didn't stop serious elements being also tackled in the show. However, it was that science-fiction aura around it that made it the poor relation of the Reithian BBC mindset. So it was neglected, in my view because they hoped it would quietly die off, and they never managed to monetise the property (as we say nowadays).
The 70s tried to give it a darker tone, but it was done in a less overt fashion than the 80s, the era of grimdark and "adult" in many genres, and in the same way the new people involved in running the show and writing for it tried to make it more 'serious' with 'adult' tone by bringing in violence (to an extent) and a darker, less optimistic tone. This would have been questionable enough, but they tried to do this during the era of Tom Baker who was not having it. (He was a bit of a prima donna, let's be honest).
I'm skipping ahead to Colin Baker's Doctor because I became aware of Who properly around this era, and my reaction was "crikey", which was most of the viewers' reactions as well due to Baker's Doctor being an unpleasant pain in the backside, not to put a tooth in it.
Ups and downs continued, with criticism over the dark and violent (by BBC standards) content, and the renewal of the show was dragged out so that fans thought it was going to be cancelled and protested about that. Baker was replaced by McCoy (who most will probably know better as Radagast from the Hobbit movies) and the "Doctor is not human, he's an alien, he will manipulate others because he has that Time Lord arrogance" tone continued, but McCoy was more charming about it, his relationship with his companion, Ace, was much better, and it was done in a better, less heavy-handed way. Tragedy happened, but that had always been part of Who.
The attempt to turn it into a "property" like the movie was a sad and failed effort in that direction, and after that Who was left to limp along and not be renewed.
Rights eventually reverted to the BBC and interest revived, and they approached Russell Davies, a huge fanboy and a commercially successful writer for TV drama (he did the UK original Queer As Folk). Davies revived Who, and he did genuinely love the character and the show, but.
But. This is where the woke elements crept in, long before ever the term "woke" was known. Davies is gay (well, you might have gathered that) and wanted to introduce a more modern feel and look. So we got our Northern Doctor, a romance or at least acknowledged romantic possibility with his companion Rose, and later characters like Captain Jack Harkness (who helmed the 'adult' spin-off "Torchwood", notable mainly for being set in Wales and every main character being some flavour of queer).
That set the stage for what was to come, after Davies left. The Doctor gets a wife! The Doctor is a woman! and now the Doctor is black! as well as retcons all round about the origins of the Doctor and how there can be more than the (early established in canon) thirteen regenerations so we can go on to Fourteen, Fifteen, and beyond.
That they had to bring back David Tennant and Russell Davies to grab back the audience attention before launching the new, black, Doctor tells you how the efforts to be more modern and to retcon everything in sight went.
Modernisation is not a bad thing, and trying to keep it as this quirky, jokey, stuck-in-the-past show from your childhood isn't good in the long run, but there's ways of bringing it up to date without fundamentally changing the characters, and then there is "ticking off boxes on the bingo card". There have been Time Ladies before, so why was it so important to make the Doctor (and the Master) female regenerations instead of introducing new female characters? Ah, well!
New Who (that is, post-2005) always had a bit of what we could call "BBC" politics sprinkled in, but at mostly tolerably low levels that just produced the occasional eye-roll from the general audience. And the show itself was mostly pretty good.
The quality of the writing slowly declined over the years, but the point at which things really went off the rails was 2018 (or 19 maybe?) when Chris Chibnall took over as showrunner and the Doctor turned into a woman, which was the point at which the show became almost entirely *about* identity politics. This was jarring, since it's supposed to be a show about travelling through space and time, but the identity politics of early 21st century London inevitably wind up being the most important issue everywhere.
This culminated in a much-hated arc where the Doctor's character history was retconned so that twelve known (white, male) iterations of the Doctor were not the first, they were preceded by an unknown number of previous iterations (mostly "Women of Colour") that he had forgotten about. (Bear in mind that the Doctor is an alien from a planet of people who just happen to look identical to humans for no reason, there is no reason why Earth racial categories should have any meaning.)
>the Doctor is an alien from a planet of people who just happen to look identical to humans for no reason
A *real* fan would know that the causation here is backwards - humans look like Time Lords, because Rassilon mucked with a bunch of aliens' genetic origins.
Alright I stand corrected. I make no claim to be a "real fan" and it doesn't surprise me to hear that there's a canon explanation from one of Classic Who's occasional fits of attempted hard sci fi.
Pretty sure that Drinker is a novelist. So he is creating new stories.
I'm not a fan of his shtick, but I thought his guest, The Little Platoon, did a good job with Star Wars Andor--especially the parallels between its prison arc and Foucault's Surveiller et punir.
Yeah, I like the Drinker the best precisely because he shows the most sympathy to what he thinks the writers were trying to do, from a workman's perspective. I've also used advice from him in my own writing from time to time.
.
I've not seen as much of Little Platoon, apart from when they're all there chatting together.
"These channels are pretty low status, and should be"
That seems a little harsh straight off the bat? Though I *think* I understand what you mean.
I started watching those channels with "Rings of Power" coverage because every other outlet was so far up Amazon's arse you would have needed a team of rescue spelunkers to guide them back out, and any qualms I for one might have had about the wonderful new "show the world as it is today" version were because I was a racist, and a sexist, and a misogynist, and a homophobe (and probably a transphobe) who hated black people, brown people, yellow red and what we need is a great big melting pot - sorry, got carried away there.
It certainly wasn't because the adaptation was rubbish, oh my no, it was pure perfection so the only reason I didn't 300% adore it was because I am a hateful hater white cis het Christian Republican white man (er, wait a mo on that last one there... and yeah I'm a republican but not Republican.)
Are they perfect? NO. Do they have their own agendas? Yes. Are they flawed like the unquestioningly adoring channels? Sure! Do they make me laugh? Hell yeah, and Critical Drinker is miles nearer to my own grubby, shabby, muck-spattered origins.
The Little Platoon is not, and has a lot of views very much opposed to my own (I imagine) but there's a wonderful if very long video (three and a half hours!) about taste and quality and story-telling in regard to "Avatar: The Way of Water":
The Rings of Power is indeed a gift in how much adverse commentary it generated and how much *that* made me laugh, so in fact I am looking forward to Season Two (if we ever get it). The rumours are already swirling and are wild and weird, some of them are incredible but then neither would I have believed that Season One would ship Sauron and Galadriel and turn her into a genocidal psychopath, so what do I know?
Spoiler rumours: You like Sauron? Of course you like Sauron! So what's better than one Sauron? TWO Saurons! Or possibly three, or even four!
Yes, they're going to give us (having already cast) Annatar in season two, but that doesn't mean Halbrand has gone away. The weirder, wilder rumours are that Amazon have bought (some of) the rights to "The Silmarillion" - let's pause until the cold chill down our spines at that one fades - and are going to show the creation of the Valar and Maia, with Mairon being there. So that makes three Saurons, and to get to four - remember Celeborn? Well, seeing how as Galadriel didn't until six episodes in, never mind. He may show up in season two - but don't worry, they're not going to be faithful to the canon and have this really be Celeborn! It is going to be Sauron (yes, that guy again!) in disguise as Celeborn in order to fool Galadriel and Elrond and Gil-galad, because they already know about Halbrand (at least, one of the three does) and maybe suspect Annatar.
I can't wait. I cannot freakin' wait to see how much more worse they can make this desecration, and I won't give a penny to Amazon Prime to watch it, but I'll sure as hell be following the jeering on Youtube.
Hoping for more gems such as this, from someone (literally) half-way between me and Critical Drinker, come on down Norn Iron and the Despot of Antrim!
Yeah, "low status" as in, I tell you about a club of people who like to get together and bitch about this one guy, and you might fairly conclude, "Well they sound like mean spirited and petty people." I then add that the guy in question is the school bully who beats us all up every morning. I mean, it's still bitter and enlittling behaviour, but suddenly I'm happy being in that club.
In this case the school bullies have done us the favour of being hilariously incompetent, losing billions of dollars and making total fools of themselves.
Plus the narrative of it all is so neat and satisfying. Watching Elon Musk tell Bob Iger to fuck off was a better pay off after a longer build up than anything in the fantasy fiction they were trying to flog us.
Well, Iger's troubles he brought upon his own head. He 'retired' in 2021, but hung on as an "adviser" to Chapek, who was then given the boot and the blame for the start of the string of troubles, and Iger came back as the presumed saviour who would turn it all around.
I'm well aware that I'm only being shown curated clips of the man. But I've never seen someone who comes across quite so insincerely when he talks. It's like every word he says is the product of focus groups and public relations training. There's not one iota of anything true or substantive left at the end of the process.
I have very little sympathy for Disney in all this mess, I think they've handled the DEI stuff terribly. Take "The Little Mermaid" live-action remake, with Ariel race-swapped. They could have done a new mermaid movie with an original black character, but they wanted to eat their cake and have it: the guaranteed, because proven, product with Ariel and try and rake in new market for black girls (I don't know if little black girls go to Disney movies anyway, I'd imagine they do), and a commercially motivated decision was dressed up as REPRESENTATION! ONLY RACISTS COULD OBJECT!!
I don't care what colour Ariel is, but I do think it looked dumb to have "redhead, same costume, but we're making her black". Oh, well.
They seem to have less good fortune in their tussle with DeSantis, as well, and again that's something they brought down on their own heads. Seeing all the online lefty/progressives defending a megacorporation that had to be forced to pay increased/back wages to their staff back in 2016, under Iger, is something else. That is not true communism or even socialism, comrade!
> Seeing all the online lefty/progressives defending a megacorporation that had to be forced to pay increased/back wages to their staff back in 2016, under Iger, is something else.
See what I mean? Reality has better writing! The dumb, blind process of cause-and-effect has a better grasp of satire than a Hollywood scriptwriter.
This is a scene comparison breakdown between the original Ghostbusters and Lady Ghostbusters that explains how they are different and why the 1st works and the 2nd mostly doesn't. I found it QUITE enlightening.
He has similar details for other movies (e.g. The lady protagonist in Indy 5 laughing while she and Indy get away right after Indy's friend has just been killed ... makes the character difficult to like).
One of his points for a recent movie (maybe Aquaman 2) was that it probably would have worked better if released earlier before we had seen so many OTHER comic book movies. He understands *why* the movie came out later, but his point that the timing hurt it is likely dead on.
Drinker also praises movies he likes. You will find examples of this on his channel, too.
Incompetent or lazy coders is likely the answer. Even my 2 year old laptop has trouble with it. But I did discover you can just buy a $1300 flagship phone and it's slightly less bad that way (the only problem so far with an S24 ultra is where if you scroll up and then down in the comments, the top half of the screen blanks out). Maybe if we complain about this every week, someone will do something (or SA will ban us).
Regarding 4: I have an automation set up that ingests and runs through text to speech all my Substack emails. I could modify it to handle what you're talking about, but I'd prefer not to, for what it's worth.
The last Dominant Assurance Contract closes in one day. Logic Tournaments! So far all of these except for EnsureDone itself has paid out. https://ensuredone.com/projects
Why doesn't Trump (clearly a highly money-motivated person) open some kind of franchise/chain? It could be a bar, restaurant, wings place, burger joint, whatever (a taco restaurant would be kind of hilarious). The guy spent most of the 80s and 90s trying to license his name to various products like Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump airline, etc. He's the only one that can license the actual Trump name, and it doesn't take that much expertise to open up say a TrumpBurger- he can hire restaurant experts and so on. It would have lots of eagles, flags, guns, and the Bill of Rights on the wall. Once you get to a certain scale, there are 3rd party companies that just work on expanding franchises- just listened to a podcast where the Alamo Draft House founder explained that's how they went from 5 locations to a few hundred.
He could pitch TrumpBurger to all of his following, it would probably expand very rapidly in red states and red portions of blue states. Franchising is pretty close to printing money- various small entrepreneurs would beg to buy in and open one in their town, and he has tons of small business types as fans. He could be spending his late 70s getting much, much richer. Why not do that instead of running for office again?
(Inspired by an Instagram video I saw of a MAGA acai bowl store in Southern California)
I think this is a misunderstanding. In my opinion, while he is somewhat motivated by money, he's more motivated by public attention and admiration. And he's getting plenty of that from the whole "President" thing. He's currently being talked about as the savior or antichrist of the USA; opening a burger franchise would be bathos.
>He's currently being talked about as the savior or antichrist of the USA
Am I the only person in the USA who is neither particularly for nor particularly against Trump?
I thought his suggestion to eliminate two regulations for every new one added was a fairly good idea. I thought his suggestion to investigate injecting disinfectant to treat Covid was a quite bad idea. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn't seem to have weaponized the IRS during his term as President. He wasn't a good President, but he wasn't the worst we've had.
Well, I agree with everything you said about him. I was also a big fan of his executive order requiring classical architecture for new buildings. I suppose one way to put it is that I think there are enough real things to worry about with him, that I get frustrated when people make up new ones.
TrumpBurgers might or might not be a stupid idea, but at this point, I'm prepared to bet that Trump would cash the check, if it were of sufficient size, so long as someone else took all the risk and did all the work.
Note that Trump U was initially going to be a licensing scheme but Trump decided to get directly involved, to his detriment. A mistake I don't think he'll repeat.
2. Trump has spent decades building up the Trump brand as representing a certain type of ostentatious luxury. Burgers don't fit in.
3. Too much surface area for controversy. Tens of thousands of unvetted minimum-wage Trump Burger employees out there, with the press waiting to pounce the first time one of them does something stupid? Not worth it.
#3 would be a plus for him. He loves it when the press pounces on him; it's free advertising and supports the narrative that the press is out to get him.
And the deepstate is rigging the Super Bowl. It’s all part of the same big conspiracy that is not just out to get him but each one of his supporters. He’s the only thing standing in the way of radical left wing communist fascists that Rush Limbaugh warned them about.
I very strongly disagree that there isn't 'much money' in a national fast-food chain. McDonalds? Chipotle? He could plausibly make tens to hundreds of millions in revenue
Plausibly, if he manages to build one of the most successful chains in history (while dealing with the fact that half the population including many core fast food demographics will outright refuse to eat there because they hate him, and another third of the population is vaguely embarrassed by him).
Remember, too, that McDonald's had first mover advantage, and so did Chipotle to some extent (not the first Mexican fast food chain but the first one that was actually good). Launching the nation's eight hundredth burger chain is going to be very different to launching the first fast food restaurant ever.
Some of them fail and some of them do well, and my guess is trumpburger would do pretty badly because it would be competing with dozens of beloved burger chains all over the country who are already in a cutthroat war of all against all.
Yes, starting with the fact that it's a lot more work. It does also make more money, but Donald J Trump does not appear to be short of money in the absolute sense. At the margin, the ratio of money:work is almost certainly higher for the next licensing deal than for establishing and operating a franchise. The fun:work and ego:work ratios are *definitely* higher, and that's almost certainly more important to him.
"He's the only one that can license the actual Trump name"
Is he? It's not a rare name. Now his likeness, and possibly the specific "Donald John Trump" name are much more exclusive. Maybe even things like Presidential-themed decoration in combination with the name Trump. But a Trump restaurant with generic Americana and a partner named Trump (genuinely involved or not)? Seems like pretty solid ground. Now that you mention it I'm less surprised he didn't do it and more surprised no one tried to piggyback.
I prefer to keep the full article in the email because I forward these emails from automatically to an IFTTT task that sends it to Pocket so I can read it later or listen to it at my leisure or when I don't have data.
I prefer getting the full post in email because my phone caches the contents of recent emails. This allows reading posts even when without cell service or when Substack is down.
What is the "Total deaths" (1.1 million) in this page referring to exactly? Total deaths due to any cause in this week of Jan 2024? Or total deaths from covid so far i.e. from 2029 to now? I suspect it is the latter.
How can I find the total number of daily deaths on average in a day now in 2024? If it is 3.6% of 1.1 million for this week, then it is 42k deaths this week from covid i.e. about 6k deaths a day from covid ?!
In the US (and I suspect elsewhere as well), there are no raw statistics on deaths due to covid--only on deaths associated with covid. That means they did a covid test post-mortem and it was positive. Anecdotally, based on cases I'm acquainted with, most covid-associated deaths were not caused by covid. We do have statistics on people put on respirators for covid, which we can more confidently associate with covid; but that will of course give underestimates for both covid and covid-caused deaths.
EDIT: This may have changed. Newer criteria for counting covid deaths are given on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/tech_notes.htm , but it is ambiguous in 2 important ways: it doesn't clarify whether "covid deaths" means "deaths with covid listed as a cause" (which would be the same as covid-associated deaths), or "deaths with covid listed as the underlying cause". It does clarify that a positive covid test is not necessary to be listed as a covid death.
But it says that "COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause on the death certificate in 87% of deaths" (presumably meaning death certificates listing covid as a cause), and that number is much too high to be correct, as you can check by estimating the number of people expected to test positive for covid at death who would have died anyway without covid. (That is, the expected number of of deaths in people who just happened to have covid at the time, is much higher than 13% of the number of covid-associated deaths, which is roughly the number of people who test positive for covid at death, but whose death certificates don't list covid as the underlying cause. I'm assuming that all people who tested positive for covid at death, had covid listed as a contributory cause.)
Current estimates are that 6.3% of the US population has covid at any given time (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). The CDC currently says that 3.6% of US deaths are caused by covid. 6.3 * .964 * .87 = 5.28, so we expect the number of people who die and just happened to have covid at the time to be 5.28% of all deaths. This is much more than (1-.87) * .036 = 0.47%, the number of people who, according to the CDC, test positive for covid, but whose deaths weren't due to covid. Do the math and you'll find we currently have negative excess deaths from covid. In short, I think that means that the CDC's current covid death numbers are too high by at least one order of magnitude.
It might be better to look at "excess deaths from covid", which is an estimate; see https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm. But in this case, we have an excess of "excess deaths from covid", because many people died from not being able to get tested or treated for life-threatening illnesses due to covid restrictions. I personally know of about as many deaths due to covid restrictions as deaths due to covid, and more deaths listed as covid-associated but certainly not due to covid.
On the other hand, we have a deficit of excess deaths from covid, due to the fact that people had fewer traffic accidents, and presumably caught other contagious diseases less, during the lockdowns. Covid disrupted life so much that expected deaths are difficult to compute.
There is also the problem that health-care institutions were given cash payouts for covid-associated deaths. I was told by a worker at a funeral home that the first covid-associated death in my area was fraudulent; they were told the body did not actually have covid.
Were they given payouts for people with COVID merely dying in their care? That seems like a weird way to do it, instead of payments for treating patients for COVID. I’ve found some evidence the latter was done (e.g. https://www.hrsa.gov/provider-relief/about/covid-uninsured-claim), at least for uninsured patients. Do you know what government programs were paying hospitals for deaths? Or is the issue that they would find the patient had COVID post-mortem and then just pretend whatever treatment they gave them was for COVID after the fact?
> Were they given payouts for people with COVID merely dying in their care?
That's what I heard, but I didn't verify it. I didn't hear whether the money was federal or state, or from what agency, or who could get it (eg hospitals or nursing homes). There were probably many different programs, with different methods.
It's the total number of deaths from covid so far, from 2019 to now. It matches the ourworldindata number pretty well.
For deaths it's a good heuristic that since people live ~100 years, about 1% of the population dies every year. So in the US with 400 million people, we should see ~4 million deaths per year, or 10,000 per day. A few percent of that is ~500 per day.
You can use the recorder to transfer a tape from one reel onto an empty reel (by playing or fast-forwarding), but during that process the tape winds "in the opposite direction" onto the empty reel. If you repeat that process again, the tape will end wound up the original way.
Is it possible to arrange such transfers so that at the end, every tape is on the same reel it started from, but inverted in the opposite direction?
Yrg'f hfr zngevprf. N irpgbe i va {-15, 0, 15}^16 funyy ercerfrag bhe fgngr, jvgu i_v ercerfragvat gur pbagrag bs erry v: mreb sbe rzcgl, -x sbe gncr x va onpxjneqf, +x sbe gncr x va sbejneq.
Fcbbyvat erry 1 gb erry 2 funyy or ercerfragrq ol Z=
0 rcf 0
-1 0 0
0 0 V
jurer V ercerfragf vqragvgl (14k14) cnqqvat naq rcf vf fbzr erny orgjrra mreb naq bar.
Sbe rknzcyr (1, 0, ...) -> (0, -1, ...) vf whfg zhygvcylvat gur vachg fgngr jvgu Z.
N trareny "fcbby erry a gb fbzr bgure erry x" pna or ercerfragrq ol
Z'=C*Z*C^-1
jurer C vf n crezhgngvba zngevk. Guvf pna ercerfrag nyy nyybjrq genafsbezngvbaf.
Gurersber, G vf abg n cebqhpg bs nal ahzore bs Z', be gur qrfverq genafsbezngvba vf abg cbffvoyr ol pbafrphgviryl fcbbyvat erryf jvguva gur ceboyrzf pbafgenvagf.
Abgr gung guvf cebbs yrnirf gur cbffvovyvgl gung gurer vf fbzr G juvpu erirefrf gur svefg 15 gncrf, ohg qbrf abg xrrc gur gncrf va beqre.
Sbe nal 15k15 crezhgngvba zngevk C jvgu qrg(C)=-1, G=
I think that argument doesn't quite work. Every time you transfer a tape, *two* reels switch their status between "occupied" and "empty" (note that both could be originally-full reels), so theoretically an odd number of transfers can lead to an even number of state changes of reels.
@Scott: The next time you ask for feedback on some issue, could you please create one thread to collect all the replies? After the 182nd top-level post about how yet another reader really, really wants to keep the email feature, it gets a bit tiring.
Full text in email is preferred. Sometimes when I notice an error I check the updated post and see it is already fixed, but I strongly prefer the ability to read in the email. In most cases I read entirely in the email and don't open the site.
Putting only the first paragraph in the email - well, I'm glad you asked because my initial reaction would be to be reminded of all those "you got a message! we're not going to tell you anything about it, log on to the website to check it out!" emails that I get. So I've always been rather pleased that substack gives you the whole text. I'd prefer it if serious corrections simply got sent again, but I don't know how practical substack makes that.
Yeah, like how LinkedIn will send you a "you have 1 new invitation" mail, but not give you the name of the other person in the e-mail, so you don't know if it's an actual friend/colleague or just some random recruiter spam. Really annoying.
Our local elections are not important. We live in a rural area and the issues are usually small potatoes, but the way we elect local officials recently became a fiasco; hopefully, this is not a sign of what's to come in our national elections this year. Read about it here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/local-election
I'm fine with first paragraph only in the mail. I usually go to the post anyway because it's a better reading experience and I know you sometimes edit the posts. The only posts I often read inside the email client are the open thread posts (If I'm only interested in the updates).
Has anyone theorized that willpower involves actively putting your “thumb on the scale” of some probabilities in your predictive processing network, possibly through a “make-believe” like mechanism?
For me it seems to go the opposite way. When I am depressed it is harder to do things because I am more pessimistic. When I am on antidepressants I am more optimistic . So mustering willpower to exercise and avoid junk food is so much easier as I believe every instance adds up to a larger positive impact. When I am depressed it feels actions have negligible results so why make any effort. I guess optimistic people have higher probabilities which means it’s easier for them to muster willpower to do things they don’t enjoy.
Placebos may be working by this mechanism. We believe we are getting better, so subconsciously find it easier to adopt healthier lifestyle behaviour, socialize etc which ends up physically and mentally making us feel better.
Also, since you're here, I remember you once shared a link about how the Bank of England admitted to printing money to fund WWI. Any chance you have further reading material?
It’s worth revisiting Scott’s piece on Moloch causing World War One.
I think in the future, historians will agree that central banks enabled the massive human atrocities of the 20th century by hiding the true financial cost of armed conflict. The elites stole from the people (via inflation) to fight massive wars, and deceived them with the help of mass media that did not act as a check on centralized power but rather as an amplifier for its self-serving narratives.
If all wars had to be paid for in hard money (ie not debt money), the peole at home would feel their cost far more directly and I think would therefore oppose them.
Thanks. Although I was moreso wondering if maybe the bitcoin maximalists had a dossier of other coverups or something.
(Also -- alas, I don't remember your original link so many months ago being paywalled.)
EDIT: I also seemed to remember you saying something about the BoE colluding with the U.S. federal reserve regarding WWI. But when I skimmed the thread, I didn't find anything like that. Was I hallucinating?
Ah, so it turns out you've complained about the BoE more than once, and I was looking under the wrong post. Here's the excerpt that I originally remembered.
- printing all that money put the bank of england at risk of being found out, so the bankers reached out to their american friends, who were more than happy to help print more money too, causing the boom of the 1920's and the, of course, eventually crash
When I follow the link you provided, I don't see any mention of the U.S. involvement. So I assumed you knew more than you were letting on.
>If all wars had to be paid for in hard money (ie not debt money), the peole at home would feel their cost far more directly and I think would therefore oppose them.
You might be right, though I feel it would be ironic. This reminds me of mandatory seat belt laws: A chance of death won't get people to buckle their seat belts, but a chance of death and a $50 fine will. Certainly war plus a tax hike will get more opposition than war alone.
> I think the claim (briefly mentioned eg here) is that your brain hacks eg the hunger drive by “predicting” that your mouth is full of delicious food. Then, when your mouth is not full of delicious food, it’s a “prediction error”, it sets off all sorts of alarm bells, and your brain’s predictive machinery is confused and uncertain. The only way to “resolve” this “uncertainty” is to bring reality into line with the prediction and actually fill your mouth with delicious food. On the one hand, there is a lot of basic neuroscience research that suggests something like this is going on. On the other, Wo’s writes about this further:
I’m not sure this explains willpower though, does it? This seems to explain how the hunger drive (or others) would work. And I’m asking, is it possible that we can intentionally manipulate some probabilities in these networks, for short periods of time. I can see how this would perhaps be both necessary for imagination and sufficient for something that looks like willpower. Experimentally I have found that intense imagination helps me exert myself more while exercising, so it seems to fit.
I didn't go too hard in the paint exploring it. But it hypothesizes that action-potentials consist of a psychic vector-field, like how solar flares follow magnetic lines. This models, for instance, drug-addiction in terms of the psychic equivalent of a blackhole. It endorses the "Symmetry Theory of Valence" on top of Predictive Coding. Maybe you'll find it interesting.
As I understood, Friston believes that the manipulation of beliefs explains *action in general*, not just drives. The post framed the Predictive Coding Paradigm as "not a theory of everything" because it was unable to account for motor-activity. That is, until Friston came along and said "actually, it *is* a theory of everything" and posited that motor-activity is a sort of "bayesian-updating in reverse". "Reverse" in the sense that: epistemic-cognition reduces error by changing beliefs to match perception; whereas agentic-cognition reduces error by changing perception (via acting upon the environment) to match beliefs. So by setting arbitrary yet stubborn beliefs, you can "trick" your nervous system into generating an error-signal. And then an error-correction mechanism drives your motor-activity. This is supposedly how all motor-activity is instantiated.
With this in mind, "willpower" looks like a synonym for "act by believing delusional things with all your heart", even if the exact term "willpower" is never used in the post. Although I suppose it's possible that "willpower" refers to a more specific phenomenon, where the delusions are given a nitro-boost or something.
> Friston mentions many times that free energy is “almost tautological”, and one of the neuroscientists I talked to who claimed to half-understand it said it should be viewed more as an elegant way of looking at things than as a scientific theory per se.
And while I'm running my mouth, I might as well add that I think I know what he's talking about here.
The units in any given equation or inequality (such as miles-per-hour) can be analogized to a currency. This is a tautology of dimensional analysis in the sense that if you're performing a sanity-check and find something like "5 mph = 11 miles", you know you screwed up somewhere since the units don't match. And *of course* the brain uses something functionally equivalent to an inequality-operator to make comparisons to make decisions. What else would it use? So *of course* the brain is using some sort of "currency-esque" thing to make comparisons. The only question is what the currency is. In lieu of a real answer, people often call it "utility", though I guess Friston prefers "free-energy".
On one hand, this is laughably trivial. But on the other hand, it unlocked some other insights for me when I was trying to wrap my head around quaternions for the first time.
Wow, this is a great explanation. It seems to gibe with Noether’s theorem. Whenever you have a symmetry in the action of n a dynamic system (ie, the laws of physics are the same across all of time), you get a conserved quantity (ie, energy). So in this case if the brain is consistently making comparisons between predictions, that consistency should give rise to a conserved quantity.
I'm familiar with the name and prosaic description of Noether's Theorem. But I never understood the math itself on a deep level. So I never properly integrated it, mentally. But yeah, seems analogous.
In retrospect though, I think it can be boiled down to the Peano Axioms. Numbers are just stacks of successor-functions. The successor-functions and relational-operators between them need to be the same dimension by logical necessity. Or in other words, the symmetry of successor-functions is what gives rise to quantities.
I'm not sure you can separate the willpower part of the thought process. Some part is clearly "cake is tasty" and another is "avoid weight gain", in addition to zillions of other thoughts, including things like "I'm sad" or "I'm happy".
I’m interested in understanding if there is an agreed upon mechanism by which willpower operates. What I’m wondering is if the thing we call willpower is something like “the extent to which we can temporarily nudge probabilities in our predictive networks.” I can see how “make believe” is useful here. When a child engages in imaginative play, im guessing this works by temporarily shifting assigned probabilities to courses of action, so that narratives (ie “now I’m a bear”) take weight over the memories that say they are a primate. In the case of the cake / weight gain example, I’m taking it as a given that our brains are still likely doing some expected value calculation, even in the willpower case. Im guessing people eat the cake despite “knowing” it causes weight gain because they asses that the probability of weight gain is assessed as being too low because it’s distant and some fraction. If the cake make you gain 30 pounds immediately upon eating it, I think more people could resist it. So if a person imagines themselves ballooning up as big and fat, it’s like pretending the probability of weight gain is higher than it is, which can help with the outcome pointing the way “rational” you wants. Most people will tell you that using willpower all the time is exhausting, and approaches the tie into identity (ie “I just don’t enjoy sweets”) work better or feel more automatic. From a predictive processing perspective, it makes sense that once you’ve giant enough evidence that you don’t eat cake, the suggestion never comes up because it’s never assigned a significant probability.
Again, my goal here is to try and understand what willpower is doing from a predictive processing perspective.
I've always thought of "willpower" and "free will" as basically the same thing.
When we're at a decision point, and as Sapolski and others argue, what you're going to choose is basically a deterministic function of your genes, epigenetics, upbringing, background around similar choices, the context (you might make different choices on a date or around a new person you're trying to impress), and so on.
So that's your sort of fixed probability cloud, with a density function around the various options split some way. 30% eat the cake, 40% don't eat the cake, 20% distract yourself and change context, 10% eat something else, or whatever.
Now where free will and willpower comes in is altering the "background around similar choices" part of the equation. You can change future-you's PDF by choosing a better choice now and in the subsequent choices like this, and this is where habits and imagination and all the other tools people have mentioned come in.
But I don't think an exertion of "willpower" is necessary, your "thumb on the scale." What if you just chose better choices with no effort? What if you'd sustained some localized insult to the brain, or what if your taste buds matured or changed as you aged, or what if a hypnotist convinced you to make better choices with no effort? Then your future you's PDF's will be changed accordingly with no effort on your part.
Surely if a hypnotist or aging can induce the change, you could also "decide" to make that change in a non-effortful way, ie it is at least possible (due to those existence proofs) to reach that mental state without the perception of effort and willpower.
So what is willpower? It's a fiction, like conscious decisions, that we pointed to after the fact, in the mien of our new PDF's - I have this PDF now, because I made those choices back then. Or another way, it's something we choose to pretend to engage in now, to "earn" our better states in the future. But it's not necessary or real, much like Libet's experiments showing us that "I *decided* to hit that switch" is a back-propagated tag added well after the unconscious decided and started moving your finger.
What evidence is there for the assertion that the process is purely deterministic? This seems like a philosophical sleight of hand to me. I can imagine how it _could_ be deterministic, but I don’t see an argument here so much as an assertion.
I thought the underlying assumption was basically materialism writ at human scale - like if it *wasn't* deterministic, what outside force is acting to insert the non-determinism? Your immortal soul?
An analogical thought exercise - wouldn't a sufficiently intelligent being be able to predict with arbitrarily high accuracy what your actions would be in pretty much any given situation? Thus arguing you're deterministic?
I mean, that's not an existence proof, but the fact that adults can largely predict what children or pets are going to do in 99% of situations at least analogically backs it up.
In what ways are you imagining it could NOT be deterministic? RNG's in our heads somewhere? Quantum stuff ala Penrose?
I agree this is essentially a statement of materialist philosophy taken as a given. My answer is that I think the concept of an immortal soul is more plausible than materialist monism ever solving the hard problem of consciousness. I think that souls likely interact with the world by means of Penrose-style quantum interactions. It’s an empirically observable fact that quantum mechanical phenomena influence the behavior of our brains, otherwise we couldn’t be having this kind of conversation. The only question is what precisely the casual relationship is, between quantum mechanical phenomena and our brains. I suspect our souls interact with the world not just over the span of our brains but literally everywhere, and that the souls of the departed still influence reality by collectively influencing and maintaining the laws of physics. This then explains why the laws of physics are what they are: they are a projection onto quantum chaos by the collective departed who love us and wish us well. I suppose this is an old fashioned way of thinking though.
Is there even agreement that "willpower" is a real thing rather than an epiphenomenon? There is certainly the "appearance of willpower", but is that a correct perception? (OK, centripetal force is an example of what I mean by calling it an epiphenomenon. Yeah, it's sort of real, but not in any basic sense.)
Everyone knows you gain 10 pounds from eating a one-pound box of chocolates. Emotional weight varies even in the instance itself. Plus, if you resist one minute, you must resist again in another few minutes, and each time might need more willpower to resist. This doesn't mesh well with your hypothesis, as far as I can see, but doesn't directly contradict it.
I doubt the brain does calculations of any sort, in the mathematical sense. Using logic, we can often tell the correct course of action, yet end up doing something else. In the words of the band Rush from the song New World Man, "He's old enough to know what's right but young enough not to choose it".
Calculation is not some sort of physical entity. It's an abstract process.
I'm sure the brain calculates just as much as a computer does. A computer flips electric voltages around, the brain flips chemical signals around. Both can be modeled as equivalent to calculating, which is an abstract process. (And neither is error free.)
I disagree, after having read "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. It presents a convincing argument that some things can be true yet not computable. Computers follow algorithms, and it is not clear to me that the brain follows an algorithm of any sort.
The central thesis of the book is that the brain somehow uses quantum mechanics to think and be conscious, but I think it falls short on that point. But Godel's theorem shows some things must be true within the universal that cannot be proven. I think it is possible thinking does something to reach conclusions that machines, as we understand them currently, cannot do, even in principle.
Godel's Theorem relies on a "perfectly correct" reasoning. The brain doesn't do that. (Computers try...an are designed around the idea that they approach that at the limit.)
But what the brain does is still computation. It definitely does other things as well, as it's computation is not without side effects.
Whether what is computable by a particular device matches reality (i.e. "truth") is an independent question. OTOH, the brain has evolved to ensure that there's a useful correspondence between what the brain predicts and what the universe will present.
FWIW, I feel that the brain definitely uses quantum operations. There doesn't seem to be any alternative. But to jump from there to "consciousness is a quantum phenomenon" is a step much too far. First you need an operational definition of consciousness. (OTOH, I haven't read "The Emperor's New Mind". I'm relying on general consensus. Perhaps he does offer an operational definition of consciousness. I'd still need a lot more evidence to take it seriously. ) Currently, I believe, they've shown (with reasonable plausibility) that signals propagate a couple of nm further along the tubules than classical models would suggest. I find that quite plausible, but don't find that it implies that consciousness, itself, is a quantum phenomenon, except in the sense that everything is.
re 4. i would argue this kills this nice feature of substack which is “you get your text in the mail app and get to read it”. if instead the email is just a proxy for visiting web site, then i need to perform an action, even directed by the link from the email, to quit the mail app and go to the browser. that does not often work smoothly. then, in browser i have 50 opened tabs and bringing my attention back there is not helpful for the current text and its P(read|opened in browser) which is obviously lower than P(read in email app right away). it is often hard to focus on the content, on one piece of content, etc so receiving stuff to the mailbox comes quite handy — having all the emails around the text is not the same like having one_more_tab being added to the fifty_tabs_that_i_once_found_interesting_to_read_and_never_read_just_to_close_them_all_300_days_later.
Are there any accounts of people who've learned to lucid dream developing schizophrenia?
I often wonder about this, because if learning to lucid dream is primarily about learning when an experience is happening in the real world vs your brain's fabrication of the real world - then does this skill transfer if one develops waking hallucinations like with schizophrenia?
It sounds kinda kooky, but a part of my brain wonders if lucidity, or lucidity interventions (drugs that increase lucidity during dreams) could have a large impact on schizophrenia symptoms.
I just checked if a common drug taken with lucid dreamers (galantamine) has any effect. Results seem very mixed, with the drug affecting sub-scores but not having much of an effect of overall standardized measurements of symptom severity.
Still, galantamine is not a magic lucid dreaming pill, so I wonder if advanced lucid dreamers would have different experiences with things like schizophrenia symptoms.
Since I taught myself to fly at will in my dreams, my current check for whether I'm dreaming is to attempt that. Works like a charm, but I don't see how it can be helpful for schizophrenia.
Since childhood I noticed that while dreaming I may actually be unsure about whether I'm dreaming or not, while in the waking world I never have any doubts that I'm awake. I suspect that conditions like schizophrenia have something to do with this feeling of certanity/uncertanity.
There's two mechanisims of lucidity I think are relevant - the one you mentioned (a feeling of certainty/uncertainty) - and the occurence of something specific that you know to be deeply unlikely in the real world.
I have some experience with lucid dreaming too, and there are times I get a vague feeling something is a dream for no specific identifiable reason. I can just feel it (mechanism 1). And then there's the times I notice something deeply unlikely, like a walk through the door and there's a celebrity and I realize something is off (mechanism 2).
The way I'd imagine both mechanisms might be helpful with schizophrenia are:
1. having the vague feeling your brain is making things up is probably a good ability to have when detecting hallucinations or wayward thinking.
2. being on alert for generally unlikely things happening and 'reality testing' when they occur is probably also helpful for detecting hallucinations or wayward thinking.
I don't think it could actually stop the occurrence of symptoms - just that it might be helpful in managing and detecting them in yourself
As a lucid dreamer ... one time, I am thinking about someone who I haven't seen for ages, and then by coincidence they just show up. Now, I know dreams work that way and waking reality usually doesn't. Quick mental check: is any of this real? Answer: yep, seems real ... must be just a coincidence.
On the other hand....
I dream that I am at philosophy conference, at which Eric Schwitzgebel presents a paper on radical skepticism. How would you know if you are dreaming right now? We go for coffee afterwards, and discuss Eric's paper. It is certainly very interesting. At no point during this do I realise that, in fact, I am dreaming right now.
I tell this dream to a colleague of mine, and we develop a bit about a conference on radical skepticism, where authors present papers in which they argue that their audience might not exist.
Some psych textbooks are happy to theorise that drug-induced hallucinations and schizophrenia associated hallucinations share a common mechanism (e.g. the drug and the disease process affects the same brain region) but are reluctant to extend this to hypnagogic hallucinations.
A tentative hypothesis (which I think you would need to find evidence against to declare hypnagogic hallucinations an unrelated phenomenon) ... hallucinogenic drugs, schizophrenia, and the onset of the sleep state all affect the same brain mechanism.
Re: 4 btw can you please tell substack to fire their entire programmer team starting with the CTO and hire people who can write a backend that serves plain html instead of whatever they do now, that takes 5 seconds to render? And to re-render when switching to another tab and back? Just a suggestion.
For what it's worth, the rerender when switching tabs is your browser's doing. But it's doing it because substack is taking up so much memory that the browser is supsending the process to free some up.
They dont just return strait HTML because that would limit the client side interactivity. There are ways around this of course, but without knowing more about their architecture I couldn't say how hard/easy it would be.
Hear hear. This comment added nothing and - given the system we're complaining about - is contributing to making things even slower. But I'm gonna post it anyway just to +1 firing the programmers.
The code does not cope with many comments. Apparently, allowing readers to have intelligent discussions in the comments is not part of Substack's business plan.
(The page does not _deliberately_ re-render itself. It's just that it uses up so much memory that the browser is forced to throw it out at the earliest opportunity to allow the other tab some room to breathe.)
> The code does not cope with many comments. Apparently, allowing readers to have intelligent discussions in the comments is not part of Substack's business plan.
Unironically yes, with the important nuance that Substack's performance is at its worst specifically on ACX where the default behavior is to display a large comment section at the end of an extended article; Scott asked for some concessions, and they hacked something together from the parts they had rather than do it the efficient way. Standard behavior is optimized first for where an article only has two curated comments and second for a dedicated comments page with the article excluded, this is a pretty bad structural fit for ACX.
>The page does not deliberately re-render itself. It's just that it uses up so much memory
See, if so, that's precisely the problem, and why all of Substack's web devs should have their Software Engineer licenses revoked (hah, as if)
I just popped into the console and checked:
>$(".comment-list-items").textContent.length
= 354693
JS uses UTF-16, so add a factor of 2, that's ~700 *kilo*bytes of text. You could fit that on a floppy diskette. There is absolutely no reason it should be taking up 2-3 orders of magnitude more space (browser task manager says ~450,000Kb) to store that text in memory.
There's a sort of pervasive lack of machine affinity so to call it. For another example, if you want to browse the post archive, the page automatically loads 10 or so more article titles when you scroll to the bottom, it takes a second or two, then you can scroll to the bottom again and have more titles loaded.
I guarantee that loading all 1000 or so article titles for the entire history of the blog would be *faster than a single update* , because the amount of data is minuscule, the amount of processing required is minuscule, and it's all probably dwarfed by the complications required to dynamically load paginated stuff.
But no, kids these days have no intuitions about how much time things really take (and especially, should take when done straightforwardly), and so extremely misguidedly try to not overload the poor computer with too much work by having it process more than ten article titles at a time.
That one, I suspect, is some sort of engagement metric or whatever. If you only load ten at a time, the user scrolls through the ten, then has to wait, increasing the chance they see something in the ten they want to read. If you everything all at once they scroll much quicker, maybe Ctrl+F, and on finding/not finding what they want, leave.
Since the goal is to keep users around, that outcome is to be avoided at all costs. So just loading a small number of titles at a time, even though it would be faster and easier to load them all at once.
I suspect that people who read their e-mails feel strongly about getting them, but people who click to read the website do not care much about whether the e-mail contained the entire story or not.
Just to elaborate, one of the main reasons is that I'm trying to avoid the substack app/website when possible, because the experience is not great (to put it mildly).
Has anyone here tried tDCS? Everything I’ve read seems to suggest it’s surprisingly safe, even when specifically searching for risks and adverse effects. Would I be an idiot to try it via the DIY route?
I have a friend who used the Flow tDCS headset and reported very positive results with a noticeable reduction in depression symptoms, and another who didn’t experience any change.
Yes, years ago I connected a 9 volt battery to my temples via salt water soaked cotton pads, my goal was to try making up riffs on my guitar while connected to the current cause I'd read it increases creativity and wanted to test it out. I think I put the pads too near to my eyes because it gave me mild continuous flashes of light in my vision. This freaked me out so I took the electrodes off after only a minute or two. Anyway this is probably not too useful to you since you probably want to use higher voltage for a longer period of time, but for the record this caused no adverse effects at all to either my brain or eyes. Also I can't see any reason it would be any more or less dangerous than having it done by a professional as long as you're careful about measuring voltage, amperage and electrode placement (NB: I am not a doctor or in any way qualified to be giving this advice). Please let me know about your results if you end up trying it, I also want to give it another go!
Whoa. That's definitely more DIY than what I had in mind! I was just thinking of trying out one of the more reputable retail devices.
My interest is actually somewhat adjacent to yours - a number of studies seem to show that tDCS has a positive effect on motor learning so I'm wondering if it might be able to help me break through some coordination/motor planning barriers that I've been struggling against for years, also on guitar. (I'm personally skeptical but the lack of, really, any significant adverse effects across dozens of papers is intriguing).
Ah well, I've been around young men and young women in my time (I was a young woman once) and while I won't say there are *no* women who'd do something like that, the odds are on that it was a young man 😀
I'm glad you survived and made it to the comments section here!
Wow, maybe I'll consider being less cavalier with electricity. But I've also been electrocuted by a car battery and 220 volts from a wall socket, as I assume most people have at some point, and been totally fine; does the skin really provide so much resistance that 220 volts is no big deal outside the skin, but 9 volts is deadly under the skin? (I know it's mostly the amperage that determines if a shock is deadly, but still that's ~6 amps versus ~2 amps maximum)
Update: my simple amateur tester showed about 800 kohm between temples, and over 1 Mohm between hands. My skin is on the dry side, and the contact area was small, so there’s that. I also suspect the resistance of any tissue to be nonlinear, and may go down with increasing voltage.
Yes, skin is quite resistive compared to what’s under it. Its resistance varies widely due to genetics, moisture levels, location in the body, etc, but kohm-levels are common. Underneath are tissues soaked in electrolytes. Orders of magnitude more conductive.
4: That would stop me from cheating LeechBlock by reading your posts from my mail reader rather than my browser. Whether that's good or bad it's up to you.
I usually read the posts through the email. I don't know why, but whenever I go to the website it's incredibly slow. Clicking on a link takes at least 5 seconds to open a new tab, + another 5 to 10 seconds where the page just freezes. The same for highlighting or copying something, etc. Scrolling on a post, again, takes around 5 to 10 seconds to show me the content where I scrolled to.
I really don't know why this is happening, I tried disabling all my plugins but it doesn't solve it. I use Firefox
Yeah, it's the comments, Substack has dogshit optimization for displaying (purely text!!!) comments, and since ACX displays comments alongside the articles it lags like fuck. They seriously should fix it, it's horrid.
I feel like they're optimizing for "displays new comments promptly and unobtrusively", and they got that down. But whatever they're doing makes the rest of it hideously slow at any significant scale.
Yeah I substack on mobile is terrible (which is bizarre since it's a plain text page mostly). Right now as I'm typing this comment the text box is lagging. I think it's something to do with how they render comments because I have less issues on pages without them and the most on open threads.
Does this also happen on other Substack blogs? I suspect it is the long comment section that causes the freezing.
I have clicked on 3 blogs that Substack recomments on its main page, and clicked the latest article on each one. The number of comments: 0, 66, 16. This Open Thread has 100 comments at the moment (3 hours after its publishing) and the number is quickly growing.
It doesn't happen on other Substack blogs I follow. I just tried to find another random Substack with a blog post with 100+ comments and indeed I see the same issue happening, so you might be right.
In a perfect world, the choice between "full article in e-mail" and "only the start" could be done by the subscriber, individually. Yet another way Substack sucks.
The thing is: individually, no one benefits from having only the first paragraph in the mail, since that provides strictly less choices (ie, someone who cares about reading an up-to-date post can always click through to Substack). The only advantage of sending only the first paragraph is to create common knowledge that everyone is reading the most recent version at the time they read it... Which is still a paltry advantage, since some people will inevitably read the post before any edits are made.
This can be done pretty easily by subscribing via RSS feed but not email (although that might have problems for paid subscribers if locked posts don't have a preview)
I prefer to have the full text in my email. Then if I'm offline I can still get most of the benefit, and if I'm online I know I'll get the best experience by going to your website, especially if it's a links post where commenters are likely to have added significant insight. However I recognise that I've been reading ACX long enough to know the system, and you're disproportionately likely to get comments from such people.
Twice. Slate Star Codex was deleted and later reinstated, but his older LiveJournal, which contained some of my favourite short stories, but was understandably too revealing of personal information given how much attention he later attracted, remains down.
I would also be inconvienced, not for archival reasons, but because I usually read these Open Threads by email first to check out if any of the main announcements interest me.
Excellent point. Yes- i would probably never read an open thread again if it was just a link. Though a different subject line could fix that and might be a good idea regardless.
Came here to say this. I was happy to have all post-2017 content from Slate Star Codex in my inbox when it imploded. I click through for comments and to like, but I enjoy having an easy copy in my archive. :) (To be clear, I don't think the chance that ACX is going to implode is at all large, at least when modulated on top of "substack continues to exist". But it's nice not to have to think about it.)
I prefer long reads on my kindle and use KTool to send them there. For newsletters from Substack, the best way is to setup forwarding filters. So I would no longer read ACX on my kindle if the whole post does not come in the email. I could manually send it, but the additional effort is more likely going to mean I read in email on my phone and it would get lumped into “phone time” which I am actively working to limit.
I strongly prefer having the email in my inbox to read. I mean with Zvi's AI posts I usually end up having to go to the website after I read through it mostly, but it's not what I like.
I think we can all accept that the canonically updated version that expresses your current opinions is the website, without needing to have it be the current version in our email. Besides, think of the advantages of not being able to (slightly) bury history this way?
>Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails?
Yes, given this website's jankiness, I would be absolutely inconvenienced. Sufficiently that I would stop reading, and end my (using-discount-code) subscription in response.
This website continues to suck, horribly. I only very rarely dip into the comments (reading or writing) simply because it's such a chore to deal with. If I have to deal with the mess in order to simply read your posts, I won't be reading enough of them, often enough, to justify spending any money on this anymore.
I agree. I am not a paid subscriber, but if I stopped receiving post emails I would be likely to read less ACX overall and less likely to become a subscriber in the future. The website is very laggy and janky to the point that it can be almost impossible to read sometimes, especially on a mobile device. I therefore read the posts primarily through my email.
Also, I often read posts shortly before bed. When they are sent to my email, I can read them on a very dim screen with a black background, which helps my sleep hygiene greatly. I would not read them before bed with the blue background present on the substack website while dealing with the janky website.
I posted a complaint about the substack user interface to the ssc reddit several months ago, and it has received 27 upvotes. I think many of those upvoting people would be inconvenienced if there were to be an end to email posts.
If there are substantial updates to posts after they are sent out as email posts, I would appreciate receiving an email update, preferably on the same email thread as the original post email.
My only issue with the comment facility is that each time I post a comment, the site trundles through two profile set up pages before it publishes the comment. But I'm so used to that now I hardly notice.
I'm getting a whole litany of bullshit on mobile, including ludicrously slow loading, random and very obnoxious page jumps (ie I'll be reading and suddenly I'll be somewhere else in the comments with no idea how far up or down I've been jumped) and truncated comments with a missing "read more" button (that means I can't read anything without refreshing the entire page and going through it all again.) Plus the reply-by-email bug that catches at least one person every week, and pollutes the main tree for everyone.
If enough commenters complain, is Scott likely to take this seriously?
If so, if Scott makes an issue out of this, are the devs likely to take *him* seriously?
No one has a particularly painful BATNA they can inflict so neither Scott nor the devs have any reason to give a fuck.
The substack website is blocked in China, possibly other places. Obviously there are workarounds but having the post come via email is very helpful there.
Math puzzle: everyone in the family drank exactly a whole mug of coffee with milk. Kate's mug contained 1/4th of all the milk consumed and 1/6th of all the coffee. How many members are in the family?
(not very hard, but curiously harder than it ought to be)
Nffhzvat svir crbcyr, gur bgure sbhe unir 3/4=12/16 bs gur zvyx, fb Xngr trgf 4/16 naq gur bguref trg 3/16 bs gur zvyx. Gur bgure sbhe unir 5/6=20/24 bs gur pbssrr, fb Xngr trgf 4/20 naq gur bguref trg 5/24 bs gur pbssrr. Gur havgf npghnyyl jbex bhg jvgu gubfr ahzoref: rirelbar trgf 8 havgf va gurve zht, vs jr nffhzr 16 havgf bs zvyx naq 24 havgf bs pbssrr.
Be gb chg vg nabgure jnl: fvapr rnpu zht ubyqf gur fnzr nzbhag, naq rirelbar unf 3/16 bs zvyx naq 4/24 bs pbssrr, Xngr'f rkgen 1/16 bs zvyx arrqf gb or gur fnzr nzbhag nf rirelbar ryfr'f rkgen 1/24 bs gur pbssrr.
Zl fbyhgvba vf gung V oryvrir guvf chmmyr vf bayl fbyinoyr jura gurer'f rknpgyl bar ahzore bs gur sbez 1/x (jurer x vf n cbfvgvir jubyr ahzore) orgjrra gur senpgvba bs gur gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx gung'f va Xngr'f zht naq gur senpgvba bs gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr gung'f va Xngr'f zht :)
Zl nafjre vf svir. Ohg svefg, fbzr pynevsvpngvba. V gnxr vg gung gur vqrn vf gung rnpu snzvyl zrzore svyyf na (rdhny fvmrq) zht jvgu n pbzovangvba bs pbssrr naq zvyx, fhpu gung gur fhz bs gur nzbhag bs pbssrr naq gur nzbhag bs zvyx rnpu snzvyl zrzore qevaxf rdhnyf bar zht bs ibyhzr (V’yy fnl rnpu zht vf n cvag sbe rnfr bs ersrerapr). Gurer ner A snzvyl zrzoref, fb gurl qevax A cvagf bs yvdhvq gbgny.
Fb lbh unir gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr + gur gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx rdhnyf A cvagf. Gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr vf P cvagf, gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx vf Z cvagf. Onfrq ba Xngr’f zht, (1/6) * P + (1/4) * Z = 1.
Erjevgr gung nf 2P + 3Z = 12. Jr jnag gb xabj P + Z. Abeznyyl lbh’q fnl guvf vf bar yvarne rdhngvba jvgu gjb inevnoyrf, naq fb gurer’f ab fvatyr fbyhgvba, ohg jr nyfb unir gur nqqrq pbaqvgvba gung A unf gb or n cbfvgvir vagrtre. Lbh pna erjevgr gur ahzore nf 2(P+Z) + Z = 12. Va cnegvphyne, Z zhfg or rira.
Vs Z = 0, lbh unir P+Z = 6 (naq P = 6)
Vs Z = 2, lbh unir P+Z = 5 (naq P = 3)
Vs Z = 4, lbh unir P+Z = 4 (naq P = 0)
Gurer frrzf gb or 3 fbyhgvbaf, ohg jura lbh fnl rirelbar unq “pbssrr jvgu zvyx”, vagrecerg gung gb zrna rirelbar unq n abamreb nzbhag bs rnpu. Gur svefg fbyhgvba vf rirelbar unq fgenvtug pbssrr, gur 3eq fbyhgvba vf rirelbar unq fgenvtug zvyx, rnpu bs juvpu vf n pbzovangvba bs zvyx naq pbssrr va n zngurzngvpny frafr ohg abg “n jubyr zht bs pbssrr jvgu zvyx” va abezny ynathntr.
Fb V gnxr vg gb or gur zvqqyr fbyhgvba. Svir crbcyr, gurer jrer 3 cvagf bs pbssrr naq 2 cvagf bs zvyx, Xngr unq 1/6gu gur sbezre (unys n cvag bs pbssrr) naq 1/4gu gur ynggre (unys n cvag bs zvyx).
I've been thinking a lot recently about memes as living organisms. Specifically, it's pretty common to hear people say memetics is just an analogy, but if so: is a human being just an analogy? What I mean is, what we call a human is the pattern that arises from the interaction between its neurons, same as a meme is the pattern that arises from the interaction of lots of human minds, so what's the difference? What makes a meme any less real and solid than you or me?
(Maybe you say: 'But humans are individuals, and they're a physical thing I can point to, unlike a meme.' But are they? If you isolate a human from other humans, and therefore the supply chains of food and water those humans form, it'll die the same as a single neuron isolated from blood vessels will; and if you point at a dead body and say "that's John" then everyone can agree that whatever John was, it's not actually contained in that particular collection of cells anymore.)
So what are everyone's thoughts about this? Also, I'm assuming that people have already gone down this rabbit hole in more depth and more coherently somewhere else, so feel free to link to wherever that place is too.
>What I mean is, what we call a human is the pattern that arises from the interaction between its neurons,
...no, what we call a human is the meat inside the self-sealing skin of an upright, typically lightly-haired body. I'm quite certain half the humans at the grocery store have never had neural activity.
Reactivity is what makes memes less solid. Show a facepalming human an adorable kitten, and they'll stop facepalming and probably Ooh and Aah over it, or freak out about allergies, or possibly go on a rant about how kittens are a tool of the bourgeoisie to keep the common man down (and then you say "damn right they are" and hurl the kitten into their eyes). But take a facepalming Picard meme and show it an adorable kitten, and the only response it's capable of is facepalming. And being Picard.
>and if you point at a dead body and say "that's John"
It's unclear what you're asking about. Maybe you're asking about:
A) Semiotics. Signs/labels are pointers. An utterance is real. A concept is real. A referent may or may not be real.
B) The Heap Problem. Aggregates are configurations. As for life, the thing being aggregated is chemical disequilibrium. As for consciousness, nobody knows for sure.
C) The definition of "real". Which is an open problem.
D) Personal identity. Which the Buddha had a lot to say about.
E) Supervenience. I.e. big things are made out of small things.
You might have missed the classical allusion: that's Democritus, "By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void."
But what else would you say exists? Some exotic assortment of quarks, leptons, and bosons, missing the point entirely?
>Another way to view reduction is that the physical grounds all higher structures and concepts, and that these higher level structures are existing entities in good standing. So all the features of the human experience, e.g., desires, happiness, love, etc exist, they just don't exist fundamentally. A good concept to look into is the concept of levels. The fundamental level grounds higher levels; and each level has a certain explanatory autonomy such that we can speak of tables, chairs, desires, love, etc as proper features of our ontology without compromises.
To pick a simpler example, consider a file of ASCII text. Yeah, it is "only" "really" a set of patterns of magnetic domains on a disk, and, short of cutting the magnetic domains out of the disk, one cannot "move" it. Yet it is useful to speak of moving or copying or "the same" file, at the level of abstraction of ASCII text files. A nobleman's honor is more complex, involving patterns in their head and in the heads of their associates, but it is also a higher level construct on a physical basis.
Re
>, and God
Personally, as nearly as I can tell, it exists only in the sense that a literary character like Hamlet or Macbeth exists.
"Human" and "meme" are different levels of abstraction. Likes memes, humans can be seen as an idea, which is why John can live on after his body's death. However, ideas need cognition to be interpreted. John does not need another person to be sure to exist, that is the point of "I think therefore I am". Further, John has goals, a meme does not. A meme might have a purpose, but enacting that purpose requires someone with actual goals.
And why does John have goals? Because he is a biological being, rooted in the physical world. Not reaching those goals can have real world consequences, even deadly ones. And as a physical being, John is bound by the laws of thermodynamics. The meme is only bound by the laws of evolution, or perhaps laws of computation, should those two be the same thing. Like the gene, the meme does not desire anything, it does not want for anything. It just is.
(Edit) I think it's a very good question though because it goes at the heart of what we mean by referring to John or a meme. It comes down to truth and reference, a core philosophical theme I wish we discussed much more often.
Very interesting points, let me try to understand:
> Further, John has goals, a meme does not. A meme might have a purpose, but enacting that purpose requires someone with actual goals.
I was making a loose analogy that (neuron : human mind) = (human mind : meme), so I'll keep going with that. Coming from the lower level, all human desires ultimately emerge from the 'desires' of their individual neurons (e.g. connect to other neurons, fire when a certain electrical potential is reached). Continuing up the levels of abstraction, all the 'desires' that a meme has emerge from individual humans acting out their desires. So what's so special about the middle level of abstraction that we call 'a human' that we can say that it's goals are 'real' and everything else's goals arent?
> Like the gene, the meme does not desire anything, it does not want for anything. It just is.
But from the outside view everything is just acting in ways that will increase the chances that it'll achieve a certain outcome, so what you're saying is that it's the subjective feeling of wanting, i.e. consciousness, that means something can really have goals? This seems like a pretty valid point. But let me wander into crazy town a little here: how could we ever know that conscious memes don't exist? What is it like to be a meme?
> And why does John have goals? Because he is a biological being, rooted in the physical world.
But here I don't see the distinction; a meme is also just as rooted to the physical world, it needs a substrate of brains to continue existing in the same way that the pattern of a human mind needs a physical substrate of cells or (someday!) semiconductors to continue existing.
> What makes a meme any less real and solid than you or me?
...Because memes don't physically exist? They're just concepts. Fiction loosely representing reality. And of course, what humans consider to be "human" doesn't really exist either, especially considering how consistently wrong they are about the universal human condition. And for the record, thinking of humans as "individuals" isn't really accurate either. They're a large colony of cells and microorganisms, with various, autonomous "intelligences" spread throughout the body. Even the brain itself cannot be considered a singular entity, considering that people can function mostly fine even after you cut their brain in half. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
So... call things whatever you like. Reality does not care.
Yeah this is exactly what I was getting at - if memes don't really "exist" then "humans" also don't "exist"
> call things whatever you like. Reality does not care.
This is also true and important to remember, all of this is just different ways of dividing up a continuous reality. But I care! It's just fun to think about for me
Thanks, that's probably a better fit for what I'm trying to say here. It might be a bit too narrow but at the same time the term 'meme' is probably much too broad for what I'm talking about.
I also prefer reading email to waiting for the site to load, but even if the site loaded instantly it'd still be slower and less satisfying. I read posts the same day they come out, so I wouldn't see changes anyway (until you announce your corrections in email later), so I wouldn't benefit from going to the site.
Also note that If for some reason someone can't read a post properly in email, they can always click over to the site, but the reverse isn't true: if the post isn't in email and the site isn't accessible there's no way to work around that. Emails are convenient as a searchable offline cache as well, for the posts I want to be able to find/refer to again.
I much prefer reading in my email rather than on Substack. I also like having my own copy of the posts so that I don't lose access to them if I ever have to unsubscribe.
Agreed. Personally, for time management reasons, I don't have a browser on my phone, only email and other essentials, so having the need to follow back to Substack would be quite cumbersome... and 'time consuming'. Thanks for everything in any case 😊
I like reading in dark mode and clicking through to the website doesn't let me do that, so it would be a (very slight) negative to force me to do so (I can then click through to the Substack app, but haven't had great experiences there yet). To be clear, that's possibly outweighed by the improvements of me reading the edited version; I don't know substantial those changes tend to be.
Yes, and clicking "Read in app" does work for me now, so I withdraw my criticism. (My Substack app had been glitching so that functionality wasn't working but I reinstalled it and now it seems to be working properly.)
I always make it a point to visit the actual blag (gotta pump those click-through numbers!), but do occasionally get really bored and read-from-inbox on my phone. Much preferable to visiting Substack on mobile or using the dreaded Substack app. So my preference would lean towards continuing to do Whole Term Post Insurance. (Also it gives you more opportunities to the the.)
Has anyone read a bunch of loner manifestos (e.g. the Unabomber) and written a book or blog post comparing them? I would be interested to read it. I'd like to know which manifestos are most interesting and if any of them are worth reading sections of.
I dipped into a bunch after reading the Unabomber's. I'll echo what retonlage said about the Unabomber's being the best of the worst (though still mostly dreck).
Generally they're men who believe they're incredibly important, but have done nothing interesting or valuable. This leads to dull reading as they present petty grievances or banal socio-political observations as though they're mind-blowing *dark truths*.
Elliot Rodger's is incredibly long, and laughably pathetic. He details incredibly mundane details like what sort of Gucci outfit he failed to get laid in. If you have the ability to forget the fact that he ended up murdering people and the desire to laugh at spoiled rich kids it's sort of funny to skim through a few sections.
Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto was the one that genuinely unnerved me--he presents a proposed gamified system for recognizing and rewarding white supremacist violence in obsessive detail.
up until a few years ago i used to read at least part of every shooting manifesto i heard of. i also went back and read some of the 80s's and 90's ones. i never wrote anything up about it, but here are a few things i remember.
- "industrial society and it's future" is way better than any of the others. order of magnitude better. there's a reason it's the only one people talk about. it's the only remotely worth reading for it's own sake.
- the variation in length is massive. both two-page pamphlets and 1500-page tomes were common. the longer ones only in internet-ideology associated ones.
- probably goes without saying, but the mental issues of the authors were very apparant. most were disorganized and not really lucid.
- generally two categories: people committing their crimes as marketing for their manifestos, and people excusing their crimes with ideology. the latters manifestos generally just contain talking points
i realize you asked for loner manifestos and not crime manifestos, but i honestly don't think there's anything worth investigating much here. reading them is mostly just looking at mental illness, which i don't believe is good for the soul.
I've only actually read the Unabomber's, "Industrial Society and its Future". I will freely admit to being biased against it, as my basic worldview and mental framework is diametrically opposed to everything Ted K stands for, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I found it confused and profoundly unconvincing. Mostly, it comes across as a bitter and angry man coming up with post-hoc rationalizations for why the world changing in a way he disapproves of is actually a bad thing for "objective" reasons. Also, his proposed plan for stopping the march of progress is one of the least pragmatic plans I've ever read.
I'm not surprised by this. I would think it would be really hard for him to convince me of the arguments he's trying to make, but I'm probably biased against it as well. Thanks for sharing.
I remember seeing, in the 90s/00s, American conservatives sharing quizzes like "Which of the following sentences were written by Al Gore and which by Unabomber?" (ie. from the manifesto), and when one has read the entire "Industrial Society and its Future" this starts coming off as funny as hell, since abou half of that text is basically Unabomber ranting about the goddamn libruls.
There was a web site where you read ten quotes and voted who wrote it. The web site is gone, but a functional copy still exists in the Wayback Machine:
It's true that the Unabomber rants about liberals in his manifesto, but considering how much respect pockets of left-coded people have granted him, I suspect many of them think "Oh, he's talking about *that* kind of liberal." The Sanders fans and such.
I haven't seen resepct for Unabomber in the left-coded circles for a long time. Much more in right-coded (well, right-wing) circles talking about "Uncle Ted". This is probably because people encountering Unabomber nowadays are genuinely doing so because they are reading the Manifesto out of interest, not just media coverage about his exploits like in the 90s, and the manifesto really leaves his opinions on leftists (the word he uses - I probably shouldn't have said "libruls" in the first place, even ironically) rather unambiguous.
>15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
I haven't read the manifestos, but I've read analyses of manifestos that claim most (especially for school shootings) include a desire and expectation for fame/notoriety as a result of their crimes. They see all the press of previous shootings, and view this as a way to create a lasting public impression.
Given this, is it a good idea to popularize the manifestos of mass killers? I'm asking genuinely, not rhetorically. Is there a way to learn something from these manifestos that could help prevent future killings, without unintentionally inventivizing copycats?
My guess is truly popularizing them would be a bad thing. I think the attention the Columbine shooters got likely drove more copycat killers. But I would also distinguish between being popularized in mass media versus being studied by, say, criminologists.
Personally, I think the publicity is a bad idea, given that we know a common motive for terrorism is to gain attention for the terrorists cause/stupid manifesto.
By reading it, you're incentivising the creation of more of it,
"Now THIS manifesto, this one's just trash. Spelling errors, lack of complete thoughts, nonsensical ramblings. THIS manifesto was written by a fucking imbecile."
Substack is a distracting website. Being able to read your posts by email is useful to me, because it means I don't need to pull up Substack and then inevitably get sidetracked onto other pages that use up my time.
I, along with several friends, read your email newsletter. We're in a yeshiva that only allows email access, and switching the format would prevent us from reading ACX during most of the year. I appreciate the web versions, which I often find myself saving as bookmarks, but would be kind of stuck if you stopped emailing full posts.
I had my hopes up for a moment, but my reply to your comment didn't go through. It's just as well -- the horrible UI prevents me from arguing with wrongheads among the commentariat.
I appreciate having a full archive of all your writings in my email, just in case you ever need to delete your blog again. (I genuinely appreciated that time you accidentally mailed the entirety of SSC to all subscribers!)
I am obviously biased, but I think in this story generally doctors are the good guys fighting back against the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats. Here in Australia we have a fun thing where drugs that we know work can go years before they are funded by the government, but we can get funding for trials, so we create a trial with a dubious methodology (everyone gets the active treatment, the trial is to assess which model of educating patients provides the greatest happiness!)
The HIV saga got the FDA a lot of bad publicity. Maybe we can do the same for the modern era of cancer medicine? A Dallas Buyers Club for 2024…
That would be amazing. Sadly, most doctors save Jakes current oncologist which we met because she’s running the trial he’s in, have not been championing the trials and we didn’t leg work to find the trial ourselves. I am a broken record encouraging oncologists to help patients navigate this and am trying to create ways to make it easier for them as my pet project.
I love your use of dubious (or rather ideal) clinical trial setups! You’re pro patient. The drug Jake is currently on has incredibly positive data and yet the company is going for a phase 3 trials. Why? We know how people fare compared to standard of care. They’re still alive. Approve the thing already.
If the pharmaceutical companies weren’t so beholden to the fda they may be more willing to allow off label uses and n of 1 let’s see what happens here and gather data for anyone willing to try it out kind of approaches but alas. I used to do a lot of biochem study design , you make me want to open a research site so I can design pro-patient trials, but here in the US no one would fund me.
Yeah, in an ideal world the instant you had clear positive results the drug would be approved. The workaround is just that, a workaround, where you expand compassionate access programs or trials of the drug to try and meet patient need. The thing is it goes on for years! It’s a profound indictment of the system as it stands that it takes regulators so long to make the decision that saves people’s lives.
Fascinating story and by all appearances he is doing very well trying something completely out of left field - great! But he has access to experimental treatments that most of us don’t. A neuro oncologist told me that he had done what she would’ve done had she ended up with GBM - which begs the question - why not everyone?
Please continue to include the whole text in emails. Its so convenient to be able to read on any email connected device, even low data or async devices. The option to click through to the web version is always there, it would be a significant loss to be forced into less optionality.
Generally use RSS and thus the website to read. Ironically today I clicked the link in the email because it popped up right when I was in Gmail anyhow.
Re 'go to site' links: the site is often very slow to load (with hundreds of comments), so reading in email is nicer. Would it be possible to hide comments by default?
Hiding comments by default is indeed the Substack default; IIRC ACX is like this because Scott explicitly asked the Substack team to make it so. I agree that ACX posts take too long to load, but I also like to have all the comments immediately below the post, as it makes it possible to scroll up and down to compare what is in the post to the comments. Also, having to click an additional button to make the comments load always annoys me in other Substacks.
I read your articles via email and would appreciate if you continued sending the whole article via email. It's much more comfortable for me.
I will say that allready now, anyone for whom it is very important not to miss corrections in the article, can click on the title and go to the online version. So you will not be adding functionality, only reducing it.
To the extent this NBC poll is accurate, it seems like Trump has a very strong advantage in many of the most prescient issues. I can't help but feel Biden will need a dramatic improvement if he wants to win.
I'm not sure if "prescient" is the word you mean. I also think that the questions on this poll are inclined towards the sorts of things that conservatives think are important, so I'm curious who commissioned this poll.
Biden won't win by convincing people that he's better on these issues, he will win by convincing people that these issues don't matter and you are a racist if you think they do and what really matters is [whatever 2024's convenient issue is].
What do you do when there are rational reasons to be depressed - suppose chronic deteriorating or even terminal disease with little if any chance of improving?
Assume the bases are covered (healthy food, exercise as possible, meditation).
If it's literally chronic / terminal, screw SSRI's, start taking ACTUAL drugs. About 1000x more potent, effective, and fun. After all, what are they gonna do? Kill you??
This is literally my "terminal diagnosis" plan. At last freed of the burden of caring and trying to push my goals forward, I just descend into a hedonistic sea of bliss before dying.
There's evidence for the use of psychedelics in depression and anxiety related to terminal illness, IIRC this is the first purpose they were put to in the modern wave of psychedelic psychiatry research.
Radical acceptance is a good good trick for some people? It seems a bit counterintuitive, but giving yourself some intentional space to feel pain, fear, grief, etc. can make it easier to cope + see the good in your situation as well as the bad.
Is it just the bad stuff in life producing sadness, or has the sadness infected other areas? That is, if you look over and see a puppy or kitten being cute, do you smile and feel warm happy feelings? Or do you still feel depressed, and your mind goes to places like "they're just mortal meat" or "is this the last time I'll see that"?
I'm no psychologist, but the latter is what I'd call depression, while the former is what I'd call an appropriate reaction to circumstances.
My dad spent a good bit of time planning out what he wanted his funeral party to be like; song playlists, who to invite, location, that kind of stuff. (Got a little wonky after they fixed the main problem and he got another five years.) And lots of parties and seeing his friends as often as he could.
Basically, concentrate on bucket list stuff. Anything you wanted to do but were too busy for, you're not too busy for anymore.
A shift in mental framework that doesn't cause you to desire something that it outside of your control. Old-fashioned stoicism, in a sense.
Obviously easier said than done, but it's a solid foundation. I don't think it's the cure for all our mental woes, but based my own personal experience and my reading of relevant writings I do believe that a great deal of mental anguish and depression derives from an incongruence between our desires and our belief in whether those desires will be achieved. Reducing or redirecting the degree to which we desire a goal, particularly if the outcome is something we can't affect, can go a long way.
I sure hope you get better. As someone who may or may not be depressed right now, but without any more good reasons to be depressed than a young student in good health can have:
There always are good reasons to be depressed? All the reasons why I’m depressed are bad reasons in the sense that they’re all pretty easily fixable, but I sure as heck think they’re pretty good reasons actually? My point is: ok, let’s assume you do have genuinely good reasons to feel hopeless and depressed and miserable (a terminal disease would certainly fit the bill), then I don’t think your depression is much different from that of someone who hates her job, someone who’s had a bad breakup, whatever, so the same mix of drugs, therapy, and lifestyle improvements should work equally well? And you should seek to feel less miserable just like any other depressed person? The main difference is that a key way to be less depressed is to "get away from the depressing thing" as Scott puts it, and that’s much easier when the depressing thing is a job than an illness. Still, to the extent that it’s possible, I’d advise getting away from the depressing thing by doing stuff to keep your mind busy, by trying to have fun when you can, etc.?
From my experience, SSRIs have no effect on psychological depression, only working to prevent the major physical symptoms (which I assume is just seasonal depression). Though, obviously it will help some people, even if it is just placebo.
Anyways, have you considered just not caring about living? Certainly works well enough for me. Honestly, I don't even understand why everyone is so obsessed with living. Well okay, obviously I know the reason why, but that still doesn't justify it.
SSRIs do affect psychological symptoms of depression. The problem is that, depending on the SSRI, that effect can be a numbing effect or complacency that makes other parts of your life more difficult. That is why I no longer take them anyway. In reality, the difficulty with chemically treating depression is that the right combination of medications takes a lot of trial and error, and a depressed person is unlikely to have the time, mental energy, and money to undertake this for themselves. Wellbutrin (bupropion) is a good alternative or addition to SSRIs that boosts energy and counteracts side effects, for example. Then there are things that other people have mentioned, like psychedelics and ketamine as potential treatments. Again, the real difficulty is that some combination of medication, lifestyle, and situational changes will probably significantly relieve depression for most people. Still, the hassle of dealing with doctors and insurance and spending months acclimating or weaning off meds is a significant burden on anyone.
As an aside, I've always enjoyed the combo of post content, avatar, and username you represent - it reminds me of myself when I was younger, and I enjoy that you're one of the few "nihilistic realist" stances among the ACX commentary who speaks their mind.
I sure hope you get better. And I avoid the joke that being male over 50 equals "chronic deteriorating health" - also, I feel fine - though my eldest son does not. But still, preparing stuff for a trip to Canada/Netherlands to leave in a dignified way seems an appropriate and rational approach, too. When Beethoven no longer reaches me. - It is not wrong to be sad. Ecclesiastes 7:2: It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.
Glad. And I am sorry for being a jerk. When Dad got cancer, the trajectory was a few months, and his life had been long and very good. Kinda easy to only need painkillers then. Son at 25 with MS, no idea how he takes it. His dad is a jerk. That said; in the long run we are all dead. And SSRI seem wrong to treat being a mortal. Strangely, I see Psilocybin as legit.
"Zwischen den Schüben ist das Leben gut" he said. Each MS is different, obviously. Thank you for making me have some talk with my son, finally. - Seems, I was wrong about SSRI and MS-fatigue, too: "Antidepressants, particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, may help with fatigue. This effect could be mainly related to the improvement of depression and associated sleep disturbance. Activating antidepressants, such as fluoxetine, venlafaxine, and bupropion can also be helpful." https://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/neurological/depts/multiple-sclerosis/ms-approaches/ms-and-fatigue
Well seeing that I don't get relapses (which sounds positive initially but really comes with substantially worse treatment options prognosis) I can't really say that either. It's just a slow but steady decline.
Managing fatigue is very much hit and miss. Lately sleep quality took a dive so maybe fluoxetine is worth a shot. I took it over a decade ago with decent enough effects (yet another decade earlier venlafaxine which was effective as AD but had more annoying side effects...)
Bupropion is probably off the table as I am already borderline underweight.
We are all dying slowly... when does an irrational reason to be depressed becomes rational? A coworker's father got a terminal cancer diagnosis and was depressed for a time, but then realized he was still able to indulge in his favorite hobby (fishing) with his family and not focus on anything else. Perked him right up until the very end.
I was talking to a company last week that are do vocational education mostly in South America. Since they end up talking to governments and charities anyway to raise funds for their programs (which are free for the accepted students), they were very interested in the idea of impact certificates.
Who should talk to? Who are the gurus of impact certificate projects? Outside of ACX grants, are there any interesting groups doing impact certificate projects at the moment?
I like reading your posts in email format because it lets me avoid the extremely slow Substack web page. Also I find black text on white background easier to read. (I could use Reader mode, but it deletes section headings.)
Most sources estimated Hamas at a nominal 30,000 fighters before the war, and Israel claims to have killed 9,000 so far. Note that in most wars, 9,000 killed would mean 18-22,000 seriously wounded as well, leaving Hamas with approximately zero effective fighters remaining. But this is not a normal war, so Hamas casualties may be disproportionately fatal (because suicide bombing, or trapped in collapsed/burned-out tunnels, or lack of medical care). And in any event, all of these numbers are highly suspect.
Right now, Hamas rules about one-third of Gaza, and the IDF rules about two-thirds. Before the war, Hamas ruled it all. There was no other authority, and there was no hope for anyone who defied Hamas's authority. You could go to them with a noise complaint, but either they made the noise, or they like the people who made the noise, or they don't like the people who made the annoying noise and probably dealt with them before you called.
After the war, Gaza will be ruled by whoever Israel says will rule it. There will be no other authority; if Israel thinks you need to be in a prison camp, men with guns will come and drag you off to prison and no one will stop them. But they'll probably try to stand up some sort of Palestinian organization to handle noise complaints, and Arab-on-Arab crimes and the like. Maybe Fatah. Maybe something in partnership with Egypt or with the UN, if they're fool enough to get involved.
Hamas, which is the current leadership everyplace that doesn't have Israeli troops all over it, explicitly endorsed the 10/7 attacks, carried out the 10/7 attacks, and promised to keep doing 10/7 attacks until Israel stopped existing.
Probably some of the ~2.1 million Palestinians who aren't Hamas members are kind of pissed off at Hamas for what they've been doing. Hamas did win by a substantial margin in Gaza the last time they ran for election, and subsequent opinion polling suggests that support for Hamas remains strong. But that election was 17 years ago, and the opinion polling since has been perhaps conducted under threat, so who knows.
Doesn't really matter, because lacking either guns or votes, the non-Hamas Gazans can't do anything about it. Well, except for reaching out to the nearest IDF unit and saying "psst, Hamas is hiding in that building over there, and we'd be thrilled if you were to go kill them all". There doesn't seem to have been much of that going on, though it is admittedly a lot to ask.
There is mounting evidence that the IDF deliberately targets and slaughters civilians, plenty of video and image evidence, videos of people seeking aid getting sniped at as they do. In spite of it all, people are insisting that the IDF does not deliberately target civilians.
It is challenging for me to see these advocates as any different than WW2 Germans, in some sense almost *worse* because of how much info is available now and how explicit the evidence is.
They're guilt of targeting civilians from before. It's absolutely policy as evidence by a nearly constant stream of video evidence, eyewitness testimony, public and private admissions from soldiers. In addition, the IDF doesn't really investigate cases except to the extent it needs to for PR.
There is also a large stream of evidence that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, and fights from among civilians while wearing civilian clothing. Between Hamas's inhuman combat doctrine, and the gigantic anti-Israel propaganda machine that wants to portray Israel as targeting civilians, I am not surprised that there is a large stream of "evidence" that Israel does so. I still think most of it should be discounted, at least until further investigation shows which parts are true and which parts are fake. Otherwise, you end up with more cases like the media frenzy from the Gaza hospital explosion in mid-October.
This is not to deny the genuine violations of protocol by soldiers on hair-trigger alert (and a few extremists out for revenge for Oct. 7). To me, the most tragic such case was when IDF soldiers shot three escaped hostages by mistake. I think that the IDF does actually investigate such cases, and not just for PR.
More evidence in general that Israel does not have a policy of targeting civilians: the order to evacuate northern Gaza, the fact that well over 99% of the Gazan population is alive even after months of fighting, and the fact that Israel has the capabilities to kill many more Gazans and it refrained from using them. There is also the fact that Israel opened Gaza's borders for humanitarian aid. Admittedly, this involved international pressure, but consider that similar pressure was exerted on Israel for more militarily important concessions like a ceasefire, and Israel refused to budge. If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in.
"If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in."
Israelis literally are blocking food, water, fuel and medicine as we speak. "Israelis could be shooting more grandmothers with white flags on camera and people trying to eat food" is not the argument you think it is.
It seems like you are in the habit of regurgitating falsehoods so I'm going to drop this mini debate. Continue your silly hasbara and know that pretty much everyone online the IDF's propaganda apparatus is failing. Congrats on keeping boomers though.
I would refute what you just wrote, but, as you so eloquently put it, it seems like you are in the habit of regurgitating falsehoods so I'm going to drop this mini debate.
I will add, never in my entire life have I seen such a sick, continual stream of outright glee expressed over the killing of civilians. Like, literally, not ever. Perhaps I should block reddit for mental health. But the infants getting burnt by white phosphorus aren't getting a break so I can barely turn away.
To add to it, cutting off supplies to an ENTIRE POPULATION? That is explicitly and utterly genocidal. In no way shape or form has it ever been acceptable to cut off water and food to a population because fighters will also share in that. Israel is not being asked to supply that food itself but to stop blocking food and water from reaching 2 million people, women, kids, infants included.
The total blockade of Gaza occurred directly in response to Hamas's genocidal attack. If was lifted several weeks later, and has not been in operation for months.
Mate, in no world is it ever acceptable to fucking cut off water and food to hundreds and thousands of children. Every single aid organization is showing that mass starvation is occurring, and in addition to that Israeli CIVILIANS are at the border blocking off needed aid and there are multiple videos and images of people seeking aid getting shot at by IDF. This is Nazi behavior. 3 kids have reportedly starved to death in northern gaza. Your atrocity apologia is not very compelling.
"no world is it ever acceptable to fucking cut off water and food to hundreds and thousands of children" - considering the sheer shock and brutality of the Oct. 7 attacks, I cannot blame Israel for its total blockade in October. I would blame it if the total blockade was prolonged, but that did not happen.
"Every single aid organization is showing that mass starvation is occurring" - extraordinary claim. I don't believe it. Can you post sources from those aid agencies?
"Israeli CIVILIANS are at the border blocking off needed aid" - I don't approve of that, but given what the Gazans recently did to those Israeli civilians, I cannot blame them.
"there are multiple videos and images of people seeking aid getting shot at by IDF" - I am convinced most of these are faked by the same machine that blamed Israel for bombing a hospital after an Islamic Jihad rocket landed in the hospital's parking lot.
"This is Nazi behavior." - Really? I think actual Nazi behavior would involve death squads roaming the villages and cities shooting anything that moves. Kind of like Hamas on Oct. 7.
"3 kids have reportedly starved to death in northern gaza" - tragic if true. These things happen in war, but I would not be surprised if it turned out they died because Hamas stole the aid (there is extensive documentation that this happens), or that they died for other war-related reasons. I am surprised that you are claiming a death toll of only "3 kids", when earlier you wrote that "mass starvation" is occurring.
"Your atrocity apologia is not very compelling" - I am sickened by how you carry water for Hamas and its ilk, and I am countering the blood libels you are propagating here.
Maybe you haven't seen people act like this, but surely you have read about it before. Humanity itself hasn't changed at all in the last few thousand years. We're ultimately all just animals. It's strange to expect history to not repeat.
It purports that there are a couple systematic biases that overcount the West Bank population, and there are really a million less than official statistics, and that the Jewish population is younger and growing faster than the Arab population.
If true, it seems to have a lot of implications for a future unitary state solution. But from how the author refers to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria", I am curious how much of this article is propaganda and how much is real.
I don't have answers about the actual size of the Arab population in the Judea and Samaria Area (that is the name used by Israelis in general, btw, so the source is definitely pro-Israel).
One thing I can say is that the demographic argument is a giant red herring. Leftists wanted to use a high Arab population and/or its high growth rate to scare Israel into signing a two-state peace deal immediately, before Jews become a minority in the entire territory west of the Jordan River (ie Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, and pre-1967 Israel). The article pushes back against that, by saying that no, Arab demographics are not on pace to outnumber the Jewish population, so there is no need to rush to sign a peace deal.
My view: It does not matter what the Jewish-Arab demographic balance is, nor what are that balance's current trends. Jewish Israel will be alright demographically if Arabs become a majority in the entire land, and Jewish Israel will be alright demographically if the Arab population remains smaller than the Jewish population. Why? Because there is a de facto border, with Israel and the large settlement blocs on one side, and the bulk of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria on the other side. That de facto border isn't going away. As long as Jews remain a supermajority in the lands Israel formally claims within its borders (pre-1967 Israel plus Jerusalem and the Golan Heights), Israel will remain the Jewish state, and the Arab population outside its borders will not affect that.
A unitary state solution will never happen. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians want to live with the other in a unitary state: both populations kind of hate each other.
A two-state solution is also not going to happen, at least not in the next few decades. The reason why it ever seemed possible was that the once-powerful Israeli left wanted (and still wants) a two-state solution, and for a while the secular PLO/Fatah was willing to pretend to want two states for its own strategic reasons. The problem is that across Palestinian society, a very large majority of the population, plus all of the powerful armed groups, want to destroy Israel and refuse any peace or compromise that does not ensure Israel's destruction. This was the case long before Israel was founded, and it remains the case to this day.
Hamas is using a shapeshifter tactics against IDF (any person, of any age or gender can potentially be a deadly threat, and there is no way to tell until it's too late). Currently the IDF is erring on the side of "overkill", literally. While this is somewhat understandable, the resulting casualties are already above 1% of the total population of Gaza, with the civilian : fighter deaths ratio being 2:1 or worse. What might be some less deadly alternatives there, provided one still has to fight the war? (Yes, disengaging and going "home" would help to avoid casualties, for a time, but that is a political not a military decision.)
I suppose the IDF probably hasn't tried politely asking Hamas to wear uniforms and only engage in combat in areas where there are no civilians. Maybe they could write a sternly-worded letter and post it through Qatar.
How much of the idea of "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas is doing all these things to increase them" is independently verifiable? I'm not saying it's totally untrue, but it seems like a lot of the stronger statements along those lines ultimately just take the IDF's word for it.
Recently the IDF shot some of the Israeli hostages, and in the aftermath it turned out the hostages were acting the way that the IDF said civilians should act to show they aren't a threat (no shirt, waving a white flag). The IDF said that the soldiers in that case didn't follow protocol. What's more likely, that the one time the soldiers didn't follow protocol and killed civilians, the civilians just so happened to be the hostages? Or that it happens routinely, and is reported as "IDF takes down Hamas guys", and this is the only time we hear about it because there's only an in-depth investigation when the civilians turn out to be hostages?
I'm fairly certain that mistakes, lapses in protocol, etc happen often. I don't think that actually contradicts the "moving mountains" idea, necessarily.
What most people are saying is that the IDF is doing more than most other militaries do in order to avoid civilian casualties. Including things like dropping leaflets in Arabic with evacuation orders, etc. This is entirely consistent with there also being many cases of mistakes.
I think there is little that can be independently verified right now given that it's an active warzone, and that access to most things is only through the IDF.
"I think there is little that can be independently verified right now given that it's an active warzone, and that access to most things is only through the IDF."
a major reason for which is the IDF policy of assassinating journalists
> a major reason for which is the IDF policy of assassinating journalists
Do you have any proof that that's IDF policy? Because I don't believe that's true. There are certainly claims against the IDF on this score, but a lot of those claims are not very reliable (they conflate "targeting of journalists" with "journalists got killed", which is a completely different thing).
I do not think anyone is claiming that "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties", and the situation with the hostages definitely reflects that they are not. When you are in the urban warfare and any human is potentially a lethal threat, people get understandably trigger-happy. My question is whether it is possible and if so how to reduce this unfortunate situation. The part about Hamas using civilians of all genders and ages to inflict casualties on Israeli soldiers is not really disputed.
"I do not think anyone is claiming that "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties", and the situation with the hostages definitely reflects that they are not. When you are in the urban warfare and any human is potentially a lethal threat, people get understandably trigger-happy."
Maybe not the exact phrase "moving mountains" but people certainly do claim that the IDF is extensively working to avoid civilian casualties.
Anyway, I think this position would be stronger if the Israeli hostages episode reflected Israel's claimed approach, but what they said was that they don't normally do that, and what those troops did was a departure from the norm.
I'll also add that, it's true that troops on the ground will err on the side of thinking people are a threat, but it's also the case that people on a screen ordering airstrikes will likely not give due regard to the people they are killing and destruction they are causing, because it's not as 'real' as when you are on the ground. You don't actually see anyone die, it's all just pixels on a screen ... and you are probably judged on how many enemy targets you eliminate, and not really chewed out or anything if you are too trigger-happy.
If they aren't following their claimed protocol with troops on the ground, how confident should I really be that they are following their claimed protocol with airstrikes?
A 2:1 ratio of civilian:fighter deaths seems very good for modern urban combat IMO. It's definitely not what you would get if the IDF didn't care about civilian casualties. Do you have examples were better ratios were achieved?
That's a war in a whole country, not a single city. If we find comparable instances from the Syrian civil war, we get more similar numbers: During the siege of Aleppo, civilian casualties are estimated to be 76% of all casualties (i.e. 3:1 ratio). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%932016)#Casualties
> We are all in agreement that that is a bad thing, correct? No?
That's a bad thing, agreed. And Hamas is to blame, because they hide among civilians, disguised as civilians, in the most densely populated areas of the Gaza strip, instead of the more rural regions, of which there are plenty. We are all in agreement, correct?
Does there have to be a less deadly alternative? Surely you understand that there is only one way to end this conflict permanently. It's only 2 million people.
I strongly condemn any suggestion of outright genocide (and also feel compelled to note that such a strategy would in no way "end this conflict permanently")
How so? There can't continue to be a conflict if the opposition ceases to exist. Of course, the Palestinians and other Islamic countries will continue to exist, but hopefully they'll wisen up once they understand what they're dealing with. And if they don't, well... that will be quite unfortunate.
Apart from the severe immorality of what you are proposing, there is also the fact that it will not scare Israel's 2 billion or so enemies, but rather galvanize them and strengthen their belief in their anti-Israel cause. They would certainly not "wisen up". Plus, neutral countries and Israel's allies would be outraged by the atrocity and switch sides. Remember that Israel is a tiny country that has been on the wrong end of an extreme power imbalance since its founding. It has no way of credibly threatening its enemies like Genghis Khan and Timur did. That is why, even if Israel decided to abandon morality, your suggestion would still be out of the question.
Not sure what you are saying here. Unless you are implying genocide or ethnic cleansing are the only two possible "final solutions" (!!!) to the conflict.
And what are the alternatives? Nobody wants to take in the Gazans as refugees; even the other Islamic countries don't want them. It would help if the people of Gaza started valuing their lives and stopped Hamas themselves by force, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. And considering over 70% of them are still supporting the whole "from the river to the sea" rhetoric, it would only be a temporary end to the conflict.
The only way I see this ending without everyone dying is if the situation in Gaza becomes so utterly bleak and helpless that the entire populace loses any and all hope for a better future. Learned helplessness, in other words.
And yes, I'm sure the Israeli government sees the obvious irony in this whole situation. At the same time, they should know better than anyone else that they can absolutely get away with it, as long as they don't start another World War.
There is an alternative that does not involve genocide:
Israel simply reoccupies Gaza and rules it, much like it did before the 2005 withdrawal. Remember that Palestinians in Judea and Samaria hate Israel no less than Gazans do, and Hamas operates there. Despite that, there were no rockets from Judea and Samaria, and the terror attacks originating from there after Operation Defensive Shield (when Israel reoccupied these territories) were never as severe as before that operation, let alone as severe as Oct. 7.
The difference is that in Judea and Samaria, Israel has soldiers on the ground and can suppress Hamas (and the other terror groups), while in Gaza, Hamas was the ruling government. The important thing is not the attitude of the civilians, but the capabilities of the terror groups.
The key is not to solve the conflict (since it is unsolvable), but rather to manage it. The problem was that Israel did an extremely poor job of conflict management by withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, under the delusion that this would somehow lead to peace. Operation Swords of Iron is about (or at least should be about) correcting that particular mistake.
Even if Gazans could somehow control Hamas (the only people who have weapons and funding, thanks to Bibi Netanyahu for that one) I can't possibly conceive of why you think killing or cowing all of the Gazans would end this conflict permanently. That's the IDF's goal after all... I don't think any of them are naive enough to think that'll be the end of it.
> Hamas (the only people who have weapons and funding, thanks to Bibi Netanyahu for that one)
It's my understanding that Hamas' main source of weapons and funding is Iran, not the Israeli government (although the latter has contributed some, which is reprehensible enough). Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Ordinarily it's very tricky because the government has guns and the civilians don't.
But right now it's very easy because the IDF have guns and are just lacking good intel. Regular Palestinians can help get rid of Hamas by pointing out the Hamas operatives in their midst to the IDF, who will then kill them. No need to point a gun when you can just point a finger.
I don't think people are all that bad at it. Russia managed to get rid of its government and out of WW1. The Italians managed to get rid of Mussolini when he was failing at WW2. Lots of Arab countries participated in the Arab Spring. The Gazans themselves managed to get rid of the PLO not too long ago.
It's really weird to see how otherwise reasonable people first think about genociding two millions instead of doing the basic niceness and civilizational thingy:
Deescalation, reducing tensions, abolishment of ethnostate, trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you, instead of locking them in a ghetto to breed even more right wing radicalism on both sides and doing a new loop of toxoplazma of rage dynamics.
"genociding two millions" - this is BS. You can tell because over 99% of those 2 million are alive after months of brutal fighting.
"Deescalation, reducing tensions, ..., trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you" - not only does it not work against a genocidal terrorist organization like Hamas, but Israel was stupid enough to try it and get direct empirical evidence of it not working. Exhibit A: Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, pulling out both the military and its own settlers. Exhibit B: the calm before Oct 7, including tens of thousands of Gazans working jobs in Israel. Turns out many of these workers were Hamas spies, and Hamas violated the truce with its genocidal attack on Israel on Oct 7.
"abolishment of ethnostate" - I don't know what you mean by "ethnostate", but if it is Israel being the Jewish state, then absolutely not. Israel has every right to be the Jewish state for the exact same reasons why France is a French state and Japan is a Japanese state. Also, of all the times to make such a concession, one of the worst is right after an enemy's genocidal massacre of Jews on Israeli soil.
"locking them in a ghetto" - Gazans were not locked in. Many managed to escape Hamas to places like Europe, and many more would have been able to go if their brothers in the Arab states opened the doors to them.
"breed even more right wing radicalism on both sides" - the last 30 years of terror waves certainly moved Israel's population to the right, but the Arab population was already fully right wing extremist in the days when their leader was the Nazi collaborator Mufti.
"doing a new loop of toxoplazma of rage dynamics" - what does this even mean?
They apparently can't get that the Nakba was NOT arabs trying to commit genocide against jews, but the culmination of the zionist dream from well before it to ethnically cleanse the land of arabs and settle jews in it.
To portray ethnically cleansed arabs from their land as equivalent to germans is insane. Even the partition deal, which was a recommendation not a decision, one that unfairly apportioned jews more land than they either owned or would be equally represented in by population, and that was more arable, it was not even the end goal of zionist leaders! Israelis are simply murdering civilians to ethnically cleanse the land. We are living in a dark era, one that I think involves more deliberation and intentionality for murder on a mass scale than that which existed during world war 2.
David McDowall (1990). Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. I.B. Tauris. p. 193. ISBN 9780755612581. "Although the Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan, it did not accept the proposed borders as final and Israel's declaration of independence avoided the mention of any boundaries. A state in part of Palestine was seen as a stage towards a larger state when opportunity allowed. Although the borders were 'bad from a military and political point of view,' Ben Gurion urged fellow Jews to accept the UN Partition Plan, pointing out that arrangements are never final, 'not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements'. The idea of partition being a temporary expedient dated back to the Peel Partition proposal of 1937. When the Zionist Congress had rejected partition on the grounds that the Jews had an inalienable right to settle anywhere in Palestine, Ben Gurion had argued in favour of acceptance, 'I see in the realisation of this plan practically the decisive stage in the beginning of full redemption and the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine."
>"Deescalation, reducing tensions, abolishment of ethnostate, trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you..."
And when that still hasn't worked, what? Because Israel has tried that and gotten terrorism in return.
- Deescalation/reducing tensions: Israel left Gaza in 2005 and forcibly pulled its own settlers out.
- abolishment of ethnostate: Gaza is an ethnostate, Israel is not.
- cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you: those are the Arab Israeli citizens; the "Palestinian" identity is an irredentist rejection of Israel's existence.
"the only way I see this getting better is if everyone in Gaza loses all hope in a better future" - I'd say the opposite. If Gazans actually started hoping to build a better future instead of just being determined to die in the cause of killing the Jews, they could actually build themselves quite a nice country (Gaza isn't all that bad; prewar it's middle income, not third world, and it would get much better if they got their terrorism under control enough to open trade). They just need to put their hopes in building themselves up instead of in war.
They cannot get away with it (Israel is a small country relying on food imports and trading for economy), and would get universal trade sanctions if they did anything remotely like that (heck they're on borderline sanctions even with trying to be maximally ethical under the circumstances).
Even if they did decide to go maximally unethical and to hell with morality and PR, it'd be much easier to push Gazans to Egypt (or Sudan, which iirc did agree to take people who want to go there), so even in a maximally unethical world there's no need for actual mass murder.
Is Hamas using "shapeshifter tactics" or is Israel's barely-discriminate war on Gaza turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?
To answer your question I think if the IDF was willing to spend way more money on surveillance and hardware they could do stuff like distribute drones/cameras over every acre of Gaza. This would, in principle, be capable of very fast targeting and elimination of genuine hostiles.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. Israel almost certainly is doing persistent overhead surveillance of the areas they're operating in. But you can't put drones or cameras inside someone's home, or any other occupied building. They'll notice, and destroy them. Yes, even if you tell them that the cameras are for their protection.
-
So, you've got a building. Maybe there are people in it, and maybe some of those people are terrorists, but you've got no way of knowing because you can't see them. You can't even infer it from who you saw go into the building, because they could have gone in or out via tunnel.
-
Now you've got a person walking out of a building carrying a package. You can't see their face, and you can't see what's in the package. Are they a "genuine hostile"?
-
Now a bunch of people just congregated, opened their packages, and promptly took out AKs and RPGs to shoot up an IDF patrol. What good did the drones and cameras do again?
>turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?
The common notion that "repressive" stratagems against X create more X (enemy combatants, criminals, etc) is more wishful thinking from lefties than fact. The Brits didn't defeat the Boers because the Brits played nice with them to starve Boer combatants of internal support; the Brits won because they put every Boer, combatant or not, in concentration camps.
Not really, because of all the indoor tunnels and spaces, and because people of every age and gender are in fact used as (nonuniformed) soldiers. Gaza is big and has a million holes and tunnels, a lot of which have weapons hidden in them. This sort of armchair generaling doesn't actually work.
Also, re "Is Hamas using "shapeshifter tactics" or is Israel's barely-discriminate war on Gaza turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?"
Probably a vicious cycle. Starts with Hamas shapeshifting tactics, results in less discriminate targeting, creating more people willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the occupation, and so on.
This isn't a cycle, it's a one way street - use of child soldiers and the like is encouraged by more discriminate targeting (since Hamas and similar orgs love having soldiers the IDF doesn't want to shoot).
Unfortunately even if the IDF actually didn't discriminate, Hamas and pals would still use child soldiers for the PR value.
I think the real problem with "small and cheap" surveillance is that it actually in practice requires a lot of expensive manpower to actually do anything with the information.
There are tons of videos (uploaded by members of Hamas themselves!) of men in civilian clothing firing RPGs at IDF troops. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that Hamas hide among civilians, disguised as civilians.
> Hamas is using a shapeshifter tactics against IDF (any person, of any age or gender can potentially be a deadly threat, and there is no way to tell until it's too late) [...]
In that context, combatants dressing as civilians and hiding among civilians seem very much on topic. If you disagree, then I'm confused about the point you're trying to make; if so, please clarify.
I don't have an opinion on this, but i notice some unstated priors. How can you tell it's overkill? How many casualties are the IDF taking? How many should they take in order to avoid civilian deaths? What ratios do we regard as acceptable in other conflicts as a total ratio, not just enemy civilians to enemy combatants?
I am mostly going by what is public, including the three hostages killed when they were clearly trying to get help and still being shot. I assume this is not how the IDF normally operates.
I get what your sources are, but I'm asking you how we can tell the reported deaths are overkill. It is possible to construct a coherent argument that giving everyone in Gaza a week in the middle of October to permanently move somewhere else before flattening the entire strip and killing anyone who stayed would have been the ne plus ultra of acceptable action, and only something more drastic would have been overkill. Note that this isn't my position -- I'm just advocating for a clear discussion about the terms we're using.
Yeah, it is hard to say what is or is not too harsh without being there and fighting the war. I do get a general vibe though that trying to avoid civilian casualties is not high on the agenda.
These are too harsh. No, avoiding civilian casualties is clearly not high on the agenda. That first article in particular shows a level of cruelty I would not have imagined outside of Auschwitz. And I'm Jewish.
By 1936, Arabs opposed a Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine, before partition and displacement. If so, is the Nakba irrelevant to the case against Israel?
Based on your link, it seems like "opposed a Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine" is hyperbole. There were Jews around for a long time, by 1936 it wasn't just a question of "there is a Jewish presence in Palestine" but the British had committed themselves publicly to making Palestine into a Jewish state - something that sounds like it can only happen with the displacement or subordination of the Arabs there - and a bunch of stuff in that general direction had happened already, and the specific spark of the revolt was discovering a cache of guns and ammunition.
As for your question - I guess it's a question of what "the case against Israel" means exactly - is it "Nakba therefore Israel bad/Arabs good?" Or "your view of Israel should more negative at the margin because the Nakba happened"? Or some specific modern-day policy issue? But in any case I don't see why it would make the Nakba irrelevant.
General point that the nakba should be thought about the same way as Germans being expelled from western Poland after ww2 - (some of the) people who started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals had to leave the area they tried to conquer when they lost it. People who mourn the nakba should be seen the same as people who mourn the fall of the third Reich.
I've not seen this argument made before, and it's instructive to encounter it. Saying that non-jewish Palestinians as an entire group were morally equivalent to Nazi Germany and therefore fair game for ethnic cleansing is something I find abhorrent in and of itself. I can only thank you for making it easy to take a firm position when everything related to this usually has an infinite regress of arguments and counterarguments.
Contra Shaked: as someone who's drawn the comparison between the post-WW2 compelled movement of peoples in the Mid East and the compelled movement of peoples in east Europe on ACX in past threads, normative judgment for or against any of the parties is besides the point. In sum, groups of people fought over the land, members of the losing groups were forced to move at gunpoint, they acquiesced, and everyone moved on with their lives to the benefit of all. Even absent the German genocides, deathcamps etc, I wouldn't have been supportive of Germans starting more conflicts over the latter half of the 20th century to get back Posen, Konigsberg, et al. This is even more the case with Palestine/Israel, where the land in question was not under any central authority after the Brits, who had taken it from the Ottomans after defeating them in WW1, threw up their hands and left.
This is not what I said. I said specifically the ones who had just*actively tried to drive the Jews into the sea* (by virtue of the attempted genocide, not based on their ethnicity) were morally equivalent and it was thus a reasonable requirement for safety to deport them from the country. Other Arabs were allowed to stay just fine (About 20% of israeli citizens are Arabs).
This is not what I said. I said specifically the ones who had just*actively tried to drive the Jews into the sea* (by virtue of the attempted genocide, not based on their ethnicity) were morally equivalent and it was thus a reasonable requirement for safety to deport them from the country. Other Arabs were allowed to stay just fine (About 20% of israeli citizens are Arabs).
The second important part of the analogy here is that *even if* you buy their moral claim, if you meet someone who's still upset over the fall of the third Reich (or the British losing India, or whatever), you can tell their takes on geopolitics are hopelessly stuck in 80-year old grudges and aren't going to be reasonable and productive.
The Germans who settled in Poland (and Hungary and Czechoslovakia) after WW2 had originally settled there as part of the Nazi lebensraum policies. They were probably not running the policy themselves, but undoing that policy under the circumstances was a reasonable decision.
Yeah this is not analogous to the Nakba this would instead be analogous to Palestinians (theoretically) kicking out Israeli settlers after winning this unwinnable "war" that's happening right now.
No, because most Israeli settlers aren't actively trying to kill Arabs (of course Palestinians are fighting to kick out all Israelis, not just settlers).
That said, I'd actually be pretty supportive of a functional peaceful Palestinian state kicking out the settlers. Opposing settlements and wanting the people there to leave and move back over the green line is actually a pretty mainstream opinions.
"General point that the nakba should be thought about the same way as Germans being expelled from western Poland after ww2"
For the most part I don't think the expulsion of Germans from Poland, or the other instances of ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of World War 2 in various directions, is thought about at all. And it isn't thought about because it was clearly immoral and wrong, and complicates the narrative of the Allies as being unvarnished good guys in World War 2.
"people who started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals had to leave the area they tried to conquer"
Is there anything showing that the Palestinians, as a group, started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals?
Here is AFAICT the declaration of war from the Arab League, from a generally pro-Israel website. No mention of genocide, nor driving the Jews into the sea:
Perhaps there is some other document where, say, the leader of Egypt says they're explicitly going to war in 1948 for genocidal purposes. But even then the Nakba went against Palestinians, not Egyptians.
>And it isn't thought about because it was clearly immoral and wrong, and complicates the narrative of the Allies as being unvarnished good guys in World War 2.
It's not clearly immoral to me. Wars have consequences: when your country invades another country, then loses the war, having to leave the country you invaded is so minor a moral problem as to be unnoticeable, in comparison to the deaths of millions that had just occurred prosecuting the war.
My understanding is that lot of the Germans who were ethnically cleansed, were ethnically German but weren't German citizens, had never lived in Germany, and in many cases their ancestors had moved from Germany centuries before.
The process of ethnic cleansing also led to hundreds of thousands of deaths - apparently the German government to this day estimates 2 million.
That doesn't make it the dominant narrative of WW2, but I don't actually believe anyone would support this, in isolation, if it wasn't a concession towards the end of supporting the Nakba (or whatever other favored instance of ethnic cleansing).
The 2 million number comes from a 1954 west German report, in 1974 the death toll estimate was lowered to 400,000.
Meanwhile 6 million Polish civilians died during the war, both in the fighting and during years of brutal German occupation. And the Allied bombing campaign of Germany killed 500,000, and destroyed the homes of over 7 million Germans.
All that to say that WWII was the worst war the world has ever seen, and the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland hardly stands out. And I think it's arguable that the Allied bombing campaign was justified! So how can I say with confidence that the ethnic cleansing was not justified? Wars are terrible, and have terrible consequences, and the consequences mostly fall on the innocent.
I'm not even sure what I'm arguing anymore. War is hell, WWII was the most hellish, and Germany started it. I can't have much sympathy.
"Is there anything showing that the Palestinians, as a group, started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals?"
Probably the single biggest reason is that the Palestinian leader was Mufti al-Husseini, a jihadist, antisemite, and Nazi collaborator.
Additional evidence: Palestinian Arab attacks against Jews prior to 1948, such as the Nabi Musa riots, the Hebron massacre, and the 1936 Arab revolt. The war started in November 1947 with Arab attacks on Jewish civilians immediately after the UN resolution for partitioning Eretz Israel into Jewish and Arab states.
TBH the evidence at your link is pretty weak, given the amount of weight the claim is supposed to carry. It's used by people as the sort of catch-all excuse for anything Israel does - well, sure, the Nakba happened but the Arabs wanted to do genocide. How do you know? Well, sweep into the sea! Sure, Israel started the 1967 war, but it was really the Arabs, how do you know? Sweep into the sea! The Arabs will never accept peace even though they already have, how do you know? Sweep into the sea! Irgun couldn't have been a gang of terrorists, they were heroes, sweep into the sea!
As for other violence, clearly there was violence by both sides, including against civilians. I don't know how you're supposed to disentangle who started it or who was worse or anything, but everyone always selectively cites history.
Overall, I still don't think the evidence supports the claim, and certainly doesn't justify the Nakba.
I admit I only spent a short amount of time searching. You could find more if you wanted to, for example by reading more about the Palestinian leader al Husseini, or his comrades like al Banna and al Qassam. I don't think that the evidence from the Palestinians' past behavior is weak: the riots and pogroms throughout the British Mandate period are well documented, and Jews had every reason to believe that these mass murders are Arab policy. Consider that the Holocaust had just happened. Many recruits into the new IDF were Holocaust survivors straight from the DP camps, and the Palestinians' leader was well known as a Nazi collaborator who wrote frequently about the need to kill Jews wherever they live. The Jews of the Yishuv had every right to be fearful of Arab intentions and to expect the worst from them.
"The Arabs will never accept peace even though they already have" - if by Arabs you mean Palestinians, then no, they never did (at least not any peace agreement where Israel gets to continue existing). If you think they did, can you provide a source?
I am not going to defend the Irgun. I think their most heroic act was not shooting back during the Altalena affair, and peacefully breaking up and integrating with the IDF afterwards.
"certainly doesn't justify the Nakba" - it does justify the seeming paranoia that drove the decision making of Jewish commanders on the ground, some (not all) of whom did engage in expulsions. Of course, this is separate from the discussion of how much of the Arab displacement was Israel's responsibility (vs how much was that of the local Arab militias and invading Arab armies), for which a specific viewpoint is implied in the word "justify".
On your last point, there was no formal Palestinian government so it's hard to say what Palestinian policy was as a group. The closest there was to something like that was this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Palestine_Government?wprov=sfla1, which explicitly claimed the entire region as Palestinian (there's nothing there about what they would have done to the Jews, but given the regular massacres of Jews by Palestinians at the time and what happened to the Jews in every other middle eastern country I think we can reasonably guess their intentions).
Re your point about post-ww2 population transfers being wrong, I disagree - leaving large German populations in Poland would have been dangerous for everyone involved and moving them was the least bad solution at the time. I also disagree that this was done to make the allies look good (this was in the Soviet part anyway, and no one minds making the soviets look bad).
I'm not sure how worked up I'm supposed to be about the idea that the Palestinians claimed all the land for themselves, given that that's exactly what the Jewish side claimed. And of course the Palestinian claim is more compatible with equal rights for the Jews than the Jewish claim is for the Palestinians, given Palestinians were the majority.
And there was ongoing violence by the Jewish side against the Palestinian side, including by groups that were condemned by American Jews, at the time, as being a bunch of fascist thugs (and who would later run Israel's government).
Finally, I'll let our POVs stand on the question of whether ethnic cleansing is OK or not, but I don't think for a second that anyone did it then (or does it in almost any other case) as some sort of sober "least bad solution", as opposed to being motivated by desires like revenge, greed, or even bloodlust.
The Jews specifically didn't claim all the land for themselves and accepted the compromise solution though. I agree that if you make up whatever facts you want you can convince yourself that the Jews were just as bad as the Arabs, but that doesn't seem very interesting. And it doesn't get around the fact that *even if you believe it*, you should still be pretty put off by people whose current day political goals are driven by an obsession with perceived wrongs from the 1940s.
When did the Jewish side claim "all the land for themselves" again?
-
The original claim was that all the land inside the UN's 1947 demarcation line would be part of the State of Israel, administered by the Israeli government, but that any such land which was presently owned by a Palestinian individual would continue to be that person's private property which they and their family could live on in perpetuity (or sell for a profit).
-
In 1948, that got revised to "OK, the 1947 line is history, so now it's the de facto ceasfire line that defines the State of Israel". Still with the bit where any Palestinian actually living on their private land in that state got to keep the land, keep living there, and eventually become Israeli citizens. That didn't always work out in practice, but it was the theory and the claim and it did usually work in practice.
-
In 1967, after another stupid Arab attempt to reduce Israel by force of arms, the newly-expanded Israel said "OK, now it looks like we're responsible for the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and some other bits. But this time we're explicitly *not* claiming those as part of Israel, we're just administering them until we can find someone willing to take them off our hands". Again, with the Palestinians keeping their private lands (but this time not getting Israeli citizenship).
-
About a decade later, Jewish families started noticing vacant land in Gaza and the West Bank, settling on it, and claiming it as theirs by squatters rights or homesteading or some such. Much of this land was privately owned by Palestinians, but seized by the IDF for "security zones" or the like, which meant Israeli settlement was legally and morally problematic and led to perverse results when iteratively repeated. So at this point, you do have Jews claming land that belongs to someone else.
-
But not *all* of the land. At this point, that's 0% of Gaza, 0% of Israel proper, about 40% of the West Bank (which, to be clear, is 40% too much), and in total about 8% of the Land Between the River and the Sea. The other 92%, is either land "the Jews" claim because they bought it or because their ancestors always lived on it or something like that, and land that the Jews *don't* claim because they acknowledge it properly belongs to the Palestinians even if it's presently being administered by Israel.
-
And yes, there are individual Jewish people who claim more than that, who claim that all of some vaguely-defined Greater Israel ought to belong to them. These individuals are not "the Jews", and I can't see where anyone who plausibly claims to represent even most of "the Jews" ever claimed *all* of the land.
As I understand it, from the Palestinian point of view, the Balfour Declaration is the original colonial injustice, if Palestine had been free and sovereign it certainly would have allowed no such thing. Everything else is consequences of that.
Palestine has never been free. Palestine has never been sovereign. The British offered Palestinians freedom and sovereignty, but they just couldn't stand that they offered Israel the same thing.
And Palestine was the name of a province of the Ottoman Empire, and before that it was the name of a province of the Roman Empire. It has never been free or sovereign, unless you go all the way back to the Philistine city states from which Palestine eventually derived it's name.
Twice the Arabs of Palestine were offered a sovereign state: once by the Peel Commision, then again by the UN. Both times they rejected it because Israel was offered a sovereign state as well.
That's much later and not really the point. From the Palestinian point of view, the Balfour Declaration was unjust and therefore the presence of Zionists was illegitimate.
Ironically, that's the point of all the obsessive historical argument on both sides; they're talking points for foreigners (realistically Americans, Europeans to a much lesser extent). In a proper war, no-one would be remotely this fussed about why their side is right, beyond propaganda and to a much lesser extent swaying neutral countries. The bizarre thing about Israel/Palestine is that even the war itself is largely dictated by both sides' desire to appeal to US public opinion, to shape US policy in turn.
I disagree. I think both sides really are obsessed with the past. People on both sides repeat their narratives to each other and teach it to their children. They are very much not just talking points for Western consumption.
I also disagree that people are not fussed about why their side is right in a "proper" war. Look for example at WWII, where every Nazi speech invoked the Aryan race, while the Allies kept talking about freedom and fighting for liberty.
>"The Arabs throughout their history have not only been free from anti-Jewish sentiment but have also shown that the spirit of compromise is deeply rooted in their life."
Thank you for this; the subthread needed some comic relief.
> If Americans oppose open-ended immigration from Mexico, does this mean Mexicans have the right to take over America and expel 80% of Americans from our homes and into small enclaves?
Ignore the part where most pro-palestinian activists in the US *literally* support unlimited immigration from countries like Mexico, and in Europe from anywhere outside of Europe, and consider it "bigoted" "racist" "white supremacy" "nazism" to impose limitations on immigration, ESPECIALLY against particular ethnic/religious groups.
I mean, over a long enough time period, the current "not unlimited" immigration rate will be enough to make Europeans a minority in many European countries, so it's absolutely ABSURD for you to say that arabs had a "right" to oppose jewish immigration. Nope, they're xenophobic bigots and they're being punished for it, that's the left-wing logic for Europe so there.
Oh, and the knee jerk response to this is that Europeans don't get to oppose immigration because of their history of colonialism. Of course, arabs have a long and bloody history of conquest, and unlike the europeans, they don't even make a token effort to appear sorry for it - quite the opposite. So again, arabs have no right to oppose immigration and are being punished for their bigotry accordingly.
"Ignore the part where most pro-palestinian activists in the US *literally* support unlimited immigration"
So even ignoring the differences between mass immigration to the US today and the stated goals of early Zionists ...
the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is OK because Palestinians' views on mass immigration in 1936 were different from other people in the US's views in 2024?
Like, if you went back in time to 1948 and could talk to some Palestinian, you'd lecture him about how he's wrong because of what some Harvard students will end up saying 76 years in the future?
He was talking about Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel, not the flight of the Palestinian Arabs from Israel in 1948.
As for why they fled and why Israel expelled some of them: those same Palestinians launched a genocidal war against the Jews in November 1947, and lost. This makes it rather similar to the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of World War II.
Conversely, do those with ancestry more native to this continent have the right to launch terrorist attacks on civilians in protest for the displacement of their ancestors? If not, why not? Too few of them? Too long ago?
All of these discussions are fundamentally on the wrong topic, and are word-thinking. It's a verb that conjugates -- I'm a hero, you're a resistance fighter, he's a bloodthirsty terrorist.
RE #4: I strongly prefer reading via email because Substack is slow and unresponsive (scrolling down has a lag of 1-3 seconds, and as I'm writing this comment, the letters don't appear until 3 seconds after I've typed them).
Hi Scott,
I was feeling about my thinkings today, and I felt of you. I hope you're good.
If you need to reach me, just say the word ;)
See you then!
How do you stop being bad?
Simple!
You stop being BOTH kinds of bad ;)
The trick is to keep it simple!
You can only be two things;
(Too bad), and (not bad enough).
Hahahahaha!
I guess the question is, do we win when we sin as little as possible? Or do we win when we sin EXACTLY the right amount ;)
I just talked to someone I know who's a long time employee of the CDC (nothing COVID related). He said that the leadership was clearly clueless and that morale was low and that everyone he knew who was old enough to retire was planning to retire soon. I'd heard him gripe about work before, but never anything like this, and it was pretty depressing to hear.
Most of it sounded like regular office politics and bureaucratic nonsense, but at one point he also said "It's clearly coming from the White House". And he's a Democrat, so this isn't just Gray Man Bad either.
I work for a different part of the federal government.
Before COVID we were working from home two or three days a week. Then they switched us to full-time working from home. Last month we switched back. No one's happy about it. Rumor has it that big-city majors pressured Biden into doing it so they'd have people downtown again.
Apart from that I haven't seen any major changes since I started work about ten years ago.
One story he mentioned was that they had a great candidate who's in Brussels, but HR is insisting that there can't be any remote hires and they'd have to go into the office 4 days a week, which is especially stupid because the people they'd work with are never in the office anyway.
Apparently, everyone is nominally supposed to be going into the office three days a week right now, but a lot of high level employees live in different states and only visit the office once every other week (and so lower level employees obviously feel no need to go to the office either), and RTO is not enforced at all.
He's also skeptical that RTO is even a good idea in the first place, complaining about HR just doing what they feel like with no good justification, but that's a separate discussion.
I'm an Israeli, and there's a prevalent belief here that's encoded in our country's narrative - There's no other place for Jews to live since the world is rife with antisemites who hate us. Granted, this was an understandable attitude in the 40s when the country was born.
This is obviously an oversimplification that has varied over time and between different groups within the country, but you'll find it all over the place. Since the start of the war, given the massive criticism against Israel, this idea has become stronger even among the more leftist/liberal Israelis I know. In my own social circle nowadays, I barely know anyone other than myself who doesn't think that moving abroad would be problematic/dangerous due to rampant antisemitism everywhere. The claim is that the anti-Israel sentiment is just a thin facade covering a deep-seated hatred of Jews.
This view doesn't fit my model of the world at all. It seems that all minorities in all countries deal with at least some form of prejudice, and being Jewish abroad is probably no different. If I look at the USA, it's probably one of the easier minority experiences, all things considered. Moreover, in most cases where I see Israelis accuse others of antisemitism, they are really just pointing to cases of political opinions with which they disagree. I see this as just another case of Jewish exceptionalism: believing that there is something unique about us and that the world (a pretty big place!) just won't let us be. An understandable collective trauma following the holocaust, but one that I don't think is relevant today.
But this view is so widely held all around me, and actively affects people who might otherwise have chosen to move abroad, that I would like to critically investigate it. There does seem to be a rise in blatant antisemitism, although I again don't really trust the sources to distinguish between actual racism and just people who don't agree with us: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-reports-unprecedented-rise-antisemitic-incidents-post-oct-7
I also heard from Israeli friends living in the USA that they feel unsafe since the beginning of the war, and are sometimes harassed for speaking Hebrew. So maybe there is some grain of truth to this whole belief.
I'd be happy to hear from rationalist Israelis (and anyone else) their thoughts on the subject, as well as suggestions on how to test the hypothesis that it's dangerous/unpleasant for Jews and Israelis to live outside Israel.
Not a Jew, but I do think there's a lot more volatility in antisemitism than there is in most other sorts of anti-minority sentiment. In the United States, there's a lot of people who really don't like e.g. Hispanic immigrants and wish there were a lot less of them around. But that's a constant baseline; it may become more or less politically salient at any time, but the raw numbers don't change very much. Which means that while there are political fights about border control, there's no significant consistency for "round them all up, even the 2nd-generation citizens", and send them home / to the camps" and there's not going to be.
Antisemitism has a much higher variance, as your US friends have noticed. And that's not just the United States. Germany in the late 19th / early 20th century was a pretty good place to be a Jew. And then there's this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jews ; I don't think many other ethnicities could come up with anything like it. Places where Jews were welcome, until suddenly they weren't.
I have some somewhat speculative guesses as to why that may be. But regardless, if the discrimination against your ethnicity is characterized by low baseline but high variance, that's going to be a rational argument for having your "go bag" constantly at the ready. And having to have a "go bag", is a rational argument for wanting there to be a place you can reliably go and not have to worry about whether they also are due for an outbreak of Maximum Antisemitism when you show up.
For something I am writing, I'm looking for examples of poems set to music where the words have been tweaked to change the message. The example I started with was a setting of Kipling's "A Pilgrim's Way" where the refrain line has been changed from "Thy people, Lord, thy people, are good enough for me" to "The people, oh the people, are good enough for me," thus eliminating the religious reference. I disapprove of that, have been thinking of why, and am looking for more examples.
Would you still disapprove if you agreed with the new message more than the old one?
Yes.
Compare Carter Family songs with Woody Guthrie songs.
Carter Family - Storms are on the Ocean (1927) --> Woody Guthrie - Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Feet (1944)
Carter Family - When the World's On Fire (1930) --> Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land (1944)
Just two that I happened to notice. With old folk songs, sometimes the originals are lost to history, so it's hard to know who changed the lyrics. Maybe there was some original version that Woody Guthrie copied faithfully, and the Carter Family had changed it to be more religious? But it seems more likely that Guthrie took old religious folk songs and updated them to fit his message.
I guess there's the opposite direction, where Johnny Cash covered "Hurt" and changed "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns", adding a religious reference where there wasn't one before.
Not actually a poem, but there was talk around the Grammys about Luke Combs changing Tracy Chapman's lyrics to "Fast Car" ever so slightly at the end, from:
> You got a fast car
> Is it fast enough so you can fly away?
to:
> You got a fast car
> Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
Although he did keep unaltered the line about "I work in a market as a checkout girl".
To be fair the we was implied. Tracy wanted to go with the car guy in the first case.
I kinda got the feeling it was more ambivalent in the original? **shrug**
There is also a large stream of evidence that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, and fights from among civilians while wearing civilian clothing. Between Hamas's inhuman combat doctrine, and the gigantic anti-Israel propaganda machine that wants to portray Israel as targeting civilians, I am not surprised that there is such a large stream of evidence. I still think most of it should be discounted, at least until further investigation sheds light on which parts are true and which parts are fake. Otherwise, you end up with more cases like the media frenzy from the Gaza hospital explosion in mid-October.
This is not to deny the genuine violations of protocol by soldiers on hair-trigger alert (and a few extremists out for revenge for Oct. 7). To me, the most tragic such case was when IDF soldiers shot three escaped hostages by mistake. I think that the IDF does actually investigate such cases, and not just for PR.
More evidence in general that Israel does not have a policy of targeting civilians: the order to evacuate northern Gaza, the fact that well over 99% of the Gazan population is alive even after months of fighting, and the fact that Israel has the capabilities to kill many more Gazans and it refrained from using them. There is also the fact that Israel opened Gaza's borders for humanitarian aid. Admittedly, this involved international pressure, but consider that similar pressure was exerted on Israel for more militarily important concessions like a ceasefire, and Israel refused to budge. If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in.
(It looks like you meant to reply to someone in the containment thread, but this wound up at the top level instead.)
Will we get a "My California Ballot 2024" from Scott this year? I really enjoyed the previous editions.
Setting up a new Windows laptop. Open Edge to download Chrome and Bing search says I don't need another browser. I think I'll download it anyway. Duckduckgo too.
I finally gave up on Windows and went completely over to Linux when I got a new laptop last year. It's still clunky, although that's partly my fault for using an out-of-the-way distro, and at least I don't have to put up with any of that kind of *%#$%*#.
What about Teams, the Window which refuses to be closed or even minimised when Windows 11 starts? Microsoft are obviously trying to push Teams literally in our face. But using it with multiple sites is like trying to knit chain mail, in that one must painstakingly log out of one session and into another, which then fails as often as as not because it obstinately remembers the previous one via its ham-fisted use of cookies. Give me Zoom or Slack any day!
Talking about PC frustrations, another of my major issues with Substack is that one can't save a comment page to disk. Something stops it in its tracks, and the save fails, on both Firefox and Chrome.
To stop Teams from loading on startup (at least in Windows 10), go into Task Manager and then the Startup tab. You can set it to Disabled there.
Yeah, Mozilla recently published a paper on shady behaviour in Win11/Bing.
I have to go to a city office in person because they are being utterly non-communicative about some confusing utility bills. The website says that they are committed to giving easy access to information. Well, frankly that feels insulting given that I will probably have to walk through the rain and then wait in line to speak to a surly bureaucrat.
Naturally this got me thinking about charter cities and special economic zones. So anyway, why wasn't anyone talking about Pronomos Capital in the recent posts on charity vs capitalism? They funded Prôspera, and have a portfolio of several charter cities and SEZs. When I searched those pages for the terms "Pronomos" and "Prospera" I found no hits for the former and very little discussion of the latter.
Is this because Pronomos is not investing well and everyone already knows it? Are they getting beaten by competitors? Is there some other major problem with them?
Because if the answers are all no, then I'm surprised that there has been almost no mention of them in 1000 comments comprising 45,000 words.
Personally, I'm feeling the temptation to start advertising Pronomos to my EA friends unless and until someone talks me out of it.
I'm not culturally libertarian, but this is my take: none of these charter cities promise to me the full muscular backing of rule of law through an impartial court system. As a human being who has been the victim of at least one violent crime and one white-collar scam in my life, from what I have read (including official material that might count as an advertisement), I *am not convinced* that it is worth risking my life or livelihood by living in such a place.
Keep in mind I'm a college-educated STEMlord. I have it pretty fucking good in the US as a normal citizen. I understand the problems these charter cities purport to solve, but *those problems do not affect me* and I don't see how they are ever going to succeed without buy-in from comfortably normal people.
The ironic part is that any place which is desperate enough to try a charter city is also a place desperate enough that you wouldn't want to live there.
There's something to this sentiment--isn't Honduras one of the most murder-heavy countries in the world? But IIRC, the beach resorts neighboring Prospera don't have too much trouble attracting customers, even though their crime rate is not 0. Point taken about the white collar crime though. Seems reasonable to worry about the lack of court precedence. Perhaps the next step would be for Pronomos to somehow learn this and make an attempt to solve the issue.
The amount of discussion about Pronomos & Prospera (again, out of 1000 comments!) still seems low to me.
The circular path of the proposed new supercollider at CERN will be almost tangential to that of the existing one - See image of proposed route at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00353-9
Wouldn't it make sense to make it actually tangential, so the existing one could get particles up to high speed and then route them onto the new one to boost their speed further?
My guess is that one does not simply reroute high speed particles, you'd need to turn giant electromagnets on and off within... what, picoseconds?
Wouldn't a shortish bit of extra track connecting the two rings also work?
In view of Melvin's plausible objection, I guess one would need at the very least a spiral path, of decreasing curvature, from the smaller ring to the larger. So it might be more trouble and expense than it is worth!
Couldn't it be a straight line along a common tangent? Curvature is sort of the enemy in these kinds of installations. It's why they make them so big in the first place.
Did y'all see this? https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1754770076841226499
A cool 60% failed a basic economics question. A simple one, too. The number of things this explains is just huge.
The correct answer to this "basic economics question" is "please define literally any of your terms."
The entire point of competition is that they can't charge just what the customer is willing to pay, because their competitor is charging that minus a few cents. So you end up pricing the thing lower than people would pay in a vacuum, because people don't aim to pay the value of the product they aim to pay as little as they can.
The actual correct answer is "all of the above".
Worth to the end user is highly ambiguous. That sounds like an emotional attachment.
The use of Capitalism rather than market muddies the waters - meaning that many left leaning people will just assume they are being fleeced by capitalists, which to be fair is true in near monopoly conditions.
On the other side pro capitalists might want to credit capitalism with producing goods very efficiently and other people are reading worth as being the value to the consumer being greater than the price.
Useless.
It might be ok to say that people misunderstood the question, but... they tend to use the same heuristic when doing a bunch of other stuff as well, some of them with a bit more consequence than a twitter poll. Voting, for example.
At which point we're not talking about an excuse, but about the mechanics of the error. They answer wrongly because they do pattern completion on the word "Capitalism", or because they don't have a good enough concept of "worth", or because they never spent any time ever thinking about demand and supply curves so they simply don't know the answer etc. These are all reasons they answer wrongly, and it's a good idea to think/talk about them. Doesn't make their answer any less of a mistake, or any less grave.
I’m not that impressed with supply and demand curves myself. Not as presented anyway. Mathematically they are highly suspect.
> Doesn't make their answer any less of a mistake, or any less grave.
Of course it does. In any case the general assumption amongst economists that we are never screwed by capitalists because supply and demand always give the correct price signal is belied in many cases, admittedly most in non competitive markets.
Price theory models non competitive markets too. Their existence and behavior isn’t strange or inconsistent with price theory.
What’s mathematically sus in price theory?
There’s no all that interesting in price theory. Stuff sells at a price or you reduce the price. More demand than expected and you increase the price. This doesn’t mean people aren’t being gouged - see housing and Nimbyism.
What’s mathematically suspect about the standard econ101 supply demand graphs - amongst other things - is that the magical lines seem to stick to the positive axis. Mathematical lines don’t do that.
How many widgets would I buy for $100 trillion each? About 0. How many widgets would I sell for -$25 each? Idk probably 0. In both cases I wouldn’t go negative. That’s why the graphs are positive.
In some dystopia where unemployed people are executed, I could see wages going negative occasionally. In the real world, there's a bunch of factors outside the formal economy that keep this from happening.
It doesn't seem a particularly basic question to me. I suppose there's an introduction to microeconomics answer which is obvious and definitional, but that's as far as it goes. "Capitalism" perhaps muddies the waters here. One might think of the question differently if "in a competitive or ideal market" is substituted perhaps.
There is the cynical perspective that due to information asymmetry, psychological manipulation, monopolization, and/or genuine stupidity, consumers do often end up paying more than what the item is worth to them in practice. Look at it this way: do you trust the 60% that failed that question to make accurate judgements about what something is worth to them?
Yes! Of course I trust them. Most people in a supermajority of contexts do reasonably sane things. Could they be "better" on a number of metrics? Of course. But in a common sense understanding of the word, most people don't regret most transactions on a daily basis.
Thanks, I made a meme out of this: https://imgflip.com/i/8eyym6
It's mostly just people not knowing what "worth" means in that context.
Exactly. It's a basic question to people who have taken Econ 101; to pretty much everyone else it's a trick question because there are several common colloquial definitions of "worth" or "value" that do not match the Econ 101 version.
So, 60% of Americans have never taken Econ 101 (or read an equivalent text). No surprise there.
And those who have taken Econ 101 will then rightly ask: but is the world like that? Because I don't immediately recognise myself or the businesses and markets I know in these abstractions and these accounts of people who are posited not real. Their teachers will then tell them no, the world isn't always like that but here is a useful framework to think about the complex mesh of reality
Assume a can opener.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_a_can_opener
Use pizza slices to explain marginal utility and I’ll tell you I like cold pizza. Use sodas and I’ll tell you I’m prone to kidney stones so I always order ‘best value’.
Oh yeah, Bluesky is open to the general public now. With Twitter kinda going to shit with all the bots everywhere and accounts getting frozen (Elon doing hard drugs doesn't help either), all the artists I follow seem to have collectively decided to evacuate to Bluesky.
Trying it out myself... well, it certainly looks like Twitter. Not sure what I expected. The whole Feeds system is very interesting though, basically giving you multiple customizable timelines. And the rules seem to be pretty lax: don't break the law, don't commit hate crimes, don't tell people to kill themselves.
I have no idea what they're trying to do with the whole decentralized protocol thing though. Are they trying to make some sort of super social media network that connects a bunch of different sites together...? Does anyone even want that?
All in all, Bluesky does seem like a decent replacement, and I do hope it succeeds. Mostly because the prospect of a moron buying a company only for its previous CEO to immediately make a competitor that bankrupts his old company is really, really funny.
>I have no idea what they're trying to do with the whole decentralized protocol thing though.
I can't speak for everyone, but the purpose of decentralised protocols for me and many others is 1) the ability to choose the servers you use and therefore the rules you post under and 2) end-to-end security; Bluesky runs under the AT Protocol[1], which stands for "Authenticated Transfer" and does what the name suggests; everything is verified using asymmetric cryptography and hashes.
Bluesky/ATProto seems like you can achieve #1 if you self-host everything. But most people don't self host even DIDs[2], preferring to use their completely centralised did:plc (literally stands for "placeholder" but it's now permanent), and the dev team admit that it will be hard to host the "relay" component in particular.
>Are they trying to make some sort of super social media network that connects a bunch of different sites together...? Does anyone even want that?
Judging by the popularity of the fediverse[3] (my current profile is at https://social.fbxl.net/@Hyolobrika), I would say yes, they do.
[1] https://atproto.com/
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
[3] https://activitypub.rocks/
The irony is ruined somewhat by the fact that Dorsey was a big investor in Musk's takeover as well though.
Unrelated: I just looked up Jack Dorsey and wow does he look different than I imagined. I always imagined him as looking like Alec Baldwin for some reason.
On first scan, Bluesky read as an alternative spelling of a Polish surname.
I've tried BlueSky a bit, but it just seems like a more boring version of Twitter.
Let's face it - whatever Elon says or does, or however much more the user experience undergoes enshittification, the reason people use Twitter is that they want the drama and the crazy stuff - to wallow in it, in fact - and thus any attempt to establish a "Twitter, expect without that" (either specifically through rules, or by attempting to cultivate a different user base) will eventually fail.
...Is Bluesky even designed to get rid of drama? It's not like there's any rules against it. The site just fully launched yesterday, there just hasn't been enough time for any drama to happen.
Again, the reason people are leaving Twitter (or at least the people I follow) is because of all the "impression zombie" bots, the fact that people's accounts randomly get suspended for posting porn, and also because Elon is an unstable maniac that can't be trusted to keep the site functional.
Not *designed*, but much of the crowd that I've seen leave specifically for Bluesky want a polite, drama-free experience, according to their own words.
Right, but the people who want drama also want an audience. What happens when they notice that a big chunk of the audience went to Bluesky?
If a big chunk of the audience goes to Bluesky, sure, the rest have to follow. Will it? Even in the category of "people searching for a Twitter alternative", there are other options, ie. Threads (seems to be more active re: Finnish ex-Twitter community than Bluesky) and Mastodon. Others, too, probably.
So maybe all of those get a share of drama-fleeing Twitter refugees, and a proportionate share of Dramatic Tweeters seeking an audience. Then what? I'm not seeing a plausible mechanism to bring in the former without the latter following in trail.
The dark upside of centralization and platform dominance is that they obey an important rule of the internet: no one wants to post on a dead board. Twitter will continue in some (more deranged) form for years, because traffic is still massive, if somewhat diminished from its peak. The comparative network effects (vs Bluesky) for creators still make X the more economical choice for a distribution channel.
Been out of the blogging loop, but did this one announce the results of the survey predictions for '23?
Charcuterie board planner - online beta
After you plan you get
- a shopping list
- an image made by Stable Diffusion
http://charcuterie.mooo.com/
TBH I was disappointed that it doesn’t actually plan the board for me.
Let me input just the number of people, maybe a couple of general preferences and the rest should be automatic. Why do I need to pick actual cheese types? I don’t know the first thing about cheese, I just know I want to impress my guests 😅
Thanks for your helpful feedback. There is no wrong cheese. All selections are right. Factors such as cost, availability and personal preference are hard to take into account. I suppose I could add pictures and descriptions of cheeses.
This is fantastic, but where are the sardines?
Thanks! Do you really want sardines?
I sincerely hope the product is better than the image, because those cucumbers and that apple look *very* dodgy based on my sample selection:
http://charcuterie.mooo.com/print.html?id=16
good point!
The selection of items do sound lovely, it's just the resulting image - not so much.
fever dream partially dehydrated cucumber.
For everyone who responded to my previous comment re: Anime Girl Profile Picture: I carefully considered my options, then started over when I learned about Statue Profile Pictures and decided I wanted some of that energy. Opting to split the difference, I made the only rational choice and selected Centurii-chan as my avatar. (In her maximally psychotic appearance, of course.)
Carthago Delenda Est.
I say there's no free will and I also have tips for optimizing productivity: Paradox? Not at all!
"Free will denial is almost a movement now," said Scott Galloway--the famous investor, NYU marketing professor, and frequent guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher--on his November 3, 2023 podcast
It is a movement. There's Sam Harris--celebrity atheist, meditation advocate, neuroscience PhD--who published Free Will in 2012, and there's Robert Sapolsky--primatologist, stress hormones expert, Stanford professor, and author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and of the bestselling, encyclopedic Behave--who has a new book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, which came out in October 2023.
And there's me.
Arrayed against us is probably 95% of Americans and the vast majority of philosophers too. According to a 2020 survey of more than 1700 philosophy professors, only 11% denied free will. Daniel Dennett--another celebrity atheist--is probably the biggest defender of free will.
And yet...
Free will is an illusion.
"So what? What difference does it make?" you say. Here's why it's interesting.
Forget for the moment the potentially soporific arguments for and against free will. There is a different angle on this. I've been researching and writing up the psychological effects of denying free will on the person who denies it. Yes, that's right. You might prefer they'd spend their time curing cancer, but some scientists have conducted experiments to see how people's behavior changes when you "prime" them with a text denying free will.
These studies as a group overwhelmingly show (or seem to show) that if you "prime" experimental subjects with free will denial by having them read a deterministic argument, they are more likely--to a degree that was statistically significant--to lie, cheat, and steal in subsequent lab games or observed situations.
I can argue with you about whether or not we have free will. I'm prepared with all the arguments against and I know all the arguments for, which I'd have to rebut. Send them to me. But I'm already moving on--because it is interesting and is our future--to consider what free will denial would be like.
To read Part 2: What's it like to deny free will? Check out https://drdavedavidson.substack.com/p/i-am-mr-theres-no-free-will
Since you're an actual philosopher and know all the arguments for and against, I'll tell you mine, and you can tell me its proper name!
Materialism posits that internal experience (including the experience of making free choices) is generated mechanistically by the body. My experience of being myself is a mere mechanical effect of the machine of my body interacting with the world.
Now imagine an identical copy of my body, perfectly the same, down to the atomic level. It's put in an environment identical to mine, a million miles away from me. Identical machines, given identical inputs, produce identical effects.
The effect in question is my feeling of what it's like to be myself right now. So materialism is obligated to make two statements about this thought experiment. First: My feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is generated mechanistically by my body. Second: My feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is generated mechanistically by a different body, a million miles away.
Under materialism, it's emphatically _not_ the case that the distant identical body produces somebody else's feeling of what it's like to be that other person right now. That's a different effect altogether. Somebody else's awareness is not what my body generates. Materialism's claim is that my specific, actual, subjective feeling of being myself is generated mechanistically by my body. Well, if it's generated mechanistically in one place, it can be generated mechanistically in two places.
This seems like a pretty hard bullet for a materialist to bite. "Yes, your experience of being yourself could be caused by a different body from yours, a million miles away." It's a little weird, and feels non-Newtonian, to assert that there exists an effect which can be produced by multiple distinct mechanical causes at the same time, at any distance whatsoever from each other. Yet, that seems to be precisely what materialism obligates itself to when it asserts that my feeling of what it's like to be myself right now is produced mechanically by my body.
But the alternative is that the different body _doesn't_ produce my consciousness; it produces somebody else's consciousness. In that case, you've lost causality, and opened the door to every spooky phenomenon. Identical mechanical causes producing different mechanical effects. Free will is no longer off the table, then.
There's also the possibility that I've tied myself up in language game knots. Like, maybe there's some internal incoherence in the idea behind the word "me" or "feeling", which a true materialist would deny. The materialist who wanted to make me aware of this would, of course, be able to substitute an alternative to that word, which more exactly matches the phenomena and doesn't permit dualist sleight-of-hand like what I'm trying to pull.
Am I copying somebody else's ideas, without knowing it?
1. You keep eqiovocating between "free will" and "libertarian free will" and opposing free will to determinism. Thus ignoring compatibilism. Last I saw, the majority of philosophers were compatibilists, and the "libertarian" position wasn't much larger than the "no free will" one.
2. You also seem to be saying determinism is incompatible with moral judgement and blame, when I (and many compatibilists) would say it's necessary for it. See my reply to Deiseach.
3. Were the subjects in those experiments primed with "determinism" or "free will doesn't exist"? If the latter, you're basically just giving them an excuse to act immorally by telling them morality doesn't exist. It says nothing whatsoever about the benefits of believing in libertarian vs compatibilist freedom.
(And has anyone tested how people behave when primed with each of the latter two? I wonder if compatibilism properly described would make people more moral than libertarianism, since if they act badly it's not "I did a bad thing today" but "I am a bad sort of person".)
Is free will a concept we should delete from our toolbox, like "phlogiston," or does it, like "life," point to a real underlying phenomenon despite being deeply misunderstood?
I love this question! Why didn't I think of it?!
What Sam Harris says may be relevant. Starting with the libertarian definition that free will means you could have done otherwise than you in fact did do. If causal determinism is true (and even if we build in some randomness metaphysically not epistemologically because of quantum mechanics) then the LIB def of FW is false.
We might still want to keep the concept. It is understandable, where being nonsensical is often a main reason to revise a term out of existence. Also, we might keep it because so many people aver to experiencing free will even if it's non-veridical and actually an illusion.
But what Harris says--still with me?--what Harris says is that if we do not actually ever have the experience of "I could have done otherwise". He says this because of, well, meditation. He says if we pay proper or sufficient attention to experience we will see that we are not the author of our thoughts.
Now I need to do some more thinking since that is not necessarily equivalent to "coulda-done-otherwise". But if he's right and we do not even experience the so-called illusion then it would be up there with phlogiston perhaps.
BTW, Harris says he himself no longer feels like he could have done otherwise. This is in contrast, I'd say, to Sapolsky who admits that he quite often "regresses" and accidentally acts as if FW were true, as if he believed in it.
I describe it in a way philosophers won't like: he knows there's no free will but he does not always believe there's none. But that is because actually disbelieving free will is quite a strange experience. It's uncanny. It's dizzying. But it doesn't last. Our natural credence takes over as soon as we are no longer willfully keeping the thought in front of our minds that there's no free will.
The dizziness is for real but temporary and caused by thinking, so i call it "armchair vertigo". Except for Harris's professed experience it goes away as soon as we get out of the armchair so to speak and engage in the world of praise and blame and agency and voluntary action.
Try to think about what "could-ness" actually means as part of human descision making algorithm. For what our minds actually use such category? There has to be some evolutionary reason why we have free will/illusion of free will/illusion of illusion of free will/etc, no matter how long you are going to pass the illusionary buck.
"Try to think about what "could-ness" actually means as part of human descision making algorithm. For what our minds actually use such category? There has to be some evolutionary reason why we have free will/illusion of free will/illusion of illusion of free will/etc,"
And it could be that it's real. Yudkowsky's approach just doesn't show that the sense of free will is necessarily an illusion, only potentially.
IMO there's a useful abstraction that it's pointing to, a certain shard of consciousness, but once the concept has been reified people use it in ways that can be outright counterproductive. E.g. crime and punishment, moral desert, etc.
It’s looks, to maintain morality , that the denial of free will needs a God enforcing his will.
For moral realism you mean, yes? Antirealism still needs moral agents in order to be meaningful, but there aren't a lot of preconditions on what that might minimally require.
Thanks for the comment. But, I'm not sure I follow. Can you expand on the point you are trying to make please? The denial of free will needs God doing what and why?
Many religions believe in determinism. Only the elect are chosen, but being part of the elect (the religious group which doesn’t believe in free will) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. If you are even inclined to sin, or engage in it, then you are proving that you weren’t chosen. So obviously this form of determinism will not lead to people abandoning morality - or at least morality from the point of view of their religious beliefs. The opposite more likely.
Thanks for clarifying
This guy expressed the objection better than I could:
"In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind. This is startlingly the reverse of the truth. It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before. But obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation. That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment."
The over-excessively 'kind' reaction to offenders (he can't help it, he's a victim of society and his genes and systemic racism and is not personally responsible for being a violent thug, abolish the school to prison pipeline!) will mean a reaction in the opposite direction, and if the idea is believed that "he can't help it, it's deterministic that he will be a violent thug" then of course you can't make any appeals to his 'free will' to consciously change. But you can be as harsh and even cruel in punishment as you like, along the lines of "this is how we train animals/we can condition a response of fear and aversion to doing crime for this as the punishment to crime".
I don't think that's better for us, as a society, in the long run to take on a model of excusing our vindictiveness and vengefulness as 'it's the only language they understand', even if we too can't help being vindictive and vengeful, it's all determinism.
See the discussion about genes versus environment on this very site with Scott's posts on schizophrenia etc. Even with the nice, poverty and stressor-free environment envisaged by Sapolsky after government intervenes to end all childhood poverty, there will still be people with genes selecting for more violent behaviour, less impulse control, and so forth. Those genes may not be expressed in an environment that represses them, but maybe they will break out in some cases. So if there's no free will, and we can no longer shift the blame onto "If you see someone with poor emotional regulation, deficits in executive function, and poor impulse control, you might be looking at someone in prison. And you might conclude they had an impoverished childhood... through no fault of their own" because Government Intervention Works, then what do we do with the people who do the naughty no-no things? What do we do with the future SBFs? After we've dismantled the criminal justice system root and branch?
I think we'd see the increase in vigilante justice, or the use of the mental health system as per the Soviet dissident treatment model: we can't put Sam in prison because prison is a no-no place that doesn't exist any longer, but Sam is a swindler and fraudster. Sam can't help being a swindler and fraudster so we can't ask Sam to stop doing that. We don't want to be swindled and defrauded either, though, so.... we dose Sam up on medication à la the 'chemical cosh' and/or lock him away in a nice (we're so nice, all things will be nice) 'treatment centre' where he will be so zombified, he hasn't the capacity to swindle and defraud.
Yes, so much more humane. Bring on the boiling oil.
I'll confess to finding it odd how many people think morality, blame and punishment (and in your argument, persuasion and encouragement)* are incompaitible with determinism. The more normal assumption is that those things are incompatible with *indeterminism*. If determinism is true, then everything people do is reducible in theory to a set of intelligible reasons and conditions. And if people are doing bad things, we can improve their behaviour by altering those reasons and conditions: raising them well, providing peaceful means of resolving their grievances in society, encouraging them to act morally, and as a last resort using force or threat of force to scare them into acting morally.
But if things aren't determined, why bother with any of these things? You could raise someone perfectly, encourage good behaviours, reward good and punish evil etc, and they could still do bad actions for...no reason at all. And you could punish good and reward evil and they could still do good just because. It's all random, it's all unintelligable, there are no actual reducible *reasons* for why they act. So why bother with any of it?
And how does it make sense to "blame" someone for an evil act, if indeterministic (libertarian) free will is true? What does it *mean* that person A did an evil act? On libertarianism, it means that some irreducible, unexplainable..."fact"...occured, some incomprehensible "choice". "Mere hap" as I think Elizabeth Anscombe put it. There's no *reason* why they chose one way or another. They just did! What judgement can you make from this irreducible "choice" that happened because it did?
But on (compatibilist) determinism, person A acted freely if they acted according to their character, and not external compulsion. Simple. So if they were uncoerced and they did an evil act, you can judge them as having a bad, evil character. You can justify exiling or executing them, since their character is inferior and they don't belong in your community. You can rationally hate them and want to punish them for their evil character. And of course you can try to *improve* their character, teach them they did wrong and punish them to make them feel the harm they inflicted on another if they're unable to understand it. That's the theory and it's logical, even if it doesn't always work.
But all that only makes if people act for intelligible reasons, i.e. determined reasons.
(*And the same is true of God: incompaible with *indeterminism*, not with determinism as some people weirdly think.)
"If determinism is true, then everything people do is reducible in theory to a set of intelligible reasons and conditions."
This is, if you will pardon the candour, why I think your entire argument is stupid. If we perfectly knew everything - but we don't. This is the old 50s SF argument about "now that we have the science of psychiatry, crime and mental disease will no longer exist in the Society of the Future".
Well, this *is* the future, and we've still got crime and mental illness, because people are not simply meat puppets. Why does one person in one environment turn to crime, and someone in the same environment does not? If it comes down to the determined "just a shift of inches in space makes a difference", then in order to perfectly understand the programming of the particular meat puppet we will need to understand the position of every particle in the Universe first, so we can perfectly plot out all the influences.
This is astrology by the back door.
"You could raise someone perfectly, encourage good behaviours, reward good and punish evil etc, and they could still do bad actions for...no reason at all."
People do bad things for reasons. Maybe the reasons are stupid, but they very seldom are "for no reason at all".
"And if people are doing bad things, we can improve their behaviour by altering those reasons and conditions: raising them well, providing peaceful means of resolving their grievances in society, encouraging them to act morally, and as a last resort using force or threat of force to scare them into acting morally."
And that last is the problem with the "no such thing as free will". We can't encourage anyone, since their character is fixed and unalterable. We can only coerce. It's a beautifully neat theory, but it will have problems when it comes to practice. Because if we don't fully understand the "set of intelligible reasons and conditions" as to why Rich, Well-Raised Johnny stole money and Poor, Badly-Raised Billy didn't, then how do we go about reforming Johnny? Anything we do may be useless, because if we don't have the entire chain figured out, then treating Johnny with method A may be as bootless as treating cancer like a migraine.
We can't blame Johnny for being a thief, because the dominoes that fell in orderly rows from the instant of the Big Bang meant that everything was pre-ordained to happen as it did and Johnny was foredoomed from the creation of existence to be a thief. This is as bad as Calvinism.
If we can't blame Johnny, then by what right do we punish him? Hatred alone - "You can rationally hate them and want to punish them for their evil character" - because we can't improve them. How can there be improvement, to a fixed chain of conditions? It's like saying we'll "improve" a mountain by getting it to stop being made of rock.
Your model of "improvement" involves a lot of force and coercion - the boiling oil environment, after all. "punish them to make them feel the harm they inflicted on another if they're unable to understand it". You talk about "Another good result of society-wide recognition that there's no free will would be that the criminal justice system would have to be dismantled root and branch" and then conclude here that if all else fails, eh, exile or punishment or lock them up forever. Just like the old ways and the old days, before the enlightened view of "there is no free will so there is no blame", then?
Of course they can't understand it because they're not capable of understanding it because they are not wired up to understand it; if they understood it, they would not have committed the offences in the first place. At least, that is the conclusion determinism comes to, so far as I can see.
You're making a very unwarranted distinction between "determinism means intelligible reasons and conditions for actions, indeterminism means doing things for no reason at all and we can never understand why". Holding to free will, I say we can understand why people do things, and why they don't run along grooves like a tram or trolley, and how it is possible to get people to change, to improve, to teach them better.
"What does it *mean* that person A did an evil act?"
It means A chose to do that act, for reasons which may indeed include how their character was formed by the environment and influences around them, and the way they were raised, and their particular genetics expressed in the shape of their intellect and mind. But at the end, they *chose* to do this thing; there is no 'since they are formed in this way, like a machine set up to do one action, they could not have done otherwise, they have no will and no choice'.
Determinism to me *is* the argument about external compulsion, because it postulates that there is no way of acting outside of the set of conditions that came about in a particular way because this is how the laws of nature work out because this is the long chain of causation from the Big Bang on down.
"If that is your question, I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine. We quarantine and try real rehabilitation but if rehabilitation is unsuccessful we continue with quarantine. Free will deniers like Sapolsky and especially Greg Caruso have explicitly analogized to public health, where we do not necessarily blame people who are disease vectors but we nevertheless are occasionally justified in quarantining them perhaps against their will."
'Against their will'? I thought you had done away with the idea of "will". But how does Sapolsky reconcile rehabilitation (that is, getting people to shift grooves from 'do bad things' to 'do good things' or 'refrain from doing bad things') with his belief that he can't even choose his own shirt?
From your original piece:
"someone says to him, "You're dressed nice today," and, as Sapolsky tells it, "I say 'Thank you,' as if I had anything to do with it."
So a man who thinks he can't even make a choice of his own about what clothes he wears is going to sit down opposite a bank robber, murderer, or rapist, and rehabilitate them by teaching and persuading them to behave in better ways as though they could 'choose' to do this. Mm-hmm. Yes, I'm sure that will work.
"This is, if you will pardon the candour, why I think your entire argument is stupid. If we perfectly knew everything - but we don't. This is the old 50s SF argument about "now that we have the science of psychiatry, crime and mental disease will no longer exist in the Society of the Future"."
I guess I should have emphasised the "in theory" part more. I'm not implying in any way that we can actually discover those reasons and causes in practice. To clarify, my argument is (practically) an entirely conservative one: all the stuff we're doing, like moral judgement, exhortation, blame and punishment makes sense and we should continue to do it (subject to minor arguments over how the details could be improved). Only as a matter of philosophical theory am I challenging the common belief that this is continuation in our practices requires us to disbelieve determinism. (And this is a somewhat conservative argument as well; as you observed, it's the Calvinist position).
With that clarified, what exactly do you object to in my position?
"People do bad things for reasons. Maybe the reasons are stupid, but they very seldom are "for no reason at all"."
This is...just restating determinism. If I act the way I do for a set of reasons, such that if those reasons were not present I would not act that way, then my act is determined by those reasons. No matter how stupid or sensible the reasons, they determine my act as long as they are a necessary and sufficient condition, i.e. a full explanation of my action.
The libertarian's challenge is to explain what it even *means* to act for reasons that are not determinative. How this differs from the act being ultimately random, and thus meaningless.
"And that last is the problem with the "no such thing as free will". We can't encourage anyone, since their character is fixed and unalterable. We can only coerce."
No, no, no, no, no! Determinism means your act is constrained by your character (as it is at the time of your act). It does NOT mean your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed. Your character can absolutely change, and will change according to meaningful reasons. This is a common misunderstanding it seems.
Determinism says you could (in fact would) have done otherwise *if the state of the world and yourself had been different*. It only denies that you could have done otherwise even if everything antecedent was exactly the same. Which, I contend, is not even a logically coherent concept.
"We can't blame Johnny for being a thief, because the dominoes that fell in orderly rows from the instant of the Big Bang meant that everything was pre-ordained to happen as it did and Johnny was foredoomed from the creation of existence to be a thief. "
Yes. We. Can. On determinism, we can blame Johnny for thieving, *because of what it shows about his character*: the reason he thieves is his thieving character, thus his act of thieving causes us to rationally attach the predicate of blame *to him* (not just to his act), and to attach the description of "thief" to him (meaning not just the trivial "one who has thieved" but also "one who is inclined to thieve"). On libertarianism, his act of thieving is an unexplained fact, with no necessary condition to who he is, and so what justifies attaching blame to *him* rather than just his act?
Just to hammer home the point: imagine Johnny grows up and cheats on his wife one time. If his wife is a libertarian, he can say say to her "hey honey, it's not that I don't love you, it doesn't say anything about me at all! It's just that the cosmic dice happened fall one way and I cheated; they could just as well have fallen the other way. Don't blame *me*, I had nothing to do with it!" Wheras if she's a determinist, she's not buying it. "No Johnny," she says, "your cheating proceeded from your character, which was a necessary and sufficient cause for it. By definition, either you don't love me, or your idea of 'love' does not involve the comittment I thought it did."
Determinist!Wife has eminently rational logic for either a divorce, or a "change your character, or we divorce" ultimatum. Libertarian!Wife gets stuck in a philosophical hole if she tries to reason this out. Or so it seems to me.
"This is as bad as Calvinism."
Well, without trying to re-litigate the Reformation...what's wrong with Calvinism? It has some huge theological and moral issues (but only, it would seem, because of the doctrine of damnation; that's the doctrine from which the moral horrors arise, not the metaphysical framework), but it's the only really coherent account of God's omnipotence and human action. Aside maybe, from atemporalism (God is outside time), which raises further major paradoxes. Otherwise, you either dispense with God, dispense with free will, or juggle metaphysical contradictions just out of sight (i.e. Molinism). Do you have an alternative?
Thanks for this long reply, it's very helpful.
First, I think that the definitions of Determinism and Non-Determinism/Free Will we are using are talking past each other, and I think this is a large part of the difficulty.
"Determinism means your act is constrained by your character (as it is at the time of your act). It does NOT mean your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed."
Well, neither does free will think your character is constrained in the sense of being immutable or fixed, that's the whole point of it. You can make choices, you can change your mind, you can make decisions, you can alter behaviour by effort. The version of Free Will that other comments are going by, that "poof! out of nowhere!" people do things for no reason at all is not free will, and I think it's sort of a strawman in order to let the determinist principle stand as more logically consistent.
I'll also have to hold my hands up (and apologise to Doctor Dave the PhD in Phil) that the version of free will definitions I'm using are largely to solely based on religious principles, I'm not arguing the philosophical version which may be totally different (indeed, I think it must be). So that's another morass to bog down in.
Now, let's take Cheating Johnny. His determinist wife can indeed blame him, but she also then has to decide that if this is the way Johnny's character is formed, he's likely to cheat again, and so is it a good idea for her to continue with the marriage? If soft determinism* says that character can be changed, in response to circumstances - well, here I say "but that's free will in action". Johnny can choose "do I love my wife enough to accept the ultimatum to stop cheating or else she'll divorce me, or do I prefer to get novel sex where I can and so I'll accept the divorce?" The Determinist says "the external conditions have now changed; now Johnny's wife knows, where before she didn't, now there's the threat of divorce, where before there wasn't" and I agree with that. The crux of the disagreement here is "by what mechanism does Johnny choose?" How is he able to decide to change behaviour by going against (immutable, fixed, if we go the hard determinist/physicalist view) character? I say "he exercises the freedom of his will to choose because his character is not immutably fixed since the creation of the universe", you say - what?
*I'm imagining there must be a hard version of determinism, if that Sapolsky dude is joking about how he has nothing to do with the way he dresses, it's the cosmic pixies that pick out his clothes for him or something.
"What's wrong with Calvinism?"
Ah, here we get into the religious angle! 😀 Double predestination, as a defence of and consequence of, absolute Divine sovereignty is - as you say - a moral horror. It makes a mockery of the possibility of salvation, because that has already been decided. If you obey the evangelical command to "go make disciples of all nations", then you are only preaching to the already converted (and I think that it does involve a contradiction: if they are saved already and preaching the Gospel only gives them the opportunity to hear of their salvation, what happens if they are not preached to? Do they lose their salvation? Well, some strands of "eternal assurance" say that can't happen. Does God change His mind? Again, that's a problem there for foreknowledge because if God changes His mind then He can't know the future and that's a knock against omniscience).
Worse than that, God has chosen *you* to be damned and there's nothing you can do about it, even if you live what is considered a godly life and think you have saving faith, that is all illusion. No wonder James Hogg wrote "Confessions of a Justified Sinner".
EDIT: I agree that Calvin's views are beautifully logical, but he was so stuck on creating the beautiful logical clockwork mechanism that he didn't recognise he had turned God into a tyrannical sadist. Even the God of the Old Testament is willing to be bargained down to "but will you destroy Sodom and all in it if there are only fifty - forty - thirty - twenty - ten righteous men in it?" by Abraham.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2018%3A16-33&version=NIV
That's the God that wants to exercise mercy if we only give Him the slightest chink to do so. As for absolute Divine sovereignty, He emptied Himself and assumed the form of a slave by taking on our mortal flesh, so I don't think is as bothered about His prestige as Calvin thought.
The Catholic view is different. Our will suffers, like all our faculties and powers, from the effects of Original Sin and the Fall, so that it is weakened and no longer rules our appetites perfectly. But we still have a will, and can exercise it, and can choose salvation or damnation:
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a3.htm
"God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. "God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him."
Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.
...Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts.
Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.
1736 Every act directly willed is imputable to its author:
'Thus the Lord asked Eve after the sin in the garden: "What is this that you have done?" He asked Cain the same question. The prophet Nathan questioned David in the same way after he committed adultery with the wife of Uriah and had him murdered.'
An action can be indirectly voluntary when it results from negligence regarding something one should have known or done: for example, an accident arising from ignorance of traffic laws.
An effect can be tolerated without being willed by its agent; for instance, a mother's exhaustion from tending her sick child. A bad effect is not imputable if it was not willed either as an end or as a means of an action, e.g., a death a person incurs in aiding someone in danger. For a bad effect to be imputable it must be foreseeable and the agent must have the possibility of avoiding it, as in the case of manslaughter caused by a drunken driver."
I think the part about 'responsibility can be diminished by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors' is where Determinism (or soft determinism) and Free Will meet on common ground. These are the external factors which influence Cheating Johnny's character, says Determinism. As long as Johnny is operating under duress about not cheating or else divorce, he is less responsible if he lies about 'sure darling' in agreement, says Free Will, but he's still responsible for his actions if he then goes off to see his girlfriend afterwards.
EDIT EDIT: As ever, we leave it up to Tommy A to do the heavy lifting on the technicalities:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2013.htm
"Article 6. Whether man chooses of necessity or freely?
Objection 1. It would seem that man chooses of necessity. For the end stands in relation to the object of choice, as the principle of that which follows from the principles, as declared in Ethic. vii, 8. But conclusions follow of necessity from their principles. Therefore man is moved of necessity from (willing) the end of the choice (of the means).
Objection 2. Further, as stated above (Article 1, Reply to Objection 2), choice follows the reason's judgment of what is to be done. But reason judges of necessity about some things: on account of the necessity of the premises. Therefore it seems that choice also follows of necessity.
Objection 3. Further, if two things are absolutely equal, man is not moved to one more than to the other; thus if a hungry man, as Plato says (Cf. De Coelo ii, 13), be confronted on either side with two portions of food equally appetizing and at an equal distance, he is not moved towards one more than to the other; and he finds the reason of this in the immobility of the earth in the middle of the world. Now, if that which is equally (eligible) with something else cannot be chosen, much less can that be chosen which appears as less (eligible). Therefore if two or more things are available, of which one appears to be more (eligible), it is impossible to choose any of the others. Therefore that which appears to hold the first place is chosen of necessity. But every act of choosing is in regard to something that seems in some way better. Therefore every choice is made necessarily.
On the contrary, Choice is an act of a rational power; which according to the Philosopher (Metaph. ix, 2) stands in relation to opposites.
I answer that, Man does not choose of necessity. And this is because that which is possible not to be, is not of necessity. Now the reason why it is possible not to choose, or to choose, may be gathered from a twofold power in man. For man can will and not will, act and not act; again, he can will this or that, and do this or that. The reason of this is seated in the very power of the reason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as good. Now the reason can apprehend as good, not only this, viz. "to will" or "to act," but also this, viz. "not to will" or "not to act." Again, in all particular goods, the reason can consider an aspect of some good, and the lack of some good, which has the aspect of evil: and in this respect, it can apprehend any single one of such goods as to be chosen or to be avoided. The perfect good alone, which is Happiness, cannot be apprehended by the reason as an evil, or as lacking in any way. Consequently man wills Happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to be happy, or to be unhappy. Now since choice is not of the end, but of the means, as stated above (Article 3); it is not of the perfect good, which is Happiness, but of other particular goods. Therefore man chooses not of necessity, but freely.
Reply to Objection 1. The conclusion does not always of necessity follow from the principles, but only when the principles cannot be true if the conclusion is not true. In like manner, the end does not always necessitate in man the choosing of the means, because the means are not always such that the end cannot be gained without them; or, if they be such, they are not always considered in that light.
Reply to Objection 2. The reason's decision or judgment of what is to be done is about things that are contingent and possible to us. In such matters the conclusions do not follow of necessity from principles that are absolutely necessary, but from such as are so conditionally; as, for instance, "If he runs, he is in motion."
Reply to Objection 3. If two things be proposed as equal under one aspect, nothing hinders us from considering in one of them some particular point of superiority, so that the will has a bent towards that one rather than towards the other."
Hang on a second, I think you're mixing me up with "Dr. Dave F. Davidson". You're replying to things I said and things he said in the same comment, and I'm not sure if the replies to me are actually directed at me.
I'm a compatibilist, saying free will (along with moral agency, blame, punishment) is compatibile with, and in fact probably requires, determinism. He's saying free will doesn't exist (because it's *incompatible* with determinism) and that we should never punish people for anything, which I criticised above.
And he's the one using the American "z"s...
Yeah, I realised that about half way through but I was so BEFOGGED IN A CLOUD OF EMOTIONALISM that I didn't want to stop and sort it all out.
Apologies to all concerned. I still think your "prison is horrible, death is better" stance and his "quarantine them and punish them to force to behave" stance are not reconcilable as to how to treat the irredeemable who, despite all the nice shiny clean no more poverty environment and Bestest Childraising Educating Methods still go out and do naughty things.
You're more reasonable to talk to, Doctor Dave The PhD in Philosophy is heavy on the theory and "leave us be ever so rational" but not so great about what will the theory look like once translated into practice.
"I still think your "prison is horrible, death is better" stance"
Um, that wasn't me either that was anomie. I'll accept the blame for that since "I criticised above" could mean in reply to your second-level comment OR in reply to Davidsin's top-level comment (I meant the latter). And it could mean earlier or later depending on the comments are set to Newest or Chronological.
Now having cleared that up, I need to go to bed as it's 4 am in Victoria. I'll reply to the parts of your comment directed at me when I can.
That long quotation from whomever that was was very hard to understand, ie unclear. But you made some interesting and good points after that. I will re-read and reply later. But the first thought that came to mind is we must make an effort not to be emotional about the imagined end of free will. It will be very tempting to defend free will merely because our emotions in favor of justice (and even revenge) and our emotions that want to punish bad deeds rise up and motivate our reasoning in favor of free will. "What are we going to do about XYZ terrible thing?!" That is a bit of evidence that emotions are at work and we ought to look again. More soon. Thanks!
Trying to figure out how to deal with the end of free will is premature, since the non existence of free will isn't a fact.
You don't understand clear English? I thought that passage was easy enough to follow. But then again, I'm not pretending to be any more elevated than I am as an ordinary person.
Doctor Dave, PhD. In Philosophy. Kind of you to slap your qualifications down on the table like that, so we lesser mortals can be properly put in our places.
I agree. It’s fairly basic 19C or early 20C English. I wouldn’t take any notice of credentials on the internet either.
You wrote: "Even with the nice, poverty and stressor-free environment envisaged by Sapolsky after government intervenes to end all childhood poverty, there will still be people with genes selecting for more violent behaviour, less impulse control, and so forth. Those genes may not be expressed in an environment that represses them, but maybe they will break out in some cases" .... And then you wonder what will we do then? Do you mean "how will we punish them if there's no FW and no MR?" If that is your question, I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine. We quarantine and try real rehabilitation but if rehabilitation is unsuccessful we continue with quarantine. Free will deniers like Sapolsky and especially Greg Caruso have explicitly analogized to public health, where we do not necessarily blame people who are disease vectors but we nevertheless are occasionally justified in quarantining them perhaps against their will. (Although if they were rational they would see the merits in them being quarantined if they are disease vectors.)
" I think Sapolsky's answer is that we do not punish, we quarantine."
Quarantine is being forced to live somewhere you don;t want to, and so is jail. The problem with the Harri/Sapolsky approach is that the resulting approach to criminal justice isnt different enough from a typical western society.
Do you think locking people up in solitary confinement is any more humane? The system we have right now is that we put petty criminals in prison, knowing full damn well that prison is not going to magically rehabilitate them, and then let them out an arbitrary amount of time later, only for them to commit the same crime again (or worse) and they end up back in prison. This isn't about being "nice", this is about making the system actually work.
And free will not existing doesn't mean persuasion doesn't work, it obviously does. Humans clearly have agency, but there are clear limits to it. Reasonable people do not not commit crime because society is set up in a way so that there is a massive incentive not to commit crime. The people who commit crime anyways are either 1. stupid enough to think they can get away with it, 2. stupid enough to not even realize it's a crime, or 3. smart enough to see that the system is flawed enough that they actually can get away with it. The last one has the obvious fix of improving the system so that it isn't possible to get away with it, and the second one you might be able to fix by teaching civics better in school (though you can't expect all the kids to actually learn), but the first one doesn't have any obvious solution. Threatening greater punishment doesn't matter because the punishment isn't even being considered by them in the first place. And we currently do not have the means to cure stupidity. They are always just going to be a liability.
So what can we even do about this? Well, locking them up permanently is the usual solution, but that's both a waste of resources and needlessly cruel. Using them as slave labor is a bit more productive (and something the US does already). But the most ethical solution is just to put them out of their misery. The dead cannot suffer, after all.
You've gotten a lot of pushback, particularly on your final two sentences, but I see the logic in the overall message, particularly in your description of the criminal mindset.
I even see the logic in your final paragraph, with a caveat that the "we" you mention should not be the state, but rather the individual targets of criminal attempts. There is no better time to permanently end the suffering of a criminal than *while he is actively engaged in crime* and there can be no possible mistake about it.
I think one of the issues in this thread is that most of the highly intelligent people who post on ACX are too intelligent to *accurately* imagine what it's like to be the kind of stupid that leads to criminal acts.
It's not their fault; the people writing comments here are almost universally living in highly intelligent "social bubbles" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/). They tend to have highly intelligent family, seek highly intelligent friends, and end up in careers which expose them to highly intelligent peers. They might not *consider* themselves to be highly intelligent - because they tend to socialize with highly intelligent people, they know people who are even smarter than they are - but nevertheless, they're highly intelligent and everyone they know pretty well is highly intelligent, and thus they instinctively model the minds of *everyone* from this perspective.
They can't *fully* model what it's like to be truly stupid; unobservant, incapable of dispassionate self-reflection, unable to accurately predict the consequences of a given action, unable to absorb information, unable to update priors. They can't model what it's like to have an entirely different set of motivational priorities based on an *inability* to think, and that's why so many of their suggestions about how to help and/or manage stupid criminals are ultimately unsuccessful.
I'm not nearly as intelligent as some folk here, but I'm (deliberately) underemployed in a job which provides long-term exposure to not only different classes, but wildly different levels of intelligence. I worked closely with a few low-IQ people for *years,* people who were only *just* intelligent enough to have a fairly simple job, and it took me years and *years* to fully understand and accept that they weren't merely under-educated or emotionally unbalanced, problems which might be corrected with enough resources.
No.
They're simply...
Stupid.
Too stupid to choose to do better.
And these were stupid people who were just smart enough to be capable of keeping a job for multiple years! There's a whole bubble of people under them who are too stupid to even want to keep a job, much less actually manage to keep one.
You're right when you say, "Threatening greater punishment doesn't matter because the punishment isn't even being considered by them in the first place." I've seen that demonstrated over and over; my stupid coworkers would be confronted with a relatively simple problem, either at work or in their personal lives, and simply *could not solve it,* no matter how much informal education they received from me or others about it.
There is no cure for stupidity, and it is a liability, and woe unto the society who cannot recognize it.
"The system we have right now is that we put petty criminals in prison, knowing full damn well that prison is not going to magically rehabilitate them, and then let them out an arbitrary amount of time later, only for them to commit the same crime again (or worse) and they end up back in prison"
That depends on who "we" are -- some systems are morerehabilitative than others.
You were making good points and then you lost me at the end there.
Well, what are you going to do with them? In the bright shiny 'no free will it's all determinism' future, we've done away with prisons and nobody is raised in a bad environment anymore.
And yet, oddly enough, there will be criminals still - since we have plenty of people raised in good environments today who engage in crime.
But they can't help it, poor dears, it's their genes and they can't even choose to change their behaviour, no more than Sapolsky can choose which pair of socks he puts on in the morning*
So. What. Then. Do. You. Do. With. Them?
I think the "poor dear" approach will fall out of favour as criminals continue to crim, and the "put 'em in boiling oil" element will predominate. Drugging people into zombies is as bad as solitary confinement. If we agreed even to pretend that people had free goddamn will, maybe we could do something to help them change, but since we're going to treat everyone as meat robots, there is no "helping" or "change", there is only "put the shock collar on them and jolt them with volts when they offend". That's a better outcome? I don't want to live in that world, thanks all the same.
Yes, let's just kill the inconvenient. Who would possibly object to the death penalty for "hmm, don't like the face he makes"? And when you yourself are judged inconvenient for someone or other, just step into the disintegration booth, there's a good meat robot.
Lord God in Heaven, I don't even support execution for murderers, but for "you can't help your genes, and you certainly can't do anything to fight against them because free will is an illusion, so we're going to kill you"?
*'He likes to tell a story about how, immediately after finishing a syllogism concluding in the falsity of free will, someone says to him, "You're dressed nice today," and, as Sapolsky tells it, "I say 'Thank you,' as if I had anything to do with it."'
You wrote: "So. What. Then. Do. You. Do. With. Them? I think the "poor dear" approach will fall out of favour as criminals continue to crim, and the "put 'em in boiling oil" element will predominate. " I responded to someone else a few minutes ago in a way that I think is a good response to your point just quoted too. First, emotion seems to be in control of your reasoning (see an even earlier post tonight). Second, quarantine along the public health model. Not backwards looking deontological deserved blame-y punishment, but utilitarian forward looking harm preventing not based in desert/blame quarantine. Quarantine . That's what we do with them then.
Here's some cold logic for you:
If you put a bunch of people with criminal tendencies into the same place, they are going to attack each other. If you allow it to happen, that makes it even more of a punishment; if you prevent it with solitary confinement, that makes it even more of a punishment; if you prevent it by hiring guards to keep order, you have reinvented prison.
Oh, NO! Am I being EMOTIONAL????
Just like a woman with her empty little head which can't handle anything like cool, calm reason and logic of men, yes?
As you may gather from the rather heavy-handed sarcasm there, I gave up being terribly, terribly impressed by the "you're being emotional" argument a long time ago. I think that emotion does have a place in this discussion, when we are talking about people as meat puppets.
" Quarantine . That's what we do with them then."
So, prison, then. Nice prison, kind prison even, but still prison. So you and OP need to argue that one out (so logically and reasonably and non-emotionally) because they want to do away with prison entirely and would prefer to execute the offenders rather than confine them.
If blame is not deserved, then punishment is not deserved, either. We don't blame an oak tree for not being a willow. And undeserved punishment has no limits as to cruelty or how long it is inflicted.
...It's just so sad. In an effort to appear "moral" and "humane", people end up creating a system that perpetuates far more suffering than one that simply operates pragmatically. Yes, of course there is genetic variance, the people who claim it doesn't exist are insane. And that ultimately means there are always going to be people born whose existence cannot be tolerated by society. It's obviously not their fault, but the reality is that they are going to cause more harm than good if they're allowed to walk free.
In a perfect world, gene editing would allow everyone to be made compatible with society, but that world doesn't exist yet. Civilization's existence is conditional on people actively working to perpetuate it, and some are just physically unable to do so. There is only so much slack that can be tolerated before everything falls apart. And for the record, if I am ever deemed a liability... I'm not going to complain. I don't particularly value my own life.
"In a perfect world, gene editing would allow everyone to be made compatible with society, but that world doesn't exist yet."
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
This is a perfect example of how sentimentality leads to cruelty. Prison is so horrible! Let's avoid having to put people in prison by.... murdering them, the same way unwanted puppies are drowned. Except *shudder* drowning puppies? How barbaric! Getting rid of human dross, that's just hygienic, on the other hand.
I don't know whether to pray for Paperclip AI to come fast or not, before we get the post-free will 'utopia'.
We are observers in the branched block universe, discovering the world (including ourselves) not changing it.
Of one of the other theories.
Anything non-blocky is not really compatible with relativity, spatially separated observers have different future lightcones, and the union of all of them is basically the block universe.
You are supporting a branched cosmos as well, but you have no reason to believe that branching, by some QM mechanism, is compatible with GR .QM assumes a flat spacetime, GW assumes the opposite.
Also, the block universe thing isn't a straightforward implication of GR, as Rovelli argues here:-
https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02474
Read the link, and it's unusually bad. All sneery and without any clear description of "the third option". Expected better from Carlo Rovelli.
If find this interesting and intriguing but you'll forgive me if I don't understand. Could you humor me and explain how relativity can be glossed as "spatially separate observers have different future lightcones" and also how all of them unified is the block universe? The block universe in my laymen's understanding was, I thought, a way of characterizing our universe as it would look to a being capable of standing outside of it, outside of space-time. Thanks!
Sure, I'll try to explain it the way I understand it. So, relativity, among other things, means relativity of simultaneity. That is, at any spacetime point the spatial "slice", the surface in space where t=const depends on the observer's direction and velocity. If we take all possible directions and velocities at a given point, the union of these t=const surfaces will cover the spacelike separated parts of the observer's lightcone. So, imagine that X is the union of the past and future lightcones, and the observer is in the middle, then the constant time surfaces cover all but the top and bottom part of the X. Now, for a set of observers at a slightly different spatial point it will be a different lightcone, something like XX. With the lines, of course, extending infinitely far into the past and the future. If you take all possible observers, then the union of all the XXXXXXXX.... covers the whole spacetime, present, past and future. This is different from Galilean relativity, where all observers agree on the t=const slice, and you can have a Growing block universe rather than eternalist universe. Not so in Einstein's relativity, where there is no preferred spatial slice that can grow the universe from the past into the future. You are basically stuck with eternalism.
The situation is more complicated in quantum mechanics, especially if one subscribes to the version of it with unitary evolution without collapse (usually leading to the Many Worlds emergent branching due to decoherence and einselection). So the eternal universe is not just one connected block, but more of a tree, with infinitely many branches sticking out everywhere. But "from the outside" it still looks like a static object, just a rather intricately shaped.
Hope it makes sense. Please feel free to point out any errors you may notice.
It's It's a bit misleading to imply 89% of philosophers are pro free will, when many of them are compatibilists , who are anti libertarian free will.
I don't think it's misleading. But yes there are two different definitions of free will. Together they comprise 89% of philosophers. And while they both endorse "free will" they mean rather different things by it.
I think both above comments are a mistake. Compatibilists and libertarians don't (in general) mean different things by "free will" - if that were the case they would not be competing views, which they are. They mean the same thing by "free will", but have different beliefs about it - in particular, about its relation to determinism.
I do not agree. I read you saying X but I do not see a separate idea Y on offer as support for X.
They have two diff definitions. I laid them out. LIB is you could have done otherwise which is contravened by causal determinism. (This framing, by the way, is recognized as accurate by as disparate participants as Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Josh Greene and co-author Cohen, most textbooks etc.) COMP says you COULD NOT have done otherwise because you are part of the causal chain, the casual chain of causal determinism, but you are free if you are caused in the right way, in a special way .(And then various COMPs have various descriptions of what kinds of causes are "constraining" and make us unfree and which kind of causes allow for free will of this COMP sort.
Could you expand please on what those beliefs are? Those about FW's relation to CD?
Here is how my framing goes.
The problem of FW is a prima facie conflict between an intuitive (inchoate and undefined) sense of FW and the truth of causal determinism. The various psble positions in logical space can be found by two questions.
1) Are FW and CD incompatible?
2)) If yes, which one obtains and which one doesn't?
You can answer #1 yes or no and then if yes we have one more degree of articulation to specify.
A. Incompatibilist Hard Determinism answers yes they are incompatible and the one that obtains is CD, FW is false. As a deductive argument for HD it's this.
P1. If CD then not-FW
P2. CD
Conclusion: Therefore, not-FW.
B. Incompatibilist Libertarianism says yes they are incompatible and then FW (defined as "could have done otherwise") obtains, CD is false. As an argument it's
P1. If CD then not-FW
P2. Not CD
Conclusion: Therefore FW is not ruled out.
Finally there is the position that says NO they are not incompatible, they're compatible. COMP does not have to answer which obtains as it says both do. But it is a sleight of hand (or "wretched subterfuge" as Kant put it) because while it says "both obtain" it has changed the definition of FW that obtains. How so? Because COMP affirms CD it thereby denies LIBFW. Because LIBFW contravenes CD. Interestingly, COMP agrees that LIBFW is contravened CD, so they are "incompatibilists" too. What they have done is say, like AJ Ayer does in Freedom and Necessity: LIBFW was always a dumb definition of FW, FW ought to mean not uncaused, but caused in the right way.
". LIB is you could have done otherwise which is contravened by causal determinism. "
Which would be contravened by casual determinism *if it were true*. You keep taking the hypothetical to be categorical.
"COMP says you COULD NOT have done otherwise because you are part of the causal chain, the casual chain of causal determinism, but you are free if you are caused in the right way, in a special way ."
"Special" doesn't mean anything mysterious -- it's pretty much the legal definition of responsibility -- you are and adult, yo have a normally functioning brain, and you are not under external duress.
"But it is a sleight of hand (or "wretched subterfuge" as Kant put it) because while it says "both obtain" it has changed the definition of FW that obtains."
It changes the definition if the LIB definition was clearly the definition, but earlier you said the definition was "inchoate". ...so maybe it just was never clear.
1) Compatibilists often do not agree that being part of a deterministic causal chain means you could not have done otherwise. One area on which there is debate is what the "ability to do otherwise" amounts to, and there are both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of this ability (See for example this section of the Stanford encyclopedia article on compatibilism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#CompAbouFreeDoOthe)
2) Your final paragraph is very confusing. It looks to me like you are making the mistake of inferring from the fact that compatibilists and libertarians disagree about what is included in or entailed by some concept (in this case FW), they are using the term "free will" with different meanings. That's a bad inference. In both the mouth of the libertarian and in the mouth of the compatibilist, "free will" can mean what you call FW, and their views are competing views about FW. Don't conflate people having different theories about some concept with them using a term with different meanings. By analogy, utilitarians and kantians do not (necessarily) mean something different by "right" - they are both using "right" with its ordinary meaning. They just have different theories about rightness.
The literature is of course a little messier than this, but I think the best way to understand the debate between libertarians and compatibilists is that they (and ordinary people as well) use "free will" with more or less the shared meaning "the kind of control over one's action necessary for moral responsibility and desert". Then they have substantive (not verbal!) disagreements about what this kind of control involves.
SEP:
"4.1 Compatibilism about the Freedom to Do Otherwise
The Consequence Argument (section 3.1) makes a strong case for the incompatibility of determinism and the freedom to do otherwise. Assuming that determinism is true, it states that:
No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.
Compatibilists who accept that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility must show what is wrong with this powerful argument. They also should offer some account of what John Martin Fischer (1994) has called regulative control—a form of control agents possess when they can bring about X and can refrain from bringing about X— that makes clear how it is possible even at a determined world. We will first consider three different compatibilist attempts to unseat the Consequence Argument. Then we will consider how some compatibilists, the so-called New Dispositionalists, explain regulative control, that is, how they might explain the freedom to do otherwise in a way that is compatible with causal determinism."
I have a job. Two actually. Where do you all find the time?! I will respond to all comments as soon as I can. This is fun. (Except getting screamed at. That gives me a stomach ache and is not appreciated.) But for now here is what I can say about that passage from SEP.
They need to show that CD does not contravene couldadoneotherwise.
But what Frankfurt shows is that “FW” (the intuitive folk notion, invariant necessary and sufficient conditions of proper use for which philosophers tease out the contours via thought experiment and the method of cases (I say all this because later I will say something about kludged concepts and experimental philosophy and Knobe/Doris's "variantism")) does not require that you could have done otherwise.
In other words and without that distracting paranthetical, all that Frankfurt shows is that the folk concept of FW does not turn, as some had thought, on couldadoneotherwise, it turns on whether or not the action was caused in the right way.
Frankfurt shows that what matters (ie what the folk concept of FW has built into it) is the nature of the causal chain leading up to the given action, ie was it your intention that caused you or was it the brain control chip).
This is still a version of what I’ve called COMP which is folks who endorse CD and endorse that CD contravenes “couldadoneotherwise/LIBFW” and thereby endorse that people could *not* do otherwise and yet might have “free will”... But by this account “free will” here no longer means “could have done otherwise” it means “caused in the right way” thus...as I've been saying... there are two definitions of FW out there. LIB and COMP.
I wonder if I think this because (or if those who disagree disagree because) of a take on stuff in the ballpark of experimental philosophy's attack on philosophical methodology. Ex-Phi has shown that people will say XYZ is a case of free will and ABC is not a case of moral responsibility etc depending on various experimentally manipulatable features of the case(s) like the extremity of violence in the act or the abstract discussion of causation or about norms like who gets to take pens for free and who doesn't.
Having reflected on that stuff I do not think there is a stable folk concept of FW to be discovered (there is not a description of it as necessary and sufficient conditions of its application across all possible scenarios). Thinking that there is nec-and-suff-cond etc is what Knobe/Doris call invariantism and it is classic in philosophy. But it's more likely that we have a kludged together set of propositions that could not be made internally consistent without "revising" away one of the intuitive judgments on edge cases.
But Frankfurt et alia are still going on as if the task is to tease out the true folk concept. So, right, they might not like to hear or not accept that there are two definitions out there LIB and COMP. .... Thanks! More soon as I can.
Please don't do link-only emails. It breaks reading apps and makes it much harder to read articles offline.
I prefer to read on web, and the current emails don't even have a link to the website anywhere on them. I end up having to go search for the article from scratch. That seems broken too, and is a baffling choice.
They do - just click the title of the post (large font at the top).
Here's a puzzle that combines some rather boring computer programming with a cute piece of maths.
What is the following snipped of C code (edited to fix several typos - good catch, those who spotted them) for?
int f (uint x)
{
n = __builtin_ctz(x);
return (((x>>n)-1)&0x7) || (n&1);
}
(Note: the question is "what is it for?", not just "what does it return?" - there's a reason you might want this function.)
The first half of the or returns 0 only if the number in binary ends with 001 followed by any number of trailing zeroes. So 1,9,17,25,33... as well as any of those multiplied by a power of 2 (1,2,4,8..., 17,34,68..., 25,50,100...). Otherwise, it returns the last three digits before the trailing zeroes. The second half returns 0 if there's an even number of trailing zeroes (meaning the number is a power of 4), 1 otherwise.
So, it identifies numbers that are not powers of 4 or 1 more than a multiple of 8? I have no idea what that would be for.
Besides, couldn't you simplify it to the following?
return ((x>>n)&0x6) || (n&1);
The whole thing smells like Mersenne primes and Euclid–Euler theorem.
Is it to test if your compiler can detect imbalanced brackets?
Because it looks like you've got one more close than open.
In case it's a forum rendering issue, I'm seeing this for the last line: "return ((x>>n)-1)&0x7) || (n&1);"
In any case, that makes it much harder to figure out what the code is meant to be doing.
Hm, so... chop off all the trailing zeros, flip the lowest (and possibly only) 1 to be a 0, and then ... bitwise-and the last three bits with 111? Why not bitwise-and with 110? I'm probably misunderstanding something; it's been quite a while since I worked at this level. Then return it if it's non-zero, or else return ... whether there was an odd number of trailing zeros? But why go base-16 for &0x7 but not for &1? I could easily be forgetting some arcane C behavior.
Anyway, I'm coming up blank. Probably I'm too rusty to figure it out.
(Did you mean "__builtin_ctz", with no 'g'? And is there a missing open-paren in the first half of the return? Also, since there's no explicit check, it's probably worth noting that this could have undefined behavior if the argument is 0.)
[Edit to remove rot13 since no one else is doing it.]
Is this the first step in testing if a positive integer is a square? If x is a square, then f(x) is zero, and this lets you efficiently rule out most numbers. But that seems too trivial to be the actual use.
Spot on. If, for example, someone sent you two files of numbers, one of which was mostly square, and you somehow garbled the top bits of each number, this would let you tell which were candidates for low bits of squares.
I don't think that's true.
36 is a perfect square, 100100 in binary. N = 2.
(1001 - 1) & 111 || 10 & 01 = 100 & 111 || 10 & 01 = 100 || 0 = 100b, so f(36) = 4.
No, (1001 - 1) & 111 = (1000 & 111) = 0, so f(36) = 0.
That seems right. Hadn’t occurred to me that if x is odd, x^2 mod 8 is 1, but it sure is.
The other side of the comparison isn't right, then. It checks if n (number of trailing zeroes) is even, not x.
If we write x = 2^n * b, where b is odd, the function is zero iff n is even and b is 1 mod 8. x is a square iff b is a square and n is even. If b is a square, then b is 1 mod 8 (since it's the square of an odd number), so if x is a square, then the function is zero.
White space is now back on my iPhone.
I was having a similar problem on my browser.
I'm interested to know your opinions on the recent ruling by Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick rescinding Elon Musk's last compensation deal with Tesla. I'm particularly interested in the opinion of anyone with no particular opinion of Mr. Musk himself (if such exist).
The ruling in full can be found here (https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=359340), and there are plenty of media summaries out there, but briefly, as I understand it: this compensation deal was quite unusual in that it made very high compensation contingent on achieving commensurately difficult milestones. The deal was voted on and approved by the shareholders, but a lawsuit was filed (nominally by a shareholder) shortly thereafter, challenging that the shareholders had been misled and the deal was unfair to them. This ruling rescinds this deal six years later, after all the specified milestones have been achieved. It finds that the company had described members of the company's board as independent, who were too closely affilliated with Mr. Musk to be described that way. Consequently (based on Delaware law), the deal would have to be "entirely fair", and the defendants could not meet the burden of showing this.
It's important to note that all payments were contingent on large increases to the stock price, so there was no way for shareholders to lose money on this.
One of the most relevant sticking points is this:
"The deal was voted on and approved by the shareholders, but a lawsuit was filed (nominally by a shareholder) shortly thereafter, challenging that the shareholders had been misled and the deal was unfair to them. "
The shareholders voted on the measures, but the proposal did not (according to judgement) include relevant and important details. This is tantamount to misleading shareholders . That's an enormously big sticking point, and is why the deal was later amended and struck down as unfair in this judgement. By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair" which means "agreed to in premise on mutual understanding of all concerns.
There is nothing particularly incorrect about compensating people involved in a business.
There is something incorrect about the means to doing so being pushed through by misguiding the shareholders of a public company by not informing them of the relevant factors behind a proposal. It fundamentally undermines the logic of shareholder capitalism.
There are other reasons why the deal in particular is dubious and certainly questionable, but the core logic of the ruling is simply the above[1, 2]. Any inquiry which finds that shareholders agreed to a proposal which was later found to have been submited for consideration on flawed premises is generally something the securites regulators of the largest financial market in the world takes rather seriously. It is more or less, err, the only way to have a functioning investment world.
[1] one example: Musk' compensation was based on market capitalization, not share price, and much of Tesla's gains has come from issuing vast amounts of new shares profitably scooped up by various interested parties which hae all been interested due to the high flying antics of Mr. Musk. This inflates the market cap, but might not be in keeping with the interests of any actual shareholders. There's dubious economic merit to the figurhead repeating that the company could be the most profitable one in the world and then pushing through issuing more shares. One might reasonably wonder if he means what he is saying, or if he is doing it because he knows that if it works, his gain will be enormous. It misaligns shareholder incentives with that of the figurehead.
[2] Logically, the proposal has an issue of coherency. Musk already owns and owned significant shares of Tesla at the time of the proposal. What further incentive is gained by paying him more money if the value of the enormous percentage of the company he already owns from increases in value? Significantly, a value that is so high as to be the highest in literal history? His increase in payout comes at the cost of non-controlling shareholders. In all senses of the word, that's their money too. Musk' proposal stipulates the ability to cash out in terms which will directly influence their share value. It misaligns the incentives of the shareholder and the figurehead.
2. Re your second footnote: "Logically, the proposal has an issue of coherency. Musk already owns and owned significant shares of Tesla at the time of the proposal. What further incentive is gained by paying him more money if the value of the enormous percentage of the company he already owns from increases in value? Significantly, a value that is so high as to be the highest in literal history? His increase in payout comes at the cost of non-controlling shareholders. In all senses of the word, that's their money too."
Counterpoint: All the shareholders (himself certainly included) stand to gain from the work Mr. Musk puts into the company, but only he bears the cost of putting in this work. In all senses of the word, that labour is his. Why should he not be compensated for this investment into the company?
There's an appealingly precise and natural way to resolve the tension between these two points: given a figure that we could agree upon as a "fair price" for Mr. Musk's service as C. E. O. of the company had he no prior equity in it, we should then be able to multiply that figure by whatever share of the company he in fact does not own, to arrive at a similarly fair price for the case where he has an ownership stake. For instance, if he owned around 20% of the company (as was approximately the case in real life), it would be fair to pay him 80% of what he would be paid if he owned 0% of it. The increased value of the 20% share of the company he owns accounts for 20% of the value yielded by his efforts and 20% of his compensation therefor; the increased value of the remaining 80% of the company, which accrues to the other shareholders, is accounted for by 80% of the "fair" compensation were he not an owner at all.
To be sure, agreeing on said hypothetical price would be no trivial thing. Still, at least in principle, the breakdown I've outlined seems to me like the logically fair one. It sounds like you (and the judge) are suggesting, in principle, that the returns of a 20% stake in a company constitute 100% compensation for an investment in that company, which doesn't seem right to me.
Your hypothethical here illustrates the point rather well. As you write, agreeing on it would be no trivial thing.
As demonstrated by the court proceedings extensive interviews with several of the board members involved in the negotiations with Musk, they did not even engage in an untrivial amount of things. The point of the argument against it isn't that people cannot agree to a process by which Musk is paid for his services. The point is that there was no such negotiation honestly taking place.
The whole grant lacks logical coherency. If Musk is sworn to stay with Tesla, for life, as he says, and he owns a significant fraction of Tesla, as he does, and he makes vast sums of money from Tesla increasing in share value, as he does, then what is gained by Teslas as an entity in paying Elon even more money, above and beyond the enormous amounts of money he would already be getting for doing the thing he says he is going to be doing?
Any negotiation based on these premises should account for those facts. But in this case, it seems this did not happen. To wit:
" The defendants also point to the duration of the process (nine months) and the number of board and committee meetings (ten) as evidence that the process was thorough and extensive. The defendants’ statistics, however, elide the lack of substantive work. Time spent only matters when well spent. Plus, most of the work on the compensation plan occurred during small segments of those nine months and under significant time pressure imposed by Musk. Musk dictated the timing of the process, making last-minute changes to the timeline or altering substantive terms immediately prior to six out of the ten board or compensation committee meetings during which the plan was discussed." (p5)
And
" That timeline envisioned that on July 7, the Compensation Committee would “[g]ain agreement on proposed approach, award size and metrics/goals” and “[g]ain preliminary approval of grant agreement[.]”208
The timeline reflected a reckless approach to a fiduciary process, given that the Compensation Committee had not yet discussed any substantive terms nor met concerning the Grant. Despite the break-neck speed contemplated by the timeline, Maron reported to counsel on June 18 that Ehrenpreis was “aligned on the plan and timing." (p41)
and
" Defendants emphasize that nine months passed after the initial April 9 call between Musk and Ehrenpreis until the Board approved the Grant. In reality, however, most of the work on the Grant occurred during small segments of that nine- month timeline and under significant time pressure imposed by Musk " (p129).
--
There's a lot of other general descriptions of a rushed negotation process, a lack of oversight and a seeming total inability to engage in the very thing your hypothethical requires: Negotiation as to a fair compensation for services rendered.
By not even engaging in the trivial things, let alone the non-trivial, the board directors in charge of working out the grant demonstrate a lack of fiduciarcy duty and basic governing competence.
So in that sense, the ruling is pretty spot on. That's why I brought up that that from any reading of the agreement, it's pretty understandable why a Court ruling would rule that there's some vast amounts of corporate government failures here.
I disagree with you on a number of points. I believe that dealing with them in separate replies will be easier for both of us.
1. On the issue of fairness, before taking issue with your position, I'd like to make sure I've correctly understood it:
On the one hand, you write:
'By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair" which means "agreed to in premise on mutual understanding of all concerns.'
On the other hand, you describe the shareholders as "misguided" by the omission of "relevant and important details", and later describe the proposal as "submit[t]ed for consideration on flawed premises".
If the shareholders had an "understanding of all concerns", surely it follows that they were not ignorant of any details relevant to, let alone premises of, their approval! From your careful wording ("submitted for consideration" rather than "approved"), I infer that your position is as follows:
1. We can safely take it that the shareholders were aware of all relevant concerns, not withstanding any shortcomings in the presentation of the proposed compensation.
2. Nonetheless, the presentation *depicted* certain concerns as possibly relevant factors and mischaracterized those.
3. Even though this mischaracterization did not in practice affect the outcome of the shareholder vote, because it represented a bad practice that, if generally followed, would tend to harm shareholder interests, the vote based on this mischaracterization must be nullified.
Do I have this basically right?
Fairness in these corporate rulings is a procedural and legal principle. This is why the ruling overview references "entire fairness". The ruling also goes to the length of specifying what fairness means in this legal context.
As the ruling states, the proposal put to vote ommited several key details. This makes it, by its nature as judged by the court, not fair to the shareholders. And is the grounds for its suggested recession of the deal at this time. One can probably appeal this ruling, though do note the ruling also notes that perhaps other options are available.
I think you have inferred a position quite... oddly. I don't really know how to respond to you in a way that is coherent, sorry. Without in any way wanting to be rude your 1) is nonsense and 2) and 3) are strange. I am not sure who you are talking to, what that position would even be, or how it makes sense.
Shareholders cannot be aware of all relevant concerns and simultaneously be subject to relevant information being withheld, omitted and not presented. That would make them, errr, unaware of relevant concerns.
Especially not when those same concerns make a vote on a proposal materially quite different. The ruling (you have linked!) makes the argument that had these concerns been presented to the shareholders, the deal struck with Musk would have been quite differently. Namely, it might not have been agreed upon, because materially relevant information was omitted.
It also comes within close distance of insinuating that Tesla's board of directors completely bungled the barest semblance of competent corporate governance, which, okay, yeah, I can see that. Like, I knew some details before reading this ruling but it's also kind of incredible what level of tomfoolery was going on, if we take the ruling as God's honest truth. But since that's not entirely what the ruling is about, its not so relevant at present.
You wanted an opinion, this is that. It looks like fairly standard corporate governance legal proceedings to me, made interesting by the involvement of Musk, the sheer amount of money involved and because the legal ruling makes the single greatest logical inference of all time:
" Colonizing Mars is an expensive endeavor." (p15)
I'm sorry for inferring so oddly, but I couldn't make any better sense of your words than that. At any rate, now I say the key point where I misunderstood you. You wrote, "'By any measure, it was and is, in the strict meaning of "fair"..." which I read as something like "...conforms to the strict meaning of fair".
Now that you alerted me that you meant nothing of the sort, I've reread that bit more closely and realized those words meant "it was and is [unfair], per the strict meaning of fair". Sorry for misunderstanding at first.
I saw where someone looked at it, and they thought the sticking point was the lack of negotiation. Like, just for example, even assuming the sheer amount of money is legit, and it quite well could be, wouldn't it be in Tesla's interest to at least **try** to get Musk to stop getting into Twitter fights? Which is to say, devote more attention to Tesla, but not at the expense of anything else actually useful like SpaceX. There's really nothing more that the board could ask of Elon Musk other than "keep up the good work"? They don't have any ideas themselves, and only rubber-stamp the deal that Elon Musk himself proposed?
I highly object to any law that requires people to play more politics in business settings. Don't require companies to fight themselves, you'll just end up with stupid "queen's duck" chicanery. https://www.simplethread.com/looks-great-lose-the-duck/
I believe that was also Musk and the board's argument, that they don't do that type of politics-for-show at Tesla. Alas, it may be required by Deleware corporate law, and I can't really argue against that because they've seen more corporate malfeasance than I ever will. And it's not like the whole "largest compensation package in history" thing wouldn't attract a bit of scrutiny no matter what.
Highly uninformed on the issue, and Musk in general. Having said that, sounds dumb on Delaware's part.
At a core level, this seems like a really big deal for Tesla and Musk and 99% of the people involved were happy with the outcome given how well Tesla's stock did. Seems really dumb to mess with core features of a major company without, like, a good reason and it's not clear there was one.
Kinda curious whether the investors decide to reincorporate in Texas. I mean, ignore Musk, if you had a significant amount of money in Tesla, would you be happier in Delaware or some place like Texas or Nevada where the courts would have probably left this alone? And if the investors think their money is safer/better under Texas than Delaware for Musk, does that extend to their other investments.
But, honest, my gut says this was an iffy case that the judge decided based on CW stuff and if I was an active investor, that's...there's a risk there that's probably not worth the marginal benefit of incorporating in one state vs another. But I'm not an active investor and I'm curious what people with skin in the game do.
If I read everything correctly, the argument comes down to:
Musk made $110 billion dollars from Tesla's increased market valuation, and an additional $50 billion dollars would be unfair to other stockholders, because Tesla got nothing extra for offering that additional $50 billion (as the $110 billion he gets regardless would be incentive enough).
Because this incentive is high enough, the plan is unfair to other stockholders, as Musk's behavior would not substantively change had the compensation plan not been in place - basically a counterfactual which, at its core, is saying what Musk's behavior would have been, had things been different. Which seems, uh, dubious. Relative to that counterfactual, the other shareholders do lose money - but I don't know that that is actually a reasonable counterfactual to stake a legal case on. (I'm not a lawyer, maybe this is standard practice, but I regard all rescission cases with a certain degree of skepticism - because they are almost always decided after new information has arisen, and you can't actually return the parties to their prior state, because the new information changes their relevant stakes - for example, would the case have even proceeded had Tesla begun losing value, instead of increasing twelvefold? Seems like there's no point in pursuing the case at that point - that there is even a case for rescission means that rescission cannot actually return the parties to their prior state)
That all said - the shareholder in question did raise the lawsuit almost immediately, and it's been going through the legal process over the relevant timeframe, so in a sense, Musk, being aware that the case might be lost, should have priced the possibility of losing into his personal investment in the company. So, in the universe we actually live in, as opposed to the counterfactual universes - Musk did choose to do whatever Musk chose to do with the knowledge that the compensation package might get struck down.
There are some legal particulars I'd be vaguely interested in, such as whether there was a shift in a disposition of the court at any point but most particularly as benchmark targets were met (that is, if there is meaningful evidence that the court's attitude towards the fairness of the compensation package depended on how it played out), but I expect they'll be raised in appeal, and if they aren't, well, I don't care that much.
Not a lawyer, and the opinions I've read were not in this field. On the one hand, if the deal really was 33 times larger than the largest deal ever completed (which was to Musk, meaning he's previously agreed to a smaller package), I can understand ruling it unfair. On the other hand, with Musk controlling what I'm reading as only 21% of the company's voting power I think it's a stretch to say he strong-armed everyone in an unfair manner. And the guy who filed apparently had 9 shares of stock, that's ludicrous that he can bring a case like this. They're right to stop being incorporated in Delaware.
Otherwise, I'm amused by the footnotes including a citation of Star Trek. I've seen judges quote pop culture before but I don't think I've seen them cite it.
"It's important to note that all payments were contingent on large increases to the stock price, so there was no way for shareholders to lose money on this."
This does not logically follow.
How not? By the terms of the deal, if any money were paid to Mr. Musk, it would mean that the value of the company's shares had risen, hence the shareholders would have made money, not lost it.
The value of the shares *in total* would have increased, but that doesn't mean that the value per share has increased and so it doesn't mean that any stockholder has seen a net gain.
Hypothetical, making up numbers out of thin air: There are a billion shares of Tesla each with a market value of $500. Tesla then issues 250 million new shares, also selling at $500 because everybody thinks they're buying in to what will soon be a 25% larger company with 25% more factories, etc. Tesla sees that its market cap has increased by $125 billion, and therefore pays Elon a $25 billion bonus.
The market notices that the company they were expecting to be 25% bigger on account of all that new capital is really only positioned to be 20% bigger. And nobody's sure what Elon will do next except that it probably has more to do with Twitter than Tesla, so maybe they hedge and assume a 15% larger Tesla with 25% more outstanding shares.
TSLA now sells at $460/share. Every Tesla stockholder has lost 8% of their investment, a total of fifty billion dollars. Elon got half of that, and probably a bunch of short-sellers got the other half.
You can understand why a Tesla shareholder would call shenanigans if that happened. Or even if it looked like Elon was setting up for that to happen and lying to them about it.
Wouldn't diluting equity like that itself require approval by a vote of existing shareholders? If not, surely that would be the real root problem of the hypothetical you're describing, and it would be a problem with or without the compensation plan in question.
Not going to dig into the Delaware Civil Code directly, put per an SEC summary there is not a general requirement under Delaware law for shareholder approval to issue new shares. It can be required in some circumstances, and of course a company can put such a requirement in its own bylaws - which would seem sensible but I'm guessing that Tesla specifically is structured to "Let Elon be Elon" to the maximum extent allowed by law.
But even if a shareholder vote is required, "Vote for this new stock issuance and we'll put the money into new Tesla factories, moar profitz for all!" while hiding the gargantuan cut Elon will take off the top, seems like it would be fraudulent and/or lawsuit-inducing even if the shareholders do vote Yes.
Well, my narrow response to your example would be that if the compensation deal at issue damages shareholder interests only in case of a later "fraudulent and/or lawsuit-inducing event" damaging shareholder interests then it doesn't really damage shareholder interests in itself, and any damage you attribute to it should be incidental to the lawsuit resulting from that later event.
Still, you've helped me see that in principle, at some later point it might be in shareholder interests to issue new stock, diluting their ownership, so that the market cap target governing the C.E.O.'s compensation is hit, even if the shareholders have lost money. I don't know how likely a scenario it is, but I concede it's a possible one. Thanks!
You're ignoring the possibility that the stock price could have risen without this deal and indeed without Musk at the company at all.
By "lose", I meant "end with less than they started with".
My take on rulings like this in general - that is, "rulings dealing with things that only high-profile public figures are able to do, so that a) there is very little precedent and b) there's high emotional/political valence" is that they are a weak spot of the western "frame laws in broad generalities and then leave it to judges to disambiguate them" model of jurisprudence.
I don't know enough of the details of this case to have an informed opinion either way, and it would be quite hard for anyone claiming to do so that they genuinely were motivated by knowledge of and concern for the law rather than strong pro/anti Musk feelings.
But I'd be surprised if the law and existing precedent were unambiguous enough that it wasn't possible to make plausible-looking cases in either direction, and if that's true then a) the judge will have essentially pulled this ruling out of her arse, b) that would be just as true if she'd ruled in the other direction, and c) pulling a ruling out of her arse was her official judicial responsibility, because there was no-where else to get one from.
(Of course, this is just idle speculation. It's entirely possible that there really is detailed enough law to resolve this one way or another. But the two ways I could come to know that are "read a vast amount of Delaware case law" (too much like hard work) or "trust experts on Delaware case law who are not letting their partisanship overrule their expertise" (I don't know how to distinguish them from the ones who are), so I'm afraid idle speculation is all I have to offer.)
Just noticed Substack decided that new paragraphs in comments don't get spaces anymore. What a terrible decision. Especially since all these programs love to just chomp out empty spaces so you can't mitigate the damage they're doing. Change it back, idiots.
I still see a space between paragraphs. Using Safari/iOs.
They were gone for me earlier but are back now. I'm guessing someone broke something by accident but then fixed it.
This is new, isn't it? It wasn't happening a few weeks ago.
.
I thought Substack was shit because of absent devs, but I was wrong. The devs are here and they actively hate us.
"The devs are here and they actively hate us."
"It's that uppity bunch that write a million comments of 10,000 words each instead of being happy consumers on the mobile app just replying 'so insightful, dude, take my subscription', let's get 'em!" 😁
"Look, you're the ones who wanted to remove 'likes' to encourage discussion. It's not our fault that you people are so wordy!"
Just indent your paragraphs with nbsps
I tried that. Extra spaces to indicate a new paragraph are deleted too.
wut's nbsps
more trouble than it's worth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space
I recently watched a video essay on Youtube in which it was asserted that fourth-wave (current) feminism has morphed into a binary ideology of victim and oppressor. Either you are a victim (good), or you are not-a-victim, which equals oppressor (bad). There is no middle ground, and no agency.
I found the argument compelling. It explains such phenomena as university professors wearing face-masks, long after everyone else has given up. By wearing a mask, a professor is signalling that he is a victim, and therefore not an oppressor. By this means he hopes to avoid being cancelled, which is a salient risk for all authority figures these days, particularly those who work in universities.
I thought we were on to fifth wave by now? Must update my references!
https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/fourth-and-fifth-waves
Me, I'm stuck in old second wave, you kids get off my lawn now, okay?
Nth wave sticks around until it's popular (Time featuring an article is a sure symptom) and then it's off to N+1th wave (which contradicts Nth wave in a number of ways, how important those are is up to the viewer).
This is sloppy thinking. You need to define the group more carefully. Do you mean members of NOW? Women's studies professors? And then you need to figure out what the claim is precisely. Ideally in a way that's falsifiable. Do they exhibit significantly different behavior from professors in comparable disciplines? If they do, what is the cause? How do you know this? Etc.
There's a certain kind of explanation that works by making something similar to the other group and explains what their beliefs are to you. This inoculates you against directly interacting with them. It's very effective politically (and used by both sides) but not a good way to actually model the world. In a practical sense it degrades your ability to predict what that faction will do.
While I tend to agree with you, sometimes that approach actually works. You start looking at a group through a particular lens, and all of a sudden their previously-inexplicable behaviors make sense, and your predictions get a lot better. Although of course it doesn't remove the need for individual analysis of individual cases.
In this case, I'm kind of skeptical of the concept of "fourth-wave feminism" itself, although I admit that that's probably because I've been living under a rock and this is the first time I've heard the term. I'd tend to classify the phenomenon as a limb of "woke ideology", or whatever it's being called these days. It's like a borg drone, or maybe one of the lions that make up Voltron. Or better yet, one of the independent states that formed a union, and has been discovering that the feds keep gaining power, that more and more of their resources are sucked out and returned with federal strings attached, and that the very mention of "state's rights" is now anathema.
Here's a really good rule for life: never base your ideas about how a group of people think on what people who dislike them say about them.
If you want to understand contemporary feminism and you're not spending at least as much time - and probably quite a lot more - listening to, reading and engaging with contemporary feminists as you are to summaries of their beliefs by people who don't share them, you're going to fail.
This kind of silliness is a classic example of why. Yes, it gestures - very, very broadly, with massive, uncharitable, misrepresentations and oversimplifications - at a genuine trend, but overall it's going to hamper rather than help your understanding.
Which contemporary feminists do you recommend?
For what purpose?
Contemporary feminists whom I personally read regularly include a bunch of authors at Vox (which I generally think quite highly of even when I disagree with it, although slightly less so for its arts/culture coverage) or the Guardian (good news coverage, lousy comment and analysis), or the twitter feeds of Helen Pluckrose and Emma Pierson.
But those very much aren't a representative sample of contemporary feminism, and probably won't give you a good understanding of the distribution of opinions and ways of thinking therein. If you want that, I'm afraid I'm not in a position to offer well-informed advice.
> Here's a really good rule for life: never base your ideas about how a group of people think on what people who dislike them say about them.
I agree you shouldn't entirely. But do you actually apply this standard or is it special pleading for a group you're sympathetic to? For example, do you primarily base your view of pro-life groups on pro-life writings without significant reference to pro-choice writings? Do you spend at least as much time, if not more, reading and engaging with contemporary pro-lifers?
I don't do that with many groups. But I also wouldn't say that there's a general obligation to primarily base your opinions of a group on what their self-identification. Plenty of groups are highly self-deceived about what they actually are. You need to understand what a group believes they are. But you also need to accept those beliefs might have little, or no, basis in reality and privileging that self-conception reflexively is not a generalizable policy.
>I agree you shouldn't entirely. But do you actually apply this standard or is it special pleading for a group you're sympathetic to? For example, do you primarily base your view of pro-life groups on pro-life writings without significant reference to pro-choice writings? Do you spend at least as much time, if not more, reading and engaging with contemporary pro-lifers?
Yes, yes, and no respectively. I read more pro-choice than pro-life articles, (although not that many of either - it's much less of a live topic here in the UK) but I attach very little weight to what they have to say about the motivations of those who disagree with them (for example, I don't believe for a second that the desire to control women is a major part of the motivation of most anti-abortion activists). If I cared more about the motivations of anti-abortion activists, I would read more of what they have to say.
I guess if I were trying to convict myself of special pleading, you could point to the fact that I do attach at least some weight to Matthew Yglesias's suggestion that a big part of the motivation of CEOs hyping up immigration as a crisis is that they want to help Republicans win election and get tax cuts, not just because they care about immigration, despite not having listened to many CEOs. But even there, while this seems plausible (but far from proven) in the case of e.g. Jamie Dimon, I have a harder time believing it of Elon Musk.
I absolutely agree that many groups misunderstand their own motivations, and present unduly charitable self-images, so you certainly shouldn't take their claims at face value. But I think that practically *every* group understands its opponents motivations worse, and is unduly uncharitable by a greater margin. I think the best way to get a picture of how people think is to listen to them, but with an ultra-critical, ultra-cynical mindset. Where arguments from people's adversaries come in valuable is in highlighting gaps in the logic of their arguments, not it identifying flaws in their motivations.
> If you want to understand contemporary feminism and you're not spending at least as much time - and probably quite a lot more - listening to, reading and engaging with contemporary feminists as you are to summaries of their beliefs by people who don't share them, you're going to fail
Possibly, although contemporary feminists don't have much of an understanding of their own ideology either. Certain ideologies are so complex, ill-defined and all-encompassing that from inside it you can't see out. You ask a contemporary feminist to characterise an opposing position and you just get something like "Women should be rape-slaves". The ideology is an insatiable egregore (I only learned that word yesterday, I'm gonna overuse it this week) with a solid diamond motte every five feet and a bailey encompassing the entire universe. They can't characterise their own position because they think their own position is everything and everywhere.
Not every ideology is like that. If you ask a disestablishmentarianist and an antidisestablishmentarianist to characterise each others' positions on the relationship between the Church and the Crown then they can do it pretty well even if they disagree. A Sunni and a Shia can explain the difference between their beliefs much better than I can, even if they want to kill each other over it.
An egregious egregore, even?
I'm curious - when did you last ask a contemporary feminist to characterise an opposing position?
I see a fairly common misuse motte and bailey where people call a more extreme argument from one person the motte and a more reasonable argument from a different person the bailey. They then use this to dismiss the more reasonable argument as though the existence of a more extreme argument undermines it despite no one retreating from one argument to another.
As I recall, the essay was by a Frenchwoman who called herself a feminist, but disliked another prominent French feminist's characterisation of rioting Arab youths as members of the patriarchy. "They are male; therefore they are oppressors" rather than powerless and frustrated. Certainly a good part of the essay was orthodox doctrine.
That's interesting, but it still falls into the category "person attributing beliefs they disagree with to third parties", not "person describing their beliefs".
And obviously, the former is also very valuable, but to form an opinion of a group you do need lots of the latter first, and your summary makes me think you're probably missing it.
This sounds like a vast oversimplification of a genuine phenomenon. Directionally correct, but not necessarily all that much use in explaining why people think the way they do.
Left-wing politics has always been about dividing people up into "oppressor" and "oppressed" groups and attempting to build a coalition of "oppressed" that you, as a leader, can ride into power. That's just leftism 101, but there's plenty of other bells and whistles you can add which are probably worth understanding.
I am not convinced that this explains mask-wearing professors (if indeed those are still a thing, I haven't been to the US recently). That's just in-group signalling; at some point wearing a mask or not became a culture war thing in the US and he's still trying to display his allegiance. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative universe in which wearing a mask became right-coded instead (it's like a wall for your mouth designed to keep filthy foreigners out!) depending on exactly who was in power at which moment.
It started in China as a way to keep the smog out of your mouth. It had previous history where the lower rank would stuff paper in their mouth as a way to purify their breath when speaking to a higher rank.
That doesn't really sound like something the American right would adopt.
My wife and I I, between us, spend lots of time in the company of academics and we live deep in the heart of "blue" America. I'm struggling right now to even remember the last person I saw wearing a mask...somebody in line at a local 7-11 the other week was. And when we flew to/from Scotland over the holidays I saw a scattering of masks in the airports that we passed through. That's all that are coming to mind.
Isn't this just ingroup / outgroup signaling? There's an ideological gloss, fine, but I'm not sure it explains much more than the running model of "fourth-wave feminism is collectivist, similar to second-wave (but with different boundries) and in contrast to the more individualistic third-wave".
If it were that, mask-wearing would not be concentrated in authority figures.
Zero of the authority figures in *my* life wear masks, except in specific instances of sickness or high-exposure travel (Honolulu airport is a biological minefield). It sounds like you're extrapolating from a peculiar experience, one that you might be reporting secondhand if not largely theoretical?
Yeah, if you see someone wearing a mask these days, usually it mans they are either a germopobe, immunocompromised, or possibly contagious.
The last person I personally interacted with on a daily basis who regularly wore a mask was the longtime colleague and friend who, in December 2022, abruptly died at age 61 of "long-COVID" symptoms. (The virus attacked her neurological system which she had never previously had any issues with.) Her masking had become less consistent during 2022, which became a point of self-recrimination that fall as her doctors struggled to counteract the escalating random failures of various nerve centers in her body.
What does mask wearing have to do with feminism? And do you really think that professors who wear masks think they are trying to signal victimhood?
Recently I've been watching Succession clips on youtube. It looks like a really well written, well acted show with a whole lot of compelling and interesting characters, and I'm considering sitting down to watch the whole series (which would involve signing up for a whole new streaming service, but not a particularly big deal).
The only thing that gives me pause is the show's politics, which are not so much opposed to mine, but incoherently spaced across a gulf of misunderstanding from mine. It's a show where everybody is a conservative, but nobody is _really_ a conservative (because the writers can't even understand that as a coherent world view)... everyone is either cynically exploiting the conservative dum-dums to make money, or else they're pretending to be conservative while secretly being a crypto-fascist who wants to be bad and do fascist things because fascism. The right side of politics seems to be treated more or less like the dark side of the force, a seductive evil influence that corrupts everyone it touches. I feel like watching this show as a rightie or even a moderate would be an incredibly frustrating experience.
Can anyone who has seen the whole show tell me if I'm right or wrong?
You're incorrect. The show is about a malignant psychopath and how his relationship with his children shapes them into narcissists of different varieties, stunting them as people and crippling their abilities to achieve the goals he wants for them.
Any stuff about red team / blue team politics is just details. The patriarch of the show is indeed inspired by Rupert Murdoch, but he really only cares about the influence he can wield *for himself* with his right wing news network. He isn't a passionate conservative and isn't interested in shaping civilization with red team values, or anything like that. The little people that are impacted by the red team / blue team power struggle are beneath him.
The show also introduces a blue team version of the Roys and mercilessly skewers them, as well.
Don't worry about the politics. Just watch the show. I'm politically non-binary and I was delighted with it. I'm hard to please, so that's really saying something.
Edit: This ticker on Logan Roy's network is quietly one of my favorite jokes of a very, very funny show. No one who doesn't understand both teams could have written it. https://youtu.be/gW4ckooQngA?si=2O_qBflB1CbQZzwz&t=59
I'm just going to say it, forget "Succession", watch "The Wire" if you haven't already. It's a little bit longer, but it's the best TV series I've ever seen. If you do, I'd be interested to hear your reactions, especially given that our political views are a bit different.
This is terrible advice.
The Wire has its merits and was groundbreaking at the time, but isn't remotely as witty, nuanced, and self-disciplined as Succession.
I say that as a Peak TV connoisseur who procrastinated watching The Wire until 2021 because it felt like homework. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't as grim and onerous as I'd been expecting, but I was also thoroughly underwhelmed after all the hype, and then later outraged when it beclowned itself with silly like excesses McNulty's faked serial killer, Hampsterdam, and its increasing reverence for Omar as a legendary figure.
This scene alone is worth the price of admission
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A
I won't deny that there's been 15 years of refinement in the production of prestige TV, and The Wire shows its age. And it's always possible to hype things too much, leading to disappointment. But I would argue that in a lot of ways, Succession is **too** slick and *"too** tidy. The Wire is more like a Japanese brush painting where there's little ink blots and imperfections everywhere, where the circles aren't quite round and the lines aren't quite straight. Perhaps we simply have different tastes.
I'll push back a little on Omar; among other things, the last season should have deconstructed the myth. And some of the things in the show were toned down. In real life, the spiderman jump was from 2 floors higher, and the guy walked away with nothing broken.
As for Hamsterdam... I'm 99% sure we live in the same city, and I just don't see how you can say that! I was down there on a regular basis. IMO, the most unlikely part was the lack of guns. And some of the rest draws from the history of Kurt Schmoke, who I am reliably informed is a great guy, and who showed up as an extra in the show, and who "donated" the quote about being "the most dangerous man in America".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Schmoke
I watched the show and enjoyed it (although it does become repetitive). Realistically, you're not going to have your brand of "conservatism" represented unless you're a media billionaire but don't think it's particularly necessary. You probably won't enjoy it if you spend too much time worrying about whether a fictional character is a "true" conservative.
The politics mostly serve as an explanation of the characters (spoilers). One character, Conner, runs for president as a libertarian, despite having no political experience. Or really any sort of experience at all-he's spent most of his time managing a ranch that's paid for by family money and he becomes overwhelmed by even minor jobs like organizing catering. When he talks politics, it's vague non-sequitur and bizarre gotchas, similar to the canned arguments you'd see online. Sometimes he "debates" someone that is actually active in politics but they just roll their eyes and politely change the subject which he interprets as a victory.
While he fancies himself a serious political thinker and actor, he seems like he's just repeating the last thing he heard on a podcast. Or maybe a pop history book. But this sort of superficiality extends to every part of his life. He also "hyperdecants" wine and try to hack his sleep schedule. All off Conner's behavior is dictated by an insecurity that leads to hyperfixating on details without doing the actual work of a project. You can interpret his shallow libertarian tendencies as a criticism of libertarianism or as a continuation of his character's inability to seriously engage with anything, whether it's politics or home decoration. Personally, I viewed it more of a statement about Connor than about libertarians.
Connor Roy was interested in politics at a very young age.
> Personally, I viewed it more of a statement about Connor than about libertarians.
Yeah, he's an interesting character:
"You're needy love sponges. And I'm a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn't come back that's fine. Because I don't need love. It's a like a superpower. And if she comes back and doesn't love me, that's okay too, 'cause I don't need it."
Shiv: She’s a call girl, Connor!
The Roys are Blue Tribe, and are rich enough that their practical politics are largely about what benefit them, and they happen to own chunks of alternate-reality Fox News. They in no way should be considered "conservative" or "Red Tribe", but they fund their lifestyle by selling stuff to people who are, and not the smart ones at that. And that's where they get their view of the Red Tribe. TLDR, they're capitalists.
There **is** actually a legit crypto-fascist in later seasons, but I'd say about 95-99% of the people on the show are not portrayed as having well-thought-out, consistent principles. And the ones who do, tend to avoid the Roys, because the current generation of Roys are "not serious people" (to steal a quote from the show). They're horrible people who attract other horrible people to them.
But, it's a really good show. You can look at it as an examination of how power warps people who come in contact to it, much like comic book radiation or mutagens. Or as an occasionally Shakespearean drama. Or as wealth porn. And there's some brilliant acting and writing.
And hey, if you splurge for Max, and "Succession" doesn't work out, you can always check out "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" and "Veep".
Bunk: “I’m just a humble man with a big dick… I take that back, I’m not so humble.”
Lester Freamon: "But you'd be surprised what you can get done when no one's looking over your shoulder."
I think they tried to paint the whole right wing spectrum: uncle Ewan is the old archetype: no fun allowed, hard work, don't waste your food, small time farmer. Logan Roy is the boomer capitalist: greedy, shameless. The children are molded by their desire to be seen as cool by their own and younger generations, specially Kendall. Connor is the clueless libertarian trying to convince anybody that he is self-made. Siobhan tries to make it into the progressive elite with her NGO sting, fails and goes back into the staunch old media family empire. And Roman is the hedonistic true cynic.
Ewan wasn't really right-wing. What about the lawyer he got Greg? In the first meeting, he started talking about the structural contradictions of capitalism. Ewan's planning to give his money to Greenpeace. I think he's best characterized as an old-school leftie, familiar with anyone that has read Howard Zinn.
fair enough, He's just an Eisenhowever era man then, modeled after every meme hippie protagonist's grumpy father character.
Kinda funny that the actor who played uncle Ewan crazy glued his hand to a Starbucks counter in a protest to get non dairy creamer.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098162254/succession-actor-james-cromwell-glues-hand-starbucks-counter-protest
Is "real-life supergluin' " a pun or reference? It's a bizarre way to construct a sentence.
An attempt at colloquial English? Droppin’ the ŋ‘s of gerunds? Like us regular folk?
I shouldn’t really make fun. Unless I speak slowly and concentrate I tend to pronounce them as hard g’s. Got a lot of [See me]’s in phonology class IPA homework.
‘Yep, that’s how *you* pronounce it.’
Me talk pretty one day.
Maybe. I thought it might be meant to parallel the word "Secession" or maybe rhyme with Ewan.
Maybe so.
in-character Ewan would have done the same if they were slow with service
Ha!
I first saw him in "L.A. Confidential", and he has seemed sinister ever since, even when his roles are largely benevolent.
Oh that's funny! I first knew him from Babe and I will forever think of him as a giant sweetheart!
"Have you a valediction? Boyo?"
"Reciprocity, Mr. Hudgens, is the key to every relationship."
"You have your extracurricular activities, and I have mine. We must have a clarification session one of these days."
I knew Matthew Macfadyen from MI5 - ‘Spooks’ on BBC -
He was serious and competent in the spy show. Did a good job of playing a hapless dufus in Succession.
Yeah, it was damn right bizarre seeing him play a clumsy bumbling fool. You were always imagining he was running some op, and was about to snap out of it, which come to think of it…
And the heir to the throne is…
From what I can tell the show-writers are dirt-bag left types of the sort that are anti-woke enough to hang out with us reactionaries* in the NY art world's reactionary adjacent scene.
I personally found their depiction very gratifying, even if I'm sure it was calculated to send shivers down the spine of normie liberals; but then again my version of right wing politics might be more extreme than yours. Take a victory speech they write for a gubernatorial candidate for example:
"To my critics, I am not a demagogue. I am a defender of democracy. But democracy, it has this tendency that we have to beware to become mere transaction. You give me this, I give you that. I come begging for your vote. Welfare checkbook out. Crowning the welfare kings and queens, till everyone has become a little tyrant, crowned by the state. The model that I follow isn’t from the scorched marketplace, where cunning men haggle for the best price.
That’s not me. The democracy I believe in is where a leader emerges from the people, willed almost, into being, brought forth by the great sweetness of the virtue of the combined wisdom of the good people of this republic.
Don’t we long sometimes for something clean once in this polluted land? That’s what I hope to bring. Not something grubby with compromise. Something clean and true and refreshing. Something proud and pure... "
Added: * I'm more reactionary adjacent than reactionary myself.
It’s a smart well acted show. The family is pretty cynical, yeah. But no more cynical than the real life Murdochs.
The patriarch reads as pretty conservative. Roman Roy, the youngest son veers right by the series end.
It’s the only place I’ve heard the words ‘moving the Overton Window’ spoken out loud.
Plus Holly Hunter has a well acted part in the penultimate season.
I'm not surprised it's like that. Nobody likes an antagonist who's just stupid. They need to have some coherent motivation to actually be interesting and seem like a threat. And while fascism is still really stupid, it's still far more threatening than run-of-the-mill conservatism.
You will become less intelligent and less informed by watching the show.
RE: I recently saw someone recommend only including the first paragraph of a post in emails, then including a “go to website” link afterwards.
I like the idea. Large post load slowly to my phone. Having links would improve this so that I pay the download cost (time) only for those posts I want to read. After all, substack archives the entirety of every daily post so I can always go there to search for things I am interested in later.
re #4
Two factors contributing to me enjoying having the entire post in my email.
1) Easier to read and load. My recent email pulls automatically to my phone and I can read it without consistent network access, eg while flying.
2) I actively enjoy having my email as a repository of the initial text. I understand this one is probably a niche preference and can be solved by, eg, wayback machine.
Where do y'all store your old substack and newsletter emails?
I *don't* want to delete them (well, most of them); I enjoy the option of searching in a curated archive of interesting material, particularly some that I no longer have access to otherwise. But it's straddling the 17GB limit of my Gmail. Obviously, this is not what an online mailbox should be used for. But Thunderbird doesn't seem to be the tool for the job, unless the job is heating my room through overwhelming my CPU with its attempts to sync what has already been synced. In theory, I can download my email archive from GMail and throw Thunderbird at that static "mailbox", but it feels... not quite right, and besides, I want to be able to update it.
There has to be some tool for that, right?
You can store them on Readwise Reader.
I'm looking at its website and I have no clue what it actually does. Is it a "media library" for HTML files? Are they stored online? Synced across devices? Does it offer search over the library?
I wrote a piece last week that I think might be of interest to ACX readers. In it, I try to come up with a speculative definition of social status based on what others like Tyler Cowen and Rob Henderson have written. I've always found the concept of social status a bit hand-wavey and this is my attempt to make sense of it.
https://nathanielhendrix.substack.com/p/what-is-status
Feedback also very welcomed.
I have found this explanation quite good: https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole/
I'd appreciate if there was more discussion of how this particular model of power and status differs from others. Reading that essay just now, I just kept thinking "this is just repackaging Machiavelli's notions of fear and love, through an evolutionary lens, right?". And in the end there was no mention of Machiavelli, or any explanation of whether this model differs from his and how.
So, does it differ? If "dominance" is a different word for fear, and "prestige" a different word for love, is it still the case that (1) it's best to be both feared and loved, (2) if you have to choose, fear is more effective than love, and (3) it's essential to avoid being hated? The end of the essay seems to imply that *love* is more effective for maintaining power, but gives little explanation for this highly surprising (given most historical and contemporary political examples) claim.
It is probably a similar model, with more technical detail.
What exactly did Machiavelli mean by "love"? Do people "love" Einstein? Not sure. But he definitely has "prestige".
I understood the end as a claim that for humans it is impossible to rule using fear *alone*; you must also demonstrate some skills (e.g. social skills, strategy). If you were a 3 meter tall giant with sharp claws, someone would simply stab you in your sleep.
Disagree with point 3 and with the eventual conclusion. Status might be addictive, but not corrosively so; plenty of people throw away their status for the sake of whatever else they want to do (drunk-driving celebrities, Kanye-West-style rants, and such), and that's selecting from the people who cared enough to gain it in the first place.
I think you can replace the word 'status' with the word 'gravity', and the idea becomes clearer; social status is making people want to be around you, and at higher levels making them want to be you. That's part of why social gravity increases by attacking the larger bodies; you have to break people away from their gravity before they'll enter yours. People like social status because they like having people like them. People who don't like people let others have the gravity.
(Maybe Magnetism works better; then you can have high magnetism inside a group that magnetically repels other groups.)
Thanks for the thoughts. There's plenty more room for disambiguation in the concept of status, and I like the physical metaphors you brought up. Of the two, I think I prefer social gravity, simply because it brings to mind a kind of social Lagrange point where people achieve an equilibrium between granting status to multiple groups. I'm not sure whether the repulsive aspect of magnetism maps cleanly onto people who are very widely liked.
I think you're too quick to dismiss the relationship between status and reproductive success. It's a mistake to take modern failures of status to track reproductive success as definitive against the association. Another example of this kind of failure is our desire for sex as a proxy for promoting reproduction. In modern times we've largely decoupled sex from reproduction, but this in no way counts against the idea that the historical association explains our modern desires. Civilization is unnatural, and the products of civilization result in failures of various traits and proxies to result in reproductive success. But this doesn't mean the associations never held true.
It's also a mistake to focus on reproductive success in absolute terms. Evolution is statistical, and so as long as a trait is beneficial to some degree more often than not, we will see the trait selected for. While an old person may not reproduce, their legacy is relevant to their reproductive success; their kids' success is their own success. This is one of the core benefits of our finely-tuned sensitivity to status as proxy for reproductive success, it ensures we reproduce with people who are likely to have reproductively successful kids. It does your genes no good to reproduce with a low status partner who then has reproductively unsuccessful kids. Your genes still reach a dead end. This is also why women are far more sensitive to the status of their sexual partners. Their investment (historically) in each child was much higher and so were the risks of a bad mate choice. The association between status and sexual attraction is strong and must be well explained by any proposed concept of social status.
Your capitalize on play idea has merit, but I feel like it is another avenue for modern humans to demonstrate their reproductive fitness. As humans advanced towards modernity, our behavior expanded from narrowly focused on survival into creative avenues like art and other artifacts of modern minds that aren't directly relevant to reproductive fitness. These traits surely have evolutionary value, although its harder to pinpoint exactly what it is. Perhaps they are ways to strengthen group cohesion. Play is a relevant dimension of creativity and so could be taken as an independent signal for reproductive success. But all paths seem to lead back to reproductive success.
I agree that I was a little dismissive of the link between status and reproductive success. If I were to rewrite that section, I think I'd say something to the effect that, with a little ingenuity, reproductive success can be used to explain almost any facet of the human experience. This is by its nature hard to verify as an explanation for any specific phenomenon, and I don't think we should take for granted that every phenomenon is traceable to reproductive fitness. Our intelligence gives us a lot of leeway, and there's likely room for cultural behavior that's irrelevant or even wasteful from a reproductive fitness POV.
For that reason, I think it's productive to try to think of alternative explanations. And if these don't stand up to challenges from reproductive fitness arguments, they can be thought of as analyses at intermediate levels. These intermediate analyses can be useful in themselves, just because they're closer to our everyday experience and a bit easier to reason with.
I liked it overall! Since you asked, Writing feedback:
Positives: The idea is pretty interesting and you make some good points about it, and the general structure is good.
Negatives: try to use fewer words, especially in the opening paragraphs where your goal is to grab the readers' attention. I think you could improve a lot by having a habit of rereading the last few paragraphs each time and thinking if you could have said it more clearly in fewer sentences. Same goes for idea clarity - e.g. your axioms there are good, but I think you could have gotten them to be more clear by reviewing and condensing them a bit.
Thanks! I appreciate it. Some of my favorite writers are Henry James and David Foster Wallace, so it’s always a battle with myself not to imitate them ;-)
Hm yeah, I should specify that it's not that using more words is never good, just be careful about only doing it when it adds something and doesn't reduce clarity
(It's been a while since I read DFW but from what I remember he actually is pretty good at this - he writes a lot of words, but each specific point or anecdote is pretty simple and condensed)
Actually I asked gpt to give me an example wordy DFW quote and he gave this
> "And but so the point here is that the best way to do this, to allow your deformed infant son to lead a somewhat normal life, is you first need to make your peace with the fact that your son, no matter how many cute little hats you put on him to disguise the fact, is, and forever will be, deformed
Which is a really good example. It's a long sprawling complex sentence, but each part of it is simple and necessary to the overall structure
Love it. Thanks again for the thought you’ve put into this.
I'm looking for academic papers, or books, or blogposts about basic child rearing practices somewhere in rural Africa*. For example at what age babies start to be carried on the mother's back, and when they stop. What time babies are put to bed every night, and how they are put to bed. Who can be trusted with small children. What are the disciplining practices. Etc.
Any references? The more accessible the better.
* I don't mean to imply that the answers to these questions across all of Africa are the same. I know Africa pretty well actually, well enough to say that almost anywhere I pick in rural Africa will have answers that are different from the practices in the West, and closer to answers for other places in rural Africa.
A quick search through google scholar using the search terms "child rearing practices rural Kwazulu Natal" pulls up thousands of articles, a good chunk of which look directly relevant.
I'd strongly suggest picking a specific area or ethnic group and then going with that, because practices can vary wildly even inside specific countries.
I haven't read this book but I've read a review and it sounds like it covers some of that sort of thing: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-baby-meets-world-by-nicholas
Incidentally I've been reading Mr and Mrs Psmith's book review substack recently after it got added to Scott's blogroll, and it really is some top notch stuff. Highly recommended for anyone looking for more substack stuff to read.
"The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings" is all about differences in how children are viewed and reared in different societies around the world. It's not only about Africa, but a lot of examples there are.
#4 - prefer current situation - choice is good! I sometimes click through and sometimes not, even though I know there are edits.
I like that I have the full version in my inbox both for convenience (reading without the comments and the lags of substack on Chrome, or offline) and to later be able to search terms and things I remember from the posts.
Same here -- offline reading and email search are both things I do.
Is there a term for a non-reductionist physicalism?
The people who debate meta physics they either seems to be super reductionist (if viruses exist we can make nano bots, if brains exist we can make super human ai in 10 years, if we can simulate physics we can simulate the whole universe and we are in an finite chain of stimulated universes) or they get incredulous at these claim throw out everything and claim panpychism. I'm not seeing a middle ground term.
I'd divide panpsychism into two versions:
Strong panpsychism: Rocks have something like an evolving mental process, and can do something like ponder being a rock, and may have emotions or values or similar things pertaining to the state of being a rock. A rock can be self-aware.
Weak panpsychism: The experience of being a rock, insofar as we can discuss the experience of being a rock, is fundamentally static and unchanging, and is represented in the physical state of the rock at any given time. A rock does not have emotions, values, or variable states-of-being it cycles through on a regular basis, excepting insofar as the physical structure of the rock itself varies, and this experience-of-being-a-rock is fundamentally rooted in the physical configuration of the rock at any given time. Although we can ascribe consciousness to a rock, it is a mistake to treat this consciousness as similar to the consciousness that we would ascribe to an animal, and it is certainly incorrect to treat this consciousness as being fundamentally capable of things like self-awareness - it has consciousness, but it does not have something we would recognize as thoughts, or a mind, or even anything resembling awareness. Its consciousness, much like the rock itself, simply is.
Weak panpsychism is not saying anything about the rock, that is, but rather simply treating "consciousness" as a non-special property which is not unique to things we would identify as minds. I'd analogize weak panpsychism to "A rock is an analog simulation of a rock".
Or, alternatively, we could analogize to radio; radio waves are everywhere, but they only seem to do anything interesting when you put matter together in particular patterns.
Emergentism/Emergent physicalism is one. It's the idea that the physical grounds all of reality, but that mental properties "emerge" from the physical in such a way as to make them not reducible to physical properties. It has it's adherents, but I don't give the idea much credence. The problem is that "emergence" is more of an explanatory placeholder rather than an explanation in its own right. There is no "emergence relation" with which one can explain the origin of some substance from a supposedly categorically dissimilar substance. Any theory that successfully fills in the emergence promissory note will just be a kind of reduction.
Perhaps your resistance to reduction is thinking that reduction means that we are nothing "over and above" merely particles following Schrodinger. This tends to deflate what it means to be human in a way that will be extremely off-putting for most people. But I don't think this is the correct way to view reduction. Another way to view reduction is that the physical grounds all higher structures and concepts, and that these higher level structures are existing entities in good standing. So all the features of the human experience, e.g., desires, happiness, love, etc exist, they just don't exist fundamentally. A good concept to look into is the concept of levels. The fundamental level grounds higher levels; and each level has a certain explanatory autonomy such that we can speak of tables, chairs, desires, love, etc as proper features of our ontology without compromises. I think this is the way to go to get a satisfying understanding of the mind in relation to the physical world. Further reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levels-org-biology/
Is it only about biology and consciousness?
Sorry, what are you referring to?
Physicalism is a view that there is nothing beyond the physical world, that is it. Non-reductive physicalism is a view that some observables, e.g. mental states, cannot be reduced to physical states, without necessarily specifying the reason why. One reason I can see that is perfectly compatible with physicalism is that mental processes are perfectly physical, but so complex, reproducing them requires simulating or recreating all or a big chunk of the universe, and so in that sense they are non-reductive.
The example I like to use is traffic: nobody thinks there's anything dualistic about traffic, and it clearly supervenes on the set of cars on a road. But the bounds of any particular traffic jam are fuzzy and hard to locate, there's a steady turnover of which cars are caught at any moment, and an identifiable traffic jam can even migrate up or down a road network given certain conditions. In some ways it's a system property that we can point to and care about, but at the same time it's not a specific physical thing per se.
Yeah, that is classic emergence, but traffic is reductive, it can be simulated on a computer and the same pattern emerges.
Tractability of simulation is a slippery distinction to make, and IMO doesn't survive the kind of changes in intuition that follow a few more order of magnitude improvement in hardware. Beyond that, it's hard to hold that mental states are in principle *impossible* to simulate without pulling in one form of property dualism or another.
As I said, I can believe that some observations happen to be too hard to simulate without faithfully simulating a big chunk of the universe. Traffic patterns are not like that. I do not expect mental states to require simulating the universe, but since we have zero clue about qualia beyond that we perceive it, I withhold judgment until we have a better idea.
Oh, I'm an eliminative materialist: I think we have far more than zero insight into mental states, and I don't particularly feel the need to withhold judgement until that prophesied day when there's a consensus definition of qualia.
I feel like the words don't follow the battle lines of the debate
I'm the far side of the anti-scientism debate and I look around and see peterson(who literally lecters from the bible) formscapes(who claims memory is in nature and rituals can make you have memory's from your blood line) etc.
and... ugh, why.
Like I dont see claims about the moral authority of the bible as worse then simulation theory; but I'd like articulated terms to navigate this space.
How can I clearly state, I think gobels incompleteness and evidence of non neodarwin generics, should move the metaphysics of society's towards epistemological anarchism; without you know, someone looking up those 3 magic words and needing to win 3 debates before stating an axiom.
This reads like word salad... But I got a kick out of "gobels incompleteness" :)
Goebbels’, Goethe’s or Gödel's?
I gobble incompleteness and am perpetually hungry for more.
The worse part is I mean every word.
For a simple example:
1. the food in your stomach is broken down by your micro-biome
2. your micro-boime comes from your environment or from your mother pooping in your mouth during child birth(FUN FACT), never you father sprem(it just doesn't carry enough dna)
3(1+2). nutrition studies controlling factors genetic factors based on race(rather then a theory based on mircoboime lineage) is obviously stupid
4. I've never seen a diet study that wasn't based on race or country
5(3+4). all nutritional science is therefore obviously stupid.
This is rejecting neo-darwinism and current science and I'm pretty sure 100% correct; god help me if try to suggest its a pattern.
I don't see how any of those statements have to do with reductionism? All of those are statements that can just be proven true or false, and the straw man hasn't given any evidence that they're true.
If you can reduce the brain to mathematical model, and you are a reductionist; you put that model on a computer and expect a prefect emulation.
It's like >90% rationalist who seems to think the specific nn's we have are good models for brains and ai is X years away; and you can read any simulated universe argument it will assume if we just make a big enough computer simulating atoms will be good enough, its not a strawman.
> All of those are statements that can just be proven true or false
I would also label this line of reasoning as reductionist
> Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. -wikipedia
If you believe all statements can be proven true or false; I would suggest you have a poor answer to lairs paradoxes and incompleteness. (and if you then respond there 3 possible answers true, false,unproven/invalid/stupid/paradox; that will ALSO be a minimal number)
> I would also label this line of reasoning as reductionist
So, if in ten years, there was superhuman AI, this would not prove that we will have superhuman AI in ten years? If there was not superhuman AI in 2034, that would not disprove that we would have superhuman AI?
I suppose we could have AI like current AI (i.e. superhuman in some tasks, subhuman in others), and then there's ambiguity on whether we should call it "superhuman," but I doubt that's what you or anybody else is talking about.
There's a difference between even full AGI and human. A non-reductionist view could still see something unique about human thinking even if an AI is able to perform most or all "mental" tasks faster/better.
The existence of AGI or superhuman AGI doesn't actually answer the core question. For instance, I would consider a paperclip maximizer willing to exterminate humanity in favor of paperclips to be missing something fundamental about human thinking even if it's "smarter" than any and all humans. I think most people would agree with me, even if they have a materialist outlook. To my mind, it's similar to the difference between a human arm and a robotic arm - they might do similar functions but are clearly not the same.
That would prove it true, but I offered 3 statements (and I dont think ai is impossible, just that nn's airnt going to do it)
I believe saying simulation theory is true or false is very reductionist; its unfalsfable as its about, an infinite chain of universe we cant visit. And its about infinitely and self referential reasoning (if we can simulate a universe, its likely we are in a simulated universe is selfreferencal) so liar's paradoxes are relevant. And its obliviously logically false as to make a single bit of information in a computer you needs 1000's of atoms in the right place.
and for completeness I believe nano machines will have the goal posts moved, and when playing at that scale water tension and immune system attacks will make artificial grey goo, look alot like an mold and not the artist renderings of metal, gear like motion, thats next to a ruler saying its small.
Nr 4: TLDR: Substituting the text with a link would break the reason I get the emails.
The only time I read blogs through my email is when I only have satphone or SSB connection at sea, and cannot browse the web in a standard fashion. The emails that I get to my SailMail account are stripped of pictures, formatting, and reply-history, and held in a server that will drip-feed them to me over extremely slow connections (sometimes <100 b/s. One text-only email can take several minutes to download). No normal web server has the patience for clients like that, and will assume the connection has dropped long before I get the text.
Anyone here tried “self medicating” with Ketamine for treating mild depression? Did it work for you in the long term?
I've done this with other psychedelics, including those most fêted in studies - it definitely works for mild depression. Deep depression takes many very heavy sessions to do anything about.
I tried self medicating lots "over the counter" things
I suggest rhodiola rosea, avoid using it daily or mixing it with other serotonin sources(i.e. most anti depressants) until you know what it does so you dont get serotonin sickness
The reason I dont think its uses by mainstream medicine is that the "half life" seems to be a day and a half and its is two psychoactive compounds thats probably not well controlled the ratio by random vitamin companies grinding up leafs
User banned for one week for this comment.
Not on Twitter but I am pretty far left. I just watched the duet. It was charming.
Edit
Oh man. The Annie Lennox cover of Sinead was great too. Nothing compares…
Fantasia Barrino tribute to Tina? This is a pretty good Grammys.
But who the hell is Taylor Swift?
I've been wondering recently what happened to people like Tracy Chapman and Joan Armatrading! Good songs from the 80s (though I think "Nothing Compared To You" is overdone, I've heard it about 20 times too many recently), can this finally be a Grammys for the Gen X generation? 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifARMmcqhD8
Thanks for the link.
I saw Joan Armatrading in college at the campus auditorium. Front row seats. My wife gave me a funny look when Joan looked down at us and returned my little wave.
“I picked your face from a thousand smiles…”
Could you please remove the first sentence, or edit it to something that isn't so spiteful? There's plenty of ways to express an appreciation of collaboration over conflict, which don't themselves leak conflict into the thread.
I’ve often wished I had a longitudinal study of my own political views/leanings… like a yearly survey of what I think about various things.
Does anyone know if something like this exists? I’m thinking of building some kinda thing that emails you once a year to fill out a survey…
I enjoyed this survey (https://pluralpolitics.com/) albeit a bit US-focused. If anyone has pointers or ideas or dis/encouragement I’d appreciate it! I don’t think I have the expertise on surveys and whatnot to do the non-tech parts alone.
Interesting and more multidimensional politics quiz than most, so that was nice, but many questions felt like, "Do you agree with this straw man of your views?" I was unsure what disagreement meant for those questions.
SSC's remains the undefeated champion of these in my view, though not really fit to your purpose:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/08/the-slate-star-codex-political-spectrum-quiz/
As I look back, the areas where I've changed my viewpoint were in response to specific learned facts about history of government, not about just growing older or vague feelings. A study would be especially good if you could track the things that influenced your views as well, but that's hard to do outside long form answers, which undermines your desire for data. Maybe a new year's reflection on the things that most impacted your thinking that year on most topics, including an addendum on what "tribe" you feel most closely aligned to, if any. Then have something score it in post processing using sentiment analysis, you might even be able to get AI to do that, feed it the essay, then ask it to predict where the person fell on an imaginary political spectrum quiz.
That SSC quiz is nice, but basically only has a single axis (object-meta).
I think getting some AI involved is not a bad idea: take a nice survey but add some freeform text to each answer (eg why you answered this way) plus some kind of what impacted you the most, or something. Orrr, where your answers/LLM encodings significantly differ from the previous year, prompt you to describe how/why.
Anyways, I'm gonna tinker. Thanks for the ideas!
So, a journal.
1. Thanks for the snark.
2. I have that, but journals is vibes and I’d like something that more closely approximates data.
More writing from me that I wanted to share. For those of you who have seen my stuff and have found it too technical, these two pieces are not technical at all.
The first is essentially just musing on my experience as a 3rd year psychiatry resident:
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/on-being-a-3rd-year-psychiatry-resident
The second is an essay that would be most interesting to people who work in hospitals, especially on consulting services, in which I argue that rejecting consults is an important part of resident education and part of good professional practice overall (as long as you're not a dick when you do it).
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/consult-rejections-as-a-teaching
https://foldedpapers.substack.com/p/my-years-as-a-feminist-on-red-pill
I recently came across a really interesting reflection on old SSC/culture war thread culture from a feminist perspective. Good read.
Thank you for sharing. That was really good.
Looks long and rambling... TL;DR?
Leftist learns to empathize with other people's perspectives and value civilized discussion after frequenting SSC culture war thread, realizes that almost everyone else on the subreddit didn't get the memo and they suck even more now.
Sounds like the best outcome possible...
Wow, that really was a good read. Though, it is depressing that the only thing all this "debate" ended up accomplishing was make a tiny group of people a bit more emotionally intelligent.
> We can’t survive, as a society, without finding ways to talk to each other that can make the participants better people, rather than worse.
Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that. It just always ends in blood. Turns out "the strong eat the weak" is a perfectly viable ethos for sustaining society, which should have been obvious considering that's how the rest of nature works.
>> We can’t survive, as a society, without finding ways to talk to each other that can make the participants better people, rather than worse.
>Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that.
I agree with you. (Certainly way more than I agree with Gemmae M.)
I think artifex0 also has a valid point about social technologies, but I think that it is important to be clear on plausible expectations for those technologies. It is useful, for instance, to have vast disputes, e.g. between billion dollar corporations, settled by catapulting lawyers at each other rather than by armed warfare. This does not require that the people involved become "better people", that they adopt the ideology of the winning side, or that they stop holding grudges. It suffices for them to just grit their teeth and agree that their particular dispute will be resolved in a courtroom rather than a battlefield.
Human civilization wasn't even civilized until extremely recently, and it certainly wasn't doing "just fine" up until about 5 minutes ago, and you'd be hard pressed to even make that argument. A few wealthy places in the world are doing just fine. That's about it. "The strong eat the weak" is *not* a society that's doing just fine. Good societies are places we design explicitly *not* to be that way.
The recent innovation is that we've given up on letting the strong eat the weak and are instead committed to letting the weak eat the strong.
We had a brief shining moment of "nobody eats anybody" but that's gone now.
Ridiculously over-simplified and not at all reflective of any reality outside of a mind addled by social media.
>Human civilization seems to have survived just fine for the last ten thousand years without ever doing that. It just always ends in blood. Turns out "the strong eat the weak" is a perfectly viable ethos for sustaining society, which should have been obvious considering that's how the rest of nature works.
I'm not sure I agree. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity had modern brains and knew about cultivating plants and crafting tools, but the global population was stuck at under a million. Then, something changed and the population exploded into an exponential trend. I think that something was probably the invention of social technologies that promote coordination- things like morality, culture and governance.
We used to be a species where tiny bands would regularly raid their neighbors to rape and pillage- and while that dynamic still exists at the largest scale, we've almost entirely fixed it on the small scale because of those social technologies. Even nation states have been getting measurably more coordinated.
I think those social technologies have been becoming steadily more advanced- more effective at solving coordination problems and unlocking comparative advantage- and I think we should expect that trend to continue.
Japan's population boom didn't really have anything to do with morality, it mostly happened because one group took power and stopped everyone else from killing each other. Morality and culture is just a means to an end for the sake of promoting collectivization. The global rise of nation states has less to do with humanity advancing culturally and more that it became impossible to survive unless you were part of a large collective. Just look at what happened to American natives for example.
If this trend does continue... don't expect anything resembling humanity to continue being a part of it for long. Humans simply aren't optimized for this sort of large scale collectivism, and looking at the current progress of AI, they have the potential to be much, much better at this than we are.
Generally agreed, though "collectivism" has political associations that I'd just as soon avoid.
Thanks for linking that, it was indeed a good read.
My mental health is terrible. (Seriously - I've had at least a dozen temper tantrums since last October, maybe almost two dozen - despite trying to log them all, I've lost count.) Any suggestions?
(Scott, this may be something that might actually be up your alley!)
>(Seriously - I've had at least a dozen temper tantrums since last October, maybe almost two dozen - despite trying to log them all, I've lost count.)
Under what conditions?
Food and drink (and medication) can cause anger directly; if these bouts are common enough to need logging, then pay attention to what you ate beforehand. Anything that consistently shows up, cut back on.
Work sucks and bad jobs suck harder. Get enough money saved up that you can leave, and let that option comfort you even when you aren't doing it.
Being overweight stresses the body, and a stressed body is a stressed you. Get an exercise routine set up. The classic is Push-ups and Sit-ups which need no equipment or space to perform. Once those are easy you can expand to whatever's most fun.
From the Gunflint reply; look at screens less, relax more. Don't worry about Meditating or Setting Goals;, they're overrated. Do worry about sleep; turns out sleep is necessary for digestion too, and likely a slew of other health bits. A stressed body is a stressed you.
Self control. Stop blaming your actions on "bad mental health" as if it's arthritis.
Blocking Twitter from my devices has been good for me and I recommend it. If you have social media or other habits that make you unreasonably angry or interfere with your sleep, blocking them is good.
1. Eat good food (look up macros and micros, lots of good explanations online)
2. Lose weight till you hit a BMI of 23 or less
3. Walk at least 7000 steps a day, every day
4. Spend at least 30 minutes a day, 4 days a week at the gym lifting weights
5. Lookup the Novos Protocol, take the supplements on their list
If the above fails to solve it after 90 days, I’d look into therapy and/or various prescribed pills for treating conditions similar to yours. But most likely the above routine would solve it for you.
Could you go into more details about these "tantrums"? What's the environment in which they occur, how long do they last, what happens in them?
They tend to have relatively trivial causes (eg I once had a tantrum upon waking from an hour missed of sleep, and another when I realized I was on the verge of missing dinner).
Each one tends to last several minutes(?), though it takes me an hour at the very least to recover from one. They're irregularly spaced, on average once every few days but occasionally I'll have them two days in a row or even twice on the same day.
As for what happens in them, they often involve me throwing around random objects that happen to be nearby. I've broken two iPhones that way. (Once was in an isolated incident in 2022, though in retrospect it's similar to the rash of incidents I've been having now.)
Does it run in the family? I once dated someone who had verbal tendencies that were similar, and they seem to have gotten it from their father.
Have you tried getting a heavy bag or some sort of punchable surface, and beating the **** out of it until you get tired?
Oh, when you said terrible mental health, I (and apparently everyone else) assumed it was depression. From the sounds of it, it might be some kind of behavioral disorder. I really do recommend talking to a doctor or mental health professional about this. Though their competence is... variable, they're all far more qualified than most people here to help you figure out if there's any underlying cause for these events. And who knows, maybe it's a condition that medication can actually alleviate.
There’s the anger over a trivial irritation. The shame of being angered over something trivial. Then the anger over the initial cause of the irritation that caused shame. Lather rinse and repeat.
The trick is recognizing the pattern.
...You haven't really given us much information to work with. If it is the "I literally do not have any energy to do anything and existence is pure suffering" kind of depression, I highly recommend seeing a doctor and getting anti-depressants prescribed, or switching medications if you're on one already. If it isn't like that, well... talking to people might help. I know therapists are kind of a crapshoot, but a good one can help you figure out what's behind the distress. Of course, if you do know what's causing the problem, you can always try to fix that.
IIRC you are about 20. Remembering myself at that age the first thing you should probably thInk about is, Am I getting enough sleep?
Re the last question: No. Last night I slept from 1 to 3 and then from 6 to 9.
I don't think that's all to it though. I spend far too much time looking at screens and far too little relaxing or meditating or Setting Goals™, which I think may also be a major component.
Also, Gunflint, you got my age down to the year; congrats I guess?
EDIT: clarifying the comment
duck_master, I believe you mentioned your BDay in passing on Discord not too long ago, so I wasn’t really guessing.
Sleep deprivation not be "all" of it, but I would think it's a much higher component than you're giving it credit for, likely overshadowing the sum of "relaxing or meditating or Setting Goals™". There's a reason Maslow's hierarchy of needs is structured the way it is. Don't let a focus on higher-order needs act as an excuse to ignore your lower-level ones.
As far as screen time, your devices probably have options to lock down functionality during "bedtime" hours (I understand iOS is particularly aggressive in this regard), you might do well to use that.
What about physical activity? Do you engage in group activities that leave you exhausted and barely capable of standing? If not, I highly recommend them. Followed by stretching, eating protein, taking a hot shower or bath, and if it's in the evening, getting to bed.
Confirming the other advice: make a harsh priority out of sleeping more and screensing less.
Twenty one years ago, *when I was your age 👴🏻🦯* I was studying in England, and I sent my laptop battery home to the United States for the last two months of school. If I needed computers, and I did, I went to the computer lab.
This sucked very much but fixed my sleep and screens problems for a good while.
"relaxing, meditating and Setting Goals" sounds like serious stuff, the kind the brain loves to procrastinate. If I may offer two simpler suggestions instead:
- go take a stupid walk for your stupid mental health. just do it.
- best goal-setting combo for depression is exercise-related stuff. Both because exercise is good for your brain, and also because it tends to be easily measurable, and thus goal-fulfilling. I suggest applying Tiny Habits here.
> Any suggestions?
> Last night I slept from 1 to 3 and then from 6 to 9.
> I spend far too much time looking at screens
Get more sleep. About 10 hours per day sounds about right for someone your age.
Spend less time in front of screens.
You're welcome.
Sounds like a miserable life. Wake up, work, do all of the horrible exercising recommended in this thread, take your endless supplements, go to bed. Do it again the next day. All in the hopes of... living longer to continue doing that? But with good mental health!
Actual Zen story: a student asked a master, "How do we free ourselves from the daily bondage of dressing in clothing and eating food?" The master responded, "We dress, we eat." The student said, "I don't understand." The master said, "If you don't understand, put on your clothes and eat breakfast."
"Just shut up and do it."
Oh yes, what a miserable life of psychological health, physical health, feeling well-rested, and having the mental capacity to be productive during the day. The horror! I'd rather feel anxious, irritable, sleep-deprived, and unsatisfied with my life while doom-scrolling Twitter all day.
Because those are our only two options. Boring vs. boring.
There are too many replies to look through them all, so apologies if this (rather obvious) solution has already been suggested: You can get the best of both worlds by posting the full text in the email, but right at the start of the email you put a link to the latest version on your website.
This is already the situation - the title is a link to the website.
Re. "Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails?" -
I almost didn't reply, because I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all, and thus didn't care. But it occurred to me that that mean lots of people who wouldn't mind, wouldn't reply; and Scott would get a heavily biased set of answers. Which it appears he already has.
Suggestion to Scott: When you ask a question, post a comment to which everyone can answer with their reply, so the replies aren't spread all thru the comments.
Please continue to include the whole text in your e-mails. My email client forwards it to my note-taking app and I read it there. Just including the opening paragraph would make the system worse.
Please keep full text emails. I am aware that the online version may contain corrections, and I check it when relevant, but having the full text in email is very convenient to me.
+1
I prefer full text emails BUT almost never go to the actual page and thus never observe the edits. Depending on frequency, I would be ok with follow up emails, but will navigate to the page if on desktop in future.
Does anyone here have a post explaining the dopamine transporter hijacking by SSRI theory in depth for a layperson?
I always have very mild side effects when I start on SSRIs; rapidly show improvements and then get extreme agitation and restlessness side effects around 2 month mark. Tapering off and stopping medication improves symptoms. I suspect the dopamine transport to fire serotonin which takes a few weeks is leading to sudden high concentrations of serotonin around 6-8 weeks which is triggering a mild form of hypomania. The DSM criteria for mixed depression feels very rigid. But some other articles I read have a broader definition of mixed depression which includes the irritability, anxiety and restlessness I feel. My symptoms get worse late evening which I feel may be related to dopamine circadian rhythm. No bipolar family history. An example of my extreme restlessness - my Fitbit shows over 15000 steps even on days I work from home and do not leave the house for any purpose like errands or walks.
Well damn, I might be going through the same thing. That really does explain a lot. Though, the only reason I started taking venlafaxine (better known as Effexor™) last year was because I tapered off of my old SNRI, which ended up resulting in massive physical depressive symptoms a few months later, which the venlafaxine quickly cured... Now that I think of it, I never really had this level of anxiety back when I was taking my old medications, and that might be because I was taking gabapentin alongside duloxetine and clonidine (the last of which I'm still taking). So maybe consider getting gabapentin or some other anti-anxiety medication prescribed?
Funnily enough, the gabapentin+fluoxetine combo does seem to be a popular prescription for shelter dogs and cats. Maybe that's proof that it's quite effective?
I definitely prefer full-text emails.
I prefer full-text emails. I usually click through to read the latest version of the post. If I'm catching up somewhere that's not feasible (e.g., a plane), I settle for reading the original version and figure any particularly important correction will show up as a follow-up post or in an open thread.
If my methodology is flawed, perhaps breaking it with teaser-emails is a good thing.
I find reading articles in my smartphone Gmail app more comfortable than reading them on Substack, for hard to quantify reasons.
I started vaguely watching Critical Drinker and various other film critic Youtube channels, who have a common theme of jeering at Disney/Marvel/DC/the BBC/whoever and glorying in their misfortune.
.
These channels are pretty low status, and should be, because they're critics who add nothing, as opposed to original content creators who could output new films and stories that might enrich my life. I gain entertainment from them, but most often it's a mean spirited kind of entertainment.
.
If you consider something like Dr Who, there were a lot of us who used to enjoy that programme, and who enjoyed talking about it afterwards, to the point that it formed a kind of community. Then the BBC came in and said, "Fuck you, we're taking your toys and calling you a dickhead on the way out. Oh yeah - and if you want to talk about the same stuff you used to enjoy talking about, I'm gonna make it so half the people you're talking with are fat soys or anaemic purple haired wretches and I'm gonna make sure to tell them you suck."
.
So you know what, if you and all the old crowd can find a channel of people who get together just to say, "You know that guy who stole our toys? That guy sucks." - I don't care if it's not the highest form of wit, it's cathartic and it feels good. I think people like Critical Drinker are doing useful work by being the lynch pins around which these old, displaced communities can re-coalesce.
.
But I'm not sure that a community built on such a negative premise can/should survive long term. It would be better if people in said community were to start creating new, original stories of their own and we could all spend our time talking and thinking more about that, and forget Disney/the BBC entirely.
.
I keep waiting for this to happen, but it doesn't seem in any hurry.
"These channels are pretty low status, and should be, because they're critics who add nothing, as opposed to original content creators who could output new films and stories that might enrich my life. "
-
You have a very odd definition of "status", because to pretty much the entire rest of the world a reliably good critic has pretty high status - e.g. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, when we still had them. Critics provide real value, first by matching content with the proper audience, and second by highlighting aspects the audience might not have noticed in a casual viewing.
-
And I don't know about "various other film critic Youtube channels", but Critical Drinker does a lot more than just trash-talk Hollywood Wokies(tm) or whatever so like-minded people can commiserate with him. He provides positive reviews for good movies and TV shows, including "woke" ones when they are actually good. And, e.g., after describing how "Captain Marvel" was turned into crap by what might be described as excessive wokeness, offered a way the movie could have been made without sucking but also without compromising the producers' intent and message. That is what a good critic can do, and it's worth doing.
-
If it were just the trash-talk, CD would be a guilty pleasure that would wear thin real fast.
I have a pretty clear idea of what I mean by low status, which is that when I find more and more Critical Drinker et al turning up in Youtube's recommendations, I know it's time to close out and open up Youtube again in a fresh Private Browsing window.
.
If left unattended, the natural path is a spiral into more and more gossipy, people- and drama-focussed content, which is not a good diet and not the way I want to be spending my time.
.
There's probably a better word than "status" for what I'm talking about but I don't know what I'd use instead.
.
And yes, I like all the good things Drinker does. But I don't feel that all his counterparts do the same. I didn't think making a distinction between him and them would add much to the post, apart from luring fellow fans out of the woodwork.
>fat soys or anaemic purple haired wretches
I'd be very careful with this sort of seething tribal contempt- it will break your epistemology and make you more easy to manipulate politically.
The more fury and fear that we feel toward an outgroup, the more power we're willing to give to the people who position themselves in opposition to it- so people who want lots of power are strongly incentivized to push those feelings as far as they can go. The usual way of doing that is to get your political group to collect cherrypicked examples of the craziest members of the outgroup going too far, present that as representative of the outgroup's ideology, present milder aspects of the outgroup's culture as secretly supportive of that ideology, blame a bunch of major problems on that secret support, and then explain the entire thing as an attack on the cultural status of ingroup members. This happens, of course, on both the left and the right.
It's something that works particularly well online because tribal fury and fear are incredibly effective at driving engagement- so there's a symbiotic relationship between political groups and content creators; political groups churn up the emotions, and content creators capitalize on them.
I think The Critical Drinker and other anti-woke media critics are an example of that.
It's definitely true that art is harder to make when you're trying to conform to political ideals or include political signifiers of something like wokeness. Ideally, art should approach politics by exploring political themes rather than just signaling support- but doing the latter only introduces a constraint to the art. It makes the art harder, but art under those constraints can still be done well. Take, say, Bojack Horseman- that show had a lot of leftist things that were more about signaling support than exploring themes, but it managed to weave them into the art rather than letting them interfere with it, and the result was great.
Of course, it's also true that when lazy, uncreative writing teams are influenced by leftism, they will insert signifiers of support for leftist ideals in a way that's lazy and uncreative. This deserves criticism, but the problem with how Youtubers like TCD do it is that they too often blame the politics rather than the artistry- tapping into outgroup hate to drive engagement. More clear-headed media critics are often a lot more boring, and don't get the numbers that someone like TCD does- but I think the way he gets those numbers is culturally unhealthy.
I said, "I think people like Critical Drinker are doing useful work by being the lynch pins around which these old, displaced communities can re-coalesce."
.
Without the tribalism and gossip-mongering, they would not be able to do that job. The ill-feeling is not made up, it comes from actual territory that was taken by an outgroup that already exists and is aggressing.
.
The result of high minded virtue instead would have been Disney/the BBC coming in and enshittening our entertainment to no "organised" outcry at all. Certainly nowhere for the old, rejected fans to congregate afterwards.
.
The idea of culturally healthy vs unhealthy is exactly what I was driving at in my post though. I would like to see the group perform a sort of "import replacement" on the cultural assets it values. That is what I would call healthy.
.
> Take, say, Bojack Horseman ... that was great.
.
Bojack Horseman was an amazing technical achievement, in that someone managed to create a form of malware that perched on every platform and streaming site and detected whether a client device was owned by me, personally, or by anyone else in the world. Then it apparently showed everyone else a funny, clever and deep comedy of some kind. What it showed me was hours and hours of a whiny horse with some camp friends and a shitty attitude.
> hen the BBC came in and said, "Fuck you, we're taking your toys and calling you a dickhead on the way out. Oh yeah - and if you want to talk about the same stuff you used to enjoy talking about, I'm gonna make it so half the people you're talking with are fat soys or anaemic purple haired wretches and I'm gonna make sure to tell them you suck."
I don't know what a "soy" is, and it seems unnecessarily rude anyway. Could you edit to explain the actual problem?
> I don't know what a "soy" is, and it seems unnecessarily rude anyway. Could you edit to explain the actual problem?
.
Well that's alright, since you don't know what a soy is, you can't have any idea whether it's rude or not.
.
So maybe I'll leave my post the way I wrote it.
It was preceded by "fat" and followed by "anaemic purple haired wretches", which are clearly insulting.
Obviously they know what you might be insinuating by "soy," but they're not rude enough to immediately jump to the least charitable conclusion. Other people aren't going to be so charitable, so I would recommend clarifying what you meant by that.
You're able to read the subtext in Geek's comment well enough. So why couldn't you read the subtext of my reply, which was, "I'm not editing my post to suit your sensibilities, sod off and don't try policing my tone."?
I provided a characterisation of the BBC that a lot of people agree with. I did this in a post about the social function of rage youtube channels, and how they provide a community for those who got displaced by expansionist forces of political correctness, and who now have very hard feelings towards those tactics and agendas.
Can you see the irony in my getting rid of it because people decided to be offended?
"I provided a characterisation of the BBC that a lot of people agree with"
Also, disagree with. You're not supporting your point about the youtube channel because you never supported your claim about the BBC.
"Can you see the irony in my getting rid of it because people decided to be offended?"
This blog has rules.
>"I provided a characterisation of the BBC that a lot of people agree with" Also, disagree with. You're not supporting your point... because you never supported your claim.
.
You disagree that other people agree with something? Okay, sure, disagree away. I'm not interested in providing sources and citations to justify to your satisfaction why I'm allowed to feel a certain way about events that happened.
.
You're coming at me with the language of pedantic debate and trying to argue points, and I'm here for a casual discussion with people who want to exchange ideas.
.
> This blog has rules.
.
If you want to come into the thread I started and make a fuss about it to our host, when everyone else either contributed positively or skipped quietly because it wasn't for them, then go right ahead.
.
You can go away and get into the philosophical weeds about whether an accurate description of the perspective of a group of people can ever count as "necessary" or "true", but forgive me if I'm not interested in joining you.
.
Heckler's veto is at least as destructive to good conversation as more explicit forms of rudeness, and that's what you're doing by butting in here. You have shown zero interest in talking about Youtube channels, fandom behaviour or Dr Who with me.
This is tangential, but, what point in time were you referring to here?
> Then the BBC came in and said
I don't follow Dr. Who, but I watched a bunch of people get obsessed with "new Who", and I was wondering if it was the entire run, or a specific point in it, or a more general trend?
> what point in time were you referring to here?
.
I bet people could debate it. What's hopefully uncontroversial is that by the time of Girl Doctor, the show was unwatchable.
.
The most obvious point before that was when they brought in the lesbian companion halfway through Capaldi's term. Things got pretty lamentable after that.
.
But drawing the line there would mean leaving Clara Oswald on the other side of it, which is an indefensible omission.
.
Personally I'd go right back and excise River Song and the latter half of Matt Smith's reign, for several reasons.
.
The first is that giving the Doctor a wife is the same kind of meddling that later turns into Timeless Children style bullshit, and I basically don't think the writers had the skill to be making huge changes like that. (Which isn't the same thing as saying there should never be dramatic changes to the canon - I just should think they should be done by writers who aren't dribbling imbeciles.)
.
Secondly, the Doctor's wife just wasn't very good. It was a lazy rip off of The Time Traveller's Wife, itself a damp squib of a book that had one good premise and no idea what to do with it. And River Song herself was just universe-fillingly smug as a character.
.
Thirdly, that was when the quality of the writing really began to suck as far as I'm concerned. Maybe not overtly woke suckery, just the the-writers-are-dumber-than-you-and-don't-realise-it kind.
.
But most importantly, if you cut things off there, you skip the bit where Matt Smith gets magically handed all those extra lives. (The Doctor only has thirteen lives, everyone knows this is the limit, the showrunners back in the day had no idea the show would continue on long enough to actually run into that limit, but now it has: what are they going to do about it?) This should have been a multi-series, multi-Doctor long epic arc, one that brought in all the lore from Old Who and kept everyone guessing til the last minute as the "deadline" drew closer. Instead the showrunners took half an episode to shit out what we would now call a Rian Johnson manouevre. This was a criminal waste of potential!
.
> I don't follow Dr. Who
.
Ah. Then you will find the above answer of no earthly use whatsoever.
>The most obvious point before that was when they brought in the lesbian companion halfway through Capaldi's term. Things got pretty lamentable after that.
I semi-regularly see left-wingers alleging that people who complain about "wokeness" are using the term to mean "doesn't pretend that black/gay/trans/etc people don't exist".
I would like to be able to tell them that they are wrong, but sadly all that I can tell them is that they are overgeneralising.
It may well be used that way, but my objections are not to "here's our lesbian starship engineer, now we tell the tale of adventure in space", it's the hit-you-over-the-head "Hello, I am the new LESBIAN engineer, did you know I am LESBIAN, let me tell you all about how I'm LESBIAN and while we're at it, let's have a couple of episodes per season about The Planet Where Gays and LESBIANS Are Oppressed, the Allegory For LGBT+ Oppression, The One Where I'm Persecuted After First Contact With Crazy Religious Zealots Because I'm LESBIAN, and the fun comedy one about Go To The Planet of LESBIANS Where The Cis Hets Get The Tables Turned On Them. Oh, and by the way, did you know I'm LESBIAN?" type of introducing diverse characters.
Like "Rings of Power" which made such a big deal out of DIVERSE CHARACTERS and then RACIST BACKLASH, and finally gave us:
One (1) black Dwarf, antecedents unexplained
One (1) black Elf, antecedents unexplained
Some (didn't bother to count them) black Hobbits, sorry Harfoots not Hobbits
Rest of main cast and majority of everybody else: white
Uh-huh. Really. 'The mountains labour and bring forth a mouse'. I didn't care about race-swapping Tar-Míriel, she's human and you can fill in the plot holes there without too much effort. But not even bothering to give one sentence in the script to deliver a line about where black Elf and black Dwarf came from? But they *were* able to fit in Sauron/Galadriel, enemies to lovers, slow-burn, their kids will be so cute *and* The Knife Ears Are Taking Our Jerbs.
But go on, I'm just pretending black people don't exist, right?
Have you actually watched the series in question here? I would do so before choosing this particular line to take.
"Thirdly, that was when the quality of the writing really began to suck as far as I'm concerned. Maybe not overtly woke suckery, just the the-writers-are-dumber-than-you-and-don't-realise-it kind."
.
. (nice trick with the dots, thanks)
.
You've just described what's the problem with basically all TV and movies post 2019 or so.
.
Through the whole "writer's strike against AI" I was genuinely wondering why ANYONE was on the writer's side at all. I think the AI will do a MUCH better job, even at today's capabilities!
.
Writers of the last few years literally write at a 5 year old level - like, I wouldn't be surprised if their actual method was that they put a bunch of sets and action figures pertaining to the show in a room with a 5 year old, and then, fingers eagerly poised, they just transcribe whatever said 5 year old comes up with over the next hour. That's E3 of season 2, post it!
.
GPT-4 sucks at continuity and long continuous story arcs, and it STILL writes about 2-5x times better than any writer on any show after 2020.
.
I mean sure, supply and demand - streaming exploded, those writers had to come from somewhere, and in the streaming company's bottomless need to feed the ever-multiplying coal-furnaces of episode narrations, they started giving near-illiterate 18 years olds fresh out of high school writer jobs or something.
.
Why did it happen so universally though? What happened to that cache of writers pre-2018 that was actually talented enough to connect a season's narrative arc in a way that wasn't blatantly simple-minded or wrong?
I meant to add: Not all the time, of course. There were hits here and there. So maybe it's also a matter of not enough supply to meet demand.
I wonder if it's a matter of money. There were a handful of places, like HBO (RIP?), which would happily invest in quality programming, but most everything else after 2005ish seemed to be "let's make as much stuff as we can, as cheaply as we can, and hope that lightning strikes". Hiring experienced writers and showrunners seems like it could be viewed as an unnecessary expense.
I watched the Twilight film back in the day and it was fantastic for self-confidence. I thought: if this can make a million pounds then I, too, can make a film if I tried.
.
What I don't understand is why more people aren't coming forward with their own creations. Look at the competition, guys. Now is the time!
I am also very interested to hear this as someone who got obsessed with new Who when it first came on, then fell off after a while (around the time a lot of others did, anecdotally, for reasons entirely unrelated to wokeness) and is trying to get back into it because I heard it got good again.
I hadn't really heard that it got good again, from anyone I trust on the whole good/bad thing.
As for it getting bad, there was a clear drop in quality when Russel T. Davies left for the first time. But that's because RTD Who was really amazingly good and post-RTD reverted to the mean of "pretty good". Moffat et al could tell some very good stories, even if they didn't do great story arcs,
It did not, for me, become unwatchably bad until partway through the Peter Capaldi era. Not because of the show's politics, which had started shifting but not to an overwhelming degree, but because Capaldi's doctor was kind of pretentiously dark in his outlook. That's not a good fit for The Doctor. It's also not a good fit for anyone's politics, because for those of us on the outside we'd rather hear about the good things you plan to do than the great evils you attribute to your outgroup.
Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams were able to keep me semi-interested for a while, but it didn't last.
I checked out a few Jodie Whittaker episodes, and actually found *her* to be an improvement on Capaldi. But by that point the show had veered unbearably into being a political tract with at least every second episode. Also, while Whittaker's doctor was fine, her Companions were dull and boring.
OK, the bit with a female doctor wasn't *completely* fine. Obviously it shouldn't be out of the question for a Time Lord to gender-swap on regeneration, but after thirteen consecutive male Doctors it's pretty clear that this *particular* Time Lord is a cis male. And from his taste in and occasional flirtations with companions, probably straight or straight-ish even if not actively so. Still, that alone wouldn't have been enough to sink it for me.
Now we've got Russel T. Davies back, and even David Tennant back for a bit, and that *should* be an indication of some very good Dr. Who to come. But the reviews and clips I have seen suggest that maybe some alien time traveler has swapped our RTD with one from a much less appealing parallel universe. I haven't yet dared to look myself (in part because I'd now have to pay real money for the privilege).
As an old crone, here is my unreliable impression of it (I never got into Doctor Who even though it would have been precisely what I liked, because we didn't get the "foreign channels" on our TV where I lived, and the national broadcaster didn't show it for those of us not living on the east coast who could get the signals overspill from the UK, so I never got to see it - yes, dinosaurs walked the earth still in those days). I'll also be helping out my memory by looking up Wikipedia as to when Doctors changed.
It was always considered a kids' show, even with the veneer of "no this is educational actually it will teach the little tykes about science and history in a fun learning way!", and thus something of a slight embarrassment to the BBC due to its long-running popularity over decades. There were certainly elements that were played for laughs (think of Pertwee's Doctor and things like his car, Bessie) but that didn't stop serious elements being also tackled in the show. However, it was that science-fiction aura around it that made it the poor relation of the Reithian BBC mindset. So it was neglected, in my view because they hoped it would quietly die off, and they never managed to monetise the property (as we say nowadays).
The 70s tried to give it a darker tone, but it was done in a less overt fashion than the 80s, the era of grimdark and "adult" in many genres, and in the same way the new people involved in running the show and writing for it tried to make it more 'serious' with 'adult' tone by bringing in violence (to an extent) and a darker, less optimistic tone. This would have been questionable enough, but they tried to do this during the era of Tom Baker who was not having it. (He was a bit of a prima donna, let's be honest).
I'm skipping ahead to Colin Baker's Doctor because I became aware of Who properly around this era, and my reaction was "crikey", which was most of the viewers' reactions as well due to Baker's Doctor being an unpleasant pain in the backside, not to put a tooth in it.
Ups and downs continued, with criticism over the dark and violent (by BBC standards) content, and the renewal of the show was dragged out so that fans thought it was going to be cancelled and protested about that. Baker was replaced by McCoy (who most will probably know better as Radagast from the Hobbit movies) and the "Doctor is not human, he's an alien, he will manipulate others because he has that Time Lord arrogance" tone continued, but McCoy was more charming about it, his relationship with his companion, Ace, was much better, and it was done in a better, less heavy-handed way. Tragedy happened, but that had always been part of Who.
The attempt to turn it into a "property" like the movie was a sad and failed effort in that direction, and after that Who was left to limp along and not be renewed.
Rights eventually reverted to the BBC and interest revived, and they approached Russell Davies, a huge fanboy and a commercially successful writer for TV drama (he did the UK original Queer As Folk). Davies revived Who, and he did genuinely love the character and the show, but.
But. This is where the woke elements crept in, long before ever the term "woke" was known. Davies is gay (well, you might have gathered that) and wanted to introduce a more modern feel and look. So we got our Northern Doctor, a romance or at least acknowledged romantic possibility with his companion Rose, and later characters like Captain Jack Harkness (who helmed the 'adult' spin-off "Torchwood", notable mainly for being set in Wales and every main character being some flavour of queer).
That set the stage for what was to come, after Davies left. The Doctor gets a wife! The Doctor is a woman! and now the Doctor is black! as well as retcons all round about the origins of the Doctor and how there can be more than the (early established in canon) thirteen regenerations so we can go on to Fourteen, Fifteen, and beyond.
That they had to bring back David Tennant and Russell Davies to grab back the audience attention before launching the new, black, Doctor tells you how the efforts to be more modern and to retcon everything in sight went.
Modernisation is not a bad thing, and trying to keep it as this quirky, jokey, stuck-in-the-past show from your childhood isn't good in the long run, but there's ways of bringing it up to date without fundamentally changing the characters, and then there is "ticking off boxes on the bingo card". There have been Time Ladies before, so why was it so important to make the Doctor (and the Master) female regenerations instead of introducing new female characters? Ah, well!
New Who (that is, post-2005) always had a bit of what we could call "BBC" politics sprinkled in, but at mostly tolerably low levels that just produced the occasional eye-roll from the general audience. And the show itself was mostly pretty good.
The quality of the writing slowly declined over the years, but the point at which things really went off the rails was 2018 (or 19 maybe?) when Chris Chibnall took over as showrunner and the Doctor turned into a woman, which was the point at which the show became almost entirely *about* identity politics. This was jarring, since it's supposed to be a show about travelling through space and time, but the identity politics of early 21st century London inevitably wind up being the most important issue everywhere.
This culminated in a much-hated arc where the Doctor's character history was retconned so that twelve known (white, male) iterations of the Doctor were not the first, they were preceded by an unknown number of previous iterations (mostly "Women of Colour") that he had forgotten about. (Bear in mind that the Doctor is an alien from a planet of people who just happen to look identical to humans for no reason, there is no reason why Earth racial categories should have any meaning.)
>the Doctor is an alien from a planet of people who just happen to look identical to humans for no reason
A *real* fan would know that the causation here is backwards - humans look like Time Lords, because Rassilon mucked with a bunch of aliens' genetic origins.
Alright I stand corrected. I make no claim to be a "real fan" and it doesn't surprise me to hear that there's a canon explanation from one of Classic Who's occasional fits of attempted hard sci fi.
If you don't have an explanation otherwise, "Rassilon did it" is the general all-purpose solution 😀
Pretty sure that Drinker is a novelist. So he is creating new stories.
I'm not a fan of his shtick, but I thought his guest, The Little Platoon, did a good job with Star Wars Andor--especially the parallels between its prison arc and Foucault's Surveiller et punir.
In real life, Drinker is Will Jordan who is the author of the Ryan Drake series.
Yeah, I like the Drinker the best precisely because he shows the most sympathy to what he thinks the writers were trying to do, from a workman's perspective. I've also used advice from him in my own writing from time to time.
.
I've not seen as much of Little Platoon, apart from when they're all there chatting together.
"These channels are pretty low status, and should be"
That seems a little harsh straight off the bat? Though I *think* I understand what you mean.
I started watching those channels with "Rings of Power" coverage because every other outlet was so far up Amazon's arse you would have needed a team of rescue spelunkers to guide them back out, and any qualms I for one might have had about the wonderful new "show the world as it is today" version were because I was a racist, and a sexist, and a misogynist, and a homophobe (and probably a transphobe) who hated black people, brown people, yellow red and what we need is a great big melting pot - sorry, got carried away there.
It certainly wasn't because the adaptation was rubbish, oh my no, it was pure perfection so the only reason I didn't 300% adore it was because I am a hateful hater white cis het Christian Republican white man (er, wait a mo on that last one there... and yeah I'm a republican but not Republican.)
Are they perfect? NO. Do they have their own agendas? Yes. Are they flawed like the unquestioningly adoring channels? Sure! Do they make me laugh? Hell yeah, and Critical Drinker is miles nearer to my own grubby, shabby, muck-spattered origins.
The Little Platoon is not, and has a lot of views very much opposed to my own (I imagine) but there's a wonderful if very long video (three and a half hours!) about taste and quality and story-telling in regard to "Avatar: The Way of Water":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql2VVMMOsto
The Rings of Power is indeed a gift in how much adverse commentary it generated and how much *that* made me laugh, so in fact I am looking forward to Season Two (if we ever get it). The rumours are already swirling and are wild and weird, some of them are incredible but then neither would I have believed that Season One would ship Sauron and Galadriel and turn her into a genocidal psychopath, so what do I know?
Spoiler rumours: You like Sauron? Of course you like Sauron! So what's better than one Sauron? TWO Saurons! Or possibly three, or even four!
Yes, they're going to give us (having already cast) Annatar in season two, but that doesn't mean Halbrand has gone away. The weirder, wilder rumours are that Amazon have bought (some of) the rights to "The Silmarillion" - let's pause until the cold chill down our spines at that one fades - and are going to show the creation of the Valar and Maia, with Mairon being there. So that makes three Saurons, and to get to four - remember Celeborn? Well, seeing how as Galadriel didn't until six episodes in, never mind. He may show up in season two - but don't worry, they're not going to be faithful to the canon and have this really be Celeborn! It is going to be Sauron (yes, that guy again!) in disguise as Celeborn in order to fool Galadriel and Elrond and Gil-galad, because they already know about Halbrand (at least, one of the three does) and maybe suspect Annatar.
I can't wait. I cannot freakin' wait to see how much more worse they can make this desecration, and I won't give a penny to Amazon Prime to watch it, but I'll sure as hell be following the jeering on Youtube.
Hoping for more gems such as this, from someone (literally) half-way between me and Critical Drinker, come on down Norn Iron and the Despot of Antrim!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2XlEjfhz_8
Yeah, "low status" as in, I tell you about a club of people who like to get together and bitch about this one guy, and you might fairly conclude, "Well they sound like mean spirited and petty people." I then add that the guy in question is the school bully who beats us all up every morning. I mean, it's still bitter and enlittling behaviour, but suddenly I'm happy being in that club.
In this case the school bullies have done us the favour of being hilariously incompetent, losing billions of dollars and making total fools of themselves.
Plus the narrative of it all is so neat and satisfying. Watching Elon Musk tell Bob Iger to fuck off was a better pay off after a longer build up than anything in the fantasy fiction they were trying to flog us.
Well, Iger's troubles he brought upon his own head. He 'retired' in 2021, but hung on as an "adviser" to Chapek, who was then given the boot and the blame for the start of the string of troubles, and Iger came back as the presumed saviour who would turn it all around.
See how that worked out for you, Bob?
I'm well aware that I'm only being shown curated clips of the man. But I've never seen someone who comes across quite so insincerely when he talks. It's like every word he says is the product of focus groups and public relations training. There's not one iota of anything true or substantive left at the end of the process.
I have very little sympathy for Disney in all this mess, I think they've handled the DEI stuff terribly. Take "The Little Mermaid" live-action remake, with Ariel race-swapped. They could have done a new mermaid movie with an original black character, but they wanted to eat their cake and have it: the guaranteed, because proven, product with Ariel and try and rake in new market for black girls (I don't know if little black girls go to Disney movies anyway, I'd imagine they do), and a commercially motivated decision was dressed up as REPRESENTATION! ONLY RACISTS COULD OBJECT!!
I don't care what colour Ariel is, but I do think it looked dumb to have "redhead, same costume, but we're making her black". Oh, well.
They seem to have less good fortune in their tussle with DeSantis, as well, and again that's something they brought down on their own heads. Seeing all the online lefty/progressives defending a megacorporation that had to be forced to pay increased/back wages to their staff back in 2016, under Iger, is something else. That is not true communism or even socialism, comrade!
> Seeing all the online lefty/progressives defending a megacorporation that had to be forced to pay increased/back wages to their staff back in 2016, under Iger, is something else.
See what I mean? Reality has better writing! The dumb, blind process of cause-and-effect has a better grasp of satire than a Hollywood scriptwriter.
Critical drinker's content is a lot more than "this sucks."
Example counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsxa2tOWs6w
This is a scene comparison breakdown between the original Ghostbusters and Lady Ghostbusters that explains how they are different and why the 1st works and the 2nd mostly doesn't. I found it QUITE enlightening.
He has similar details for other movies (e.g. The lady protagonist in Indy 5 laughing while she and Indy get away right after Indy's friend has just been killed ... makes the character difficult to like).
One of his points for a recent movie (maybe Aquaman 2) was that it probably would have worked better if released earlier before we had seen so many OTHER comic book movies. He understands *why* the movie came out later, but his point that the timing hurt it is likely dead on.
Drinker also praises movies he likes. You will find examples of this on his channel, too.
I hope it wasn't about Aquaman 2, because timing had no chance of making that movie work better.
Yeah, I like his more technical content and do end up using his advice in my own writing. On the vanishingly rare occasions I sit down and do any.
I'm going to beat the dead horse. The Substack website on browser on phone is absolutely horrendous. What is the technical reason its so bad?
React, apparently.
Incompetent or lazy coders is likely the answer. Even my 2 year old laptop has trouble with it. But I did discover you can just buy a $1300 flagship phone and it's slightly less bad that way (the only problem so far with an S24 ultra is where if you scroll up and then down in the comments, the top half of the screen blanks out). Maybe if we complain about this every week, someone will do something (or SA will ban us).
I would be surprised if Scott would ban anyone over a politely stated complain regarding substack, even if it was rephrased weekly.
At the most, such comments would be restricted to a single top level thread.
I'm also curious!
Seems like they attempted to improve things by stripping out white space.
Regarding 4: I have an automation set up that ingests and runs through text to speech all my Substack emails. I could modify it to handle what you're talking about, but I'd prefer not to, for what it's worth.
The last Dominant Assurance Contract closes in one day. Logic Tournaments! So far all of these except for EnsureDone itself has paid out. https://ensuredone.com/projects
Why doesn't Trump (clearly a highly money-motivated person) open some kind of franchise/chain? It could be a bar, restaurant, wings place, burger joint, whatever (a taco restaurant would be kind of hilarious). The guy spent most of the 80s and 90s trying to license his name to various products like Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump airline, etc. He's the only one that can license the actual Trump name, and it doesn't take that much expertise to open up say a TrumpBurger- he can hire restaurant experts and so on. It would have lots of eagles, flags, guns, and the Bill of Rights on the wall. Once you get to a certain scale, there are 3rd party companies that just work on expanding franchises- just listened to a podcast where the Alamo Draft House founder explained that's how they went from 5 locations to a few hundred.
He could pitch TrumpBurger to all of his following, it would probably expand very rapidly in red states and red portions of blue states. Franchising is pretty close to printing money- various small entrepreneurs would beg to buy in and open one in their town, and he has tons of small business types as fans. He could be spending his late 70s getting much, much richer. Why not do that instead of running for office again?
(Inspired by an Instagram video I saw of a MAGA acai bowl store in Southern California)
> (clearly a highly money-motivated person)
I think this is a misunderstanding. In my opinion, while he is somewhat motivated by money, he's more motivated by public attention and admiration. And he's getting plenty of that from the whole "President" thing. He's currently being talked about as the savior or antichrist of the USA; opening a burger franchise would be bathos.
>He's currently being talked about as the savior or antichrist of the USA
Am I the only person in the USA who is neither particularly for nor particularly against Trump?
I thought his suggestion to eliminate two regulations for every new one added was a fairly good idea. I thought his suggestion to investigate injecting disinfectant to treat Covid was a quite bad idea. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn't seem to have weaponized the IRS during his term as President. He wasn't a good President, but he wasn't the worst we've had.
Well, I agree with everything you said about him. I was also a big fan of his executive order requiring classical architecture for new buildings. I suppose one way to put it is that I think there are enough real things to worry about with him, that I get frustrated when people make up new ones.
Many Thanks!
Looks like there's already a Trump Burger, though I don't think it's actually affiliated with him. https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/19/houston-area-burger-joint-inspired-by-president-donald-trump/
There are a lot of laws around true franchising that expose him to disclosure rules and would require him to actually follow through on stuff.
When he licenses his name, he gets the money and thats it - all the follow through is on the other person.
Yep.
TrumpBurgers might or might not be a stupid idea, but at this point, I'm prepared to bet that Trump would cash the check, if it were of sufficient size, so long as someone else took all the risk and did all the work.
Note that Trump U was initially going to be a licensing scheme but Trump decided to get directly involved, to his detriment. A mistake I don't think he'll repeat.
1. There's not that much money in it
2. Trump has spent decades building up the Trump brand as representing a certain type of ostentatious luxury. Burgers don't fit in.
3. Too much surface area for controversy. Tens of thousands of unvetted minimum-wage Trump Burger employees out there, with the press waiting to pounce the first time one of them does something stupid? Not worth it.
#3 would be a plus for him. He loves it when the press pounces on him; it's free advertising and supports the narrative that the press is out to get him.
And the deepstate is rigging the Super Bowl. It’s all part of the same big conspiracy that is not just out to get him but each one of his supporters. He’s the only thing standing in the way of radical left wing communist fascists that Rush Limbaugh warned them about.
Shouldn't Roswell Greys be in there somewhere? :-)
I very strongly disagree that there isn't 'much money' in a national fast-food chain. McDonalds? Chipotle? He could plausibly make tens to hundreds of millions in revenue
Plausibly, if he manages to build one of the most successful chains in history (while dealing with the fact that half the population including many core fast food demographics will outright refuse to eat there because they hate him, and another third of the population is vaguely embarrassed by him).
Remember, too, that McDonald's had first mover advantage, and so did Chipotle to some extent (not the first Mexican fast food chain but the first one that was actually good). Launching the nation's eight hundredth burger chain is going to be very different to launching the first fast food restaurant ever.
He's done a ton of these things over over the years. Check out https://www.trumpstore.com/. There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Steaks
Also casinos, resorts, various other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Donald_Trump
Some of them fail and some of them do well, and my guess is trumpburger would do pretty badly because it would be competing with dozens of beloved burger chains all over the country who are already in a cutthroat war of all against all.
These are licensing of his name and likeness. A franchise like that referenced in the original question is different.
Yes, starting with the fact that it's a lot more work. It does also make more money, but Donald J Trump does not appear to be short of money in the absolute sense. At the margin, the ratio of money:work is almost certainly higher for the next licensing deal than for establishing and operating a franchise. The fun:work and ego:work ratios are *definitely* higher, and that's almost certainly more important to him.
"He's the only one that can license the actual Trump name"
Is he? It's not a rare name. Now his likeness, and possibly the specific "Donald John Trump" name are much more exclusive. Maybe even things like Presidential-themed decoration in combination with the name Trump. But a Trump restaurant with generic Americana and a partner named Trump (genuinely involved or not)? Seems like pretty solid ground. Now that you mention it I'm less surprised he didn't do it and more surprised no one tried to piggyback.
He seems pretty busy? He did do basically this with truth social (with a spac no less), but now he's back to presidential campaigning.
I prefer to keep the full article in the email because I forward these emails from automatically to an IFTTT task that sends it to Pocket so I can read it later or listen to it at my leisure or when I don't have data.
RE: "go to website" link. As someone who reads this email on desktop, I'd be fine with this change.
Same.
I prefer getting the full post in email because my phone caches the contents of recent emails. This allows reading posts even when without cell service or when Substack is down.
Folks,
What is the "Total deaths" (1.1 million) in this page referring to exactly? Total deaths due to any cause in this week of Jan 2024? Or total deaths from covid so far i.e. from 2029 to now? I suspect it is the latter.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
How can I find the total number of daily deaths on average in a day now in 2024? If it is 3.6% of 1.1 million for this week, then it is 42k deaths this week from covid i.e. about 6k deaths a day from covid ?!
In the US (and I suspect elsewhere as well), there are no raw statistics on deaths due to covid--only on deaths associated with covid. That means they did a covid test post-mortem and it was positive. Anecdotally, based on cases I'm acquainted with, most covid-associated deaths were not caused by covid. We do have statistics on people put on respirators for covid, which we can more confidently associate with covid; but that will of course give underestimates for both covid and covid-caused deaths.
EDIT: This may have changed. Newer criteria for counting covid deaths are given on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/tech_notes.htm , but it is ambiguous in 2 important ways: it doesn't clarify whether "covid deaths" means "deaths with covid listed as a cause" (which would be the same as covid-associated deaths), or "deaths with covid listed as the underlying cause". It does clarify that a positive covid test is not necessary to be listed as a covid death.
But it says that "COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause on the death certificate in 87% of deaths" (presumably meaning death certificates listing covid as a cause), and that number is much too high to be correct, as you can check by estimating the number of people expected to test positive for covid at death who would have died anyway without covid. (That is, the expected number of of deaths in people who just happened to have covid at the time, is much higher than 13% of the number of covid-associated deaths, which is roughly the number of people who test positive for covid at death, but whose death certificates don't list covid as the underlying cause. I'm assuming that all people who tested positive for covid at death, had covid listed as a contributory cause.)
Current estimates are that 6.3% of the US population has covid at any given time (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). The CDC currently says that 3.6% of US deaths are caused by covid. 6.3 * .964 * .87 = 5.28, so we expect the number of people who die and just happened to have covid at the time to be 5.28% of all deaths. This is much more than (1-.87) * .036 = 0.47%, the number of people who, according to the CDC, test positive for covid, but whose deaths weren't due to covid. Do the math and you'll find we currently have negative excess deaths from covid. In short, I think that means that the CDC's current covid death numbers are too high by at least one order of magnitude.
It might be better to look at "excess deaths from covid", which is an estimate; see https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm. But in this case, we have an excess of "excess deaths from covid", because many people died from not being able to get tested or treated for life-threatening illnesses due to covid restrictions. I personally know of about as many deaths due to covid restrictions as deaths due to covid, and more deaths listed as covid-associated but certainly not due to covid.
On the other hand, we have a deficit of excess deaths from covid, due to the fact that people had fewer traffic accidents, and presumably caught other contagious diseases less, during the lockdowns. Covid disrupted life so much that expected deaths are difficult to compute.
There is also the problem that health-care institutions were given cash payouts for covid-associated deaths. I was told by a worker at a funeral home that the first covid-associated death in my area was fraudulent; they were told the body did not actually have covid.
There's also a literature on suicide and covid. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00303-0/fulltext indicates covid had little effect on worldwide suicide.
Were they given payouts for people with COVID merely dying in their care? That seems like a weird way to do it, instead of payments for treating patients for COVID. I’ve found some evidence the latter was done (e.g. https://www.hrsa.gov/provider-relief/about/covid-uninsured-claim), at least for uninsured patients. Do you know what government programs were paying hospitals for deaths? Or is the issue that they would find the patient had COVID post-mortem and then just pretend whatever treatment they gave them was for COVID after the fact?
> Were they given payouts for people with COVID merely dying in their care?
That's what I heard, but I didn't verify it. I didn't hear whether the money was federal or state, or from what agency, or who could get it (eg hospitals or nursing homes). There were probably many different programs, with different methods.
Thank you so very much for the detailed response.
It's the total number of deaths from covid so far, from 2019 to now. It matches the ourworldindata number pretty well.
For deaths it's a good heuristic that since people live ~100 years, about 1% of the population dies every year. So in the US with 400 million people, we should see ~4 million deaths per year, or 10,000 per day. A few percent of that is ~500 per day.
Obviously, the numbers are not super-precise, but should be roughly right. For precise data look at ourworldindata, https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths .
Here's another math puzzle.
You have a reel-to-reel tape recorder, 15 reels with tapes on them, and one empty reel.
(here's what such a recorder looks like: https://www.google.com/search?q=reel-to-reel+tape+player&tbm=isch&source=lnms)
You can use the recorder to transfer a tape from one reel onto an empty reel (by playing or fast-forwarding), but during that process the tape winds "in the opposite direction" onto the empty reel. If you repeat that process again, the tape will end wound up the original way.
Is it possible to arrange such transfers so that at the end, every tape is on the same reel it started from, but inverted in the opposite direction?
Bxnl, V jvyy tvir vg n gel.
Yrg'f hfr zngevprf. N irpgbe i va {-15, 0, 15}^16 funyy ercerfrag bhe fgngr, jvgu i_v ercerfragvat gur pbagrag bs erry v: mreb sbe rzcgl, -x sbe gncr x va onpxjneqf, +x sbe gncr x va sbejneq.
Fcbbyvat erry 1 gb erry 2 funyy or ercerfragrq ol Z=
0 rcf 0
-1 0 0
0 0 V
jurer V ercerfragf vqragvgl (14k14) cnqqvat naq rcf vf fbzr erny orgjrra mreb naq bar.
Sbe rknzcyr (1, 0, ...) -> (0, -1, ...) vf whfg zhygvcylvat gur vachg fgngr jvgu Z.
N trareny "fcbby erry a gb fbzr bgure erry x" pna or ercerfragrq ol
Z'=C*Z*C^-1
jurer C vf n crezhgngvba zngevk. Guvf pna ercerfrag nyy nyybjrq genafsbezngvbaf.
Hasbeghangryl, Z pna nyfb ercerfrag qvfnyybjrq genafsbezngvbaf, r.t. (1, 2, ...) -> (2*rcf, -1, ...). Sbe genafsbezngvbaf G juvpu fgneg jvgu erry 16 orvat rzcgl naq raq gurer nf jryy, jr pna fvzcyl qrznaq gung
G_16,16 = rcf^a, jurer a vf gur ahzore bs Z' zngevprf zhygvcyvrq gb cebqhpr G.
Va cnegvphyne, "erirefr rirel erry" vf n genafsbezngvba G juvpu vf
G=qvnt(-1, -1, ...-1, rcf^a)
Abj pbafvqre gur qrgrezvanagf.
qrg(Z)=rcf
qrg(Z')=qrg(C)*qrg(Z)*qrg(C^-1)=qrg(CC^-1)*qrg(Z)=qrg(Z)=rcf>0
Ubjrire, qrg(G)=(-1)^15*rcf^a=-rcf^a<0
Gurersber, G vf abg n cebqhpg bs nal ahzore bs Z', be gur qrfverq genafsbezngvba vf abg cbffvoyr ol pbafrphgviryl fcbbyvat erryf jvguva gur ceboyrzf pbafgenvagf.
Abgr gung guvf cebbs yrnirf gur cbffvovyvgl gung gurer vf fbzr G juvpu erirefrf gur svefg 15 gncrf, ohg qbrf abg xrrc gur gncrf va beqre.
Sbe nal 15k15 crezhgngvba zngevk C jvgu qrg(C)=-1, G=
-C 0
0 rcf^x
unf gur qrfverq qrgrezvanag rcf^x. Rkcrevzragvat jvgu 3+1 inevnag bs gur ceboyrz fhttrfgf gung fhpu fbyhgvbaf vaqrrq rkvfg sbe nal 3a+1 gbgny fvmr.
V'z fnlvat ab, orpnhfr gurer'f na bqq ahzore bs gncrf (fb na rira ahzore bs erryf). Vg'f vzcbffvoyr sbe gjb erryf, cbffvoyr sbe guerr, vzcbffvoyr sbe sbhe, naq V guvax gur cnggrea pbagvahrf. Vg'f cbffvoyr gb fjnc/syvc gur gncrf bs gjb erryf jvgu n serr erry, naq fb nal rira ahzore bs gncrf pna or fjnccrq guvf jnl, ohg jura gurer'f na bqq ahzore bs gncrf, gurer'f tbvat gb or bar yrsg bire.
This is a nice problem! If I understand correctly:
Fhccbfr gurer rkvfgf n fbyhgvba. Rirel gncr zhfg trg onpx gb vgf bevtvany cbfvgvba nsgre na bqq ahzore bs genafcbfvgvbaf (nxn gncr genafsref). Fb gur gbgny ahzore bs genafcbfvgvbaf gb nccyl vf gur fhz bs 15 bqq ahzoref, juvpu vf bqq. Ohg gur vqragvgl crezhgngvba vf rira, fb guvf vf abg cbffvoyr. (Sbe pbagrkg, nal crezhgngvba vf rvgure gur cebqhpg bs na rira be bqq ahzore bs genafcbfvgvbaf, ohg abg obgu.)
Ah, nice, you actually proved it!
This is correct.
(rot13)
Jr unir gb hfr rnpu erry rira ahzore bs gvzrf, orpnhfr erry fjvgpurf orgjrra "bpphcvrq" naq "rzcgl" fgngrf rnpu gvzr, fb gbgny ahzore bs fgrcf zhfg or rira. Ohg jr unir gb hfr rnpu gncr bqq ahzore bs gvzrf, orpnhfr gncr fjvgpurf orgjrra "fgnegvat qverpgvba" naq "bgure qverpgvba" rnpu gvzr, fb gbgny ahzore bs fgrcf zhfg or bqq. Fb ab, vg'f vzcbffvoyr.
I think that argument doesn't quite work. Every time you transfer a tape, *two* reels switch their status between "occupied" and "empty" (note that both could be originally-full reels), so theoretically an odd number of transfers can lead to an even number of state changes of reels.
O-ops, yes, my bad
True. But your proof doesn't work if you start with 14 tapes and one empty reel. And in fact the thing is doable in this case.
I'm imagining giving this problem to fresh crops of math students, who have never interacted with tape-based technology in daily life lol.
So if I understand this right then
@Scott: The next time you ask for feedback on some issue, could you please create one thread to collect all the replies? After the 182nd top-level post about how yet another reader really, really wants to keep the email feature, it gets a bit tiring.
I strongly agree.
+1
+1
Full text in email is preferred. Sometimes when I notice an error I check the updated post and see it is already fixed, but I strongly prefer the ability to read in the email. In most cases I read entirely in the email and don't open the site.
Yes, not having to click through is strongly preferable for me too.
Putting only the first paragraph in the email - well, I'm glad you asked because my initial reaction would be to be reminded of all those "you got a message! we're not going to tell you anything about it, log on to the website to check it out!" emails that I get. So I've always been rather pleased that substack gives you the whole text. I'd prefer it if serious corrections simply got sent again, but I don't know how practical substack makes that.
Yeah, like how LinkedIn will send you a "you have 1 new invitation" mail, but not give you the name of the other person in the e-mail, so you don't know if it's an actual friend/colleague or just some random recruiter spam. Really annoying.
I prefer getting the post in my email.
Our local elections are not important. We live in a rural area and the issues are usually small potatoes, but the way we elect local officials recently became a fiasco; hopefully, this is not a sign of what's to come in our national elections this year. Read about it here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/local-election
Also, the question was raised on what type of human being might emerge from utopia, should we ever succeed in building one. Here is a good answer: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-notes-from-the-underground, amazing that it was offered over 150 years ago!
I'm fine with first paragraph only in the mail. I usually go to the post anyway because it's a better reading experience and I know you sometimes edit the posts. The only posts I often read inside the email client are the open thread posts (If I'm only interested in the updates).
Has anyone theorized that willpower involves actively putting your “thumb on the scale” of some probabilities in your predictive processing network, possibly through a “make-believe” like mechanism?
For me it seems to go the opposite way. When I am depressed it is harder to do things because I am more pessimistic. When I am on antidepressants I am more optimistic . So mustering willpower to exercise and avoid junk food is so much easier as I believe every instance adds up to a larger positive impact. When I am depressed it feels actions have negligible results so why make any effort. I guess optimistic people have higher probabilities which means it’s easier for them to muster willpower to do things they don’t enjoy.
Placebos may be working by this mechanism. We believe we are getting better, so subconsciously find it easier to adopt healthier lifestyle behaviour, socialize etc which ends up physically and mentally making us feel better.
Also, since you're here, I remember you once shared a link about how the Bank of England admitted to printing money to fund WWI. Any chance you have further reading material?
Sure, here’s a 100 year old correction:
https://www.ft.com/content/1a9f7e7e-7c43-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928
It’s worth revisiting Scott’s piece on Moloch causing World War One.
I think in the future, historians will agree that central banks enabled the massive human atrocities of the 20th century by hiding the true financial cost of armed conflict. The elites stole from the people (via inflation) to fight massive wars, and deceived them with the help of mass media that did not act as a check on centralized power but rather as an amplifier for its self-serving narratives.
If all wars had to be paid for in hard money (ie not debt money), the peole at home would feel their cost far more directly and I think would therefore oppose them.
Thanks. Although I was moreso wondering if maybe the bitcoin maximalists had a dossier of other coverups or something.
(Also -- alas, I don't remember your original link so many months ago being paywalled.)
EDIT: I also seemed to remember you saying something about the BoE colluding with the U.S. federal reserve regarding WWI. But when I skimmed the thread, I didn't find anything like that. Was I hallucinating?
Ah, so it turns out you've complained about the BoE more than once, and I was looking under the wrong post. Here's the excerpt that I originally remembered.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos/comment/10840888
- printing all that money put the bank of england at risk of being found out, so the bankers reached out to their american friends, who were more than happy to help print more money too, causing the boom of the 1920's and the, of course, eventually crash
When I follow the link you provided, I don't see any mention of the U.S. involvement. So I assumed you knew more than you were letting on.
There’s a book called “broken money” by Lyn Alden that goes into all this in more detail. Perhaps someone has a short summary list?
oo, I'll look into it!
>If all wars had to be paid for in hard money (ie not debt money), the peole at home would feel their cost far more directly and I think would therefore oppose them.
You might be right, though I feel it would be ironic. This reminds me of mandatory seat belt laws: A chance of death won't get people to buckle their seat belts, but a chance of death and a $50 fine will. Certainly war plus a tax hike will get more opposition than war alone.
Scott's post on Karl Friston espoused exactly this theory, no?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand-friston-on-free-energy/
> I think the claim (briefly mentioned eg here) is that your brain hacks eg the hunger drive by “predicting” that your mouth is full of delicious food. Then, when your mouth is not full of delicious food, it’s a “prediction error”, it sets off all sorts of alarm bells, and your brain’s predictive machinery is confused and uncertain. The only way to “resolve” this “uncertainty” is to bring reality into line with the prediction and actually fill your mouth with delicious food. On the one hand, there is a lot of basic neuroscience research that suggests something like this is going on. On the other, Wo’s writes about this further:
I’m not sure this explains willpower though, does it? This seems to explain how the hunger drive (or others) would work. And I’m asking, is it possible that we can intentionally manipulate some probabilities in these networks, for short periods of time. I can see how this would perhaps be both necessary for imagination and sufficient for something that looks like willpower. Experimentally I have found that intense imagination helps me exert myself more while exercising, so it seems to fit.
Also, Scott once linked to this website in a link-dump (or something) once.
https://smoothbrains.net/
I didn't go too hard in the paint exploring it. But it hypothesizes that action-potentials consist of a psychic vector-field, like how solar flares follow magnetic lines. This models, for instance, drug-addiction in terms of the psychic equivalent of a blackhole. It endorses the "Symmetry Theory of Valence" on top of Predictive Coding. Maybe you'll find it interesting.
As I understood, Friston believes that the manipulation of beliefs explains *action in general*, not just drives. The post framed the Predictive Coding Paradigm as "not a theory of everything" because it was unable to account for motor-activity. That is, until Friston came along and said "actually, it *is* a theory of everything" and posited that motor-activity is a sort of "bayesian-updating in reverse". "Reverse" in the sense that: epistemic-cognition reduces error by changing beliefs to match perception; whereas agentic-cognition reduces error by changing perception (via acting upon the environment) to match beliefs. So by setting arbitrary yet stubborn beliefs, you can "trick" your nervous system into generating an error-signal. And then an error-correction mechanism drives your motor-activity. This is supposedly how all motor-activity is instantiated.
With this in mind, "willpower" looks like a synonym for "act by believing delusional things with all your heart", even if the exact term "willpower" is never used in the post. Although I suppose it's possible that "willpower" refers to a more specific phenomenon, where the delusions are given a nitro-boost or something.
> Friston mentions many times that free energy is “almost tautological”, and one of the neuroscientists I talked to who claimed to half-understand it said it should be viewed more as an elegant way of looking at things than as a scientific theory per se.
And while I'm running my mouth, I might as well add that I think I know what he's talking about here.
The units in any given equation or inequality (such as miles-per-hour) can be analogized to a currency. This is a tautology of dimensional analysis in the sense that if you're performing a sanity-check and find something like "5 mph = 11 miles", you know you screwed up somewhere since the units don't match. And *of course* the brain uses something functionally equivalent to an inequality-operator to make comparisons to make decisions. What else would it use? So *of course* the brain is using some sort of "currency-esque" thing to make comparisons. The only question is what the currency is. In lieu of a real answer, people often call it "utility", though I guess Friston prefers "free-energy".
On one hand, this is laughably trivial. But on the other hand, it unlocked some other insights for me when I was trying to wrap my head around quaternions for the first time.
Wow, this is a great explanation. It seems to gibe with Noether’s theorem. Whenever you have a symmetry in the action of n a dynamic system (ie, the laws of physics are the same across all of time), you get a conserved quantity (ie, energy). So in this case if the brain is consistently making comparisons between predictions, that consistency should give rise to a conserved quantity.
I'm familiar with the name and prosaic description of Noether's Theorem. But I never understood the math itself on a deep level. So I never properly integrated it, mentally. But yeah, seems analogous.
In retrospect though, I think it can be boiled down to the Peano Axioms. Numbers are just stacks of successor-functions. The successor-functions and relational-operators between them need to be the same dimension by logical necessity. Or in other words, the symmetry of successor-functions is what gives rise to quantities.
damn do we sound high.
I'm not sure you can separate the willpower part of the thought process. Some part is clearly "cake is tasty" and another is "avoid weight gain", in addition to zillions of other thoughts, including things like "I'm sad" or "I'm happy".
I’m interested in understanding if there is an agreed upon mechanism by which willpower operates. What I’m wondering is if the thing we call willpower is something like “the extent to which we can temporarily nudge probabilities in our predictive networks.” I can see how “make believe” is useful here. When a child engages in imaginative play, im guessing this works by temporarily shifting assigned probabilities to courses of action, so that narratives (ie “now I’m a bear”) take weight over the memories that say they are a primate. In the case of the cake / weight gain example, I’m taking it as a given that our brains are still likely doing some expected value calculation, even in the willpower case. Im guessing people eat the cake despite “knowing” it causes weight gain because they asses that the probability of weight gain is assessed as being too low because it’s distant and some fraction. If the cake make you gain 30 pounds immediately upon eating it, I think more people could resist it. So if a person imagines themselves ballooning up as big and fat, it’s like pretending the probability of weight gain is higher than it is, which can help with the outcome pointing the way “rational” you wants. Most people will tell you that using willpower all the time is exhausting, and approaches the tie into identity (ie “I just don’t enjoy sweets”) work better or feel more automatic. From a predictive processing perspective, it makes sense that once you’ve giant enough evidence that you don’t eat cake, the suggestion never comes up because it’s never assigned a significant probability.
Again, my goal here is to try and understand what willpower is doing from a predictive processing perspective.
I've always thought of "willpower" and "free will" as basically the same thing.
When we're at a decision point, and as Sapolski and others argue, what you're going to choose is basically a deterministic function of your genes, epigenetics, upbringing, background around similar choices, the context (you might make different choices on a date or around a new person you're trying to impress), and so on.
So that's your sort of fixed probability cloud, with a density function around the various options split some way. 30% eat the cake, 40% don't eat the cake, 20% distract yourself and change context, 10% eat something else, or whatever.
Now where free will and willpower comes in is altering the "background around similar choices" part of the equation. You can change future-you's PDF by choosing a better choice now and in the subsequent choices like this, and this is where habits and imagination and all the other tools people have mentioned come in.
But I don't think an exertion of "willpower" is necessary, your "thumb on the scale." What if you just chose better choices with no effort? What if you'd sustained some localized insult to the brain, or what if your taste buds matured or changed as you aged, or what if a hypnotist convinced you to make better choices with no effort? Then your future you's PDF's will be changed accordingly with no effort on your part.
Surely if a hypnotist or aging can induce the change, you could also "decide" to make that change in a non-effortful way, ie it is at least possible (due to those existence proofs) to reach that mental state without the perception of effort and willpower.
So what is willpower? It's a fiction, like conscious decisions, that we pointed to after the fact, in the mien of our new PDF's - I have this PDF now, because I made those choices back then. Or another way, it's something we choose to pretend to engage in now, to "earn" our better states in the future. But it's not necessary or real, much like Libet's experiments showing us that "I *decided* to hit that switch" is a back-propagated tag added well after the unconscious decided and started moving your finger.
What evidence is there for the assertion that the process is purely deterministic? This seems like a philosophical sleight of hand to me. I can imagine how it _could_ be deterministic, but I don’t see an argument here so much as an assertion.
Good question.
I thought the underlying assumption was basically materialism writ at human scale - like if it *wasn't* deterministic, what outside force is acting to insert the non-determinism? Your immortal soul?
An analogical thought exercise - wouldn't a sufficiently intelligent being be able to predict with arbitrarily high accuracy what your actions would be in pretty much any given situation? Thus arguing you're deterministic?
I mean, that's not an existence proof, but the fact that adults can largely predict what children or pets are going to do in 99% of situations at least analogically backs it up.
In what ways are you imagining it could NOT be deterministic? RNG's in our heads somewhere? Quantum stuff ala Penrose?
I agree this is essentially a statement of materialist philosophy taken as a given. My answer is that I think the concept of an immortal soul is more plausible than materialist monism ever solving the hard problem of consciousness. I think that souls likely interact with the world by means of Penrose-style quantum interactions. It’s an empirically observable fact that quantum mechanical phenomena influence the behavior of our brains, otherwise we couldn’t be having this kind of conversation. The only question is what precisely the casual relationship is, between quantum mechanical phenomena and our brains. I suspect our souls interact with the world not just over the span of our brains but literally everywhere, and that the souls of the departed still influence reality by collectively influencing and maintaining the laws of physics. This then explains why the laws of physics are what they are: they are a projection onto quantum chaos by the collective departed who love us and wish us well. I suppose this is an old fashioned way of thinking though.
Is there even agreement that "willpower" is a real thing rather than an epiphenomenon? There is certainly the "appearance of willpower", but is that a correct perception? (OK, centripetal force is an example of what I mean by calling it an epiphenomenon. Yeah, it's sort of real, but not in any basic sense.)
Everyone knows you gain 10 pounds from eating a one-pound box of chocolates. Emotional weight varies even in the instance itself. Plus, if you resist one minute, you must resist again in another few minutes, and each time might need more willpower to resist. This doesn't mesh well with your hypothesis, as far as I can see, but doesn't directly contradict it.
I doubt the brain does calculations of any sort, in the mathematical sense. Using logic, we can often tell the correct course of action, yet end up doing something else. In the words of the band Rush from the song New World Man, "He's old enough to know what's right but young enough not to choose it".
Calculation is not some sort of physical entity. It's an abstract process.
I'm sure the brain calculates just as much as a computer does. A computer flips electric voltages around, the brain flips chemical signals around. Both can be modeled as equivalent to calculating, which is an abstract process. (And neither is error free.)
I disagree, after having read "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. It presents a convincing argument that some things can be true yet not computable. Computers follow algorithms, and it is not clear to me that the brain follows an algorithm of any sort.
The central thesis of the book is that the brain somehow uses quantum mechanics to think and be conscious, but I think it falls short on that point. But Godel's theorem shows some things must be true within the universal that cannot be proven. I think it is possible thinking does something to reach conclusions that machines, as we understand them currently, cannot do, even in principle.
Godel's Theorem relies on a "perfectly correct" reasoning. The brain doesn't do that. (Computers try...an are designed around the idea that they approach that at the limit.)
But what the brain does is still computation. It definitely does other things as well, as it's computation is not without side effects.
Whether what is computable by a particular device matches reality (i.e. "truth") is an independent question. OTOH, the brain has evolved to ensure that there's a useful correspondence between what the brain predicts and what the universe will present.
FWIW, I feel that the brain definitely uses quantum operations. There doesn't seem to be any alternative. But to jump from there to "consciousness is a quantum phenomenon" is a step much too far. First you need an operational definition of consciousness. (OTOH, I haven't read "The Emperor's New Mind". I'm relying on general consensus. Perhaps he does offer an operational definition of consciousness. I'd still need a lot more evidence to take it seriously. ) Currently, I believe, they've shown (with reasonable plausibility) that signals propagate a couple of nm further along the tubules than classical models would suggest. I find that quite plausible, but don't find that it implies that consciousness, itself, is a quantum phenomenon, except in the sense that everything is.
re 4. i would argue this kills this nice feature of substack which is “you get your text in the mail app and get to read it”. if instead the email is just a proxy for visiting web site, then i need to perform an action, even directed by the link from the email, to quit the mail app and go to the browser. that does not often work smoothly. then, in browser i have 50 opened tabs and bringing my attention back there is not helpful for the current text and its P(read|opened in browser) which is obviously lower than P(read in email app right away). it is often hard to focus on the content, on one piece of content, etc so receiving stuff to the mailbox comes quite handy — having all the emails around the text is not the same like having one_more_tab being added to the fifty_tabs_that_i_once_found_interesting_to_read_and_never_read_just_to_close_them_all_300_days_later.
Are there any accounts of people who've learned to lucid dream developing schizophrenia?
I often wonder about this, because if learning to lucid dream is primarily about learning when an experience is happening in the real world vs your brain's fabrication of the real world - then does this skill transfer if one develops waking hallucinations like with schizophrenia?
It sounds kinda kooky, but a part of my brain wonders if lucidity, or lucidity interventions (drugs that increase lucidity during dreams) could have a large impact on schizophrenia symptoms.
I just checked if a common drug taken with lucid dreamers (galantamine) has any effect. Results seem very mixed, with the drug affecting sub-scores but not having much of an effect of overall standardized measurements of symptom severity.
Still, galantamine is not a magic lucid dreaming pill, so I wonder if advanced lucid dreamers would have different experiences with things like schizophrenia symptoms.
This article: https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/advance-article/doi/10.1093/schbul/sbad173/7517011?login=false is about a sufferer's discovery that it helps to worry *less* about whether they are having a hallucination. I imagine it depends what kind of hallucinations you get, though.
Since I taught myself to fly at will in my dreams, my current check for whether I'm dreaming is to attempt that. Works like a charm, but I don't see how it can be helpful for schizophrenia.
Since childhood I noticed that while dreaming I may actually be unsure about whether I'm dreaming or not, while in the waking world I never have any doubts that I'm awake. I suspect that conditions like schizophrenia have something to do with this feeling of certanity/uncertanity.
There's two mechanisims of lucidity I think are relevant - the one you mentioned (a feeling of certainty/uncertainty) - and the occurence of something specific that you know to be deeply unlikely in the real world.
I have some experience with lucid dreaming too, and there are times I get a vague feeling something is a dream for no specific identifiable reason. I can just feel it (mechanism 1). And then there's the times I notice something deeply unlikely, like a walk through the door and there's a celebrity and I realize something is off (mechanism 2).
The way I'd imagine both mechanisms might be helpful with schizophrenia are:
1. having the vague feeling your brain is making things up is probably a good ability to have when detecting hallucinations or wayward thinking.
2. being on alert for generally unlikely things happening and 'reality testing' when they occur is probably also helpful for detecting hallucinations or wayward thinking.
I don't think it could actually stop the occurrence of symptoms - just that it might be helpful in managing and detecting them in yourself
As a lucid dreamer ... one time, I am thinking about someone who I haven't seen for ages, and then by coincidence they just show up. Now, I know dreams work that way and waking reality usually doesn't. Quick mental check: is any of this real? Answer: yep, seems real ... must be just a coincidence.
On the other hand....
I dream that I am at philosophy conference, at which Eric Schwitzgebel presents a paper on radical skepticism. How would you know if you are dreaming right now? We go for coffee afterwards, and discuss Eric's paper. It is certainly very interesting. At no point during this do I realise that, in fact, I am dreaming right now.
I tell this dream to a colleague of mine, and we develop a bit about a conference on radical skepticism, where authors present papers in which they argue that their audience might not exist.
Some psych textbooks are happy to theorise that drug-induced hallucinations and schizophrenia associated hallucinations share a common mechanism (e.g. the drug and the disease process affects the same brain region) but are reluctant to extend this to hypnagogic hallucinations.
A tentative hypothesis (which I think you would need to find evidence against to declare hypnagogic hallucinations an unrelated phenomenon) ... hallucinogenic drugs, schizophrenia, and the onset of the sleep state all affect the same brain mechanism.
Re: 4. I forward substack emails to my Kindle. Not having the entire post in the email would suck quite a bit.
Do you just forward them directly to your @kindle.com address? Or is there some more complicated mechanism?
Re: 4 btw can you please tell substack to fire their entire programmer team starting with the CTO and hire people who can write a backend that serves plain html instead of whatever they do now, that takes 5 seconds to render? And to re-render when switching to another tab and back? Just a suggestion.
For what it's worth, the rerender when switching tabs is your browser's doing. But it's doing it because substack is taking up so much memory that the browser is supsending the process to free some up.
They dont just return strait HTML because that would limit the client side interactivity. There are ways around this of course, but without knowing more about their architecture I couldn't say how hard/easy it would be.
Hear hear. This comment added nothing and - given the system we're complaining about - is contributing to making things even slower. But I'm gonna post it anyway just to +1 firing the programmers.
The code does not cope with many comments. Apparently, allowing readers to have intelligent discussions in the comments is not part of Substack's business plan.
(The page does not _deliberately_ re-render itself. It's just that it uses up so much memory that the browser is forced to throw it out at the earliest opportunity to allow the other tab some room to breathe.)
I literally just installed the app for this exact reason. Works much smoother now.
> The code does not cope with many comments. Apparently, allowing readers to have intelligent discussions in the comments is not part of Substack's business plan.
Unironically yes, with the important nuance that Substack's performance is at its worst specifically on ACX where the default behavior is to display a large comment section at the end of an extended article; Scott asked for some concessions, and they hacked something together from the parts they had rather than do it the efficient way. Standard behavior is optimized first for where an article only has two curated comments and second for a dedicated comments page with the article excluded, this is a pretty bad structural fit for ACX.
>The page does not deliberately re-render itself. It's just that it uses up so much memory
See, if so, that's precisely the problem, and why all of Substack's web devs should have their Software Engineer licenses revoked (hah, as if)
I just popped into the console and checked:
>$(".comment-list-items").textContent.length
= 354693
JS uses UTF-16, so add a factor of 2, that's ~700 *kilo*bytes of text. You could fit that on a floppy diskette. There is absolutely no reason it should be taking up 2-3 orders of magnitude more space (browser task manager says ~450,000Kb) to store that text in memory.
There's a sort of pervasive lack of machine affinity so to call it. For another example, if you want to browse the post archive, the page automatically loads 10 or so more article titles when you scroll to the bottom, it takes a second or two, then you can scroll to the bottom again and have more titles loaded.
I guarantee that loading all 1000 or so article titles for the entire history of the blog would be *faster than a single update* , because the amount of data is minuscule, the amount of processing required is minuscule, and it's all probably dwarfed by the complications required to dynamically load paginated stuff.
But no, kids these days have no intuitions about how much time things really take (and especially, should take when done straightforwardly), and so extremely misguidedly try to not overload the poor computer with too much work by having it process more than ten article titles at a time.
That one, I suspect, is some sort of engagement metric or whatever. If you only load ten at a time, the user scrolls through the ten, then has to wait, increasing the chance they see something in the ten they want to read. If you everything all at once they scroll much quicker, maybe Ctrl+F, and on finding/not finding what they want, leave.
Since the goal is to keep users around, that outcome is to be avoided at all costs. So just loading a small number of titles at a time, even though it would be faster and easier to load them all at once.
Yeah the rendering issue is really annoying, especially on ACX for some reason.
I like that the posts are automatically downloaded in email and so available offline with no pre planning required on my part.
4. I would much rather live in error than click on a link.
Re 4 I just love how unanimous we all are that full text in email is great. Feels rare on the internet
I suspect that people who read their e-mails feel strongly about getting them, but people who click to read the website do not care much about whether the e-mail contained the entire story or not.
The latter describes yours truly. Just don't care one way or the other.
Apathy seconded (thirded?), and for the same reason.
4. I will be significantly inconvenienced for a few reasons. I'd probably even consider cancelling my paid subscription.
Also, I imagine some people still use RSS, did you consider how it will impact them?
Just to elaborate, one of the main reasons is that I'm trying to avoid the substack app/website when possible, because the experience is not great (to put it mildly).
Has anyone here tried tDCS? Everything I’ve read seems to suggest it’s surprisingly safe, even when specifically searching for risks and adverse effects. Would I be an idiot to try it via the DIY route?
I have a friend who used the Flow tDCS headset and reported very positive results with a noticeable reduction in depression symptoms, and another who didn’t experience any change.
Yes, years ago I connected a 9 volt battery to my temples via salt water soaked cotton pads, my goal was to try making up riffs on my guitar while connected to the current cause I'd read it increases creativity and wanted to test it out. I think I put the pads too near to my eyes because it gave me mild continuous flashes of light in my vision. This freaked me out so I took the electrodes off after only a minute or two. Anyway this is probably not too useful to you since you probably want to use higher voltage for a longer period of time, but for the record this caused no adverse effects at all to either my brain or eyes. Also I can't see any reason it would be any more or less dangerous than having it done by a professional as long as you're careful about measuring voltage, amperage and electrode placement (NB: I am not a doctor or in any way qualified to be giving this advice). Please let me know about your results if you end up trying it, I also want to give it another go!
Whoa. That's definitely more DIY than what I had in mind! I was just thinking of trying out one of the more reputable retail devices.
My interest is actually somewhat adjacent to yours - a number of studies seem to show that tDCS has a positive effect on motor learning so I'm wondering if it might be able to help me break through some coordination/motor planning barriers that I've been struggling against for years, also on guitar. (I'm personally skeptical but the lack of, really, any significant adverse effects across dozens of papers is intriguing).
"years ago I connected a 9 volt battery to my temples via salt water soaked cotton pads"
Holy Mother of God. What's that they say about young men and risk?
I think you got off very lightly with only "mild continuous flashes of light". Your Guardian Angel must have been working overtime!
It's funny how you correctly assumed I'm a young man without any demographic information; I am truly a living stereotype I guess
Ah well, I've been around young men and young women in my time (I was a young woman once) and while I won't say there are *no* women who'd do something like that, the odds are on that it was a young man 😀
I'm glad you survived and made it to the comments section here!
Yikes. That reminds me of the famous story of the soldier who managed to accidentally kill himself using only a 9V battery: https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
Wow, maybe I'll consider being less cavalier with electricity. But I've also been electrocuted by a car battery and 220 volts from a wall socket, as I assume most people have at some point, and been totally fine; does the skin really provide so much resistance that 220 volts is no big deal outside the skin, but 9 volts is deadly under the skin? (I know it's mostly the amperage that determines if a shock is deadly, but still that's ~6 amps versus ~2 amps maximum)
Update: my simple amateur tester showed about 800 kohm between temples, and over 1 Mohm between hands. My skin is on the dry side, and the contact area was small, so there’s that. I also suspect the resistance of any tissue to be nonlinear, and may go down with increasing voltage.
Yes, skin is quite resistive compared to what’s under it. Its resistance varies widely due to genetics, moisture levels, location in the body, etc, but kohm-levels are common. Underneath are tissues soaked in electrolytes. Orders of magnitude more conductive.
Thank you for sharing this!
4: That would stop me from cheating LeechBlock by reading your posts from my mail reader rather than my browser. Whether that's good or bad it's up to you.
I usually read the posts through the email. I don't know why, but whenever I go to the website it's incredibly slow. Clicking on a link takes at least 5 seconds to open a new tab, + another 5 to 10 seconds where the page just freezes. The same for highlighting or copying something, etc. Scrolling on a post, again, takes around 5 to 10 seconds to show me the content where I scrolled to.
I really don't know why this is happening, I tried disabling all my plugins but it doesn't solve it. I use Firefox
Yeah, it's the comments, Substack has dogshit optimization for displaying (purely text!!!) comments, and since ACX displays comments alongside the articles it lags like fuck. They seriously should fix it, it's horrid.
I feel like they're optimizing for "displays new comments promptly and unobtrusively", and they got that down. But whatever they're doing makes the rest of it hideously slow at any significant scale.
Yeah I substack on mobile is terrible (which is bizarre since it's a plain text page mostly). Right now as I'm typing this comment the text box is lagging. I think it's something to do with how they render comments because I have less issues on pages without them and the most on open threads.
Does this also happen on other Substack blogs? I suspect it is the long comment section that causes the freezing.
I have clicked on 3 blogs that Substack recomments on its main page, and clicked the latest article on each one. The number of comments: 0, 66, 16. This Open Thread has 100 comments at the moment (3 hours after its publishing) and the number is quickly growing.
It doesn't happen on other Substack blogs I follow. I just tried to find another random Substack with a blog post with 100+ comments and indeed I see the same issue happening, so you might be right.
In a perfect world, the choice between "full article in e-mail" and "only the start" could be done by the subscriber, individually. Yet another way Substack sucks.
The thing is: individually, no one benefits from having only the first paragraph in the mail, since that provides strictly less choices (ie, someone who cares about reading an up-to-date post can always click through to Substack). The only advantage of sending only the first paragraph is to create common knowledge that everyone is reading the most recent version at the time they read it... Which is still a paltry advantage, since some people will inevitably read the post before any edits are made.
This can be done pretty easily by subscribing via RSS feed but not email (although that might have problems for paid subscribers if locked posts don't have a preview)
I prefer to have the full text in my email. Then if I'm offline I can still get most of the benefit, and if I'm online I know I'll get the best experience by going to your website, especially if it's a links post where commenters are likely to have added significant insight. However I recognise that I've been reading ACX long enough to know the system, and you're disproportionately likely to get comments from such people.
> Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails?
Yes. Among other things, you have already deleted your entire blog once; having an archive in my email is a nice bit of security against that.
Twice. Slate Star Codex was deleted and later reinstated, but his older LiveJournal, which contained some of my favourite short stories, but was understandably too revealing of personal information given how much attention he later attracted, remains down.
I would also be inconvienced, not for archival reasons, but because I usually read these Open Threads by email first to check out if any of the main announcements interest me.
Excellent point. Yes- i would probably never read an open thread again if it was just a link. Though a different subject line could fix that and might be a good idea regardless.
Came here to say this. I was happy to have all post-2017 content from Slate Star Codex in my inbox when it imploded. I click through for comments and to like, but I enjoy having an easy copy in my archive. :) (To be clear, I don't think the chance that ACX is going to implode is at all large, at least when modulated on top of "substack continues to exist". But it's nice not to have to think about it.)
I prefer long reads on my kindle and use KTool to send them there. For newsletters from Substack, the best way is to setup forwarding filters. So I would no longer read ACX on my kindle if the whole post does not come in the email. I could manually send it, but the additional effort is more likely going to mean I read in email on my phone and it would get lumped into “phone time” which I am actively working to limit.
I strongly prefer having the email in my inbox to read. I mean with Zvi's AI posts I usually end up having to go to the website after I read through it mostly, but it's not what I like.
I think we can all accept that the canonically updated version that expresses your current opinions is the website, without needing to have it be the current version in our email. Besides, think of the advantages of not being able to (slightly) bury history this way?
>Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails?
Yes, given this website's jankiness, I would be absolutely inconvenienced. Sufficiently that I would stop reading, and end my (using-discount-code) subscription in response.
This website continues to suck, horribly. I only very rarely dip into the comments (reading or writing) simply because it's such a chore to deal with. If I have to deal with the mess in order to simply read your posts, I won't be reading enough of them, often enough, to justify spending any money on this anymore.
I agree. I am not a paid subscriber, but if I stopped receiving post emails I would be likely to read less ACX overall and less likely to become a subscriber in the future. The website is very laggy and janky to the point that it can be almost impossible to read sometimes, especially on a mobile device. I therefore read the posts primarily through my email.
Also, I often read posts shortly before bed. When they are sent to my email, I can read them on a very dim screen with a black background, which helps my sleep hygiene greatly. I would not read them before bed with the blue background present on the substack website while dealing with the janky website.
I posted a complaint about the substack user interface to the ssc reddit several months ago, and it has received 27 upvotes. I think many of those upvoting people would be inconvenienced if there were to be an end to email posts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16lrdiy/substack_user_interface/
If there are substantial updates to posts after they are sent out as email posts, I would appreciate receiving an email update, preferably on the same email thread as the original post email.
I think enough people have responded to the email question by now that Scott's got the message and my voice isn't needed in the mix.
But I can't pass up this chance to stress how shitty this website is for comments. The worst thing is there's nothing any of us can do about it.
I think this is the most consensus I've seen on any internet question. Maybe on any question.
My only issue with the comment facility is that each time I post a comment, the site trundles through two profile set up pages before it publishes the comment. But I'm so used to that now I hardly notice.
I'm getting a whole litany of bullshit on mobile, including ludicrously slow loading, random and very obnoxious page jumps (ie I'll be reading and suddenly I'll be somewhere else in the comments with no idea how far up or down I've been jumped) and truncated comments with a missing "read more" button (that means I can't read anything without refreshing the entire page and going through it all again.) Plus the reply-by-email bug that catches at least one person every week, and pollutes the main tree for everyone.
If enough commenters complain, is Scott likely to take this seriously?
If so, if Scott makes an issue out of this, are the devs likely to take *him* seriously?
No one has a particularly painful BATNA they can inflict so neither Scott nor the devs have any reason to give a fuck.
The substack website is blocked in China, possibly other places. Obviously there are workarounds but having the post come via email is very helpful there.
Math puzzle: everyone in the family drank exactly a whole mug of coffee with milk. Kate's mug contained 1/4th of all the milk consumed and 1/6th of all the coffee. How many members are in the family?
(not very hard, but curiously harder than it ought to be)
Nffhzvat na vagrtre ahzore bs snzvyl zrzoref naq nyy zhtf ubyqvat gur fnzr ibyhzr, svir. Vs gur ahzore jrer sbhe, gura gurer'q or yrsgbire pbssrr, naq vs gur ahzore jrer fvk gurer jbhyqa'g or rabhtu zvyx. Naq gur fnzr ybtvp nccyvrf gb ahzoref yrff guna sbhe naq zber guna fvk, fb svir.
Svthevat bhg nal zber qrgnvyf vf tbvat gb gnxr zr ybatre, gubhtu.
Nffhzvat svir crbcyr, gur bgure sbhe unir 3/4=12/16 bs gur zvyx, fb Xngr trgf 4/16 naq gur bguref trg 3/16 bs gur zvyx. Gur bgure sbhe unir 5/6=20/24 bs gur pbssrr, fb Xngr trgf 4/20 naq gur bguref trg 5/24 bs gur pbssrr. Gur havgf npghnyyl jbex bhg jvgu gubfr ahzoref: rirelbar trgf 8 havgf va gurve zht, vs jr nffhzr 16 havgf bs zvyx naq 24 havgf bs pbssrr.
Be gb chg vg nabgure jnl: fvapr rnpu zht ubyqf gur fnzr nzbhag, naq rirelbar unf 3/16 bs zvyx naq 4/24 bs pbssrr, Xngr'f rkgen 1/16 bs zvyx arrqf gb or gur fnzr nzbhag nf rirelbar ryfr'f rkgen 1/24 bs gur pbssrr.
Another rot13 cypher:
Zl fbyhgvba vf gung V oryvrir guvf chmmyr vf bayl fbyinoyr jura gurer'f rknpgyl bar ahzore bs gur sbez 1/x (jurer x vf n cbfvgvir jubyr ahzore) orgjrra gur senpgvba bs gur gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx gung'f va Xngr'f zht naq gur senpgvba bs gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr gung'f va Xngr'f zht :)
I think you're right :)
Jul qb zngu? Vs nyy gevrq gb qevax gur fnzr engvb, gur pbssrr'f tbar nsgre sbhe phcf naq gurer'f fgvyy zvyx yrsg. Fb sbhe'f abg rabhtu gb pbafhzr nyy yvdhvq. Nsgre fvk phcf, gur zvyx'f nyy tbar ohg jr'er fubeg ba pbssrr, fb gurer'f abg rabhtu yvdhvq sbe fvk. Gur bayl cbffvovyvgl vf svir.
This was surprisingly good
Is Kate a member of the family?
Did everyone have the same ratio of coffee to milk?
Did anyone other than family members drink coffee?
Yes, no, and no.
Spoiler below, assuming I didn't make a mistake:
.
.
.
.
4m + 6c = n
m + c = 1
4(m+c) + 2c = n
4 + 2c = n
c = 0.5
n = 5
My answer in rot13:
Zl nafjre vf svir. Ohg svefg, fbzr pynevsvpngvba. V gnxr vg gung gur vqrn vf gung rnpu snzvyl zrzore svyyf na (rdhny fvmrq) zht jvgu n pbzovangvba bs pbssrr naq zvyx, fhpu gung gur fhz bs gur nzbhag bs pbssrr naq gur nzbhag bs zvyx rnpu snzvyl zrzore qevaxf rdhnyf bar zht bs ibyhzr (V’yy fnl rnpu zht vf n cvag sbe rnfr bs ersrerapr). Gurer ner A snzvyl zrzoref, fb gurl qevax A cvagf bs yvdhvq gbgny.
Fb lbh unir gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr + gur gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx rdhnyf A cvagf. Gur gbgny nzbhag bs pbssrr vf P cvagf, gbgny nzbhag bs zvyx vf Z cvagf. Onfrq ba Xngr’f zht, (1/6) * P + (1/4) * Z = 1.
Erjevgr gung nf 2P + 3Z = 12. Jr jnag gb xabj P + Z. Abeznyyl lbh’q fnl guvf vf bar yvarne rdhngvba jvgu gjb inevnoyrf, naq fb gurer’f ab fvatyr fbyhgvba, ohg jr nyfb unir gur nqqrq pbaqvgvba gung A unf gb or n cbfvgvir vagrtre. Lbh pna erjevgr gur ahzore nf 2(P+Z) + Z = 12. Va cnegvphyne, Z zhfg or rira.
Vs Z = 0, lbh unir P+Z = 6 (naq P = 6)
Vs Z = 2, lbh unir P+Z = 5 (naq P = 3)
Vs Z = 4, lbh unir P+Z = 4 (naq P = 0)
Gurer frrzf gb or 3 fbyhgvbaf, ohg jura lbh fnl rirelbar unq “pbssrr jvgu zvyx”, vagrecerg gung gb zrna rirelbar unq n abamreb nzbhag bs rnpu. Gur svefg fbyhgvba vf rirelbar unq fgenvtug pbssrr, gur 3eq fbyhgvba vf rirelbar unq fgenvtug zvyx, rnpu bs juvpu vf n pbzovangvba bs zvyx naq pbssrr va n zngurzngvpny frafr ohg abg “n jubyr zht bs pbssrr jvgu zvyx” va abezny ynathntr.
Fb V gnxr vg gb or gur zvqqyr fbyhgvba. Svir crbcyr, gurer jrer 3 cvagf bs pbssrr naq 2 cvagf bs zvyx, Xngr unq 1/6gu gur sbezre (unys n cvag bs pbssrr) naq 1/4gu gur ynggre (unys n cvag bs zvyx).
That's cute!
V'yy cbvag bhg gung lbh qba'g unir gb nffhzr gung gur ahzore bs cvagf bs zvyx/pbssrr ner vagrtre. Nf Wnpx Fberafra fnlf, jr unir 2P+3Z=12 naq P+Z=A. Fb 2P+2Z<12 naq 3P+3Z>12, tvivat 4<P+Z<6. Fvapr gur ahzore bs snzvyl zrzoref vf qrsvavgryl na vagrtre, P+Z=5.
Ur qvqa'g nffhzr vg. Bapr ur tbg 2(P+Z) + Z = 12, fvapr A = P + Z vf na vagrtre, gung jnf fhssvpvrag sbe uvz gb pbapyhqr gung Z vf na rira vagrtre.
Don't give your pets an entire mug of coffee.
I've been thinking a lot recently about memes as living organisms. Specifically, it's pretty common to hear people say memetics is just an analogy, but if so: is a human being just an analogy? What I mean is, what we call a human is the pattern that arises from the interaction between its neurons, same as a meme is the pattern that arises from the interaction of lots of human minds, so what's the difference? What makes a meme any less real and solid than you or me?
(Maybe you say: 'But humans are individuals, and they're a physical thing I can point to, unlike a meme.' But are they? If you isolate a human from other humans, and therefore the supply chains of food and water those humans form, it'll die the same as a single neuron isolated from blood vessels will; and if you point at a dead body and say "that's John" then everyone can agree that whatever John was, it's not actually contained in that particular collection of cells anymore.)
So what are everyone's thoughts about this? Also, I'm assuming that people have already gone down this rabbit hole in more depth and more coherently somewhere else, so feel free to link to wherever that place is too.
>What I mean is, what we call a human is the pattern that arises from the interaction between its neurons,
...no, what we call a human is the meat inside the self-sealing skin of an upright, typically lightly-haired body. I'm quite certain half the humans at the grocery store have never had neural activity.
Reactivity is what makes memes less solid. Show a facepalming human an adorable kitten, and they'll stop facepalming and probably Ooh and Aah over it, or freak out about allergies, or possibly go on a rant about how kittens are a tool of the bourgeoisie to keep the common man down (and then you say "damn right they are" and hurl the kitten into their eyes). But take a facepalming Picard meme and show it an adorable kitten, and the only response it's capable of is facepalming. And being Picard.
>and if you point at a dead body and say "that's John"
Then John was a zombie.
It's unclear what you're asking about. Maybe you're asking about:
A) Semiotics. Signs/labels are pointers. An utterance is real. A concept is real. A referent may or may not be real.
B) The Heap Problem. Aggregates are configurations. As for life, the thing being aggregated is chemical disequilibrium. As for consciousness, nobody knows for sure.
C) The definition of "real". Which is an open problem.
D) Personal identity. Which the Buddha had a lot to say about.
E) Supervenience. I.e. big things are made out of small things.
F) Something else entirely.
Sure, there are only atoms and the void.
There is more than atoms and void.
You might have missed the classical allusion: that's Democritus, "By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void."
But what else would you say exists? Some exotic assortment of quarks, leptons, and bosons, missing the point entirely?
Honor, love, truth, meaning, math, and God. The former things are not made of atoms, the latter is that atom's inventor.
>Honor, love, truth, meaning, math
It turns out that a nice phrasing of the answer to this was articulated earlier in this current Open Thread:
hackinthebocks wrote, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-314/comment/48908435 :
>Another way to view reduction is that the physical grounds all higher structures and concepts, and that these higher level structures are existing entities in good standing. So all the features of the human experience, e.g., desires, happiness, love, etc exist, they just don't exist fundamentally. A good concept to look into is the concept of levels. The fundamental level grounds higher levels; and each level has a certain explanatory autonomy such that we can speak of tables, chairs, desires, love, etc as proper features of our ontology without compromises.
To pick a simpler example, consider a file of ASCII text. Yeah, it is "only" "really" a set of patterns of magnetic domains on a disk, and, short of cutting the magnetic domains out of the disk, one cannot "move" it. Yet it is useful to speak of moving or copying or "the same" file, at the level of abstraction of ASCII text files. A nobleman's honor is more complex, involving patterns in their head and in the heads of their associates, but it is also a higher level construct on a physical basis.
Re
>, and God
Personally, as nearly as I can tell, it exists only in the sense that a literary character like Hamlet or Macbeth exists.
Personally, as far as I can tell, we only exist in the sense that a literary character like Hamlet or Macbeth exists. We are the creations.
"Human" and "meme" are different levels of abstraction. Likes memes, humans can be seen as an idea, which is why John can live on after his body's death. However, ideas need cognition to be interpreted. John does not need another person to be sure to exist, that is the point of "I think therefore I am". Further, John has goals, a meme does not. A meme might have a purpose, but enacting that purpose requires someone with actual goals.
And why does John have goals? Because he is a biological being, rooted in the physical world. Not reaching those goals can have real world consequences, even deadly ones. And as a physical being, John is bound by the laws of thermodynamics. The meme is only bound by the laws of evolution, or perhaps laws of computation, should those two be the same thing. Like the gene, the meme does not desire anything, it does not want for anything. It just is.
(Edit) I think it's a very good question though because it goes at the heart of what we mean by referring to John or a meme. It comes down to truth and reference, a core philosophical theme I wish we discussed much more often.
Very interesting points, let me try to understand:
> Further, John has goals, a meme does not. A meme might have a purpose, but enacting that purpose requires someone with actual goals.
I was making a loose analogy that (neuron : human mind) = (human mind : meme), so I'll keep going with that. Coming from the lower level, all human desires ultimately emerge from the 'desires' of their individual neurons (e.g. connect to other neurons, fire when a certain electrical potential is reached). Continuing up the levels of abstraction, all the 'desires' that a meme has emerge from individual humans acting out their desires. So what's so special about the middle level of abstraction that we call 'a human' that we can say that it's goals are 'real' and everything else's goals arent?
> Like the gene, the meme does not desire anything, it does not want for anything. It just is.
But from the outside view everything is just acting in ways that will increase the chances that it'll achieve a certain outcome, so what you're saying is that it's the subjective feeling of wanting, i.e. consciousness, that means something can really have goals? This seems like a pretty valid point. But let me wander into crazy town a little here: how could we ever know that conscious memes don't exist? What is it like to be a meme?
> And why does John have goals? Because he is a biological being, rooted in the physical world.
But here I don't see the distinction; a meme is also just as rooted to the physical world, it needs a substrate of brains to continue existing in the same way that the pattern of a human mind needs a physical substrate of cells or (someday!) semiconductors to continue existing.
> What makes a meme any less real and solid than you or me?
...Because memes don't physically exist? They're just concepts. Fiction loosely representing reality. And of course, what humans consider to be "human" doesn't really exist either, especially considering how consistently wrong they are about the universal human condition. And for the record, thinking of humans as "individuals" isn't really accurate either. They're a large colony of cells and microorganisms, with various, autonomous "intelligences" spread throughout the body. Even the brain itself cannot be considered a singular entity, considering that people can function mostly fine even after you cut their brain in half. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
So... call things whatever you like. Reality does not care.
If you say things that exist don't exist, then your definition of existence needs some work. Clearly concepts exist and fiction exists.
Yeah this is exactly what I was getting at - if memes don't really "exist" then "humans" also don't "exist"
> call things whatever you like. Reality does not care.
This is also true and important to remember, all of this is just different ways of dividing up a continuous reality. But I care! It's just fun to think about for me
You may want to look into the concept of an egregore
Thanks, that's probably a better fit for what I'm trying to say here. It might be a bit too narrow but at the same time the term 'meme' is probably much too broad for what I'm talking about.
I also prefer reading email to waiting for the site to load, but even if the site loaded instantly it'd still be slower and less satisfying. I read posts the same day they come out, so I wouldn't see changes anyway (until you announce your corrections in email later), so I wouldn't benefit from going to the site.
Also note that If for some reason someone can't read a post properly in email, they can always click over to the site, but the reverse isn't true: if the post isn't in email and the site isn't accessible there's no way to work around that. Emails are convenient as a searchable offline cache as well, for the posts I want to be able to find/refer to again.
I much prefer reading in my email rather than on Substack. I also like having my own copy of the posts so that I don't lose access to them if I ever have to unsubscribe.
Me too. I like that I can continue to reread old subscriber-only posts in my inbox even if I unsubscribe in the future. (I don't plan to unsubscribe.)
Also my email client is better at displaying text than the website.
Agreed. Personally, for time management reasons, I don't have a browser on my phone, only email and other essentials, so having the need to follow back to Substack would be quite cumbersome... and 'time consuming'. Thanks for everything in any case 😊
Substack is often very buggy and hard-to-load on my phone, I much prefer reading in email.
similarly, I hate the substack website, I only ever read ACX in email format
Agree. Having the full post in your email archive is like a version of the decentralised, uncensored internet that crypto enthusiasts talk about.
I like reading in dark mode and clicking through to the website doesn't let me do that, so it would be a (very slight) negative to force me to do so (I can then click through to the Substack app, but haven't had great experiences there yet). To be clear, that's possibly outweighed by the improvements of me reading the edited version; I don't know substantial those changes tend to be.
I also had this problem, but then I realised the Substack app has dark mode, which lets me read the up to date post in dark mode.
Yes, and clicking "Read in app" does work for me now, so I withdraw my criticism. (My Substack app had been glitching so that functionality wasn't working but I reinstalled it and now it seems to be working properly.)
A brief rejoinder here to the entire sequence of discourse. Quick & dirty thoughts, so pardon the abrupt ending and narrative-setting link embeds. https://www.jdhaltigan.com/p/discourse-that-caught-my-attention?lli=1
I always make it a point to visit the actual blag (gotta pump those click-through numbers!), but do occasionally get really bored and read-from-inbox on my phone. Much preferable to visiting Substack on mobile or using the dreaded Substack app. So my preference would lean towards continuing to do Whole Term Post Insurance. (Also it gives you more opportunities to the the.)
Has anyone read a bunch of loner manifestos (e.g. the Unabomber) and written a book or blog post comparing them? I would be interested to read it. I'd like to know which manifestos are most interesting and if any of them are worth reading sections of.
Also, one of the ACX book review contest finalists from two (?) years ago wrote a review of a book about columbine, which was interesting.
https://whimsi.substack.com/p/why-did-columbine-happen
I dipped into a bunch after reading the Unabomber's. I'll echo what retonlage said about the Unabomber's being the best of the worst (though still mostly dreck).
Generally they're men who believe they're incredibly important, but have done nothing interesting or valuable. This leads to dull reading as they present petty grievances or banal socio-political observations as though they're mind-blowing *dark truths*.
Elliot Rodger's is incredibly long, and laughably pathetic. He details incredibly mundane details like what sort of Gucci outfit he failed to get laid in. If you have the ability to forget the fact that he ended up murdering people and the desire to laugh at spoiled rich kids it's sort of funny to skim through a few sections.
Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto was the one that genuinely unnerved me--he presents a proposed gamified system for recognizing and rewarding white supremacist violence in obsessive detail.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I own a copy of this collection (I didn't upload it, I just found this link while trying to search for a page to direct you):
https://archive.org/details/rants-and-incendiary-tracts-voices-of-desperate-illumination-1558-present-loompanics-unlimited
This is pretty interesting. Thanks!
up until a few years ago i used to read at least part of every shooting manifesto i heard of. i also went back and read some of the 80s's and 90's ones. i never wrote anything up about it, but here are a few things i remember.
- "industrial society and it's future" is way better than any of the others. order of magnitude better. there's a reason it's the only one people talk about. it's the only remotely worth reading for it's own sake.
- the variation in length is massive. both two-page pamphlets and 1500-page tomes were common. the longer ones only in internet-ideology associated ones.
- probably goes without saying, but the mental issues of the authors were very apparant. most were disorganized and not really lucid.
- generally two categories: people committing their crimes as marketing for their manifestos, and people excusing their crimes with ideology. the latters manifestos generally just contain talking points
i realize you asked for loner manifestos and not crime manifestos, but i honestly don't think there's anything worth investigating much here. reading them is mostly just looking at mental illness, which i don't believe is good for the soul.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I had wondered if any had stood out and I'm not surprised it's that one.
I've only actually read the Unabomber's, "Industrial Society and its Future". I will freely admit to being biased against it, as my basic worldview and mental framework is diametrically opposed to everything Ted K stands for, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I found it confused and profoundly unconvincing. Mostly, it comes across as a bitter and angry man coming up with post-hoc rationalizations for why the world changing in a way he disapproves of is actually a bad thing for "objective" reasons. Also, his proposed plan for stopping the march of progress is one of the least pragmatic plans I've ever read.
I'm not surprised by this. I would think it would be really hard for him to convince me of the arguments he's trying to make, but I'm probably biased against it as well. Thanks for sharing.
I remember seeing, in the 90s/00s, American conservatives sharing quizzes like "Which of the following sentences were written by Al Gore and which by Unabomber?" (ie. from the manifesto), and when one has read the entire "Industrial Society and its Future" this starts coming off as funny as hell, since abou half of that text is basically Unabomber ranting about the goddamn libruls.
There was a web site where you read ten quotes and voted who wrote it. The web site is gone, but a functional copy still exists in the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150606184238/http://www.crm114.com/algore/quiz.html
It's true that the Unabomber rants about liberals in his manifesto, but considering how much respect pockets of left-coded people have granted him, I suspect many of them think "Oh, he's talking about *that* kind of liberal." The Sanders fans and such.
I haven't seen resepct for Unabomber in the left-coded circles for a long time. Much more in right-coded (well, right-wing) circles talking about "Uncle Ted". This is probably because people encountering Unabomber nowadays are genuinely doing so because they are reading the Manifesto out of interest, not just media coverage about his exploits like in the 90s, and the manifesto really leaves his opinions on leftists (the word he uses - I probably shouldn't have said "libruls" in the first place, even ironically) rather unambiguous.
>15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
I haven't read the manifestos, but I've read analyses of manifestos that claim most (especially for school shootings) include a desire and expectation for fame/notoriety as a result of their crimes. They see all the press of previous shootings, and view this as a way to create a lasting public impression.
Given this, is it a good idea to popularize the manifestos of mass killers? I'm asking genuinely, not rhetorically. Is there a way to learn something from these manifestos that could help prevent future killings, without unintentionally inventivizing copycats?
My guess is truly popularizing them would be a bad thing. I think the attention the Columbine shooters got likely drove more copycat killers. But I would also distinguish between being popularized in mass media versus being studied by, say, criminologists.
Personally, I think the publicity is a bad idea, given that we know a common motive for terrorism is to gain attention for the terrorists cause/stupid manifesto.
By reading it, you're incentivising the creation of more of it,
... Because that totally worked against Trump.
"Now THIS manifesto, this one's just trash. Spelling errors, lack of complete thoughts, nonsensical ramblings. THIS manifesto was written by a fucking imbecile."
your manifest does not meet our current needs.
Substack is a distracting website. Being able to read your posts by email is useful to me, because it means I don't need to pull up Substack and then inevitably get sidetracked onto other pages that use up my time.
I much prefer having a copy of the full post in my email.
I, along with several friends, read your email newsletter. We're in a yeshiva that only allows email access, and switching the format would prevent us from reading ACX during most of the year. I appreciate the web versions, which I often find myself saving as bookmarks, but would be kind of stuck if you stopped emailing full posts.
H-how are you leaving this comment?
You can comment via email
Or this may be the part of the year they're allowed to use things other than email
I had my hopes up for a moment, but my reply to your comment didn't go through. It's just as well -- the horrible UI prevents me from arguing with wrongheads among the commentariat.
Please continue sending the whole post via email.
I appreciate having a full archive of all your writings in my email, just in case you ever need to delete your blog again. (I genuinely appreciated that time you accidentally mailed the entirety of SSC to all subscribers!)
Please keep sending emails with the full text.
The FDA continues to fill the invisible graveyard:
https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the-gates-of-oncology-clinical-trials/
I am obviously biased, but I think in this story generally doctors are the good guys fighting back against the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats. Here in Australia we have a fun thing where drugs that we know work can go years before they are funded by the government, but we can get funding for trials, so we create a trial with a dubious methodology (everyone gets the active treatment, the trial is to assess which model of educating patients provides the greatest happiness!)
The HIV saga got the FDA a lot of bad publicity. Maybe we can do the same for the modern era of cancer medicine? A Dallas Buyers Club for 2024…
That would be amazing. Sadly, most doctors save Jakes current oncologist which we met because she’s running the trial he’s in, have not been championing the trials and we didn’t leg work to find the trial ourselves. I am a broken record encouraging oncologists to help patients navigate this and am trying to create ways to make it easier for them as my pet project.
I love your use of dubious (or rather ideal) clinical trial setups! You’re pro patient. The drug Jake is currently on has incredibly positive data and yet the company is going for a phase 3 trials. Why? We know how people fare compared to standard of care. They’re still alive. Approve the thing already.
If the pharmaceutical companies weren’t so beholden to the fda they may be more willing to allow off label uses and n of 1 let’s see what happens here and gather data for anyone willing to try it out kind of approaches but alas. I used to do a lot of biochem study design , you make me want to open a research site so I can design pro-patient trials, but here in the US no one would fund me.
Yeah, in an ideal world the instant you had clear positive results the drug would be approved. The workaround is just that, a workaround, where you expand compassionate access programs or trials of the drug to try and meet patient need. The thing is it goes on for years! It’s a profound indictment of the system as it stands that it takes regulators so long to make the decision that saves people’s lives.
Have you heard about Prof Scolyer?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67870595.amp
Fascinating story and by all appearances he is doing very well trying something completely out of left field - great! But he has access to experimental treatments that most of us don’t. A neuro oncologist told me that he had done what she would’ve done had she ended up with GBM - which begs the question - why not everyone?
Please continue to include the whole text in emails. Its so convenient to be able to read on any email connected device, even low data or async devices. The option to click through to the web version is always there, it would be a significant loss to be forced into less optionality.
Generally use RSS and thus the website to read. Ironically today I clicked the link in the email because it popped up right when I was in Gmail anyhow.
Re 'go to site' links: the site is often very slow to load (with hundreds of comments), so reading in email is nicer. Would it be possible to hide comments by default?
Hiding comments by default is indeed the Substack default; IIRC ACX is like this because Scott explicitly asked the Substack team to make it so. I agree that ACX posts take too long to load, but I also like to have all the comments immediately below the post, as it makes it possible to scroll up and down to compare what is in the post to the comments. Also, having to click an additional button to make the comments load always annoys me in other Substacks.
+1 I read a lot of Substacks, but ACX is the only one where I actively dislike reading it on the site as opposed to email, as it’s so slow to load.
Hey!
I read your articles via email and would appreciate if you continued sending the whole article via email. It's much more comfortable for me.
I will say that allready now, anyone for whom it is very important not to miss corrections in the article, can click on the title and go to the online version. So you will not be adding functionality, only reducing it.
Thank you!
I strongly prefer being able to read the posts in email format vs. having to click through to the site. A few reasons:
* Being able to read the post in my email reader even when I don't have good data
* Being able to move through my newsletters quickly in one place without having to open separate tabs for each
* Cleaner & more focused in my email client (Superhuman) than on the Substack website
https://twitter.com/IAPolls2022/status/1754163261769969745
To the extent this NBC poll is accurate, it seems like Trump has a very strong advantage in many of the most prescient issues. I can't help but feel Biden will need a dramatic improvement if he wants to win.
I'm not sure if "prescient" is the word you mean. I also think that the questions on this poll are inclined towards the sorts of things that conservatives think are important, so I'm curious who commissioned this poll.
Biden won't win by convincing people that he's better on these issues, he will win by convincing people that these issues don't matter and you are a racist if you think they do and what really matters is [whatever 2024's convenient issue is].
I often read full ACX posts without leaving my email inbox
What do you do when there are rational reasons to be depressed - suppose chronic deteriorating or even terminal disease with little if any chance of improving?
Assume the bases are covered (healthy food, exercise as possible, meditation).
Munch SSRIs and hope they work?
If it's literally chronic / terminal, screw SSRI's, start taking ACTUAL drugs. About 1000x more potent, effective, and fun. After all, what are they gonna do? Kill you??
This is literally my "terminal diagnosis" plan. At last freed of the burden of caring and trying to push my goals forward, I just descend into a hedonistic sea of bliss before dying.
There's evidence for the use of psychedelics in depression and anxiety related to terminal illness, IIRC this is the first purpose they were put to in the modern wave of psychedelic psychiatry research.
Radical acceptance is a good good trick for some people? It seems a bit counterintuitive, but giving yourself some intentional space to feel pain, fear, grief, etc. can make it easier to cope + see the good in your situation as well as the bad.
Is it just the bad stuff in life producing sadness, or has the sadness infected other areas? That is, if you look over and see a puppy or kitten being cute, do you smile and feel warm happy feelings? Or do you still feel depressed, and your mind goes to places like "they're just mortal meat" or "is this the last time I'll see that"?
I'm no psychologist, but the latter is what I'd call depression, while the former is what I'd call an appropriate reaction to circumstances.
My dad spent a good bit of time planning out what he wanted his funeral party to be like; song playlists, who to invite, location, that kind of stuff. (Got a little wonky after they fixed the main problem and he got another five years.) And lots of parties and seeing his friends as often as he could.
Basically, concentrate on bucket list stuff. Anything you wanted to do but were too busy for, you're not too busy for anymore.
A shift in mental framework that doesn't cause you to desire something that it outside of your control. Old-fashioned stoicism, in a sense.
Obviously easier said than done, but it's a solid foundation. I don't think it's the cure for all our mental woes, but based my own personal experience and my reading of relevant writings I do believe that a great deal of mental anguish and depression derives from an incongruence between our desires and our belief in whether those desires will be achieved. Reducing or redirecting the degree to which we desire a goal, particularly if the outcome is something we can't affect, can go a long way.
How is the depression rational in that case?
I sure hope you get better. As someone who may or may not be depressed right now, but without any more good reasons to be depressed than a young student in good health can have:
There always are good reasons to be depressed? All the reasons why I’m depressed are bad reasons in the sense that they’re all pretty easily fixable, but I sure as heck think they’re pretty good reasons actually? My point is: ok, let’s assume you do have genuinely good reasons to feel hopeless and depressed and miserable (a terminal disease would certainly fit the bill), then I don’t think your depression is much different from that of someone who hates her job, someone who’s had a bad breakup, whatever, so the same mix of drugs, therapy, and lifestyle improvements should work equally well? And you should seek to feel less miserable just like any other depressed person? The main difference is that a key way to be less depressed is to "get away from the depressing thing" as Scott puts it, and that’s much easier when the depressing thing is a job than an illness. Still, to the extent that it’s possible, I’d advise getting away from the depressing thing by doing stuff to keep your mind busy, by trying to have fun when you can, etc.?
From my experience, SSRIs have no effect on psychological depression, only working to prevent the major physical symptoms (which I assume is just seasonal depression). Though, obviously it will help some people, even if it is just placebo.
Anyways, have you considered just not caring about living? Certainly works well enough for me. Honestly, I don't even understand why everyone is so obsessed with living. Well okay, obviously I know the reason why, but that still doesn't justify it.
SSRIs do affect psychological symptoms of depression. The problem is that, depending on the SSRI, that effect can be a numbing effect or complacency that makes other parts of your life more difficult. That is why I no longer take them anyway. In reality, the difficulty with chemically treating depression is that the right combination of medications takes a lot of trial and error, and a depressed person is unlikely to have the time, mental energy, and money to undertake this for themselves. Wellbutrin (bupropion) is a good alternative or addition to SSRIs that boosts energy and counteracts side effects, for example. Then there are things that other people have mentioned, like psychedelics and ketamine as potential treatments. Again, the real difficulty is that some combination of medication, lifestyle, and situational changes will probably significantly relieve depression for most people. Still, the hassle of dealing with doctors and insurance and spending months acclimating or weaning off meds is a significant burden on anyone.
As an aside, I've always enjoyed the combo of post content, avatar, and username you represent - it reminds me of myself when I was younger, and I enjoy that you're one of the few "nihilistic realist" stances among the ACX commentary who speaks their mind.
Not my experience with psychological depression and either SSRI or SNRI, did have a definite effect
I sure hope you get better. And I avoid the joke that being male over 50 equals "chronic deteriorating health" - also, I feel fine - though my eldest son does not. But still, preparing stuff for a trip to Canada/Netherlands to leave in a dignified way seems an appropriate and rational approach, too. When Beethoven no longer reaches me. - It is not wrong to be sad. Ecclesiastes 7:2: It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.
Thankfully living in Switzerland those preparations are not that hard.
But I am also not nearly bad enough for that yet, it's mainly the long term trajectory that gets to me.
Glad. And I am sorry for being a jerk. When Dad got cancer, the trajectory was a few months, and his life had been long and very good. Kinda easy to only need painkillers then. Son at 25 with MS, no idea how he takes it. His dad is a jerk. That said; in the long run we are all dead. And SSRI seem wrong to treat being a mortal. Strangely, I see Psilocybin as legit.
MS in my case as well. It's mainly the fatigue that really starts to get to me... Also means bucket list is hard to pull off.
The remainder is more or less manageable so far.
"Zwischen den Schüben ist das Leben gut" he said. Each MS is different, obviously. Thank you for making me have some talk with my son, finally. - Seems, I was wrong about SSRI and MS-fatigue, too: "Antidepressants, particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, may help with fatigue. This effect could be mainly related to the improvement of depression and associated sleep disturbance. Activating antidepressants, such as fluoxetine, venlafaxine, and bupropion can also be helpful." https://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/neurological/depts/multiple-sclerosis/ms-approaches/ms-and-fatigue
Well seeing that I don't get relapses (which sounds positive initially but really comes with substantially worse treatment options prognosis) I can't really say that either. It's just a slow but steady decline.
Managing fatigue is very much hit and miss. Lately sleep quality took a dive so maybe fluoxetine is worth a shot. I took it over a decade ago with decent enough effects (yet another decade earlier venlafaxine which was effective as AD but had more annoying side effects...)
Bupropion is probably off the table as I am already borderline underweight.
We are all dying slowly... when does an irrational reason to be depressed becomes rational? A coworker's father got a terminal cancer diagnosis and was depressed for a time, but then realized he was still able to indulge in his favorite hobby (fishing) with his family and not focus on anything else. Perked him right up until the very end.
I was talking to a company last week that are do vocational education mostly in South America. Since they end up talking to governments and charities anyway to raise funds for their programs (which are free for the accepted students), they were very interested in the idea of impact certificates.
Who should talk to? Who are the gurus of impact certificate projects? Outside of ACX grants, are there any interesting groups doing impact certificate projects at the moment?
I don't have the inside scoop on this, not have you looked at Manifund?
I like reading your posts in email format because it lets me avoid the extremely slow Substack web page. Also I find black text on white background easier to read. (I could use Reader mode, but it deletes section headings.)
------------------MIDDLE EAST CONTAINMENT SUBTHREAD------------------
Dumb questions:
How many Hamas fighters are there, anyway?
If they mostly get killed, who would rule Gaza? Hamas 2.0? The local rationalist clique?
To what extent does Hamas control Gaza? Can someone phone them with a noise complaint?
Has the current leadership explicitly endorsed the 10/7 attacks?
Most sources estimated Hamas at a nominal 30,000 fighters before the war, and Israel claims to have killed 9,000 so far. Note that in most wars, 9,000 killed would mean 18-22,000 seriously wounded as well, leaving Hamas with approximately zero effective fighters remaining. But this is not a normal war, so Hamas casualties may be disproportionately fatal (because suicide bombing, or trapped in collapsed/burned-out tunnels, or lack of medical care). And in any event, all of these numbers are highly suspect.
Right now, Hamas rules about one-third of Gaza, and the IDF rules about two-thirds. Before the war, Hamas ruled it all. There was no other authority, and there was no hope for anyone who defied Hamas's authority. You could go to them with a noise complaint, but either they made the noise, or they like the people who made the noise, or they don't like the people who made the annoying noise and probably dealt with them before you called.
After the war, Gaza will be ruled by whoever Israel says will rule it. There will be no other authority; if Israel thinks you need to be in a prison camp, men with guns will come and drag you off to prison and no one will stop them. But they'll probably try to stand up some sort of Palestinian organization to handle noise complaints, and Arab-on-Arab crimes and the like. Maybe Fatah. Maybe something in partnership with Egypt or with the UN, if they're fool enough to get involved.
Hamas, which is the current leadership everyplace that doesn't have Israeli troops all over it, explicitly endorsed the 10/7 attacks, carried out the 10/7 attacks, and promised to keep doing 10/7 attacks until Israel stopped existing.
Probably some of the ~2.1 million Palestinians who aren't Hamas members are kind of pissed off at Hamas for what they've been doing. Hamas did win by a substantial margin in Gaza the last time they ran for election, and subsequent opinion polling suggests that support for Hamas remains strong. But that election was 17 years ago, and the opinion polling since has been perhaps conducted under threat, so who knows.
Doesn't really matter, because lacking either guns or votes, the non-Hamas Gazans can't do anything about it. Well, except for reaching out to the nearest IDF unit and saying "psst, Hamas is hiding in that building over there, and we'd be thrilled if you were to go kill them all". There doesn't seem to have been much of that going on, though it is admittedly a lot to ask.
To the best of my knowledge, there are some tens of thousands Hamas fighters, and some more from smaller terrorist groups.
They are practically the government of Gaza, but I don't think authocratic governments of failing states care about noise complaints.
The current leadership organized the attacks.
There are many possibilities for who rule after Hamas, that are different combinations of unlikely and terrible, though not worse than Hamas IMO
There is mounting evidence that the IDF deliberately targets and slaughters civilians, plenty of video and image evidence, videos of people seeking aid getting sniped at as they do. In spite of it all, people are insisting that the IDF does not deliberately target civilians.
It is challenging for me to see these advocates as any different than WW2 Germans, in some sense almost *worse* because of how much info is available now and how explicit the evidence is.
https://www.oct7factcheck.com/White-flag-executions-by-Israel-5313b9bf8e82432e92abd6e61cef6963
This is not IDF policy. Individual soldiers can definitely do things like this, and it is up to the army to discipline those who act like this.
If you want to understand Israel's position, including why the IDF is fighting a much bloodier war in Gaza than previous rounds, consider https://www.thefp.com/p/i-watched-hamas-unleash-hell, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/hamas-israel-yoav-fromer
They're guilt of targeting civilians from before. It's absolutely policy as evidence by a nearly constant stream of video evidence, eyewitness testimony, public and private admissions from soldiers. In addition, the IDF doesn't really investigate cases except to the extent it needs to for PR.
There is also a large stream of evidence that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, and fights from among civilians while wearing civilian clothing. Between Hamas's inhuman combat doctrine, and the gigantic anti-Israel propaganda machine that wants to portray Israel as targeting civilians, I am not surprised that there is a large stream of "evidence" that Israel does so. I still think most of it should be discounted, at least until further investigation shows which parts are true and which parts are fake. Otherwise, you end up with more cases like the media frenzy from the Gaza hospital explosion in mid-October.
This is not to deny the genuine violations of protocol by soldiers on hair-trigger alert (and a few extremists out for revenge for Oct. 7). To me, the most tragic such case was when IDF soldiers shot three escaped hostages by mistake. I think that the IDF does actually investigate such cases, and not just for PR.
More evidence in general that Israel does not have a policy of targeting civilians: the order to evacuate northern Gaza, the fact that well over 99% of the Gazan population is alive even after months of fighting, and the fact that Israel has the capabilities to kill many more Gazans and it refrained from using them. There is also the fact that Israel opened Gaza's borders for humanitarian aid. Admittedly, this involved international pressure, but consider that similar pressure was exerted on Israel for more militarily important concessions like a ceasefire, and Israel refused to budge. If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in.
"If Israel wanted Gazan civilians to die, it could have similarly refused to budge under pressure to let food and fuel and medicine in."
Israelis literally are blocking food, water, fuel and medicine as we speak. "Israelis could be shooting more grandmothers with white flags on camera and people trying to eat food" is not the argument you think it is.
It seems like you are in the habit of regurgitating falsehoods so I'm going to drop this mini debate. Continue your silly hasbara and know that pretty much everyone online the IDF's propaganda apparatus is failing. Congrats on keeping boomers though.
I would refute what you just wrote, but, as you so eloquently put it, it seems like you are in the habit of regurgitating falsehoods so I'm going to drop this mini debate.
+1
I will add, never in my entire life have I seen such a sick, continual stream of outright glee expressed over the killing of civilians. Like, literally, not ever. Perhaps I should block reddit for mental health. But the infants getting burnt by white phosphorus aren't getting a break so I can barely turn away.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1ajnuow/under_a_video_of_a_palestinian_baby_being_found/
To add to it, cutting off supplies to an ENTIRE POPULATION? That is explicitly and utterly genocidal. In no way shape or form has it ever been acceptable to cut off water and food to a population because fighters will also share in that. Israel is not being asked to supply that food itself but to stop blocking food and water from reaching 2 million people, women, kids, infants included.
"sick, continual stream of outright glee expressed over the killing of civilians" - reminds me of how the entire far-left reacted in the days following October 7. See for example https://www.thefp.com/p/when-people-tell-you-who-they-are, https://www.thefp.com/p/my-old-friend-is-ripping-down-posters, https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/some-us-professors-praise-hamass-october-7-terror-attacks, https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinians-celebrate-hamas-attack-as-israel-supporters-rally-in-new-york/.
The total blockade of Gaza occurred directly in response to Hamas's genocidal attack. If was lifted several weeks later, and has not been in operation for months.
If you decide to stick around on reddit, I would recommend seeing r/Israel. It might help counter the propaganda you were seeing from Hamas supporters. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/1alwgz5/starvation_deaths_in_gaza/
Mate, in no world is it ever acceptable to fucking cut off water and food to hundreds and thousands of children. Every single aid organization is showing that mass starvation is occurring, and in addition to that Israeli CIVILIANS are at the border blocking off needed aid and there are multiple videos and images of people seeking aid getting shot at by IDF. This is Nazi behavior. 3 kids have reportedly starved to death in northern gaza. Your atrocity apologia is not very compelling.
"no world is it ever acceptable to fucking cut off water and food to hundreds and thousands of children" - considering the sheer shock and brutality of the Oct. 7 attacks, I cannot blame Israel for its total blockade in October. I would blame it if the total blockade was prolonged, but that did not happen.
"Every single aid organization is showing that mass starvation is occurring" - extraordinary claim. I don't believe it. Can you post sources from those aid agencies?
"Israeli CIVILIANS are at the border blocking off needed aid" - I don't approve of that, but given what the Gazans recently did to those Israeli civilians, I cannot blame them.
"there are multiple videos and images of people seeking aid getting shot at by IDF" - I am convinced most of these are faked by the same machine that blamed Israel for bombing a hospital after an Islamic Jihad rocket landed in the hospital's parking lot.
"This is Nazi behavior." - Really? I think actual Nazi behavior would involve death squads roaming the villages and cities shooting anything that moves. Kind of like Hamas on Oct. 7.
"3 kids have reportedly starved to death in northern gaza" - tragic if true. These things happen in war, but I would not be surprised if it turned out they died because Hamas stole the aid (there is extensive documentation that this happens), or that they died for other war-related reasons. I am surprised that you are claiming a death toll of only "3 kids", when earlier you wrote that "mass starvation" is occurring.
"Your atrocity apologia is not very compelling" - I am sickened by how you carry water for Hamas and its ilk, and I am countering the blood libels you are propagating here.
["there are multiple videos and images of people seeking aid getting shot at by IDF" - I am convinced most of these are faked]
You aren't really different from Holocaust deniers.
Maybe you haven't seen people act like this, but surely you have read about it before. Humanity itself hasn't changed at all in the last few thousand years. We're ultimately all just animals. It's strange to expect history to not repeat.
For what it's worth, I strongly recommend blocking Reddit for mental health.
Does anyone have more info on the claims in this article (from right before 10/7)?
https://www.jns.org/demographic-optimism-in-demographic-pessimism-out/
It purports that there are a couple systematic biases that overcount the West Bank population, and there are really a million less than official statistics, and that the Jewish population is younger and growing faster than the Arab population.
If true, it seems to have a lot of implications for a future unitary state solution. But from how the author refers to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria", I am curious how much of this article is propaganda and how much is real.
I don't have answers about the actual size of the Arab population in the Judea and Samaria Area (that is the name used by Israelis in general, btw, so the source is definitely pro-Israel).
One thing I can say is that the demographic argument is a giant red herring. Leftists wanted to use a high Arab population and/or its high growth rate to scare Israel into signing a two-state peace deal immediately, before Jews become a minority in the entire territory west of the Jordan River (ie Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, and pre-1967 Israel). The article pushes back against that, by saying that no, Arab demographics are not on pace to outnumber the Jewish population, so there is no need to rush to sign a peace deal.
My view: It does not matter what the Jewish-Arab demographic balance is, nor what are that balance's current trends. Jewish Israel will be alright demographically if Arabs become a majority in the entire land, and Jewish Israel will be alright demographically if the Arab population remains smaller than the Jewish population. Why? Because there is a de facto border, with Israel and the large settlement blocs on one side, and the bulk of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria on the other side. That de facto border isn't going away. As long as Jews remain a supermajority in the lands Israel formally claims within its borders (pre-1967 Israel plus Jerusalem and the Golan Heights), Israel will remain the Jewish state, and the Arab population outside its borders will not affect that.
A unitary state solution will never happen. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians want to live with the other in a unitary state: both populations kind of hate each other.
A two-state solution is also not going to happen, at least not in the next few decades. The reason why it ever seemed possible was that the once-powerful Israeli left wanted (and still wants) a two-state solution, and for a while the secular PLO/Fatah was willing to pretend to want two states for its own strategic reasons. The problem is that across Palestinian society, a very large majority of the population, plus all of the powerful armed groups, want to destroy Israel and refuse any peace or compromise that does not ensure Israel's destruction. This was the case long before Israel was founded, and it remains the case to this day.
Hamas is using a shapeshifter tactics against IDF (any person, of any age or gender can potentially be a deadly threat, and there is no way to tell until it's too late). Currently the IDF is erring on the side of "overkill", literally. While this is somewhat understandable, the resulting casualties are already above 1% of the total population of Gaza, with the civilian : fighter deaths ratio being 2:1 or worse. What might be some less deadly alternatives there, provided one still has to fight the war? (Yes, disengaging and going "home" would help to avoid casualties, for a time, but that is a political not a military decision.)
I suppose the IDF probably hasn't tried politely asking Hamas to wear uniforms and only engage in combat in areas where there are no civilians. Maybe they could write a sternly-worded letter and post it through Qatar.
How much of the idea of "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas is doing all these things to increase them" is independently verifiable? I'm not saying it's totally untrue, but it seems like a lot of the stronger statements along those lines ultimately just take the IDF's word for it.
Recently the IDF shot some of the Israeli hostages, and in the aftermath it turned out the hostages were acting the way that the IDF said civilians should act to show they aren't a threat (no shirt, waving a white flag). The IDF said that the soldiers in that case didn't follow protocol. What's more likely, that the one time the soldiers didn't follow protocol and killed civilians, the civilians just so happened to be the hostages? Or that it happens routinely, and is reported as "IDF takes down Hamas guys", and this is the only time we hear about it because there's only an in-depth investigation when the civilians turn out to be hostages?
(Israeli but no insider knowledge)
I'm fairly certain that mistakes, lapses in protocol, etc happen often. I don't think that actually contradicts the "moving mountains" idea, necessarily.
What most people are saying is that the IDF is doing more than most other militaries do in order to avoid civilian casualties. Including things like dropping leaflets in Arabic with evacuation orders, etc. This is entirely consistent with there also being many cases of mistakes.
I think there is little that can be independently verified right now given that it's an active warzone, and that access to most things is only through the IDF.
"I think there is little that can be independently verified right now given that it's an active warzone, and that access to most things is only through the IDF."
a major reason for which is the IDF policy of assassinating journalists
> a major reason for which is the IDF policy of assassinating journalists
Do you have any proof that that's IDF policy? Because I don't believe that's true. There are certainly claims against the IDF on this score, but a lot of those claims are not very reliable (they conflate "targeting of journalists" with "journalists got killed", which is a completely different thing).
I do not think anyone is claiming that "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties", and the situation with the hostages definitely reflects that they are not. When you are in the urban warfare and any human is potentially a lethal threat, people get understandably trigger-happy. My question is whether it is possible and if so how to reduce this unfortunate situation. The part about Hamas using civilians of all genders and ages to inflict casualties on Israeli soldiers is not really disputed.
"I do not think anyone is claiming that "the IDF is moving mountains to avoid civilian casualties", and the situation with the hostages definitely reflects that they are not. When you are in the urban warfare and any human is potentially a lethal threat, people get understandably trigger-happy."
Maybe not the exact phrase "moving mountains" but people certainly do claim that the IDF is extensively working to avoid civilian casualties.
Anyway, I think this position would be stronger if the Israeli hostages episode reflected Israel's claimed approach, but what they said was that they don't normally do that, and what those troops did was a departure from the norm.
I'll also add that, it's true that troops on the ground will err on the side of thinking people are a threat, but it's also the case that people on a screen ordering airstrikes will likely not give due regard to the people they are killing and destruction they are causing, because it's not as 'real' as when you are on the ground. You don't actually see anyone die, it's all just pixels on a screen ... and you are probably judged on how many enemy targets you eliminate, and not really chewed out or anything if you are too trigger-happy.
If they aren't following their claimed protocol with troops on the ground, how confident should I really be that they are following their claimed protocol with airstrikes?
I think there were accounts in Israeli press of them not following the protocol with airstrikes, either, so not at all confident.
A 2:1 ratio of civilian:fighter deaths seems very good for modern urban combat IMO. It's definitely not what you would get if the IDF didn't care about civilian casualties. Do you have examples were better ratios were achieved?
I get what you are saying, and it is hard to find a comparable example. The war in Syria has roughly the opposite ratio, 1:2 civilians : combatants, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil_war#Death_tolls_by_time_periods.
That's a war in a whole country, not a single city. If we find comparable instances from the Syrian civil war, we get more similar numbers: During the siege of Aleppo, civilian casualties are estimated to be 76% of all casualties (i.e. 3:1 ratio). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%932016)#Casualties
We are all in agreement that that is a bad thing, correct? No?
> We are all in agreement that that is a bad thing, correct? No?
That's a bad thing, agreed. And Hamas is to blame, because they hide among civilians, disguised as civilians, in the most densely populated areas of the Gaza strip, instead of the more rural regions, of which there are plenty. We are all in agreement, correct?
Does there have to be a less deadly alternative? Surely you understand that there is only one way to end this conflict permanently. It's only 2 million people.
I strongly condemn any suggestion of outright genocide (and also feel compelled to note that such a strategy would in no way "end this conflict permanently")
How so? There can't continue to be a conflict if the opposition ceases to exist. Of course, the Palestinians and other Islamic countries will continue to exist, but hopefully they'll wisen up once they understand what they're dealing with. And if they don't, well... that will be quite unfortunate.
Apart from the severe immorality of what you are proposing, there is also the fact that it will not scare Israel's 2 billion or so enemies, but rather galvanize them and strengthen their belief in their anti-Israel cause. They would certainly not "wisen up". Plus, neutral countries and Israel's allies would be outraged by the atrocity and switch sides. Remember that Israel is a tiny country that has been on the wrong end of an extreme power imbalance since its founding. It has no way of credibly threatening its enemies like Genghis Khan and Timur did. That is why, even if Israel decided to abandon morality, your suggestion would still be out of the question.
Not sure what you are saying here. Unless you are implying genocide or ethnic cleansing are the only two possible "final solutions" (!!!) to the conflict.
And what are the alternatives? Nobody wants to take in the Gazans as refugees; even the other Islamic countries don't want them. It would help if the people of Gaza started valuing their lives and stopped Hamas themselves by force, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. And considering over 70% of them are still supporting the whole "from the river to the sea" rhetoric, it would only be a temporary end to the conflict.
The only way I see this ending without everyone dying is if the situation in Gaza becomes so utterly bleak and helpless that the entire populace loses any and all hope for a better future. Learned helplessness, in other words.
And yes, I'm sure the Israeli government sees the obvious irony in this whole situation. At the same time, they should know better than anyone else that they can absolutely get away with it, as long as they don't start another World War.
There is an alternative that does not involve genocide:
Israel simply reoccupies Gaza and rules it, much like it did before the 2005 withdrawal. Remember that Palestinians in Judea and Samaria hate Israel no less than Gazans do, and Hamas operates there. Despite that, there were no rockets from Judea and Samaria, and the terror attacks originating from there after Operation Defensive Shield (when Israel reoccupied these territories) were never as severe as before that operation, let alone as severe as Oct. 7.
The difference is that in Judea and Samaria, Israel has soldiers on the ground and can suppress Hamas (and the other terror groups), while in Gaza, Hamas was the ruling government. The important thing is not the attitude of the civilians, but the capabilities of the terror groups.
The key is not to solve the conflict (since it is unsolvable), but rather to manage it. The problem was that Israel did an extremely poor job of conflict management by withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, under the delusion that this would somehow lead to peace. Operation Swords of Iron is about (or at least should be about) correcting that particular mistake.
Even if Gazans could somehow control Hamas (the only people who have weapons and funding, thanks to Bibi Netanyahu for that one) I can't possibly conceive of why you think killing or cowing all of the Gazans would end this conflict permanently. That's the IDF's goal after all... I don't think any of them are naive enough to think that'll be the end of it.
> Hamas (the only people who have weapons and funding, thanks to Bibi Netanyahu for that one)
It's my understanding that Hamas' main source of weapons and funding is Iran, not the Israeli government (although the latter has contributed some, which is reprehensible enough). Do you have evidence to the contrary?
In general, people are bad at stopping their own governments by force. I can't imagine what methods Gazans could use to control Hamas.
Ordinarily it's very tricky because the government has guns and the civilians don't.
But right now it's very easy because the IDF have guns and are just lacking good intel. Regular Palestinians can help get rid of Hamas by pointing out the Hamas operatives in their midst to the IDF, who will then kill them. No need to point a gun when you can just point a finger.
I don't think people are all that bad at it. Russia managed to get rid of its government and out of WW1. The Italians managed to get rid of Mussolini when he was failing at WW2. Lots of Arab countries participated in the Arab Spring. The Gazans themselves managed to get rid of the PLO not too long ago.
It's really weird to see how otherwise reasonable people first think about genociding two millions instead of doing the basic niceness and civilizational thingy:
Deescalation, reducing tensions, abolishment of ethnostate, trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you, instead of locking them in a ghetto to breed even more right wing radicalism on both sides and doing a new loop of toxoplazma of rage dynamics.
"genociding two millions" - this is BS. You can tell because over 99% of those 2 million are alive after months of brutal fighting.
"Deescalation, reducing tensions, ..., trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you" - not only does it not work against a genocidal terrorist organization like Hamas, but Israel was stupid enough to try it and get direct empirical evidence of it not working. Exhibit A: Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, pulling out both the military and its own settlers. Exhibit B: the calm before Oct 7, including tens of thousands of Gazans working jobs in Israel. Turns out many of these workers were Hamas spies, and Hamas violated the truce with its genocidal attack on Israel on Oct 7.
"abolishment of ethnostate" - I don't know what you mean by "ethnostate", but if it is Israel being the Jewish state, then absolutely not. Israel has every right to be the Jewish state for the exact same reasons why France is a French state and Japan is a Japanese state. Also, of all the times to make such a concession, one of the worst is right after an enemy's genocidal massacre of Jews on Israeli soil.
"locking them in a ghetto" - Gazans were not locked in. Many managed to escape Hamas to places like Europe, and many more would have been able to go if their brothers in the Arab states opened the doors to them.
"breed even more right wing radicalism on both sides" - the last 30 years of terror waves certainly moved Israel's population to the right, but the Arab population was already fully right wing extremist in the days when their leader was the Nazi collaborator Mufti.
"doing a new loop of toxoplazma of rage dynamics" - what does this even mean?
They apparently can't get that the Nakba was NOT arabs trying to commit genocide against jews, but the culmination of the zionist dream from well before it to ethnically cleanse the land of arabs and settle jews in it.
To portray ethnically cleansed arabs from their land as equivalent to germans is insane. Even the partition deal, which was a recommendation not a decision, one that unfairly apportioned jews more land than they either owned or would be equally represented in by population, and that was more arable, it was not even the end goal of zionist leaders! Israelis are simply murdering civilians to ethnically cleanse the land. We are living in a dark era, one that I think involves more deliberation and intentionality for murder on a mass scale than that which existed during world war 2.
David McDowall (1990). Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. I.B. Tauris. p. 193. ISBN 9780755612581. "Although the Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan, it did not accept the proposed borders as final and Israel's declaration of independence avoided the mention of any boundaries. A state in part of Palestine was seen as a stage towards a larger state when opportunity allowed. Although the borders were 'bad from a military and political point of view,' Ben Gurion urged fellow Jews to accept the UN Partition Plan, pointing out that arrangements are never final, 'not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements'. The idea of partition being a temporary expedient dated back to the Peel Partition proposal of 1937. When the Zionist Congress had rejected partition on the grounds that the Jews had an inalienable right to settle anywhere in Palestine, Ben Gurion had argued in favour of acceptance, 'I see in the realisation of this plan practically the decisive stage in the beginning of full redemption and the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine."
>"Deescalation, reducing tensions, abolishment of ethnostate, trying to cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you..."
And when that still hasn't worked, what? Because Israel has tried that and gotten terrorism in return.
- Deescalation/reducing tensions: Israel left Gaza in 2005 and forcibly pulled its own settlers out.
- abolishment of ethnostate: Gaza is an ethnostate, Israel is not.
- cooperating with people on the other side who would cooperate with you: those are the Arab Israeli citizens; the "Palestinian" identity is an irredentist rejection of Israel's existence.
"the only way I see this getting better is if everyone in Gaza loses all hope in a better future" - I'd say the opposite. If Gazans actually started hoping to build a better future instead of just being determined to die in the cause of killing the Jews, they could actually build themselves quite a nice country (Gaza isn't all that bad; prewar it's middle income, not third world, and it would get much better if they got their terrorism under control enough to open trade). They just need to put their hopes in building themselves up instead of in war.
The problem is that, to most Gazans, a "better future" is one without Israel. *That's* what they need to lose hope in.
They cannot get away with it (Israel is a small country relying on food imports and trading for economy), and would get universal trade sanctions if they did anything remotely like that (heck they're on borderline sanctions even with trying to be maximally ethical under the circumstances).
Even if they did decide to go maximally unethical and to hell with morality and PR, it'd be much easier to push Gazans to Egypt (or Sudan, which iirc did agree to take people who want to go there), so even in a maximally unethical world there's no need for actual mass murder.
This is far outside and much in the opposite direction of what I asked.
Is Hamas using "shapeshifter tactics" or is Israel's barely-discriminate war on Gaza turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?
To answer your question I think if the IDF was willing to spend way more money on surveillance and hardware they could do stuff like distribute drones/cameras over every acre of Gaza. This would, in principle, be capable of very fast targeting and elimination of genuine hostiles.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. Israel almost certainly is doing persistent overhead surveillance of the areas they're operating in. But you can't put drones or cameras inside someone's home, or any other occupied building. They'll notice, and destroy them. Yes, even if you tell them that the cameras are for their protection.
-
So, you've got a building. Maybe there are people in it, and maybe some of those people are terrorists, but you've got no way of knowing because you can't see them. You can't even infer it from who you saw go into the building, because they could have gone in or out via tunnel.
-
Now you've got a person walking out of a building carrying a package. You can't see their face, and you can't see what's in the package. Are they a "genuine hostile"?
-
Now a bunch of people just congregated, opened their packages, and promptly took out AKs and RPGs to shoot up an IDF patrol. What good did the drones and cameras do again?
>turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?
The common notion that "repressive" stratagems against X create more X (enemy combatants, criminals, etc) is more wishful thinking from lefties than fact. The Brits didn't defeat the Boers because the Brits played nice with them to starve Boer combatants of internal support; the Brits won because they put every Boer, combatant or not, in concentration camps.
Not really, because of all the indoor tunnels and spaces, and because people of every age and gender are in fact used as (nonuniformed) soldiers. Gaza is big and has a million holes and tunnels, a lot of which have weapons hidden in them. This sort of armchair generaling doesn't actually work.
Also, re "Is Hamas using "shapeshifter tactics" or is Israel's barely-discriminate war on Gaza turning every person of every age and gender into an enemy?"
Probably a vicious cycle. Starts with Hamas shapeshifting tactics, results in less discriminate targeting, creating more people willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the occupation, and so on.
This isn't a cycle, it's a one way street - use of child soldiers and the like is encouraged by more discriminate targeting (since Hamas and similar orgs love having soldiers the IDF doesn't want to shoot).
Unfortunately even if the IDF actually didn't discriminate, Hamas and pals would still use child soldiers for the PR value.
It certainly did not start with Hamas, which was formed in 1987.
Israel's prior wars had much, much lower civilian casualties. So, yes, it did start with Hamas (and Hezbollah).
That is a good point. I never hear much about the IDF using small and cheap surveillance drones extensively, for example.
I think the real problem with "small and cheap" surveillance is that it actually in practice requires a lot of expensive manpower to actually do anything with the information.
This is where I keep hoping that multimodal AI with good image processing and maybe face recognition might help.
no way that military usage of AI could possibly go wrong
> Is Hamas using "shapeshifter tactics" [...]
There are tons of videos (uploaded by members of Hamas themselves!) of men in civilian clothing firing RPGs at IDF troops. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that Hamas hide among civilians, disguised as civilians.
Men in civilian clothing was not in fact part in contention here.
Sergei wrote:
> Hamas is using a shapeshifter tactics against IDF (any person, of any age or gender can potentially be a deadly threat, and there is no way to tell until it's too late) [...]
In that context, combatants dressing as civilians and hiding among civilians seem very much on topic. If you disagree, then I'm confused about the point you're trying to make; if so, please clarify.
I don't have an opinion on this, but i notice some unstated priors. How can you tell it's overkill? How many casualties are the IDF taking? How many should they take in order to avoid civilian deaths? What ratios do we regard as acceptable in other conflicts as a total ratio, not just enemy civilians to enemy combatants?
I am mostly going by what is public, including the three hostages killed when they were clearly trying to get help and still being shot. I assume this is not how the IDF normally operates.
I get what your sources are, but I'm asking you how we can tell the reported deaths are overkill. It is possible to construct a coherent argument that giving everyone in Gaza a week in the middle of October to permanently move somewhere else before flattening the entire strip and killing anyone who stayed would have been the ne plus ultra of acceptable action, and only something more drastic would have been overkill. Note that this isn't my position -- I'm just advocating for a clear discussion about the terms we're using.
Yeah, it is hard to say what is or is not too harsh without being there and fighting the war. I do get a general vibe though that trying to avoid civilian casualties is not high on the agenda.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/middleeast/babies-al-nasr-gaza-hospital-what-we-know-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/hala-khreis-white-flag-shooting-gaza-cmd-intl
These are too harsh. No, avoiding civilian casualties is clearly not high on the agenda. That first article in particular shows a level of cruelty I would not have imagined outside of Auschwitz. And I'm Jewish.
By 1936, Arabs opposed a Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine, before partition and displacement. If so, is the Nakba irrelevant to the case against Israel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine
What do you even mean by "the case against Israel"?
Is slavery relevant to "the case against the US"? I'm not even sure what you're asking.
Based on your link, it seems like "opposed a Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine" is hyperbole. There were Jews around for a long time, by 1936 it wasn't just a question of "there is a Jewish presence in Palestine" but the British had committed themselves publicly to making Palestine into a Jewish state - something that sounds like it can only happen with the displacement or subordination of the Arabs there - and a bunch of stuff in that general direction had happened already, and the specific spark of the revolt was discovering a cache of guns and ammunition.
As for your question - I guess it's a question of what "the case against Israel" means exactly - is it "Nakba therefore Israel bad/Arabs good?" Or "your view of Israel should more negative at the margin because the Nakba happened"? Or some specific modern-day policy issue? But in any case I don't see why it would make the Nakba irrelevant.
General point that the nakba should be thought about the same way as Germans being expelled from western Poland after ww2 - (some of the) people who started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals had to leave the area they tried to conquer when they lost it. People who mourn the nakba should be seen the same as people who mourn the fall of the third Reich.
I've not seen this argument made before, and it's instructive to encounter it. Saying that non-jewish Palestinians as an entire group were morally equivalent to Nazi Germany and therefore fair game for ethnic cleansing is something I find abhorrent in and of itself. I can only thank you for making it easy to take a firm position when everything related to this usually has an infinite regress of arguments and counterarguments.
Contra Shaked: as someone who's drawn the comparison between the post-WW2 compelled movement of peoples in the Mid East and the compelled movement of peoples in east Europe on ACX in past threads, normative judgment for or against any of the parties is besides the point. In sum, groups of people fought over the land, members of the losing groups were forced to move at gunpoint, they acquiesced, and everyone moved on with their lives to the benefit of all. Even absent the German genocides, deathcamps etc, I wouldn't have been supportive of Germans starting more conflicts over the latter half of the 20th century to get back Posen, Konigsberg, et al. This is even more the case with Palestine/Israel, where the land in question was not under any central authority after the Brits, who had taken it from the Ottomans after defeating them in WW1, threw up their hands and left.
This is not what I said. I said specifically the ones who had just*actively tried to drive the Jews into the sea* (by virtue of the attempted genocide, not based on their ethnicity) were morally equivalent and it was thus a reasonable requirement for safety to deport them from the country. Other Arabs were allowed to stay just fine (About 20% of israeli citizens are Arabs).
Well said! Thank you!
This is not what I said. I said specifically the ones who had just*actively tried to drive the Jews into the sea* (by virtue of the attempted genocide, not based on their ethnicity) were morally equivalent and it was thus a reasonable requirement for safety to deport them from the country. Other Arabs were allowed to stay just fine (About 20% of israeli citizens are Arabs).
The second important part of the analogy here is that *even if* you buy their moral claim, if you meet someone who's still upset over the fall of the third Reich (or the British losing India, or whatever), you can tell their takes on geopolitics are hopelessly stuck in 80-year old grudges and aren't going to be reasonable and productive.
The Germans who were expelled from Poland had been used as an excuse by Nazis. This doesn't mean they were the people running Nazi policy.
The Germans who settled in Poland (and Hungary and Czechoslovakia) after WW2 had originally settled there as part of the Nazi lebensraum policies. They were probably not running the policy themselves, but undoing that policy under the circumstances was a reasonable decision.
Yeah this is not analogous to the Nakba this would instead be analogous to Palestinians (theoretically) kicking out Israeli settlers after winning this unwinnable "war" that's happening right now.
No, because most Israeli settlers aren't actively trying to kill Arabs (of course Palestinians are fighting to kick out all Israelis, not just settlers).
That said, I'd actually be pretty supportive of a functional peaceful Palestinian state kicking out the settlers. Opposing settlements and wanting the people there to leave and move back over the green line is actually a pretty mainstream opinions.
"General point that the nakba should be thought about the same way as Germans being expelled from western Poland after ww2"
For the most part I don't think the expulsion of Germans from Poland, or the other instances of ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of World War 2 in various directions, is thought about at all. And it isn't thought about because it was clearly immoral and wrong, and complicates the narrative of the Allies as being unvarnished good guys in World War 2.
"people who started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals had to leave the area they tried to conquer"
Is there anything showing that the Palestinians, as a group, started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals?
Here is AFAICT the declaration of war from the Arab League, from a generally pro-Israel website. No mention of genocide, nor driving the Jews into the sea:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-league-declarationon-the-invasion-of-palestine-may-1948
Perhaps there is some other document where, say, the leader of Egypt says they're explicitly going to war in 1948 for genocidal purposes. But even then the Nakba went against Palestinians, not Egyptians.
>And it isn't thought about because it was clearly immoral and wrong, and complicates the narrative of the Allies as being unvarnished good guys in World War 2.
It's not clearly immoral to me. Wars have consequences: when your country invades another country, then loses the war, having to leave the country you invaded is so minor a moral problem as to be unnoticeable, in comparison to the deaths of millions that had just occurred prosecuting the war.
My understanding is that lot of the Germans who were ethnically cleansed, were ethnically German but weren't German citizens, had never lived in Germany, and in many cases their ancestors had moved from Germany centuries before.
The process of ethnic cleansing also led to hundreds of thousands of deaths - apparently the German government to this day estimates 2 million.
That doesn't make it the dominant narrative of WW2, but I don't actually believe anyone would support this, in isolation, if it wasn't a concession towards the end of supporting the Nakba (or whatever other favored instance of ethnic cleansing).
The 2 million number comes from a 1954 west German report, in 1974 the death toll estimate was lowered to 400,000.
Meanwhile 6 million Polish civilians died during the war, both in the fighting and during years of brutal German occupation. And the Allied bombing campaign of Germany killed 500,000, and destroyed the homes of over 7 million Germans.
All that to say that WWII was the worst war the world has ever seen, and the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland hardly stands out. And I think it's arguable that the Allied bombing campaign was justified! So how can I say with confidence that the ethnic cleansing was not justified? Wars are terrible, and have terrible consequences, and the consequences mostly fall on the innocent.
I'm not even sure what I'm arguing anymore. War is hell, WWII was the most hellish, and Germany started it. I can't have much sympathy.
"Is there anything showing that the Palestinians, as a group, started a war in the 1940s with explicitly genocidal goals?"
Probably the single biggest reason is that the Palestinian leader was Mufti al-Husseini, a jihadist, antisemite, and Nazi collaborator.
Additional evidence: Palestinian Arab attacks against Jews prior to 1948, such as the Nabi Musa riots, the Hebron massacre, and the 1936 Arab revolt. The war started in November 1947 with Arab attacks on Jewish civilians immediately after the UN resolution for partitioning Eretz Israel into Jewish and Arab states.
There is also the Azzam Pasha quotation, and https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/20/did-arab-states-really-promise-to-push-jews-into-the-sea-yes/.
TBH the evidence at your link is pretty weak, given the amount of weight the claim is supposed to carry. It's used by people as the sort of catch-all excuse for anything Israel does - well, sure, the Nakba happened but the Arabs wanted to do genocide. How do you know? Well, sweep into the sea! Sure, Israel started the 1967 war, but it was really the Arabs, how do you know? Sweep into the sea! The Arabs will never accept peace even though they already have, how do you know? Sweep into the sea! Irgun couldn't have been a gang of terrorists, they were heroes, sweep into the sea!
As for other violence, clearly there was violence by both sides, including against civilians. I don't know how you're supposed to disentangle who started it or who was worse or anything, but everyone always selectively cites history.
Overall, I still don't think the evidence supports the claim, and certainly doesn't justify the Nakba.
I admit I only spent a short amount of time searching. You could find more if you wanted to, for example by reading more about the Palestinian leader al Husseini, or his comrades like al Banna and al Qassam. I don't think that the evidence from the Palestinians' past behavior is weak: the riots and pogroms throughout the British Mandate period are well documented, and Jews had every reason to believe that these mass murders are Arab policy. Consider that the Holocaust had just happened. Many recruits into the new IDF were Holocaust survivors straight from the DP camps, and the Palestinians' leader was well known as a Nazi collaborator who wrote frequently about the need to kill Jews wherever they live. The Jews of the Yishuv had every right to be fearful of Arab intentions and to expect the worst from them.
Also worthy of note: Jews in Arab countries were violently persecuted and expelled before and after Israel's victory (example for before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud. Article about after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world). That is not what you would expect from people who want peaceful coexistence with their Jewish neighbors.
"The Arabs will never accept peace even though they already have" - if by Arabs you mean Palestinians, then no, they never did (at least not any peace agreement where Israel gets to continue existing). If you think they did, can you provide a source?
I am not going to defend the Irgun. I think their most heroic act was not shooting back during the Altalena affair, and peacefully breaking up and integrating with the IDF afterwards.
"certainly doesn't justify the Nakba" - it does justify the seeming paranoia that drove the decision making of Jewish commanders on the ground, some (not all) of whom did engage in expulsions. Of course, this is separate from the discussion of how much of the Arab displacement was Israel's responsibility (vs how much was that of the local Arab militias and invading Arab armies), for which a specific viewpoint is implied in the word "justify".
On your last point, there was no formal Palestinian government so it's hard to say what Palestinian policy was as a group. The closest there was to something like that was this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Palestine_Government?wprov=sfla1, which explicitly claimed the entire region as Palestinian (there's nothing there about what they would have done to the Jews, but given the regular massacres of Jews by Palestinians at the time and what happened to the Jews in every other middle eastern country I think we can reasonably guess their intentions).
Re your point about post-ww2 population transfers being wrong, I disagree - leaving large German populations in Poland would have been dangerous for everyone involved and moving them was the least bad solution at the time. I also disagree that this was done to make the allies look good (this was in the Soviet part anyway, and no one minds making the soviets look bad).
I'm not sure how worked up I'm supposed to be about the idea that the Palestinians claimed all the land for themselves, given that that's exactly what the Jewish side claimed. And of course the Palestinian claim is more compatible with equal rights for the Jews than the Jewish claim is for the Palestinians, given Palestinians were the majority.
And there was ongoing violence by the Jewish side against the Palestinian side, including by groups that were condemned by American Jews, at the time, as being a bunch of fascist thugs (and who would later run Israel's government).
Finally, I'll let our POVs stand on the question of whether ethnic cleansing is OK or not, but I don't think for a second that anyone did it then (or does it in almost any other case) as some sort of sober "least bad solution", as opposed to being motivated by desires like revenge, greed, or even bloodlust.
The Jews specifically didn't claim all the land for themselves and accepted the compromise solution though. I agree that if you make up whatever facts you want you can convince yourself that the Jews were just as bad as the Arabs, but that doesn't seem very interesting. And it doesn't get around the fact that *even if you believe it*, you should still be pretty put off by people whose current day political goals are driven by an obsession with perceived wrongs from the 1940s.
When did the Jewish side claim "all the land for themselves" again?
-
The original claim was that all the land inside the UN's 1947 demarcation line would be part of the State of Israel, administered by the Israeli government, but that any such land which was presently owned by a Palestinian individual would continue to be that person's private property which they and their family could live on in perpetuity (or sell for a profit).
-
In 1948, that got revised to "OK, the 1947 line is history, so now it's the de facto ceasfire line that defines the State of Israel". Still with the bit where any Palestinian actually living on their private land in that state got to keep the land, keep living there, and eventually become Israeli citizens. That didn't always work out in practice, but it was the theory and the claim and it did usually work in practice.
-
In 1967, after another stupid Arab attempt to reduce Israel by force of arms, the newly-expanded Israel said "OK, now it looks like we're responsible for the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and some other bits. But this time we're explicitly *not* claiming those as part of Israel, we're just administering them until we can find someone willing to take them off our hands". Again, with the Palestinians keeping their private lands (but this time not getting Israeli citizenship).
-
About a decade later, Jewish families started noticing vacant land in Gaza and the West Bank, settling on it, and claiming it as theirs by squatters rights or homesteading or some such. Much of this land was privately owned by Palestinians, but seized by the IDF for "security zones" or the like, which meant Israeli settlement was legally and morally problematic and led to perverse results when iteratively repeated. So at this point, you do have Jews claming land that belongs to someone else.
-
But not *all* of the land. At this point, that's 0% of Gaza, 0% of Israel proper, about 40% of the West Bank (which, to be clear, is 40% too much), and in total about 8% of the Land Between the River and the Sea. The other 92%, is either land "the Jews" claim because they bought it or because their ancestors always lived on it or something like that, and land that the Jews *don't* claim because they acknowledge it properly belongs to the Palestinians even if it's presently being administered by Israel.
-
And yes, there are individual Jewish people who claim more than that, who claim that all of some vaguely-defined Greater Israel ought to belong to them. These individuals are not "the Jews", and I can't see where anyone who plausibly claims to represent even most of "the Jews" ever claimed *all* of the land.
As I understand it, from the Palestinian point of view, the Balfour Declaration is the original colonial injustice, if Palestine had been free and sovereign it certainly would have allowed no such thing. Everything else is consequences of that.
Palestine has never been free. Palestine has never been sovereign. The British offered Palestinians freedom and sovereignty, but they just couldn't stand that they offered Israel the same thing.
What are you talking about? At that time there was no Israel.
And Palestine was the name of a province of the Ottoman Empire, and before that it was the name of a province of the Roman Empire. It has never been free or sovereign, unless you go all the way back to the Philistine city states from which Palestine eventually derived it's name.
Twice the Arabs of Palestine were offered a sovereign state: once by the Peel Commision, then again by the UN. Both times they rejected it because Israel was offered a sovereign state as well.
That's much later and not really the point. From the Palestinian point of view, the Balfour Declaration was unjust and therefore the presence of Zionists was illegitimate.
Properly speaking, the past is always irrelevant -- either the Israelis have the power and the American support to continue or they don't.
Ironically, that's the point of all the obsessive historical argument on both sides; they're talking points for foreigners (realistically Americans, Europeans to a much lesser extent). In a proper war, no-one would be remotely this fussed about why their side is right, beyond propaganda and to a much lesser extent swaying neutral countries. The bizarre thing about Israel/Palestine is that even the war itself is largely dictated by both sides' desire to appeal to US public opinion, to shape US policy in turn.
I disagree. I think both sides really are obsessed with the past. People on both sides repeat their narratives to each other and teach it to their children. They are very much not just talking points for Western consumption.
I also disagree that people are not fussed about why their side is right in a "proper" war. Look for example at WWII, where every Nazi speech invoked the Aryan race, while the Allies kept talking about freedom and fighting for liberty.
And that's why I point it out, even in such a small forum as this.
Counterargument to the idea that Arabs were free of anti-Jewish prejudice, from the same website: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-treatment-of-jews-in-arab-islamic-countries
>"The Arabs throughout their history have not only been free from anti-Jewish sentiment but have also shown that the spirit of compromise is deeply rooted in their life."
Thank you for this; the subthread needed some comic relief.
> If Americans oppose open-ended immigration from Mexico, does this mean Mexicans have the right to take over America and expel 80% of Americans from our homes and into small enclaves?
Ignore the part where most pro-palestinian activists in the US *literally* support unlimited immigration from countries like Mexico, and in Europe from anywhere outside of Europe, and consider it "bigoted" "racist" "white supremacy" "nazism" to impose limitations on immigration, ESPECIALLY against particular ethnic/religious groups.
I mean, over a long enough time period, the current "not unlimited" immigration rate will be enough to make Europeans a minority in many European countries, so it's absolutely ABSURD for you to say that arabs had a "right" to oppose jewish immigration. Nope, they're xenophobic bigots and they're being punished for it, that's the left-wing logic for Europe so there.
Oh, and the knee jerk response to this is that Europeans don't get to oppose immigration because of their history of colonialism. Of course, arabs have a long and bloody history of conquest, and unlike the europeans, they don't even make a token effort to appear sorry for it - quite the opposite. So again, arabs have no right to oppose immigration and are being punished for their bigotry accordingly.
"Ignore the part where most pro-palestinian activists in the US *literally* support unlimited immigration"
So even ignoring the differences between mass immigration to the US today and the stated goals of early Zionists ...
the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is OK because Palestinians' views on mass immigration in 1936 were different from other people in the US's views in 2024?
Like, if you went back in time to 1948 and could talk to some Palestinian, you'd lecture him about how he's wrong because of what some Harvard students will end up saying 76 years in the future?
He was talking about Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel, not the flight of the Palestinian Arabs from Israel in 1948.
As for why they fled and why Israel expelled some of them: those same Palestinians launched a genocidal war against the Jews in November 1947, and lost. This makes it rather similar to the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of World War II.
Well said! Many Thanks!
Conversely, do those with ancestry more native to this continent have the right to launch terrorist attacks on civilians in protest for the displacement of their ancestors? If not, why not? Too few of them? Too long ago?
All of these discussions are fundamentally on the wrong topic, and are word-thinking. It's a verb that conjugates -- I'm a hero, you're a resistance fighter, he's a bloodthirsty terrorist.